The Cull
by Robert Reed

Smiles mean nothing here. Inside the station, everybody smiles. Optimism is the natural state of mind. But this particular smile is larger and brighter than usual, and it happens to be honest. The man grins at me while taking a slow and very deep breath, trying to infect me with his prurient joy. He has news, important enormous delightful news, and he relishes the chance to tell me what I can’t possibly know yet.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Orlando,” he says.

I don’t respond.

“That boy,” he says. “The brat — ”

“What has Orlando done?”

“This time, he’s hurt a child.”

Surprise fills my face. My enduring smile is replaced with a concerned, suspicious grin. “Which child?”

“His sister.”

Compassion twists my features. “How badly?” I ask.

“She’s bleeding.”

I start to pick up my doctor’s case.

“Just a bad bloody nose. She’s going to be fine.” He doesn’t want me rushing off. The girl isn’t half as important as Orlando.

“When did this happen?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“He struck her?”

“Punched her with his fist.”

“You saw this?”

“No.”

“Who were the witnesses?” I start to ask.

But he interrupts, explaining, “They were together in their quarters. Nobody else. Then there was a scream, and she was bleeding and crying. Several people saw her running into the hallway, holding her nose.”

I pick up the case anyway.

“She says he hit her. She says her brother is mean.”

Orlando has a well-earned reputation. But stealing and lying are lesser crimes compared to physical violence, particularly violence towards a small and very pretty three-year-old girl.

“What do the parents say?” I ask.

“Not very much. You can imagine.” In the small, intense politics of the station, this is an important man. But he looks at me warily, wondering if I will do what is obvious to him.

“I will talk to them,” I say.

“Of course.”

My clinic is a large room with three interior walls and a tall ceiling. The walls are padded, cutting the roar of blowing fans and aging machinery and the endless music of voices engaged in happy conversation. But when I step through the door, a strange, almost unheard-of quiet takes hold. Dozens of faces watch me, and nobody speaks. The black case rides in my most human hand, and I walk quickly, passing one old lady who turns to a grandchild, saying the word that everyone wants to hear.

“Cull,” she says.

I stop and look back at her.

My expression makes her flinch. But she attempts to straighten her back — impossible with her collapsing bones — and with that fearless certainty of creatures not long for this world, she says, “Oh, but you’ll have to cull the brat now. That’s the law. You haven’t any choice.”

A four-year-old stole the playmate’s favorite toy, and everybody assumed a case of boys being boys. No need for alarm, no need to forgive. And when he was seven and tricked that little girl out of her morning rations, it was easy to believe that one stern lecture from his otherwise sterling parents would do enough good. But lectures never helped, except to teach the troublemaker that he didn’t need the approval of others, and even when children avoided him, nothing changed. He was a loner, an outcast in the making. And more disturbing was how the adults would speak in front of him, talking openly about eradicating what was wrong with the world, and Orlando’s only response was to erupt into wild, mocking laughter.

His parents worried but for somewhat different reasons.

The mother was quick to blame herself. If she was the problem, then she could be the solution too. “I love Orlando,” she would say, trying to convince herself of her motherly adorations. “I just need to show my love more. Then I’ll make him understand. I will. He can’t keep acting this way. He can’t steal and lie. This won’t end well, if he doesn’t change.”

The father embraced several myths. Other children were the problem, gullible and silly, and they might even deserve what they got. Or his boy was testing boundaries, mastering his environment. But was either story good enough? If they didn’t convince, there was one final, best hope: He looked at me, adding winks to his smile. “Orlando’s a genius,” he claimed. “That’s the heart of our problem. Look at his test scores. Look what the teachers write. Humans and machines say the same thing: He’s practically exploding with promise.”

But there was more than test scores to consider. Observations and gut feelings from his teachers belied every exceptional mark. Orlando’s real genius was for making trouble. And it wasn’t just the larceny and mendacity. That boy could pick the best possible moment to say the worst possible words — flat alarming and awful statements crafted to test everybody’s happiness.

When he was eleven, Orlando leaped onto the cafeteria table, begging to be noticed. Most of the time he ignored other people, but on that day he drank in the nervous energies, waving arms while launching into a brief, polished speech about how there wasn’t enough food in the station. Starvation was everyone’s destiny. Except for the children whose parents were going to slit their throats and drink their thin blood and then fry up their scrawny little bodies. Those babies were the lucky ones, spared by the coming nightmares.

Dhaka is the mother. Nearly as pretty as her son, she held her baby daughter in her lap, shaking her head sadly. “I have no idea why he would say that. Where would that come from?”

The father tried to laugh. “It was a stupid joke. That’s all. We aren’t starving, not to death certainly, and the boy knows it. He’s just rattling cages.”

Dhaka dipped her head and sighed.

Houston is the father, and he can be tenacious when it comes to denying the obvious. “The boy is bored. That’s all.”

“How can Orlando be bored?” Dhaka asked. “The station was designed with children in mind. We’ve got the playground and an exercise yard. Every book ever written is waiting to be read, and he can play any game, and his AI teachers are always awake and ready to work with him. Or they could just talk to him. Even if he never plays with another child, he can keep very, very busy.”

The playground was shabby, and the exercise yard smelled of puke. And to keep people from dwelling too much on negative influences, a large portion of the digital library was misfiled, leaving it unavailable to ordinary citizens.

But Houston wanted to echo the praise. “No, the station is great. It is.” He straightened his back, giving his best effort at conviction. “Hell, this is the perfect life. For kids and for adults too.”

The station was a shit hole, but I tried keeping the focus on one difficult boy. “Believe what you wish,” I told them. “But Orlando is a disruption. And worse, he can be an agent of despair.”

“This is crap,” declared Houston.

With a doctor’s smooth, sorry voice, I said, “Chronic self-centeredness. If you want to give his affliction a name, that’s it.”

Dhaka sobbed and held her baby until the poor girl squirmed, and looking up asked the clinic’s ceiling, “What else can I do? Tell me, and I’ll help him. Whatever it takes.”

I pretended to think, but my ideas were uniformly grim.

Once again, Houston denied the problem. But he wasn’t quite as determined, and it was easy to see him achieving a truce with the possibilities. He wouldn’t agree to any diagnosis, but it was important to ask, “What about medicine?”

“Which medicines would you suggest?”

Dhaka felt at ease with the topic. “Tranquilizers,” she blurted.

A sedated boy couldn’t cheat or make people’s faces red. But he couldn’t be a productive citizen, not within this tiny, tightly orchestrated community.

“How about harder stuff?” Houston asked.

I leaned forward, staring at his eyes. “You must believe me. Sir. There are no drugs to treat this affliction or shots to make the brain immune to these impulses. And even if there were chemical tricks, the molecules would be complicated and I’d have to pull one of my synthesizers off its critical jobs, which as I’m sure you understand would be an enormous burden on every other patient.”

The parents sat back, blinking nervously. “If only this, if only that,” they were thinking to themselves.

It was Houston who finally spoke. “What are we talking about? If Orlando doesn’t improve, I mean.”

Two smart, scared adults watched me. I could offer a variety of appealing lies, but they wouldn’t help anybody. The station was ruled by happiness, so deeply engrained that only the doctor sees its pernicious effects. If I wasn’t blunt — if I diluted my words or my tone — these clever, joyous people were going to invent some ridiculous excuse not to believe me.

“This is your official warning,” I began.

Terror spoiled those beaming, optimistic faces. They didn’t want the word “cull”. Even the happiest soul would be crushed to hear that term linked to his oldest child. But then the baby decided she was famished, shattering the drama with her own self-possessed wailing. I decided not to say the word. Not yet. Dhaka held her daughter to her breast, and the two-time father smiled gamely, shaking his head while proudly admiring this perfect little angel that was his.

Not that a doctor can read thoughts, of course. But in so many ways, human beings are more transparent than glass.

Every station must have its doctor.

The first doctor was a collection of wetware and delicate machinery designed to serve deep-space astronauts. He was built because human doctors were too expensive, doing little most of the time while demanding space and oxygen and food. The modern doctor was essential because three Martian missions had failed, proving that no amount of training and pills could keep the best astronaut sane, much less happy. My ancestor knew all of tricks expected of an honorable physician: He could sew up a knife wound, prescribe an antipsychotic, and pluck the radiation-induced cancer out of pilot’s brain. But his most vital skill came from smart fingers implanted in every heroic brain — little slivers armed with sensors and electricity. A doctor can synthesize medicines, but more important is the cultivation of happiness and positive attitudes essential to every astronaut’s day.

I am the same machine, tweaked and improved a thousand ways but deeply tied to the men and women who first walked on Mars.

And this station can be regarded as a spaceship, overcrowded and stinking, every passenger facing demands on his patience and courage and simple human decency — one hundred and seventeen humans making a voyage that has already gone on too long, with no end in sight.

Today, almost everybody is bubbling with joy.

Carrying the ceremonial bag, I walk into the east hallway and past three open doors where people stand watch. I am expected. This is a huge moment in the hallway’s history, and nobody wants to miss it. My smile is polite. I say nothing, and my silence feels like dignity. There are some children, and they want to follow, but old hands grab and quiet voices say, “No.” Somebody sniffs back a tear or two. I look at the readouts, spotting the weeper among the closest signals. Add a little current to that mind, and the sorrow fades away.

Houston and Dhaka have shut their door. Every mood reaches out to me, except for the little girl’s: She won’t receive implants until her fifth birthday. If I act too soon, the surgery might fail in subtle ways.

No station door has a lock, but I knock politely, waiting a moment before coaxing them with their names. I guess that Houston will answer, and I am wrong. Orlando pushes the door into the hallway, showing off a broad beaming grin. He is irrepressibly happy, but never in the usual ways. I learned this long ago. The feel of his mind is different, and I don’t entirely understand why. But if emotions were colors, his color would always be darker and hotter than anyone else’s — like a wicked purple with the power to burn.

“Hello,” I say.

Dhaka sits with her daughter, a bloodied rag pressed against the sore nose. The other hand is stuck into the woman’s mouth, enduring the slow chewing of nervous teeth. Dhaka is sad. In her life, she has never felt this sorry and helpless. That’s why I aim a feeble current through her mind, and for no reason she can name, that black despair weakens slightly.

Houston is a worse threat. He decides to push between the boy and me, the shredded smile turning into a wicked grimace. He wants to hit. Free his impulses, and he would batter me with his fists, breaking fingers before the pain was too much. But that would mean a second culling. Besides, the enforced happiness keeps him rational enough to recognize the real source of this disaster. One hand and then other make fists, and he looks at Orlando with a begging expression, trying to find some route by which he can punish his child and not suffer the same fate.

“Sir,” I say. “Please, let me into your home.”

Dirty bunks and dirty clothes and a few lucky toys and little artifacts fill up the ugly little space. The poorest caveman in the darkest days of humanity would have had better quarters. Yet despite these miserable surroundings, this is where these people feel most comfortable.

Once more, I say, “Sir.”

Houston’s hands open. “Don’t,” he says.

I look at his children.

“I want to see,” I say.

What do I want to see? The parents glance at each other, not understanding.

“Your daughter,” I say. “She bumped her nose, I heard.”

“Yes,” Dhaka says.

Houston nods. “Bumped it, yeah.”

“Accidents happen.” That’s a useful cliché, and my personal favorite. I move past Houston while lowering myself. My face and the little girl’s face are at the same level. The bleeding is finished, and it never was bad. She sniffs to prove that she can breathe, and when I smile, her smile turns more genuine. She is suspicious, but she wants to believe that she can go back to her day.

“You bumped this, did you?”

She nods.

“Did Orlando hit you?”

She hesitates and then shakes her head. “No.”

“But others saw him hit you,” I say. “Just outside, in the hallway. He hit you with his foot.”

“No,” the girl says, finding the flaws in that tale. “In the house here. With his hand.”

Her parents nearly melt.

“Leave us,” I say. Then I make myself tall, my face above every head. “Dhaka. Houston. Take your daughter out of here.”

Giggling, Orlando asks, “What about me?”

I watch the adults. I watch him. Then it is just the two of us inside that filthy little room, and I put down my satchel and grab the boy by the head, squeezing hard enough that his eyes bug out.

“Shut the door,” I say.

“Why?”

“Shut it now.”

There was a thirty-year window where humans touched Mars and the asteroids and flew bracingly close to Venus and Mercury. Every successful mission had its doctor, and after serving the expedition to Vesta — the final deep-space mission — my lineage was put to work on the increasingly fragile earth. That’s when the earliest stations were being built: Huge complexes of sealed buildings and greenhouses and solar farms, recycling systems proved in space reclaiming water and trash. But instead of caring for small crews of highly trained specialists, the new doctors were called on to culture optimism in tens of thousands of ill-prepared citizens. Perhaps this is why each of those giant stations failed. Too many bodies meant too many variables. Inadequate planning and political turmoil proved to be decisive enemies. In the end, what survived were the small-scale, isolated stations. Purity and New Beginnings and The Three Cycles of Charm were burnt out shells, but a thousand obscure, nameless hamlets like mine passed into the next century, and then the next.

I am the last kind of doctor: A mock-human machine built to mimic the warmest, most trusted elements of caregivers, but with skills and codes recognizing what is best for my patient.

My patient is the station and the parts of its precious body.

This is what I am thinking when the boy smiles at his own hands. Only when he bolsters his courage with some dangerous thought can he look at me. Orlando is healthier than most fourteen year-olds — taller and stronger than one would expect, knowing his genetics and the daily ration. These are the blessings of being a gifted scavenger and thief. Through most of human history, that handsome, well-fed exterior would serve him well. But everybody knows his face already. That face smiles at me, and his mouth narrows, and he says, “I’m not scared.”

A man’s voice is beginning to emerge, and his shoulders promise an easy, increasingly dangerous strength.

“You don’t worry me,” he says, sounding perfectly honest. “Send me out of here. Cull me. I’ll just find a better place to live.”

There is no smile on my face. “Do you remember the last cull?”

“Old Syd. He got senile, started hitting people.”

“You were seven,” I say.

He nods, delight brightening the brown eyes. “You took him out the door and over the lake and left him there. The rats caught him, I heard. A day or two later, wasn’t it?”

“It was best,” I say.

And the boy agrees. “I’ve spent a lot of days outside,” he says. “I know the surface. I know how to survive. Terror tactics don’t work if your target refuses to be scared.”

“And you have another advantage,” I say. “Your survival kit is packed and waiting for you.”

Just slightly, Orlando flinches. Then with a skill that can only impress, he lies. He says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Two bags are buried in the lake. One has dried food, the other tools and the tarp that have gone missing in the last year.”

He says nothing, watching my eyes.

“No one else knows,” I tell him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, the lie barely registering in his pulse and his breathing.

“The kit doesn’t matter,” I say. “Those thefts are old news.”

He says nothing.

I push my face close. “Nobody can hear us, Orlando.”

“How do you know?” he asks, holding his ground.

“I know where everybody is,” I explain. “There’s a lot of ambient noise, and I know exactly how deaf your parents are. Yes, they are standing in the hallway, on the other side of this door. But they’re scared and very sad, and they don’t want to hear what I am telling you. So they aren’t listening. They’ve never been so sick with worry, and that’s why I can tell you this, Orlando.”

“Tell me what?”

“I have a confession. Since you are a smart boy…a genius, if the truth is told…you might have suspected this already: My critical job as Doctor is to chemically feed happiness into every citizen in this station.”

“How do you do that?”

“Your fifth-year inoculations contained pseudo-worms and assorted chemosynthetic platforms. One injection leaves the brain laced with my agents, my most talented fingers.”

This is an official secret, and Orlando is being invited into the knowing circle. He recognizes the importance of the moment. Relaxing, he breathes and drops his shoulders, his pleasure matching that very smug grin.

“I knew it,” he says.

Maybe that is a lie, maybe not. I don’t need to look.

“This place is a stinking dump,” he says. “But everybody walks around singing. How crazy is that?”

“You don’t feel that way,” I say.

“Not most of the time.”

“And do you know why?”

He blinks. “Why?”

“I haven’t kept you happy like the others,” I say. “This is intentional. It has been my strategy for years. You are sane and sober while the others are neither, and I knew conflicts would arise. Some incident. Some excuse. This is a day both of us saw coming, and that’s why you stole those supplies, and that’s why I allowed it.”

The boy has never been happier.

“But you are mistaken too,” I add. “Marching alone across the world? No, that isn’t your fate, Orlando. You must believe me.”

He wants to believe. “What happens to me?” he whispers.

“Put on your outdoor clothes, please. Now. We need to walk past the lake and meet the others.”

“Others?”

“Dress while I explain,” I say.

The boy listens and dresses, and then he cannot move any longer. My answer takes him by surprise. I have never seen such a broad honest smile. One boot is on and untied, the other in his hands, and he is so happy that he cries, and that’s when my human hand reaches, one of those tears feeling my touch, slipping off the eye and the lash to form a perfect bead resting lightly on my least useful finger.

People fill the hallway, waiting. And everyone sees what he needs to see. The cool clean agent of decency takes the lead, quietly begging the others to step away, to leave them room. Behind the doctor walks the criminal, the scourge. Nothing about Orlando appears worried. He struts and flashes his grin, even when his parents fall in behind him. Dhaka sobs and moans and wraps her arms around her panting chest. Houston takes responsibility for the daughter, holding the little hand while staring at his son’s erect back, his face pinched and pained but the remnants of a thirty-year smile refusing to melt away.

Our audience follows us into the public plaza — a space of high ceilings and vibrant colors, the black rubber floor wearing to pieces in the high-traffic areas. More people wait there. The station’s entire population gathers, including three citizens that should be in bed. Everybody needs to see Orlando one last time, and he loves the attention. He shows them a cocky, smug creature, which is best. Which is my intention. Nobody is going to feel sorry for him. Nobody will ever miss him. This ridiculous image is what they will remember — a crazed man-child being led to his demise — and nobody will ache for what has been lost.

The station’s inner door stands open. Orlando passes me at the end, grabbing the filter mask and goggles from the peg wearing his name. But he doesn’t put them on. He has to look back at the others, throwing out one mocking laugh. Then his mother grabs him, and he endures her smothering hug while winking at his angry, sorrowful father.

He says to Houston, “It’ll be all right.”

“Come,” I say.

“Don’t worry about me,” the boy says.

Houston drops his eyes, saying nothing.

I pull the mask from Orlando’s hands, placing it over his careless mouth. But then he kneels, putting his face in front of his sister. Touching the nose and a last bit of dried blood, he tells that scared little girl, “It’s nothing. You’re better already. And be happy. Now you get three more bites every day.”

She backs away, panicked.

He stands and puts on the goggles, and after adjusting the straps until comfortable, he calls out to everybody, “What’s the delay? Let’s get this chore done.”

“Vesta,” he says.

There is one light. Mine. I spread the beam, giving us a good view of the path leading down to the lake. It is January and dark. My light hides whatever stars might be showing through the dust and clouds that cling to these mountains. It is a rare night, the air chilly enough to make breath visible. Orlando pulls the work gloves from his pocket, trying to keep his fingers warm. Then he repeats that magical word. “Vesta,” he says, turning and looking into the light. “Tell me again.”

“It’s an asteroid.”

“I know.”

“But the mission was unique,” I say. “A secret fleet of spacecraft was sent there along with the small official mission. There was a lot of cargo, and the one ship returned for no reason except to fool people. Their plan was to convince the world that the little world had been touched and then abandoned. That’s what gave the colonists time and peace enough to build what was needed.”

“A new living world,” he says, staring at my face, breathing hard through the increasingly filthy mask.

“Domed and powered by the endless sunlight, yes. They built reliable habitats with room for the children to explore and grow and new ships were built, and when the children were grown, they flew to new asteroids. That was the dream — a desperate last gambit to give humanity new homes.”

“Secret homes,” he says.

“Walk on,” I say. “You need to hurry.”

He believes me. Young legs push, almost running. Looking over his shoulder, he says, “And why the secrecy?”

“To keep it all safe. So the big earth stations didn’t launch desperate missions. So they didn’t try to pour too many bodies into that final lifeboat.”

“Sure they did,” Orlando says, as if he has worked out the problem for himself. “It was necessary. Yeah.”

“Three centuries have passed,” I say.

“A long time.”

“Twenty-nine asteroids are inhabited, partly or completely.”

“Shit. How many people total?”

He asked that same question before. Once again, I say, “I don’t know. The voices from the sky won’t tell me.”

“This is incredible.”

I touch his back with my human hand and then pull the hand back.

“Wonderful,” he says.

I remain silent.

“What about me?”

The trail flattens into sand and gravel packed smooth, and we step onto the lake’s surface. Last summer was long and exceptionally dry, leaving the top layers dry as old bone. But ten meters down is moisture, and thirty meters deep is water enough to last until the next good rain. Our feet make crunching sounds on the dry gravel. We walk and he slows, and that’s when I ask, “Where did you bury them?”

“My kits?”

“You might need them. It is a long walk.”

Orlando searches for his landmark — one of the access pipes, sealed and leading down to the water table. Once again he asks, “What about me?”

“Make one guess, son.”

He likes that word. “Son.” Reaching the correct pipe, he holds up the compass sewn to his sleeve, finding his bearings. “They want talented people,” he says. “Good smart sharp kids who can help them.”

I don’t have to say another word. He believed what I needed him to believe, which is why he left so easily. Everything was so much neater than people expected, and everybody but his parents is celebrating now. Yet this story is so promising and so lovely. I want to keep telling it, even when I know better. Every good lie comes from this desire — the relentless search for beauty and for hope.

“The Vestans,” I say. “They want smart minds, yes. But more than that, they want fresh genes to mix into their limited pool. They’re looking into the long future, saving as much of the old species as possible.”

“Sure,” the boy says. Then he laughs. “A girl. I’m going to get a girl.”

“Probably several.”

“These people must really want me.” He stops and squats. “Diving into the gravity well like this, burning so much fuel just to save me.”

“You must be worth it,” I agree.

With gloved hands, he starts to dig, flinging gravel up between his legs.

I stand to one side, supplying the light.

“Could you help me?” he asks.

“I can’t. My hands might be damaged.”

Orlando is in a generous mood. “I suppose so,” he allows, working faster. “The other people still need doctoring, I guess.”

I watch him, and I watch quite a lot more. My various antennae reach into the darkness, listening. Searching. I don’t often step outside, escaping the station’s shielded walls. But tonight’s sky is silent. Maybe it will stay this way for the rest of the winter, and maybe longer. The last several decades have grown quieter, the rare bits of radio noise thoroughly encoded. There might be dozens and hundreds of little stations scattered about the Arctic, each taking precautions, keeping their positions and resources hidden from raiders. Or maybe there is no one to talk to, even in code. Either way, I listen, and the boy digs until his hole is wide and hip-deep in the center. Then he straightens his back, saying, “That’s funny. The bags should be here.”

“Keep searching,” I urge.

Those words give him new energy. He shifts to his right and digs again, looking like an animal following a last desperate scent.

“Cull,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“Removing what weakens, making the whole stronger as a consequence. That’s what it means to cull.”

His arms slow, and he looks straight ahead.

“Humans cull, and worlds cull too,” I say.

Orlando sits back on the dry gravel. “Do you think maybe somebody moved my kit?”

“Perhaps it was stolen,” I agree.

Then he rises. “Well, I don’t really need it. How far is this walk?”

“Down the mountains, following this drainage,” I tell him.

“But if I’m so important, can’t they come meet me halfway?”

“They don’t want to get close and be seen,” I tell him. “They promised to be waiting where the old lake sits.”

The old lake was an open water reservoir, dry now for fifty years.

“I know that spot,” he says. “I can run all the way, no problem.”

I like my lie so much. So much. Humans living above our heads, comfortable and well fed, and thriving among them — essential and worshipped — a generation of doctors who aren’t consumed by every possible worry and hazard and the miserable future for their stations.

Orlando looks back at me. “I’ll wave. When I’m flying over your head, I’ll give you a big wave.”

“And I’ll watch for you,” I say.

Orlando turns away.

I lift my least-human hand, aiming for the back of his neck.

“What a day…” he starts to say.

I drop him into the hole, and as I do with every cull and with every corpse delivered by natural causes, I cut open the skull. Before I kick the sand over the body, I pull out each of the pseudo-worms. I can’t make them anymore. I need to add them to my stockpile — a hoard that grows only larger with time.

About the Author

Robert has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had 140 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“.

Paper Cradle
by Stephen Gaskell

Even though you would’ve despised the weapon, Papa, you would’ve appreciated the beauty of its creation.

First, beyond Mercury, a mote of starlight is ensnared. An archipelago of steel-blue optical cavities, strung out like a chain of sapphires around the wildfire neck of the sun, pumps the trapped light much like the way you used to spin me faster and faster on the merry-go-round at Shinjuku Park. When the light is hotter than the heart of the star from which it was born, it will be flung Earthwards like a white-hot hammer from an athlete’s hands. It will leap the cold gap of space fast. Faster than you grew up? you’d ask wryly. No, not that fast, I’d admit.

At the same time, far above the deep-sea blue of the Pacific, above the wispy cirrus, above even the line where night becomes eternal, a parabolic mirror will unfurl. The curve of its surface is so perfect you would’ve said it had been plucked from Plato’s world. The light will strike this mirror, and then, more focused than the Buddha himself, it will laser towards a small atoll four hundred kilometers off the Chinese mainland where it will meet a pellet of frozen hydrogen. The atoms, pressed together tighter than the victims of Auschwitz, will fuse.

The very sky will burn in the inferno.

Origami comes from the words oru meaning to fold, and kami meaning paper. You told me that the first time I demanded to know how to make the paper animals that were carefully placed around our small Tokyo apartment. You sat me on your knee at our tiny kitchen table, a perfect square of paper in front of us. “First,” you said, pulling back my over eager hands, “you should recognize that every form resides in the unmade sheet.”

I didn’t understand your words then. All I wanted was to touch the ivory paper, a treat as delicious as mochi ice cream on the tongue. Now I realize you were talking about me.

Myself, Commander Clayton Barnes, and Mission Specialist Pavel Lenki float in the Unity module of the ISS, 360km above the Pacific Ocean.

You would’ve related to the mood among us. We don’t move. We don’t speak. We don’t look each other in the eye. None of us signed up to NASA, FKA, or JAXA for this. We thought the human exploration of space meant understanding spider’s webs in microgravity, testing our species’ limits, and important things like learning how to say rude words in each other’s mother tongue. Admit it, you did too. At least to begin with you did.

“ISS, this is Darmstadt.”

“Barnes here, Darmstadt.” Clayton knows what’s coming, but his voice doesn’t betray any emotion. “Go ahead.”

“The phoenix is nearly ready to leave the nest. Commence deployment of the mirror.” The whole event — radio exchanges included — is being broadcast across the globe. There are cameras pointed at the sun, pointed at the ISS, pointed at the atoll. There’s even a camera pointed at us. You would’ve been disgusted by the razzmatazz, I’m sure.

“Copy that,” Clayton replies. He nods at Pavel, who’s stationed beside a command console. The Russian taps away at the keyboard, then lets his middle and index fingers linger over the ENTER key. He doesn’t want to be party to this, but what choice does he have? His is a purely symbolic role. The instructions could easily be relayed from ISOC without his input. He hits the button.

In unison, we turn our heads to the bank of screens that give view onto the ISS’s exterior. On the bottom row, second screen from the left, against a backdrop of stars, a complex, folded object slips out of its cylindrical sheath. The mirror has been kept sealed until the last to protect its nanometer perfect veneer from the scarring effects of paint flakes, slag from spent solid rocket motors, cosmic rays, micrometeoroids, and the rest. Pavel taps out another command.

You would’ve applauded my acting skills. I keep my gaze locked on the screen, expectant. The mirror is meant to unfurl along its carefully delineated fold lines, a crystal rose blooming in the light of the sun. It doesn’t. Instead, it remains in its own embrace, motionless. It does this because two days ago, I altered a line of code in the mirror’s IO protocols.

Pavel taps away, investigating. “I don’t understand.”

ISOC comes back, a LED on one of the consoles indicating we’re on a non-public channel, now. “We’re picking up a problem with the mirror’s receiver, ISS.”

“Yeah, I see that,” Clayton replies, skimming the error feedback on a nearby terminal. “We’ll have to abort the test, check it out.”

There’s a muffled sound — somebody’s hand over the mike — before ISOC speaks again. “That’s a negative, ISS.”

“What?”

“I repeat that’s a negative. Test must proceed. Prepare Koryo for an EVA.”

EVA. Extravehicular activity. A spacewalk. I don’t mean it to be so visible, but I can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. My days as an astronaut, an engineer — hell, my days as a free citizen, even — ended the moment I committed that IO file to memory. The truth would’ve come out in time. I’ve known that all along. What I didn’t know was whether they’d still go ahead with the test. The powers that be didn’t disappoint.

You can guess what I’m going to do, Papa, can’t you? You would’ve approved, wouldn’t you?

“Why did Mama make animals?” I asked you when I was six. I’d been so young when she’d died that I couldn’t remember her. For me all that was left, aside from a few photos, were her paper constructions.

You stopped reading, peered down at me where I was folding patterned sheets. “They helped her become.”

“Become what?”

“Whatever she wanted. If she needed strength, she made a tiger. If she needed grace, a swan.” You bit your lip, went quiet.

I was still too young to understand your pain, too young to know how tortuous her cancer must have been, but, despite my age, I still felt guilty that I wasn’t in her life anymore. I clung on to those figures — or the idea of them — as tightly as I would’ve hugged her if she’d still been alive.

It was through the origami that I got interested in space. Do you remember? I read about the Miura fold that JAXA had used to package solar panels up in the most efficient way possible. I couldn’t believe the ancient art could have such applications. Soon I was reading about weightlessness and geosynchronous orbits and space stations. Soon I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

You were happy for me.

“This is bullshit.” Clayton pauses from helping me get into one of the Constellation spacesuits. We’re in Quest’s equipment lock, the cold vacuum of space beyond the crew lock in the adjacent section. I should be “camping-out”, spending eight hours in here in a reduced-nitrogen atmosphere to help lessen the chances of the bends, but the world is waiting. “You just make sure you’re well out the way when that laser arrives.”

“I will.” The white-hot lance of coherent light is nearing its operational temperature. I’ll have about fifteen minutes to replace the receiver once I get out there. If that was what I was doing it would be plenty of time.

I hate to deceive him. I want to tell him what I have planned, but that would put him in an uncomfortable position. Better that he doesn’t know.

He sighs, starts adjusting the SAFER unit on my back. The jet pack is for emergency use only; I’ll be tethered by an umbilical to the ISS.

“Thank you, Commander,” I say through the two thin microphones of my snoopy cap after I’m fully suited up. The comms device snuggly grips my head like an aviator’s hat. I wonder if Clayton can detect the nerves in my voice. You certainly would be able to.

“Something wrong, Koryo?”

I shake my visored head.

In 2010 when I enrolled at JAXA, space-exploration had more to do with non-stick frying pans than weapons of mass destruction. Reagan’s Star Wars project, born in the hot crucible of a cold war, had been dead and buried twenty years. The loss of space shuttle Columbia during reentry in 2003 had lessened the global public’s appetite for sending men and women to the stars.

You asked if I really wanted to commit to something that might not exist in ten years. I said I had to hope. Then came the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the awful pictures of seabirds trapped in thick folds of crude, beady eyes bewildered. Like sunflowers, the oil companies turned their gluttonous faces to the light. Solar harvesters became the tech that would solve our ever growing energy needs. Funding poured back into the space agencies. JAXA, NASA, and the rest enjoyed a renaissance. When I graduated you took me to that restaurant in Kibo where you said you’d used to celebrate special occasions with Mama, and we ordered tora-fugu.

“She would be so proud,” you said, claiming it was the wasabi making your eyes filmy.

Looking back, it seems that time of optimism, of innocence, passed faster than the time it takes to make a single fold in a piece of origami.

On my second expedition to the ISS I remember my sheer physical response — throat tightening, chest constricting, stomach balling — upon seeing the contents of the glove boxes. A shaved cat, wrinkled skin raw with burns. A hamster or a gerbil, bloated, eyes popped. A dead chimp, red rust globules of dried blood hanging like the fronds of a sick mobile.

The experiments had changed since my last trip. I pushed away, backing into one of the handover cosmonauts. “They want to know what fighting up here will be like,” she said. The skin of her face was sallow, her eyes sunken.

I wondered what they’d have me do on my tour of duty.

“Walk away,” you told me when I came back to Earth. “It will only worsen.”

You were right, but I was stubborn. I’d already folded myself, and I didn’t think I could change. I told you to stop interfering.

As nations stopped talking, so did we.

Canadarm swings close, and I grab the end boom.

Beneath my suit I feel the tendrils of cold water lace through my cooling long johns. I still feel slightly light-headed from the pure-oxygen I’m breathing, and the blue-and-white Earth looks glorious.

“You set?” Clayton asks. He’ll be sitting in the orbiter aft flight deck, manning the control station ready to manipulate the arm, while Pavel will be next to him, controlling the camera.

“Ready,” I say. I feel the rumble of motors through Canadarm’s hard, metal skin. The Earth slides and turns in the firmament as if a marble in the hands of a God. As the trusses of the station glide past, I think of you in your hospital bed, telling me you don’t believe in a higher power or an afterlife or a final judgment. You’d kept your illness from me. I’d kept myself from you. We had a lot of talking to do.

“I want you to know something about your Mama,” you said, wheezing.

I held your wrist, felt the weak pulse inside, nodded for you to go on.

“She wasn’t born in Shikoko.”

I didn’t understand. “She wasn’t?”

“She was born in Honshū.” You lifted yourself up, sipped a little water. “Not far from Hiroshima.”

I sat down in the small plastic red chair next to the bed. Mama had been born early 1946. I’d always thought both sides of my family had escaped the worst of the war. “Her cancer — ”

“We don’t know.” Your hands gripped the bed sheets, your fingers paling. “Perhaps she was lucky compared to some.”

I delved into my handbag to fetch the paper you’d asked for —

“ — quicken it up, Koryo?”

I snap out of the memory at Clayton’s words. I’ve drawn alongside the enfolded mirror. Sunward, parallel to the arc of the sky, I see the glint of satellites and solar farms and other orbitals. ISOC won’t like it, but my impromptu spacewalk will be beaming live across the world. In the treacle-slow way of space, I turn so that my bulk blocks line-of-sight between the ISS external cam that tracks me and the concertina’d mirror.

Clayton’s onto the mistake immediately. “Now we can’t see what you’re doing.”

“This is the easiest way for me to work.” I lie. “Do you want to re-orient the boom?” I ask, knowing time is too short.

Clayton sighs. “Negative. Just talk me through what you’re doing.”

I reach across the umbilical that snakes out from the center of my chest, grab two sides of the mirror, and pull. “I’m uncoupling the faulty transmitter,” I lie again, buying myself a little more time. Despite the pure-oxygen I feel breathless. I’ve just wrecked a multi-million dollar instrument. The mirror is nothing more than the world’s most expensive sheet of tin foil. The weapon will not be demonstrated today.

“Koryo?” Clayton says, hesitantly. “What’s going on? Koryo — ”

I click my VOX radio switch to OFF. As I do, I watch my umbilical go taut. Before I can react I’m jerked away from the sheet. I swipe a thickly-gloved hand, but I’m too late. “No!” I shout in the bubbled space of my helmet, the word echoing off the visor. They’re reeling me in. Too soon. I’m not finished yet.

I circle my hands around the neck of the umbilical, ready to wring it like a chicken, and twist. It separates with a smooth hiss, then snaps away from the force of the ejecting oxygen. The laws of momentum don’t care for human concerns. Despite being free, I drift lockwards, the panels of the solar arrays passing overhead. I spin one-eighty, uncap the SAFER joystick on my left forearm, and vent a high-pressure stream of nitrogen. I stop moving backwards, begin to move forwards. Nobody’s been on an untethered EVA for over thirty years, and the lack of connection to the ISS unnerves me. My stomach knots.

As I come back to the glittering sheet, I tap a couple of reverse thrusts, bring myself to rest. I don’t have much time. I know the pattern inside-out, but the suit gloves, even with their textured rubber fingertips, are unwieldy for such dexterous work. The laser is out there, closing fast.

“Do you know the story of Sadako?” you asked on one of my last visits.

I shook my head. In a quiet, whispering voice, so low I had to turn my ear to your mouth, you told me.

Sadako Sasaki was a little girl who was two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. When the bomb exploded she was at home, a mile from Ground Zero. In time she was diagnosed with leukemia, “an atom bomb disease” as her mother called it, and eventually went to hospital to die.

You said if anyone had a right to be bitter and hateful about the bomb it was her. She wasn’t. She knew such a terrible thing should never have happened in the first place, and she decided to do her utmost to ensure it would never happen again. She vowed to make a thousand paper cranes as a symbol of peace for the world. Though she had plenty of time during her days in the hospital to fold the cranes, she lacked the paper. She used medicinal packaging, old newspapers, the wrapping of other patients’ get-well presents, and yet that wasn’t enough.

She died before she finished, but her story touched the hearts of many, and in time her vow was kept.

When you told me that story I knew I couldn’t stand and watch.

I fold the sheet in half, first across the middle, then across the diagonal. As I continue making the folds, fifty meters away I see the VASIMR plasma engines firing, the flame salmon-pink. The ISS is being moved into a higher orbit, out of harm’s way of the incoming laser. Good. You’d be the first to know that I never intended this to end violently.

The origami is almost complete. I invert fold one of the upper tips to form the long pointed beak. Next I pull back the other tip to make the upflung tail. Lastly, I gently pull the wings apart and the crane which has always been there comes to life. I make a last inspection of my creation, then satisfied, I swat it away in the direction of the orbitals.

Mama was right. Origami is a way of becoming. As I watch the crane glide off, its tapered wings cutting through an invisible sea, for the first time in a long time, I feel at peace.

About the Author

Stephen Gaskell, often mistaken for an “English bum” at writerly shindigs, is actually a highly educated individual with MPhys and MSc degrees in physics and artificial intelligence from University College, Oxford, and the University of Sussex, respectively. A firm believer in repaying his debt to society, he uses this colossal investment of state taxes to make videogames for Ubisoft, personally tutor overprivileged teens, and invent science-fictional universes. His work has appeared in many places including Interzone, Futurismic, and, much to the disappointment of his academic superiors, the prestigious journal Nature. He is currently working on his first novel.

Steel Is Not Enough: The Lives and Times of Magnus, Robot Fighter
by Bill Spangler

It was a bright and boundless future, with flying cars dotting a perpetually blue sky. In the shadows of the mile-high spires, though, the poor and the outsiders struggled to survive. And everywhere you looked, thinking their steel thoughts, were robots.

This was the world of Magnus Robot Fighter, a comic book that premiered in 1963, from Gold Key comics. Although Magnus has never been as popular as Batman or Iron Man, he’s a character — and a concept — that keeps resurfacing. The newest version of the comic, a four-issue limited series from Dark Horse, started in August. Magnus’ longevity can be attributed to a lot of factors, but one of the major reasons is that it can be taken seriously as science fiction. While the chroniclers of Magnus’ adventures never skimped on the action, there was some real world-building and extrapolation in the series.

Magnus Robot Fighter is set in the early 41st century, in the city of North Am. With a few exceptions (such as the Grand Canyon), North Am covers every available square foot of North America. Robots and artificial intelligences are an integral part of daily life, and few question the arrangement… but some do. One dissenter, oddly enough, is 1A, an ancient robot.

In order to protect mankind against renegade robots and to provide an example of a different way of life, 1A takes an orphan boy he calls Magnus and trains him in his secret Antarctic refuge. 1A teaches him how to destroy renegade robots and implants a device in his brain that allows him to eavesdrop on communications between robots. In issue four of the first run, a renegade robot tells him that “Your flesh and blood cannot stand against my steel!” The human replies, “Steel is not enough,” shortly before taking the robot permanently off-line.

As an adult, Magnus returns to North Am, where he becomes friends with Senator Zeremiah Clane and his beautiful daughter, Leeja.

Magnus Robot Fighter was created by writer/ artist Russ Manning, with story assistance by Chase Craig. Basically, the 21 issues that Manning produced are what made the comic’s reputation. Manning’s vision of the 41st century was simple, but dynamic, and managed to suggest that the world continued beyond the borders of the panels. North Am follows in the tradition of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Isaac Asimov’s Trantor, and it may have, in turn, influenced the mega-cities in Judge Dredd’s world, and Corcuscant, in the Star Wars prequels. (It’s worth noting that Manning was the first artist/writer to work on the Star Wars newspaper strip.) In addition, Manning produced a wide variety of robotic designs, both humanoid and non-human.

The very first words of Magnus Robot Fighter show how well Manning and Craig were grounded in prose science fiction. The first issue begins with, “No robot may harm a human, or allow a human to come to harm,” words that have a familiar ring to readers acquainted with Asimov’s robot stories. It’s quickly established that the definition of “harm” has changed since the 21st century. In that same issue, a robot takes a book away from a teenager because “humans might try such adventures again and come to harm.” It’s a moment reminiscent of Jack Williamson’s Humanoid stories.

While robots who look like humans are relatively rare in the Magnus canon, they do exist, which may also make Magnus a spiritual ancestor to Rick Deckard and the replicant hunters of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In Magnus Robot Fighter #15, “The Weird World of Mogul Badur,” there’s an explicit warning about humanity becoming too dependent on robots. Magnus and Leeja are taken to Sarkorum, a land isolated from the outside world for 800 years.  The robots in Sarkorum, though, are still highly advanced and humans there have relinquished much of their independence to them. There’s a scene of robots feeding morbidly obese people, resting on floating couches. It bears a striking resemblance to the passengers on the Axion, in Wall-E. More importantly, this emphasis on social issues was very unusual for a comic of the time.

(Another quality that Magnus Robot Fighter shares with prose sf is that it shows the limitations of science fiction as strictly an exercise in prediction. In issue three of the original run, robots are reading information from punched tapes.)

Along with the various robotic threats, Magnus and people of North Am are sometimes menaced by the Gophs, the residents of the lowest levels of the city. Leeja describes the Gophs as “criminals and anti-socials (who) resent all upper-level people.” Establishing that the paradise of North Am had a dark side was an unusual and memorable touch, and, again, it resonated with a classic: H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine.

The Gophs actually agreed with Magnus’ feelings about robots, but that wasn’t the only grievance they had with the upper-level “cloud-cloddies.” One of the major villains in Magnus’ first incarnation also felt that mankind had become too dependent on robots. The conflict arose in how he planned to solve this problem.

In his introduction in Magnus Robot Fighter #13, Dr. Laszlo Noel argued that all robots should be destroyed. That put Magnus in the interesting position of defending the status quo…at least in part. He replied, “All of the robots should not be destroyed. Robots are of use to mankind, but there should be fewer of them!” You didn’t see this sort of distinction when Superman battled Lex Luthor.

Among Magnus’ friends were Leeja Clane and the Outsiders, a group of teenagers who had embraced — or who were trying to embrace — Magnus’ philosophy. While she left most of the physical combat to Magnus, and occasionally needed rescuing, Leeja always came across as smart and strong-willed, unafraid to defy society’s expectations of her. She and Magnus meet when police robots try to arrest her. Shortly after their escape, she tells Magnus: “Fifteen minutes ago, I was only a daughter of Senator Clane. Now, I am a hunted robot resister…and I’m glad!” Later, she develops telepathic powers due to being the subject of experiments conducted by the renegade robot H8. These powers play a major role in the defeat of Malev-6, a planet-sized artificial intelligence.

The Outsiders started as a group of four boys, but, before long, they were joined by a girl. They liked Magnus and wanted to help him, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t make mistakes, like joining a paramilitary group controlled by Dr. Noel. For the time, the Outsiders were surprisingly multi-cultural: one boy was African-American; another had oriental ancestry and the girl was Native American. (Yes, those terms were undoubtedly different in their world, but that’s the clearest way to describe them in this one.)

These days this type of arrangement is considered a cliché in some quarters. However, when the Outsiders first appeared, the only analogous group was the bridge crew of the original starship Enterprise. The oriental member of the group was colored butter yellow,which seems like a less-than-enlightened approach now. Aside from that, though, none of the Outsiders could be called ethnic stereotypes; they were competent, admirable people. And introducing the Outsiders gave Magnus some teenaged sidekicks, without really giving him sidekicks.

After Manning left the comic, Gold Key commissioned new stories from other creators.  There was some real talent associated with these stories; Paul Norris drew the Brick Bradford newspaper strip and Dan Spiegle drew everything from Space Family Robinson to Blackhawk to Indiana Jones. Unfortunately, they were never able to maintain the level of quality that Manning and Craig established. The comic reverted to reprints, until it was cancelled in 1977.

In the early 1980s, Magnus resurfaced as a back-up strip in three issues of Doctor Solar, Man Of the Atom, another Gold Key comic. The first of these three stories — written by Roger McKenzie, with art by Frank Bolle — is particularly worth noting. This story is set in 1A’s underwater dome, shortly before Magnus returns to North Am. 1A tells him that the only way he’ll be leaving is if he destroys his robotic mentor. Magnus is supposed to be a robot fighter after all, and that includes fighting robots that he’s grown attached to. This disturbing idea proves to be a foreshadowing of the sort of questions that Magnus confronts in his next incarnation.

In 1991, Magnus Robot Fighter returned again, as part of the new Valiant comics line-up. Valiant featured both Gold Key characters, and original creations, such as the Harbingers (a team with some similarities to the X-Men) and Shadowman. The editor and head writer for the company was Jim Shooter, the former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics. Shooter wrote — or co-wrote — the first 20 issues of the new Magnus. During that time, he both deepened the theme and came up with a clever twist to Magnus’ biography.

The thematic change was both simple and profound. The rogue robots of the 1960s were now freewill robots, and foremost among them was 1A. In the first issue of the new run, it’s established that there are approximately 10 million freewill robots in North Am…and they’re organizing.

Magnus is reluctant to assume that all the freewill bots are killers; “Some may be well-balanced, but confused and afraid,” he says However, the panicky government wants a Final Solution to the problem of freewill robots. By issue two, Magnus is saying things like “I have killed rogues because it is my sworn duty to protect the lives of soft, arrogant human swine like you. I don’t like it and I don’t like you.” He destroys the leader of the freewill movement, but issue four ends with him extracting the robot communication monitor in his brain, and declaring himself a free man.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that Magnus’ sense of duty eventually reasserts itself. However, he comes to think of himself as an outsider, not part of the power structure. In a later issue, he even identifies himself as a Goph.

Art for these stories was provided by a variety of illustrators. The art was always slick and dynamic, but some artists came closer than others to matching Manning’s style.

The addition to the robot fighter’s back story was the revelation that he was the son of two members of the Harbingers. Another new character, the Geomancer, took baby Magnus into the future, to fulfill his destiny. In addition to tightening the continuity of the Valiant universe, the suggestion that Magnus was born with super powers provided a possible explanation of how he could “learn” to smash robots. (Steel is not enough, indeed.)

Two more Valiant comics — Rai and The Psi-Lords — were set in the 41st century. For a short time, Magnus appeared in two comics a month — his own book and the retooled Rai and the Future Force — as they fought an invasion from Malev-7, an upgraded version of the robot planet. This version of Magnus Robot Fighter ran for 64 issues. The next two revivals didn’t fare as well.

Writer Tom Poyer turned Magnus into a fanatical technophobe who travelled back to the present in order to nip robot development in the bud. It was a plausible extrapolation of the character but if you were looking for a likeable protagonist, you weren’t going to find him here. In 2005, in another attempt to revive Magnus tried to put North Am’s robot problems in a larger context. It proposed that the conflict was caused by an alien race known as theTraffickers, as the prelude to an invasion. This approach, for better or for worse, lasted only one issue.

Shooter has returned to Magnus as the writer of the Dark Horse series, with Bill Reinhold providing the art. So far (after two appearances), Shooter seems to be focusing on humans using robots for criminal purposes, rather than artificial intelligences, and on character changes for Magnus and his cast. It looks like 1A is going to play a significant role in this story, and Magnus’ relationship with Leeja is nowhere near as simple as it used to be.

It’s too early to tell whether this new version of Magnus is likely to be nominated for the recently-established Hugo for graphic storytelling. The potential is definitely there, though.

About the Author

Bill Spangler has been selling comic book scripts since the late 1980s, and has been writing about pop culture even longer. His most recent credits are a four-issue comic book revival of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and a prose story starring the Green Hornet, scheduled to appear in the first volume of the The Green Hornet Chronicles. Bill’s wife, Joyce, is a school psychologist and they live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

To See Beyond the Points of View: A Conversation with Karin Lowachee
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Canadian novelist Karin Lowachee’s experiences have spanned the Western hemisphere. She was born in South America and raised in Canada. Her time spent working in the Arctic greatly influenced her most recent The Gaslight Dogs, as did her love of the Wild West, Victoriana, and Inuit culture.

In 2001, Lowachee won the Warner First Novel Contet, which led to the publication of the science fiction novel Warchild. Subsequent novels, Burndrive and Cagebird, expanded the Warchild universe and further revealed Lowachee as a writer concerned with exploration and discovery — of worlds, of the self and of the traditions that form and confine us.

“Storytelling has ever been a pathway to discovering truths, of taking ourselves out of our own limits, our own prisons, whether they be in location or in mind,” writes Karin Lowachee in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” on the Orbit Books webpage. She is speaking here of her work recording inmates’ stories in a penitentiary, but she might as well be talking about situations and characters in Cagebird or in The Gaslight Dogs or about her own creative process.

Truth and Limitations and the Self are not easy topics, not new ideas. They’ve been challenging humans across time. Lowachee accesses these universal concerns while invoking a brilliantly conceived new world, a world of nomadic tribes and militant empires, of daughters and sons, of men and women, of cultures learning from and refusing to learn from each other.

Fear not, The Gaslight Dogs is no simple pitting of the Noble Savage against the Greedy Imperialist or Humans against Nature. This is a novel about people — people so real that, at times, you will feel trapped in the characters’ skins with them.

The points of view in The Gaslight Dogs alternate between Sjennonirk, an ankago (spiritwalker) of the Aniw, and Jarrett Fawle, a captain in the Ciracusan military. Lowachee gives us two intimate windows on a larger world. The result is a novel that contrasts vast lands with personal confinement, cultural rigidity with the need for adaptation.

As Lowachee says below, “You have two protagonists that are both literally and emotionally in prison.” It takes more than 300 pages to understand the nature of the many different prisons the protagonists find themselves in. And if we are lucky there will be many more pages in the future.

Lowachee’s novel has a way of sinking into your bones. Not like the teeth of a dog, but like the prolonged arctic cold, like hot tea cutting a brutal chill. Reading The Gaslight Dogs is a challenge, but the best sort of literary challenge. There is an undeniable depth to the characters, an urgency to the situations, and a constant sense of hope against the most challenging of perils.

Below, Lowachee and I talk about writing, the creative process, and other discomforts.

Can you describe The Gaslight Dogs in 200 words or less?

This is a hard question to answer so I cheated and went back to the proposal pitch I’d given my publisher and used that as inspiration. And even then I think it’s inadequate, but here is my attempt: The Gaslight Dogs tells the story of a young female spiritwalker from the Arctic and an army captain from the South who are forced to discover each other’s worlds, both spiritual and temporal, in a world neither of them fully understand. The book draws on the histories of clashing cultures, when modern and ancient thought collide, and examines the consequences that befall individuals caught in a society’s need for exploration, knowledge, and conquest.

In what ways does the frontier, especially the arctic frontier, spark your creativity?

It is such a harsh environment, it astounds me that people thrive there at all. But it’s also extremely beautiful. In a way it’s a lot like space — one wrong step and you’re facing death, and yet you can’t deny the beauty. The Arctic is very much like a desert too. Any extreme environment can be a perfect breeding ground for storytelling because you throw people in the midst of it and see how they build. Why are writers so fascinated by the idea/environment of a frontier? A frontier pares you right down to the bare essentials — when you strip away humanity’s decadence and niceties, you’re left with raw confrontation. You can’t hide and you have to rely on others for survival.

What comes first — the story, a character, setting, plot, voice? Something else?

It’s hard to say sometimes because they tend to come all at once. I had the idea that I wanted to tell a story about a character from the Arctic who would travel south and collide with a culture s/he had never seen before. Is that the story, character, setting or plot first of all? In that list the voice comes last, because the voice comes when I actually put words to the page. I have to say, though, that without the right character(s), I have no interest in a book. A cool idea or untangling a clever plot won’t propel me to write for 400 pages. I have to be intensely interested in the people and their lives.

The Gaslight Dogs opens with the arrival of an army and guns. Why start here? Were there any false starts?

There were a couple false starts, but that had more to do with me trying to find Sjenn’s voice than anything else. If I can’t nail the character, I can’t continue to write because I’m a linear writer and a psychological one, so there’s little point in me beginning at the end, so to speak. I need to live through the story with the character to see emotionally where s/he ends up. Beginning with the army landing on the shore with the guns, and the priest being complicit in that (even against his will), seemed like the best place to start the story because that’s when her world really begins to change and open up. That introduces everything wrong about her world, and introduces her world at the same time. And from there everything begins to fall apart. It also got the idea across, hopefully quickly, that this is the beginning of an actual invasion. There’s nothing benign about boxes of guns.

Do you craft, build, or grow a novel? And can you describe the process by which The Gaslight Dogs came to be in comparison to your previous novels?

All three. I’m an organic writer, in that I like stories to grow naturally once I water them with attention, but it doesn’t stay organic. At some point you have to be conscious, militant, and surgical in your creation. It begins broad and then narrows in examination as you go along — down to selecting every letter specifically and pouring over it when you’re making up a word in a different language.

It’s a little different to compare this book with the science fiction series because I lived with the science fiction world for a couple years before I actually wrote Warchild. I knew that world before Jos [Joslyn Musey] and company began to people it on a page. It became more specific and “perfect” through writing the novels but I didn’t begin the character and the world at the same time with Warchild like I did for this book. But this book did rumble around for awhile since working in the Arctic. The inclination grew over time and once I was given a blank slate by my editor to come up with a fantasy world, it all coalesced. I had opportunity now to explore in specifics. I wanted to write a book that brought the Arctic world and culture (with some fantasy liberties) into the forefront since living up there; I have a longstanding love of the Wild West; I find the Victorian era to be fascinating and, luckily for me, a hot topic right now. Combining all three seemed natural. They fit the kernels of my idea, the shaping of the world.

What did the alternating limited third person points of view allow you to do that, say, single third or single first person wouldn’t have?

I can’t remember when I decided that Jarrett would have his own point of view, but I can’t imagine his point of view not being there now. It’s essential because it’s literally one-half of the story I want to tell. His experience is important to understand Sjenn’s, and vice versa, and if people get to read the subsequent books in the trilogy this would become all the more apparent. I felt early on that saying things purely from Sjenn’s point of view would be too alienating and too limiting — there would be too much she didn’t understand once she landed in Ciracusa and that would frustrate me as a writer and likely the readers too. Jarrett’s polar opposite world view, plus his understanding of his world (which comes with its own biases and prejudices) is a good contrast to Sjenn’s.

Some people tend to think because it’s in third person, too, that there is more authorial intervention, an authorial opinion. But as you said it’s a limited third person; it’s basically first person — I treated it as such — but with the natural distance of a third person voice which I chose more for voice than anything else. Because of that, the world begins from a narrow point of view and you’re judging everything through these two points of view and the contrast you can see between them. But they’re not complete points of view. Putting the two together doesn’t make the world whole — you’re still stuck with their biases and prejudices. To try and see beyond that, the reader has to work.

I don’t appeal to lazy readers in my novels and never have, where everything is spelled out both in plot and character. Not everything is explained upfront (because the universe doesn’t work that way and I’m of the mind that people should accept unknowns or at least be patient with them), but what I do explain is very conscious and exactly what I want you to know if you’re paying attention. This first book is rather claustrophobic and I did that on purpose. Some people have said that it feels limited. That’s the point. You have two protagonists that are both literally and emotionally in prison. If I wrote this book from an omniscient point of view or washed it all in authorial niceties in order to make the reader comfortable that would be cheating the idea, the tone, and the voices of the characters.

Can you outline the process by which you built the Dog ancestry culture in particular and the world of The Gaslight Dogs in particular?

I had the idea of the little spirit years ago, when I worked up North. I’ve always been fascinated by cultures that believe in animal spirits, but I didn’t want to just settle on the common knowledge of that, with those expectations. I didn’t want Sjenn to have a wolf companion as such, or to make her shapechange like you see in so much fantasy. Because the book/idea deals with spiritual issues, I made it much more elemental, in a way. This little spirit actually resides in their bodies. Then I had to ask the questions of why and how? It all just fell into place. It made sense that these aren’t, in fact, animal spirits. Like Sjenn says in the book, that is just the form that they take. They belong to something more than our terrestrial understanding, something much older, and as such, would be incredibly difficult to control or understand. And yet we have a relationship with them.

To me that’s the beauty of the spiritual (and I’m talking a little about theme right now, which bears on how I view the Dog ancestry). We can have a relationship with the spiritual without fully understanding it (but we do that with other people too, if you think about it, and nobody questions that; that’s “love” and that’s what “everyone” wants.) That takes faith and a sense of wonder. That’s stripping our love of the speculative right down to its essentials — what is more speculative than the question of where we come from and what exists beyond our physical reality? The spirituality in Sjenn’s world has an order and a reason, and a definite importance, the characters just don’t fully understand them, but they’ll be revealed over time.

Jarrett’s problem (one of them) is his arrogance and his unwillingness to believe in things that are larger than himself, that are outside of his limited experience. He doesn’t become “the white savior” because he can’t be arsed to believe in it and because he can’t even save himself. I think that’s more realistic than someone sweeping in, all enlightened. When he does finally accept it at the end it doesn’t come with angels singing, in fact it’s a hard pill to swallow, and it doesn’t even necessarily make him a better person. It just makes him more aware and anyone can tell you that knowledge is a double-edged sword, because then you can no longer rely on ignorance. Logically his 29 years of life isn’t enough to fully explain the universe, but you meet people all the time that claim that their short time on this Earth, what they’ve seen and what they’ve read and heard, is sufficient to explain everything. It’s arrogance. That idea bears very heavily in the world of this novel and how Jarrett is connected to the Dog.

For all of General Fawle’s bad deeds, he’s one of the few Kabliw who opened his mind to other possibilities, other explanations. Another was Father Bari. Both of them are from pretty stringent subcultures — a military and a religion. Yet they accepted another culture’s beliefs. And in the wrong hands, that acceptance can do damage, just as much as it can enlighten. I’m sure people can find real-world correlation with that idea too. The Ciracusan world is a sharp contrast to the Aniw one, but there is commonality in both and that’s what the book explores and will explore (hopefully). Because despite the diversity, cultures are made up of people, and there is commonality in people. There’s “good” and “bad” in all cultures too, which you’ll see more of, hopefully, and which I was conscious of creating. To me it’s not that the Aniw or the Nation tribes are perfect and the Ciracusans are lost bastards. There’s a lot that’s dicey in all of them because they all have an incomplete understanding of the world. I read one blogger say something like obviously the tribes are “better” and the Ciracusans are “wrong.” Clearly they didn’t read well enough because I just need to point to Qoyotariz or Sjenn’s father/little spirit. There is nothing clear-cut about their characters at all. Or any of them. When I talk about the world of this book, the scaffolding is one thing, the psychology is another. Both are essential.

The overall world of the book came in parts as ideas rolled into one another. You ask yourself questions and the world builds. What do the Ciracusans believe? Where did they come from? How many gods? How much of the world is settled, what does the frontier look like? What tribes are they in contact with? Who are these tribes? What differentiates them? Who are the Aniw? What do they believe? It’s endless. Every time I had a question, I had to seek the answer, and from that answer, more often than not, came a plot point.

Your story of Sjenn and Captain Jarrett suggests that there is great value in disorientation. Likewise, adaptation seems crucial to the story. How much disorientation and adaptation do you experience and/or embrace in the creative process?

Disorientation and adaptation is crucial in life because when you’re too comfortable you get lazy — with what you believe and what you’re willing to believe, as well as many other things. It’s not life’s responsibility to adhere to your comfort level and your biases; that kind of entitlement is a road to nowhere. Answers and self-discovery aren’t found in comfortable places, and if there’s any one thread in all of my writing, it’s that specific thing.

Your question is perfect because disorientation and adaptation seems to be a very accurate way of describing the creative process, especially in novel writing, and I’ve never read anyone phrase it like that. We start off wondering what the hell? And then figure out our answers. Which create more what the hell? questions — “What the hell does this mean?” — whilst flailing around looking for explanation. That’s it. It’s fun, though. Much more fun for me than for the characters.

Figuring out the puzzle of the book is exciting because when you get those moments where the inspiration is flowing and the pieces are fitting, you feel like you’re doing exactly what you are meant to be doing with your time. You feel like you might actually have something to say that might be worth something to other people and to yourself. And that’s pretty important.

What’s next for you?

Only the gods know. That’s not me being coy either. I’m working on some things but whether they’ll be put on the shelves is another matter altogether.

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.

Each Facet Intensely: A Conversation with Angela Slatter
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Australian fiction writer Angela Slatter has two beautiful story collections out, Sourdough & Other Stories (Tartarus Press [UK]) and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications). They are beautiful inside and out — both the stories that make up the books and the books themselves.

Slatter’s stories are startling and exuberant and they will remind you why the short story form is so powerful.

“Angela Slatter writes fiction like an artist turned poet,” said Ann VanderMeer, editor-in-chief of Weird Tales. “Her stories are lyrical and, more important, vividly human. The brilliantly drawn images in her first collection will deliver a satisfying shock of recognition to any reader.”

Slatter’s stories posses a primal magic. They make you hold your breath. They stop your heart. And they open moments wide enough to fill whole worlds.

“[I write about] fairytales and fear — and sometimes overcoming the odds … in fairytales,” said Angela Slatter. “I enjoy writing about really engaging characters — who are terribly flawed but still bring the reader along with them. I do like fairytale themes as my jumping off point because they’re so universal; they’re what we hear in the cradle.”

Below, Slatter and I talk about the short story form, ebooks, and learning patience.

How does a short story work on the reader? What should a short story do?

I had a lot of chats with Sean Williams about this at Clarion South last year over chocolate frogs and herbal tea … a short story should show a slice of life at a particular moment — a reader is sucked in and then thrown out again, with head spinning — a bit like a trip with a malfunctioning vortex manipulator. It’s holding a gem up to the light and looking at only one facet really intensely. Whereas the novel needs lots of nice workmanlike narrative prose to move the story along — the river of brown — and float your golden boats of highlight moments on, a short story needs to be all gold. A reader shouldn’t feel that any word is out of place or wasted. It should also (in my opinion) leave a reader feeling that there’s other stuff that’s gone on that they haven’t been told … that there’s another story, an “under-story” that still remains hidden. It’s about a subtle layering that leaves a sense of unease even after a satisfactory conclusion. Finally for me, a short story should be about the three C’s: crisis, choice, and consequence.

What comes first — character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else?

It really depends. One of the stories in the Sourdough collection, “Sister, Sister” has a couple of sparks: one is a book of Norwegian folktales that belonged to my Mum about trolls and changeling babies; the other is from reading in Miéville’s Perdido Street Station a description of a pub Isaac goes into and thinking “There should be a crèche in there”. Another story, in the Sprawl anthology, called “Brisneyland By Night” came from an INXS song that contains the line “I’ll make wine from your tears.” Or I might have a character popping up and demanding attention: Patience Sykes in “Gallowberries” is such a one (also in the Sourdough collection). Yes, it’s a strange place in my head.

Is there a landmark story in your career?

Argh! That’s really hard: it could be the first story I sold — which was to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (”The Juniper Tree”), because it was such a lovely high profile market and I thought “Hey, maybe I can write.” Or maybe “The Jacaranda Wife,” which was for the Dreaming Again anthology that Jack Dann edited, because it was my first really big sale and my first Australian sale. Or maybe it was Sourdough because it started the cycle of stories that ultimately became the Sourdough & Other Stories collection. Too hard to choose!

Which stories in Sourdough & Other Stories and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales gave you the most trouble? And did any of them come easily?

With Sourdough & Other Stories, Gallowberries took four years to write. “Lost Things” didn’t fall into place until I’d worked out how to connect it with “Ash” and “The Story of Ink”. And ”A Porcelain Soul” made me seriously grumpy until a chat with Alison Goodman about reverse engineering for writers made me look really closely at what a secondary character wanted and then I was able to pull everything together at last.

The Girl with No Hands … was a bit different because most of those tales are early work and I love the collection as a map of my journey as a writer. I suppose the hardest ones were “The Jacaranda Wife” and “Dresses, three” because they were both written with some pressure - the first one because Jack had liked but refused my first sub for Dreaming Again and asked “Do you have anything else?”And when Jack says that, you damn well write something! And the second one because it was written for an Art-themed issue for Shimmer and I wanted to do justice to Chrissy Ellsworth’s gorgeous artwork! A lot of sweat went into those stories.

Were you pleased with how Sourdough Dough & Other Stories turned out? A special edition like this really reminds me how great a book as an object can be.

I think it’s glorious — I never thought I would have a book like that! It makes me feel so humble and grateful to be with a publisher like Tartarus for my first ever book because they love the book as an artifact and a thing of beauty as well as a means of transmitting the stories. I have also been very, very fortunate in that I have two short story collections out this year, The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales is also beautiful and comes in a paper back and a limited edition hardcover version too. Russell at Ticonderoga also shares the same aesthetic sense of how lovely a book can be!

Any thoughts on ebooks?

Ebooks … keep in mind that I am a Luddite and well, it doesn’t feel the same as curling up with a nice book that smells like ink and paper. It doesn’t feel right to me and the glow hurts my eyes still. I think of them as expensive coasters. But I also know that they’re a great new income stream for writers and we need to know how to leverage the potential for multi-platform storytelling and reading — the book is also now a tool for social networking, which it was before in its old form with book clubs — now it has the potential for an online book club with many, many, many members.

But still, they don’t look as nice as a hardcover book. And if I drop my book on my head when I fall asleep at night, it may hurt but it won’t cost a packet unlike the ebook reader that will surely not bounce very well and need to be replaced.

How are the novels coming? What do you prefer about the longer form? The shorter form?

The novels are slow, because I am also working on a PhD and working part-time to make ends meet. I like the shorter form because it can be quicker to finish and I generally know how I want it to end and I can imagine its shape. Novels take a lot more perseverance and it’s just a new form for me. I feel at this point that I’m kind of transitioning … but I need to learn to be patient and learn.

What’s next for you?

Finishing the first book of the duopoly, Well of Souls … then the second book, Gate of the Dead … and I would really like to do another collection of stories in the Sourdough universe, because I still have more of those stories buzzing around in my head … I want to examine what happens to Selke, and Patience and Theodora and I want to write more about Rilka.

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.