On the Banks of the River Lex
by N. K. Jemisin

Death lay under the water-tower on a sagging rooftop, watching the slow condensation of water along the tower’s metal belly. Occasionally one of the water beads would grow pregnant enough to spawn a droplet, which would then fall around — and occasionally onto — Death’s forehead. He had counted over seven hundred hits in the past few days.

Sleep appeared and crouched beside Death, looking hopeful. “You look bored. I don’t suppose you’d care for a little oblivion?”

“No, thank you,” said Death. He was always scrupulously polite, to counter his reputation. He waited until another drop fell — a miss, alas — and then turned his head to regard Sleep. “You’re looking a little detached yourself.”

At the refusal, Sleep had sighed and sat down beside him. “I thought I would be all right,” she said. “I should be all right. Animals sleep, even plants in their way. But it just isn’t the same.”

Death reached out to touch her hand. It was his own silent offer.

“No thanks,” she said, though she did take his hand. He was glad. Others rarely touched him, if they could help it. By this gesture he understood: not yet.

He sat up. The sun had just risen above the city. Clouds like strings of pearls girded the sky. A flock of tiny birds — Death guessed hummingbirds, migrating back from the south — passed through the rust-rimmed hole in the Met Life Building.

“What’s that?” asked Sleep.

Death followed her finger and saw a cluster of flowers. The rooftop on which he lay was thick with meadowgrass, and one very determined ailanthus grew in the dust and silt of one corner. There were many flowers amid the meadowgrass, which was why Death liked this roof so much. He would be sorry when it finally caved in.

“Just a daisy,” he replied.

“No, beyond that.”

They got up and walked around the roof’s holes for a better look. Beyond the daisy, fighting its way up through the grass in the shadows of the roof-wall, was a flower Death had never seen before. Its shape was something like that of a crocus, but its roots were shallow, like all rooftop flora. There was no bulb. And its petals were a lush, deep matte black.

“That’s different,” said Sleep.

Death crouched to peer at the flower, then reached out to stroke the satin softness of one petal. Not just different. New.

Something tickled his cheek. He reached up to brush it away and found his fingers wet. Glancing back at the water-tower, he wondered how he could’ve missed his count.

Death liked to walk across bridges. For this reason he had claimed a home for himself relatively far from the center of town. This was in a big ugly gray stone of a building that had once been a factory, and then had been colonized by artists, and then by trend-obsessed young professionals. Now it was ruled by cats. Death passed perhaps a dozen of them on his way down the stairs, including one mother briskly carrying a mouse and trailed by two gangling adolescents. As usual they ignored his presence, merely slinking out of the way as he passed. On the rare occasions when one would deign to look at him, he nodded in polite greeting. Sometimes they even nodded back.

He had attempted, once, to entice a kitten to live with him. This was something he knew humans had done. But he kept forgetting to bring food, and because he did not sleep, the kitten was unable to cuddle with him at night. After a few days the kitten had left in a huff. He still saw its descendants around the building, and felt lingering regret.

The Williamsburg Bridge had not yet begun to warp and sag like the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Death suspected there was some logical reason for this — perhaps the Williamsburg had been renovated more recently, or built more sturdily in the first place. But in his heart, Death believed that he helped to keep the bridge intact. By walking across it, he gave the bridge purpose. For all things created by humankind, purpose was the quintessence of existence.

So Death walked into town every day.

There was much activity in town when Death arrived.

“The twins have opened a Starbucks at Union Square!” said a stranger, when Death stepped off the bridge on Delancey. He nodded in pleasant response to this, though he was not certain what a Starbucks was or why the twins would have bothered with it.

Still, everyone seemed so excited about the Starbucks that Death wandered uptown, curious. Most of the streets were empty, except for cats and a few coyotes. The coyotes were not as bold as the cats; they mostly tried to keep out of sight. At 14th Street and Avenue A, Death found the Dragon King of the Western Ocean playing bagpipes on the corner stoop. He sat on the gnarled root of a young oak that was slowly crushing an ancient, spindly cherry, and destroying the sidewalk in the process. Skirting around the growing sinkhole, Death sat down to listen until the Dragon King was done.

“Thanks,” the Dragon King said. “It’s good to have listeners.”

“You’re very good,” said Death.

“Always wanted to learn this thing. It’s just so ugly, you have to love it. I looked all over the mainland, even in Hong Kong, and couldn’t find one. Had to come here, finally. Thank little apples for the Chinese Diaspora.” The Dragon King set down the bagpipes carefully. “Are you going to Starbucks?”

“I was thinking about it, yes. Are you?”

“Course not. I hate coffee. People used to offer it to me all the time — nasty, vile stuff. Now, a Krispy Kreme doughnut? Got one of those once, thought I would die of joy.” He let out a wistful sigh.

“I’ve never tried coffee.” People, in the time before, had made very different offerings to Death.

“You probably won’t have any today, either. Mawu only found a few bricks of the freeze-dried stuff; I bet they’ll run out by noon.”

“Oh.” Death felt mildly disappointed.

“Let’s go anyhow. I’m bored.”

They walked over to Union Square, where as usual the south-end steps were filled with worshippers. Not people, for all that most of them had adopted the forms of people in homage. Just others of their kind who were willing and had the strength to assist those in need. But this time the line around the square, trailing from the Starbucks all the way to the collapsed bank on the opposite corner, was long enough to rival the crowd on the steps.

The Dragon King clapped Death on the shoulder. “See what I mean? Good luck getting a taste.”

“Anything new is worth trying,” Death replied with a shrug.

The Dragon King sighed. “I know you don’t need it, man, but you really ought to try a service.” He nodded toward the square. “Way better than coffee.”

“Others need it more than me.” They both fell silent, embarrassed, as a thin, waiflike creature shuffled past. It was difficult to tell if this one was male or female or one of the androgynes, because its clothing was ragged and its face too hollow for easy recognition. Its gaze was fixed on the square. As Death and the Dragon King watched, the creature crossed the street; the worshippers there opened their ranks at once to admit the newcomer.

“Damn,” said the Dragon King. “I think that was one of the Bodhisattvas. I used to know all those guys. Girls. Them.”

Death nodded, solemn. He had known them too.

The Dragon King glanced at him, guiltily. “Look, I know I don’t need it either. The oceans are still around, the rain still falls. But it’s not the same, you know?”

“I know that,” Death said, a little taken aback. “You don’t have to justify it to me.”

“Damn straight I don’t.” The Dragon King glared at him for a moment; in the distance, clouds rumbled with faint thunder. But almost as quickly as the Dragon’s anger had come, it seemed to fade, and he sighed. “Well… anyway. Thanks for listening to the music.”

The Dragon King then crossed the street to join the throng on the steps. Death watched him for a moment, contemplating. They would help the ones who needed it most first, but beyond that they helped everyone, offering worship in whatever form necessary — blood, prayer, sex — for hour-long increments. If not for them and other groups like them, many would have given up, or faded away, by now.

Would they die for him, if he asked it? Death wondered idly.

Then he turned and went to the end of the Starbucks line. They ran out of coffee before he got halfway there.

But the twins had attempted another experiment, which Death did get to try: cookies. He sat at one of the small tables in the crowded cafe, and peered dubiously at the plate that Lise had set in front of him.

“They’re good,” she said.

“They’re green,” he replied.

“That’s because we made the flour from crabgrass seeds,” she said. “It makes them a little bitter, but otherwise they’re good. Look, real raisins.”

Wild grapevines had overrun Brooklyn Heights. “Ah. As I recall, Mawu did make passable wine for libations, once.”

“Yes, the bottles that didn’t explode or turn to vinegar. He’s still working on the technique. But raisins are easy. Grow some grapes and ignore them. Try it.”

Death picked up the cookie and nibbled. It was, to his great surprise, good. He said as much, and meant it.

“You don’t have to sound so shocked,” Lise said, annoyed. She stormed away behind the counter and resumed work on some contraption that she must have rigged to bake the cookies. She and her twin brother, Mawu, were good at creating new things. Almost as good as people had been.

“I need to talk to you,” said an angel, coming over to sit across from him. She did not ask to sit, but angels did not ask permission.

“Of course,” he said. Lise glared at him from behind the dusty old counter, and he remembered the ritual of sitting in a cafe. Small talk was necessary before business could be conducted. It was respectful to treat the twins’ endeavor in the spirit it was meant. “How have you been? Is, er, is life good for you?” He had not meant that the way it came out. Hopefully she would not think he wanted to kill her.

“The life of mankind has passed on, and we are but shadows in its wake,” she said truthfully, ignoring the polite fiction that the ritual demanded. He winced. At the counter, Lise sucked her teeth. “I came to tell you that the Lex has overflowed its banks. I talked to Ogun; the pumping system is completely unsalvageable. Took everything he had to keep it going this long. He thinks the entire upper east side will be underwater within a year.”

Death spat out a raisin-pit, and fished in his mouth for a bit of grass-seed hull that seemed to have gotten stuck in his teeth. He did not have to have teeth, he supposed, but he generally liked them, except at times like this. “Why is that a problem?”

“The English Nursery Rhymes. They all live on the upper east side.”

“Why can’t they move?”

She looked at him with annoyance, though this was mild, her being an angel. He thought she might be Gabriel; the rest were less tolerant of those outside their circle. “There are more kindergartens and schools in that part of town than any other.”

Which explained why the Rhymes had claimed that neighborhood. Death considered. “What about Park Slope?” This was a neighborhood in Brooklyn not far from his home in Williamsburg. He remembered visiting there often, in the old days. It had been a hotbed of gang activity once, but later, before the people had gone, there had been many children.

“They can’t make it that far. They’re not like the rest of us that had thousands of years and dozens of cultures to strengthen them. To get to Brooklyn, they’d have to travel through several neighborhoods that didn’t have many kids, and across the East River. It’s too much for them.”

Death frowned, a slow suspicion eating into his enjoyment of the cookies. He sat back, silent for a long moment, and gazed at her until she sighed and said it out loud.

“You need to help them,” she said. She spoke softly. A rarity. “It’s worse to wither away. You know that.”

“My help is always available. To those who ask.”

“They’re children! They sing and rhyme and bounce around — they don’t know to ask!”

He remained silent, not bothering to point out the obvious. The Nursery Rhymes weren’t children, any more than he was a man, or she a woman. There were no more children.

“It isn’t right.” She looked away. Her hand lay on the table. Her fingers tightened into a fist, then relaxed, then tightened again. Her wings, which dragged the floor behind her chair, fluffed and settled. “Letting them suffer when they don’t have to. You know it’s not right.”

It was not. Inadvertently he thought of the Bodhisattva he had seen, shambling its way toward survival. “They might want to try.”

“They don’t think that far, Death. They’re full of nonsense. But they suffer as much as the rest of us. It’s amazing they’ve managed to hang on this long.”

He shook his head slowly, but sighed. “I’ll speak to them,” he said at last. “I’ll try to make them understand, and then ask what they want. Life — even its shadow — deserves that much consideration.” He leveled a hard look at her. “And I will abide by their decision.”

She nodded slowly. “That’s all I ask.” With a heavy sigh, she got up, and finally yielded to propriety. “Thank you. Er, have a nice day.” At this, Lise looked pleased.

Death finished his cookie and got up. He walked uptown, which took the rest of the day. By the time he reached the upper east side, night had begun to fall. He traveled more slowly along the banks of the river, because the sidewalks and streets were treacherous here. The water flowing through the subway lines had undermined the whole area, and it was obvious that this part of the island would soon be reclaimed by the sea. But at 66th street he found a downed Victorian turret fetched up against several cars, which formed a precarious bridge. After climbing over this, Death made his way further north, following the old sense that had always led him to wherever he needed to be.

He found the Nursery Rhymes in the garden of an ancient school. Though it was pitch dark, they were still running about and playing, chasing fireflies, their peals of laughter making Death feel lonely and nostalgic. There were peacocks and peahens in the garden too, some of them roosting sleepily in the trees as he passed underneath. They cooed challenges at him, less indifferent than his building’s cats. But then he stopped, surprised to find one peacock down on the ground, directly in his path. As he stared at it, he realized it was not blue and green like the others. Its head was a fierce, iridescent red, shading to gold on the neck and below. When it suddenly fanned and shivered its great tail, he saw that all the eye-spots were a baleful, white-rimmed black.

Then, as if satisfied that he had noticed its strangeness, the peacock dropped its tail and flew away.

When the children ran over to Death, still giggling and delighted to meet someone new, he could not help noticing how thin they were.

One day Death began to feel restless, which was strange. He was Death, the inevitability of all living things. He should never have felt restless. Yet he did.

He wondered: was his dissolution beginning, as had happened to so many others? But there was still death in the world, all around him, every day. The cats in his building. The rats and mice and birds that they fed on. The plants that grew from cracks in the concrete. His own kind, when they faltered. Yet he also knew the truth: that death might exist in the absence of humankind, but not Death.

He felt no weaker. There was no perceptible thinning of his substance. But something troubled him, nevertheless.

He began to walk, picking a direction at random. South. The streets in Brooklyn were less damaged and flooded than those in Manhattan, but there were other problems, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. He had to go slowest in Flatbush, which had been in a state of disrepair long before the end of humanity. The sinkholes and downed facades got so bad that eventually he simply willed himself over to Kensington. (He preferred to walk, but physicality was not always convenient.) Strolling along tree-lined streets and gazing at brownstones that still looked as beautiful as the year they’d been built was marvelous, though it felt a bit like cheating.

Because Death did not tire, he walked well into the night, and reached Coney Island by morning. It was nice to watch the sunrise from the beach. The ocean hummed with its own cycles, hardly changed by the presence or absence of humanity. He spent an hour or two just listening to the surge and sough of the waves, and remembering all that had been. He was not like many of his fellows, who were confined to the places where they had been conceived and nurtured. Where there was life, there was death, and where there was death, was his domain. He was one of the few who could, if he wished, travel the whole world. It was good to be Death.

When the sun was well-risen, he turned away from the sagging rollercoaster and the midway, with its stands full of mildewed lumps that had once been stuffed animals. The Aquarium stood open, the glass of its doors long since shattered and washed away in the hurricane that had hit the city not long after its abandonment. Inside the Alien Stingers exhibit — the only building still standing — Death found mostly darkness and silence. He moved quietly between the still, dark tanks, looking for nothing in particular. Just walking. Listening. He sensed now that something had drawn him to this place. He didn’t know what, but he knew this: it was a sensation he had not felt since before people had gone. That in itself was enough to merit his attention.

As Death reached the south end of the building, he found that it had been torn open by long-gone wind and rain, leaving a great, gaping, splintered hole. Debris, itself mostly buried in sand with the passage of time, paved the way across the tumbled wall of the sea lion tank, between the manmade hills (now flat) which had bordered the site, and through the crazily leaning pillars which were all that remained of the Boardwalk. The building’s guts trailed away in a clear path all the way down to the water.

Here, Death found something odd. A series of peculiar, curlicued scuff-marks moved along this trail of lathing and salt-rotted wood, cutting across the windblown drifts of sand. Following them, he found that the marks petered out a few dozen meters from the water’s edge, washed away by the tide-line. Backtracking instead, he found them continuing into the aquarium — but where the sand gave way to the building’s cheap, nearly-indestructible carpeting, there were no marks for him to follow.

Death did not have much imagination. He did not require it. He was patient, however, so lacking any other means of fathoming the mystery, he sat down beside the trail. The marks were fresh, after all. Perhaps whatever had made them would eventually return.

And finally, as dusk fell, he saw movement down near the beach. An animal, dragging itself out of the surf. At first he thought that it was another new thing, like the black flower, and the red peacock. Then it drew closer, and belatedly he realized it was just a small, dark blue octopus, walking its way along the lathing and sand. As it came, he saw that it carried an old blue plastic cup that read SLURPEE in faded letters, balanced carefully atop two of its tentacles. Water sloshed over the cup’s lip now and again, though it was clear the creature was making an effort not to spill the liquid. It used the other six tentacles to walk, Death saw, leaving behind that familiar curling pattern.

Now and again the creature stopped, set the cup on some flat surface or against a rock, and thrust its head into the water. Death watched it breathe in and out, its color flickering momentarily lighter blue, like the cup. When it had finished this procedure, it withdrew from the cup and resumed walking.

It paused when Death rose to follow it into the Aquarium. He stopped when it did, and felt himself actively considered by the creature’s strange bar-pupilled eyes. When he did not approach more closely, however, the creature finally resumed its laborious march.

Inside, they both proceeded to one of the building’s vast, double-walled tanks. Here, unlike the rest of the tanks — most of which no longer had any need of his services — this one still flickered in glowing, vibrant blue. There was a hole in the tank’s uppermost corner, where the glass met the plaster of its display case, and something had cleared away the killing algae from the water’s surface. Above the tank was a skylight in the aquarium’s ceiling, which let in plenty of the setting sun’s rays. Thanks to this, Death could see that the tank was still halfway full with water, the water-mark just at his eye level. The water had gone murky, the glass speckling with age and wear — but beyond the speckling, he could see many small things darting and moving.

Before he could identify this, the octopus stopped beside this tank, then laboriously climbed the glass wall, still carting the cup. It poured the water into the tank, dropped the cup — Death had already noticed many other cups, cans, and coconut shells littering the floor here — then wriggled through the gap in the glass. Here it paused, clinging to the glass above the water-line, gazing through a clear patch at Death. Again, Death felt himself considered.

Then one of the darting things in the water flicked up and attached itself to the plastic too, and he understood. It was a tiny copy of the larger octopus — a baby. There were likely hundreds of them, if not thousands, in the tank.

Death leaned close to the glass, looking the elder octopus in its — her — odd little eye. He considered her in return.

“Shall I kill you?” he asked. “Is that what you want?”

He felt her deep weariness. This was the way of things, he knew then: the mother died, her flesh granting the young a last bit of strength so that they might survive. It had happened for countless generations already, since the destruction of the Aquarium had provided her ancestors with such a convenient, safe nursery for their young. How many more octopi had survived their youth, thanks to this happenstance, than there would have been in the wild? How many more adults had learned to leave the ocean, carrying their water with them as they found safer shelter somewhere along the empty seaside?

The octopus did not answer. She could not speak. Yet he knew, because he was what he was, that she understood what he was. She was not a red peacock or a black flower, yet she was, in a similar way, a new thing. Or an old thing, taking advantage of a new opportunity. It did not matter. Of such opportunities, embraced and exploited, were new things born.

One of the mother octopus’s wet, attenuated tentacles curled over the edge of the broken glass, twitching slightly. Nodding, Death touched this. A moment later the octopus turned gray and dropped into the water. The tank roiled with movement as her children swarmed in for a last loving taste of her.

The small octopus that had leapt out of the water, and which had continued to cling to the glass, observing, while Death killed its mother, remained where it was. Death nodded to it, solemn, then turned to go.

Movement caught his eye. The small octopus had begun to scurry up toward the hole in the glass. Death stopped.

“No,” he said, recalling that its mother had not come ashore ’til dusk, with the tide. “Wait until morning, near dawn. Bring water with you.”

The baby octopus stopped, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe out of the water. He had no idea whether it understood him. If it did, it would wait, and have that much better a chance of surviving the trek to the ocean. Perhaps a few of its siblings would attempt and survive the journey too, and in turn they would pass on the necessary skill, and the intelligence to use it, to the young who came after them. And in time, with luck and other opportunities…

It was how people had begun. It was how all new things began. He understood this, the life and death of species, as he had always understood the life and death of individuals. But perhaps he had been too preoccupied with the latter, as a result failing to notice the former.

The little octopus detached itself from the side of the tank and dropped back into the water, darting in for its own share of the mother’s corpse. Death felt himself ignored and forgotten — but that was all right. The young did not often think about Death, but Death was no less eternal for their disinterest.

He smiled with the realization that some concepts would always be the same, no matter who conceptualized them. Still… lifting his hand, he contemplated the shape and structure of tentacles. They would be very versatile, he decided, though they would take some getting used to.

Then he turned and headed for home.

A few days later, Death went to Union Square. He walked over to the worshippers on the south-end steps, and asked them what to do.

“Just… think about the one you’re trying to help,” said the Dragon King, who had been looking at him oddly since his arrival. “That’s all any of us really needs, y’know. But if you don’t mind me saying so, buddy, I never expected to see you here. I figured — ” He paused, abruptly looking embarrassed. “Well, I figured you didn’t mind seeing the rest of us crash and burn.”

Death understood. Others usually assumed worse. “Death comes on its own,” he said. “I don’t have to do anything to facilitate it. But everyone deserves a chance to try and survive.” Even us, he had decided.

“Well, sure. But…” The Dragon King scratched his long, curling moustache, finally letting out a weak laugh. “Man, you’re weird.”

Death smiled. It pleased him to be called “man,” though eventually there would be other names and other manifestations for him. He would not be the same, filtered through such different imaginations. None of them would be — but it was now important to him that his fellows hold on, take the opportunity to adapt if they could. The world had not ended, after all. The stuff of which he and his kind had been made, had not vanished. The thinker did not matter, so long as thought remained.

“Thank you,” Death said, and then he clapped the Dragon King on the shoulder. (The Dragon King started and threw him a puzzled look.) “Now tell me: are bagpipes easy to learn?”

While he still had fingers, he would need a way to pass the time.

About the Author

N. K. Jemisin has sold short stories to Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Baen’s Universe, and other markets. Her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was published by Orbit in February 2010 and she was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her 2009 Clarkesworld story, “Non-Zero Probabilities”. She’s lived in New Orleans, New York, Boston, and Mobile (Alabama), and has only written stories about the first two cities so far.

Genevieve Valentine
by Seeing

After it was over, they pulled her from the sea.

Even as they lifted her into the rescue boat she was saying, “No, no; we could have made it.”

She was cradling the hand the Captain broke.

The first time Marika saw the night sky, she was terrified.

(Strange she wasn’t terrified sooner. They’d escaped the city because of the water riots. The city wouldn’t last long; the night swallowed it up one time too many, and then day just never came.

Maybe that’s what happened to her — one terror swallowing another.)

The night sky was a battle of stars, a violent seam tearing through the center like a wound badly sewn up. The points of light marshaled in ways she didn’t understand; the constellations she remembered were devoured by the hordes. Everything bled.

(This prepares her, a little, for what comes later.)

(What comes later:

A star dropping out of sight, a ship that holds three, a scattering of gold.)

It is impossible, from the ground, to look at a star.

The atmospheric interference muddies the light, drags it through the sky faster than your eyes can follow. If you’re lucky — if you’re at a high altitude, on a clear night, in a lonely place — this interference is perhaps a few dozen arcseconds out of alignment with reality. If it’s windy, or you can’t escape the summer, or you are trapped by people and lights, your problems multiply. You fall away from the truth by full seconds; you are hopelessly lost the moment you turn your face to the sky.

By the time you look up, nothing is true any more; the ghosts of the stars only flicker and shine.

Astronomers call this measurement Seeing. (Science has run out of more complicated words to explain the ways the universe has outwitted us.)

What it means: you can’t trust your eyes. You can’t trust your instruments. You can’t trust a thing, from the ground.

They made it to a boat. At night, Marika slipped from her mother’s arms and climbed to the deck to watch the sky.

Once, an old man was sitting on the railing. He was staring at something — a steady, bright star that was already setting.

The water that night was calm, past the ship’s wake; the edges of the sky were mirrored clean. The star, reflected in the water’s edge, looked like twins moving to greet one another.

The old man didn’t turn to look at her. He didn’t move at all. He watched the star setting for a long time.

When it slipped into the water, so did he.

It seemed rude that some places survived when others didn’t, but Marika and her mother found a city where lights still came on. (Her mother didn’t last six months there; too used to running.)

The city drafted for sciences; better than a war that only drafted cannon fodder. When the city came for Marika, she didn’t argue.

(They had privatized water. Mission Control got it below market price. Marika even had enough to bathe in. She still hoarded, took furtive gulps like she didn’t know when the next one was coming. It gave her away as a refugee, but she couldn’t stop. Some thirsts you never get over.)

They teach Marika how to measure light.

In some ways it’s interesting to discover that light has measures other than Safe and Not Safe, that there’s still a world in which mathematics are of any use at all. But the more she learns about candelas and albedo and gravitational lensing and seeing and the impossibility of ever knowing anything for sure, the more thinks that every light should just be classified Not Safe.

(You know as little about light as you know about why a man would slip away into the water when the shore was in sight by morning.)

But still she negotiates the unlikelihood of Gaussian distribution in phase fluctuations, and calculates probable intermittency to gauge turbulence strength, all so that someone standing at the telescope can point the lens at the sky and know where it’s really looking.

Konstantinova heads up the observation banks, and Marika tries not to look over her shoulder at the star map there. (It doesn’t matter. Not her business. Not Safe.)

When Gliese 581-d transits its star, Marika is the only one still awake working, and Konstantinova says, “Well, it might as well be you — come look at this.”

Marika leans in and watches the screen; it’s a grainy, stuttering image replaying in a slow-motion loop, tucked into a corner and drowned out by a crawl of numbers underneath. She recognizes the numbers at the very bottom edge; the initial readings are run through her model to peel away the seeing and get as close to exact locations as their numbers allow.

“It’s beautiful,” Konstantinova says.

Marika knows she’s only looking at the numbers.

Numbers are universal, Marika gets it. You have to rely on mathematics if you’re going to get anywhere, because the universe conspires against you the moment you lift your face to the sky in some warm place on a windy plain, the atmosphere sluicing across the nightscape, your meager vision blurred by tears. Marika understands.

(But she knows, she knows, you can’t tell a thing from the ground.)

This moment is their first point of contact.

(Only Konstantinova would know what that means, what will happen now; but it’s a measurement she never takes.)

Konstantinova has a knack for transit.

She watches the map they’ve made, piled with F-through-M stars (warm enough to heat a planet, cool enough to last). They’re tagged; the closest ones have telescopes dogging them, just in case.

(They won’t be able to stay here very long. They have to pick somewhere to go where they stand a chance.)

Sometimes one of the stars has a drop in luminosity, the intensity of their light suddenly dimming. This happens sometimes when one is dying, or a flare ends, or when debris comes between the telescope and the far-off star.

But Konstantinova has a knack, and she can watch the numbers sinking and know she has a transit even before the alarm sounds.

Every time it comes she flips the switch to record, replays it in slow motion, marks the points of contact: click, click, click, click.

Every time, she thinks, Let this be home.

(By now the numbers are practically shapes; she can look at a column of numerals and see the corona of a star.)

During a planetary transit, there are four points of contact, moments where the circumference of the planet touches the edge of the star in only one place.

1. Just before the transit begins, when the outermost edges meet for the first time.

2. As the planet moves closer to the center, when the trailing edge of the planet has just come within the circle of the star.

3. As the planet passes the center of the transit, its leading curve touches the far edge of the star.

4. At the end of transit, the trailing curve of the planet moves closer and closer to freedom; then there is a single point of contact with the edge of the star; then the transit is over and they are parting.

(This has no real scope if you are close to the event; schoolchildren gather with shoeboxes to peer into the eclipse, that’s all.

This has no meaning until you are watching your new home become a black pearl against a far-off disc of light.)

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star, warm and small, twenty light years from the Earth. It hangs in Libra, if you’re watching from the ground. It has four planets ringing it. One of them transits at the right speed; it’s close enough to Gliese for light, far enough for water.

(The classification is Gliese 581-d; when people begin to pin hopes on it, it shrinks to “Gliese Dee”; to “Dee.” Marika calls it Gliese 581, never mentions Dee at all.)

There is a chance Dee is an ocean planet.

In the ops bay, there is construction on a small-scale human transport. There are calculations being made.

It is a very slight chance, but these are desperate days, and people must put a lot of faith, sometimes, in very slight chances.

Sometimes when they were still running from place to place, it was a comfort for Marika to watch the sky and see there was no balance there, either. The stars you knew would roll beyond your sight and be replaced by strangers, and there was nothing you could do.

After a while she couldn’t breathe in cities, wanted only to be in the wild, watching a war she couldn’t win.

(The sky is a battle; stars are always falling.)

Seeing can be mitigated on cold, clear nights. From a refuge on top of a mountain, the seeing is so clear that, if you didn’t know better, it might not occur to you that the star is even moving.

(You know better now; you can’t trust your eyes.)

Sometimes there’s no such luck, and even the Moon wavers like a coin submerged in shallow water. When seeing is at its worst, the Aristarchus crater on the Oceanus Procellarum can suffer so much distortion that it’s only intermittently visible. If you know what you’re looking for, and you know your numbers, you can calculate the seeing from that.

Marika doesn’t learn this until it’s too late. For her, Aristarchus is always just a pale dot in a black sea, washing in and out of sight; a star on dark water, or a drowning man.

Maybe the old man held out a hand as he toppled — a reflex, second thoughts — but Marika never remembers. Maybe he called for help, or tried to pull himself up before the water took him, but it might be a lie.

This moment always blurs when she tries to recall it; it wavers like the Moon, sneaks sidelong into her imagination when she’s running checklists on the three-seat ship that will carry them to Gliese 581.

(She doesn’t think she was terrified watching the old man drop into the water, but she must have been; whenever he appears in her thoughts she freezes, fumbles for something to hold on to.)

When she’s drunk enough and dreaming, sometimes he holds out his arm and the star-wake catches him, pulls him smoothly across the water until he disappears into the sky.

But it was only Jupiter, she thinks, not a star; you know that now.

She wakes up grieving, doesn’t know why.

Marika calls it Gliese 581 because she doesn’t ever want to pin her hopes on a planet by mistake.

Their spacesuits are molded in the Orlan model — a thick skin they can pull on and clamp shut — and Konstantinova thinks it’s remarkably like wearing an elephant.

Apparently it’s not as bad as it used to be. The gloves are more articulated, the legs less bulky. There’s still no joint at the neck; the chest is stiff to support the oxygen and coolant strapped to the back.

Before Alkonost I, she and Zeke and Marika run drills until they can all get in, attach the water-coolant hoses, and seal up in five minutes; in four; in three.

Konstantinova always hears an exhale over the mike when Marika’s fastened in. For a long time she thinks it’s relief. Exertion, maybe. Panic, maybe. (Marika is a liability; why they’re sending her up is anyone’s guess.)

But once, Konstantinova sees Marika’s face as Zeke seals her in: Marika frowns, brushes at the helmet’s gold-coated visor like she’s cleaning a dirty glass.

(The sound is a sigh. It hurts.)

Konstantinova’s life support system whirrs awake.

“Clear,” she says, turns her mind to important things.

“The life support system isn’t active in the pods,” says Zeke. “Shit. Mission Control, are you reading me?”

An acknowledgement comes back over the static; then a plan. Marika and Zeke fish around in the toolbox and do as they’re told. Konstantinova takes comm, passing along a series of orders that become wild guesses.

No one panics until they realize the ambient heat from the launch melted a circuit in the outer hull that can’t be set right again.

Mission Control goes quiet for a long time.

Marika and Zeke wait, holding the handrails to keep from floating away; at the comm, Konstantinova is bent over like someone punched her in the stomach.

Then the Director says, “At full speed, it’s forty years to Dee. Operations calculates that it’s possible to make it, without suspension, on the existing lift-support.” A pause. “There’s not enough for a return.”

He doesn’t say, We might not have this chance again, if this ship comes down in pieces. He doesn’t say, You might as well take your chances, things aren’t any better on the ground.

Konstantinova’s visor trembles against the net of stars.

“You’ll have some life support after landing,” comes over the line. “A day, maybe, maybe a week. Depends how much oxygen you use on the trip. But even a day is long enough to find out if Dee is really habitable.”

The Director clears his throat. “This isn’t a call we’re going to make, Alkonost. It’s up to you.”

After a long time, Konstantinova says, “No.”

Zeke says, “And I’m a No. That’s majority — we’re no-go, Control. We’re inputting a new trajectory. Confirm.”

Konstatinova curses under her breath, until the roar of the atmosphere swallows the words.

After it’s over, Konstantinova pulls Marika out of the hatch.

“My hand hurts,” Marika says, absently.

Konstantinova says, “We broke your fingers.”

(This is the second; it is nearly the eclipse.)

Marika doesn’t remember anything until they play the recording.

Then she listens as Zeke orders her more and more sharply to let go of the handhold and strap in for re-entry, where are you going, the decision’s been made, this is an order, don’t touch the hatch, have you lost your mind, that’s an order, answer me goddammit, move back now or I’ll make you move.

“Why didn’t you answer?” they ask her.

She says, “I did.”

(Not then — when Zeke blocked the hatch and broke her fingers, it was Konstantinova who yelped.

But on the recorder, as soon as the Director said “It’s possible to make it,” she said “Go.”)

They put Marika back at the computer bank, and she gauges wind resistance and plots angles and tells the telescope where it should be pointing.

(She’s still good at it; she just doesn’t look behind her any more where the map is, where the ghosts of the stars flicker and shine.)

It’s a week before anyone talks to her.

The first person who does is Konstantinova.

“Can you move your fingers?”

Marika says, “Yes.”

A week later, Konstantinova hands her a screwdriver, says, “Prove it.”

Konstantinova makes her do mechanic drills at night, after the others are asleep.

So Marika drills: into her suit in two minutes, alone; flicking switches to a full-speed metronome; screwing and unscrewing panels until the pads of her fingers have no skin left.

She doesn’t understand why, until she hears rumors that the techs are making modifications and repairs; that it will be going back up as Alkonost II, with three chairs up for grabs.

“They’ll never crew me again,” she says.

Konstantinova says, “You have fifteen seconds. Go.”

It takes a year for Alkonost II to take off.

Zeke gets water-fever and dies. No one offers to replace him.

Walters gets drafted out of the pilot pool. He’s surly to the techs; he can suit up in two minutes; he cries in his bunk.

Konstantinova wishes for one, just one, to be the sort of person you want beside you when you stand on a new planet.

But no one else comes, and that morning on the launch pad, it’s Marika standing on her other side.

(This is the third; it’s almost over.)

The launch succeeds. The pods register nominal. The life support system holds.

They make it through the asteroid belt with only one bump (a fragment of meteorite, so small that when it strikes the hull it makes a soprano ping they can hear inside).

Decision point comes after that, with the inner planets behind them and Jupiter filling the viewscreen. Along the top edge, a shadow is passing; a moon in transit.

“We are go,” says Konstantinova; her feet go numb just saying it.

“Godspeed,” says Mission Control.

On the ground, they’ve already started to leave notes, to write things down and lock them up safely in case the war gets worse while they’re gone. They’re making a covenant of things for their children to do when they’re grown and staring at the dusty computer banks, greeting three far-away strangers.

“When we wake up,” says Konsantinova, “we won’t know a soul. Imagine that.”

She glances behind her, but Marika’s looking out at Jupiter with a crestfallen face; a moment later, Marika closes her pod like she’s glad to go.

(Walters went into his right after launch, even before the asteroid field. He’d better be as good at landings as they swear he is. She doesn’t put much faith in people who are surly to techs.)

Konstantinova stays up long enough to watch the ship accelerate to full speed, just in case.

Jupiter drops away, and Uranus and Neptune roll past in the distance like blue marbles, and there’s a brief bright string of stones along the Kuiper belt (Haumea whirling by), and then they’re in deep space and it’s nothing but her star map, as far as she can see.

It’s so familiar, suddenly, that she has to calculate the luminosity of Vega from memory before she can breathe again.

(Some thirsts you never get over.)

They wake up three days shy of Gliese 581.

Konstantinova wakes a day before the others to check out the comm. The Captain should be first, she feels. Zeke would have agreed.

When Dee comes into sight, cloudy and blue and welcome, Konstantinova holds her breath, runs some numbers.

(It’s an afterthought. By now the numbers are practically shapes, and she knows what home looks like.)

Walters wakes next. He looks out at the planet, sighs, and starts to dress.

Marika wakes last. As her pod cracks open she knocks it away with outstretched arms, leans out the edge and takes a few gasping breaths.

“I dreamed we hit the water,” she says.

Konstantinova doesn’t answer. People’s dreams are their own business.

The navigation system is working and the life support is as expected (enough air to get home, and Konstantinova tries not to shout with relief).

There’s a message from Mission Control, only twenty years old, which catches up to them on the second day. A few of the old voices from Mission Control send good wishes, and introduce some new voices.

“We’ve been monitoring your trip, Alkonost,” says one of the strangers. “Everything looks good; watch fuel usage on your way in, so you can make it back up all right if the gravity’s stronger than estimated. Let us know when you wake up. Good morning, and Godspeed.”

Konstantinova sends a message back. Beside her, Marika looks grimly through the viewscreen, where Gliese 581-d is spinning in the glow of their new home star.

They suit up and take positions for landing; it’s so instinctive now that Konstantinova smiles.

(She spent forty years dreaming of setting down on Dee, and after all that practice the comm switches feel like her own fingertips.

She never got to the part where they step out on a new world; not enough imagination left over.)

The checklist goes well until the very last moment, until Dee’s gravity has already caught them and they’ve begun the slow, inevitable fall.

“The third shock absorber isn’t running,” says Konstaninova. The words sound distant; disbelieving.

“We can land with two,” Marika says.

Walters says, “Not on water; if we’re off by more than a few degrees the surface tension will knock us over before we even touch down. We’ll slam into the water and be pulverized by impact.” He’s not disbelieving; he sounds like that’s just what he’s expected all along.

“Then you’d better do your job, I guess,” Konstantinova snaps.

“What’s wrong with it?” asks Marika. “It froze?”

Konstaninova frowns at the diagnostic. “Doesn’t look like it. The mechanism still registers. Something must have broken loose while we were sleeping. Maybe we can open the nav panel in the back and -”

“In the asteroid belt,” says Marika. “Something hit the hull.”

“After last time, there better not be a fucking thing wrong with that hull,” says Konstantinova.

“But it sang,” Marika says quietly.

All at once Konstantinova has a vision like a reel of film, as a sliver of rock careens into the hull, as a few grains slice through the hull and nick the fuel line, as forty years of a microscopic accident converge on them at once when there’s not enough pressure in a valve.

She tries for words, and for a moment fails.

“We can’t access that now,” Walters says. “We’re heading into the atmosphere, we’ll burn up if we go out there. Let’s pull out, we’ll look at it from a steady orbit.”

“If we pull out now,” says Konstanitnova, “we’ll burn the fuel we need to launch from the surface of Dee and go home. So we take our chances in the water, or we take our chances on the ground.”

This shouldn’t be such an agony; this isn’t the first time she’s been here. It should get easier. This should have an answer, by now.

“All right,” she manages, “pull out and circle back on a one-way trip. This is the go/no go. Vote.”

She waits without turning for them to weigh in. She has a new respect for Mission Control, forty-one years ago; this is a silence that’s hard to allow.

At last, Walters says, “No go. We’ll take our chances in the water.”

Marika doesn’t say anything. Konstantinova frowns at the comm, wonders if she missed it; if Marika answered while Konstaninova was still talking.

(Marika has that habit, and her answer is always Go.)

But she waits for an answer a long time, until there is the sound of something sealing; Konstantinova sees the warning light go red under her fingers before she registers that Marika is opening the outer hatch.

Click.

(The transit is over; they are parting.)

The hairline crack is in the hydraulics panel. As Marika approaches it, moving hand over hand along the side rails, one bead of gasoline pushes through it and away.

“You won’t get home,” she says into her mic. “You’ve lost too much already.”

She doesn’t know if the connection is still live; she forgets if she turned it on or not, and her heart is pounding too loudly for her to hear a thing.

She grips the screwdriver in her free hand and gets to work. It’s familiar by now, and the screws come apart one by one, cling gently to the magnets in the fingertips of her glove.

The suit warms up with her work; her visor fogs. She tries not to panic. There’s not enough air to panic. (She disconnected — there wasn’t time for anything else.)

If she lets go of the handrail, she’ll vanish.

She imagines a darkness like the darkness of the boat on calm water, imagines stretching out a hand as she falls.

The screwdriver shakes; she clamps down with numb fingers to keep it from escaping, drags off another screw.

But it’s useless. Her helmet is fogging up from the inside now — she can’t see, she can’t see, and there’s not enough time left to hold her breath and wait for equalization, not enough oxygen left to hyperventilate and turn it into droplets big enough to see around.

She shoves the pick in at an angle, to avoid her eyes.

Three stabs before the visor cracks; another three before she can wedge the pick inside and wrench it out.

The shield winks once and spins gently out of sight, knocks away a scattering of gold where the coating has flaked off under the chisel.

She exhales, so her lungs don’t explode from the decompression, and turns to the bulkhead with shaking hands. She has to work fast — she forgets how long you can last before the darkness swallows you.

(You have fifteen seconds. Go.)

The last screw opens; the panel opens.

She slices the fuel line where it’s torn, shoves the healthy end of the hose back into the joint, throws the clamp shut. Stray gasoline floats past her in black pearls.

(She’s freezing; her lips are numb; when she blinks her eyelids crack, snap off, go flying.)

The panel begins to vibrate as the system kicks in.

(Seven seconds.)

She slams the bulkhead shut, fumbles three of the screws back into place. It’s all she manages before her fingers freeze.

Far away, Konstantinova is saying something about re-entry, about being out of time, she’s panicked, she’s screaming — but the last of the air escapes the suit, and then there’s silence.

(Marika breathes in; her lungs collapse.)

The ship is accelerating now, dragging her.

She pulls free.

The motion spins her slightly, away from the planet towards the sky. For a moment, the full view stuns her.

She thinks, It’s beautiful.

It’s the first time in her life she’s ever thought it.

(This is why: there is no seeing.

Now there is only the sky; she’s looking, for an instant, straight to the stars. This is the true geography.)

The Milky Way rips through the black at a different angle; this sky is a stranger, a ceaseless riot, sharp and steady-bright.

It’s a lovely war.

(Two seconds.

One second.)

After it’s over, Konstantinova will emerge from the sea.

She will stand on the deck of the Alkonost; pull off her helmet; breathe.

The night will be deep. When she turns her face to the sky, to search for a place to begin with her numbers, the ghosts of the stars will flicker and shine.

About the Author

Genevieve’s World-Fantasy-Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and more. Her first novel, Mechanique, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her appetite for bad movies in insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

Sherlock Holmes & the Science Fiction of Deduction
by Ryan Britt

Despite being brilliant, the great Sherlock Holmes is an ignoramus when it comes to the astronomical workings of the planets and stars. In the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, he accosts Watson on the subject: “What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”1 Holmes likens his mind to an attic, one he can only fill with the rights kinds of “furniture” necessary for his occupation as the world’s first consulting detective. But even if Holmes does get an “F” in astronomy, there’s no denying his influence on the genre of science fiction.

For the uninitiated, Sherlock Holmes, and his biographer Dr. John Watson, inhabited 4 novels and 56 short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between from the years 1887 to 1927. During this time, Holmes dies and comes back, faces a variety of criminals, schemes, and ghoulish mysteries as well as making a nuisance of himself to Inspector Lestrade and the rest of Scotland Yard. But perhaps his most relevant contribution to SF is the invention of something Holmes calls “The Science of Deduction”.

Essentially, Holmes believes any mystery can be approached, and a solution deduced, scientifically, by gathering necessary data, and drawing conclusions based on logic and reason. In the Doyle stories, the science of deduction usually always works, and serves as the basic premise for every single Holmes adventure. Like a science fiction writer, Doyle seemed to start with the premise of “what if?” Instead of a detective who arrived at the answers through intuition or moxy, Doyle asserted a different premise with the Holmes stories — what if the detective discovers the answers scientifically? What kind of adventures might he have? Looked at from this semantic angle, the original canon of Sherlock Holmes almost passes for science fiction.

Naturally, the hard science of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really stack up against the forensics labs of today, and it is also possible that the Holmesian methodology might not pass as real science to actual scientists. According to Zachary Pirtle, program analyst at NASA; “Real science still doesn’t work in the strictly deductive way that Holmes describes, for the best scientific questions, there are no straightforward answers, and a lot of the hard work comes from simply trying to imagine new possibilities.”2 And yet Holmes is constantly affirming his belief in the improbable, indicating his imagination is among his intellectual tools. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” Holmes — without any evidence — conceives of the fantastic notion of a body being placed on the roof of a moving train.3 In the Granada Television adaptation of the same story, after the hypothesis is proven true Holmes (as portrayed by the late Jeremy Brett) grins broadly and shouts “Imagination Watson! Imagination!”4 So while Sherlock Holmes was a walking computer full of logic and reason, he was also a compassionate, imaginative person.

According to acclaimed filmmaker and author of three Holmes pastiches, Nicholas Meyer, “Because the Holmes stories deal with chemistry and scientific stuff, it’s a hop-skip-and-a-jump over to actual science fiction.”5 Meyer of course, put some memorable Holmes quips into the mouth of another uber-logical yet compassionate man: Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. “The link between Spock and Holmes was obvious to everyone. I just sort of made it official.”5Spock appropriating Holmes is somewhat fitting insofar as Holmes’ famous phrase “…the game’s afoot…”6 was taken from Shakespeare’s King Henry V. But more importantly, the notion of Spock quoting Holmes makes it doubtful that very popular SF characters like the Vulcan scientist, or The Doctor from Doctor Who, could exist without the brainy heroics of Sherlock Holmes coming first. Doyle himself created Professor Challenger, a character who is much more of a true scientist than Holmes, for the classic science fiction novel, The Lost World. Without the success of Holmes, Doyle may not have been as confident in such a logical, thinking man as protagonist. A priori of Holmes, a generation of brainy heroes may never have been born.

And science fiction surely thrives on its brainy protagonists. Five-time Hugo Award winner Mike Resnick asserts that Sherlock Holmes appeals to fans and writers of science fiction because, “He [Holmes] is cerebral rather than physical. And he has overcome what seems a tendency to be a social maladroit, which latter defines a lot of writers, many of whom chose their profession for that very reason.”7 John Joseph Adams, editor of numerous SF publications, including last year’s The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, agrees. “Holmes was one of the first great literary action-adventure heroes whose defining qualities were his intelligence and deductive reasoning rather than bravery or brawn … he’s so far ahead of almost every one of his contemporaries that he’s almost a superhero compared to them.”8

In 1995, along with Martin H. Greenberg, Mike Resnick edited an anthology of science fiction themed Holmes stories called Sherlock Holmes in Orbit. (Many of these stories are also re-printed in the recent John Joseph Adams book) With names like David Gerrold, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Vonda M. McIntyre, Robert J. Sawyer, and Dean Wesley Smith, this collection is brimming with talent. A reoccurring premise in SF Holmes stories seems to be a Sherlock unstuck in time. If taken from their familiar Victorian setting and whisked to the present or the future, would Holmes and Watson be of any use? According to several science fiction Holmes pastiches the answer is that they would do just fine, thank you very much.

In Dean Wesley Smith’s “Two Roads, No Choices”, Holmes and Watson are visited by two time travelers coming from a future in which the Titanic did not sink. Because Holmes and Watson are living in this alternate reality, they have no reason to believe the Titanic was supposed to have sunk, and yet the time travelers are desperate for help in unraveling the puzzle. The men of Baker Street are transported to the deck of the Titanic on the night of its fateful collusion with an iceberg. Notably, Holmes takes the notion of time travel in his stride, and is even able to identify the travelers as being out of place by observing contact lenses in eyes of one of them. He is also able to deduce that the ship should have sunk, and only interference from another time traveler caused the catastrophe to be averted.

In Ralph Robert’s “The Greatest Detective of All Time”, time travel is extremely common for Holmes and Watson, as they are consulted constantly by persons from various eras, dimensions and planets. In this story, the duo is even outfitted with cybernetic implants which allow them to “scan” documents rapidly, and download the information cyberpunk style, directly into their brains.

In “Second Fiddle” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Holmes is brought to a contemporary Los Angeles to assist the police department in tracking down a serial killer. The story centers around a disgruntled LA cop assigned to Holmes. From the protagonist’s point of view, Holmes is an outdated, sexist idiot. Knowledge of cigar ash, bicycle tracks, and certain kinds of foot prints hardly matter in this modern setting. And yet, because Holmes operates scientifically and logically, the cop, in the end, learns a thing or two about bias, and eventually admits that Holmes has still got it.

Not everyone thinks a time-traveling Sherlock Holmes would stick to solving mysteries. Nicholas Meyer believes because “the Holmes stories deal with the variety of human experience… people would probably be coming to him for advice if he were living now.”5 Meyer famously had Sherlock cross paths with Sigmund Freud in his novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, so it makes sense he would think of Holmes in a psychoanalytical way. But would a temporally displaced Holmes become a shrink? “Well,” Meyer quips, “I heard Dinosaurs turned into birds, so you never know.”

But science-fictional Holmes adventures aren’t simply limited to traveling through time. Frequently, these tales inhabit other forms of existence all together. In Susan Casper’s “Holmes Ex Machina”, the detective is reconstructed as a holographic computer program and assists in solving a minor mystery relating to missing film canisters. In “Moriarty by Modem” by Jack Nimershein, another complex computer program is created to emulate the thought patterns and theories of Sherlock Holmes. However, in this story, a parallel computer virus called “Moriarty” is also accidentally created and loosed upon cyberspace.

Perhaps the most daring of SF Holmes stories is “A Study in Emerald” by Neil Gaiman. In this chilling tale, Lovecraft meets Conan Doyle as Gaiman imagines and alternate Victorian London ruled by the infamous many-tentacled Cthulhu. Here, there are numerous Cthulhu, and one of them, a prince, has been murdered. As in the plot of A Study in Scarlet, Holmes and Watson have just become flat mates, and though perfect strangers to each other are rapidly thrust into their inaugural adventure. Gaiman toys with the notion of Holmes himself being aware of the existence of alternate realities but believing that destiny would bring him in contact with Watson regardless. “I have a feeling we were meant to be together,” he says, “That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or future, I do not know…”9

On the appeal of Sherlock Holmes to fans of science fiction, and the persistence of SF Holmes pastiches, John Joseph Adams asserts, “I think it’s a natural progression for an SF writer/reader to wonder: If Holmes investigates a crime scene and has all of his deduction techniques at his disposal, but one variable has changed — Holmes can’t eliminate the impossible — what then? And that, I think, is why so many genre writers are drawn to writing Holmes pastiches in which the impossible happens.”8

Not all science fictional adventures of Sherlock Holmes need be found in non-Doyle pastiches. The original canon yields a story called “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” which expert Sherlockian David Stuart Davies noted, “…veers towards risible science fiction.”10 In this tale Holmes and Watson are confronted with an almost Jekyll and Hyde scenario. An aging professor, known for his intellectual prowess and short temper, has begun to act strangely. A bloodhound on the premises, once friendly to the man, now attacks the professor regularly. Additionally, this old man has been seen hunched over, creeping like an animal in the house on certain nights. He also suddenly possesses great agility and is able to climb up the side of the house with ease. Eventually, Holmes discovers the professor has been attempting to reverse his aging by drinking a sort of elixir. But the ingredients of the potion are taken largely from langurs, a variety of large monkey, and as a result the old man has unwittingly acquired monkey-like traits and abilities.

At the end of the story Holmes muses on the ramifications of such attempts to unnaturally extend one’s life. “There is a danger there — a very real danger to humanity. Consider Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly, would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool might or poor world become?”11 Here, Doyle gives us the same sort of themes which genetic engineering-themed or cybernetic-centric speculative fiction still tackles today.

One purported purpose of fiction seems to be an attempt to understand the human experience through stories. Science Fiction has always been highly equipped to handle this problem by viewing culture and individuals through the lens of technology or fantastical concepts. Explaining life as we know it, or might one day live it, is certainly the task of all good science fiction. Similarly, the stories and enduring character of Sherlock Holmes provide a lens through which the human experience can be explained. Commenting on why Sherlock Holmes speaks to him specifically, Nicholas Meyer notes that, “They [the Doyle stories] constitute a sort of secular bible.” For many, growing up with science fiction, the experience is similar. In an unreasonable world, the greatest science fiction can frequently comfort us, while at the same time forcing us to confront our greatest fears. And the ultimate impact of Sherlock Holmes is the same.

“The message of Sherlock Holmes is simple,” Nicholas Meyer points out, “Life can be understood.”

And as long as writers, of science fiction or otherwise, strive for that, the game will forever and always be afoot.

Footnotes:

1. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, A Study In Scarlet- (Vintage) Random House (2009), p. 13

2. E-mail correspondence between the author and Mr. Pirtle on 9/15/10

3. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, “The Bruce Partington Plans” from His Last Bow

4. “The Bruce Partington Plans” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes DVD box set. Granada Television

5. Phone conversation between the author and Mr. Meyer on 9/6/10

6. Shakespeare, William King Henry V Act 3, Scene I

7. E-mail correspondence between the author and Mr. Resnick on 8/22/10

8. E-mail correspondence between the author and Mr. Adams on 9/15/10

9. Gaiman, Neil “A Study in Emerald” from The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes pp. 425 Editor: Adams, John Joseph

10. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes - (Collector’s Library). CRW Publishing Limited (2004), p. 298

11. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, Berkley Medallion Edition (1927), p. 184

About the Author

Ryan Britt’s writing has been published with Nerve, Soon Quarterly, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and is forthcoming in Opium Magazine. He has performed stories on stage in New York City with The Moth, The Liar Show, Stripped Stories, and Heeb Magazine. Ryan’s plays have enjoyed readings and productions in NYC with The Longest Lunch Theatre Company and Collective Unconscious, with a new play slated for summer 2010 at The Tank. Recently, he wrote weekly short stories for the blog Brooklyn The Borough. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Testing What They’re Made of: A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Miles Vorkosigan is back. He’s been around, here and there, for the last few years, but with the release last month of Cryoburn he’s really back. It’s been a while, definitely. His story could’ve ended with A Civil Campaign or with Diplomatic Immunity. But, for now, he’s back and death is on his mind.

Miles Vorkosigan’s creator, Lois McMaster Bujold, is very much alive and on the brink of yet another career reinvention, detour, or leap of faith. Bujold has been publishing novels for a quarter of a century now. In 1985, she sold her first three novels — completed manuscripts all, not proposals — in one fateful sale to Baen Books. Since then her bibliography has grown to include more than 30 books (including omnibus editions) of science fiction and fantasy.

Bujold has been nominated for and won just about every major speculative fiction award, often more than once. For all the laurels, Bujold remains a fan’s writer, a reader’s writer. “To me,” said Bujold, “the value of fiction is in the joy it brings to its readers, for all the varied values of joy — and of readers — that one can imagine.”

Bujold is best known for the Vorkosigan Saga, which features Cordelia Naismith and, later in the chronology, Naismith’s son, Miles Vorkosigan. Vorkosigan is a dashing, complicated figure, short in stature, big in personality. He is quick of wit and somewhat hyperactive. When assassins failed to kill a pregnant Naismith, Vorkosigan was poisoned in utero, resulting in a bone disorder that has left his spine crooked and skeleton brittle. He is both frail and larger than life, endearing and annoying — the perfect protagonist for sweeping, character-based space opera — a brat, conman, (sort of) soldier, outlaw, commander, ambassador, entrepreneur…

Vorkosigan is, as Bujold says below, “a character with a lot of potential scope.” And characterization is Bujold’s strong suit.

Bujold writes “about characters on spiritual journeys through their lives. The SF (or the fantasy, or the speculative theology) is just there to give them interesting challenges, to test what they are made of. Plots and settings explore characters as much as the other way around.”

Bujold has lived a life of reading, travelling, studying and, of course, writing — a life doing what she loves to do, testing herself and what she’s made of.

And what does she enjoy about writing?

“I enjoy the writing when it is going well, when the ideas and images are boiling up as fast as I can write them down,” she said.

Below, Bujold and I talk about how things have changed, how they stay the same, and what the future holds.

You’ve been publishing since 1985. In nearly three decades of publishing, what changes have caught you off guard? Pleasantly surprised you? Has the business side of writing ever made you want to give up?

I am a shy person when allowed. I regard a lot of the PR — book tours, speeches, appearances, media interviews — with much the same dismay as a non-swimming parent would contemplate the prospect of jumping into a raging torrent to rescue their child. One doesn’t really see how any good can come of it, but one can’t not jump. (”My baby book, help, it is drowning!”) I need to get in touch with my surly side more, I suppose, to learn to say “no” to nice people who like me.

I have certainly been pleasantly surprised by the burgeoning of the audiobooks market, which is entirely tech-driven. It has gone from very constricted distribution of bulky and awkward physical media, to essentially unlimited distribution through MP3 downloads over the Internet, which people load up on their iPods or whatever and take along everywhere. Blackstone Audiobooks has brought all of my titles, both fantasy and SF, into availability, and has been producing more royalties in the past couple of years than my backlist paper book sales (but see below), nearly all sold as downloads through their partner Audible.com and other on-line outlets.

At the same time, the independent distributor implosion of the mid-90’s, the increase in the number of competing titles, and the rise of e-book sales have been nibbling away at mass market paperback sales, which are down from even a few years ago, and way down from a few decades ago.

The business side of writing has been good to me — without ever achieving the highly visible sales spikes of the most famous bestselling writers, I have nonetheless managed to sell a startling number of books spread stealthily over the past quarter-century. Baen, in their latest PR, claims to have sold over two million of my books, and that’s not counting the fantasies from Eos/HarperCollins, e-books, audiobooks, or foreign translations, now up to twenty languages. Some of those latter markets are really tiny, but they do add up.

Fred Pohl once remarked to me, almost twenty years ago: “The good news about a writing career is that the sales curve is asymptotic. The bad news is that it starts at zero.” I certainly experienced the long, shallow left-hand slope in the 80’s and early 90’s. (In my first three years of writing, from late 1982 to late 1985, in which I wrote three novels, I made a grand total of $250.) We’ll see if he’s right about that right-hand rise…

What are some of the things you learned from Jim Baen? Did you ever disagree? What footprints did he leave in the Miles Vorkosigan universe?

Jim, very patiently and bit-by-bit, taught me a lot about the business of writing, about which I knew almost nothing when I started, talking me down off the ledge of my newbie-writer paranoias. He told me once that from his point of view I only budged about half an inch, when being edited.

Jim would have liked, I suspect, if I had written the Vorkosiverse as the continuing military adventures of Mercenary Admiral Naismith. (The novella “The Mountains of Mourning” was written by me, in part, to settle the question of whether the banner on the front covers should read “A Miles Naismith Adventure” or “A Miles Vorkosigan Adventure”.) To Jim’s credit, he took what he got instead in pretty good humor, though I suppose the awards helped. He never did love Mirror Dance, or Miles’s clone-brother Mark, I thought, though when I turned in the 167,000 word draft, he manfully said, “We’ll find the paper somehow.” Squirming a bit, he did try to talk me into making Mark muscular instead of fat, in the first draft; I thought that missed the point of Mark’s essential transgressive qualities. Baen never did put on the paperback cover the fact that the book had won a Hugo (my third for best novel), but that may have been an oversight.

Jim also once told me, when I was whinging about my books not selling as well as someone else’s (a favorite pastime among writers, alas — we are a green-eyed bunch) that my books were “too smart” to be bestsellers. To this day, I don’t know if he meant that sincerely, or if it was just a very sly way to get himself off the hook. Like I’m going to argue…?

How much outlining or preplanning did you do for the Sharing Knife series? Did it change much as you wrote it? What were the challenges (and joys) of making the transition from an interstellar future to a pre-industrial past?

The story really began with a very simple, classic, soldier-meets-girl seed crystal. The decision to use a Midwest-American-frontier-inspired background instead of the default European medieval, and for the sharing knives, both symbol and technology of sacrifice, created the beginnings of the backdrop, which as usual grew in detail and implication — and consequence — as I wrote.

There were snags and pauses, also as usual, but no real dead ends. Each pair of books came with an inherent shape built in, though the details of what should fill that shape were a constant surprise. Most of my false starts and wrong turns were fixed in the outline stage, when it’s cheap and easy, which is why I use a constantly-mutating rolling outline the way I do.

I wrote what became the first two volumes of the tetralogy as one volume, split subsequently for publisher-economic reasons; Beguilement and Legacy really should be stacked up and read as one book. The second pair, Passage and Horizon, had a brief period at the beginning where I thought they might be one fat book, making a trilogy, but they split early on — into “There” and “Back Again” — and their events are more naturally rounded as a result.

I loved the chance to get outdoors, at least in my imagination, with all of these books, and of course relished being able to incorporate the landscapes and lake experiences of my lost Ohio childhood. Not to mention the old river lore passed down by my father, who loved the great river system of the region going back to his own childhood with his father on the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh. Three generations of love of the muddy Midwest waters, moving or still.

How do you sustain a character like Miles Vorkosigan over so many books and stories?

Well, it certainly helps to have a character with a lot of potential scope, who can act in many different sorts of stories. Plot and character are closely intertwined, and create each other. The two elements have to coordinate — the classic example being, if you dropped Othello and Hamlet down in each other’s plots (or Bertie Wooster down in either’s), in no case would you get a 5-act tragedy. Othello would run the wicked uncle through no later than Act Two, and Hamlet might well dither around and dither around until he established Desdemona’s innocence. Not sure what Bertie would do, though the prospect does invite wonder…

Miles can do adventure, mystery, occasionally romance, comedy or tragedy. He can’t do women’s issues, and he’s not terribly good at humility, nor deep spirituality. (Although he did a bravura job on abject, once.) Hence the need for Cordelia, Ekaterin, Ista, Cazaril, and so on.

The fact that Miles grows and changes over time means that neither of us has to get bored.

In the recent CryoBurn, you’ve returned to a Miles Vorkosigan novel after a few years away. Did you miss Miles? Had he changed much while you were apart?

He and I have both aged a comparable amount, I think. I would have been content to leave him with his well-earned happy ending at the close of A Civil Campaign. I did manage to find a second organic series-closure with Diplomatic Immunity. CryoBurn brought us both face to face with some issues of aging and mortality I had spent seven books ducking — in a sense, the whole of CryoBurn is an extended meditation on death, thematically speaking, but I think we were both ready to grapple with that at last.

I was surprised at how fast his “voice” came back to me, I must say. Practice, I suppose.

The drabbles were written to stick a sock in the outcry for an immediate sequel right then that I actually don’t want to write ever, and to prevent fannish speculation from galloping off in all directions. And because they were a kick to do — all that concentrated story folded into such a small space, like literary origami. Five small spaces, I suppose, like the fingers of the hand or the gods of Chalion.

I must mention, the first hardcover printing of CryoBurn contains, bound in the back, a CD-ROM with a dozen of my prior series books as various open-format e-texts, starting with Cordelia’s Honor, including the e-text for CryoBurn itself, essays and interviews, and other fun tidbits. About the only things missing are Memory and The Vorkosigan Companion, both left out by accident in the scramble last spring when the table of contents was being put together. I figure it will give us something else to include should I ever do another book with Baen with this value-added feature.

What are you working on now and what’s next?

Last winter I got on a strange, abrupt roll and started a book for Ivan (Lord Vorpatril, a long-running secondary character in the Vorkosigan series, to those not already on a first-name basis with him), probably as the result of the accumulated power of fannish suggestion. It went well for a couple of months, but derailed when I went out of town and then plunged into some long-overdue and disruptive house maintenance projects in the Spring. These dragged on, as construction generally does, until overtaken by the unexpected extension of book launch madness season for CryoBurn — I’d been expecting the noise to start up in November, and last about three weeks, but between the release of the e-ARC at the beginning of August and the shifting forward of the release date to October 19th, it looks to occupy three months, first to last. We’ll see what happens with the writing when I finally get my life and brain back in mid-November. No contract yet, so no deadline pressure, which I prefer just now. Nonetheless, there are too many chapters to abandon, so Ivan’ll have to be brought up to scratch before I can involve myself in any other novel-length project. There are, so to speak, special challenges in making a dedicated slacker the hero of one’s supposed action-adventure novel. I’m feeling more and more on Ivan’s side about that, personally.

Notions for the last two Chalion books have been rattling around in my head for years, but neither has reached critical mass yet. It feels like it’s about time to remake myself as a writer yet again, think of something new and unexpected, but really, the pleasures of slacking loom ever larger.

I’ve been wondering what the heck retirement means for a writer. At the end of a long career, I can at last… stay home and write books? Puzzling. I have been more-or-less retiring piecemeal, dropping chores or outgrowing life-phases. Right now I have two part-time jobs, one as a writer, the other as a writer’s secretary/bookkeeper/housekeeper/publicity manager. I think the next thing I would like to retire from is being an author — all those time-consuming PR chores that were an exciting challenge once, but are now more of an energy drain than an energy boost. I mean, they are all very well, but they aren’t writing. Or slacking, for that matter.

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.

Struggling to Define Themselves: A Conversation with Cherie Priest
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Cherie Priest writes everything from steampunk to horror to alternate history to Southern Gothic to urban fantasy. Sometimes she seems to be pulling the best from all the genres and subgenres and twisting them into harrowing rides for her characters. And there are few authors who can torment her protagonists quite like Priest does.

A Southerner living in Seattle, Priest brings the best of both regions to her work — deep characterization, rich settings, a pervading sense of loss, and a boundless and battered sense of hope.

“I write about people in peculiar, sometimes historically improbable situations,” said Priest. “To answer in a broader, more philosophical fashion, I’d say that I tend to write about people who struggle to define themselves.”

Priest’s Clockwork Century novels include airships, steam trains, zombies, mad scientists, Bushwhackers, and submarines. Her Eden Moore novels feature ghosts, magic, and ruin antebellum estates. Most importantly of all, her central characters do their damndest to survive. They are, as she says below, “strong, competent people” who face challenges larger than they are.

Priest’s first book, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, came out in 2003. Since then she has published eight more novels and novellas, including Boneshaker, Clementine, and the recent Dreadnought all set in the Clockwork Century series. Boneshaker was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award and won the Locus Award and the PBNA Award. She has at least four more novels slated for release in 2011 and 2012.

Cherie Priest has contributed fiction to anthologies from Tachyon Publications, Subterranean Press, and George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards universe, among others. Her writing has also appeared in magazines such as Subterranean Magazine, Chiaroscuro, and Apex Digest. When not writing fiction or freelancing magazine work, Priest is an associate editor at Subterranean Press.

Below, Priest and I talk about the South, the Clockwork Century, and where she’s headed next.

What do you enjoy about writing? What don’t you enjoy?

It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting. Also, it’s amazing what people will share if you tell them you’re a writer. I don’t know if it’s just the general sense of human exhibitionism or what — but if they think there’s a chance you might write about them, they’ll tell you stuff they wouldn’t tell a doctor.

But more than that, it’s fun and satisfying to produce a story. That’s the meat of it, I suppose.

There’s not much I dislike about it, except that sometimes it can be a lonely way to earn a living. When my husband gets home from work, I’m like a freaking puppy. “You’re home! You’re home! I’ve been by myself all day…pay attention to me…”

What is the value of speculative fiction? At its best, what role does it play in the world?

It’s entertaining. I don’t think it’s required to be any more or less than that, but that’s not to say that it can’t be — or isn’t. Speculative fiction can be an interesting mirror, showing us what we’re afraid of, what we want, what we hope. It’s a form of fiction that gives us another way of talking about the problems and promises of our times.

You are originally from Florida and you’ve lived throughout the south. Your early books have southern settings and the recent Dreadnought starts in the southeast and moves westward. Some of your books have been called Southern Gothic. Do you self-identify as a southerner? What of the South shows up in your work?

Sure, I self-identify as a southerner — which is sometimes tricky. As a native Floridian, I’m in a funny position: Most of the traditional “deep south” states don’t think of Florida as Southern, despite the fact that — especially in the rural sections of the state — many Floridians strongly identify as such.

When I moved from Florida to Tennessee, I found myself constantly insisting that yes, I did too qualify as a Southerner, dammit … meaning that I was asserting my right to be identified as part of the losing side. Which feels … odd.

It was particularly weird once I started writing about Chattanooga. I considered myself a local, as I’d lived there a dozen years. But Chattanoogans (and Southerners in general) did (and still do) tend to see me as an outsider from another region.

I’m not. And that’s why I’m so comfortable there.

When it comes to “Southernness” that may or may not appear in my books — it’s all over my earlier work, as I often write about wherever I live. Boneshaker less so, for the obvious reason that it’s set in Seattle; and I don’t want to call out any particular character traits that might be identified as specifically “Southern,” because honestly, the strengths and weaknesses of Southerners are the strengths and weaknesses of people everywhere.

With a novel, what comes first — character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else? And how does it grow from there? Is it the same for stories and novels?

It depends, and for me, it’s all the same regardless of the fiction’s length.

Sometimes it starts with just a word, like Boneshaker. I thought, “What a funny word. If you didn’t know what it was [an old bicycle], it could be damn near anything.” It could have sexual connotations, or horror implications, or the suggestion of violence and adventure. Hell, I sometimes call my husband’s coffee roasting machine the “Boneshaker.” That word collided with my desire to write (a) a Seattle book, and (b) a steampunk book. When the three things combined, a novel grew out of it.

But sometimes it’s more complicated. It’s a character, or a situation. Often it’s a fragment of real history so terribly strange and insufficient that it seems to demand a fuller telling. It varies greatly from project to project.

I think Four and Twenty Blackbirds (my first novel) was inspired by some sidewalk drawings done by first-graders. Fathom started out as a sliver of a dream, barely remembered, about an abandoned house I saw on an island off the coast of St. Petersburg.

You just never know.

Many of your novels have altered historical settings. Do you find the stories in history or do you have the stories and find the history to go with them?

It goes both ways. Often I’ll read a snippet, a footnote, a lost scrap of history that’s been largely forgotten. And I’ll think to myself, “Self, what a great jumping-off point for something bigger and weirder…” But occasionally I’ll have an idea for a character or a conflict, and then I go mining through the history books to find a good place to stick it.

How did you decide on the alternating point of view [POV] for Boneshaker?

It actually began with just Briar [Wilkes] as the POV. But everyone who read the first few chapters said the same thing — the feedback was uniform across the board: “You really need to include the kid’s POV. You’re missing the opportunity to say a million things about this city.”

So I ran with it, and created Zeke’s storyline to interlace with his mother’s — and I think the early readers were right. It gives a much fuller picture of the bizarre, dangerous world that way.

You’ve described Boneshaker as a thirty-something-year-old woman’s coming of age story. Briar Wilkes is the mother of a runaway, daughter of a folk legend, and widow of a mad scientist… How on earth did you keep her from being consumed by the men in her life?

I pitched her that way, to tell you the truth. I liked the idea of this woman who’s been worn into a groove, defined by other people — in relation to these men, all three of whom are absent. I wanted to tell a story about her clawing out her own identity despite the words that have been stacked against her.

You want to know something funny? Women never ask me about this. It’s always men who seem to find it interesting (and to tell you the truth, I really like it when they notice).

Maybe it’s something women are simply more accustomed to. We’re mothers, wives or widows, whores, sluts, or any number of other descriptors — applied courtesy of our relationships with men. Our proximity to them so often defines us, whether we like it or not.

Your version of the historical figure Princess Angeline in Boneshaker really kicks butt?

Angeline was a real woman — Chief Sealth’s daughter (I believe that’s the appropriate spelling of his name, in English text, anyway). She lived to a very ripe old age, and was a local character for all her days. Quite a pill, by all reports — an intelligent woman with a strong personality. Allegedly, her ghost haunts the Pike Place Market.

To answer your question I’ll have to be a little vague, in order to avoid Boneshaker spoilers, but here goes: Angeline had a daughter who died under suspicious circumstances, precisely as described in the book. And Angeline fought for decades, trying to see justice done … but it never happened. She went to her grave knowing what had happened, but having never seen anyone answer for it.

I thought it might be interesting to fix that.

Both Boneshaker and Dreadnought seem to be driven by characters’ refusal to accept or be broken by painful loss. The intensity with which you inundate your characters with external jeopardy and internal turmoil makes me wonder… What is at the heart of a novel for you? At the heart of the process?

I’m not sure, really. I think if I had to boil it down to the core of what’s important to me from a storytelling standpoint, I’d say that I want to take strong, competent, intelligent people … and challenge them. I hate plots wherein the crux of a matter turns out to be stupid behavior — wherein someone has to make a dumb, illogical choice in order to provide the suspense. It’s much more interesting to me when the problem is larger than the character’s capacity to easily manage it.

What’s next for you?

Next? I’d like to write a few more Clockwork Century books, at least. Following Dreadnought I have Ganymede in the queue — a piece set in my alt-history version of New Orleans, and featuring a fourth-gen “Hunley”-esque submarine. Following that, my editor and I are still noodling around with a couple of different stories and angles, trying to decide precisely how to handle what comes after; so I’d rather not talk about that yet.

Suffice it to say, there are definitely two more books in this setting forthcoming. In my perfect world, if the series continues to sell, I’d like to do another Seattle novel, plus one in Florida, one in Chattanooga, and one in Washington D. C. — whereupon I think I’d like to wrap up the war. I’m also considering a series of shorter pieces about Maria Boyd’s case files with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

Apart from this franchise, I’m not entirely sure. I enjoy writing stories in the 19th century, but I have the start of a modern urban fantasy series coming from Bantam next year, and those have been an awful lot of fun. Maybe I’ll chase those farther, and maybe I’ll stick with the vintage stuff. It’s hard to say.

The ideas are never the tough part. Finding enough hours in the day — that’s the tough part.

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.