Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 65

Table of Contents

And the Hollow Space Inside

by Mari Ness

A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

by Xia Jia

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

by Helena Bell

From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

by Matthew Johnson

Everything's Surprising: A Conversation with Lev AC Rosen

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

2011 Reader's Poll Results

by Neil Clarke

Pilot

Art by Alexander Trufanov

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

And the Hollow Space Inside

Mari Ness

Doug reaches for my hand as the ship approaches. He continues to hold it as the great doors open, as we watch them leave the ship. They pause; they have been in space and ultra-low gravity for five years now. Five years, one month, and three days, to be precise; I cannot believe my mind has memorized this.

We are too far away to see this, but I know their eyelids are blinking as they adjust, process, calculate, move, adjust again, the change in gravity no more than a problem to be solved.

As always, I am struck by how human and inhuman they look. Even their pauses have a precise, calculated feel. No one has ever seen them show uncertainty. No one ever will.

Gravity adjustments made, they walk with precision to the terminal, directly in front of us. It takes me a moment to recognize her, out of the eight faces. That is not surprising; it has been twelve years since I last saw her. What is surprising is how, even now, I am still desperately looking for any trace of my daughter’s smile in my daughter’s face.

The Mars missions, we were assured, would be the eventual saving grace of humanity. Oh, certainly, we hadn’t managed to use up all of the world’s resources yet, but that was only a matter of time. Population growth had slowed, but not stalled out completely, and wars over resources kept getting bloodier — while not reducing the population much. Mars was the only planet we could reach in an acceptable period of time, terraform, and begin colonizing. Other worlds would come, but by the time we reached the next nearest acceptable planet — a 40 year journey each way, under optimum conditions that few scientists thought we would meet — it would be too late for Earth. The Mars missions offered us that saving grace.

Only one problem: ordinary humans couldn’t survive the trip.

Beside me, Doug takes a deep breath. “She looks good.”

“Yes,” I agree.

The four years in low gravity, not to mention the years of dehydrated food before that, should have taken their toll, but she still looks fit and considerably younger than her actual age. Then again, she always did. They all did, a side effect of programming and lack of temptation, and (but this is only my opinion) emotions and stress.

The eight of them reach the terminal, turn in unison, and wave in precision. I have to remind myself once again that I have been assured that they all have individual implants and computers, individual programming. They were all expected to perform different tasks, after all; it would make no sense to have them

They vanish into the facility.

“They didn’t say hello,” says Doug.

I do not tell him that I am relieved.

The facility explained: humans needed interaction. A mere eight people, stuck together in the tight confines of a ship, and then on the almost equally tight confines of the first Mars base, could not be trusted to stay sane. The astronauts on the space stations had remained sane only because they were regularly rotated in and out, and could also continue to converse via radio and satellite to people back on earth. By the time the mission reached Mars, these transmissions would be delayed — not by much, but just enough to leave a long silence after a statement.

Just enough to drive people over the edge — only this edge was out in space, or on a hostile planet with no real edge to go to.

Unless they had no edge to fall off from.

Amy is blind, navigating with touch, sound and precision memory. Her taste and pleasure centers are nonfunctional. She eats carefully balanced meals at carefully programmed times, although she is never hungry.

“I don’t understand why they’re using the… children.” I shouldn’t have hesitated before that word, but I’d never been comfortable using it. They weren’t children. I didn’t know what they were, but they weren’t children, not by any definition of the word. But Doug hated the other, better word: implants. And adults just sounded wrong. The hesitation made Doug flinch. Which might have been why I’d hesitated. “If they think regular people can’t handle it, then why not just send out regular robots?”

Doug flinched again. Any reminder that his — our — daughter was any sort of robot did that to him. “As I understand it, they want to understand and see the long term effects of Mars gravity and terraforming on human bodies, since eventually they do plan to send the rest of us out there.”

“But — ” I swallowed, tried to get my thoughts in order. “They’re programmed. They’ll be eating and exercising absolutely regularly in a way regular adults wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Even Olympic athletes aren’t that careful.”

“But it will give them a general idea. Plus, they need to ensure that human bodies — ” it was my turn to flinch — “are capable of spending sustained time in a Martian environment.” He sounded like someone quoting a speech from a marketing consultant; it took me a second to realize that was probably exactly what he was doing.

I gave up attempting to eat. “Ok. What I don’t understand is this. Why are you telling me this?”

“Because they want us to talk to her before she goes.”

By “they” he meant the facility’s attorneys, of course.

Amy is also a skilled engineer and astronaut, programmed with the equivalent of multiple doctorate degrees in engineering, computer science, astronomy, microbiology, geology and geophysics and to speak multiple languages with the same flat intonation, who has to be reminded by a computer program to eat, who has never laughed or cried in her entire life.

“I’ll sign more papers if I have to,” I said. “I don’t want to see her.”

“Crystal.”

“I’m serious.”

“Crystal. If you don’t go, she can’t go. And — ” He swallowed, and I saw that he was about to start crying. “She doesn’t belong here. You’ll see.”

The reason for their quick disappearance is soon explained. The eight of them must be thoroughly checked — their programs are not yet perfectly adjusted for self-maintenance, although they are able to observe and check each other. Then a patch, to ensure that they are properly programmed to adjust to the new gravity, and another patch to ensure that they are able to translate and understand the very latest idioms in multiple languages.

And, of course, they must eat, which none of us will want to see.

This last part is true. The implants do not respond to appetite or taste, and although they are programmed to eat, with the precise, mechanical movements they use for everything else, they have difficulty with this. Eating, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than mere programming, and it is not something I want to watch again.

None of this is anything I want to watch again.

“Of course she’s agreeing to go,” I ranted at Ariela, my best friend, the only one other than Doug who knew the whole story. “She’s programmed to go. Why do I have to go to see this for myself?”

Ariela fiddled with her coffee cup. “I don’t think that’s it,” she said, after a moment.

“Then what is it?”

“I think they want you to be able to say good-bye.”

I have a picture of my daughter, in her crib, surrounded by wires and tubes.

It is the only one I have. Most of the time, I leave it buried at the bottom of a drawer in the guest room, face down. But sometimes I take it out, and try to imagine that in it, my daughter is smiling.

When I found out my child would be born without a brain, I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. Everything inside me was swallowed up, gone, empty, and I had nothing to cry with. I just sat quietly, hands folded over my abdomen, listening. I didn’t have much to say.

I had options, they explained, carefully. I could terminate the pregnancy — it was difficult to find anyone who would terminate late term pregnancies here, but a trip to Europe or Asia could be arranged. I could bring the child to term. (Beside me, Doug jerked, but didn’t say anything.) The child would not live, but some parents found that comforting, and I could hold her afterwards. (”Comforting”? The hollow part of me could not ask.)

Or, they said, they could offer a third possibility.

I’ve cried enough about this already. Enough.

The medical procedure was less simple than they had promised. Eight hours of initial surgery, and then two days in bed, another surgery, and then a third. Doug tried to read books to me, but I was so sick I could barely understand his words. Finally he set me up with an tablet and music and let that play while he slept and slept.

With each procedure, I dreamed, dreamed that metal was moving through my skin and bones, dreamed that wires were replacing my nerves. I saw myself as a computer. I saw myself linking to my daughter.

I threw up, over and over. The pregnancy, said the nurses sympathetically. Or the drugs. But I knew it wasn’t either.

Even now, I sometimes wonder if some of those nanobots entered my blood, my skin, if their presence is why I can now look at my daughter and have no desire to hold her.

I was allowed to hold her, briefly, after the birth. It was psychologically better for the mother, one of the doctors argued; a compassionate thing to do, agreed the attorneys, who probably had other fears in mind. I had no thoughts of a lawsuit, not then.

She was small, so very small. And so limp. For some reason I had thought that the procedures would extend metal all the way through her body, but no. Not that she was lacking in metal; she had wires and tubes seemingly everywhere, controlling her food intake and bladder and monitoring pulse rates and the electronic activity in her brain.

But no tubes in her nose or her mouth, and her tiny chest rose and fell steadily.

“There were some problems,” Doug says.

“Problems,” I repeat.

He swallows. “They could send commands to them while they were on the mission, but apparently, something about the distance and time — anyway, they weren’t able to successfully upload all of the patches and fixes. Some of the programming broke down.”

“And?”

“Some of them — well, they’re saying some of them may be nonfunctional.”

It takes me a moment to sort through the pronouns. “Amy?”

“I don’t know.” He swallows miserably.

“The implant is letting her breathe,” explained one of the doctors. “In time, it might allow her to do more.”

“What more?” asked Doug.

“We don’t entirely know,” said the doctor. “Movement, walking, certainly. Speech, hopefully. And more beyond that.”

I touched her cheek. It was warm to the touch, and I could tell that she was breathing. But that was all. She did not move, did not even flutter an eye at my touch.

She had not cried, not even that first baby cry after birth.

“This is your fault,” I shout at Doug, although it isn’t. “You were the one who insisted on fixing her.”

“You are the one who keeps thinking she’s dead,” he shouts back.

“Did you have a name in mind?” One of the lawyers, a young man who had seemed almost human. “We can use that, if you like. Otherwise a name will be randomly chosen by computer.”

I had not. “Amy,” I said. It had been the name of one of my childhood dolls.

He made a note on his tablet.

“Will you need my breast milk?”

“We would be grateful.”

And then a doctor came and took her away, and the hollow space was inside me, consuming me, and I couldn’t even cry. I couldn’t even move. Doug was crying, shaking, and I was nothing.

We will not be allowed to talk to Amy, to see Amy, until an unspecified time. Doug is furious, but the lawyers he calls are not encouraging. If Amy is a fully legal human, and that status is dubious, capable of making decisions without the facility, she is also an adult, and we have no legal claim on her. And since she has just traveled to Mars and back, we can hardly claim her as a disabled dependent. And if she is not a fully legal human — the conclusion of most of the attorneys — she is property, and not ours, and any attempt to push these boundaries is a crime.

The hollow place inside me is growing again, and I desperately need to return to work.

I never explained to anyone why I continued to pump milk for six months.

No one was unkind enough to ask.

They sent us the first pictures when she was five. An unsmiling child, looking straight at the camera, unblinking.

I begin to receive messages from Doug’s lawyers. I delete them. I need to focus, focus.

Doug received the status updates and read them regularly. I couldn’t. He told me tidbits, however: that Amy had been able to sit up, to move her legs and arms. That Amy had successfully downloaded the program that might help her control her urination. That Amy had connected with her vocal cords —

“Not Amy,” I finally shouted at him. “Not Amy. Her goddamn implant. The implant. The implant is making all of these goddamn connections!“

It is so easy, on a computer, to move a few pixels around, to change an image from sorrow to laughter. So easy to use the programming already there.

We got a divorce about two years after that.

Much later I heard that attempts had been made to get the children with implants to smile, to make laughing sounds, to move their faces. It had all been abandoned. Emotions were, it seemed, the one thing that a program could not fake, and a face was all emotions. Some of the caretakers at the facility had become physically ill just watching a computer attempt to move their faces.

On Ariela’s advice, I switched careers entirely, moving from insurance to marine biology. I focused on the microorganisms in mangrove ecosystems, forgetting, in my kayak, or on my computer, or snorkeling in the mangrove roots, that I had ever had a daughter, that I in some ways still had a daughter. Instead, I had spironemids.

Doug and I stayed in touch, meeting once a year or so. I went to his wedding, to a small fierce musician named Inari. He met some of the succession of boyfriends I had and disposed over the years.

And he kept me updated on Amy.

Whenever he did, I allowed myself to think of my mangroves, disappearing into them, into the images I created of spironemids racing up and down the mangrove roots.

I receive an email from one of the other parents, one of the few who understands. Their son and his implant have failed; they will be heading to the facility to say goodbye, and put some of the dust of Mars on his hand. “I feel as if we already said this,” says the email. “I feel as if I have to say this every day.”

I agreed to meet her. At the very least, it might help end Doug’s endless updates, coming at odd intervals through the year. I should have insisted to an end to those in the divorce agreement.

I made him drive us to the facility, and pay for the hotel stay. In separate bedrooms.

“One meeting,” I say. “Just one.”

“No.”

“I’m her mother,” I manage. I remember Ariela’s words. “I have to say good-bye.”

“Hello,” came a voice.

Something was wrong with that voice, terribly wrong, but I could not pinpoint the problem.

“Hello,” I managed back.

“Should I enter?”

“Yes,” said Doug.

And she stepped into the light.

Doug’s features. My mother’s hair. My eyes.

Our daughter. And yet, not our daughter.

It — she? — stepped forward with small, efficient movements, as if every step was carefully measured — which, I realized in shock, was actually what was happening. The face — Doug’s nose, his chin, in her face — was extraordinarily, perfectly still. Her hands brushed the chair in front of her, and she sat. The motion — I tried to find words for it, and then realized. She was not moving the way a human would. She was moving the way a computer thought a human would move.

She has an individual implant, my daughter. It can still be accessed, still be reprogrammed at the will of the facility. Doug and I have no rights over this, cannot stop the facility from turning her into whatever it wishes. That was part of the agreement we signed, to keep her alive.

“Hello,” Doug said, his voice remarkably steady under the circumstances.

The face turned towards him. “Hello,” it repeated. Its eyelids blinked, rapidly.

It’s processing, I thought. They had warned us of that facial tic, programmed to allow others to tell when the implants needed to pause to process.

I was going to throw up. I knew it. I stood, wobbled, and pushed my way out of the door, not sure I could even make it to the nearest bathroom, feeling the floor rock beneath him. Behind me I heard Doug say something, but I could not be sure if he was talking to me or Amy.

Amy.

I am in the middle of finishing up a presentation for an important conference when the email arrives. Doug, of course, telling me that he has contacted people in the facility, who say that Amy is not completing all of her programmed tasks, that she is instead sitting at a window staring up into a sky.

That sounds most unlike Amy. I have never known her to stare at anything.

I threw up, again, and again, then leaned against the toilet for a while, body shaking.

The second meeting went better.

I refused to think of it as my daughter, as anything remotely related to me, even if its eyes were the same color as mine. Oddly, what helped was the voice, the same voice that had made me so sick. I had never heard anything like it; the “computer” voices I’d heard before were either the recorded voices of actors, or clearly mechanical synthesized sounds that had never approached human vocal cords. This — this was different; the sound of a mechanical voice pushed through human vocal vocals, precise, emotionless, flat, with no accent that I could think of. At Doug’s request, it demonstrated 50 languages for us, all with that same precise flatness. It explained how it spent its day, in regular exercise and eating and downloading. I watched the eyelids blink each time it answered our questions.

I signed the papers.

“Thank you,” it said.

I find myself wondering what she is thinking. If she is thinking. Can she think? She is programmed to process, to sift, to keep herself alive while analyzing vast amounts of data and transmitting it back to computers for further analysis.

I know she cannot see the stars. But I cannot stop wondering if she looked at them anyway, in those quiet hours between the earth and Mars. If something in her looked at them. I clench my fists and rub them against my legs.

We made other visits before the launch. She had downloaded more languages, which she demonstrated for us. She did not listen to music, but could list off every song and album from any artist I named, knowing the exact length of each song, the record company, and where it was produced.

She could not use my daughter’s eyes to see. But a million million images had been downloaded into her brain, including mine. She navigated by touch and utter precision, and had been updated with the very latest in voice recognition software.

We arranged to meet her outside. For some reason, this seemed more natural, easier on both of us. I could not tell if this affected her or not. But when we were outside, she sometimes turned her face to the sky.

After she left for Mars, I almost forgot about her.

Almost.

I receive an urgent email from the facility. It is not an update on Amy’s medical condition. It is a request, typed by her and signed with her electronic thumbprint. In it, she asks that we authorize her return to Mars.

“She says she wants to go,” I tell Doug.

I cannot believe that I am saying this, that I am the one arguing for her, that I am the one saying that she — an implant, a computer, should be allowed to make her own decisions.

“You said it yourself. She’s a computer program. She can’t want anything.”

My voice is barely a whisper. “Maybe she wants this.”

It would be easier to have Amy away from here, on a spaceship, or on Mars.

I do not think that is why I am arguing for her to leave. But I cannot be sure.

After the launch, people found us — all of us, every parent that had given, donated, lost a child to the implant program. We got calls, emails, twitters, comments. Hellish. I had to slam my sites down, only to find myself stalked at work and home by media, by religious zealots, by advocates of one side or another. People who thought I had done the right thing, people who thought I was the living embodiment of evil. I changed my name, my address.

My colleagues would not meet my eyes at biological conferences. I understood; I had, in a way, created Frankenstein’s monster, or at least consented to it. And it was easier to handle than their curiosity would have been.

I sometimes imagine breaking into that facility, and wiping away all of its computers with a single program, or perhaps just taking an axe to its servers. (My practical mind whispers that with a program like this, the facility must have multiple backups in multiple places, but my imagination will not be silenced.) I imagine the implants twitching in response, the bodies falling into heaps on the ground, puppets suddenly cut from their strings.

I imagine putting flowers on a gravestone, and weeping.

My eyes remain dry.

Doug insists on another visit.

“You look terrible,” he tells her.

Amy does not respond. To me, she has never looked well, even when she has looked fit. But looking at her closely, I see she is less fit, less trim, than when she originally emerged from the ship and headed into the facility without talking to us. She looks slightly — loose, if that makes sense. Perhaps her programming has not adjusted to the gravity, or perhaps she is merely getting old. I realize with a shock that she is middle aged by now, and even regularly programmed exercise can only do so much, especially when combined with the radical changes in gravity she has been undergoing.

A shock because of her unlined face, her almost childlike skin. Any dermatologist claiming that wrinkles are an inevitable part of aging, and not a result of emotion and stress, should take a look at her face. She does not even have lines between her cheek and her mouth, or around her eyes.

The hollow part inside me rises up again, swallowing me, and I am at a loss for words.

Doug is right about something else as well. I cannot pinpoint it, but since she has returned, something is… missing.

“How can we tell them that you are physically able to make the trip?” asks Doug.

“I am programmed with a word,” my daughter says, in the flat, toneless voice that no human vocal cords should ever make. “The word is lie.”

When she left for Mars, I did not watch her leave. I stayed on my computer, modeling, modeling, writing, writing, drafting, organizing, too lost in my work and my words to catch the faintest roar of burning engines, the faintest cheers that humans — well, humans of a sort — were headed to Mars at last.

At my request, a nurse arranges one more meeting, in one of the gardens on the edge of the facility.

When I arrive, it — Amy — my daughter — is facing into the sky, eyes unblinking. It is the first time, I realize, that I have ever seen her focused on anything.

“This is not my programming,” she says.

It is so easy to sign documents, to watch those documents get swallowed up in a machine.

When I tell this story, I can see its events taking place, one after another, as inexorably as life and death.

When I remember this story, I can feel myself holding my daughter, my baby, and rocking her back and forth, a moment that has never quite stopped.

I dream of giving Amy a doll, a doll covered in wires and strings. I help her cut the strings. But with each string I cut, another wire grows on Amy’s head, until she is held in place, unable to move.

She is alive, I think. She breathes. She moves. She processes. She communicates. She knows the songs and titles of every album published since the invention of those old phonographs.

She is alive.

I think.

This time, I watch the launch, from ten miles away, on a comfortable beach chair, surrounded by loud beachgoers and picnickers. And children. Hordes of children, all seemingly determined to out-scream each other as they leap in and out of the waves.

I have my net radio on, with the broadcasters comparing this to the old moon and shuttle launches that I have seen only in documentaries and history shows. I cannot focus on their words, although I try. I can only look at the endless blue of the sky, keep my eyes trained on the spot where a golden flame will soon be lifting into a sky.

The countdown starts. I stand.

It is more beautiful, this launch, than anything I could have expected, a bright golden streak against the sky, trailing steam and mist behind it. And I am crying, crying, as the gold hits my eyes, as if the flame is burning through me. I feel it traveling through my eyes, my arms, my chest, feel it burning in the hollow place inside, the hardened still place that has been my center for thirty-three years. I feel it burning, splitting, fading. Tonight, I promise myself, tonight, I will watch the stars, and imagine what it is like to be moving towards them.

About the Author

Mari Ness lives in central Florida with two cats who think her fingers should spend less time on a keyboard and more time in their fur. Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Daily Science Fiction, and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. On Thursdays, she blogs about classic works of children’s fantasy literature over at Tor.com. You can also follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.

A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

Xia Jia

Awakening of Insects, the Third Solar Term:

Ghost Street is long but narrow, like an indigo ribbon. You can cross it in eleven steps, but to walk it from end to end takes a full hour.

At the western end is Lanruo Temple, now fallen into ruin. Inside the temple is a large garden full of fruit trees and vegetable patches, as well as a bamboo grove and a lotus pond. The pond has fish, shrimp, dojo loaches, and yellow snails. So supplied, I have food to eat all year.

It’s evening, and I’m sitting at the door to the main hall, reading a copy of Huainanzi, the Han Dynasty essay collection, when along comes Yan Chixia, the great hero, vanquisher of demons and destroyer of evil spirits. He’s carrying a basket on the crook of his elbow, the legs of his pants rolled all the way up, revealing calves caked with black mud. I can’t help but laugh at the sight.

My teacher, the Monk, hears me and walks out of the dark corner of the main hall, gears grinding, and hits me on the head with his ferule.

I hold my head in pain, staring at the Monk in anger. But his iron face is expressionless, just like the statues of buddhas in the main hall. I throw down the book and run outside, while the Monk pursues me, his joints clanking and creaking the whole time. They are so rusted that he moves as slow as a snail.

I stop in front of Yan, and I see that his basket contains several new bamboo shoots, freshly dug from the ground.

“I want to eat meat,” I say, tilting my face up to look at him. “Can you shoot some buntings with your slingshot for me?”

“Buntings are best eaten in the fall, when they’re fat,” says Yan. “Now is the time for them to breed chicks. If you shoot them, there won’t be buntings to eat next year.”

“Just one, pleaaaaase?” I grab onto his sleeve and act cute. But he shakes his head resolutely, handing me the basket. He takes off his conical sedge hat and wipes the sweat off his face.

I laugh again as I look at him. His face is as smooth as an egg, with just a few wisps of curled black hair like weeds that have been missed by the gardener. Legend has it that his hair and beard used to be very thick, but I’m always pulling a few strands out now and then as a game. After so many years, these are all the hairs he has left.

“You must have died of hunger in a previous life,” Yan says, cradling the back of my head in his large palm. “The whole garden is full of food for you. No one is here to fight you for it.”

I make a face at him and take the basket of food.

The rain has barely stopped; insects cry out from the wet earth. A few months from now, green grasshoppers will be jumping everywhere. You can catch them, string them along a stick, and roast them over the fire, dripping sweet-smelling fat into the flames.

As I picture this, my empty stomach growls as though filled with chittering insects already. I begin to run.

The golden light of the evening sun splatters over the slate slabs of the empty street, stretching my shadow into a long, long band.

I run back home, where Xiao Qian is combing her hair in the darkness. There are no mirrors in the house, so she always takes off her head and puts it on her knees to comb. Her hair looks like an ink-colored scroll, so long that the strands spread out to cover the whole room.

I sit quietly to the side until she’s done combing her hair, puts it up in a moon-shaped bun, and secures it with a pin made of dark wood inlaid with red coral beads. Then she lifts her head and re-attaches it to her neck, and asks me if it’s sitting straight. I don’t understand why Xiao Qian cares so much. Even if she just tied her head to her waist with a sash, everyone would still think she’s beautiful.

But I look, seriously, and nod. “Beautiful,” I say.

Actually, I can’t really see very well. Unlike the ghosts, I cannot see in the dark.

Xiao Qian is happy with my affirmation. She takes my basket and goes into the kitchen to cook. As I sit and work the bellows next to her, I tell her about my day. Just as I get to the part where the Monk hit me on the head with the ferule, Xiao Qian reaches out and lightly caresses my head where I was hit. Her hand is cold and pale, like a piece of jade.

“You need to study hard and respect your teacher,” Xiao Qian says. “Eventually you’ll leave here and make your way in the real world. You have to have some knowledge and real skills.”

Her voice is very soft, like cotton candy, and so the swelling on my head stops hurting.

Xiao Qian tells me that Yan Chixia found me on the steps of the temple when I was a baby. I cried and cried because I was so hungry. Yan Chixia was at his wit’s end when he finally stuffed a handful of creeping rockfoil into my mouth. I sucked on the juice from the grass and stopped crying.

No one knows who my real parents are.

Even back then, Ghost Street had been doing poorly. No tourists had been coming by for a while. That hasn’t changed. Xiao Qian tells me that it’s probably because people invented some other attraction, newer, fresher, and so they forgot about the old attractions. She’s seen similar things happen many times before.

Before she became a ghost, Xiao Qian tells me, she had lived a very full life. She had been married twice, gave birth to seven children, and raised them all.

And then her children got sick, one after another. In order to raise the money to pay the doctors, Xiao Qian sold herself off in pieces: teeth, eyes, breasts, heart, liver, lungs, bone marrow, and finally, her soul. Her soul was sold to Ghost Street, where it was sealed inside a female ghost’s body. Her children died anyway.

Now she has white skin and dark hair. The skin is light sensitive. If she’s in direct sunlight she’ll burn.

After he found me, Yan Chixia had walked up and down all of Ghost Street before he decided to give me to Xiao Qian to raise.

I’ve seen a picture of Xiao Qian back when she was alive. It was hidden in a corner of a drawer in her dresser. The woman in the picture had thick eyebrows, huge eyes, a wrinkled face — far uglier than the way Xiao Qian looks now. Still, I often see her cry as she looks at that picture. Her tears are a pale pink. When they fall against her white dress they soak into the fabric and spread, like blooming peach flowers.

Every ghost is full of stories from when they were alive. Their bodies have been cremated and the ashes mixed into the earth, but their stories still live on. During the day, when all of Ghost Street is asleep, the stories become dreams and circle under the shadows of the eaves, like swallows without nests. During those hours, only I’m around, walking in the street, and only I can see them and hear their buzzing song.

I’m the only living person on Ghost Street.

Xiao Qian says that I don’t belong here. When I grow up, I’ll leave.

The smell of good food fills the room. The insects in my stomach chitter even louder.

I eat dinner by myself: preserved pork with stir-fried bamboo shoots, shrimp-paste-flavored egg soup, and rice balls with chives, still hot in my hands. Xiao Qian sits and watches me. Ghosts don’t eat. None of the inhabitants of Ghost Street, not even Yan Chixia or the Monk, ever eat.

I bury my face in the bowl, eating as fast as I can. I wonder, after I leave, will I ever eat such delicious food again?

Major Heat, the Twelfth Solar Term:

After night falls, the world comes alive.

I go alone to the well in the back to get water. I turn the wheel and it squeaks, but the sound is different from usual. I look down into the well and see a long-haired ghost in a white dress sitting in the bucket.

I pull her up and out. Her wet hair covers her face, leaving only one eye to stare at me out of a gap.

“Ning, tonight is the Carnival. Aren’t you going?”

“I need to get water for Xiao Qian’s bath,” I answer. “After the bath we’ll go.”

She strokes my face lightly. “You are a foolish child.”

She has no legs, so she has to leave by crawling on her hands. I hear the sound of crawling, creeping all around me. Green will-o’-the-wisps flit around, like anxious fireflies. The air is filled with the fragrance of rotting flowers.

I go back to the dark bedroom and pour the water into the wooden bathtub. Xiao Qian undresses. I see a crimson bar code along her naked back, like a tiny snake. Bright white lights pulse under her skin.

“Why don’t you take a bath with me?” she asks.

I shake my head, but I’m not sure why. Xiao Qian sighs. “Come.” So I don’t refuse again.

We sit in the bathtub together. The cedar smells nice. Xiao Qian rubs my back with her cold, cold hands, humming lightly. Her voice is very beautiful. Legend has it that any man who heard her sing fell in love with her.

When I grow up, will I fall in love with Xiao Qian? I think and look at my small hands, the skin now wrinkled from the bath like wet wrapping paper.

After the bath, Xiao Qian combs my hair, and dresses me in a new shirt that she made for me. Then she sticks a bunch of copper coins, green and dull, into my pocket.

“Go have fun,” she says. “Remember not to eat too much!”

Outside, the street is lit with countless lanterns, so bright that I can no longer see the stars that fill the summer sky.

Demons, ghosts, all kinds of spirits come out of their ruined houses, out of cracks in walls, rotting closets, dry wells. Hand-in-hand, shoulder-by-shoulder, they parade up and down Ghost Street until the narrow street is filled.

I squeeze myself into the middle of the crowd, looking all around. The stores and kiosks along both sides of the street send forth all kinds of delicious smells, tickling my nose like butterflies. The vending ghosts see me and call for me, the only living person, to try their wares.

“Ning! Come here! Fresh sweet osmanthus cakes, still hot!”

“Sugar roasted chestnuts! Sweet smelling and sweeter tasting!”

“Fried dough, the best fried dough!”

“Long pig dumplings! Two long pig dumplings for one coin!”

“Ning, come eat a candy man. Fun to play and fun to eat!”

Of course the “long pig dumplings” are really just pork dumplings. The vendor says that just to attract the tourists and give them a thrill.

But I look around, and there are no tourists.

I eat everything I can get my hands on. Finally, I’m so full that I have to sit down by the side of the road to rest a bit. On the opposite side of the street is a temporary stage lit by a huge bright white paper lantern. Onstage, ghosts are performing: sword-swallowing, fire-breathing, turning a beautiful girl into a skeleton. I’m bored by these tricks. The really good show is still to come.

A yellow-skinned old ghost pushes a cart of masks in front of me.

“Ning, why don’t you pick a mask? I have everything: Ox-Head, Horse-Face, Black-Faced and White-Faced Wuchang, Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa, Pixiu, and even Lei Gong, the Duke of Thunder.”

I spend a long time browsing, and finally settle on a Rakshasa mask with red hair and green eyes. The yellow-skinned old ghost thanks me as he takes my coin, dipping his head down until his back is bent like a bow.

I put the mask on and continue strutting down the street. Suddenly loud Carnival music fills the air, and all the ghosts stop and then shuffle to the sides of the street.

I turn around and see the parade coming down the middle of the street. In front are twenty one-foot tall green toads in two columns, striking gongs, thumping drums, strumming huqin, and blowing bamboo sheng. After them come twenty centipede spirits in black clothes, each holding varicolored lanterns and dancing complicated steps. Behind them are twenty snake spirits in yellow dresses, throwing confetti into the air. And there are more behind them but I can’t see so far.

Between the marching columns are two Cyclopes in white robes, each as tall as a three-story house. They carry a palanquin on their shoulders, and from within Xiao Qian’s song rolls out, each note as bright as a star in the sky, falling one by one onto my head.

Fireworks of all colors rise up: bright crimson, pale green, smoky purple, shimmering gold. I look up and feel as though I’m becoming lighter myself, floating into the sky.

As the parade passes from west to east, all the ghosts along the sides of the street join, singing and dancing. They’re heading for the old osmanthus tree at the eastern end of Ghost Street, whose trunk is so broad that three men stretching their arms out can barely surround it. A murder of crows lives there, each one capable of human speech. We call the tree Old Ghost Tree, and it is said to be in charge of all of Ghost Street. Whoever pleases it prospers; whoever goes against its wishes fails.

But I know that the parade will never get to the Old Ghost Tree.

When the parade is about half way down the street, the earth begins to shake and the slate slabs crack open. From the yawning gaps huge white bones crawl out, each as thick as the columns holding up Lanruo Temple. The bones slowly gather together and assemble into a giant skeleton, glinting like white porcelain in the moonlight. Now black mud springs forth from its feet and crawls up the skeleton, turning into flesh. Finally, a colossal Dark Yaksha stands before us, its single horn so large that it seems to pierce the night sky.

The two Cyclopes don’t even reach its calves.

The Dark Yaksha turns its huge head from side to side. This is a standard part of every Carnival. It is supposed to abduct a tourist. On nights when there are no tourists, it must go back under the earth, disappointed, to wait for the next opportunity.

Slowly, it turns its gaze on me, focusing on my presence. I pull off my mask and stare back. Its gaze feels hot, the eyes as red as burning coal.

Xiao Qian leans out from the palanquin, and her cry pierces the suddenly quiet night air: “Ning, run! Run!”

The wind lifts the corner of her dress, like a dark purple petal unfolding. Her face is like jade, with orange lights flowing underneath.

I turn and run as fast as I can. Behind me I hear the heavy footsteps of the Dark Yaksha. With every quaking, pounding step, shingles fall from houses on both sides like overripe fruits. I am now running like the wind, my bare feet striking the slate slabs lightly: pat, pat, pat. My heart pounds against my chest: thump, thump, thump. Along the entire frenzied Ghost Street, mine is the only living heart.

But both the ghosts and I know that I’m not in any real danger. A ghost can never hurt a real person. That’s one of the rules of the game.

I run towards the west, towards Lanruo Temple. If I can get to Yan Chixia before the Yaksha catches me, I’ll be safe. This is also part of the performance. Every Carnival, Yan puts on his battle gear and waits on the steps of the main hall.

As I approach, I cry out: “Help! Save me! Oh Hero Yan, save me!”

In the distance I hear his long ululating cry and see his figure leaping over the wall of the temple to land in the middle of the street. He holds in his left hand a Daoist charm: red character written against a yellow background. He reaches behind his back with his right hand and pulls out his sword, the Demon Slayer.

He stands tall and shouts into the night sky, “Brazen Demon! How dare you harm innocent people? I, Yan Chixia, will carry out justice today!”

But tonight, he forgot to wear his sedge hat. His egg-shaped face is exposed to the thousands of lanterns along Ghost Street, with just a few wisps of hair curled like question marks on a blank page. The silly sight is such a contrast against his serious mien that I start to laugh even as I’m running. And that makes me choke and can’t catch my breath so I fall against the cold slate surface of the street.

This moment is my best memory for the summer.

Cold Dew, the Seventeenth Solar Term:

A thin layer of clouds hides the moon. I’m crouching by the side of the lotus pond in Lanruo Temple. All I can see are the shadows cast by the lotus leaves, rising and falling slowly with the wind.

The night is as cold as the water. Insects hidden in the grass won’t stop singing.

The eggplants and string beans in the garden are ripe. They smell so good that I have a hard time resisting the temptation. All I can think about is to steal some under the cover of night. Maybe Yan Chixia was right: in a previous life I must have died of hunger.

So I wait, and wait. But I don’t hear Yan Chixia’s snores. Instead, I hear light footsteps cross the grassy path to stop in front of Yan Chixia’s cabin. The door opens, the steps go in. A moment later, the voices of a man and a woman drift out of the dark room: Yan Chixia and Xiao Qian.

Qian: “Why did you ask me to come?”

Yan: “You know what it’s about.”

Qian: “I can’t leave with you.”

Yan: “Why not?”

Qian: “A few more years. Ning is still so young.”

“Ning, Ning!” Yan’s voice grows louder. “I think you’ve been a ghost for too long.”

Qian sounds pitiful. “I raised Ning for so many years. How can I just get up and leave him?”

“You’re always telling me that Ning is still too young, always telling me to wait. Do you remember how many years it has been?”

“I can’t.”

“You sew a new set of clothes for him every year. How can you forget?” Yan chuckles, a cold sound. “I remember very clearly. The fruits and vegetables in this garden ripen like clockwork, once a year. I’ve seen them do it fifteen times. Fifteen! But has Ning’s appearance changed any since the year he turned seven? You still think he’s alive, he’s real?”

Xiao Qian remains silent for a moment. Then I hear her crying.

Yan sighs. “Don’t lie to yourself any more. He’s just like us, nothing more than a toy. Why are you so sad? He’s not worth it.”

Xiao Qian just keeps on crying.

Yan sighs again. “I should never have picked him up and brought him back.”

Xiao Qian whispers through the tears, “Where can we go if we leave Ghost Street?”

Yan has no answer.

The sound of Xiao Qian’s crying makes my heart feel constricted. Silently, I sneak away and leave the old temple through a hole in the wall.

The thin layer of clouds chooses this moment to part. The cold moonlight scatters itself against the slate slabs of the street, congealing into drops of glittering dew. My bare feet against the ground feel so cold that my whole body shivers.

A few stores are still open along Ghost Street. The vendors greet me enthusiastically, asking me to sample their green bean biscuits and sweet osmanthus cake. But I don’t want to. What’s the point? I’m just like them, maybe even less than them.

Every ghost used to be alive. Their fake, mechanical bodies host real souls. But I’m fake throughout, inside and outside. From the day I was born, made, I was fake. Every ghost has stories of when they were alive, but I don’t. Every ghost had a father, a mother, a family, memories of their love, but I don’t have any of that.

Xiao Qian once told me that Ghost Street’s decline came about because people, real people, found more exciting, newer toys. Maybe I am one of those toys: made with newer, better technology, until I could pass for the real thing. I can cry, laugh, eat, piss and shit, fall, feel pain, ooze blood, hear my own heartbeat, grow up from a simulacrum of a baby — except that my growth stops when I’m seven. I’ll never be a grown up.

Ghost Street was built to entertain the tourists, and all the ghosts were their toys. But I’m just a toy for Xiao Qian.

Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake.

I walk slowly toward the eastern end of the street, until I stop under the Old Ghost Tree. The sweet fragrance of osmanthus fills the foggy night air, cool and calming. Suddenly I want to climb into the tree. That way, no one will find me.

The Old Ghost Tree leans down with its branches to help me.

I sit, hidden among the dense branches, and feel calmer. The crows perch around me, their glass eyes showing hints of a dark red glow. One of them speaks: “Ning, this is a beautiful night. Why aren’t you at Lanruo Temple, stealing vegetables?”

The crow is asking a question to which it already knows the answer. The Old Ghost Tree knows everything that happens on Ghost Street. The crows are its eyes and ears.

“How can I know for sure,” I ask, “that I’m a real person?”

“You can chop off your head,” the crow answers. “A real person will die with his head cut off, but a ghost will not.”

“But what if I cut off my head and die? I’ll be no more.”

The crow laughs, the sound grating and unpleasant to listen to. Two more crows fly down, holding in their beaks antique bronze mirrors. Using the little moonlight that leaks through the leaves, I finally see myself in the mirrors: small face, dark hair, thin neck. I lift the hair off the back of my neck, and in the double reflections of the mirrors, I see a crimson bar code against the skin, like a tiny snake.

I remember Xiao Qian’s cool hands against my spine on that hot summer night. I think and think, until tears fall from my eyes.

Winter Solstice, the Twenty-Second Solar Term:

This winter has been both dry and cold, but I often hear the sound of thunder in the distance. Xiao Qian says that it’s the Thunder Calamity, which happens only once every thousand years.

The Thunder Calamity punishes demons and ghosts and lost spirits. Those who can escape it can live for another thousand years. Those who can’t will be burnt away until no trace is left of them.

I know perfectly well that there’s no such thing as a “Thunder Calamity” in this world. Xiao Qian has been a ghost for so long that she’s now gone a little crazy. She holds onto me with her cold hands, her face as pale as a sheet of paper. She says that to hide from the Calamity, a ghost must find a real person with a good heart to stay beside her. That way, just like how one wouldn’t throw a shoe at a mouse sitting beside an expensive vase, the Duke of Thunder will not strike the ghost.

Because of her fear, my plan to leave has been put on hold. In secret I’ve already prepared my luggage: a few stolen potatoes, a few old shirts. My body isn’t growing any more anyway, so these clothes will last me a long time. I didn’t take any of the old copper coins from Xiao Qian though. Perhaps the outside world does not use them.

I really want to leave Ghost Street. I don’t care where I go; I just want to see the world. Anywhere but here.

I want to know how real people live.

But still, I linger.

On Winter Solstice it snows. The snowflakes are tiny, like white saw dust. They melt as soon as they hit the ground. Only a very thin layer has accumulated by noon.

I walk alone along the street, bored. In past years I would go to Lanruo Temple to find Yan Chixia. We would knock an opening in the ice covering the lotus pond, and lower our jury-rigged fishing pole beneath the ice. Winter catfish are very fat and taste fantastic when roasted with garlic.

But I haven’t seen Yan Chixia in a long time. I wonder if his beard and hair have grown out a bit.

Thunder rumbles in the sky, closer, then further away, leaving only a buzzing sensation in my ears. I walk all the way to the Old Ghost Tree, climb up into its branches, and sit still. Snowflakes fall all around me but not on me. I feel calm and warm. I curl up and tuck my head under my arms, falling asleep like a bird.

In my dream, I see Ghost Street turning into a long, thin snake. The Old Ghost Tree is the head, Lanruo Temple the tail, the slate slabs the scales. On each scale is drawn the face of a little ghost, very delicate and beautiful.

But the snake continues to writhe as though in great pain. I watch carefully and see that a mass of termites and spiders is biting its tail, making a sound like silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves. With sharp mandibles and claws, they tear off the scales on the snake one by one, revealing the flesh underneath. The snake struggles silently, but disappears inch by inch into the maws of the insects. When its body is almost completely eaten, it finally makes a sharp cry, and turns its lonesome head towards me.

I see that its face is Xiao Qian’s.

I wake up. The cold wind rustles the leaves of the Old Ghost Tree. It’s too quiet around me. All the crows have disappeared to who knows where except one that is very old and ugly. It’s crouching in front of me, its beak dangling like the tip of a long mustache.

I shake it awake, anxious. It stares at me with two broken-glass eyes, croaking to me in its mechanical, flat voice, “Ning, why are you still here?”

“Where should I be?”

“Anywhere is good,” it says. “Ghost Street is finished. We’re all finished.”

I stick my head out of the leaves of the Old Ghost Tree. Under the slate-grey sky, I see the murder of crows circling over Lanruo Temple in the distance, cawing incessantly. I’ve never seen anything like this.

I jump down from the tree and run. As I run along the narrow street, I pass dark doors and windows. The cawing of the crows has awakened many of the ghosts, but they don’t dare to go outside, where there’s light. All they can do is to peek out from cracks in doors, like a bunch of crickets hiding under houses in winter.

The old walls of Lanruo Temple, long in need of repairs, have been pushed down. Many giant mechanical spiders made of steel are crawling all over the main hall, breaking off the dark red glass shingles and sculpted wooden molding, piece by piece, and throwing the pieces into the snow on the ground. They have flat bodies, blue-glowing eyes, and sharp mandibles, as ugly as you can imagine. From deep within their bodies comes a rumbling noise like thunder.

The crows swoop around them, picking up bits of broken shingles and bricks on the ground and dropping them on the spiders. But they are too weak and the spiders ignore them. The broken shingle pieces strike against the steel shells, making faint, hollow echoes.

The vegetable garden has been destroyed. All that remains are some mud and pale white roots. I see one of the Monk’s rusted arms sticking out of a pile of broken bricks.

I run through the garden, calling for Yan Chixia. He hears me and slowly walks out of his cabin. He’s still wearing his battle gear: sedge hat over his head, the sword Demon Slayer in his hand. I want to shout for him to fight the spiders, but somehow I can’t spit the words out. The words taste like bitter, astringent paste stuck in my throat.

Yan Chixia stares at me with his sad eyes. He comes over to hold my hands. His hands are as cold as Xiao Qian’s.

We stand together and watch as the great and beautiful main hall is torn apart bit by bit, collapses, turns into a pile of rubble: shingles, bricks, wood, and mud. Nothing is whole.

They’ve destroyed all of Lanruo Temple: the walls, the main hall, the garden, the lotus pond, the bamboo grove, and Yan Chixia’s cabin. The only thing left is a muddy ruin.

Now they’re moving onto the rest of Ghost Street. They pry up the slate slabs, flatten the broken houses along the sides of the street. The ghosts hiding in the houses are chased into the middle of the street. As they run, they scream and scream, while their skin slowly burns in the faint sunlight. There are no visible flames. But you can see the skin turning black in patches, and the smell of burning plastic is everywhere.

I fall into the snow. The smell of burning ghost skin makes me vomit. But there’s nothing in my stomach to throw up. So I cry during the breaks in the dry heaves.

So this is what the Thunder Calamity looks like.

The ghosts, their faces burned away, continue to cry and run and struggle in the snow. Their footprints criss-cross in the snow, like a child’s handwriting. I suddenly think of Xiao Qian, and so I start to run again.

Xian Qian is still sitting in the dark bedroom. She combs her hair as she sings. Her melody floats in the gaps between the roaring, rumbling thunder of the spiders, so quiet, so transparent, like a dreamscape under the moon.

From her body come the fragrances of myriad flowers and herbs, layer after layer, like gossamer. Her hair floats up into the air like a flame, fluttering without cease. I stand and listen to her sing, my face full of tears, until the whole house begins to shake.

From on top of the roof, I hear the sound of steel clanging, blunt objects striking against each other, heavy footsteps, and then Yan Chixia’s shouting.

Suddenly, the roof caves in, bringing with it a rain of shingles and letting in a bright patch of grey sky full of fluttering snowflakes. I push Xiao Qian into a dark corner, out of the way of the light.

I run outside the house. Yan Chixia is standing on the roof, holding his sword in front of him. The cold wind stretches his robe taut like a grey flag.

He jumps onto the back of a spider, and stabs at its eyes with his sword. The spider struggles hard and throws Yan off its back. Then the spider grabs Yan with two sharp claws and pulls him into its sharp, metallic, grinding mandibles. It chews and chews, like a man chewing kimchee, until pieces of Yan Chixia’s body are falling out of its mandibles onto the shingles of the roof. Finally, Yan’s head falls off the roof and rolls to a stop next to my feet, like a hard-boiled egg.

I pick up his head. He stares at me with his dead eyes. There are no tears in them, only anger and regret. Then with the last of his strength, Yan closes his eyes, as though he cannot bear to watch any more.

The spider continues to chew and grind up the rest of Yan Chixia’s body. Then it leaps down from the roof, and, rumbling, crawls towards me. Its eyes glow with a deep blue light.

Xiao Qian jumps from behind me and grabs me by the waist, pulling me back. I pry her hands off of me and push her back into the dark room. Then I pick up Yan Chixia’s sword and rush towards the spider.

The cold blue light of a steel claw flashes before my eyes. Then my head strikes the ground with a muffled thump. Blood spills everywhere.

The world is now tilted: tilted sky, tilted street, tilted snow falling diagonally. With every bit of my strength, I turn my eyes to follow the spider. I see that it’s chewing on my body. A stream of dark red fluid drips out of its beak, bubbling, warm, the droplets slowly spreading in the snow.

As the spider chews, it slows down gradually. Then it stops moving, the blue light in its eyes dim and then go out.

As though they have received some signal, all the other spiders also stop one by one. The rumbling thunder stops, plunging the world into silence.

The wind stops too. Snow begins to stick to the spiders’ steel bodies.

I want to laugh, but I can’t. My head is now separated from my body, so there’s no way to get air into the lungs and then out to my vocal cords. So I crack my lips open until the smile is frozen on my face.

The spiders believed that I was alive, a real person. They chewed my body and tasted flesh and saw blood. But they aren’t allowed to harm real people. If they do they must destroy themselves. That’s also part of the rules. Ghosts, spiders, it doesn’t matter. Everyone has to follow the rules.

I never imagined that the spiders would be so stupid. They’re even easier to fool than ghosts.

The scene in my eyes grows indistinct, fades, as though a veil is falling from the sky, covering my head. I remember the words of the crows. So it’s true. When your head is cut off, you really die.

I grew up on this street; I ran along this street. Now I’m finally going to die on this street, just like a real person.

A pair of pale, cold hands reaches over, stroking my face.

The wind blows and covers my face with a few pale pink peach petals. But I know they’re not peach petals. They’re Xiao Qian’s tears, mixed with snow.

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Ms. Xia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “The Representation of Women in Science Fiction Films.” Currently, she’s pursuing a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and World Culture at Peking University. She has been publishing science fiction and fantasy since 2004 in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Milky Way, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. Besides writing and translating science fiction stories, she also writes film scripts. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Ms Xia’s surname is listed first on this story.)

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

Helena Bell

2249 A.D.

All the young Kirks in Riverside Public High School are assigned to the same Homeroom class. They sit together in the back corner on the far side from the door. They speak only to each other.

The young Kirk on the Moon goes to school with no one. Each of the colonists has a job and he or she is responsible only to the duties of that job. The others call him Fisher instead of James since he spends his days knee deep in the trout pond, allowing the fish to glide between his legs. When the fish become completely inured to his presence, he thrusts his hands into the water and grasps one around the belly. It fights and Fisher holds on. He is supposed to take it out of the water, to throw it into the white bucket by the shore, but Fisher never does. He lets the fish go and when he comes home, with nothing to show for it, his mother expresses her irrevocable disappointment and sends him to bed.

Jamie

All the young Kirks in Riverside are in love with Jamie. She wears tight green skirts and impractical shoes. When she crosses and uncrosses her legs all the Kirks, even the girls, turn their heads ever so slightly to watch. Jamie does not have a boyfriend as none of the Kirks are so bold as to admit their feelings to another. Sometimes, when the teacher lectures on the sixth extinction and flashes slides of West African frogs and fungal diseases, Jamie slides the heel of her shoe off and lets it dangle from her toes. She enjoys being wanted, but sometimes imagines instead that she is a girl named Lucy who is allowed to love whomever she chooses without upsetting the balance.

Jamie Kirk has a plan. Every year they send the best and brightest students to the moon to join the colony. She hears there are animals there long dead on earth, and everyone is beautiful and kind and exotic. There will be no other Kirks there to demand she talk and act in a certain way. She will be free.

The moon colony is very selective, only one couple from Riverside has ever gone, but Jamie knows she alone of the Kirks will be selected as she is the best, the brightest, the most adored. The other Kirks will beg her to bring them too as her one true love and companion. They will fight amongst themselves to see which of them is the most worthy, and Captain, or perhaps Jimmy, or Tiberia of the surreptitious movements, will win. When she is about to consent, a gleaming stranger with skin brighter than fresh fallen snow will appear as there is always a twist in these kinds of dreams.

Jamie is in love with the Challenger. She has been in love with him/her since the first night she climbed to the top of her parents’ barn and saw him/her walking on the road leading away from the river. Jamie believes the Challenger must a creature of magic: the embodiment of hope and freedom and walks the roads alone because he/she is unafraid of the night time creatures, of the illnesses which travel on the air. Jamie suspects The Challenger is an alien, an unknown race who wanders the dark roads for someone worthy of his/her company. Jamie is worthy. Jamie is worthy of all.

But Jamie cannot tell any of the others about the stranger as they are all in love with her and she must pretend to not be in love with them all equally. To balance between the sharp edges of desire and duty to her companions is a very Kirk-like thing to do. And so she waits.

T

All the young Kirks ride their bicycles to the Wal-Mart parking lot after school. They draw straws to see which of them will go inside and attempt to buy a case of beer. Though he does not know how, T’s straw is always the shortest. Captain hands him a wad of sweaty, five dollar bills and wishes him luck. With a confidence which is not his own, T walks in and slams the beer and the money on the counter.

“Go home,” the cashier says.

“Please,” T says. “Just once.”

The cashier shakes his head.

When T comes out, empty handed, Captain sighs and goes in himself.

“You just have to know how to talk to them,” Captain says.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “It’s all in the attitude.”

Captain hands the cans out in order of his favorites. T is always last, and he always refuses to take it. “I don’t drink shit.”

Captain smiles. “Now I see. You’re choosing not to buy it each time. Making an executive decision, saving us from this foul tasting beverage.”

T shrugs. “Think what you want.”

T suspects that the cashier and Captain have a secret arrangement designed to humiliate T in front of Jamie and everyone else. He fears that one day Captain will kick him out of the group entirely unless he can find a way to be useful. One night, as they ride home, T tells Captain that there’s a tree on T’s property from which, with a telescope, one can see into Jamie’s bedroom window.

“I know,” Captain says. “You can see into Red’s too,” and with a grin, rides off.

Red

Red has a job at the local Wal-Mart. She is the only one of the Riverside Kirks to have dropped out of school and seek employment elsewhere. She saves every cent and one day will buy a steamboat ticket to anywhere out of Iowa. She does not care about the moon or space or destiny. She loves her family and cheers for the local team at football games, but there is a deep restlessness in her feet. Each night she wakes from her dreams to find herself knee deep in the English River with her nightgown and underclothes floating away downstream. She doesn’t tell anyone of her plan to escape, least of all her brother T who will see it as yet another rejection. She suspects her presence is the only thing which protects him from the other Kirks. One day they will discover his birthday is not March 22, but 2 minutes past. She does not know what will happen then, but does not trust the calculated laziness in Captain’s eyes, or the pounding of Jimmy’s fists, or Jamie’s nonchalance, or any of the others whose only concern is moving in perfect synchronization with what is expected of them.

It must be the thought of her brother, the need to protect him which wakes her before she can dive into the deep part of the river and float away forever.

Walking back on the long dirt road Red feels her skin tingling in the moonlight and she knows that any boy looking out from his window will think she is a white stag or changeling or star. She hopes he falls in love with her so one day, when she is gone from this place, there will be an idea of her that takes root and grows. Perhaps in this way enough of her spirit will remain behind to cocoon her brother. Perhaps when she is gone he will fill into some of her Kirkness, enough to belong. Enough that the others will not push him away.

Water is always the problem, Red thinks. It moves and carries where it will. Red caresses the open sores on her legs, and the infections taking root therein. She wishes her sleeping brain had the sense to put on waders before stepping out the door but knows that contagion is an inevitable condition. If not the river, then the rain, then the tap, then the bottled water they import from the Delta in exchange for organic crops. At Wal-Mart she prepares the sleeping lofts where the outlying farmers will come to live when the river floods. No one builds for permanence anymore and she marvels at the other Kirks insistence on pattern.

Every day her brother comes in attempting to buy beer. Every day he fails.

“Why,” she asks T.

“If I don’t, they’ll kick me out.”

“Why,” she later asks the cashier.

“Have you seen the crap floating around in one of those cans?”

“But Captain?”

“Little prick deserves whatever salmonella he catches.”

In the winter months, Red returns to school and sits with the other Kirks in the back corner but she is ever so slightly out of step. While the others gaze longingly at the mauve pump dangling inches away from Jamie’s instep, Red is leaning back to examine the topographic maps on the walls. The Mississippi stretches from floor to ceiling, its many tributaries and old beds undulating in multi-colored bands. The teacher watches her and after class guides her hand up one stream and down the other.

“This is where we lined it with concrete to save the port, this is where it jumped its banks. This is where we think it may go, and where we now try to guide it.”

His hand on her wrist and the inside of her arm is insistent and imploring. “You can’t control a river forever. It goes where it wants. Or goes where it does not want, just to spite you.”

Red pulls back, the backs of her legs tingling with flashes of hot then cold. In the bathroom she pulls up her pant leg and dabs at the cracked scabs. She considers telling the nurse, but there’s not much to be done. She will be dead by summer, like so many others before her.

During her evening shift, Red tells the cashier she’ll make out with him if he agrees to sell T the beer.

“Just once,” she adds.

The cashier shrugs. “You’re not my type, but if it means that much to you.”

T

T’s mother says names have power. They are invasive, like a white fungus, a vine, a jumping carp. Names can take hold, changing the host and adapting it to become the perfect carrier. Why name your son and daughter after an ordinary person: Martha, George, John, Abigail when you can name your children something which will inspire them to a greatness which is not their own, but could be?

T suspects his mother failed him by having twins. If names have power, then surely that power can be diluted. Not all the Kirks are equal. Jamie is the one with whom they are all in love. Captain is the one who can charm. James is particularly good with guns. Jimmy is the bully, but he is strong and fair when it comes to the other Kirks, most of the time. Tiberius and Tiberia are lithe as willow branches and quick as rabbits. Once they claimed to have seen a falcon swooping down upon the highway, and if anyone has eyes fast enough to catch an extinct bird, they do. Jimmy K and Kirkland don’t speak much, but when they do it is measured and wise. What weaknesses he has identified in himself, T sees converted into strengths in others. They are like wandering palms in some ancient forest, constantly moving into the light. He alone feels himself slowly falling down. What space he used to occupy shall be trod over by many soft, green leaved feet.

One afternoon Captain hands T the cash and slaps him on the back. “This time, try not to fail.”

When he walks in the cashier heads him off. “Compliments of your sister,” he says and hands T a bottle of whiskey.

T is convinced that this is yet another ploy to humiliate him though he does not know how except for the suspicion that everything in his life is a mere contrivance to expose his weaknesses. When he reaches the group, Captain holds out his hand for the bottle but T ignores him. He opens it and hands it to Jimmy. It goes around and around, until finally someone hands it back to T, empty.

T shrugs. “Hasn’t tasted right since Scotland went under anyway.”

“How the fuck would you know?” someone says.

T doesn’t answer, but looks up at the sky. The sun has gone down and they all shiver in the cooling air. It will be difficult riding back in the dark, with loose stones and jostling cyclists on the road. One of them could take him out, if they perceived him as a threat or a mere annoyance. Jimmy might take him out just ’cause. For once the thought doesn’t scare him and he realizes that knowing death is certain and not caring is his first Kirk-like thought. Maybe the clock at the hospital was wrong; maybe his mother was right.

“Same way he knows everything,” Captain says. “He pretends. He thinks he’s better, different, special. But he’s not. He’s just the same as any one of us.”

T smiles back. “Think what you want,” he says.

No one attacks him on the way home, but T knows it is only a matter of time. None of them are safe; they are not a team and were never meant to be.

Jamie

The colony will select new immigrants any day now. Applications have been submitted: education, skills, physical exams. Jamie waits and waits while fending off the advances of the other Kirks.

“We will fly to the moon, you and I,” Captain says. “They let you take a companion, and I will always choose you.”

Weeks go by, months. Rumors spread that an illness has delayed the selection process and the most likely candidates will have advanced degrees in human physiology and evolutionary biology. Jamie doesn’t worry as she knows she is the perfect example of youth and health and they will want her for these attributes alone.

When the spring floods begin most of the Kirks begin to pair off: Kirkland comforts T after his sister’s funeral and rather than calling her a slut, the other girls begin turning to her for advice. When Jamie shifts her legs in class, fewer and fewer Kirks turn their heads. Jamie’s skirts become shorter and shorter until eventually the teacher pulls her aside and gives her a sweatshirt to tie around her waist.

“The noise your flesh makes when it sticks to the seat is distracting. This will help.”

Jamie pouts and twirls her hair in her fingers. “Is that the only thing about it which is distracting?”

“Yes. Now go sit down.”

Jamie believes when the floods recede everything will go back to normal. But it doesn’t. Even her white skinned alien has abandoned her, and no longer walks along the road by her house. She begins to doubt she ever saw him/her at all.

Only Captain favors Jamie openly and she pretends to favor him back to spite the others. She lets his hand wander up her leg and kisses him when the others are looking. She tells herself she is only salvaging her plan when she allows him to undress her in the dark. She is only recapturing her essence when he moves against her. But she feels nothing when he murmurs that their souls are mere whispers in the dark. She is robotic in her movements and she feels Captain, the other Kirks, the alien, her entire world slipping away from her. When they finish, Jamie goes back to the roof hoping that now she has sacrificed some small part of herself, perhaps the alien will come back. But instead there is only silence and the moon gleaming on the empty gravel.

Fisher

Everyone in the colony is slowly dying, save Fisher. He suspects his immunity is a sign of his guilt. He is the new typhoid Mary: asymptomatic and always suspiciously present. He eats only nutrition capsules and does not handle the food or animals. He walks while covered in latex gloves, hazmat suits and sanitizes constantly. If the others blame him, they do not let on and instead insist that he learn how to operate the colony in their inevitable absence.

No new immigrants will come, not until the disease is quarantined and eradicated. The computers and robots and Fisher will need to carry on, long enough to stave off the extinction. When each colonist dies, the others strip the body and place it outside the clear walls of the compound. No one is buried or incinerated. Rather, a pile of dehydrated corpses piles up in view of the corn fields where the wild deer graze. No single human matters, only the responsibility to the birds, amphibians, lizards and mammals which were saved and transplanted.

“We never intended to stay, you know,” Fisher’s mother tells him. “We just thought… a foothold. Something to get us started.”

Fisher knows that one day all the colonists save him will be dead and he will be consigned to carrying on alone. Earth will send him one companion each year and he will fall in love with him or her each time but he or she will die and another one sent. He will have to be brave enough each time, hoping that this one is different.

He reaches into the water and lets the fish glide by. If one looks long enough, one can see a pattern in any movement but it does not mean you can change it. Still, he believes one day someone will arrive who is strong enough to adapt to the path on which he or she finds herself. One day someone will open the shuttle bay door and be the person with whom Kirk can settle down and live a long, fruitful life.

About the Author

Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and is pursuing a Tax LLM in order to fulfill her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared in Brain Harvest, Daily Science Fiction, and Rattle.

From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

Matthew Johnson

Food is one of our most basic desires. It’s the first thing we ask for after being born, the fuel for our work and our reward at the end of a long day. Because of this, it’s been an integral element of storytelling since Eve ate the apple, and science fiction and fantasy are no exception. It’s true that food has had a lower profile in the fantastic genres than in literature as a whole — but while it’s rarely the star of the show, food frequently plays an essential role.

Perhaps the most common use of food in SF and fantasy is to ground a work. Taste is our most intimate sense, the only one that we experience by taking things into our bodies. For this reason, food imagery can make the most outlandish setting more real and immediate by tying it to familiar sensations. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, had his characters eat essentially the same foods he enjoyed, and there is a strong connection drawn in his The Fellowship of the Rings between food and home: the last scene set in the Shire is a dinner with Farmer Maggot, whose famous mushrooms Frodo was beaten for stealing many years before. The basket of those mushrooms that the hobbits are gifted with serves as a reminder of what they are leaving behind. It is the homeliness of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit — in which Bilbo’s first challenge is to cook breakfast for thirteen hungry, fussy dwarves — that helped set those books apart from Tolkien’s earlier work and contributed to their accessibility and timelessness.

The association of food and home is a natural one. Our notions of home are made up largely of the flavors and smells of what we cook and eat. This applies on the level of a family — most of us have experienced the mild culture shock of visiting a house that uses margarine when we are used to butter, or white bread instead of brown — but it is even more powerful in defining a whole culture. It’s the smells of different foods — say, of certain spices or kinds of meat — that can sometimes cause friction when peoples from different cultures are forced to share space.

SF and fantasy writers take advantage of this phenomenon when they use food to establish distance rather than familiarity, as George R. R. Martin does in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. While the largely authentic medieval cooking he describes is not strange enough to make his setting feel entirely alien, it communicates a powerful sense that the novels’ world is different from ours — partly by featuring foods that have fallen out of favor, such as lamprey pie (see the excellent Inn at the Crossroads blog for recipes and more information on the use of pies in Martin’s series), but also by highlighting the regional and seasonal differences in food. As Waldo Jaquith points out in his essay “On the Impracticality of a Cheeseburger,” the biggest gap between the present and the past is not what we eat but when we eat it. Until the development of railroads, canning, and refrigeration, along with the complex financial infrastructure that makes it profitable to ship and store food around the world, only a tiny number of foods could be eaten out of season. As a result, our ancestors’ meals were deeply rooted to the time of year in a way that we can hardly imagine.

Using food in this way, to highlight cultural differences rather than similarities, is a common SF trope. Works of SF nearly always include some token examples of foods that are exotic on a surface level — an obvious one being the blue milk in Star Wars — but this technique may also be used in a more thorough way to make aliens seem more alien. In particular, aliens’ eating habits are often shown as being disgusting to humans. For example, Klingon food in Star Trek is generally used as a challenge or an obstacle to the humans who must eat it: Our first introduction to Klingon cuisine on Star Trek: The Next Generation comes when Commander Riker eats a Klingon meal, to the open disgust of his colleagues, in order to accustom himself to it before serving as an exchange officer on a Klingon ship. The archetypal Klingon food — a living (and still moving) worm called gagh — is an example of a classic cultural slander: To accuse others of eating their food raw is to claim that they either have not developed or worse have rejected the use of fire for cooking — making them so savage as to be barely above the level of animals.

Historically, the only food-related slander worse than saying that people didn’t cook their food was to accuse them of eating the wrong things entirely — like other people. An example in fantasy is Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose eating habits — implied by his name, which is a near-anagram of “cannibal” — justify Prospero’s conquest of the island and Caliban’s enslavement. The ingestion of human tissue is, of course, a frequent activity of certain monsters, most notably vampires and zombies. In both cases the bite may transform the victim as well, a common feature of cannibalistic monsters. The Wendigo, according to the Algonquian peoples, was most often a malevolent spirit, but it could also be a person transformed by eating human flesh. In SF, humans are more likely to be victims of human-eating aliens — as in (spoiler alert) the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” — than to be cannibals themselves.

There are exceptions to this rule, though, one of the most famous being the film Soylent Green. Although Harry Harrison complained about the changes made to the source material for Soylent Green — his novel Make Room! Make Room!, which did not contain any references to cannibalism or even the phrase “soylent green” — those changes give the movie a deeper currency than the novel. By juxtaposing heavily processed food with cannibalism, Soylent Green’s very title has become a shorthand for the way in which our industrial food system, thanks to which we may go our entire lives eating food that has been picked, processed, cooked, and packaged out of our sight, distances us from our moral responsibility toward what we eat — leaving open the possibility that what we eat could be soylent green without our knowing it.

Like the Wendigo’s cannibalism, the invention of soylent green is caused by famine. This illustrates another way in which SF uses food: to speculate about scarcity and abundance. One of the building blocks of SF is the question, “What happens if this goes on?” — and many writers have explored the idea that developments in technology, society, or demographics might lead us to either critical shortages of food or to a future where those shortages are a thing of the past. Both visions exist side by side in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Musing on the increasing economic disparity of his day, Wells describes a life of ultimate leisure for the indolent, upper-class Eloi. While all their physical needs are tended to, however, the Eloi themselves end life as food for the subhuman Morlocks — a situation Wells likely imagined as both an echo and a reversal of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which satirically suggested that Ireland’s potato famine could be solved if the Irish were only willing to eat their own children.

Genuinely endless food supplies are not often found in SF, and when they do they are rarely the central idea of the story. Rather they are devices that keep the writer from having to deal with food as an issue, such as the food dispensers in Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld and the replicators in Star Trek. Nevertheless, food pills and machines have become fixed in the general public’s mind as one of the key elements of SF. Rather than being created by SF writers, though, the idea of the food pill more likely arose from nutritionists of the 19th century, who attempted to solve hunger by boiling down food (in some cases literally) to its supposedly essential elements. The fact that those who embarked on these diets often became worse off eventually led to the discovery of vitamins. Ironically, the isolation of vitamins in pill form encouraged a widespread belief that a complete food pill was on its way, whereas the truth was that people needed vitamins to supplement the heavily processed and barely nutritious “food pills” they were already eating.

For most contemporary readers, especially those in more developed areas of the world such as North America, the notion of a food shortage is so distant that fantasies of abundance have little power. What has taken their place is the imagining of food that is not just free but guilt-free — such as meat that can be eaten without killing animals. This, too, may be played straight or satirically, but it is the satirical examples that have endured. For instance: the vat-grown meat found in Ferderik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants and William Gibson’s Neuromancer; the Chickie Nobs in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, genetically engineered to have no heads and therefore feel no pain; and of course the sentient Meat served in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which introduces itself to diners and, in an effort to soothe their consciences, tries to reassure them by insisting, “I’ll be very humane.”

One place the fantasy of an endless food supply is still alive is children’s fiction. Food is a major part of the power dynamic between adults and children, who learn early that the pleasures of dessert only come after the sacrifice of eating vegetables. This dynamic is reproduced in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, where the impoverished Districts make do with fish and greens stew (and, no doubt, broccoli and Brussels sprouts) while the rulers in the Capitol enjoy such exotic treats as a purple-fleshed melon. With a few exceptions (such as foie gras, surely chosen for its associations with gluttony and cruelty), nearly all of the foods associated with the Capitol are sweets: melon, pancakes, marmalade, and orange juice — as close to candy as is possible in the world of the series. Because it is controlled, withheld, and only occasionally doled out by adults, candy is a natural focus for children’s fantasies. When British author Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964, many readers had vivid memories of wartime shortages (the rationing of candy had only ended in England in 1953), making the image of endless chocolate extra appealing. But the novel’s fantasy goes beyond mere abundance: It also imagines that all the restrictions adults place on eating candy may be removed by such magical treats as caramels that fill the dental cavities they create.

The most lasting images from Dahl’s book (and its film versions) are not the visions of plenty, however, but those of transformation — such as Violet Beauregarde’s metamorphosis into a giant blueberry as a result of chewing experimental gum. The notion that food can change us has a long history; as the adage has it, “You are what you eat.” In some cases this means that food acts essentially as a drug. To the cyborgs in Kage Baker’s Company series, chocolate is literally a drug, intoxicating them as alcohol does normal humans. More often, though, food is seen as having a medicinal effect — a common feature of many medical beliefs, such as the medieval theory of humors and the central tenet of the health-food movements of the last two centuries. Soylent green is in part a satire of health food; so, too, is the deadly yogurt in the movie The Stuff, which is also a critique of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality that has produced low-fat versions of ice cream and mayonnaise.

In fantasy, the transformative effects of food tend to run deeper, altering the soul as well as the body. Lembas, the Elven bread in The Lord of the Rings, resembles a food pill in its physical effects, but it is also shown as lightening the souls of good people while being inedible to evil creatures such as Gollum. Underlining its healing power, Tolkien also refers to lembas as waybread — the Anglo-Saxon name for plantain leaf, an herb whose healing and protective powers were so revered that it was numbered among Woden’s Nine Herbs in the medieval English tradition. Food can also be the cause of a negative transformation, and in some cases may change a character’s identity entirely: In some Norse sources, Loki turns from mischievous to truly evil only after eating the heart of a witch. Similarly, visitors to fairyland are typically warned to avoid eating any food there, or else they will be forced to lose their humanity and remain forever — as the Greek goddess Persephone was bound to remain in the underworld for half of every year after eating six pomegranate seeds.

While Loki brought his transformation on himself, Persephone was tricked by someone she should have been able to trust — her host Hades, the god of the dead. For the ancient Greeks, xenia — the responsibility of a host to a guest (and vice versa) — was one of the highest values. The relationship between guest and host is symbolized by food. To break bread with someone is to accept them as a guest, essentially considering them a part of the family for the length of their stay. Because of this, meals are often used in fiction to bring antagonists together in a situation where their conflict must be restrained; think of all the dinners Dracula has served his guests over the years. But they may also serve as symbols of reconciliation or restoration, as the meals served at Beorn’s and Elrond’s houses in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings do, or of a restoration of the natural order. An example of the latter is the ending of every one of René Goscinny’s Asterix stories, where Asterix’s Gaulish village joins together in a feast that shows all is once more right with the world.

The ultimate expression of the idea of feast-as-reconciliation is a wedding, in which two unrelated groups are permanently joined; this is why comedies traditionally end with weddings. The symbolic power of weddings makes it doubly powerful when those attending betray the ethic of xenia, as in the Red Wedding in Martin’s A Storm of Swords. (The link between food and xenia here is underlined by Robb Stark’s request to be fed just bread and salt, which symbolize the host’s duty to his guest in the world of the series.) A similar use of xenia in play is the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando Calrissian ushers the heroes to dinner with Darth Vader. This serves as a dramatic betrayal of xenia, as Calrissian is violating his duty to his guests. Placing Vader at the head of the table makes the scene a parody of xenia as well, by having a host who presumably cannot eat.

To the Greeks, the greatest offender against xenia was Tantalus, who failed as both guest and host. After stealing ambrosia from the gods’ table, he served them his own son for dinner. For this he was punished by being made to stand in a pool of water that drained whenever he tried to drink it, near a fruit tree whose branches pulled away whenever he tried to pick from it — which gave rise to the English word tantalized, something which may happen to you when you read about some of the meals described in SF and fantasy.

About the Author

Matthew Johnson lives in Ottawa with his wife Megan and their sons Leo and Miles, where he works as a media educator and writes fantasy and SF when time and circumstances permit. His novel Fall From Earth was published in 2009, and his short fiction, which has appeared in places such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, will be collected in 2013 in Irregular Verbs from Chizine Publications. Many of his stories involve food in some way, in particular “Long Pig,” which may be the only fantasy story ever written in the form of a restaurant review.

Everything’s Surprising: A Conversation with Lev AC Rosen

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen, Violet Adams doesn’t necessarily want to be a man, but she does want to attend the prestigious, all-male Illyria College. Denied what she desires by social convention, she does what Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the male leads in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest do: she changes her external identity in order to get what she wants.

In the process, Violet learns about herself, the society she lives in, and the way that society attempts to define her. At its heart, you see, All Men of Genius is a book about identity.

“Identity,” said Rosen, “how it’s formed, what it means, how it shifts and how we feel about the labels put on us. It’s also about invention — of identity, of course, but also of art and science and what it means for us, as people to create. Yeah, that sounds crazy-pretentious enough, I think.”

As you can imagine, there is nothing simple about Violet — her character or her situation — and there lies the beautiful heart of this book: the lead character.

“The truth would come out sooner or later,” Rosen writes early in the novel, “[Violet] just needed to make sure it was later, after she had made her genius so clear that the world could no longer scorn or punish her for what lay between her legs.”

Rosen captures Victorian England and academia with elegance, with plenty of stained glass, gears, and arched ceilings; mistaken identity, alter egos, and love triangles; human ambivalence, murderous automata, and mad science.

Through all this dances Violet and a charming ensemble of characters. And they, like Rosen, dance with great elan, plenty of gracefulness with just enough reckless abandon to keep each other and readers off-balance. The truth, the novel promises, will come out sooner or later.

Below, Rosen and I talk about style, gender roles, and the joy of writing about a large ensemble cast and the ways they are shaped by their world.

How would you describe your style?

This is hard one. I like to say every book writes itself. In All Men of Genius, I very consciously imitated a Victorian Style while still trying to stay true to my own voice and keeping it accessible to a modern audience. And I also tried to stay true (or at least lovingly pay homage to) the voices of Shakespeare and Wilde (although I also lovingly mocked their voices in the form of two rabbits, but that’s another story…).

But now, I’m working on a noir, and I’m trying to stay true to that hardboiled, pulpy noir style/voice. It’s extremely different from All Men of Genius, because the story is so different that the style is has to be told in has to be different, too. The story tells itself, and shapes its own style. That said, I like to think that I have some sort of style and it is present in everything I write. But if you asked me to pin down what that was, I don’t know if I’d be able to. I think someone else is going to have to come along and say what the Lev AC Rosen Style is.

Where did you start with All Men of Genius? What came first — image, character, situation, something else all together?

An image of the wall of gears in Illyria. I’m a big fan of the aesthetic of gears, though I couldn’t say why. But I especially love them en masse, huge clanking arrays of them, and when I first set out to write something Steampunk, this image of a wall of rotating gears was the first thing that came to mind. It was almost like a church in my mind, with spots where the gears parted for stained glass, and huge arched ceilings. I think that image pretty much stayed the same in the book.

What is the secret to writing such beautiful descriptions?

Ha. Thank you for saying that the descriptions are beautiful. As for how to write them, I think you have to find those images beautiful first and just keep writing and rewriting them until you feel like you’ve done as best credit as you can to what’s in your head. Not everyone is going to think they’re beautiful — the key is that you think they’re beautiful.

How closely does the book follow Twelfth Night?

Well, the inclusion of The Importance of Being Earnest as another inspiration does create some deviations — though not very many, as both plays have similar themes. There’s cross-dressing, though this time to prove something, as opposed to doing it for a job, and there’s a love triangle, of course… it’s difficult to answer this one without spoiling the book, since the changes I made primarily effect the ending. But there are more characters, and the more minor characters from Twelfth Night get more screen time, as it were. Sorry, I don’t think I’m answering this one very well — I really don’t want to give too much away.

Is there a moment in the book that stands out for you?

A moment? I love the parts where Miriam stands in the rain. Miriam was inspired by Mary, from Twelfth Night, but I decided to really expand her character because I wanted to explore women’s roles in Victorian London — not just the upper classes, but the lower classes and outsiders as well. Miriam is a Persian Jew, so she’s visibly “other” and culturally “other” and I really enjoyed writing her and her place in society.

Miriam’s scenes in the rain started out as my wanting to make sure there was some reference to the Wind and the Rain song that Feste sings in Twelfth Night, but when I did some research on Jews in mid-19th-century Persia, I came across an actual, historical law that forbade Jews from going out in the rain. Which, of course is terrible, but it opened up a lot for me to do with Miriam. So I loved writing these rain scenes for Miriam, because the mere act of her being outside in the rain is this act of intense rebellion and freedom. Which is what a lot of Miriam’s character is about.

I’m also really proud of the tiny things that people might not notice — little links between smaller characters, like which professor is sleeping with which other professor’s mother, and who Fiona’s first client was when she was a prostitute. I love little links like that.

What makes for a compelling protagonist in general and in a speculative fiction in particular? Can you talk a little about creating Violet or another character?

I don’t know if there’s a good answer to that question, because not all characters are compelling to all people. I know readers who refuse to read anything with female or queer protagonists, because as straight men, they feel they just can’t relate to anyone else who isn’t a straight man. This might be more a limited mindset, but it’s an extreme example of the idea that not all characters appeal to all people. That said, I think what’s important is making sure your characters are complete, and well-rounded. That means that while Ashton is a bit of a flamboyant dandy gay-man-stereotype, I tried to make him more than that — he worries about his sister, keeps things from his family, he has contradictory motivations and doesn’t always know why he feels a certain way — that’s human. Were he just a flouncing stereotype, or merely had a nod to humanity by giving him some secret sadness that pops out for one scene, he would be doing a great disservice to the reader.

In the case of Violet, it would have been easy to fall into the super-girl trap, where she had no flaws and way amazing in every way and never doubted herself, etc. etc. etc. But doubt makes a person real. Flaws make people real. Violet is flawed — she’s massively overconfident, judges people fairly quickly, and often times doesn’t really know what she’s feeling because she’s so focused on her inventions. But she’s also amazing. I love her because of her flaws, not in spite of them, and I think that’s how you make characters that people really love — no matter the genre — by making them human.

What does having a character disguise her gender allow you to do?

It lets you talk openly about gender. “Oh you do things this way” and such. Essentially, for those of us who are cisgendered, we grow up conditioned and socialized a certain way based on our sex (even your super-liberal hippie families can’t keep a child from seeing the pink and blue differentiations at some point. I mean, maybe if they were raised in a cult-situation, cut off from the rest of the world… but I digress). When you have a character who switches the outward appearance of her sex (I won’t speak to writing a trans-character, I think that’s probably very different as it’s about physically changing into what the character already is on the inside), you get to examine that socialization from the point of view of someone outside that socialization. So, things that are taken for granted about the way a man behaves might be questioned by a woman disguised as a man.

I think about that Simpsons episode a lot. The one where the school gets divided up by gender, and Lisa disguises herself as a man to joins the boys section. She does this because in the girls side she finds the math to be nonsense and soft (”what does a four feel like?”), so the implication is that she thinks “like a man” (although the episode is simultaneously mocking the idea that genders think specific ways) — but she doesn’t know how to “act like a man.” I think having a character disguised as the opposite gender is great, because you get to explore the performativity of gender. It’s not about how people think or look or any of that — it’s how they behave without thinking. Which is fascinating stuff.

What spin have you put on this classic situation?

I think the academic setting is a new one — so often you see women disguised as men to go to war, or travel alone, but it’s not usually a “for academic achievement” scenario. But also I really tried to explore not just what it means to dress up as a dude in Victorian London, but what it means to be a woman — how does Cecily, who gets to go to the school as a woman, compare to Violet, in terms of how they think about their situations. And what about Miriam, who is there, but not as a student? Or Fiona, who is completely outside it? I tried to really deconstruct so much of what gender meant back then. How’s that for a tedious, academic answer?

Did it ever get hard juggling such a large ensemble of characters?

I love large ensembles. They’re not hard for me to keep track of because every character is totally human in my mind — what’s hard is cutting. Just because I know a thousand different things about each character and wrote more detailed backstories and scenes doesn’t mean they belong in the book. But when I cut parts of their story, it feels like I’m hurting friends. But you have to do it. Not every piece of information is relevant. Fiona, especially, got a lot of her scenes and story cut, and I had to fight my agent to keep what is there. She was almost totally done away with. But I think she’s important because she’s the only really lower-class woman in the book. She’s the one who has to fight to survive and do whatever she can, no matter how mercenary it might seem, and she’s the one who can call Violet on her BS, and also the one Violet turns to when she wants to know what behaving like a woman should look like (which gets us back to gender performance).

But back to your question — like I said, I had to cut a lot. That’s the hardest part of writing a large cast. To give you an idea, the book was over 100 pages longer before we gave it to my publisher. That’s over 100 pages I essentially cut from my characters lives. But the cuts had to be made. Otherwise there’d be a 30 page stall in the middle of the action to talk about Bracknell’s childhood. And while that might be interesting, it isn’t necessary for the book.

That said, I also know reading a large ensemble can be hard for some folks. But I wasn’t trying to write a big action adventure here. I was trying to write something about people in a place and time and how they are shaped by the world and shape it in return. This goes back to your question about style: Were I trying to write a fast-paced gunslinger, there wouldn’t have been a large ensemble to begin with. The book writes itself and it creates exactly the right amount of characters.

Did the cast and crew ever get out of hand in the writing of this? Did they surprise you?

I’m not a writer who “shows up to the page” and sits in front of a blank screen waiting for the next word to come. I respect that technique but it doesn’t work for me. I’m a lie-in-bed-staring-at-the-ceiling-thinking writer. I don’t sit down at the computer until I know the next scene I’m going to write and then it flows out very quickly. I go back and fiddle with language as I’m writing it, of course, but overall, when I sit down at the keyboard, I know what’s going to happen. So the characters never surprise me as I’m writing. Sometimes, when I’m doing the thinking part, one of them will suddenly smack me upside the head with what should have been an obvious choice, but when you’re just lying there thinking the characters and story have such free reign that there are no surprises, because everything is a surprise.

What’s next for you? You mentioned writing a noir novel. Can you talk a little more about that?

I only just finished a rough draft, and it needs some serious work before I even show it to my agent, but it’s a futuristic noir, a sort of Bladerunner with climate change sort of thing. The central character is a detective named Simone Pierce, and she gets caught up in what first appears to be a cheating husband case, then an art heist, but in the end is something stranger than all that. Again, I’m playing with gender a bit as I am familiar with noir themes and archetypes and I’ve switched around the genders while trying to keep the old-school noir feel alive. So we have a female detective with men constantly fawning over her, and a possible homme fatale, plus a female nemesis and a female partner-figure. So it’s classical noir, but with science fiction and with plenty of gender bending, which changes how the classical noir elements come across.

My agent and I are also hoping to try to sell my first novel, which is a magical realism-y novel about seven interconnected people in NYC who don’t realize how connected they are. I’m also working on a YA and I have a rough draft of a sequel to All Men of Genius finished. But I put it aside for a while because I was feeling a little steampunked-out. I should be going back to it soon, though.

Oh, and the German version of All Men of Genius comes out in the spring. I don’t speak German, but I’m looking forward to seeing the book in German. It’s being translated by someone named Hanne Hammer, which is possibly one of the best names ever.

Wait, did you say a sequel? To All Men of Genius? What’s it about?

I did! It takes place two years later and opens with Jack and Cecily’s wedding, which is interrupted by the sudden appearance of Cecily’s long-lost father, who says he’s promised her hand to the prince of Lemuria and promptly kidnaps her. Jack and his friends, of course, then begin a search for Illyria so they can rescue her. The book focuses more on Jack and Cecily, but it also shows how Illyria has changed in the past few years, since Violet’s plan, and also how Violet and Earnest have adjusted to married life — Violet, after all, is a Duchess now, and the standards of gender conformity are much higher than they were when she lived at home and had only Mrs. Wilks to deal with. Now she has all of society to deal with, and she’s too famous to just go out in drag again.

This one is inspired by An Ideal Husband and The Tempest, and I’ll be frank, I sometimes wonder if The Tempest, being a problem play, was the best choice. It’s leaning more adventure-y than comedy of errors-ish. It’s also somewhat darker. A character from the first book dies, in fact (at least in the current draft). But as I said, it’s only a rough draft. It needs a lot of work before we show it to my editor and ask her to give me money for it.

Any parting words?

Is it appropriate to say “buy my book” here? Like ninety times in a row? No? Ah, well. But I will say that people can visit my webpage, LevACRosen.com for the usual blogging, news and such, but also for reading group questions, and this amazing lockpicking game my friend Sam made, which unlocks passwords to deleted scenes from the book. It’s also unnervingly addictive.

And thank you, Jeremy. This was a really fun interview.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In Bluegrass Symphony, Lisa L. Hannett writes of a place that is, perhaps, somewhere (or nowhere) in the rural United States — a place that is inspired, in equal parts, by the American South and Medieval Icelandic literature.

“Lisa Hannett weaves words the way the Norns weave fates, elegantly, seamlessly and with just a little bit of cruelty,” said Angela Slatter, author of Sourdough and Other Stories. “Her stories are astonishing in their scope, so strange and yet familiar. Her ability to insert the unlikely and the terrifying into the everyday with such a convincing touch that you have no problem believing in Swan Girls, Minotaur rodeos, soul cigars and twig-wives, is simply stunning.”

Raised in Ottawa, Canada, Hannett now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, a coastal city much like Charleston, SC on a very weird day. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. She is a graduate of Clarion South.

There is a relentless musicality to Hannett’s prose and fierceness to her vision. Beware of her beautiful song.

“L.L. Hannett’s work has the uncanny ability to get under your skin,” said Ann VanderMeer. “Her stories are so comfortable and familiar until they turn on you in the best possible way. Never a boring minute, her fiction is fiercely original and imaginative.”

Below, Hannett and I talk about style, the short form, and “the human side of even the nastiest creatures.”

Why the short form? What is it that you love about the short story?

Initially, I started writing short stories because I was also working on my PhD, which is a long and often tedious process. I wanted to write something brief, immediate, with a clear end in sight. Also, I had loads of ideas for stories, and no matter how much I tried to ignore them, more kept cropping up. I’d be reading all sorts of dry academic articles or translating passages from the Icelandic sagas while my back-brain was jumping up and down, shouting “There’s a crow stuck in a mechanical carnival! What’re you going to do about it?” or “She’s got to sing while eating corpses! How’s she going to do that without a voice?” Things like that are hard to ignore.

I grew to love short stories not just because they were convenient to write, but because they are beautiful capsules of narrative. They are complete without revealing everything. They evoke rather than explain at length. They make us wish they were longer, even though we know that stretching them out to novel length would break them, make them somehow less magical. I love that in short stories things can happen quickly — but since they’re so brief, they can also get away with having nothing happen at all. They can be vignettes, or philosophical musings, and still be satisfying. Take Kij Johnson’s “Spar”: very little happens, plot-wise, but simultaneously so much is going on in this story that we want to re-read it almost before we’ve reached the final paragraph. I love writing short stories because it’s possible to hold the whole narrative in your head, from beginning to end, and know all the twists and turns and nuances — not so with a novel (at least not for me, anyway). A novel unfolds. A novel has to be teased out. A novel needs time. But a short story is complex but compact. And it can offer more instant gratification.

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

A few years ago at Clarion, I was chatting with Sean Williams about this very subject and he described the function of a short story in a way I’ll never forget. He said to imagine the short story as one facet in a diamond. In one story, you can explore that facet completely, and through it you can describe glints and corners of the other planes — but you can’t draw them fully into your piece. Novels are long and big enough to accommodate the whole diamond, but stories are more effective if they are confined to one aspect. It’s basically another take on Poe’s “Single Effect” theory, but presented in a prettier package.

As I mentioned before, I think short stories should evoke ideas beyond the single effect without actually exploring them. Readers should get the feeling that they’ve been in a three-dimensional world with a complete history and realistic characters, but without having to sift through superfluous detail to get that feeling — the kind of extra information that would be fine, expected even, in a novel. In short stories, no word should be wasted. They should be trimmed and trimmed and trimmed again until all that is left is what is essential to the narrative.

What is style and how would you describe yours?

The way I see it, style is inherent in narrative structure, tone, and voice. Style should reinforce the story’s world and its inhabitants; in other words, it should give readers extra insight into how the setting and characters function. It should highlight the story’s themes, manipulate the pace, and help to convey the concepts driving the piece. For instance, if we were presented with a story about people in exile, disconnected from their homeworld, floating about lost in space, I’d hope the style would echo and emphasize their plight: sentences would be short, choppy, disconnected, not flowing lyrical rambles. Or if you were writing a story in which the protagonist is insane, you might want the structure of your piece to be off-kilter. You might leave chunks of information out so that the reader feels a bit nuts too — that sort of thing. In this respect, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch offers readers one of the most satisfying blends of style and content published in recent years.

My style changes from piece to piece. I like to set myself challenges, to write from different perspectives, with various voices, drawing on or breaking conventions. I’ve recently written a Regency fairy story in which the language and long sentences are part of the point. “Gutted” (Shimmer) and “The Good Window” (Fantasy) deal with gruesome and harrying subjects, so I’ve kept the style simple. By contrast, the stories in Bluegrass Symphony are, for the most part, about rednecks and hillbillies who live in the Middle of Nowhere, U.S.A. Many of these people have a twang in their voices. They have little to no education, their society is deprived (and depraved), superstitious and sometimes downright nasty. And yet… Publisher’s Weekly describes the style of these stories as “filled with lush imagery, unsettling concepts, indirect prose, and multilayered plots” and I think this description is spot-on. Just because these people are poor, uneducated farmers doesn’t mean they’re simple, less emotionally complex, less capable of being beautiful, or less pathetic and hopeful than people with money and cars and city lives. I wanted the style of the stories in Bluegrass Symphony to reflect this complexity — to contrast with the Deliverance stereotype that often comes to mind when we think of isolated, close-knit rural towns.

What has Medieval Icelandic literature taught you about life, love, and writing?

A famous Icelandic scholar once said that all of the medieval Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur) could be summarized in four words: “Farmers came to blows.” This might seem overly simplistic for such a rich and broad body of literature, but the more you read these sagas, the more you realize what an insightful comment this is. Saga characters are perhaps most famous for their stereotypical “Viking” characteristics — pillaging and plundering, sailing, adventuring, fighting — just as stereotypical “hillbillies” are often portrayed as banjo-plucking, inbred, narrow-minded, toothless hicks. In both cases, we are poorer, as readers and writers, if we stop at these generalized, superficial descriptions. One of the most beautiful things about the Icelandic works is that, stylistically, they are quite straightforward. However, they use Spartan sentences to convey multiple symbolic meanings. These are masterpieces in restraint; universally, the Íslendingasögur use words economically to express extremely complex ideas. They are riddled with black humor, veiled threats, incredible intelligence and, in most cases, passion.

These Icelandic characters are far from the mindless horned-helmet-wearing brutes we often see cast in “Viking” roles. There certainly is violence, and this violence is driven by honor — but this isn’t some comic book trope. Honor in Iceland entails much more than some incontrovertible, ephemeral notion of “duty” to one’s “chief”. Honor is bound up with emotion and love. It’s about avoiding embarrassment; proving your worth as a lover; proving yourself to your parents; proving yourself as a human being who warrants remembering.

Spending six years analyzing the Íslendingasögur has affected my fiction writing not so much stylistically as in terms of characterization. I can’t help but look for the human side of even the nastiest creatures. I also can’t help but couch beautiful elements in fraught or horrific contexts.

Where does a short story usually start for you — image, turn of phrase, character, situation, something else altogether?

All of the above, really, but if I had to narrow it down I’d say it’s mostly the first two. I am a visual person: my first degree was in Fine Arts (painting and photography) so a lot of my ideas come to me as disconnected pictures or tableaux in my mind before they translate into words. “Carousel,” the first story in Bluegrass Symphony, first appeared as an image of a girl in a birdcage, surrounded by moths. I could see “Down the Hollow” — the snow, the ravine, the girl, Jesse’s face — before I started writing the piece itself. “Forever, Miss Tapekwa County” started off as a visual, too: a tadpole in a round gelatinous egg. “Depot to Depot” practically wrote itself after I saw a news clip showing a horrendous car crash. But a lot of the time, a phrase will trigger the tale. The title of “From the Teeth of Strange Children” was what bred the narrative — actually, I have a notebook filled with titles that don’t yet have stories attached. If I’m not sure what to write next, I flick through it and inevitably something jumps out at me (usually in the form of an image…)

Is there a landmark piece of fiction in your career?

I suppose it would have to be “Commonplace Sacrifices,” which was one of the first stories I ever wrote. The day after I sold it to On Spec in 2008, I discovered that it had also earned me a spot in the Clarion South Writers Workshop for 2009. Going to Clarion was an incredible first step in my writing career — if I hadn’t taken the chance and sent in that story as my audition piece, I have no idea where I’d be now.

What did you learn from compiling Bluegrass Symphony?

Bluegrass Symphony was my first major project: it’s a collection of twelve short stories, yet all but one of them is original to this book. So I spent a lot of time writing new material, but also editing out the stories that didn’t quite fit. I think I could probably fill another book with stories set in this world, based on all the ones I left out. I also carefully considered the order in which these stories appear. Many of them go to quite dark places, and I didn’t want to put readers off right away. I wanted to lull them in with mildly disturbing stories, plunge them into the horrors of “From the Teeth of Strange Children” and then pull them back out and leave them unsettled, but hopefully not shattered. And since these are mostly new works, it was great putting Bluegrass Symphony together and seeing all the connections between the stories once they’d been compiled.

Your forthcoming collection Midnight and Moonshine is co-authored with Angela Slatter. How did you work out the collaboration? How did you guys work together? What do you admire about Angela’s writing?

Angela and I met at Clarion in 2009, and have shared a brain ever since. Individually, our stories are quite different, but we share the same values when it comes to work ethic, aesthetics vs. content, character motivations, delving into the creepiness behind the beauty, etc… So while we were at Clarion, we’d bounce ideas off each other and soon discovered that we just “got” what the other had in mind. We started collaborating on stories in 2010, writing some fun and wacky pieces for Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and then writing a more traditional fantasy story, “The February Dragon,” which won the Aurealis Award for “Best Fantasy Short Story 2010″. We wrote “Prohibition Blues” last year, which will appear in Midnight and Moonshine but is first being published in Damnation & Dames, Ticonderoga Publications’ new paranormal noir anthology, later this year. As was the case with Bluegrass Symphony, all but one of the stories in Midnight and Moonshine will be original to the collection. And I say “will be” because we’re still writing them…!

How does the collaboration work? Via email, Skype, in hotel rooms during conventions… We live in different States, so we meet and plot whenever we can in person; otherwise we chat over the internet to come up with the book’s major story arcs. This is a collection of interconnected short stories — a mosaic novel — so we are constantly in touch about where the overarching narrative is going.

On a more practical level: I’ll start a story, or Angela will, and then we’ll swap drafts, filling in gaps, fixing each other’s gaffs, adding new twists and turns. Basically, it works because we trust each other implicitly. When we collaborate, neither of us is precious. If things need to go, they go.

And I admire everything about Angela’s writing. Everyone should read Sourdough and Other Stories. Once they do, they’ll know why I can be so unequivocal here.

How did you and Ann VanderMeer get to know each other?

A last-minute change in the teaching team at Clarion meant that Jeff came to Australia to be our Week 6 tutor, but Ann wasn’t able to come at such short notice. However, because Ann is so unbelievably generous, she read all of my Clarion stories anyway and I met her “virtually” this way. The feedback Ann gave me about where to start a story always comes to mind when I find myself trying to get into a story through the wrong door… We kept in touch after Clarion, and Ann bought my story “Sisters Under the Skin” for Weird Tales. Since then, we’ve worked on a bunch of wild projects together (from steampunk to bestiaries to other weird things) and I couldn’t be more delighted that she agreed to write the introduction to Bluegrass Symphony.

On your blog, you recently posted a list of “Random Words I Kinda Love,” including Hacienda, Spyglass, and Waistcoat. What do you look for in a word? Is it the sound? The meaning? Mouth feel? Associations? And likewise for “Random Words I Hate”.

Meaning first, of course. Rhythm is next in importance (partially mouth feel and sound), then associations. I love the musicality of hacienda, just as I love the period that spyglass and waistcoat evoke. They’re such proper words, so ornate, and they conjure up images of polished brass and places to go. Wendigo has such a great rhythm and it sounds wonderful when spoken with an Australian accent (something happens to the “o” that makes it even more strange than it already is). Egypt is a word I love to write, physically, with pen and paper. All those loops connected in cursive — try it. It’s such a fun word to write down.

And, yes, the same random rules apply for words I hate. Moist sounds like someone smacking while chewing their food, and the images it evokes are always gross. I use ‘moist’ in stories if I want the character to seem disgusting or sleazy (if only to me!) As a child, I hated tummy because I thought it sounded babyish and stupid — and I still do. I will use the words I hate, almost as much as the words I love, but when I do it’s nearly always to make the characters seem uglier, more disgusting, more repellent than they would otherwise be.

What’s next for you?

I’ve recently won a grant from Arts SA, which has bought me almost a year of full-time writing time to complete my first novel, The Familiar. This is the first book in a dark fantasy trilogy focusing on witches and lunatic shapeshifters in the city of Stokenveld. There’s magic! Dead cats! Did I mention the shapeshifting lunatics? Meanwhile, finishing Midnight and Moonshine is also a top priority. Later this year, I’m heading up to Toronto for the World Fantasy Convention — and it’ll be great to meet some of you there.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

2011 Reader’s Poll Results

Neil Clarke

The results from our 2011 Reader’s Poll have been tabulated and your feedback gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Without further ado, I give you this year’s winners:

COVER ART

THIRD PLACE
(TIE, listed in order of appearance)

Nautili
by Julie Dillon

The Towers of KEILAH
by Ferdinand Ladera

Off Road
by Facundo Diaz

SECOND PLACE

Planetary Alignment
by Julie Dillon

FIRST PLACE

A Sense of Importance
by Bryn Jones

FICTION

THIRD PLACE

Ghostweight
by Yoon Ha Lee

A Militant Peace
by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

SECOND PLACE

Silently and Very Fast
by Catherynne M. Valente

FIRST PLACE

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
by E. Lily Yu

CONTEST

The winner of the contest for a signed hardcover copy of Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente is Pat Wyatt.

Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to everyone who participated!

About the Author

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