Immersion

Aliette de Bodard

In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are.

You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

You’re dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-travelled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

Quy was on the docks, watching the spaceships arrive. She could, of course, have been anywhere on Longevity Station, and requested the feed from the network to be patched to her router—and watched, superimposed on her field of vision, the slow dance of ships slipping into their pod cradles like births watched in reverse. But there was something about standing on the spaceport’s concourse—a feeling of closeness that she just couldn’t replicate by standing in Golden Carp Gardens or Azure Dragon Temple. Because here—here, separated by only a few measures of sheet metal from the cradle pods, she could feel herself teetering on the edge of the vacuum, submerged in cold and breathing in neither air nor oxygen. She could almost imagine herself rootless, finally returned to the source of everything.

Most ships those days were Galactic—you’d have thought Longevity’s ex-masters would have been unhappy about the station’s independence, but now that the war was over Longevity was a tidy source of profit. The ships came; and disgorged a steady stream of tourists—their eyes too round and straight, their jaws too square; their faces an unhealthy shade of pink, like undercooked meat left too long in the sun. They walked with the easy confidence of people with immersers: pausing to admire the suggested highlights for a second or so before moving on to the transport station, where they haggled in schoolbook Rong for a ride to their recommended hotels—a sickeningly familiar ballet Quy had been seeing most of her life, a unison of foreigners descending on the station like a plague of centipedes or leeches.

Still, Quy watched them. They reminded her of her own time on Prime, her heady schooldays filled with raucous bars and wild weekends, and late minute revisions for exams, a carefree time she’d never have again in her life. She both longed for those days back, and hated herself for her weakness. Her education on Prime, which should have been her path into the higher strata of the station’s society, had brought her nothing but a sense of disconnection from her family; a growing solitude, and a dissatisfaction, an aimlessness she couldn’t put in words.

She might not have moved all day—had a sign not blinked, superimposed by her router on the edge of her field of vision. A message from Second Uncle.

“Child.” His face was pale and worn, his eyes underlined by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept. He probably hadn’t—the last Quy had seen of him, he had been closeted with Quy’s sister Tam, trying to organise a delivery for a wedding—five hundred winter melons, and six barrels of Prosper’s Station best fish sauce. “Come back to the restaurant.”

“I’m on my day of rest,” Quy said; it came out as more peevish and childish than she’d intended.

Second Uncle’s face twisted, in what might have been a smile, though he had very little sense of humour. The scar he’d got in the Independence War shone white against the grainy background—twisting back and forth, as if it still pained him. “I know, but I need you. We have an important customer.”

“Galactic,” Quy said. That was the only reason he’d be calling her, and not one of her brothers or cousins. Because the family somehow thought that her studies on Prime gave her insight into the Galactics’ way of thought—something useful, if not the success they’d hoped for.

“Yes. An important man, head of a local trading company.” Second Uncle did not move on her field of vision. Quy could see the ships moving through his face, slowly aligning themselves in front of their pods, the hole in front of them opening like an orchid flower. And she knew everything there was to know about Grandmother’s restaurant; she was Tam’s sister, after all; and she’d seen the accounts, the slow decline of their clientele as their more genteel clients moved to better areas of the station; the influx of tourists on a budget, with little time for expensive dishes prepared with the best ingredients.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll come.”

At breakfast, you stare at the food spread out on the table: bread and jam and some coloured liquid—you come up blank for a moment, before your immerser kicks in, reminding you that it’s coffee, served strong and black, just as you always take it.

Yes. Coffee.

You raise the cup to your lips—your immerser gently prompts you, reminding you of where to grasp, how to lift, how to be in every possible way graceful and elegant, always an effortless model.

“It’s a bit strong,” your husband says, apologetically. He watches you from the other end of the table, an expression you can’t interpret on his face—and isn’t this odd, because shouldn’t you know all there is to know about expressions—shouldn’t the immerser have everything about Galactic culture recorded into its database, shouldn’t it prompt you? But it’s strangely silent, and this scares you, more than anything. Immersers never fail.

“Shall we go?” your husband says—and, for a moment, you come up blank on his name, before you remember—Galen, it’s Galen, named after some physician on Old Earth. He’s tall, with dark hair and pale skin—his immerser avatar isn’t much different from his real self, Galactic avatars seldom are. It’s people like you who have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful.

Though, really, it’s been such a long time since you took off the immerser, isn’t it? It’s just a thought—a suspended moment that is soon erased by the immerser’s flow of information, the little arrows drawing your attention to the bread and the kitchen, and the polished metal of the table—giving you context about everything, opening up the universe like a lotus flower.

“Yes,” you say. “Let’s go.” Your tongue trips over the word—there’s a structure you should have used, a pronoun you should have said instead of the lapidary Galactic sentence. But nothing will come, and you feel like a field of sugar canes after the harvest—burnt out, all cutting edges with no sweetness left inside.

Of course, Second Uncle insisted on Quy getting her immerser for the interview—just in case, he said, soothingly and diplomatically as always. Trouble was, it wasn’t where Quy’s had last left it. After putting out a message to the rest of the family, the best information Quy got was from Cousin Khanh, who thought he’d seen Tam sweep through the living quarters, gathering every piece of Galactic tech she could get her hands on. Third Aunt, who caught Khanh’s message on the family’s communication channel, tutted disapprovingly. “Tam. Always with her mind lost in the mountains, that girl. Dreams have never husked rice.”

Quy said nothing. Her own dreams had shrivelled and died after she came back from Prime and failed Longevity’s mandarin exams; but it was good to have Tam around—to have someone who saw beyond the restaurant, beyond the narrow circle of family interests. Besides, if she didn’t stick with her sister, who would?

Tam wasn’t in the communal areas on the upper floors; Quy threw a glance towards the lift to Grandmother’s closeted rooms, but she was doubtful Tam would have gathered Galactic tech just so she could pay her respects to Grandmother. Instead, she went straight to the lower floor, the one she and Tam shared with the children of their generation.

It was right next to the kitchen, and the smells of garlic and fish sauce seemed to be everywhere—of course, the youngest generation always got the lower floor, the one with all the smells and the noises of a legion of waitresses bringing food over to the dining room.

Tam was there, sitting in the little compartment that served as the floor’s communal area. She’d spread out the tech on the floor—two immersers (Tam and Quy were possibly the only family members who cared so little about immersers they left them lying around), a remote entertainment set that was busy broadcasting some stories of children running on terraformed planets, and something Quy couldn’t quite identify, because Tam had taken it apart into small components: it lay on the table like a gutted fish, all metals and optical parts.

But, at some point, Tam had obviously got bored with the entire process, because she was currently finishing her breakfast, slurping noodles from her soup bowl. She must have got it from the kitchen’s leftovers, because Quy knew the smell, could taste the spiciness of the broth on her tongue—Mother’s cooking, enough to make her stomach growl although she’d had rolled rice cakes for breakfast.

“You’re at it again,” Quy said with a sigh. “Could you not take my immerser for your experiments, please?”

Tam didn’t even look surprised. “You don’t seem very keen on using it, big sis.”

“That I don’t use it doesn’t mean it’s yours,” Quy said, though that wasn’t a real reason. She didn’t mind Tam borrowing her stuff, and actually would have been glad to never put on an immerser again—she hated the feeling they gave her, the vague sensation of the system rooting around in her brain to find the best body cues to give her. But there were times when she was expected to wear an immerser: whenever dealing with customers, whether she was waiting at tables or in preparation meetings for large occasions.

Tam, of course, didn’t wait at tables—she’d made herself so good at logistics and anything to do with the station’s system that she spent most of her time in front of a screen, or connected to the station’s network.

“Lil’ sis?” Quy said.

Tam set her chopsticks by the side of the bowl, and made an expansive gesture with her hands. “Fine. Have it back. I can always use mine.”

Quy stared at the things spread on the table, and asked the inevitable question. “How’s progress?”

Tam’s work was network connections and network maintenance within the restaurant; her hobby was tech. Galactic tech. She took things apart to see what made them tick; and rebuilt them. Her foray into entertainment units had helped the restaurant set up ambient sounds—old-fashioned Rong music for Galactic customers, recitation of the newest poems for locals.

But immersers had her stumped: the things had nasty safeguards to them. You could open them in half, to replace the battery; but you went no further. Tam’s previous attempt had almost lost her the use of her hands.

By Tam’s face, she didn’t feel ready to try again. “It’s got to be the same logic.”

“As what?” Quy couldn’t help asking. She picked up her own immerser from the table, briefly checking that it did indeed bear her serial number.

Tam gestured to the splayed components on the table. “Artificial Literature Writer. Little gadget that composes light entertainment novels.”

“That’s not the same—” Quy checked herself, and waited for Tam to explain.

“Takes existing cultural norms, and puts them into a cohesive, satisfying narrative. Like people forging their own path and fighting aliens for possession of a planet, that sort of stuff that barely speaks to us on Longevity. I mean, we’ve never even seen a planet.” Tam exhaled, sharply—her eyes half on the dismembered Artificial Literature Writer, half on some overlay of her vision. ” Just like immersers take a given culture and parcel it out to you in a form you can relate to: language, gestures, customs, the whole package. They’ve got to have the same architecture.”

“I’m still not sure what you want to do with it.” Quy put on her immerser, adjusting the thin metal mesh around her head until it fitted. She winced as the interface synched with her brain. She moved her hands, adjusting some settings lower than the factory ones—darn thing always reset itself to factory, which she suspected was no accident. A shimmering lattice surrounded her: her avatar, slowly taking shape around her. She could still see the room—the lattice was only faintly opaque—but ancestors, how she hated the feeling of not quite being there. “How do I look?”

“Horrible. Your avatar looks like it’s died or something.”

“Ha ha ha,” Quy said. Her avatar was paler than her, and taller: it made her look beautiful, most customers agreed. In those moments, Quy was glad she had an avatar, so they wouldn’t see the anger on her face. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Tam’s eyes glinted. “Just think of the things we couldn’t do. This is the best piece of tech Galactics have ever brought us.”

Which wasn’t much, but Quy didn’t need to say it aloud. Tam knew exactly how Quy felt about Galactics and their hollow promises.

“It’s their weapon, too.” Tam pushed at the entertainment unit. “Just like their books and their holos and their live games. It’s fine for them—they put the immersers on tourist settings, they get just what they need to navigate a foreign environment from whatever idiot’s written the Rong script for that thing. But we—we worship them. We wear the immersers on Galactic all the time. We make ourselves like them, because they push, and because we’re naive enough to give in.”

“And you think you can make this better?” Quy couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she needed to be convinced: on Prime, she’d never seen immersers. They were tourist stuff, and even while travelling from one city to another, the citizens just assumed they’d know enough to get by. But the stations, their ex-colonies, were flooded with immersers.

Tam’s eyes glinted, as savage as those of the rebels in the history holos. “If I can take them apart, I can rebuild them and disconnect the logical circuits. I can give us the language and the tools to deal with them without being swallowed by them.”

Mind lost in the mountains, Third Aunt said. No one had ever accused Tam of thinking small. Or of not achieving what she set her mind on, come to think of it. And every revolution had to start somewhere—hadn’t Longevity’s War of Independence started over a single poem, and the unfair imprisonment of the poet who’d written it?

Quy nodded. She believed Tam, though she didn’t know how far. “Fair point. Have to go now, or Second Uncle will skin me. See you later, lil’ sis.”

As you walk under the wide arch of the restaurant with your husband, you glance upwards, at the calligraphy that forms its sign. The immerser translates it for you into “Sister Hai’s Kitchen”, and starts giving you a detailed background of the place: the menu and the most recommended dishes—as you walk past the various tables, it highlights items it thinks you would like, from rolled-up rice dumplings to fried shrimps. It warns you about the more exotic dishes, like the pickled pig’s ears, the fermented meat (you have to be careful about that one, because its name changes depending on which station dialect you order in), or the reeking durian fruit that the natives so love.

It feels . . . not quite right, you think, as you struggle to follow Galen, who is already far away, striding ahead with the same confidence he always exudes in life. People part before him; a waitress with a young, pretty avatar bows before him, though Galen himself takes no notice. You know that such obsequiousness unnerves him; he always rants about the outdated customs aboard Longevity, the inequalities and the lack of democratic government—he thinks it’s only a matter of time before they change, adapt themselves to fit into Galactic society. You—you have a faint memory of arguing with him, a long time ago, but now you can’t find the words, anymore, or even the reason why—it makes sense, it all makes sense. The Galactics rose against the tyranny of Old Earth and overthrew their shackles, and won the right to determine their own destiny; and every other station and planet will do the same, eventually, rise against the dictatorships that hold them away from progress. It’s right; it’s always been right.

Unbidden, you stop at a table, and watch two young women pick at a dish of chicken with chopsticks—the smell of fish sauce and lemongrass rises in the air, as pungent and as unbearable as rotten meat—no, no, that’s not it, you have an image of a dark-skinned woman, bringing a dish of steamed rice to the table, her hands filled with that same smell, and your mouth watering in anticipation . . .

The young women are looking at you: they both wear standard-issue avatars, the bottom-of-the-line kind—their clothes are a garish mix of red and yellow, with the odd, uneasy cut of cheap designers; and their faces waver, letting you glimpse a hint of darker skin beneath the red flush of their cheeks. Cheap and tawdry, and altogether inappropriate; and you’re glad you’re not one of them.

“Can I help you, older sister?” one of them asks.

Older sister. A pronoun you were looking for, earlier; one of the things that seem to have vanished from your mind. You struggle for words; but all the immerser seems to suggest to you is a neutral and impersonal pronoun, one that you instinctively know is wrong—it’s one only foreigners and outsiders would use in those circumstances. “Older sister,” you repeat, finally, because you can’t think of anything else.

“Agnes!”

Galen’s voice, calling from far away—for a brief moment the immerser seems to fail you again, because you know that you have many names, that Agnes is the one they gave you in Galactic school, the one neither Galen nor his friends can mangle when they pronounce it. You remember the Rong names your mother gave you on Longevity, the childhood endearments and your adult style name.

Be-Nho, Be-Yeu. Thu—Autumn, like a memory of red maple leaves on a planet you never knew.

You pull away from the table, disguising the tremor in your hands.

Second Uncle was already waiting when Quy arrived; and so were the customers.

“You’re late,” Second Uncle sent on the private channel, though he made the comment half-heartedly, as if he’d expected it all along. As if he’d never really believed he could rely on her—that stung.

“Let me introduce my niece Quy to you,” Second Uncle said, in Galactic, to the man beside him.

“Quy,” the man said, his immerser perfectly taking up the nuances of her name in Rong. He was everything she’d expected; tall, with only a thin layer of avatar, a little something that narrowed his chin and eyes, and made his chest slightly larger. Cosmetic enhancements: he was good-looking for a Galactic, all things considered.  He went on, in Galactic, “My name is Galen Santos. Pleased to meet you. This is my wife, Agnes.”

Agnes. Quy turned, and looked at the woman for the first time—and flinched. There was no one here: just a thick layer of avatar, so dense and so complex that she couldn’t even guess at the body hidden within.

“Pleased to meet you.” On a hunch, Quy bowed, from younger to elder, with both hands brought together—Rong-style, not Galactic—and saw a shudder run through Agnes’ body, barely perceptible; but Quy was observant, she’d always been. Her immerser was screaming at her, telling her to hold out both hands, palms up, in the Galactic fashion. She tuned it out: she was still at the stage where she could tell the difference between her thoughts and the immerser’s thoughts.

Second Uncle was talking again—his own avatar was light, a paler version of him. “I understand you’re looking for a venue for a banquet.”

“We are, yes.” Galen pulled a chair to him, sank into it. They all followed suit, though not with the same fluid, arrogant ease. When Agnes sat, Quy saw her flinch, as though she’d just remembered something unpleasant. “We’ll be celebrating our fifth marriage anniversary, and we both felt we wanted to mark the occasion with something suitable.”

Second Uncle nodded. “I see,” he said, scratching his chin. “My congratulations to you.”

Galen nodded. “We thought—” he paused, threw a glance at his wife that Quy couldn’t quite interpret—her immerser came up blank, but there was something oddly familiar about it, something she ought to have been able to name. “Something Rong,” he said at last. “A large banquet for a hundred people, with the traditional dishes.”

Quy could almost feel Second Uncle’s satisfaction. A banquet of that size would be awful logistics, but it would keep the restaurant afloat for a year or more, if they could get the price right. But something was wrong—something—

“What did you have in mind?” Quy asked, not to Galen, but to his wife. The wife—Agnes, which probably wasn’t the name she’d been born with—who wore a thick avatar, and didn’t seem to be answering or ever speaking up. An awful picture was coming together in Quy’s mind.

Agnes didn’t answer. Predictable.

Second Uncle took over, smoothing over the moment of awkwardness with expansive hand gestures. “The whole hog, yes?” Second Uncle said. He rubbed his hands, an odd gesture that Quy had never seen from him—a Galactic expression of satisfaction. “Bitter melon soup, Dragon-Phoenix plates, Roast Pig, Jade Under the Mountain . . .” He was citing all the traditional dishes for a wedding banquet—unsure of how far the foreigner wanted to take it. He left out the odder stuff, like Shark Fin or Sweet Red Bean Soup.

“Yes, that’s what we would like. Wouldn’t we, darling?” Galen’s wife neither moved nor spoke. Galen’s head turned towards her, and Quy caught his expression at last. She’d thought it would be contempt, or hatred; but no; it was anguish. He genuinely loved her, and he couldn’t understand what was going on.

Galactics. Couldn’t he recognise an immerser junkie when he saw one? But then Galactics, as Tam said, seldom had the problem—they didn’t put on the immersers for more than a few days on low settings, if they ever went that far. Most were flat-out convinced Galactic would get them anywhere.

Second Uncle and Galen were haggling, arguing prices and features; Second Uncle sounding more and more like a Galactic tourist as the conversation went on, more and more aggressive for lower and lower gains. Quy didn’t care anymore: she watched Agnes. Watched the impenetrable avatar—a red-headed woman in the latest style from Prime, with freckles on her skin and a hint of a star-tan on her face. But that wasn’t what she was, inside; what the immerser had dug deep into.

Wasn’t who she was at all. Tam was right; all immersers should be taken apart, and did it matter if they exploded? They’d done enough harm as it was.

Quy wanted to get up, to tear away her own immerser, but she couldn’t, not in the middle of the negotiation. Instead, she rose, and walked closer to Agnes; the two men barely glanced at her, too busy agreeing on a price. “You’re not alone,” she said, in Rong, low enough that it didn’t carry.

Again, that odd, disjointed flash. “You have to take it off.” Quy said, but got no further response. As an impulse, she grabbed the other woman’s arm; felt her hands go right through the immerser’s avatar, connect with warm, solid flesh.

You hear them negotiating, in the background—it’s tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen’s onslaught. It’s all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and this body cue, nudging you this way and that—you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband—and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.

You feel, all the while, the Rong girl’s gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won’t move away from you; and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn’t think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the colour of cinammon—no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a colour you’ve seen all your life.

“You have to take it off,” she says. You don’t move; but you wonder what she’s talking about.

Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?

The immerser.

Abruptly, you remember—a dinner with Galen’s friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears; and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language; that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn’t remove it. And then . . . and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed—saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labelled for you. Then . . .

Then it all slid down, didn’t it? You couldn’t program the network anymore, couldn’t look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen’s compartment, wandering in the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself—as if you’d already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then—then the immerser wouldn’t come off, anymore.

“What do you think you’re doing, young woman?”

Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy—his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. “We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.” It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her—an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood—whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.

“I apologise,” Quy said, meaning none of it.

“That’s all right,” Galen said. “I didn’t mean to—” he paused, looked at his wife. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”

“You should take her to see a physician,” Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” His voice was bitter. “I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t . . .” He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. “Who knows if she’d come back?”

Quy felt herself blush. “I’m sorry.” And she meant it this time.

Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. “So we’re agreed?” Galen asked Second Uncle. “For a million credits?”

Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavours. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart—with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.

“I’m sorry,” the girl says—she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.

But they’re all shaking hands; smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck—like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you; giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.

Please don’t go.

It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalising smells of food—of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make—you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast—you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room; and you follow her inside.

They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic, they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.

Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

“I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”

To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fictionshe is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

If The Mountain Comes

An Owomoyela

François and Papa were outside, discussing what to do if the water rose. I was in, scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand.

That was the summer Enah came to our village. He’d led a donkey, and the donkey pulled a cart with tools, a flowering lilac, and a barrel of fresh water. The barrel made Enah richer than the doctor, richer than the preacher. Richer than anyone but us, and he meant to change that.

I heard footsteps crunching the cracked earth outside, but I assumed it was a pumpyard guard until Papa went silent and his dogs went barking mad and I looked to see why. There they were, in the dry riverbed: Papa and François and the Rottweilers all glaring at Enah, who approached as though he feared nothing. He had skin as dark as François; he walked barefoot, and smiled. People weren’t in the habit of smiling at my father.

Enah and Papa exchanged a few words, then turned and came into the house with the dogs keeping pace. “Make us tea,” Papa said, and I was banished to the kitchen. I boiled the water and measured the leaves, and brought out the teapot and the cups, several of them chipped. I poured for my father first, then Enah. Enah didn’t say anything. Not even to acknowledge such luxury.

“In the next months, I’m going to sink my pumps another ten meters into the ground,” Papa was saying. “I can bring more water up and provide it even more cheaply to the people of this village.”

“The people of this village do not want to pay for something the world provides freely,” Enah said. Papa snorted, boar-like.

“Not so freely. My grandfather would have called this a drought; I call it the state of things. It rains perhaps thirty days a year. Your program might work where you’re from, but here, it’s foolishness.”

Enah shrugged. “There was a river here once,” he said, and sipped the steaming tea.

“That mountain to the east was a volcano once,” Papa said. “The world changes.”

“And we are often the ones who change it.” Enah shrugged again. “That’s what I’ve promised them, Mr. Wolfe: there was a river here once and there will be again.”

They sat watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah small and strange with laughter lines around his mouth and forehead, Papa solid and strong with anger carved into his brow.

“There is a house here now,” Papa said. “A family. A dozen workers. Water pumps. You’d have us all vanish?”

“No, no,” Enah said. “I’d have you go up the bank, join the rest of your town. It must be lonely down here.”

It was lonely down there.

Ever since Mama died, Papa and I went around with a higher awareness of mortality. His mortality, mostly. Papa wasn’t a young man, and death was something we expected with half a head. Death was like rain — uncommon, but it would come.

So ever since Mama died, I had a bag packed, and I was ready to run away. I knew I couldn’t survive on the riverbed without Papa, though I didn’t know where I could go. Up to the village, if they’d take me, but what would I do? Set bones, or forage in the brush, or whore myself?

Or I could set off. See what lay beyond the horizon, and beyond the horizon beyond that. Water would be the problem — so heavy, so necessary, and something that unlike the people of the village I had never learned to go without.

The riverbed had been parched for as long as I could remember, its dirt cracked and peeling like thick and brittle plates. You could throw them toward the bank, and watch them burst into plumes of dust. Our family drilled deep and sucked water from the earth, and it was enough to keep us wealthy, by our own, dusty standards of wealth.

Papa sent Enah away. Then he went out to the pumpyard, and I ran out after our visitor. “Wait!”

Enah turned and looked at me. “We weren’t introduced,” he said.

“I’m Lena,” I said. “Lena Wolfe. You say you can bring the river back?”

He looked up and down the riverbed. The town was clustered on the bank, and my grandfather’s home and his father’s home connected the town and our farm like the dots of an ellipsis. My family had always followed the water.

“Let me ask you something,” Enah said. “Why is it you think these people don’t seek their fortunes elsewhere?”

I shrugged. “This is home,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s their home, and it’s still possible to live here. If it is possible to live, many will stay where they’ve buried their parents, and where they’ve dug the wells with their hands, and laid the cobblestones. And besides, the sun is hot everywhere. Water is precious everywhere.” He tapped the ground with one foot. “What is the name of this river?”

The name dried up when the water did. I think Papa knew it. I think it was written on the old maps, but we didn’t use the old maps. “It doesn’t have one.”

Enah turned to look at me, and his eyes were as sharp as a carrion bird’s. “That’s sad, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve brought waters to desert arroyos, Lena. I can make this river flow again. And when the waters flow again, your town will name it.”

He reached out to touch my cheek, and I stepped back. Ordinarily, no one would touch me — I’d have a dog, like Papa’s dogs, to dissuade anyone from coming too close. Not then, though. Papa had killed my dog that morning.

“There will be enough water to grow hyacinths here,” Enah said.

“What are hyacinths?” I asked.

I went to the pumpyard to draw water to pay the guards’ salaries. I hated going to the pumps, but they were locked so the guards couldn’t draw their own. The men who guarded them, with old automatics and new machetes, looked at me as though only my father kept them from leaping on me like wolves.

Only my father. So much in my life was because of my father, or only my father. Because of my father, I would never die of thirst. Only my father aimed to keep life and death in a birdcage on his accounting desk.

When I’d filled the jugs and dragged the heavy handcart back to Papa’s office, I saw Papa yelling at François. Almost-yelling. Papa only barely raised his voice, but it felt like a shot from a cannon.

“By God, they won’t have their way!” Papa was saying.

François, a braver man than most, said “God is not always merciful to our needs.”

I’d never heard him speak back to Papa before.

“I don’t care about God’s mercy,” Papa said. “Who has mercy? He doesn’t. I don’t. And you least of all.” His voice became harder, like stone. “Go find whoever brought this troublemaker to our village. Make sure they don’t bring any more trouble our way.”

François stood with his jaw muscles bulging. He must have been biting down hard.

“Well?” Papa said, and raised his hand as though to strike him. “Go on! Go!”

François turned and walked outside.

Papa turned to me, and I stared at him. Then he sighed, and clicked his fingers twice. One of the dogs perked his ears, ready for commands.

“You should take Brutus,” Papa said, though neither of his dogs will obey anyone but him. “Jaime’s bitch is about to pup; we’ll train up another dog for you soon.”

“I’d rather have Mogul back,” I said.

Papa was not a man who showed sadness, but sometimes, I could catch a softness in his eyes. Only for me. “They never live once the bloody coughs start.”

“You never treat them,” I said.

“We are all dying, Lena,” he said, and started out past me. “If I kill them a week before their time or five years before their time, what does it matter?” He stopped at the doorway to touch my cheek. “You are the only one I will fight to keep alive.”

Papa would fight anything. Fighting was the only life he knew.

When my mother came down with the cough, he fought the doctors. He fought the dust which rolled in through the windows. He even fought my mother’s body. When she died, he seemed like a man who’d lost a public match — pride smarting, eyes burning, looking to prove himself back up.

By that summer, when the dogs were sick, he’d take a machete and lop off their heads. Maybe he thought it was winning if he didn’t watch them dwindle away.

I went to fill the drip-irrigators. I passed the side path leading to the gate, where François was sharpening his machete, his skin gleaming in the sunlight in contrast to my own. François was as strong and dark as Mogul once was, and I was as tan and useless as the dirt on the riverbed.

“Where’s your dog?” he demanded.

“He was sick,” I said.

François said, huh, and went back to sharpening.

“What did you mean,” I asked him, “that God is not always merciful?”

“You know what I meant. The world doesn’t work the way we’d like it.”

“But why did you say it?” I asked. “Why God?”

François shrugged one corded shoulder. “A saying came to mind. A story my parents told me.”

Papa never told me stories. Mama had, but Mama was gone. “Tell me,” I said.

François grimaced. I think he wanted to be rid of me. He didn’t speak much, and especially not to me. Still, my father paid him, and paid him twice as much as anyone else on the water farm, so he indulged most things.

“The Prophet Mohammed was told to prove the greatness of God,” François said. “He shook his fist at a mountain and said ‘Come here, mountain, so I may pray on you!’ The mountain didn’t come. The Prophet turned to his people and said ‘If that mountain had come, it would have crushed us. So you see, God is merciful. I’ll go to the mountain and thank God for sparing his foolish children.’”

I chewed on that. “So if the river comes, God won’t stop the water from flooding our home?”

François shrugged.

“Why aren’t you Muslim?” I asked. “You still remember those Islamic stories. Weren’t your parents Muslims?”

François put the finishing edge on his machete and stood up. “You’ll learn one day that you can’t always do what your parents want you to,” he said. He looked over at the edge of the river, up toward the village on the lip. “My parents would be disappointed in what I do. Besides.” He rested his machete on his shoulder. “It’s not right to profess what you don’t believe.”

I didn’t believe in a God, either. My father prayed, but never told me who he prayed to. Mama had been a Catholic from an old sect. I usually found François the most sensible of all of them.

I took two gallons of water, separated into quarts, up the bank to the market. The people there watched me, many of them angry, but not as hungry as the guards we kept sweating and rich on the farm. Papa said people resented the rich, and that it shouldn’t bother me.

François had followed me up and I wondered if my father had told him to be my dog until I had a new one, but then he went on his way and I put him out of my mind.

The noise of the market quieted as I passed by, and resumed again in pitched whispers, and the stares were more furtive. Because I didn’t have my dog, or because of Enah?

I found Jaime, who was at least kind to me, under a frayed sunshade, fixing small electronics. A rickety contraption of rods and wires with a metal dish in the middle was perched on the edge of his table, with a radio tied into it.

“What is that?” I asked, and he flashed me a grin.

“Listen to that,” he said, and turned the radio on.

There weren’t many stations nearby — there was the Christ Channel, and the staticky weather for a city climates away. And then there was this, a violin, a channel I’d never heard before.

I strained forward into the music. “Is it a new station?”

“Just far away,” Jaime said. “But with that antenna, I can focus in on it.” He turned up the volume as high as it would go. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.

The song ended, and someone spoke in a foreign tongue. “Papa says you have a dog ready to pup,” I said.

Jaime nodded. “Any day now. The best of my stock.”

“We’ll want to buy a boy,” I said. “If there’s one you don’t keep back for breeding, reserve it for us.”

He looked at me quizzically. “I noticed you didn’t have Mogul with you.”

He didn’t ask, What happened? And so I didn’t tell him, even as the words pressed on the back of my tongue. I didn’t say how his entire body had shaken when he sneezed, how blood had sprayed out from his nostrils to paint the living room walls. “He was sick,” I said. And they never live once the coughing starts.

Jaime understood. “Tell your Papa that these dogs are companions and workers, not pieces of equipment he can use up and replace.” There was no heat to his tone. We were his best customers, and sometimes his only customers for months at a time.

Beside him, the man on the radio stopped talking and a new song started up. “Jaime,” I asked. “Why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

Jaime shook his head. “What do you mean? Don’t you see the soapstone carvings Elise does? Hear Luc singing to his rabbits? See the mats Camille weaves out of the grasses? There are beautiful things all over the village.”

“Yes, yes,” I answered, but my head was full of the violin, my mind’s eye captured by the curves of its wood. I had only seen pictures in old books. “But why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

Jaime sighed. “Because beautiful flowers don’t grow on dry clay, girl,” he said, and I felt myself drop in his estimation. “When we’re not too busy scraping by, we’ll go to another city just to buy a violin. Or perhaps you should ask your father to buy one for you.”

The words stung, so I turned to leave.

I bought rabbit meat from Luc, and wild garlic and scrawny tubers from strange old Abed. Traded water for soap, for thread, for a tin of white paint to cover the blood I hadn’t been able to scrub away. Then I started back down toward the water farm, but Enah caught my eye.

He was sitting on the edge of his cart, at the lip of the river bank, leaning down to draw pictures in the dirt with a stick. He was surrounded by villagers, and all of them watched him like a prophet. I drew nearer.

“. . . and when that is done,” he was saying, “there will be water to last you between rains, and we can turn our attention to healing the river. We’ll dig percolation trenches, to let water return to the aquifer.”

By then people had noticed me, and they were muttering. I’d decided it was time to go when Enah looked up and motioned me forward.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Come up and see.” He looked to the villagers, and before they could say anything he said, “The water we’ll bring is for everyone; go ahead and let her in.”

“She’ll just tell her father,” one of them said. I didn’t look to see who.

“I’d tell him myself if he asked me,” Enah said. “Come up, Miss Wolfe.”

I looked around at the faces of the people who hated my family. They seemed foreign, and at first I didn’t know why; of course I had little interaction with them, but I knew their faces. I saw their houses on the hill.

Then it struck me. I had never seen the flicker of hope in their eyes, and now they watched Enah as though he were the word of God. I thought back to François, and felt that I was standing on the edge of a cliff. I stepped up.

“Have you ever heard the words ‘watershed management,’ Miss Wolfe?” Enah asked. I shook my head. “Do you know what a water table is? A kund?”

“I know the aquifer is drying,” I said. A rumble passed from mouth to mouth in the crowd.

“That’s because this place,” Enah said, and gestured over the village, “is designed to waste water. It rains, and the water evaporates again. With bunds and kunds and ditches, we can train it to go back into the aquifer, and capture it from this whole land surrounding your village—”

He was interrupted by screaming.

Enah seemed confused, but the villagers knew their screams. They broke and ran, ready to help someone bit by a snake or trapped under an ancient, crumbled wall, but what they found was Jaime, his wife crouched over him and keening, his radio smashed. My heart caught and I stepped forward, knowing what I would see — and I saw that his head was lying separately to his body, the two of them connected by a sweep of bright blood.

Then it was my turn to break away from them and run. It took the villagers a moment to work through why I was running away from them, and then a yell went up. I heard Enah’s voice, nasal and rising, and then a rock crashed into the ground by my ankle. I ran faster, down into the riverbed, to the safety of the guards and Papa’s dogs.

They came to the house in numbers that night, carrying fire. I could taste their anger on my skin. From the pumpyard the guards readied their weapons, unsure whether to run to the defense of the house or to protect the water, and Papa flogged the dogs to get them growling. “Where is François? That worthless man! He can put down what he’s stirred up or I’ll have his hide nailed to my wall!”

Something crashed against our window, and I jumped back. Papa grabbed his rifle and checked it, then made it ready to fire.

Papa had had people murdered before. We never talked about it, but there was no secret. When I was ten, he had François kill the bonesetter’s son, and everyone knew it was him. Papa had guards and dogs and Papa had the water; the whole village hated him, but no one dared cross him. Now they dared.

Outside the window, something was happening in the crowd. Enah ran in front of them, raising his hands. I couldn’t hear his words but the just his voice was beautiful, melodic like a violin, fanning the fires and banking the coals until the entire mob was singing their agreement with him, and the chant started up: Enah! Enah! Bring the river! Flood them out!

When the crowd was his, he turned to our house and waved his hand until I stepped up and opened the window.

“Mr. Wolfe,” he called. “It’s true that Jaime raised me on the radio, but you’ll have to do more than kill him to drive me off. You’ll have to kill me. And you’ll have to kill all the people I am teaching, and you’ll have to teach them not to kill you. Invite me in, Mr. Wolfe.”

Quite a thing to say, for someone who had just told my father to kill him. But Papa walked to the door, and — quickly, as though the doorknob was a snake — yanked it open. He invited Enah in.

No ancient and carefully-maintained gun from the crowd shot him. No fist-sized rocks came hurtling at his head. Enah approached and the mob behind him rumbled like a single, huge beast, with fire in its many claws.

Enah walked in, and Papa shut the door behind him.

They stood watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah strange and unworldly with fire glowing on his skin, Papa holding his ground like the rocks on the riverbed. Then Enah spoke.

“All the corpses you’ve planted by your pumps,” Enah said. “How long, tell me, will it take them to bloom? Will they feed your family when they do?”

Papa frowned, confused. He wasn’t a good man to confuse — he got angry. But instead of striking Enah or taking him by the neck, he showed his hands.

“Why do you want to destroy me?” he asked. “I want to leave something for my daughter. I want to leave my wealth when I’m no longer here to take care of her.”

“You can leave her a better wealth,” Enah said, and gestured to the dry riverbed.

“It will dry up. You don’t understand this village; people don’t learn. If they’re given abundance, they’ll bleed it dry. If I control the water, everyone gets what they need; no one takes more than their fair share.”

“People learn when they are taught,” Enah said. “When they create with their own hands. They will love the river even as you love your daughter.”

“You are naive,” father said.

“And you are stubborn,” said Enah.

Papa brushed off his hands. “I would rather be stubborn,” he said, but there was a moment when he seemed to consider it. The costs, and the risks, and the damages. But Papa has never been one to back down. “I’m done arguing with you. With a word I’ll have my guards open fire on your mob. Get off of my land.”

Papa went into his office before Enah could say another word, and I caught Enah’s arm before he left our house. “Why hyacinths?” I asked. I kept my voice at a whisper, so Papa couldn’t hear.

Enah turned to look at me. “Because this,” he said, gesturing to the riverbed, “is fear in a handful of dust. Have you heard that poem? The Waste Land?”

I hadn’t, but if there was ever a wasted land, this was it.

“How much of that world we have forgotten,” Enah said, and shook his head. I understood why people crowded around him like a prophet: he promised beautiful things, and kept them in mind of how strange he was, how little they knew.

I followed him to the fence around the property, where he went out by the gate and faced the crowd. The mob watched, ready to burn me, but I felt safe in Enah’s shadow. A girl guided through a lions’ den.

“Those of you who’d see the river run,” he called. “Come at midnight to the highest part of the bank. We’ll gather there and begin: with your own hands and your native rock, we’ll build tanks and dams and bund walls. Little by little, the water will rise. We will name the first wall ‘Jaime’.” He turned, faced our house, and seemed to speak straight to Papa. “And the water will rise.”

He looked at me, and I ran back inside.

Papa must have heard him through the walls. He was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, and his face — what I could see of it — was red.

He looked to me, eyes dry and veined. “If they gather I’ll have François and my boys cleave them apart,” he said. “It’s not right that they should try to take the river. There was no law here so our family made the law. May you never have to make such a decision.”

We were both silent for a while, and I said, “Hyacinths don’t grow on clay.”

Papa’s eyes bugged. “What is this?” he demanded. “What sort of nonsense have they put in your head? Hyacinths!” He stood. “I’ve raised a beautiful girl on this land, and by God I’ll leave my wealth for her when I die. Wealth is all you can ask for in a God-forsaken place like this.”

I bit my teeth. My mind was full of blood and flowers, and the back of my tongue was dry. Papa glared for a minute, then the heat went out of him.

“Apologize to me, Lena,” he said. “I’m only trying to protect you.”

I’d lived long enough that I knew there’d be no peace in the household until I did.

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded. For a while he stared out the window, into the distance, his dogs at his ankles.

“Water,” he said.

I went into the kitchen.

I pulled a quart down from the cupboard, and felt the clean weight of it. Wealth, here, sucked out of the dirty riverbed.

I brought it back to the office, and Papa drank like a man thirsty since the days of the Flood. I watched the water disappear into his body.

He set it down and looked at me.

“Lena,” he said. “Drink up and go to bed. Keep your eyes closed. I’m going to roust the boys.”

I went into my room and closed my eyes, and imagined blood sprayed across the riverbed. Papa went out to the pumps, and I could hear his voice, and then the rasp of stones sharpening machetes. I counted my breaths. Fifty, eighty, and the guards began to speak to each other, binding their resolve in boasts and quiet banter.

Then, I snuck outside.

The sky was dark, and the electric lamps from the pumpyard didn’t cast light as far as the door. The riverbanks reared high above me to either side.

I thought, What happens if the water rises?

But then, that wasn’t the right question.

What happens if the water never rises?

The ground cracks. Skin cracks. Bones crack.

On my birthdays I was allowed the extravagant gift of a bath. When Mama was alive, she’d sit at the side of the tub and wash my back. My entire body felt light, then. I think buoyant is the word — a word I had little use for. I wanted the river to roll down from wherever it was hiding, to catch me, carry me away. I wanted buoyancy.

I ran for the bank.

Not far from my door a figure stood up from the shadow of my fence. I stopped quick and saw François, silhouetted against the wide white light of the moon.

“François,” I said. My voice cracked. I wondered: if he hacked off my head, how long would my blood stain the riverbed? Would Enah bring the waters and wash it away?

François offered his left hand. In his right, his machete gleamed.

I took a step back, but I gathered my courage and looked toward the high part of the bank. I kept my eyes on the gathering lights there as I said, “Are you going to tell Papa, or just cleave me?”

François was silent for a moment. Then, “I said that my parents would not be proud of what I do,” he said. “Lena, I am not proud. God is not proud. I hardly know him, even when I want to pray.”

I swallowed. In all the years Papa had paid him, he had never called me by name. “I don’t have anyone to pray to,” I said.

He offered his left hand. Again, I hesitated.

“François,” I said. “What will happen if the water rises?”

“Life will return to the river valley,” he said. “And if I’m lucky, I will never again cleave off anyone’s head.”

My heart raced. “So you want the water to rise?”

He offered his left hand.

I stepped forward, this time. Close enough to see that his eyes were rimmed with salt, like the blood on Mogul’s nose.

Our blood will crack. Our tears will crack.

I ran forward and wrapped my hand in his.

His hand closed around mine, larger than mine, warmer, strong. “Your father will have us hunted,” he said. “If you’re afraid, you shouldn’t come.”

I was afraid. Of him, of the guards, of the villagers, of the flood. Of Papa, of Papa’s dogs, of being cut off from the pumps. Of dying like Mogul. Of dying like Jaime. But I went up on my toes and kissed François on the cheek, and he accepted it like a man made of stone.

Then he said, “Come,” and we walked up the bank. Toward the lights, where the wind scattered Enah’s lilacs, and I imagined hyacinths on the breeze.

About the Author

An Owomoyela (pronounce it “On”) is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and a pair of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from watershed management and desertification to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008, and doesn’t plan to stop learning as long as se can help it.

You Were She Who Abode

E. Catherine Tobler

Cardee Findar dreams, but she’s wide awake.

She’s in the warzone, ashen walls rising around her in broken lines, but buttercream paint seeps through the gray. The pale yellow carries with it the scent of spring, a slice of blue sky, the slow curl of white curtains into a sunlit room. This place is far away; the ground shakes underfoot, rattling ash over paint, and she’s running, running with her heart in her throat and her hands wrapped around her rifle. Rifle pressed into breast the way Lottie should be. Seven strides to the alley—seven strides and she’s in, in and sliding down into the shadows. Her gaze latches on to Ginger across the street in another alley. Ginger prefers gunfire to silence; it tells them exactly where the enemy is.

“Mama?”

Cardee pushes the small voice in her head away. That voice is as distant as that calm yellow room. Ginger is in the here and now: Ginger and Bret and Stills, and the goddamned little shadow they’re chasing. Children in warzones aren’t a surprise, not now, but the first time she’d seen one, Cardee recoiled. They’re often lures, she knows; the urge to follow the small ones and haul them out of the wreckage is hard-wired. She wants to carry them somewhere safer. She doesn’t know where that might be.

Ginger breaks position to follow the kid into the tangle of narrow streets hung with paper lanterns from a long ago celebration. Blue, green, and—

“Gin—“

Cardee swallows the rest of her protest and at Bret’s snapped curse, runs. Runs across the street into the alley Ginger had occupied. Of the child, she has the impression of ratty clothes, bare feet, and knows the latter are the deal breaker for Ginger.

The first child they’d rescued had ruined feet from walking through the debris; Ginger spent days applying salve to them, only to have the doc tell them the feet couldn’t be saved. It makes the others harder—that kid hadn’t been a lure, he just needed out. He only planted hope inside Ginger when it came to every other kid.

The hardware store still stands, windows unbroken in their frames. Cardee draws up short, listens for Ginger. There is a sharp hiss and the thunder of retreating boots. She shoulders her way into the store, amid stripped shelves. Binned nails, hammers, and planks of wood stand in one corner but—

A slamming door erupts into flame a second later. The air is sharp with flying nails and hammers and Cardee drops to the floor, rolling until she’s under the nearest shelf. The shelf buckles with a second explosion and is shredded away with a third. Blood splatters the concrete floor amid the burning refuse, as if dripping from Cardee’s own face, but she can’t make sense of it.

“Mama.”

She gives in to the voice. “I know, baby.”

Cardee slides the warm cloth over Lottie’s temple, removing the haze of blood. Small brown face, so like her own. Wide black eyes blink up at her, tight sepia curls framing smooth apple cheeks. Cardee leans in to look at the wound.

“J-James d-dared me t-to jump,” Lottie whispers, anguished.

“Just a little scrape.” Cardee drops a kiss on Lottie’s forehead, reaches past her for the wipes and dermal sealer. She’s seen worse on the battlefield, but not worse on her daughter and though she forces a smile, the injury bothers her. Bothers her in a way she can’t quantify—

Nails, there were nails—

Cardee grits her teeth together, steadies her hands. This is now, not then, and Lottie flinches at the antiseptic wipe and then the cool flow of sealer.

“Green b-bandage?”

“You like all that green, don’t you?” But Cardee doesn’t protest her daughter’s choice. She presses the bandage over the wound, even though it’s not needed with the sealer already there.

“All that green, Mama.” Lottie’s smile ripples and through a haze of smoke, looks green in the corners. Cardee runs her thumb across it as Lottie lifts a hand to touch Cardee’s own temple where green lights pulse.

“Findar.”

That’s her name. She knows it’s her name, because she remembers stealing it from Ross. He thought he gave it to her on the lakeshore with the trees dipping low into the water and all their friends gathered close, but ten years on, she still feels like she stole it. Wood violets, wild roses, my black-eyed girls.

“Findar!”

Her fingers come away from the sky bloodied; they are snatched from her, tied against her side and she’s flying, airborne through the debris, away from Ginger and the small figure they were chasing. Cardee opens her mouth to tell Ginger the kid is there, just there beyond that pile of debris, and there’s another explosion. The world rocks and green sky tips then vanishes altogether as gloved hands draw her inside a warm, dark space, and she hears the chop-chop-chop of angel wings, as they arc high into the sky thirteen klicks from base.

Thirteen nails, doc says and drops the last into the basin. It falls with a clink, a fleck of blood, and Cardee sees faces in the red: Ross and the priest and if she closes her eyes she can feel Ross’s palm against hers. Palmers’ kiss was holy she had told him, but now there’s only the chatter of doc and his team and when these voices change, Cardee can’t latch onto why. The light takes on a clear quality, the smoke of the hotspot gone, and the bite of the stitcher is almost sweet as it crawls over her bare scalp. It tickles; the sensation tells her she’s alive.

The stitcher tiptoes over scalp while doc settles the VET into its place against the ruin of her hippocampus and he’s talking all the while, words that slide over Cardee’s consciousness and away. She knows he’s watching a screen while he talks, to see what her brain does with each word. Volatile, he calls the device. Like it might explode the way the hardware store did—

Ragged clothing and bare feet. Oh, bare feet. Cardee can feel the soft curve of Lottie’s toes against her chin.

Emotive transistor, doc says and his fingers are cool against her temple though warmth seems to sink into her skin, into her bones. Her left eye blossoms with sudden heat, the sting of salt.

Do that again, doc bids her.

Cardee doesn’t know what he means, but she thinks about Lottie’s toes, small and brown and sweet like sugar, and the salt stings her again as doc praises her. Good, good, he says, and Cardee swallows a sob. The green light floods his palm then fades as Cardee quiets. It won’t be perfect, he says, but—

—what is in this world, Ross says and his mouth moves over Cardee’s and she smiles, knowing neither one of them really wants perfection. They have always been a jumble and she’s content to stay that way. The idea that he would marry her when she means to serve their country is what sinks its hooks into her. That he would stay, no matter where they or she went, and when they go to the lakeshore all those years later and she tells him about the child, there is a quiet wonder in his eyes.

He is barefoot, jean cuffs rolled up and wet, and he tangles wild roses into Cardee’s hair. They’re pink like his tongue and later she presses these roses into a book which will sit on a shelf beside a box full of letters with different postmarks, all the places she has been. The book will sit until Lottie pulls it down at age three and scatters the flat, dried bundle everywhere. A year later, they still find bits of roses in the corners.

“Made it just the way you like,” Ross says, and leads Cardee to the corner where he’s placed her favorite chair with its worn arms and the quilt her grandmother pieced together. A tablet rests on the table beside an electric kettle which she knows holds Earl Grey. He helps her into the chair and she’s slow, like she can’t remember how to move, but the VET remembers for her, guiding her into the chair’s familiar hold.

A ring peeks out from Ross’s shirt collar as he moves, three strands of Irish gold braided together. His grandmother’s, but now hers, given to him so it couldn’t be taken even if her finger did feel bare without it. A thing to come back to he had joked, and as it slips free now he tucks it away before she can touch it. His brow creases. Don’t worry about that now, he tells her.

Ross’s hands are tentative as he settles her feet on the ottoman, as he pulls up the quilt and then reaches for her cup. The cup is sunrise orange and the tea floods it in a brown, steaming rush. Cardee draws in a breath and watches as Ross’s face is erased. The room seems to fold itself away under the rising steam and she’s in an alley again, watching a small, barefoot figure flit through the debris.

That was then, she tells herself, and tries to pull the walls of her room upright. Plaster and buttercream and not ash, but there’s only stone and choking smoke in this place. Stills presses a new magazine into her hand and she slots it into her rifle before running, running after Ginger through the debris, after the small barefoot form.

This is before, she knows. Before the hardware store. Three days? No—three months, months and this is the first kid, the one doc won’t be able to save.

Images shutter like an old film reel through her mind, guided by the VET in her temple. That was then but it’s also now, and Cardee follows Ginger over fallen stones that used to be walls that used to be houses that used to be homes.

There is a tall figure in a far door lifting a gun. Cardee lifts hers first and the figure crumples with a shriek, doesn’t move. Ginger is twelve steps from the kid, the boy, and Cardee knows she herself is twenty-five steps from the figure she shot down.

She will walk those steps, check the body, take the gun. She will. She already has.

Twenty-seven steps from the second figure who emerges behind the first, a young man in enemy colors, and he lifts his gun. Cardee takes him down too; he falls to his knees as if in prayer, then topples over.

Ginger tackles the boy, wrestles him to the ground and pins his arms behind him. Where are the others, she demands—where! And he says he doesn’t know—but he does and these kids just don’t want to go, don’t want to leave these streets that are home, home even though war has claimed them. Home, smeared into his cheeks and his bare, bloodied feet. Ginger hefts the boy, throws him over her shoulder, and they’re out, running as shells rain from the sky.

Cardee turns circles in wet grass. Don’t worry about getting wet, she tells Lottie, and they’re out, running as the rain pours from the summer sky. Lottie shrieks, like she might melt under the rain because she’s so sweet, but Cardee holds her hand and feels her daughter relax. The shriek turns to a laugh and Lottie is no longer worried about her dress, because it will dry on the laundry line when the sun comes out again. She twirls and Cardee watches those toes as they mash into the mud. Hot cocoa later, she thinks, but it’s already been later, that cocoa long drunk.

This is memory, Cardee tells herself, and pulls hard, hard enough to lift the walls of her room back into place. This was now. Her room, where nine year old Lottie now sits, bundled on the ottoman. Lottie watches everything and Cardee watches back. Lottie is taller than she remembers, all long arms and legs, her hair longer and worn pulled up on the top of her head with a mass of bright green and blue ribbons. A clumsy knot, her father’s work.

“Mama?”

Cardee offers her hand for holding. The hand Lottie offers is larger than Cardee remembers, long slim fingers. Palm to palm they sit until Lottie makes a sound, a sound like she wants to cry but is too old for such things now. Lottie curls into her mother’s lap, the way a nut curls into its shell, and she’s crying. Don’t w-worry about getting w-wet.

There was rain, Cardee thinks, rain like nails, and she lifts a hand to feel the line of her skull, whole now but still shorn, wrapped under a bright cloth. Lottie shudders and Cardee hauls her closer.

“It’s okay, baby. It helps mama remember.”

Lottie’s fingers press cool against Cardee’s temple, gentle over the soft light which flickers beneath the skin. Of course it was green. Lottie’s mouth lifts in a tentative smile at the sight and—

—it’s doc looking at her for the first time after the surgery, his face clear and sharp and framed by all that brilliant white light. Cardee stares the way she stared at Ross when he proposed, like she can’t understand or believe it. That was then, she tells herself, but doc tells her it won’t be perfect. It’ll run, but it’ll stutter, too, like a tank you need kick every now and then. Cardee doesn’t want it; Cardee can’t be Cardee without it, though. She understands that. The VET can reach pieces of her memory that she no longer can.

“Mama.”

That voice hauls her back to the yellow room with its curtains, with its small nut of a girl. Cardee doesn’t remember Lottie this way and the VET hums hard, as if trying to reconcile two different pieces of paperwork. The numbers don’t add up. Small Lottie waving goodbye in the driveway, Ross and Gamma at her side; this is the last image of Lottie the VET can give her. The Lottie who hasn’t outgrown the shoes that Cardee saw in the donation box as they came inside today. The Lottie who hasn’t yet flung herself off the swing at a friend’s dare.

“I’m here, baby.”

Always that: baby. Cardee clings to the word, the way she does to her daughter. She’s here, but she’s not. Part of her is still in those streets. The VET pulls up her most recent memory, running with it, because that’s what it does. Running—

Feet hit the ground hard as she and the fireteam seek another kid. There were two down here, two and—

Two kids emerge from the rubble, rifles cocked and drawn on the team. Cardee draws up, but doesn’t lower her rifle. These kids are taller, but still young. Eight, nine. Lottie’s age now, she thinks and something inside her turns over. This was not now, this was then, but something inside her hides its face.

“In-de-pen-dents?” one of the kids asks, drawing the word out into four hard syllables.

Bret strides forward, kicks up clouds of dust in the ruined street. “Co-a-li-tion,” he spits and the world erupts.

“Wrong answer!”

They don’t want to go, this band of kids, and they fight to stay. Cardee screams at Bret to back off, but it’s too late. She smells the blood, the gunpowder, and feels the sudden press of a knife against her side. Before her, the scene unfolds as it did before, the way she remembers, down to the taste of sweat on her lip. Only one of the kids gets away. Escapes to run and set a trap in the hardware store where nails— Where nails—

Memory stutters. Her mind goes blank.

“Mama?”

Cardee feels the touch of fingers on her face, pressing gentle and then with more insistence. She blinks and looks at the girl in her lap, but cannot recall her name. Does not know why she’s here. Bret would be here soon. Bret and Ginger and—

“Mama!”

But the only children she knows live in the streets. Rubble rats, sand kids, some used as weapons, others in need of rescue. This girl is whole and clean. A green bandage clings to her temple, but her feet are uninjured. Not bloody or cut and Cardee can’t process it. The girl pushes away. Those small feet thunder away.

“Da! Daaaaa!”

Cardee blinks, the room around her unfamiliar. She wanders, touching walls that should be made of ash. Why is there a ceiling and how can there be windows without cracks? Just when it seems the walls might crumble to ruin under her fingers, there’s another hand, this one drawing her own from the wall. Cardee whimpers because part of her wants to see these walls fall down. It’s what she knows, jagged lines against smoky sky.

There is mark upon one wall, where a frame used to rest. A frame that held a photograph, she thinks. Fingers trace this line, but there is no frame. Her eyes sweep the room and she’s moving past the man, rifling through drawers, careless with everything that isn’t the frame that belongs upon the wall. Careless until her fingers close around a bundle of letters. Handwritten, from far away places, they smell like ash and home both. Tears smudge the writing—before or after the sending and does it matter? Pushed to the back of the drawer, she thinks that is what matters. More letters and more and then at the bottom, the frame. The photograph.

It’s a face half familiar, dark and proud, and by her side there stands a man as pale as she is dark. That man, she thinks, looking up at him now, then back to the photograph. Behind them sprawls a lake and the shore is tangled with long grasses, willowed trees. Cardee lifts the frame and brings it to the wall, but there is no nail.

There were nails—

“Cardee. Beloved.” His hand covers hers.

“The team?” she asks.

He swallows hard. “Safe.”

A bright, striped flag across the length of a casket. The image is gone as quickly as it comes.

The man guides her toward the chair in the corner, with its quilt and tablet and cooling tea. “You’re home.”

Cardee shakes her head and a deep pain flares at her temple, burning down her spine. She presses the framed photograph into her lap. “Volatile,” she whispers. Explosive.

“Volatile Emotive Transistor,” he says, and there’s something in his eyes, something Cardee cannot name. His hand tightens on hers, shaking, and the line of a ring presses into her bones. His ring. His free hand lifts, to trace her temple where green lights have stilled.

Warmth and salt burn her eyes. “I should. . .” Her head comes up. Her attention narrows on the doorway. There should be a figure there and she should have her rifle, but there isn’t and she doesn’t. A tank needs kicking, she thinks, but doesn’t know why. She looks back to the man. “I don’t remember.”

He eases his hold on her, hand sliding down, around, so that palm presses to palm. Cardee’s breath hisses and fresh fire courses through her body. Old pathways blazing into new.

“Wood violets, wild roses, my black-eyed girls,” he says.

She smells the lake now and the willows brush her shoulders as they walk, hand in hand through the almost-cold grass underfoot. He offers her a tangle of violets and one of roses and then a braided ring, a ring that slides onto her finger as though it belongs. The way he slides it onto her finger now, warm from his own body.

“Palmers’ k-kiss is holy?”

There’s something else in his eyes now. Warmth and salt and everything he put away while she was gone. He smiles slow, and it’s like nothing Cardee has seen before. Nothing and yet everything she knows, and there comes the sound of small bare feet, thumping down the hall. Toward them. My black-eyed girls.

“Come from those streets, Cardee Findar. I will remember with you.”

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

Energizing Futures: How SF Fuels Itself

Stephen Gaskell

Virtual worlds. Terraforming complexes. Star-spanning generation ships. Science fiction is chock-full of massive technological artifacts born of humankind’s desire to create, to explore. What do they all have in common? They all consume energy like black holes swallow stars. Computation, mechanization, acceleration. If the future’s getting faster, it’s certainly getting more energy intensive.

Even when SF is not envisioning these glittering futures, a growing Earth population living increasingly modern lifestyles means that our collective energy needs will inevitably rise, new technologies or not. One question that’s often not given much attention is: Where does this energy come from?

System Shock

Even after Kelvin and others developed the theory of thermodynamics in the mid-19th century, early works of SF paid little heed to the energetic considerations of their invented worlds. Although Copernicus and Newton had ushered in enlightenment thinking centuries earlier—and the heavens were no longer thought of as a Platonic realm of a different category of nature to that found on Earth—writers of this period struggled (or perhaps chose not) to engage with mechanical realities.

For example, the concept of escape velocity—the minimal speed an object must be projected to escape the gravitational attraction of the body on which it resides—was well known since Newton formulated his laws, but it did not filter into most writers’ thoughts. Locomotive means usually relied on mystical “will,” such as in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), where the narrator travels the cosmos telepathically, or highly speculative technology, most notably antigravity devices. In Charles Curtis Dail’s Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn (1890), the alien protagonist traverses the solar system with the aid of an antigravity ointment smeared over his body, while in H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1901) the inventor Cavorite famously creates a gravity-screening substance by the same name.

Despite being scientifically unsound—no evidence for either gravitationally-repulsive matter or “mind over matter” ever having been found—both methods have remained popular for dodging the killjoy of physical law. Antigravity technology adorns the decks of most starships from the USS Enterprise to Battlestar Galactica, and mental gymnastics facilitate travel for everyone from Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes of Amber to Neo of The Matrix.

One of the earliest fictionalizations of the seeds of a workable route off-world appeared in Achille Eyraud’s Voyage à Vénus (1865). Unlike Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, published in the same year, where astronauts were fired into space from a giant cannon, Eyraud had his adventurers lifted from the Earth by a water-based rocket propulsion system. Though he used the correct principle, if not the most efficient propellant, Eyraud’s novel went largely unnoticed, while Jules Verne’s became one of his world-famous masterpieces.

[An early vision of astronaut transport courtesy of Jules Verne.]

Despite Verne’s oversight on a cannon as a launching means, he carefully researched the scientific possibilities of the day, inventing many plausible technologies, and coming to understandings that were often remarkably prophetic. For example, he accurately described weightlessness in outer space, and inspired American submarine inventor Simon Lake with his tale Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Most importantly for the future of SF, Verne together with his fellow “Father of Science Fiction,” H. G. Wells, laid a framework for a new brand of SF where scientific truths, as much as they could, infused the fiction.

One of the chief consequences of this focus on scientific awareness, of course, was a renewed examination of how the myriad spacecraft, off-world bases, orbitals, etc. would be powered. Rather than expanding horizons, hard SF actually narrowed the wider genre’s remit, concentrating on places and journeys within our solar system. Here, writers could extrapolate from modern engineering principles, marrying this understanding with the knowledge of our increasingly well-charted interstellar backyard.

Arthur C. Clarke, arguably the greatest exponent of creating great sensawunda moments underpinned by scientific rationale, used the solar wind—the faint pressure of innumerable photons flung from the sun—to power solar yachts in his story “Sunjammer.” And in The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke describes the construction of a space elevator from Sri Lanka. Such an engineering feat, seriously considered by NASA among other groups, would make space exploration an energetically, and much more economically viable proposition. However, it is still reliant on the development of several technologies—including carbon nanotubes for the cable and electromagnetic propulsion for the transportation.

Perhaps tracking the optimism and successes of various space agencies, hard SF set in the local neighborhood probably attained its greatest popularity in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Cold War paranoia was in its final throes. Classic texts such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix paint detailed pictures of how the solar system might be colonized. In Red Mars, the terraforming of the red planet is kick-started by “mohole” drilling to release subsurface heat; the detonation of nuclear explosions deep in the permafrost to release carbon-dioxide and other heat-trapping atmospheric gases; and the insertion of a geosynchronous asteroid to which a space elevator cable is tethered. These steps provide the foundation for the introduction of plant life in the sequel, Green Mars.

In Schismatrix Sterling posits a fragmented humanity, an Earth shattered from ecological collapse, and pockets of Shaper/Mechanist enclaves living in artificial habitats (often asteroids or small moons scooped of their interiors and spun to create artificial gravity). Energy is harvested in myriad ways utilizing biotech, solar collection, and nuclear fusion. Interestingly, although competition between the factions is intense, warfare is considered too horrifying to contemplate—not only because the memory of Earth’s demise is fresh in mind, but because the habitats are so fragile and easy to destroy. Space as an utterly hostile environment for human life is often overlooked in SF, a lesson not forgotten here.

Recent works—such as Duncan Jones’ film Moon, Jeff Carlson’s novella The Frozen Sky, and Joan Slonczewski’s novel The Highest Frontier—continue this tradition of scientifically informed, near-Earth exploration. In both Moon and The Frozen Sky, Jones and Carlson envision the off-world mining of fuels for nuclear fusion. In Moon, Helium-3 is harvested from the dark side of the moon to power an energy-spent Earth, and in The Frozen Sky, mecha-mine deuterium from the water ice of Europa to run a fusion “gas” station at the outer reaches of the solar system. In The Highest Frontier, by contrast, the cylindrical habitat of Frontera—orbiting above a climate-threatened Earth—draws power from an outer shell of photosynthetic microbes, piggybacking on research into hydrogen-producing bacteria.

[Not simply inspiration for Pink Floyd!]

Universal Power

Modern SF, of course, hasn’t only concerned itself with the exploration and colonization of places within our own solar system. Overlapping with the declining popularity of “space-race” SF through the latter part of the 20th century, new-wave space opera married the pulp adventures of the subgenre’s early days with extensive knowledge of the wider cosmos gleaned from astronomer’s increasingly powerful telescopes.

Seeing deeper and more up-close than ever before, writers such as Alistair Reynolds, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, and Justina Robson have utilized the exotic playground of dark energy, pulsars, binary stars, exoplanets, nebulae, and black holes (among other phenomena) to depict human stories against the widest, most awe-inspiring backdrops. And the energy sources have often been equally spectacular.

Adam Roberts, in his first novel, Salt, begins with a 37-year starship journey powered by a captured comet: “Our comet, fuel and buffer, building speed slowly. Us, strung out along the cable behind, eleven little homes like seashells on a child’s necklace-string.” Not only does using a comet as fuel source remove the need to bring millions of tones of propellant up the energy-sapping gradient of the Earth’s gravitational well, but affixing it to the front of a starship also means the ship is ingeniously shielded from interstellar debris, which even in tiny clumps could be lethal when traveling at appreciable fractions of light speed.

But why take any fuel at all, when the interstellar medium is chock-full of ionized hydrogen anyhow? That was the astronomical fact that inspired an American physicist to conceive of the Bussard ramjet, a space drive powered by scooping up protons using powerful electromagnetic fields, fusing those protons in a fusion reactor, and using the exhaust like a conventional rocket. Despite both theoretical and technical challenges concerning the frictional force of the interstellar gas, insufficient cloud densities, and the difficulty of fusing hydrogen, Larry Niven immortalized the Bussard ramjet by using it as a staple in his Known Space universe, most notably as the engines of his eponymous Ringworld.

[Giant space jellyfish, er, Bussard ramjet, ahoy!]

If you really want a decent, innovative power source for your galactic civilization though, you’re going to want to move away from the relatively pedestrian concepts of combustion or fusion. Burning stuff has been old hat for millennia, and fusing nuclei for magnitudes longer, the domain of a trillion stars. Antimatter is one such candidate. With impeccable scientific credentials—theorized by Dirac and discovered by Andersen a mere four years later—antimatter packs a colossal energetic punch. Being the antithesis of normal matter in every regard except mass, any antiparticle can be combined with its particle sibling in an annihilation reaction that produces oodles of energy in accordance with Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence equation, E = mc2. Although Captain Kirk was exaggerating in the Star Trek episode “Obsession,” when he told an ensign that a pound of antimatter could destroy a solar system, the annihilation of fifteen pounds of antimatter is approximately equal to the energy that Hurricane Katrina unleashed in 2005.

As well as powering the warp core of the USS Enterprise, antimatter has a long history in the genre as an energy source. Back in 1942, Jack Williamson published his story “Collision Orbit” in Astounding Science Fiction, in which engineer Jim Drake struggles to exploit the energy of contraterrene (antimatter) asteroids. Most recently, antimatter can be found propelling the ISV Venture Star, the vessel that carried Jake Sully to Pandora in Avatar. What’s often not confronted in these stories is where this antimatter comes from. To this day, for reasons physicists still don’t fully understand, the universe seems almost entirely matter-dominant, with no sign of the vast gamma ray displays that would occur along the boundaries between matter and antimatter regions. And although antiparticles can be easily created and trapped in places like CERN, if you have to make the stuff in the first place, energy considerations render the idea a non-starter.

Making stuff up is, of course, meat and potatoes for SF writers. Dubious science (Asimov’s positronic brains, anyone?) has never been a barrier to speculative power sources, as Iain M. Banks readily admits in a passage in his famous essay “A Few Notes On the Culture”: “Between each universe [in Banks' Culture series] there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it’s what the Culture starships run on.”

Perhaps Banks’ Energy Grid is not as far-fetched as it initially sounds, given a patina of credibility by the concept of zero-point energy. ZPE, or vacuum energy, is the lowest possible energy state of a quantum mechanical system. It can be conceived as a vast reservoir of infinite energy sitting below the surface of reality. Doubts are high as to whether this energy can ever be used, but this hasn’t prevented ZPE making an appearance in plenty of SF. In the Halo universe, zero-point generators harvest energy from slipspace, while in Arthur C. Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, humanity’s last chance resides with the starship Magellan, which is powered by a quantum drive that taps the vacuum energy.

Another of nature’s most mystifying phenomena, black holes, have also been mooted as potential wells of vast amounts of energy. Mini-black holes as compact energy sources were featured in both Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, where the starships use them as drives, and John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline, where prospectors hunt for ones that orbit the solar system. Unlike more massive black holes—which can be leveraged as energy sources via the emission of electromagnetic radiation from the infalling accretion disc, or through the theft of the holes’ angular momentum as in the Penrose process—reaping energy from miniature black holes utilizes a quantum-mechanical quirk that leads to the holes evaporating via Hawking radiation.

All this galactic back-and-forth probably gets a little tiring, and once a civilization has trekked around the cosmos, it’s probably going to want to take a rest and heat up from the warming fire of its destination star. This hasn’t escaped the attention of many SF writers. A whole cornucopia of Dyson spheres, bubbles, swarms, and shells have cloaked many a sun across the galaxy. In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, an alien civilization use a sphere to power a planetary shield, while in Charles Stross’ Accelerando a swarm “of computronium forms a massive matrioshka brain around the sun, providing virtual space for trillions of uploaded human minds and corporate AI.”

The Stars Not Our Destination

Environmental destruction, the specter of peak oil, the increasing wealth gap, and a tarnishing of the dream to colonize space have led many of the latest crop of SF writers to abandon a vision of humankind’s expansion into the cosmos. Instead, they’ve been focusing on terrestrial concerns of resource scarcity, ecological collapse, and sustainability. Addressing these issues has led to energy sources playing a more prominent role in both the setting and the plot of many contemporary works.

In Paolo Bacigalupi’s post-oil-age novel The Windup Girl, megodonts— huge, gene-hacked animals seemingly related to the Indian Elephant—“tread slow circles around power spindles,” winding highly engineered kink-springs that can hold gigajoules of stored energy. Whether this makes energetic sense given energy wastage between the foodstuff to animal, and animal to spring steps, requires further analysis. But the presence of an energy storage device based on elastic potential is a rarity in literature.

An energy source not often given much stage-time—but which could become a critical component of the portfolio of renewables through the 21st century—featured in the recent Doctor Who episode “The Fires of Pompeii”. Geothermal energy, powered by the decay of radioactive materials in the heart of the planet, has its most spectacular manifestation in volcanic eruptions that spew lava far and wide, and in “The Fires of Pompeii” it’s aliens tapping Vesuvius for this energy that precipitates the Doctor’s involvement.

[Did Doctor Who cause the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius?]

In Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain, energy is plentiful as society is powered by Y-energy, a form of cold fusion named after its pioneer, Kenzo Yagai, while in Lauren Beukes’ kinetic, urban dystopia Moxyland, one of the less narcissistic characters does up her home with “solar panels on the ceiling, a wind farm in the garden,” which suggests a world where energy generation is becoming an increasingly personal affair. Even more literary writers are getting in on the act. For example, the recent novel Solar by Ian McEwan is a black comedy about a morally bankrupt physicist who attempts to create artificial photosynthesis in an effort to stave off climate change.

Even when our best writers confront the very worst futures, envisaging dystopian societies borne of virus outbreaks, robot uprisings, solar catastrophes, or meddling with the fabric of space-time, the matter of fuelling up is never completely out of sight. Jeff Carlson begins Plague Year with the appetizing “They ate Jorgensen first,” while in Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Victor Gischler has indentured servants generating electricity by pedaling exercise bikes.

My personal favorite for vacuuming up the ergs at the end of the world, though, has to come from the pages of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. In it, humanity subsists on vast vats of yeast grown underground from vile-smelling kerogen shales: “And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it . . . and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast.” And remember, kids, if you’re ever caught up in an apocalypse, ants are a great source of protein!

About the Author

Stephen Gaskell is an author, games designer, and champion of science. In his recent novella, Strata, co-written with Bradley P. Beaulieu, he envisions Earth’s voracious appetite for energy being sated by vast solar-mining platforms circling the sun’s chromosphere. He runs the “science-behind-the-story” website Creepy Treehouse, and is currently finishing the first draft of a weird, ecological apocalypse thriller set in Lagos, Nigeria. He lives on England’s south coast with his partner, Eloise.

Neither the Billionaire nor the Tramp: Economics in Speculative Fiction

Jeremy L. C. Jones

I sat at a table full of professors and tried to explain the idea of world-building.

This was five years ago. Jeff VanderMeer and I (along with about a dozen others) were scrambling to put the final touches on Shared Worlds, a writing and world-building camp for teenagers at South Carolina’s Wofford College.

There was a math professor, an English professor, a few historians, and a mix of others from a mysterious world I think of as “The Sciences.”

I babbled on, trying to figure out how to bridge the “lingo” gap and get everyone to understand. (I mean, where do you begin to explain the notion to someone who doesn’t think about this stuff every day, all day?)

Of course, I didn’t really need to bridge anything. These people were smart, very smart, and they grasped the concept fast.

Then an Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance named Dr. Philip Swicegood spoke up.

“You should have a class on economics at Shared Worlds,” he said.

My first thought, I am ashamed to say, was, Eew! But I nodded, smiled, and waited.

“Economics!” Swicegood said. It was the way I might say, “Star Wars marathon!”

My expression, I’m sure, was somewhere between blank and horrified.

“Really,” he assured me, “economics. For instance, what does your character want, and what is he willing to do to get it?”

Swicegood would later explain, “Economics is about exchange and incentives.”

“Economic exchange and response to incentives can create a great angle for revealing motivation and clarifying values,” he said.

And later: “Realistic economic exchange implies that both parties think they are better off after the transaction.”

This went on for a while. I took notes.

Below, I speak with six speculative fiction writers about economics and speculative fiction. We discuss “sprawling cultural exchange,” markets, and other mechanisms of “arbitrating resource flows.” We talk about free will, personal sovereignty, and competing currencies. We talk about freedom of agency, personal integrity, and justice. We talk about Star Trek’s acutely capitalist Ferengi and “the diminishing marginal utility of money.”

And all of it comes back to fiction—character motivations, setting, and story.

Each of the six participants—Elizabeth Bear, N. K. Jemisin, Dani Kollin, Brian Francis Slattery, Charlie Stross, and John C. Wright—has a compelling interest in economics and does something interesting with the economies in his or her secondary world(s).

Elizabeth Bear is the author of The Jenny Casey Trilogy, The Promethean Age series, the Jacob’s Ladder Trilogy, The Edda of Burdens trilogy, The Iskryne series (co-written with Sarah Monette), and the New Amsterdam series. Her current series, which began with the novella Bone and Jewel Creatures and continued with the novel Range of Ghosts, “explore[s] the trade and economic situation of a vast, pre-modern empire.”

N. K. Jeminsin is the author of The Inheritance Trilogy and the forthcoming The Dreamblood duology. In the former, she’s created a Renaissance-level global economy; the latter takes place in a world where prosperity depends on fertile land, as well as “free healthcare and universal education.”

Along with his brother Eytan Kollin, Dani Kollin is the author The Unincorporated Man, The Unincorporated War, The Unincorporated Woman, and the forthcoming The Unincorporated Future, which is due August of 2012. With the Unincorporated series, the Kollins have created a world in “everyone cares about everyone else because it’s profitable to do so.”

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and the recent Lost Everything. Slattery draws inspiration from the economies of poorer nations to create fictional, post-collapse worlds that resemble our own but that have been skewed sideways.

Charlie Stross has authored the Singularity Sky series, the Laundry Files, the Merchant Princes, and the Halting State series, as well as various collections and many standalone novels. “When writing fiction,” Stross says below, “work out what people value first—and what their role is in their society. The economics then emerge from the inter-personal relations, and enrich the background and characterization.”

John C. Wright is the author of The Golden Age, in which he has created “a libertarian near-utopia.” He is also the author of the Everness series, the Chronicles of Chaos, Null-A Continuum, and the recent Count to a Trillion.

How does the economy of your secondary world(s) work? What’s exchanged? What are the incentives?

Charlie Stross: Most of my fiction is set in worlds not greatly dissimilar from our own, at least economically. The media of exchange and the incentives are more or less identical to our own. In those that are more distantly related, I generally look at the underpinnings of economics from two angles: what’s in scarce supply, and what people want or need. Where you have supply and demand you either have a market, or some other mechanism for arbitrating resource flows. Even in those societies where material scarcity may be taken care of and everyone has enough food, housing, clothing, and starships to go round, there’s a scarcity angle to play: Human psychology tends to value being at the centre of attention, and so attention economies come into play.

Brian Francis Slattery: Rather than creating an entirely new world, I tend to take the world as I think I understand it and move it sideways. So the economic logic, I think, is pretty recognizable as our own, with much the same exchange systems and incentive structures. You know, money’s exchanged for goods and services, and when money fails, there’s barter. In my first book (Spaceman Blues), I didn’t even move the world all that far sideways: I didn’t want to play with New York City’s informal economy so much as find a working metaphor to depict it in an entertaining and hopefully also slightly informative way. Granted, I ran with that idea pretty far into the ludicrous, But I still think that one of the weirdest things about that book is how much of it is true.

N. K. Jemisin: In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy), the economy is global despite the world being at only Renaissance-level development or so. This is largely because magic is used to facilitate communication and travel, at least for certain goods or those with a certain amount of wealth and influence. The world is on a single currency, the meri—although this was done to make the economy easier for a single family (the Arameri) to control, not out of any particular economic interest.

Although the system is largely capitalistic, with the same incentives as any capitalist system—accumulation of wealth and power, avoidance of poverty—it’s by no means a free market. In fact it’s heavily regulated, in keeping with the world’s philosophical dedication to order; they believe an unregulated system invites chaos. And where conventional, legislative regulation fails, the Arameri are perfectly willing to use magic to manipulate the system. When wages fall too low, for example, the Arameri unleash a plague or two to reduce the population of workers. They also achieved all this by taking advantage of the apocalypse to reboot society to their liking, and periodically using magic to wipe out nations that disagreed with their economic policies.

Elizabeth Bear: One of my major interests in writing the Eternal Sky novels was to explore the trade and economic situation of a vast pre-modern empire. I think that modern people make two mistakes in thinking about travel in a medieval or Enlightenment-era society. We make it both too hard and too easy. The fact of the matter is that even in our own perfectly non-fantastic world, people did travel—and they mostly did it by walking, and they sometimes did it over vast distances. There were trade routes that stretched from Beijing to Stockholm, and Genghis Khan used Pony-Express-like tactics to get riders from one end of his empire to the other in under six weeks. There was trade, and cross-pollination, and exchange of ideas and goods along routes thousands of miles long. China’s famous porcelain was influenced by Indian and Arabic elements, and silk made its way west to the Atlantic. I’ve tried to reflect this sort of sprawling cultural exchange in the books in Range of Ghosts and its sequels. Nothing drives me crazier than worlds with no economies, where the technology and social structures never change. So I guess the question is, what’s not exchanged?

Brian Francis Slattery: In my second and third books (Liberation and Lost Everything), there was much more messing around with the economic system. In Liberation, the United States has suffered a very severe economic collapse. In Lost Everything, the ravages of war and climate change have made the U.S. economy as we know it pretty much moribund. But in depicting the effects of these things on people, and thinking about how people react, I turned to real examples in the present day—just in other parts of the world. In Liberation, the economic situation is based more or less on my understanding and experiences of life for the rural poor in Guatemala circa 2002, where things were very hard, but all around, I saw people constantly finding ingenious ways to get what they needed on the little they had. (Tragically, things there now are worse, and I am afraid for the people that I knew there.)

Dani Kollin: In the Unincorporated series what is exchanged are shares of people. The people work for credits. The more people earn the more the shareholders get. Everyone cares about everyone else because it’s profitable to do so¾a ruthlessly efficient incentive. In short, it’s a world where charity is profitable, materially profitable. If one were to take the Marxist doctrine of the labor exchange of value and put it on a transporter pad with Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and then have a horrible accident in which the two were inadvertently mixed, you’d end up with the world of The Unincorporated Man.

N. K. Jemisin: In [the desert city-state of] Gujaareh (in the forthcoming Dreamblood duology), the economy is modeled on that of ancient Egypt, which gained much of its wealth from being the crossroads of trade for the ancient world. But within Gujaareh, prosperity rests on a few pillars: the first being the land, which is abundantly fertile thanks to the annual flooding of the river, and the second being free healthcare and universal education, which makes for a healthy, highly-skilled population that doesn’t lose much productivity to disease or short life-spans.

The healthcare and education are provided by the priesthood of Hananja, the goddess of dreams, in exchange for a moderate tithe from each citizen—including tithes of dreams (and sometimes lives), which are the source of magic in this world. But more magic is taken from the populace than is needed to keep it healthy. That leaves a surplus—and people being people, someone in Gujaareh is going to find a way to make money off this surplus, even though it’s essentially people’s souls. And just as the commoditization of faith has repeatedly torn apart the Catholic Church (and other religious institutions), it creates a huge problem in Gujaareh as well.

Brian Francis Slattery: Lost Everything is based more or less on my understanding of the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the Second Congo War (1998-2003). I didn’t experience any of it firsthand, which is why the word “understanding” is probably a vast exaggeration to describe what I think I’ve grasped about the DRC—but I learned as much as I could about it, through books and documentaries. Perhaps most harrowing was a movie called Kisangani Diary by Hubert Sauper (who also made Darwin’s Nightmare), about Rwandan refugees in the DRC during that time; it stands in my mind as a particularly unblinking account of human suffering that probably happens much more than those of us in the privileged world would like to think.

Charlie Stross: One novel I’m working on at present is a space opera, set in a universe with no faster than light travel. The one thing valuable enough to be worth trade across interstellar distances is the uploaded minds of people with specialized skills; and they have an entire currency system fine-tuned to handle incredibly slow interstellar exchanges, a form of digicash where transactions have to be digitally signed by banks separated by interstellar distances. Because, of course, if you’re selling goods that won’t arrive for decades, the last thing you want in return is a currency that is prone to bubbles and market crashes.

John C. Wright: Of my books, only The Golden Age, which was meant to depict a libertarian near-utopia (for libertarians, utopia is not an option) addressed any economic issues, and this because economics is at the core of libertarian thinking. Indeed, one is tempted to describe libertarianism as the attempt to apply free market principles to personal and political and other relationships outside the market.

The postulate of the Golden Oecumene was that all exchanges and interactions were voluntary, including the uses of technology that could rewrite a man’s own memory, personality, habits, and change his body and soul to suit himself. This was combined with a strict moral imperative of absolute personal sovereignty. No one could lay a finger on another man’s property, not one brain cell in his head, not one mote of his person or property, without his consent, no, not even to rescue him from self-destruction. This was your humble author’s attempt to carry a libertarian political principle to its logical extreme.

The society was also depicted as being immensely, unimaginably wealthy, as far above us in wealth as we Moderns of the Industrialized world are above even the wealthiest cattle owner of the Bronze Age. No matter how many tents and wives and head of cattle he had, the ancient shepherd-king could not afford an aspirin when his royal head ached.

In my book, the depiction was of a society that could accomplish nearly anything that was possible: ignite Jupiter to a second sun; put a greenhouse over Antarctica; take a vacation once every thousand years for a year, when all the world’s business stopped; tame the solar wind by building a structure of artificial energy-matter inside the photosphere of the sun. But since I wanted some realism in my unrealistic utopia, I enforced certain rules of economics which are built into the nature of reality, and which no social order, howsoever different from our own or enlightened above ours, can ever change: there will always be sacristy of resources. No matter how wealthy your society, there will always be tasks the imagination of man can conceive which has not the current resources to achieve.

There will always be conflict. In one scene, my protagonist Phaethon wants to re-engineer Saturn and abolish his distinctive rings. Since there is only one Saturn, certain machines who had filled up the interior volume of the core of that gas giant objected to the proposal, as did those for whom the glory of the ring system had a value beyond any economic value.

There will always be rich and poor. Even if the poor are unimaginably richer in utopia than the richest man of the modern day, equality of income is neither practical nor possible, since the nature of economic exchange presupposes an inequality of skills and goods, hence an inequality of the value your neighbors and customer will put on those skills and goods.

Whether the neighbor’s valuation is arbitrary or not is beside the point: I assume nearly anyone reading these words would be more eager to see a sequel of a new Star Wars movie than a movie made by an unknown? Even if the unknown movie was better, the brand name means something to most fans, because of the good will built up over decades, therefore the market, that is, the aggregate decisions of all the participants in their decisions to buy or refrain from buying, would value a new Star Wars sequel more highly than an unknown movie. Likewise, there will always be a need for market exchanges.

Again, even if all the members in a utopia are a rich as Croesus and King Midas combined, the less skilled of worker will find it to his advantage to do the work he does best and to specialize in it, even if, paradoxically, he lives alongside superhuman machines and artificial persons more skilled in all endeavors than he. A handyman who cleans a surgeons tools in two hours, which the surgeon, more skilled at tool-cleaning could clean in one hour, if the surgeon’s skill is worth $100 an hour, it will be worth it for him to hire any handyman who charges less than $50 an hour, not because he cannot clean the tools twice as well as the handyman, but because it is not worth the loss of his time that could be better spent doing what he is really good at.

In an extended society, this very inequality that promotes market exchanges creates an incentive for men to associate with each other beyond the range of their immediate emotional orbit of family and clan and friends. A civilization is possible. Without this, what you have is not civilization. No matter how technologically advanced you are, if you have no social relations, you are barbarians.

This is rather openly dramatized in the book by the portrayal of the Lords of the Silent Oecumene, whose society consists of a population of hermits who live surrounded by the super-intelligent machines which create for them their illusions of reality. At the core of their system is a black hole from which they can derive, in apparent contradiction of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, free energy in infinite amounts. But this situation eroded their need, and soon robbed them of the desire, to maintain civic social relations. Each man was a Lord, a lonely sovereign, almost a god—and, like the pagan gods of old, answerable to no one, needing nothing, and having no law or civilized customs. To answer, at long last, the question you asked: what did the utopian post-humans in the Golden Oecumene use for money?

Money in the real world is relatively stable in supply, keeps its value over time, is identifiable, hard to counterfeit or dilute, is always in demand, is fungible, and is divisible. Of all things in history, so far, gold and silver have best track record of satisfying these criteria. The artificial credit of nation-states has proved less successful, since it is vulnerable to inflation for political purposes. In the make believe world of the far future, I tried to pick a good that the happy folk of that day would always want and need, and could always identify. I said that they had three competing currencies: one was energy, measured by ergs; one was computer time, measured by seconds; and the last was gold. I mean, hey, they live in the far future, but it is allegedly our future they live in, so something of our customs and institutions would survive.

In sum, the economy there worked according to the same rules as the economy here. Economics is a science, after all, and a science fiction book, even if it is allowed to play fast and loose with speculation, is not supposed to violate any known laws of science. The laws of economics do not change any more than the laws of physics do. The same incentives were in place then as now.

What is the relationship between character and economy in fiction?

Dani Kollin: Tenuous at best. Think of Star Trek. The only economic characters that were dealt with in any detail were the Ferengi, portrayed mainly as the gnomes of Zurich. They were the slapstick race of the galaxy; good for a laugh but when things got serious you brought in the Klingons or the Borg. That’s because for most people economics is boring. This holds true in all fiction, not just the science variety. We all love to see the hero discover the mountain of gold. It’s fun and a great story. Has anyone ever written a compelling fictional narrative on what happened to the world economy when that found mountain of gold was introduced into international markets? Nope, and for good reason¾it would be pretty boring. You can explain an economic system as a backdrop and use it as a catalyst to move your story forward (as we did in The Unincorporated Man), but you’d better have a story to move forward or no matter how ingenious your economy, your audience will go home.

Elizabeth Bear: We have to work to eat, don’t we? And work is what gives our lives purpose—a calling, as it were. I think we get so divorced from the means of production in our modern society that we forget that for a half million years, creatures we would recognize as human have gotten by from day to day by growing things, hunting things, making things, harvesting things, gleaning things, trading things. Everything comes from somewhere: dinner does not materialize neatly in a plastic package under fluorescent lights at the supermarket.

Charlie Stross: I tend to use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a guide: We have basic needs that must be fulfilled in order to stay alive, and secondary needs in order to feel comfortable. So economic activities are always a necessary background detail of characterization. In roughly contemporary fiction, that usually means the protagonist has a salaried job (or equivalent), which puts constraints on their freedom of agency; used correctly it can be a very effective contrast medium for highlighting their personality.

Two signs of a somewhat lazy author: a protagonist who is independently wealthy, or one who is down-and-out and hasn’t got two cents to rub together. The former has freedom of agency, while the latter has no commitments and nothing to lose. Both of which are headaches the author now doesn’t have to worry about—neither the billionaire nor the tramp spend any time worrying about the boss phoning up at 9 p.m. on a Sunday to ask them to hold down a shift for a no-show on the Monday when they’re supposed to be having adventures! (See also the Bruce Wayne problem.)

Brian Francis Slattery: As I see it, for each character, the economy is a bit like the weather. It shapes the world they live in: Good weather presents opportunities to do things that are impossible in bad weather, and when really big storms come, initially the only thing to do is to try to survive it. After the storm passes, the characters’ individual worlds are changed, perhaps subtly, perhaps broadly—maybe, through some weird quirk, as much for the better as for the worse—and they must figure out how to do the best they can with what they have. So far, I’ve tended to write about what happens when things go bad generally—and this is revealing my own biases when I write novels—but at least in my case, I’ve tried to focus on people who survive, resist, and perhaps even overcome the hardships they face, because they’re hardy, clever, resourceful, or maybe just lucky.

Part of the pleasure in writing characters for me is in discovering how each individual reacts to the situation they face. I learn so much more about the characters, the kind of story I’m trying to tell, and the way the characters (as they often do) derail my original intentions. That said, I could very easily imagine a book about characters who can’t overcome the difficulties they face, and I can see how such a book could be really compelling. And I’m really interested in writing stories in which the economic environment changes a lot over time—where things are pretty volatile—to see what kinds of stories might emerge from that.

John C. Wright: In the utopian commonwealth of the far future depicted in The Golden Age, everything was for sale except for justice, honor, and personal integrity. It is the cost of not selling one’s personal integrity, however, which forms the point of the drama of the book. My hero was willing to give up everything, including his own memory, to keep it.

What is the value of the money in your world(s), and what can it be used to buy, etc.?

John C. Wright: In general, there is almost no relationship, unless you write a tale where the main point of the drama is an economic disaster like a depression or a strike. See Atlas Shrugged for a good example of how this can be done artfully and dramatically. Whether one agrees with the author’s theories or not, what Ayn Rand did in that book is instructive for any writer: She tied the moral code and hence the drama of the main characters into the economics of the events going on around her. In this way, the events were not about positive or negative cash flow (which is boring) but about good and evil (which is the most dramatic thing in the world, nay, the only dramatic thing).

Charlie Stross: It depends on the world in question. Sometimes it’ll buy you a better brain or a nicer lifestyle, or the chance to try and dig an entire nation out of a development trap. And sometimes all it buys you is a nicer seat on the train to the extermination camp, or a silk rope for the gallows. Money can only buy what’s for sale.

This raises the fun topic of the diminishing marginal utility of money; if I give you a $100 bill, it means less to you than it would were I to donate it to a homeless guy trying to live rough in a blizzard, and both of you would value it more than, say, Warren Buffett. Similarly, despite being a billionaire, Steve Jobs couldn’t buy a cure for his cancer at any price: It just didn’t exist. (He could afford to register for a liver transplant in three states, then keep an executive jet on 60-minute readiness for three months while waiting for a histocompatible organ to come up—but that pretty much exhausts the limits of what money can buy you by way of extra medical treatment, short of dropping a few tens of billions on cancer research ten years before you need it.)

Elizabeth Bear: The world of the Eternal Sky is not using fiat currency yet—it’s all hard currency and trade goods. And the control of the trade routes is a major driving force in the narrative. Trade is money, and money is armies, and armies are power—not to mention that trade is the ability to feed your people, and build aqueducts, and gain or maintain temporal power.

N. K. Jemisin: In the world of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms—a society whose guiding principle is order—money buys impunity from orderly rules and structures, up to a point. The movers and shakers in this world are exempt from all laws; in The Broken Kingdoms one character explains that the right to kill without consequence is the ultimate power claimed by those at the top of society.

Dani Kollin: Ours is a post-singularity world, so money can buy you trips around the solar system, perfect health for centuries, (rather cheaply too as everyone has a vested interest in keeping you working for centuries so they can milk you for earnings), huge houses with a robotized cleaning staff to keep it sparkling. Surprisingly enough the curse of rising standards still applies. Money can’t get you laid on a Friday night unless you are naturally good at that sort of thing, or can afford to pay for it. But remember, sex is a constant because it is a human need and remains a relatively consistent one. Money can’t buy you love (The Beatles were right in this regard). It can’t buy you friends, though it can buy you companions. Remember that money is both a lubricant of technological progress and the means to access the technology already produced, and does both at the exact same time.

N. K. Jemisin: Money [In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms] also buys magic, which is technically restricted to those with the training to use it, though of course obtaining this training, or hiring those who possess it, is beyond the means of most people. But because magic has been commoditized, a thriving black market in illicit magic exists as well. The magic that poor people can buy is minor stuff—spells to heal chronic medical problems, occasional favors from local gods who are willing to sell their services, temporary conferrals of power sold by those gods as a magical narcotic. The wealthy can buy the sorts of “miracles” seen in our own technological world: the ability to travel across the planet swiftly, deadly long-distance firepower, instantaneous communication.

But the greatest power in this world—the greatest impunity—is priceless. This is possessed by the gods, who are exempt even from the laws of physics and nature. Since the Arameri have ownership of some gods’ slave labor at the beginning of the trilogy, they effectively control godlike power. This isn’t something that can be purchased; one must have the right combination of ethnicity, lineage, and luck.

Brian Francis Slattery: In the three books I’ve written, the best way to describe the value of money is variable or even volatile. Ever since I grasped the concept, the idea that money is a sort of convenient social fiction has never been too far from my mind—you know, because the paper notes are inherently worthless, and the value is really only in our minds—and I’ve gravitated toward stories where the characters are acutely aware of that fiction and thus only half buy into it.

I’ve once again taken my cues from my experiences in poorer countries, where, with multiple currencies and unstable exchange rates at play, the fiction about money’s worth is pretty shaky, and makes the value of everything much more negotiable than it is in a place like the United States. It can lead to some pretty horrific transactions: people willing to sell themselves, or even worse, being involuntarily sold, for what someone in the United States would pay for an air conditioner.

But the other side of that logic has people going about their day-to-day lives with, in some ways, more humor in it. If every transaction turns into haggling, the idea isn’t so much about parting fools from their cash as it is about arriving at an exchange that everyone’s reasonably happy with, which could mean a lot more social interaction at, say, the supermarket, than we in the United States are accustomed to. As someone who thinks more social interaction is generally a good thing, that particular aspect of haggling, of bargaining with mirth and with the intention of reaching agreement, is something I’ve really enjoyed whenever I’ve had a chance to do it, and I’ve tried to put as much of that into my books as I can.

N. K. Jemisin: In Gujaareh, money buys dreams and nightmares. But I can’t talk more about that ’til the duology comes out!

John C. Wright: Where economics might play a role is as backdrop. In a movie like Cindarella Man, the Great Depression shows the backdrop of the hero and lends drama to his prizefighting career, because he is boxing not for prize money but for milk money. When his child steals a salami from the butcher, it becomes a poignant, even triumphant, moment for the father to teach the child that hardship does not excuse wrongdoing—and a scene like that would lack drama had the child not been poor and hungry, and the father hungrier than the child. But, for all this, the Great Depression was a backdrop: the causes or cure of the Depression was never mentioned in the film, nor should it have been. Cindarella Man was melodrama, not SF, but the same rules of how to cobble a good story still apply.

Charlie Stross: In a science-fictional context, it’s the job of the designer of the secondary world to work out what items are available for sale, or unavailable at any price. Which in turn may have a big impact on your characters’ motivations.

Any parting words of encouragement, advice, or mischief for writers struggling with economics in their secondary worlds?

Brian Francis Slattery: Avoid ideology, which is not the same thing as avoiding politics.

Elizabeth Bear: Just remember that economics isn’t just some esoteric, high-level thing. It’s every lemonade stand and every ferryman and every wandering bard.

Charlie Stross: Don’t assume that capitalism is the only way to mediate exchanges of value. Even in the world today, by some estimates only around 25 percent of exchanges are mediated via the formal cash-based economy. The commonest economic unit around the world today is that bastion of Marxist communism, the family unit—within which everyone pools their assets and allocation is on the basis of need. It doesn’t scale up well, but between parents and children/siblings it generally works well. Again, there have been many gift-based societies, and others where status is determined by one’s ability to conspicuously destroy luxuries. Indeed, there’s a body of theory based on historical studies and sociology that suggests money was originally invented as internal tokens for accounting within Neolithic temple complexes, and predates barter (while the classical economic theory is that barter came first, and money was a formalization to permit exchanges of value between people with dissimilar goods to trade).

The way we do things in the developed western economies today is very weird by historical standards. So when writing fiction, work out what people value first — and what their role is in their society. The economics then emerge from the inter-personal relations, and enrich the background and characterization.

John C. Wright: One thing writers should avoid is this: writing about economics if you are an ignoramus. I read a book by an author whose name I won’t mention, and in an early chapter, as part of his future history, he depicts an economic catastrophe and the events leading to it. Because I was interested in economics, I was curious as to how this author would handle the economics involved. Because the author was a famous hard science fiction writer, known for doing his homework and getting his technical facts straight, I was not just curious, but eager to see him handle a science known to me.

The author proposed that a worldwide economic depression could be caused, not by government interference in the credit cycle, but by investors all over the world trading online turning their computers off at night so that one hemisphere was engaged in speculation while the other was not, creating a speculator’s bubble, which lead to a panic and a run on the banks. (This was written before the days of the Internet, you young whippersnappers, so the idea of a worldwide Wall Street connected electronically was shiny new SF speculation of the first water.) I can hardly suppress my groan of disappointment. A schoolboy with one semester of freshman economics could have set this author straight: Speculators do not cause a general depression of the prize of wages and goods. Only meddling with the money supply can do that, and speculators have no such power.

This hard SF writer, so well known for doing his homework, had the dog eat hit homework this time. The portrait of how economic concatenation works was about at the level of Karl Marx, which is to say, cargo-cult economics. Imagine reading a book where a rocketship is described as zooming up through the upper atmosphere to space and then finding itself helplessly adrift due to the fact that in space there is no air for the rockets to push against. The error of this writer was of that magnitude. If you are going to write economics into your SF, make it dramatic, and do your homework.

N. K. Jemisin: “Follow the money” is a political adage that I’ve found useful in world-building, because it helps me consider a society as a supply chain. I have to think about who’s on the receiving end of that supply chain; how and what systems work to transport wealth, concentrate it, and resist its loss to those who “aren’t supposed to” have it; and who/what is being exploited to provide it. Just thinking that through sets up most of your societal world-building right there. And one of the most useful things I did in coming up with the Dreamblood world was to study the economics of ancient societies. But it’s not the big stuff that reveals the economics, like monuments; what you really want to look at are the hair ornaments.

No, don’t look at me like that. Consider: Every human culture does stuff with its hair. So who makes the brushes? How does an ordinary person buy or make a comb, or a clip, or beads, or hair dye? How do they buy it, and how much does it cost—not just in resources but in time and labor? How can they afford the free time to do elaborate things with their hair, if they do? (Yeah, okay, so you might have a fantasy world full of bald people; I’m speaking figuratively, here. But if they’re bald, how do they get their scalp-polish?)

What I’m getting at is, economics are visible in the everyday. Nearly every major city has a museum that showcases art or artifacts that depict everyday life in various cultures—even the tiniest museums have that. So go look at the toothbrushes. Figure out how the clothes are made. What’s a luxury food, and what’s a staple, and how is either one obtained, and who gets to eat what? Looking at the little things did more to help me figure out the “big picture” than reading a dozen economic texts. But economic texts are helpful too. I really liked Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

Dani Kollin: Don’t worry about it too much. Ours is very unique situation where economics was at the heart of the novel. Almost every other novel in the world will have [economics] at the periphery. If you have a great story and you don’t mess up the economics (to the point where it distracts), you can get away with being vague. Just deliver on the parts readers care about (sex, violence, love, betrayal, family, drama, humor, etc.) and they’ll forgive that you didn’t explain how ATMs work on a gas giant in the Andromeda Galaxy.

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.

Another Word: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Me

Daniel Abraham

A few years ago, I was at a workshop with an author who I deeply admire and personally enjoy. We were talking about community, and what made up our community, and it became clear very quickly that we had completely different definitions of the word. She meant something like “people who mutually acknowledge themselves to be peers,” where I meant something closer to “whoever’s actually around.” By her definition, for instance, there aren’t any high school dropouts, drug dealers, or billionaires in my community. By my definition, of course, there are.

When I was young, my father read me a story about a man who stepped out of bed one morning and sank into the ground a little. Through the whole day, the man sank lower and lower until, at the end of the story, he was entirely underground. The last image was of him reaching up to touch the sole of his lover’s shoe as she stood waiting for him.

The story was by Enrique Anderson Imbert and wasn’t translated into English. My father was translating it to me as he read. Imbert became one of my favorite authors of weird stories—the one about the man who became so light that he had to be tied to his own bedpost until the line broke and he floated away; the one about the father who vanished in front of his family—even though, because of my ignorance of Spanish, I couldn’t read the stories for myself.

The stories were surreal and strange, and the recurring theme of disappearance had a sense of melancholy and threat that a kid like me fed on. When I started writing, Imbert was as important to me as Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein. It was years before I found out that Imbert was Argentinian and heard of the dirty war.

My parents read to me a lot and widely. John Bellairs and Lloyd Alexander and C. S. Lewis. I don’t think my parents took part in reading circles (does anyone actually have reading circles anymore?) out of poverty. It was just something they enjoyed, and because I was the kind of kid I was, I enjoyed them too. I remember walking about three or four blocks from our house to a friend’s. I can’t remember who the friend was or who was there, even though I still drive past the house almost every day when I’m taking my daughter to school.

But I do remember they were reading Maya Angelou. I was older than seven, younger than fourteen. I couldn’t put a year to this if you paid me. I remember a little bit of the floor plan of the house we were in. I don’t know who was reading, and I certainly don’t remember their voice or the words. I remember being Maya Angelou auditioning to be a dancer at a sleazy strip joint, not sure what to wear or what to dance to, intimidated by the sexuality of the other dancers, improvising to a song I hadn’t rehearsed to. I remember the sense of insecurity and humiliation and the profound relief bordering on gratitude of getting the job at the end. It was as heady and intoxicating for a preteen Anglo boy as anything I’d ever heard.

It’s three decades later. Before I wrote this essay, I went back to track that scene down. It’s short. Maybe two or three pages. It was exactly like I remembered it. I even remembered which song she danced to.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but after college, I worked at Borders Books and Music. Shelving books was part of the job, and there were four-digit codes that told us which section each of the books belonged in. The first digit showed the general section—art, for instance—and the next three narrowed it: single-artist coffee table book. Or psychology narrowed to self-help. Things that were generally related but not the same all got their own shelf space. In fiction, Literature got the lion’s share with the other categories—romance, horror, science fiction, African-American literature, mystery—all getting their own little stretches of shelf.

Now, be honest, did you have a little hiccup there? African-American literature had its own shelf space. I wasn’t shelving Maya Angelou up near James Agee or even Kobo Abe. She was over with Toni Morrison and W. E. B. DuBois in their own place, as if she were not part of my literature. It was the only place in the store that books were shelved according to the race of their authors.

When I talked to my manager about my discomfort with this, she told me that the company did it that way because black people wanted to have the section. They would come in and ask for it. Those were books (I took her to mean) that in the opinion of the corporation spoke to their experience, not ours. This was reinforced by the fact that the first digit of African-American Lit wasn’t the 6 of literature but the 3 of anthropology and sociology.

There are more stories like those. Seriously, I could go on all day. Jorge Amado’s Home is the Sailor with its hilariously intrusive narrator and my misunderstanding of the word “cunt.” The central place of Albert Manguel’s magical realist anthology Black Water in my early short stories. My introduction to bell hooks via Jane Campion’s The Piano. Octavia Butler, Mario Vargas Llosa, Italo Calvino. Red Sky at Morning. The Ways of White Folk. My reading was always omnivorous, and sometimes the stories were by and about people who weren’t like me. Sometimes they were important to me all the same.

The debate between multiculturalism and assimilation—between the salad bowl and the melting pot—hasn’t got a side that matches my experience.

As I understand it, assimilation calls for identifying with the dominant culture—teaching and speaking only English, Americanizing names, etc.—in order to build a common context everyone participates in. The good part of assimilation is the goal of a unified, shared culture, a kind of universal buy-in of mutual allegiance. The bad part is that it does it by trying to ignore, silence, and pretend away things that don’t fit with the picture of that culture. That strikes me as . . . well, wrong-headed is a polite word.

Living as I do in the only state in the union that’s bilingual by its constitution, I have a better opinion of multiculturalism, but not without reservation. The good part of multiculturalism is that it tries to acknowledge and celebrate things that aren’t usually included in the dominant narrative, and I’m comfortable with that. The consequence that doesn’t sit so well with me is that, in practice, we seem to divide traditions and voices into fiefdoms—African-American culture, Hispanic culture, white culture. When I say that seems wrong to me, I don’t mean morally wrong. I mean inaccurate. My experience is that as soon as two cultures touch, they mix.

One of my father’s hobbies is tracing cowboy slang back to Spanish: vamoose from vamonos, mosey from muevese. The tradition of rhyming poetry came into the Western world from Moorish Spain, and I hear it on my radio every day. On the Day of the Dead, my daughter and I went to my grandmother’s grave and left a picture of my kid and a pack of cigarettes on it. I didn’t go down to the south valley for the parade, but about half the people I know did. I went to a Japanese drumming performance once where the opening act was an Indian heavy metal band. My lived experience already draws from more than what “white” or “Anglo” supplies.

My family came from a highly religious Welsh community and moved to America, or, more plausibly, made up Welsh roots to hide Jewish ones. (Ira and Miriam Abraham, the Welsh Christian couple. Suuuure.) Other folks I know are in families that came to New Mexico before it was American; they spoke Spanish, hid menorahs in their basements, and pretended to have pork allergies. And there are people whose families came here in chains. And people who were living here when all these other folks showed up. And people who aren’t Americans at all, but publish books for American audiences. Or whose books found their way to a guy who could translate them on the fly while he was reading to his kid.

Maya Angelou and Enrique Anderson Imbert already a part of my literature, no matter where they get shelved. Likewise Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, and Eduardo Galeano, and Alberto Manguel. Their books are available, although some require some work to track down. I’ve read them. I’ve incorporated, rejected, and forgotten bits of all their work. My literature also includes Dorothy Sayers and Dorothy Dunnett, Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett, Albert Camus, Terry Brooks, Rumi, David Eddings, Cornell Woolrich, Orson Scott Card, and Dan Simmons. Hell, it includes The Turner Diaries, and I think that book’s evil.

My literary experience is broad and unfocused and it’s not a tenth of a percent of what’s out there. Some of it’s wonderful, some of it’s hateful, some of it’s kind of goofy. The books cover the whole range of sins and conflicts within and among people, and they talk about universal experiences that everyone shares. They walk me through experiences and perspectives I can’t get to any other way and make my life richer, deeper, and more interesting. My guess is they do the same for you.

I believe in a single, common literature too large for any one person to embody or experience. It’s a literature that has deep conflicts within it, where people’s experiences diverge and their descriptions of events can be mutually exclusive. By literature, I mean culture, and by culture, I mean society.

And by believe, I don’t mean aspire to; I mean it’s already like that, whether we acknowledge it or not.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Clarkesworld by the Numbers

Neil Clarke

I’m a data junkie. Over the last five-plus years, I’ve collected a lot of data about all things Clarkesworld and some about the state of online fiction. This month, I thought I’d dig into that data and share some of the more interesting data and what they mean to me.

I’m going to start with something that says a lot about the history of Clarkesworld and perhaps even a little about the growing acceptance of online fiction since 2006:

The solid line in this chart indicates unique readers per issue and the dotted line is a cumulative six-month average that influences how I determine our monthly readership.

One of the first things I notice when I look at this graph are the spikes and how they become more pronounced over time. When we first launched in 2006, online fiction was still suffering from an image problem, the audience was much smaller, and there were very few SFWA-qualifying online magazines. None of those problems exist today. The spikes for those early years are small and reflect the lower potential audience of the time. This fits within the context of discussions I’ve had with other editors that were around at the time.

If the size of a spike can help you guage the changes in potential market, the frequency should demonstrate interest in what the magazine has to offer. It’s also a great visual indicator of the viral nature of the medium we’re working in. If you like something, you are more likely to share it. If someone shares something with you and you like it, you might just stick around and become a regular reader. In a sense, this is just good old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, but on steroids.

I do feel the need to comment here. When we select stories or articles, our goal is to pick great content. As far as we’re concerned, spikes happen when people think we met our goal. They are a side-effect, not the objective.

By now, you’re probably curious about what triggered some of those spikes, so here’s a few:

1. An editorial on the state of short fiction
2. “Spar” by Kij Johnson
3. “The Things” by Peter Watts
4. Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for Clarkesworld, “Spar” and “Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin.
5. Hugo win for Best Semiprozine.
6. Several items, including a resurgence in activity for “The Things”, “Spar”, and various non-fiction. Also strong showings for the first part of the serialization of “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente and “Tying Knots” by Ken Liu.

OUR READERS

We don’t know much about our readers, not even the ones that are subscribing to our Kindle or EPUB editions at Amazon and Weightless. (Ok, we do know you’re all really classy people who empower us to keep doing what we do!) However, web statistics give us a hint. For example:

70% of our readers are in the USA
20% of our readers are in the UK, Canada or Australia
10% read from a total of over 30 different countries, more than half of which aren’t English-speaking countries
35% use an Apple computer
15% use Windows XP
5% use some form of Unix/Linux
Our most widely read story is “The Things” by Peter Watts (240K+ readers)
Our most widely listened to story is also “The Things” (17K+ listeners)
Roughly 5-6K of you listen to our stories on our podcast

According to Facebook:

Obviously, this is more a profile of the 3500 people who are willing to follow us on Facebook (as opposed to the over 25K reading the magazine), but it does paint an interesting picture. This is something I’d love to have better data on, but in the end, it doesn’t influence us all that much though it might come in handy if someone decides they want to buy ad space from us.

SHORT STORIES

Since 2009, I’ve been using an online submission form to collect stories from authors interested in being published in our magazine. These stories make up what is known as the “slush pile” and I occasionally post slush pile statistics over on my blog. Here, I’m going to focus on the big picture.

The solid line is the number of stories submitted to Clarkesworld on a monthly basis. The dotted line is the number of rejection letters that go out in the same month. As you can see, we receive a lot more stories than we could ever publish. The two dips to zero were months we closed to submissions, typically Christmas break. The huge jump after the second reopening maps to a change in submission guidelines (allowing longer stories) and surge in readership and award nominations very close to spike #3 on the chart above.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

There isn’t a lot to be said about this. I have no way of knowing whether or not what we are seeing here is an accurate representation of the short fiction authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. This data is more interesting in comparison to the following:

Over the years, I’ve found it very interesting that the gender breakdown for accepted stories at any given period in our history is nearly evenly split, despite the wider disparity between the genders in the volume of submissions. I’ve seen all sorts of interesting interpretations of this data, but from my standpoint it simply says that when it comes to talent, neither gender has an upper hand. In the end, quantity loses to quality.

Now, let’s look at international submissions:

The top eleven are shown, with the Phillipines just missing the cut at number 12. They and ninety other countries represent that “other” wedge of the pie. I’m very pleased by the variety of countries represented, but the top four tend to dominate the stories we publish. In the last year, however, we have had the pleasure of publishing two Chinese translations. This is an aspect of the magazine that I hope to see expand over the next few years and a way data is influencing how I run things.

If you’ve made it this far, you can consider yourself a fellow data junkie. If you’d like to see more, or have any questions, please feel free to jump into the comments and ask away.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.