Mantis Wives

Kij Johnson

“As for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror.” —John Wyndham.

Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing their husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young. Before this, a wife devoured her lover piece by piece during the act of coition: the head (and its shining eyes going dim as she ate); the long green prothorax; the forelegs crisp as straws; the bitter wings. She left for last the metathorax and its pumping legs, the abdomen, and finally the phallus. Mantis women needed nutrients for their pregnancies; their lovers offered this as well as their seed.

It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

The Bitter Edge: A wife may cut through her husband’s exoskeletal plates, each layer a different pattern, so that to look at a man is to see shining, hard brocade. At the deepest level are visible pieces of his core, the hint of internal parts bleeding out. He may suggest shapes.

The Eccentric Curve of His Thoughts: A wife may drill the tiniest hole into her lover’s head and insert a fine hair. She presses carefully, striving for specific results: a seizure, a novel pheromone burst, a dance that ends in self-castration. If she replaces the hair with a wasp’s narrow syringing stinger, she may blow air bubbles into his head and then he will react unpredictably. There is otherwise little he may do that will surprise her, or himself.

What is the art of the men, that they remain to die at the hands of their wives? What is the art of the wives, that they kill?

The Strength of Weight: Removing his wings, she leads him into the paths of ants.

Unready Jewels: A mantis wife may walk with her husband across the trunks of pines, until they come to a trail of sap and ascend to an insect-clustered wound. Staying to the side, she presses him down until his legs stick fast. He may grow restless as the sap sheathes his body and wings. His eyes may not dim for some time. Smaller insects may cluster upon his honeyed body like ornaments.

A mantis woman does not know why the men crave death, but she does not ask. Does she fear resistance? Does she hope for it? She has forgotten the ancient reasons for her acts, but in any case her art is more important.

The Oubliette: Or a wife may take not his life but his senses: plucking the antennae from his forehead; scouring with dust his clustered shining eyes; cracking apart his mandibles to scrape out the lining of his mouth and throat; plucking the sensing hairs from his foremost legs; excising the auditory thoracic organ; biting free the wings.

A mantis woman is not cruel. She gives her husband what he seeks. Who knows what poems he fashions in the darkness of a senseless life?

The Scent of Violets: They mate many times, until one dies.

Two Stones Grind Together: A wife collects with her forelegs small brightly colored poisonous insects, places them upon bitter green leaves, and encourages her husband to eat them. He is sometimes reluctant after the first taste but she speaks to him, or else he calms himself and eats.

He may foam at the mouth and anus, or grow paralyzed and fall from a branch. In extreme cases, he may stagger along the ground until he is seen by a bird and swallowed, and then even the bird may die.

A mantis has no veins; what passes for blood flows freely within its protective shell. It does have a heart.

The Desolate Junk-land: Or a mantis wife may lay her husband gently upon a soft bed and bring to him cool drinks and silver dishes filled with sweetmeats. She may offer him crossword puzzles and pornography; may kneel at his feet and tell him stories of mantis men who are heroes; may dance in veils before him.

He tears off his own legs before she begins. It is unclear whether The Desolate Junk-land is her art, or his.

Shame’s Uniformity: A wife may return to the First Art and, in a variant, devour her husband, but from the abdomen forward. Of all the arts this is hardest. There is no hair, no ant’s bite, no sap, no intervening instrument. He asks her questions until the end. He may doubt her motives, or she may.

The Paper-folder. Lichens’ Dance. The Ambition of Aphids. Civil Wars. The Secret History of Cumulus. The Lost Eyes Found. Sedges. The Unbeaked Sparrow.

There are as many arts as there are husbands and wives.

The Cruel Web: Perhaps they wish to love each other, but they cannot see a way to exist that does not involve the barb, the sticking sap, the bitter taste of poison. The Cruel Web can be performed only in the brambles of woods, and only when there has been no recent rain and the spider’s webs have grown thick. Wife and husband walk together. Webs catch and cling to their carapaces, their legs, their half-opened wings. They tear free, but the webs collect. Their glowing eyes grow veiled. Their curious antennae come to a tangled halt. Their pheromones become confused; their legs struggle against the gathering web. The spiders wait.

She is larger than he and stronger, but they often fall together.

How to Live: A mantis may dream of something else. This also may be a trap.

About the Author

Kij Johnson is the author of three novels and a number of short stories, a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (including in 2010, for her Clarkesworld story, “Spar”), and a winner of the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Crawford, and Asimov’s Reader Awards. Currently she splits her time between Seattle and Kansas.

Honey Bear

Sofia Samatar

We’ve decided to take a trip, to see the ocean. I want Honey to see it while she’s still a child. That way, it’ll be magical. I tell her about it in the car: how big it is, and green, like a sky you can wade in.

“Even you?” she asks.

“Even me.”

I duck my head to her hair. She smells fresh, but not sweet at all, like parsley or tea. She’s wearing a little white dress. It’s almost too short. She pushes her bare toes against the seat in front of her, knuckling it like a cat.

“Can you not do that, Hon?” says Dave.

“Sorry, Dad.”

She says “Dad” now. She used to say “Da-Da.”

Dave grips the wheel. I can see the tension in his shoulders. Threads of gray wink softly in his dark curls. He still wears his hair long, covering his ears, and I think he’s secretly a little bit vain about it. A little bit proud of still having all his hair. I think there’s something in this, something valuable, something he could use to get back. You don’t cling to personal vanities if you’ve given up all hope of a normal life. At least, I don’t think you do.

“Shit,” he says.

“Sweetheart…”

He doesn’t apologize for swearing in front of Honey. The highway’s blocked by a clearance area, gloved hands waving us around. He turns the car so sharply the bags in the passenger seat beside him almost fall off the cooler. In the back seat, I lean into Honey Bear.

“It’s okay,” I tell Dave.

“No, Karen, it is not okay. The temp in the cooler is going to last until exactly four o’clock. At four o’clock, we need a fridge, which means we need a hotel. If we are five minutes late, it is not going to be okay.”

“It looks like a pretty short detour.”

“It is impossible for you to see how long it is.”

“I’m just thinking, it doesn’t look like they’ve got that much to clear.”

“Fine, you can think that. Think what you want. But don’t tell me the detour’s not long, or give me any other information you don’t actually have, okay?”

He’s driving faster. I rest my cheek on the top of Honey’s head. The clearance area rolls by outside the window. Cranes, loading trucks, figures in orange jumpsuits. Some of the slick has dried: they’re peeling it up in transparent sheets, like plate glass.

Honey presses a fingertip to the window. “Poo-poo,” she says softly.

I tell her about the time I spent a weekend at the beach. My best friend got so sunburned, her back blistered.

We play the clapping game, “A Sailor Went to Sea-Sea-Sea.” It’s our favorite.

Dave drives too fast, but we don’t get stopped, and we reach the hotel in time. I take my meds, and we put the extra in the hotel fridge. Dave’s shirt is dark with sweat, and I wish he’d relax, but he goes straight out to buy ice, and stores it in the freezer so we can fill the cooler tomorrow. Then he takes a shower and lies on the bed and watches the news. I sit on the floor with Honey, looking at books. I read to her every evening before bed; I’ve never missed a night. Right now, we’re reading The Meadow Fairies by Dorothy Elizabeth Clark.

This is something I’ve looked forward to my whole adult life: reading the books I loved as a child with a child of my own. Honey adores The Meadow Fairies. She snuggles up to me and traces the pretty winged children with her finger. Daffodil, poppy, pink. When I first brought the book home, and Dave saw us reading it, he asked what the point was, since Honey would never see those flowers. I laughed because I’d never seen them either. “It’s about fairies,” I told him, “not botany.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a poppy in my life.

Smiling, though half-asleep,
The Poppy Fairy passes,
Scarlet, like the sunrise,
Among the meadow grasses.

Honey chants the words with me. She’s so smart, she learns so fast. She can pick up anything that rhymes in minutes. Her hair glints in the lamplight. There’s the mysterious, slightly abrasive smell of hotel sheets, a particular hotel darkness between the blinds.

“I love this place,” says Honey. “Can we stay here?”

“It’s an adventure,” I tell her. “Just wait till tomorrow.”

On the news, helicopters hover over the sea. It’s far away, the Pacific. There’s been a huge dump there, over thirty square miles of slick. The effects on marine life are not yet known.

“Will it be fairyland?” Honey asks suddenly.

“What, sweetie?”

“Will it be fairyland, when I’m grown up?”

“Yes,” I tell her. My firmest tone.

“Will you be there?”

No hesitation. “Yes.”

The camera zooms in on the slick-white sea.

By the time I’ve given Honey Bear a drink and put her to bed, Dave’s eyes are closed. I turn off the TV and the lights and get into bed. Like Honey, I love the hotel. I love the hard, tight sheets and the unfamiliar shapes that emerge around me once I’ve gotten used to the dark. It’s been ages since I slept away from home. The last time was long before Honey. Dave and I visited some college friends in Oregon. They couldn’t believe we’d driven all that way. We posed in their driveway, leaning on the car and making the victory sign.

I want the Dave from that photo. That deep suntan, that wide grin.

Maybe he’ll come back to me here, away from home and our neighbors, the Simkos. He spends far too much time at their place.

For a moment, I think he’s back already.

Then he starts shaking. He does it every night. He’s crying in his sleep.

“Ready for the beach?”

“Yes!”

We drive through town to a parking lot dusted with sand. When I step out of the car the warm sea air rolls over me in waves. There’s something lively in it, something electric.

Honey jumps up and down. “Is that it? Is that it?”

“You got it, Honey Bear.”

The beach is deserted. Far to the left, an empty boardwalk whitens in the sun. I kick off my sandals and scoop them up in my hand. The gray sand sticks to my feet. We lumber down to a spot a few yards from some boulders, lugging bags and towels.

“Can I take my shoes off too? Can I go in the ocean?”

“Sure, but let me take your dress off.”

I pull it off over her head, and her lithe, golden body slips free. She’s so beautiful, my Bear. I call her Honey because she’s my sweetheart, my little love, and I call her Bear for the wildness I dream she will keep always. Honey suits her now, but when she’s older she might want us to call her Bear. I would’ve loved to be named Bear when I was in high school.

“Don’t go too deep,” I tell her, “just up to your tummy, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, and streaks off, kicking up sand behind her.

Dave has laid out the towels. He’s weighted the corners with shoes and the cooler so they won’t blow away. He’s set up the two folding chairs and the umbrella. Now, with nothing to organize or prepare, he’s sitting on a chair with his bare feet resting on a towel. He looks lost.

“Not going in?” I ask.

I think for a moment he’s going to ignore me, but then he makes an effort. “Not right away,” he says.

I slip off my shorts and my halter top and sit in the chair beside him in my suit. Down in the water, Honey jumps up and down and shrieks.

“Look at that.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“She loves it.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m so glad we brought her. Thank you.” I reach out and give his wrist a squeeze.

“Look at that fucked-up clown on the boardwalk,” he says. “It looks like it used to be part of an arcade entrance or something. Probably been there for fifty years.”

The clown towers over the boardwalk. It’s almost white, but you can see traces of red on the nose and lips, traces of blue on the hair.

“Looks pretty old,” I agree.

“Black rocks, filthy gray sand, and a fucked-up arcade clown. That’s what we’ve got. That’s the beach.”

It comes out before I can stop it: “Okay, Mr. Simko.”

Dave looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He looks at his watch. “I don’t want to stay here for more than an hour. I want us to take a break, go back to the hotel and rest for a bit. Then we’ll have lunch, and you can take your medication.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“You know what?” He looks gray, worn out, beaten down, like something left out in the rain. His eyes wince away from the light. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it if he never comes back. “I think,” he tells me, “that Mr. Simko is a pretty fucking sensible guy.”

I lean back in the chair, watching Honey Bear in the water. I hate the Simkos. Mr. Simko’s bent over and never takes off his bathrobe. He sits on his porch drinking highballs all day, and he gets Dave to go over there and drink too. I can hear them when I’ve got the kitchen window open. Mr. Simko says things like “Après nous le déluge” and “Keep your powder dry and your pecker wet.” He tells Dave he wishes he and Mrs. Simko didn’t have Mandy. I’ve heard him say that. “I wish we’d never gone in for it. Broke Linda’s heart.” Who does he think brings him the whiskey to make his highballs?

Mrs. Simko never comes out of the house except when Mandy comes home. Then she appears on the porch, banging the door behind her. She’s bent over like her husband and wears a flowered housedress. Her hair is black fluff, with thin patches here and there, as if she’s burned it. “Mandy, Mandy,” she croons, while Mandy puts the stuff down on the porch: liquor, chocolate, clothes, all the luxury goods you can’t get at the Center. Stuff you can only get from a child who’s left home. Mandy never looks at her mother. She hasn’t let either of the Simkos touch her since she moved out.

“I’m going down in the water with Honey,” I say, but Dave grabs my arm.

“Wait. Look.”

I turn my head, and there are Fair Folk on the rocks. Six of them, huge and dazzling. Some crouch on the boulders; others swing over the sea on their flexible wings, dipping their toes in the water.

“Honey!” Dave shouts. “Honey! Come here!”

“C’mon, Hon,” I call, reassuring.

Honey splashes toward us, glittering in the sun.

“Come here!” barks Dave.

“She’s coming,” I tell him.

He clutches the arms of his chair. I know he’s afraid because of the clearance area we passed on the highway, the slick.

“Come here,” he repeats as Honey runs up panting. He glances at the Fair Folk. They’re looking at us now, lazy and curious.

I get up and dry Honey off with a towel. “What?” she says.

“Just come over here,” says Dave, holding out his arms. “Come and sit with Daddy.”

Honey walks over and curls up in his lap. I sit in the chair next to them and Dave puts his hand on my shoulder. He’s got us. He’s holding everyone.

Two of the Fair Folk lift and ripple toward us through the light. There seems to be more light wherever they go. They’re fifteen, twenty feet tall, so tall they look slender, attenuated, almost insect-like. You forget how strong they are.

They bend and dip in the air: so close I can see the reds of their eyes.

“It’s okay,” Dave whispers.

And it is, of course. We’ve got each other. We’re safe.

They gaze at us for a moment, impassive, then turn and glide back to their comrades.

Honey waves at them with both hands. “Bye, fairies!”

On my first visit to the clinic, I went through all the usual drills, the same stuff I go in for every two weeks. Step here, pee here, spit here, breathe in, breathe out, give me your arm. The only difference the first time was the questions.

Are you aware of the gravity of the commitment? I said yes. Have you been informed of the risks, both physical and psychological? Yes. The side effects of the medication? Blood transfusions? Yes. Yes. The decrease in life expectancy? Everything: yes.

That’s what you say to life. Yes.

“They chose us,” I told Dave. Rain lashed the darkened windows. I cradled tiny Honey in my lap. I’d dried her off and wrapped her in a towel, and she was quiet now, exhausted. I’d already named her in my head.

“We can’t go back,” Dave whispered. “If we say yes, we can’t go back.”

“I know.”

His eyes were wet. “We could run out and put her on somebody else’s porch.”

He looked ashamed after he’d said it, the way he’d looked when I’d asked him not to introduce me as “my wife, Karen, the children’s literature major.” When we first moved into the neighborhood he’d introduce me that way and then laugh, as if there was nothing more ridiculous in the world. Children, when almost nobody could have them anymore; literature when all the schools were closed. I told him it bothered me, and he was sorry, but only for hurting me. He wasn’t sorry for what he really meant. What he meant was: No.

That’s wrong. It’s like the Simkos, hateful and worn out with saying No to Mandy, saying No to life.

So many people say no from the beginning. They make it a virtue: “I can’t be bought.” As if it were all a matter of protection and fancy goods. Of course, most of those who say yes pretend to be heroes: saving the world, if only for a season. That’s always struck me as equally wrong, in its own way. Cheap.

I can’t help thinking the absence of children has something to do with this withering of the spirit—this pale new way of seeing the world. Children knew better. You always say yes. If you don’t, there’s no adventure, and you grow old in your ignorance, bitter, bereft of magic. You say yes to what comes, because you belong to the future, whatever it is, and you’re sure as hell not going to be left behind in the past. Do you hear the fairies sing? You always get up and open the door. You always answer. You always let them in.

The Fair Folk are gone. I’m in the ocean with Honey. I bounce her on my knee. She’s so light in the water: soap bubble, floating seed. She clings to my neck and squeals. I think she’ll remember this, this morning at the beach, and the memory will be almost exactly like my own memory of childhood. The water, the sun. Even the cooler, the crumpled maps in the car. So many things now are the way they were when I was small. Simpler, in lots of ways. The things that have disappeared—air travel, wireless communication—seem dreamlike, ludicrous, almost not worth thinking about.

I toss Honey up in the air and catch her, getting a mouthful of saltwater in the process. I shoot the water onto her shoulder. “Mama!” she yells. She bends her head to the water and burbles, trying to copy me, but I lift her up again. I don’t want her to choke.

“My Bear, my Bear,” I murmur against the damp, wet side of her head. “My Honey Bear.”

Dave is waving us in. He’s pointing at his watch.

I don’t know if it’s the excitement, or maybe something about the salt water, but as soon as I get Honey up on the beach, she voids.

“Christ,” says Dave. “Oh, Christ.”

He pulls me away from her. In seconds he’s kneeling on our towels, whipping the gloves and aprons out of the bag. He gets his on fast; I fumble with mine. He rips open a packet of wipes with his teeth, tosses it to me, and pulls out a can of spray.

“I thought you said it wasn’t time yet,” he says.

“I thought it wasn’t. It’s really early.”

Honey stands naked on the sand, slick pouring down her legs. Already she looks hesitant, confused. “Mama?”

“It’s okay, Hon. Just let it come. Do you want to lie down?”

“Yes,” she says, and crumples.

“Fuck,” says Dave. “It’s going to hit the water. I have to go make a call. Take this.”

He hands me the spray, yanks his loafers on and dashes up the beach. There’s a phone in the parking lot, he can call the Service. He’s headed for the fence, not the gate, but it doesn’t stop him, he seizes the bar and vaults over.

The slick is still coming. So much, it’s incredible, as if she’s losing her whole body. It astounds me, it frightens me every time. Her eyes are still open, but dazed. Her fine hair is starting to dry in the sun. The slick pours, undulant, catching the light, like molten plastic.

I touch her face with a gloved hand. “Honey Bear.”

“Mm,” she grunts.

“You’re doing a good job, Hon. Just relax, okay? Mama’s here.”

Dave was right, it’s going to reach the water. I scramble down to the waves and spray the sand and even the water in the path of the slick. Probably won’t do anything, probably stupid. I run back to Honey just as Dave comes pelting back from the parking lot.

“On their way,” he gasps. “Shit! It’s almost in the water!”

“Mama,” says Honey.

“I know. I tried to spray.”

“You sprayed? That’s not going to do anything!”

I’m kneeling beside her. “Yes, Honey.”

“Help me!” yells Dave. He runs down past the slick and starts digging wildly, hurling gobs of wet sand.

Honey curls her hand around my finger.

“Karen! Get down here! We can dig a trench, we can keep it from hitting the water!”

“This is scary,” Honey whispers.

“I know. I know, Hon. I’m sorry. But you don’t need to be scared. It’s just like when we’re at home, okay?”

But it’s not, it’s not like when we’re at home. At home, I usually know when it’s going to happen. I’ve got a chart. I set up buckets, a plastic sheet. I notify the Service of the approximate date. They come right away. We keep the lights down, and I play Honey’s favorite CD.

This isn’t like that at all. Harsh sunlight, Dave screaming behind us. Then the Service. They’re angry: one of them says, “You ought to be fucking fined.” They spray Honey, right on her skin. She squeezes my finger. I don’t know what to do, except sing to her, a song from her CD.

A sailor went to sea-sea-sea
To see what he could see-see-see
But all that he could see-see-see
Was the bottom of the deep blue sea-sea-sea.

At last, it stops. The Service workers clean Honey up and wrap her in sterile sheets. They take our gloves and aprons away to be cleaned at the local Center. Dave and I wipe ourselves down and bag the dirty wipes for disposal. We’re both shaking. He says: “We are not doing this again.”

“It was an accident,” I tell him. “It’s just life.”

He turns to face me. “This is not life, Karen,” he snarls. “This is not life.“

“Yes. It is.”

I think he sees, then. I think he sees that even though he’s the practical one, the realist, I’m the strong one.

I carry Honey up to the car. Dave takes the rest of the stuff. He makes two trips. He gives me an energy bar and then my medication. After that, there’s the injection, painkillers and nutrients, because Honey’s voided, and she’ll be hungry. She’ll need more than a quick drink.

He slips the needle out of my arm. He’s fast, and gentle, even like this, kneeling in the car in a beach parking lot. He presses the cotton down firmly, puts on a strip of medical tape. He looks up and meets my eyes. His are full of tears.

“Jesus, Karen,” he says.

Just like that, in that moment, he’s back. He covers his mouth with his fist, holding in laughter. “Did you hear the Service guy?”

“You mean ‘You ought to be fucking fined’?”

He bends over, wheezing and crowing. “Christ! I really thought the slick was going in the water.”

“But it didn’t go in the water?”

“No.”

He sits up, wipes his eyes on the back of his hand, then reaches out to smooth my hair away from my face.

“No. It didn’t go in. It was fine. Not that it matters, with that giant dump floating in the Pacific.”

He reads my face, and raises his hands, palms out. “Okay, okay. No Mr. Simko.”

He backs out, shuts the door gently, and gets in the driver’s seat. The white clown on the boardwalk watches our car pull out of the lot. We’re almost at the hotel when Honey wakes up.

“Mama?” she mumbles. “I’m hungry.”

“Okay, sweetie.”

I untie the top piece of my suit and pull it down. “Dave? I’m going to feed her in the car.”

“Okay. I’ll park in the shade. I’ll bring you something to eat from inside.”

“Thanks.”

Honey’s wriggling on my lap, fighting the sheets. “Mama, I’m hungry.”

“Hush. Hush. Here.”

She nuzzles at me, quick and greedy, and latches on. Not at the nipple, but in the soft area under the arm. She grips me lightly with her teeth, and then there’s the almost electric jolt as her longer, hollow teeth come down and sink in.

“There,” I whisper. “There.”

Dave gets out and shuts the door. We’re alone in the car.

A breeze stirs the leaves outside. Their reflections move in the windows.

I don’t know what the future is going to bring. I don’t think about it much. It does seem like there won’t be a particularly lengthy future, for us. Not with so few human children being born, and the Fair Folk eating all the animals, and so many plant species dying out from the slick. And once we’re gone, what will the Fair Folk do? They don’t seem able to raise their own children. It’s why they came here in the first place. I don’t know if they feel sorry for us, but I know they want us to live as long as possible: they’re not pure predators, as some people claim. The abductions of the early days, the bodies discovered in caves—that’s all over. The terror, too. That was just to show us what they could do. Now they only kill us as punishment, or after they’ve voided, when they’re crazy with hunger. They rarely hurt anyone in the company of a winged child.

Still, even with all their precautions, we won’t last forever. I remember the artist in the park, when I took Honey there one day. All of his paintings were white. He said that was the future, a white planet, nothing but slick, and Honey said it looked like fairyland.

Her breathing has slowed. Mine, too. It’s partly the meds, and partly some chemical that comes down through the teeth. It makes you drowsy.

Here’s what I know about the future. Honey Bear will grow bigger. Her wings will expand. One day she’ll take to the sky, and go live with her own kind. Maybe she’ll forget human language, the way the Simko’s Mandy has, but she’ll still bring us presents. She’ll still be our piece of the future.

And maybe she won’t forget. She might remember. She might remember this day at the beach.

She’s still awake. Her eyes glisten, heavy with bliss. Large, slightly protuberant eyes, perfectly black in the centers, and scarlet, like the sunrise, at the edges.

About the Author

Sofia Samatar is a fantasy writer, poet, and critic, and a PhD student in African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies twentieth-century Egyptian and Sudanese fiction, and is writing a dissertation on the uses of fantasy in the works of the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih. Sofia’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places, including Ideomancer, Expanded Horizons and Strange Horizons. Her poetry can be found at Stone Telling, Bull Spec and Goblin Fruit, among others; one of her poems was reprinted in the anthology The Moment of Change. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria, is forthcoming from Small Beer Press in 2013.

Fade to White

Catherynne M. Valente

Fight the Communist Threat in Your Own Backyard!

ZOOM IN on a bright-eyed Betty in a crisp green dress, maybe pick up the shade of the spinach in the lower left frame. [Note to Art Dept: Good morning, Stone! Try to stay awake through the next meeting, please. I think we can get more patriotic with the dress. Star-Spangled Sweetheart, steamset hair the color of good American corn, that sort of thing. Stick to a red, white, and blue palette.] She’s holding up a resplendent head of cabbage the size of a pre-war watermelon. Her bicep bulges as she balances the weight of this New Vegetable, grown in a Victory Brand Capsule Garden. [Note to Art Dept: is cabbage the most healthful vegetable? Carrots really pop, and root vegetables emphasize the safety of Synthasoil generated by Victory Brand Capsules.]

Betty looks INTO THE CAMERA and says: Just because the war is over doesn’t mean your Victory Garden has to be! The vigilant wife knows that every garden planted is a munitions plant in the War Fight Struggle Against Communism. Just one Victory Brand Capsule and a dash of fresh Hi-Uranium Mighty Water can provide an average yard’s worth of safe, rich, synthetic soil—and the seeds are included! STOCK FOOTAGE of scientists: beakers, white coats, etc. Our boys in the lab have developed a wide range of hardy, modern seeds from pre-war heirloom collections to produce the Vegetables of the Future. [Note to Copy: Do not mention pre-war seedstock.] Just look at this beautiful New Cabbage. Efficient, bountiful, and only three weeks from planting to table. [Note to Copy: Again with the cabbage? You know who eats a lot of cabbage, Stone? Russians. Give her a big old zucchini. Long as a man's arm. Have her hold it in her lap so the head rests on her tits.]

BACK to Betty, walking through cornstalks like pine trees. And that’s not all. With a little help from your friends at Victory, you can feed your family and play an important role in the defense of the nation. Betty leans down to show us big, leafy plants growing in her Synthasoil. [Note to Casting: make sure we get a busty girl, so we see a little cleavage when she bends over. We're hawking fertility here. Hers, ours.] Here’s a tip: Plant our patented Liberty Spinach at regular intervals. Let your little green helpers go to work leeching useful isotopes and residual radioactivity from rain, groundwater, just about anything! [Note to Copy: Stone, you can't be serious. Leeching? That sounds dreadful. Reaping. Don't make me do your job for you.] Turn in your crop at Victory Depots for Harvest Dollars redeemable at a variety of participating local establishments! [Note to Project Manager: can't we get some soda fountains or something to throw us a few bucks for ad placement here? Missed opportunity! And couldn't we do a regular feature with the "tips" to move other products, make Betty into a trusted household name—but not Betty. Call her something that starts with T, Tammy? Tina? Theresa?]

Betty smiles. The camera pulls out to show her surrounded by a garden in full bloom and three [Note to Art Dept: Four minimum] kids in overalls carrying baskets of huge, shiny New Vegetables. The sun is coming up behind her. The slogan scrolls up in red, white, and blue type as she says:

A free and fertile tomorrow. Brought to you by Victory.

Fade to white.

The Hydrodynamic Front

More than anything in the world, Martin wanted to be a Husband when he grew up.

Sure, he had longed for other things when he was young and silly—to be a Milkman, a uranium prospector, an astronaut. But his fifteenth birthday was zooming up with alarming speed, and becoming an astronaut now struck him as an impossibly, almost obscenely trivial goal. Martin no longer drew pictures of the moon in his notebooks or begged his mother to order the whiz-bang home enrichment kit from the tantalizing back pages of Popular Mechanics. His neat yellow pencils still kept up near-constant flight passes over the pale blue lines of composition books, but what Martin drew now were babies. In cradles and out, girls with bows in their bonnets and boys with rattles shaped like rockets, newborns and toddlers. He drew pictures of little kids running through clean, tall grass, reading books with straw in their mouths, hanging out of trees like rosy-cheeked fruit. He sketched during history, math, civics: twin girls sitting at a table gazing up with big eyes at their Father, who kept his hat on while he carved a holiday Brussels sprout the size of a dog. Triplet boys wrestling on a pristine, uncontaminated beach. In Martin’s notebooks, everyone had twins and triplets.

Once, alone in his room at night, he had allowed himself to draw quadruplets. His hand quivered with the richness and wonder of those four perfect graphite faces asleep in their four identical bassinets.

Whenever Martin drew babies they were laughing and smiling. He could not bear the thought of an unhappy child. He had never been one, he was pretty sure. His older brother Henry had. He still cried and shut himself up in Father’s workshop for days, which Martin would never do because it was very rude. But then, Henry was born before the war. He probably had a lot to cry about. Still, on the rare occasion that Henry made a cameo appearance in Martin’s gallery of joyful babies, he was always grinning. Always holding a son of his own. Martin considered those drawings a kind of sympathetic magic. Make Henry happy—watch his face at dinner and imagine what it would look like if he cracked a joke. Catch him off guard, snorting, which was as close as Henry ever got to laughing, at some pratfall on The Mr. Griffith Show. Make Henry happy in a notebook and he’ll be happy in real life. Put a baby in his arms and he won’t have to go to the Front in the fall.

Once, and only once, Martin had tried this magic on himself. With very careful strokes and the best shading he’d ever managed, he had drawn himself in a beautiful gray suit, with a professional grade shine on his shoes and a strong angle to his hat. He drew a briefcase in his own hand. He tried to imagine what his face would look like when it filled out, got square-jawed and handsome the way a man’s face should be. How he would style his hair when he became a Husband. Whether he would grow a beard. Painstakingly, he drew a double Windsor knot in his future tie, which Martin considered the most masculine and elite knot.

And finally, barely able to breathe with longing, he outlined the long, gorgeous arc of a baby’s carriage, the graceful fall of a lace curtain so that the pencilled child wouldn’t get sunburned, big wheels capable of a smoothness that bordered on the ineffable. He put the carriage-handle into his own firm hand. It took Martin two hours to turn himself into a Husband. When the spell was finished, he spritzed the drawing with some of his mother’s hairspray so that it wouldn’t smudge and folded it up flat and small. He kept it in his shirt pocket. Some days, he could feel the drawing move with his heart. And when Father hugged him, the paper would crinkle pleasantly between them, like a whispered promise.

Static Overpressure

The day of Sylvie’s Presentation broke with a dawn beyond red, beyond blood or fire. She lay in her spotless white and narrow bed, quite awake, gazing at the colors through her Sentinel Gamma Glass window—lower rates of corneal and cellular damage than their leading competitors, guaranteed. Today, the sky could only remind Sylvie of birth. The screaming scarlet folds of clouds, the sun’s crowning head. Sylvie knew it was the hot ash that made every sunrise and sunset into a torture of magenta and violet and crimson, the superheated cloud vapor that never cooled. She winced as though red could hurt her—which of course it could. Everything could.

Sylvie had devoted a considerable amount of time to imagining how this day would go. She did not worry and she was not afraid, but it had always sat there in her future, unmovable, a mountain she could not get through or around. There would be tests, for intelligence, for loyalty, for genetic defects, for temperament, for fertility, which wasn’t usually a problem for women but better safe than sorry. Better safe than assign a Husband to a woman as barren as California. There would be a medical examination so invasive it came all the way around to no big deal. When a doctor can get that far inside you, into your blood, your chromosomes, your potentiality and all your possible futures, what difference could her white gloved fingers on your cervix make?

None of that pricked up her concern. The tests were nothing. Sylvie prided herself on being realistic about her qualities. First among these was her intellect; like her mother Hannah she could cut glass with the diamond of her mind. Second was her silence. Sylvie had discovered when she was quite small that adults were discomfited by silence. It brought them running. And when she was angry, upset, when the world offended her, Sylvie could draw down a coil of silence all around her, showing no feeling at all, until whoever had affronted her grew so uncomfortable that they would beg forgiveness just to end the ordeal. There was no third, not really. She was what her mother’s friends called striking, but never pretty. Narrow frame, small breasts, short and dark. Nothing in her matched up with the fashionable Midwestern fertility goddess floor-model. And she heard what they did not say, also—that she was not pretty because there was something off in her features, a ghost in her cheekbones, her height, her straight, flat hair.

Sylvie gave up on the fantasy of sliding back into sleep. She flicked on the radio by her bed: Brylcreem Makes a Man a Husband! announced a tinny woman’s voice, followed by a cheerful blare of brass and the morning’s reading from the Book of Pseudo-Matthew. Sylvie preferred Luke. She opened her closet as though today’s clothes had not been chosen for years, hanging on the wooden rod behind all the others, waiting for her to grow into them. She pulled out the dress and draped it over her bed. It lay there like another girl. Someone who looked just like her but had already moved through the hours of the day and come out on the other side. The red sky turned the deep neckline into a gash.

She was not ready for it yet.

Sylvie washed her body with the milled soap provided by Spotless Corp. Bright as a pearl, wrapped in white muslin and a golden ribbon. It smelled strongly of rose and mint and underneath, a blue chemical tang. The friendly folks at Spotless also supplied hair rinse, cold cream, and talcum for her special day. All the bottles and cakes smelled like that, like growing things piled on top of something biting, corrosive. The basket had arrived last month with a bow and a dainty card attached congratulating her. Until now it had loomed in her room like a Christmas tree, counting down. Now Sylvie pulled the regimented colors and fragrances out and applied them precisely, correctly, according to directions. An oyster-pink shade called The Blossoming of the Rod on her fingernails, which may not be cut short. A soft peach called Penance on her eyes, which may not be lined. Pressed powder (The Visitation of the Dove) should be liberally applied, but only the merest breath of blush (Parable of the Good Harlot) is permitted. Sylvie pressed a rosy champagne stain (Armistice) onto her lips with a forefinger. Hair must be natural and worn long—no steamsetting or straightening allowed. Everyone broke that rule, though. Who could tell a natural curl from a roller these days? Sylvie combed her black hair out and clipped it back with the flowers assigned to her county this year—snowdrops for hope and consolation. Great bright thornless roses as red as the sky for love at first sight, for passion and lust.

Finally the dress. The team at Spotless Corp. encouraged foundational garments to emphasize the bust and waist-to-hip ratio. Sylvie wedged herself into a full length merry widow with built-in padded bra and rear. It crushed her, smoothed her, flattened her. Her waist disappeared. She pulled the dress over her bound-in body. Her mother would have to button her up; twenty-seven tiny, satin colored buttons ran up her back like a new spine. Its neckline plunged; its skirt flounced, showing calf and a suggestion of knee. It was miles of icy white lace, it could hardly be anything else, but the sash gleamed red. Red, red, red. All the world is red and I am red forever, Sylvie thought. She was inside the dress, inside the other girl.

The other girl was very striking.

Sylvie was fifteen years old, and by suppertime she would be engaged.

Even Honest Joe Loves an Ice-Cold Brotherhood Beer!

CLOSE-UP on President McCarthy in shirtsleeves, popping the top on a distinctive green glass bottle of BB—now with improved flavor and more potent additives! We see the moisture glisten on the glass and an honest day’s sweat on the President’s brow. [Note to Art Dept: I see what you're aiming at, but let's not make him look like a clammy swamp creature, shall we? He's not exactly the most photogenic gent to begin with.]

NEW SHOT: five Brothers relaxing together in the sun with a tin bucket full of ice and green bottlenecks. Labels prominently displayed. A Milkman, a TV Repairman, a couple of G-Men, and a soldier. [Note to Casting: Better make it one government jockey and two soldiers. Statistically speaking, more of them are soldiers than anything else.] They are smiling, happy, enjoying each others’ company. The soldier, a nice-looking guy but not too nice-looking, we don’t want to send the wrong message, says: There’s nothing like a fresh swig of Brotherhood after spending a hot Nevada day eye to eye with a Russkie border guard. The secret is in the thorium-boosted hops and New Barley fresh from Alaska, crisp iodine-treated spring water and just a dash of good old fashioned patriotism. The Milkman chimes in with: And 5-Alpha! They all laugh. [Note to Copy: PLEASE use the brand name! We've had meetings about this! Chemicals sound scary. Who wants to put some freakshow in your body when you can take a nice sip of Arcadia? Plus those bastards at Standard Ales are calling their formula Kool and their sales are up 15%. You cannot beat that number, Stone.] TV Repairman pipes up: That’s right, Bob! There’s no better way to get your daily dose than with the cool, refreshing taste of Brotherhood. They use only the latest formulas: smooth, mellow, and with no jitters or lethargy. G-Man pulls a bottle from the ice and takes a good swallow. 5-Alpha leaves my head clear and my spirits high. I can work all day serving our great nation without distraction, aggression, or unwanted thoughts. Second G-Man: I’m a patriot. I don’t need all those obsolete hormones anymore. And Brotherhood Beer strikes a great bargain—all that and 5.6% alcohol! Our soldier stands up and salutes. He wears an expression of steely determination and rugged cheer. He says: Well, boys, I’ve got an appointment with Ivan to keep. Keep the Brotherhood on ice for me.

QUICK CUT back to President McCarthy. He puts down his empty bottle and picks up a file or something in the Oval Office. Slogan comes in at hip level [Note to Art Dept: how are we coming on that wheatstalk font?]:

Where There’s Life, There’s Brotherhood.

Fade to white.

Optimum Burst Altitude

One week out of every four, Martin’s Father came home. Martin could feel the week coming all month like a slow tide. He knew the day, the hour. He sat by the window tying and untying double Windsor knots into an old silk tie Dad had let him keep years ago. The tie was emerald green with little red chevrons on it.

Cross, fold, push through. Wrap, fold, fold, over the top, fold, fold, pull down. Make it tight. Make it perfect.

When the Cadillac pulled into the drive, Martin jumped for the gin and the slippers like a golden retriever. His Father’s martini was a ritual, a eucharist. Ice, gin, swirl in the shaker, just enough so that the outer layer of ice releases into the alcohol. Open the vermouth, bow in the direction of the Front, and close it again. Two olives, not three, and a glass from the freezebox. These were the sacred objects of a Husband. Tie, Cadillac, martini. And then Dad would open the door and Faraday, the Irish Setter, would yelp with waggy happiness and so would Martin. He’d be wearing a soft grey suit. He’d put his hat on the rack. Martin’s mother, Rosemary, would stand on her tiptoes to kiss him in one of her good dresses, the lavender one with daises on the hem, or if it was a holiday, her sapphire-colored velvet. Her warm blonde hair would be perfectly set, and her lips would leave a gleaming red kiss-shape on his cheek. Dad wouldn’t wipe it off. He’d greet his son with a firm handshake that told Martin all he needed to know: he was a man, his martini was good, his knots were strong.

Henry would slam the door to his bedroom upstairs and refuse to come down to supper. This pained Martin; the loud bang scuffed his heart. But he tried to understand his brother—after all, a Husband must possess great wells of understanding and compassion. Dad wasn’t Henry’s father. Pretending that he was probably scuffed something inside the elder boy, too.

The profound and comforting sameness of those Husbanded weeks overwhelmed Martin’s senses like the slightly greasy swirls of gin in that lovely triangular glass. The first night, they would have a roasting chicken with crackling golden skin. Rosemary had volunteered to raise several closely observed generations of an experimental breed called Sacramento Clouds: vicious, bright orange and oversized, dosed with palladium every fortnight, their eggs covered in rough calcium deposits like lichen. For this reason they could have a whole bird once a month. The rest of the week were New Vegetables from the Capsule Garden. Carrots, tomatoes, sprouts, potatoes, kale. Corn if it was fall and there hadn’t been too many high-level days when no one could go out and tend the plants. But there was always that one delicious day when Father was at home and they had chicken.

After dinner, they would retire to the living room. Mom and Dad would have sherry and Martin would have a Springs Eternal Vita-Pop if he had been very good, which he always was. He liked the lime flavor best. They would watch My Five Sons for half an hour before Rosemary’s Husband retired with her to bed. Martin didn’t mind that. It was what Husbands were for. He liked to listen to the sounds of their lovemaking through the wall between their rooms. They were reassuring and good. They put him to sleep like a lullaby about better times.

And one week out of every four, Martin would ask his Father to take him to the city.

“I want to see where you work!”

“This is where I work, son,” Father would always say in his rough-soft voice. “Right here.”

Martin would frown and Dad would hold him tight. Husbands were not afraid of affection. They had bags of it to share. “I’ll tell you what, Marty, if your Announcement goes by without a hitch, I’ll take you to the city myself. March you right into the Office and show everyone what a fine boy Rosie and I made. Might even let you puff on a cigar.”

And Martin would hug his Father fiercely, and Rosemary would smile over her fiber-optic knitting, and Henry would kick something upstairs. It was regular as a clock, and the clock was always right. Martin knew he’d be Announced, no problem. Piece of cake. Mom was super careful with the levels on their property. They planted Liberty Spinach. Martin was first under his desk every time the siren went off at school. After Henry’s Announcement had gone so badly, he and Mom had installed a Friendlee Brand Geiger Unit every fifteen feet and the light-up aw-shucks faces had only turned into frowns and x-eyes a few times ever. There was no chance Martin could fail. Things were way better now. Not like when Henry was a kid. No, Martin would be Announced and he’d go to the city and smoke his cigar. He’d be ready. He’d be the best Husband anyone ever met.

Aaron Grudzinski liked to tell him it was all shit. That was, in fact, Aaron’s favorite observation on nearly anything. Martin liked the way he swore, gutturally, like it really meant something. Grud was in Martin’s year. He smoked Canadian cigarettes and nipped some kind of homebrewed liquor from his gray plastic thermos. He’d egged Martin into a sip once. It tasted like dirt on fire.

“Look, didn’t you ever wonder why they wait til you’re fifteen to do it? Obviously they can test you anytime after you pop your first boner. As soon as you’re brewing your own, yeah?” And Grud would shake his flask. “But no, they make this huge deal out of going down to Matthew House and squirting in a cup. The outfit, the banquet, the music, the filmstrips. It’s all shit. Shit piled up into a pretty castle around a room where they give you a magazine full of the wholesome housewives of 1940 and tell you to do it for America. And you look down at the puddle at the bottom of the plastic tumbler they call your chalice, your chalice with milliliter measurements printed on the side, and you think: That’s all I am. Two to six milliliters of warm wet nothing.” Grud spat a brown tobacco glob onto the dead grass of the baseball field. He knuckled at his eye, his voice getting raw. “Don’t you get it? They have to give you hope. Well, I mean, they have to give you hope. I’m a lost cause. Three strikes before I got to bat. But you? They gotta build you up, like how everyone salutes Sgt. Dickhead on leave from the glowing shithole that is the great state of Arizona. If they didn’t shake his hand and kiss his feet, he might start thinking it’s not worth melting his face off down by the Glass. If you didn’t think you could make it, you’d just kill yourself as soon as you could read the newspaper.”

“I wouldn’t,” Martin whispered.

“Well, I would.”

“But Grud, there’s so few of us left.”

The school siren klaxoned. Martin bolted inside, sliding into the safe space under his desk like he was stealing home.

The Shadow Effect

Every Sunday Sylvie brought a couple of Vita-Pops out to the garage and set up her film projector in the hot dark. Her mother went to her Ladies’ Auxiliary meeting from two to four o’clock. Sylvie swiped hors d’oeuvres and cookies from the official spread and waited in the shadows for Clark Baker to shake his mother and slip in the side door. The film projector had been a gift from her Father; the strips were Clark’s, whose shutterbug brothers and uncles were all pulling time at the Front. Every Sunday they sat together and watched the light flicker and snap over a big white sheet nailed up over the shelves of soil-treatment equipment and Friendlee Brand gadgets stripped for parts. Every Sunday like church.

Clark was tall and shy, obsessed with cameras no less than any of his brothers. He wore striped shirts all the time, as if solid colors had never been invented. He kept reading Salinger even after the guy defected. Sometimes they held hands while they watched the movies. Mostly they didn’t. It was bad enough that they were fraternizing at all. Clark already drinking Kool Koffee every morning. Sugar, no cream. Clark was a quiet, bookish black boy who would be sent to the Front within a year.

On the white sheet, they watched California melt.

It hadn’t happened during the war. The Glass came after. This thing everyone did now was not called war. It was something else. Something that liquefied the earth out west and turned it into the Sea of Glass. On the sheet it looked like molten silver, rising and falling in something like waves. Turning the Grand Canyon into a soft grey whirlpool. Sylvie thought it was beautiful. Like something on the moon. In real life it had colors, and Sylvie dreamed of them. Red stone dissolving into an endless expanse of dark glass.

“There are more Japanese people in Utah than in Japan now,” Clark whispered when the filmstrip rolled up into black and the filmmaker’s logo. Sylvie flinched as if he’d cut her.

They didn’t talk about her Presentation. It sat whitely, fatly in their future. Once Clark kissed her. Sylvie cried afterward.

“I’ll write you,” he said. “As long as I can write.”

The growth index for their county was very healthy, and this was another reason Clark Baker should not have been holding her hand in the dark while men in ghostly astronaut suits probed the edges of the Glass on a clicking filmstrip. Every woman on the block had a new baby this year. They’d gotten a medal of achievement from President McCarthy in the spring. The Ladies’ Auxiliary graciously accepted the key to the city. She suspected her Father had a great deal to do with this. When she was little, he had come home one week in four. Now it was three days in thirty. His department kept him working hard. He’d be there for her Presentation, though. No Father missed his daughter’s debut.

Sylvie thought about Clark while her mother slipped satin-covered buttons through tiny loops. Their faces doubled in the mirror. His dark brown hand on hers. The Sea of Glass turning their faces silver.

“Mom,” Sylvie said. Her voice was very soft in the morning, as if she was afraid to wake herself up. “What if I don’t love my Husband? Isn’t that…something important?”

Hannah sighed. Her mouth took a hard angle. “You’re young, darling. You don’t understand. What it was like before. We had to have them here all the time, every night. Never a moment when I wasn’t working my knees through for my husband. The one before your Father. The children before you. Do you think we got to choose then? It wasn’t about love. For some people, they could afford that. For me, well, my parents thought he was a very nice man. He had good prospects. I needed him. I could not work. I was a woman before the war, who would hire me? And to do what? Type or teach. Not to program punchcard machines. Not to cross-breed new strains of broccoli. Nothing that would occupy my mind. So I drowned my mind in children and in him and when the war came I was glad. He left and it was me going to work every morning, me deciding what happened to my money. So the war took them,” she waved her hand in front of her eyes, “war always does that. I know you don’t think so, but the program is the best part of a bad situation. A situation maybe so bad we cannot fix it. So you don’t love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you? He who gets the cake cannot be friends with the girl who gets the crumbs.” Sylvie’s mother blushed. She whispered: “My Rita, you know, Rita who comes for tea and bridge and neptunium testing. She is good to me. Someone will be good to you. You will have your Auxiliary, your work, your children. One week in four a man will tell you what to do—but listen to me when I say they have much better manners than they used to. They say please now. They are interested in your life. They are so good with the babies.” Hannah smoothed the lacy back of her daughter’s Presentation gown. “Someday, my girl, either we will all die out and nothing will be left, or things will go back to the old ways and you will have men taking your body and soul apart to label the parts that belong to them. Enjoy this world. Either way, it will be brief.”

Sylvie turned her painted, perfected face to her mother’s. “Mom,” she whispered. Sylvie had practiced. Listened to the makeshift radio spitting half-garbled broadcasts from the other side of the world. A dictionary Clark found at a transfer station. Her mother. Whispering while she slept. Practiced until her lips hurt. So much, so often. She ordered the words in her head like dolls, hoped they were the right ones. Hoped they could stand up straight. “Watashi wa anata o shinjite ī nā.” I wish I could believe you.

Hannah’s dark eyes flew wide and, without a moment’s hesitation, she slapped her daughter across the cheek. It wasn’t hard, not meant to wound, certainly not to leave a mark on this day of all days, but it stung. Sylvie’s eyes watered.

“Nidoto,” her mother pleaded. “Never, never again.”

Gimbels: Your Official Father’s Day Headquarters!

PANORAMA SHOT of the Gimbels flagship store with two cute kiddos front and center. [Note to Casting: get us a boy and a girl, blonde, white, under ten, make sure the boy is taller than the girl. Put them in sailor suits, everyone likes that.] The kids wave at the camera. Little Linda Sue speaks up. [Note to Copy: Nope. The boy speaks first.] It’s a beautiful June here in New York City, the greatest city on earth! Jimmy throws his hands in the air and yells out: And that means FATHER’S DAY! Scene shift, kiddos are walking down a Gimbels aisle. We see toolboxes, ties, watches in a glass case, barbecue sets. Linda Sue picks up a watch and listens to it tick. Jimmy grabs a barbecue scraper and brandishes it. He says: Come on down with your Mom and make an afternoon of it at the Brand New Gimbels Automat! Hot, pre-screened food in an instant! Gee wow! [Note to Copy: hey, Stone, this is a government sponsored ad. If Gimbels want to hawk their shitty Manhattan Meals they're going to have to actually pay for it. Have you ever tried one of those things? Tastes like a kick in the teeth.] Linda Sue: At Gimbels they have all the approved Father’s Day products. (Kids alternate lines) Mr. Fix-It! Businessman! Coach! Backyard Cowboy! Mr. Gimbel appears and selects a beautiful tie from the spring Priapus line. He hands it to Linda Sue and ruffles her hair. Mr Gimbel: Now, kids, don’t forget to register your gift with the Ladies’ Auxiliary. We wouldn’t want your Daddy to get two of the same gift! How embarrassing! That’s why Gimbels carries the complete Whole Father line, right next to the registration desk so your Father’s Day is a perfect one. Kids: Thanks, Mr. Gimbel!

Mr. Gimbel spreads his arms wide and type stretches out between them in this year’s Father’s Day colors. [Note to Art Dept: It's seashell and buttercup this year, right? Please see Marketing concerning the Color Campaign. Pink and blue are pre-war. We're working with Gimbels to establish a White for Boys, Green for Girls tradition.]

Gimbels: Your One Stop Shop for a One of a Kind Dad.

Fade to white.

Flash Blindness

Martin wore the emerald green chevroned tie to his Announcement, even if it wasn’t strictly within the dress code. Everything else was right down the line: light grey suit, shaved clean if shaving was on the menu, a dab of musky Oil of Fecunditas behind each ear from your friends at Spotless Corp. Black shoes, black socks, Spotless lavender talcum, teeth brushed three times with Pure Spearmint Toothpaste (You’re Sure with Spearmint!). And his Father holding his hand, beaming with pride. Looking handsome and young as he always did.

Of course, there was another boy holding his other hand.

His name was Thomas. He had broad shoulders already, chocolate-colored hair and cool slate eyes that made him look terribly romantic. Martin tried not to let it bother him. He knew how the program worked. Where the other three weeks of the month took his Father. Obviously, there were other children, other wives, other homes. Other roasting chickens, other martinis. Other evening television shows on other channels. And that’s all Thomas was: another channel. When you weren’t watching a show, it just ceased to be. Clicked off. Fade to white. You couldn’t be jealous of the people on those other channels. They had their own troubles and adventures, engrossing mysteries and stunning conclusions, cliffhangers and tune-in-next-weeks. It had nothing to do with Martin, or Rosemary, or Henry in his room. That was what it meant to be a Husband.

The three of them sat together in the backseat of the sleek gray Cadillac. An older lady drove them. She wore a smart cap and had wiry white hair, but her cheeks were still pink and round. Martin tried to look at her as a Husband would, even though a woman her age would never marry. After all, Husbands didn’t get to choose. Martin’s future wives—four to start with, that was standard, but if he did well, who knew?—wouldn’t all be bombshells in pin-up bathing suits. He had to practice looking at women, really seeing them, seeing what was good and true and gorgeous in them. The chauffeur had wonderful laugh lines around her eyes. Martin could tell they were laugh lines. And her eyes, when she looked in the rear view mirror, were a nice, cool green. She radioed to the dispatcher and her voice lilted along with a faint twinge of English accent. Martin could imagine her laughing with him, picking New Kale and telling jokes about the King. He imagined her naked, laying on a soft pink bed, soft like her pink cheeks. Her body would be the best kind of body: the kind that had borne children. Breasts that had nursed. Legs that had run after misbehaving little ones. He could love that body. The sudden hardness between his legs held no threat, only infinite love and acceptance, a Husband’s love.

When I think about how good I could be, my heart stops, Martin thought as the space between his neighborhood and the city smeared by. The sun seared white through dead black trees. But somewhere deep in them there was a green wick. Martin knew it. He had a green wick, too. I will remember every date. Every wife will be so special and I will love her and our children. I will make her martinis. I will roast the chicken so she doesn’t have to. When I am with one of them I will turn off all other channels in my mind. I can keep it straight and separate. I will study so hard, so that I know how to please. It will be my only vocation, to be devoted. And if they, the women of Elm St or Oak Lane or Birch Drive find love with each other when I am gone, I will be happy for them because there is never enough love. I will draw them happy and they will be happy. The world will be green again. Everything will be okay.

It all seemed to happen very fast. Thomas and Martin and a dozen other boys listened to a quintet play Mendelssohn. The mayor gave a speech. They watched a recorded message from President McCarthy which had to be pretty old because he still sported a good head of hair. Finally, a minister stood up with a lovely New Tabernacle Bible in her one good hand. The other was shriveled, boneless, a black claw in her green vestments. The pages of the Bible shone with gilt. A ribbonmark hung down and it was very red in the afternoon flares. She did not lay it on a lectern. She carried the weight in her hands and read from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which Martin already knew by heart. The minister’s maple-syrup contralto filled the vaults of Matthew House.

“And when Mary had come to her fourteenth year, the high priest announced to all that the virgins who were reared in the Temple and who had reached the age of their womanhood should return to their own and be given in lawful marriage. When the High Priest went in to take counsel with God, a voice came forth from the oratory for all to hear, and it said that of all of the marriageable men of the House of David who had not yet taken a wife, each should bring a rod and lay it upon the altar, that one of the rods would burst into flower and upon it the Holy Ghost would come to rest in the form of a Dove, and that he to whom this rod belonged would be the one to whom the virgin Mary should be espoused. Joseph was among the men who came, and he placed his rod upon the altar, and straightaway it burst into bloom and a Dove came from Heaven and perched upon it, whereby it was manifest to all that Mary should become the wife of Joseph.”

Martin’s eyes filled with tears. He felt a terrible light in his chest. For a moment he was sure everyone else would see it streaming out of him. But no, the minister gave him a white silk purse and directed him to a booth with a white velvet curtain. Inside, silence. Dim, dusty light. Martin opened the purse and pulled out the chalice—a plastic cup with measurements printed on it, just like Grud said. With it lay a few old photographs—women from before the war, with so much health in their faces Martin could hardly bear to look at them. Their skin was so clear. She’s dead, he thought. Statistically speaking, that woman with the black hair and heart-shaped face and polka-dotted bikini is dead. Vaporized in Seattle or Phoenix or Los Angeles. That was where they used to make pictures, in Los Angeles. This girl is dead.

Martin couldn’t do it. This was about life. Everything, no matter how hard and strange, was toward life. He could not use a dead girl that way. Instead, he shut his eyes. He made his pictures, quick pencil lines glowing inside him. The chauffeur with her pink cheeks and white hair. The minister with her kind voice and brown eyes and her shriveled hand, which was awful, but wasn’t she alive and good? Tammy, the girl from the Victory Brand Capsule Garden commercials in her star-spangled dress. A girl with red hair who lived two blocks over and was so pretty that looking at her was like getting punched in the chest. He drew in bold, bright lines the home he was going to make, bigger than himself, bigger than the war, as big as the world.

Martin’s body convulsed with the tiny, private detonation of his soul. His vision blurred into a hot colorless flash.

Blast Wind

Sylvie’s mother helped her into long white gloves. They sat together in a long pearl-colored Packard and did not speak. Sylvie had nothing to say. Let her mother be uncomfortable. A visceral purple sunset colored the western sky, even at two in the afternoon. Sylvie played the test in her head like a filmstrip. When it actually started happening to her, it felt no more real than a picture on a sheet.

The mayor gave a speech. They watched a recorded message from President McCarthy’s pre-war daughter Tierney, a pioneer in the program, one of the first to volunteer. Our numbers have been depleted by the Germans, the Japanese, and now the Godless Russians. Of the American men still living only 12% are fertile. But we are not Communists. We cannot become profligate, wasteful, decadent.We must maintain our moral way of life. As little as possible should change from the world your mothers knew—at least on the surface. And with time, what appears on the surface will penetrate to the core, and all will be restored. We will not sacrifice our way of life.

A minister with a withered arm read that Pseudo-Matthew passage Tierney had dredged up out of apocrypha to the apocrypha, about the rods and the flowers and Sylvie had never felt it was one of the Gospel’s more subtle moments. The minister blessed them. They are flowers. They are waiting for the Dove.

The doctors were women. One was Mrs. Drexler, who lived on their cul-de-sac and always made rum balls for the neighborhood Christmas cookie exchange. She was kind. She warmed up her fingers before she examined Sylvie. White gloves for her, white gloves for me, Sylvie thought, and suppressed a giggle. She turned her head to one side and focused on a stained-glass lamp with kingfishers on it, piercing their frosted breasts with their beaks. She went somewhere else in her mind until it was over. Not a happy place, just a place. Somewhere precise and clean without any Spotless Corp products where Sylvie could test soil samples methodically. Rows of black vials, each labeled, dated, sealed.

They took her blood. A butterfly of panic fluttered in her—will they know? Would the test show her mother, practicing her English until her accent came out clean as acid paper? Only half enemy, half threat, born in San Francisco before the war, white enough to pass. A woman who spent her life curling her hair like it would save her. Lining her eyes so heavy, so they would look like magazine eyes. Sylvie shut her own unlined eyes. She said her mother’s name three times in her mind. The secret, talismanic thing that only they together knew. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Don’t be silly. Japan isn’t a virus they can see wiggling in your cells. Mom’s documents are flawless. No alarm will go off in the centrifuge.

And none did.

She whizzed through the intelligence exams—what a joke. Calculate the drag energy of the blast wind given the following variables. Please. Other girls milled around her in their identical lace dresses. The flowers in their hair were different. Their sashes all red. Red on white, like first aid kits floating through her peripheral vision. They went from medical to placement testing to screening. They nodded shyly to each other. In five years, Sylvie would know all their names. They would be her Auxiliary. They would play bridge. They would plan block parties. They would have telephone trees. Some of them would share a Husband with her, but she would never know which. That was what let the whole civilized fiction roll along. You never knew, you never asked. Men had a different surname every week. Only the Mrs. Drexlers of the neighborhood knew it all, the knots and snags of the vital genetics. Would she share with the frosted blonde who loved botany or the redheaded math genius who made her own cheese? Or maybe none of them. It all depended on the test. Some of these girls would score low in their academics or have some unexpressed, unpredictable trait revealed in the great forking family trees pruned by Mrs. Drexler and the rest of them. They would get Husbands in overalls, with limited allowances. They would live in houses with old paint and lead shielding instead of Gamma Glass. Some of them would knock their Presentation out of the park. They’d get Husbands in grey suits and silk ties, who went to offices in the city during the day, who gave them compression chamber diamonds for their birthdays. As little as possible should change.

Results were quick these days. Every year faster. But not so quick that they did not have luncheon provided while the experts performed their tabulations. Chicken salad sandwiches—how the skinny ones gasped at the taste of mayonnaise! Assam tea, watercress, lemon curd and biscuits. An impossible fairy feast.

“I hope I get a Businessman,” said the girl sitting next to Sylvie. Her bouffant glittered with illegal setting spray. “I couldn’t bear it if I had to live on Daisy Drive.”

“Who cares?” said Sylvie, and shoved a whole chicken salad triangle into her mouth. She shouldn’t have said anything. Her silence bent for one second and out comes nonsense that would get her noticed. Would get her remembered.

“Well, I care, you cow,” snapped Bouffant. Her friends smiled behind their hands, concealing their teeth. In primates, baring the teeth is a sign of aggression, Sylvie thought idly.She flashed them a broad, cold smile. All thirty-two, girls, drink it in.

“I think it’s clear what room you’ll be spending the evening in,” Bouffant sneered, oblivious to Sylvie’s primate signals.

But Sylvie couldn’t stop. “At best, you’ll spend 25% of your time with him. You’ll get your rations the same as everyone. You’ll get your vouchers for participating in the program and access to top make-work contracts. What difference does it make who you snag? You know this is just pretend, right? A very big, very lush, very elaborate dog breeding program.”

Bouffant narrowed her eyes. Her lips went utterly pale. “I hope you turn out to be barren as a rock. Just rotted away inside,” she hissed. The group of them stood up in a huff and took their tea to another table. Sylvie shrugged and ate her biscuit. “Well, that’s no way to think if you want to restore America,” she said to no one at all. What was the matter with her? Shut up, Sylvie.

Mrs. Drexler put a warm hand on her shoulder, materializing out of nowhere. The doctor who loved rum balls laid a round green chip on the white tablecloth. Bouffant saw it across the room and glared hard enough to put a hole through her skull at forty yards.

Sylvie was fertile. At least, there was nothing obviously wrong with her. She turned the chip over. The other side was red. Highest marks. Blood and leaves. Red on white. The world is red and I am red forever. One of Bouffant’s friends was holding a black chip and crying, deep and horrible. Sylvie floated. Unreal. It wasn’t real. It was ridiculous. It was a filmstrip. A recording made years ago when Brussels sprouts were small and the sunset could be rosy and gentle.

FADE IN on Mrs. Drexler in a dance hall with a white on white checkerboard floor. She’s wearing a sequin torchsinger dress. Bright pink. She pumps a giant star-spangled speculum like a parade-master’s baton. Well, hello there Sylvia! It’s your big day! Should I say Hidaka Sakiko? I only want you to be comfortable, dear. Let’s see what you’ve won!

Sylvie and the other green-chip girls were directed into another room whose walls were swathed in green velvet curtains. A number of men stood lined up against the wall, chatting nervously among themselves. Each had a cedar rod in one hand. They held the rods awkwardly, like old men’s canes. A piano player laid down a slow foxtrot for them. Champagne was served. A tall boy with slightly burned skin, a shiny pattern of pink across his cheek, takes her hand, first in line. In Sylvie’s head, the filmstrip zings along.

WIDE SHOT of Mrs. Drexler yanking on a rope-pull curtain. She announces: Behind Door Number One we have Charles Patterson, six foot one, Welsh/Danish stock, blond/blue, scoring high in both logic and empathy, average sperm count 19 million per milliliter! This hot little number has a reserved parking spot at the Office! Of course, when I say “Office,” I mean the upper gentlemen’s club, brandy and ferns on the 35th floor, cigars and fraternity and polished teak walls. A little clan to help each other through the challenges of life in the program—only another Husband can really understand. Our productive heartthrobs are too valuable to work! Stress has been shown to lower semen quality, Sylvie! But as little as possible should change. If you take the Office from a man, you’ll take his spirit. And what’s behind Door Number Two?

Sylvie shuts her eyes. The real Mrs. Drexler was biting into a sugar cookie and sipping her champagne. She opened them again—and a stocky kind-eyed boy had already cut in for the next song. He wore an apple blossom in his lapel. For everlasting love, Broome County’s official flower for the year.The dancing Mrs. Drexler in her mind hooted with delight, twirling her speculum.

TIGHT SHOT of Door Number Two. Mrs Drexler snaps her fingers and cries: Why, it’s Douglas Owens! Five foot ten, Irish/Italian, that’s very exciting! Brown/brown, scoring aces in creative play and nurturing, average sperm count 25 million per milliliter—oh ho! Big, strapping boy! Mrs. Drexler slaps him lightly on the behind. Her eyes gleam. He’s a Businessman as well, nothing but the best for our Sylvie, our prime stock Sylvie/Sakiko! He’ll take his briefcase every day and go sit in his club with the other Husbands, and maybe he loves you and maybe he finds real love with them the way you’ll find it with your friend Bouffant in about two years. Who can tell? It’s so thrilling to speculate! It’s not like men and women got along so well before, anyway. Take my wife, please! Why I oughtta! To hell with the whole mess. Give it one week a month. You do unpleasant things one week out of four and don’t think twice. Who cares?

Someone handed her a glass of champagne. Sylvie wrapped her real, solid fingers around it. She felt dizzy. A new boy had taken up her hand and put his palm around her waist. The dance quickened. Still a foxtrot, but one with life in it. She looked at the wheel and spin of faces—white faces, wide, floor-model faces. Sylvie looked for Clark. Anywhere, everywhere, his kind face moving among the perfect bodies, his kind face with a silver molten earth undulating across his cheeks, flickering, shuddering. But he wasn’t there. He would never be there. It would never be Clark with a cedar rod and a sugar cookie. Black boys didn’t get Announced. Not Asians, not refugees, not Sylvie if anyone guessed. They got shipped out. They got a ticket to California. To Utah.

As little as possible should change.

No matter how bad it got, McCarthy and his Brothers just couldn’t let a nice white girl (like Sylvie, like Sylvie, like the good floor-model part of Sylvie that fenced in the red, searing thing at the heart of her) get ruined that way. (If they knew, if they knew. Did the conservative-suit warm-glove Mrs. Drexler guess? Did it show in her dancing?) Draw the world the way you want it. Draw it and it will be.

Sylvie tried to focus on the boy she was dancing with. She was supposed to be making a decision, settling, rooting herself forever into this room, the green curtains, the sugar cookies, the foxtrot.

QUICK CUT to Mrs. Drexler. She spins around and claps her hands. She whaps her speculum on the floor three times and a thin kid with chocolate-colored hair and slate eyes sweeps aside his curtain. She crows: But wait, we haven’t opened Doooooor Number Three! Hello, Thomas Walker! Six foot even, Swiss/Polish—ooh, practically Russian! How exotic! I smell a match! Brown/gray, top marks across the board, average sperm count a spectacular 29 million per milliliter! You’re just showing off, young man! Allow me to shake your hand!

Sylvie jittered back and forth as the filmstrip caught. The champagne settled her stomach. A little. Thomas spun her around shyly as the music flourished. He had a romantic look to him. Lovely chocolate brown hair. He was saying something about being interested in the animal repopulation projects going on in the Plains States. His voice was sweet and a little rough and fine, fine, this one is fine, it doesn’t matter, who cares, he’ll never sit in a garage with me and watch the bombs fall on the sheet with the hole in the corner. Close your eyes, spin around three times, point at one of them and get it over with.

IRIS TRANSITION to Mrs. Drexler doing a backflip in her sequined dress. She lands in splits. Mr. and Mrs. Wells and Walker invite you to the occasion of their children’s wedding!

Sylvie pulled the red, thornless rose and snowdrops from her hair and tied their ribbon around Thomas’s rod. She remembered to smile. Thomas himself kissed her, first on the forehead and then on the mouth. A lot of couples seemed to be kissing now. The music had stopped. It’s over, it’s over, Sylvie thought. Maybe I can still see Clark today. It takes time to plan a wedding.

Voices buzzed and spiked behind her. Mrs. Drexler was hurrying over; her face was dark.

ZOOM on Mrs. Drexler: Wait, sorry, wait! I’m sorry we seem to have hit a snag! It appears Thomas and Sylvie here are a little too close for comfort. They should never have been paired at the same Announcement. Our fault, entirely! Sylvie’s Father has been such a boon to the neighborhood! Doing his part! Unfortunately, the great nation of the United States does not condone incest, so you’ll have trade Door Number Three for something a little more your speed. This sort of thing does happen! That’s why we keep such excellent records! CROSS-REFERENCING! Thank you! Mrs. Drexler bows. Roses land at her feet.

Sylvie shut her eyes. The strip juddered; she was crying tracks through her Spotless Corp Pressed Powder and it was not a film, it was happening. Mrs. Drexler was wearing a conservative brown suit with a gold dove-shaped pin on the lapel and waving a long-stemmed peony for masculine bravery. Thomas was her brother, somehow, there had been a mix-up and he was her brother and other arrangements would have to be made. The boys and girls in a ballroom with her stared and pointed, paired off safely. Sylvie looked up at Thomas. He stared back, young and sad and confused. The snowdrops and roses had fallen off his rod onto the floor. Red on white. Bouffant was practically climbing over Douglas Owens 25 million per milliliter like a tree.

In four years Sylvie will be Mrs. Charles Patterson 19 million per. It’s over and they began to dance. Charles was a swell dancer. He promised to be sweet to her when he got through with training and they were married. He promised to make everything as normal as possible. As little as possible should change. The quintet struck up Mendelssohn.

Sylvie pulled her silence over her and it was good.

Fade to white.

CLOSE-UP of a nice-looking Bobby, a real lantern-jaw, straight-dealing, chiseled type. [Note to Casting: maybe we should consider VP Kroc for this spot. Hair pomade knows no demographic. Those idiots at Brylcreem want to corner the Paternal market? Fine. Let them have their little slice of the pie. Be a nice bit of PR for the re-election campaign, too. Humanize the son of a bitch. Ray Kroc, All-American, Brother to the Common Man. Even he suffers symptomatic hair loss. Whatever—you get the idea. Talk to Copy.] Bobby’s getting dressed in the morning, towel around his healthy, muscular body. [Note to Casting: if we go with Kroc here we'll have to find a body double.] Looks at himself in the mirror and strokes a 5-o’clock shadow.

FEMALE VOICE OVER: Do you wake up in the morning to a sink full of disappointment?

PAN DOWN to a clean white sink. Clumps of hair litter the porcelain. [Note to Art Dept: Come on, Stone, don't go overboard. No more than twenty strands.] Bobby rubs the top of his head. His expression is crestfallen.

VOICE OVER: Well, no more! Now with the radiation-blocking power of lead, All-New Formula Samson Brand Hair Pomade can make you an All-New Man.

Bobby squirts a generous amount of Samson Brand from his tube and rubs it on his head. A blissful smile transforms his face.

VOICE OVER: That feeling of euphoria and well-being lets you know it works! Samson Pomades and Creams have been infused with our patented mood-boosters, vitamins, and just a dash of caffeine to help you start your day out right!

PAN DOWN to the sink. Bobby turns the faucet on; the clumps of hair wash away. When we pan back up, Bobby has a full head of glossy, thick, styled hair. [Note to Art Dept: Go whole hog. When the camera comes back put the VP in a full suit, with the perfect hair—a wig, obviously—and the Senate gavel in his hand. I like to see a little more imagination from you, Stone. Not a good quarter for you.]

VOICE OVER: Like magic, Samson Brand Pomade gives you the confidence you need. [Note to Copy: not sure about 'confidence' here. What about 'peace of mind'? We're already getting shit from the FDA about dosing Brothers with caffeine and uppers. Probably don't want to make it sound like the new formula undoes Arcadia.]

He gives the camera a thumbs-up. [Note to Art Dept: Have him offer the camera a handshake. Like our boy Ray is offering America a square deal.]

Bold helvetica across mid-screen:

Samson Guards Your Strength.

Fade to white.

Ten Grays

Martin watched his brother. The handsome Thomas. The promising Thomas. The fruitful and multiplying Thomas. 29 million per mil Thomas. Their father (24 million) didn’t even try to fight his joyful tears as he pinned the golden dove on his son’s chest. His good son. His true son. For Thomas the Office in the city. For Thomas the planning and pleasing and roasted chickens and martinis. For Thomas the children as easy as pencil drawings.

For Martin Stone, 2 million per milliliter and most of those dead, a package. In a nice box, to be certain. Irradiated teak. It didn’t matter now anyway. Martin knew without looking what lay nestled in the box. A piece of paper and a bottle. The paper was an ordnance unknown until he opened the box. It was a lottery. The only way to be fair. It was his ticket.

It might request that he present himself at his local Induction Center at 0900 at the close of the school year. To be shipped out to the Front, which by then might be in Missouri for all anyone knew. He’d suit up and boot it across the twisted, bubbled moonscape of the Sea of Glass. An astronaut. Bouncing on the pulses from Los Alamos to the Pacific. He would never draw again. By Christmas, he wouldn’t have the fine motor skills.

Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work. The most important work. Only Brothers could really view things objectively. Big picture men. And women, Sisters, those gorgeous black chip girls with 3-Alpha running cool and sweet in their veins. Martin would probably pull Department of Advertising and Information. Most people did. Other than Defense, it was the biggest sector going. The bottle would be Arcadia. For immediate dosage, and every day for the rest of his life. All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do. They said it tasted like burnt batteries if you didn’t put it in something. The first bottle would be the pure stuff, though. Provided by Halcyon, Your Friend in the Drug Manufacturing Business. Martin would remember it, the copper sear on the roof of his mouth. After that, a whole aisle of choices. Choices, after all, make you who you are. Arcadia or Kool. Brylcreem or Samson.

Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world. You could work your way into the Art Department. Keep drawing babies in carriages. Someone else’s perfect quads, their four faces laughing at you forever from glossy pages.

Suddenly Martin found himself clasped tight in his Father’s arms. Pulling the box out of his boy’s hands, reading the news for him, putting it aside. His voice came as rough as warm gin and Martin could hardly breathe for the strength of his Father’s embrace.

Thomas Walker squeezed his Brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.

Velocity Multiplied by Duration

Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.

Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.

She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.

It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.

On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo in ’45, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Berlin and Rome swept clean and blank as pages. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie. Something opening over and over, with nowhere to burn itself out but in.

“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”

Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.

“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.

On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.

Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.

Fade to black.

And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:

Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!

About the Author

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

The Spell of History: Magic Systems and Real-World Zeitgeists

Jeff Seymour

Systems of magic in fantasy can be as varied as the worlds they inhabit. Some novels feature rigorous, intensely scientific collections of spells, reagents, and forces whose causes and effects can be measured, mapped, and predicted. Others treat magic as whimsical, unpredictable, and fantastic in every sense of the word. In those worlds, a spell can be as likely to blow up in the caster’s face as to go off successfully, or even have a will of its own. And sometimes, magic is just treated as a given. The reader may never learn more about it than he or she absolutely needs to.

Every system of magic is a product of its creator. Robert Jordan gave us saidin and saidar. Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman gave us Solinari, Nuitari, and Lunitari. Brandon Sanderson gave us Allomancy. But systems of magic are also the products of the cultural forces that act on, inspire, or dismay their authors as they create their secondary worlds. And if we do a little digging, we can unearth the zeitgeist that helped give birth to a system of magic, put the two side by side, and learn a bit about how the one can influence the other.

We can start as far back as 1872, when a British professor and minister named George MacDonald penned The Princess and the Goblin, a fairy tale about a princess and a miner’s son outwitting the goblins who live below them. The book went on to influence several of the seminal authors of modern fantasy.

Magic in The Princess and the Goblin falls very much into the “given” category. It’s used very sparingly, and it’s focused around a grandmother who gives the titular princess a magic ring and a ball of thread. Neither the princess nor the reader learns how the magic works. It simply does, and the princess uses it to escape from the goblins when they capture her. Magic, in the world of The Princess and the Goblin, is decidedly unscientific.

When we look into what was going on in Britain in 1872, we get a glimpse at one reason that might be. Despite the Industrial Age revving into full force, the world as mirrored through the pages of British newspapers doesn’t seem to contain a great deal of science either. In 1872, the Empire’s major papers reported on plenty of economic stories and lots of religious ones. They were crawling with foreign affairs pieces, murders, and poisonings. They did not spend much space on science coverage. The Guardian ran a regular short feature called “Art, Literature, and Science” that seems to have focused primarily on art. The Times (of London) covered the occasional scientific expedition or society meeting. That’s about it.

Fast-forward eighty-two years to J. R. R. Tolkien, who began publishing The Lord of the Rings in 1954. There’s a similarly nonscientific system of magic in a very different cultural moment. Magic in Middle-Earth shares a lot in common with the magic of The Princess and the Goblin. It is rarely used and often focused around objects, and while it’s necessary for the story to proceed, the mechanics of the magic itself are not at the heart of it. Gandalf and Saruman occasionally use magic. The One Ring possesses extremely powerful magic. But the particulars of how any of it works are left to the imagination. Magic just is.

1954 was a tumultuous time in Britain. World War II had been over for nine years, but the Cold War was heating up. In the months surrounding the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Times covered a shortage of science teachers, awards for new glider designs, the development of new jetliners and the crashes of old ones, and the advent of nuclear energy and failed attempts to de-escalate the nuclear arms race. On the day the book came out, The Times ran a scathing disapproval of British diplomacy. The world was growing smaller, Britain’s place in it was changing, and you can feel the societal tension crackling in the headlines.

How magic in The Lord of the Rings plays into all that is a little difficult to tease out. One need not reach beyond Tolkien’s feelings on religion and science to find an explanation of his magic. But Tolkien also held strong opinions on the changes taking place in his country, and given the upheaval of 1950s Britain, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to see the simple magic in The Lord of the Rings,or at least its resonance with readers,as a throwback to a simpler age.

Several decades later, the world seems to have grown more interested in the future than the past. On November 12, 1984, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight came out in the United States, spawning the incredibly successful Dragonlance fantasy franchise. Ronald Reagan had just won a buoyant reelection campaign. Time was running articles on extra-solar planets, plans for the Star Wars missile defense program, and an infant who had received a heart transplanted from a baboon. The advertisements running between the stories (”Introducing the ultimate VCR: The end of an incredible journey”) sported inspirational, glowing imagery and a sense of the magical even within the technological.

Dragonlance, which owes its existence to the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying games, introduced a magic system that was much more scientific than those MacDonald and Tolkien had developed, but still left plenty to the imagination. In the world of Dragonlance, spells take time to memorize and vanish from the caster’s mind once used. They sometimes require reagents. They take a toll on the body, and they’re related to three of the gods in the Dragonlance pantheon.

But that’s about all the reader learns in the early books of the series. How spells do what they do, and exactly what forces are being manipulated, goes unsaid. There’s a great deal of unpredictability and even playfulness to the magic, although it’s better explained than much of what came before it. And the feeling in the news that anything is possible feels well-suited to the lively, anything-might-happen atmosphere of the magic.

A little more than half a decade later, the optimism was slipping. The Soviet Union was cracking and dissipating, communist bloc countries were falling to uprisings, and the American economy was still recovering from the savings and loan crisis. The New York Times covered racial iniquities in schools and terrorist attacks in Peru. And in January 1990, The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan’s mind-bogglingly massive epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time, was released.

Magic in The Wheel of Time revolves around a mystical font of energy called The One Power, which can be channeled and woven by individuals for various purposes. The results of a given weave of The Power are repeatable, and there’s an element of empirical experimentation present. In one of the later novels in the series, a character discovers how to restore a person’s connection to The One Power by playing with different weaves until she succeeds.

But The Wheel of Time leaves many things unexplained. How exactly The One Power changes from mystical energy into another form is left unexplored, as is why some people can grasp it while others cannot. In The Wheel of Time, magic has measurable, repeatable effects, but it remains incompletely understood, like gravity or the strong force. And in the face of the uncertainty of 1990, it could be that Jordan’s semi-scientific magic system, in which cause and effect made a definite appearance but magic kept an almost spiritual undertone, appealed to readers.

In 2006, the headlines showed a lot of uncertainty again, and the first volume of another fantasy saga, Mistborn: The Final Empire, was released mid-year. In Mistborn, written by Brandon Sanderson, magic revolves around the use of metals. Allomancers can “burn” them in their bodies to gain certain powers. Feruchemists can store magical power in them. And Hemalurgists can steal power from others using spikes driven through the heart. All three types of magic are precise and provide predictable, often physics-driven outcomes, while the metals used in the magic range from the real and common (iron, copper) to the real and uncommon (cadmium, chromium), to the imaginary.

The cultural moment of July 2006 makes for an interesting contrast with Sanderson’s scientific magic. George W. Bush was president. Stem-cell research was on the outs. Headlines and articles in U.S. publications covered flaws in the Dolly sheep-cloning experiments and problems in Einstein’s personal life. One can feel a palpable distrust of, or at least disillusionment with, science in the headlines. In that environment, skeptical readers may have rewarded Sanderson for creating a system they could trust to behave in predictable ways.

Sanderson makes an interesting segue into another genre in which magic and science often intersect: steampunk. He recently jumped 300 years ahead in the Mistborn timeline to write The Alloy of Law, which takes his magic from a more traditional fantasy setting into the middle of a time period roughly analogous to the late 19th century. Though the origins of steampunk reach all the way back to the Victorian Era it so often emulates, the term itself didn’t crop up until the 1980s, and it makes sense to start our investigation of magic in the genre there, with Tim Powers’ seminal novel The Anubis Gates.

In The Anubis Gates, which came out in December 1983, magic and science coexist uneasily. The book’s entire plot hinges around an attempt to bring back ancient Egyptian gods and rejuvenate the dying magic they once fueled. Certain elements of magic in the book involve scientific principles (there’s a reference to a “Newtonian” reaction after the summoning of fire elementals), and others, like magic being negated by a physical connection to the earth, are repeatable and explained.

But the book leaves plenty of magical elements soundly in the realm of the inexplicable, as well. The book’s sorcerers eventually start to gravitate (literally) toward the moon rather than the earth, but the reader never learns why. As in Dragonlance, magic in The Anubis Gates has a deleterious effect on the body, but it’s never quantified. While sorcerers in the book complain about being exhausted by their magic, they always seem to have enough energy left to cast a spell when they need to.

The news in December 1983 was a little less optimistic than that it was when Dragonlance was born a year later, but there was still plenty to feel good about. Coverage of developments in science included new satellite images and improvements in surgical techniques. Advertising imagery was even more futuristic, with car drivers talking to robots and science fiction movies being presented as the best reason to buy a VCR. One article on improved telephone technology ran complete with a picture of a keyboard, a joystick, and an astonished-looking man reflected on a computer screen that showed a wire model of a digital telephone. Given the news and the ads, it seems likely that the zeitgeist that affected Dragonlance had a similar effect on The Anubis Gates.

There’s been a steady stream of steampunk novels, movies, conventions, comic books, and video games since The Anubis Gates, and in 2001 China Miéville, one of the genre’s latest darlings, broke big with the award-winning steampunk/New Weird novel Perdido Street Station. In that book,magic exists side by side with science, and the line between them is often blurry. Both subjects are studied in university, and scientists and magicians often operate in the same fashion with similar results. Magic can be unpredictable, but its results vary in the same ways that results can fluctuate in physics and chemistry when you’re working with imprecise tools. Magicians sometimes use machines to work their magic, and scientists sometimes use magic to improve their machines. In Perdido Street Station, neither the magic nor the science is wholly fleshed out, but neither is completely obscure, and both are subsumed entirely by the overwhelming alienness of the story as a whole.

Early 2001 was a quiet but unsettled time. The U.S. had just been through the polarizing first election of George W. Bush, and its magazines and newspapers were covering the new administration and the pardons Bill Clinton made during his last days in office. In the UK, where Miéville was pursuing a Ph.D., the presses were rolling on an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, train crashes, and political sparring over an upcoming election. The period was an uncomfortable one, full of scandals and disasters. Reading the headlines, you can catch a whiff of the skepticism that was in full force by 2006. It’s little wonder that Miéville’s blurring of science and magic, and the way his characters vacillate between the two while trying to solve their problems, went over well in that environment.

It’s difficult to draw any major conclusions from the juxtaposition of systems of magic and history. It would certainly be as unfair to assume that the creation of a system of magic stemmed completely from its zeitgeist as it would be to claim that it was entirely independent of it. And while readers react undeniably to the magic in fantasy novels, they also fall in love with (or despise) characters, worlds, storytelling, and voice. The interactions between magic and zeitgeist are complicated, to boot. In the uncertainty of the 1950s, readers enjoyed the nonscientific magic of The Lord of the Rings. In the uncertainty of the new millennium, they flocked to the more scientific magic systems of Mistborn and Perdido Street Station.

Trying to look at past cultural moments and the magic that developed in them in a way that would allow us to predict the future will probably always be a lost cause. There are too many variables to take into account. But at the same time, it remains fascinating to think about. The zeitgeist we live in is a tumultuous one. Commercial space travel is edging closer and closer to reality. Earth’s climate grows painfully and inexorably warmer every year. Technology is rapidly worming its way into every moment of our lives. Politics are as fraught and dysfunctional as ever. It will be exciting, at least, to see what magic may grow out of it.

About the Author

Author, freelance writer, and editor Jeff Seymour has been creating speculative fiction since he was a teenager. His writing covers a variety of genres, from magical realism to SF to young adult fantasy, and his first book of short stories, Three Dances, is slated for a Fall 2012 release. Jeff is also serializing a novel on Wattpad.com, and he presently works as a freelance editor for Harlequin’s digital-first imprint Carina Press. In his free time, Jeff blogs about his writing and editing, climbs mountains near his home in Colorado, and dreams about someday getting a cat.

In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Intense, immersive, and startling, China Miéville’s novels have done more than won many major awards—they’ve helped change the face of speculative fiction. The English-born fantasist attended Cambridge University, earned a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and has taught at Harvard University. He’s the author of the Bas-Lag series, which comprises Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. His standalone novels include King Rat, Un Lun Dun, The City & the City, Kraken, Embassytown, and the recent Railsea, his second Young Adult novel.

Set on a train in a world of railways and wastelands, Railsea maintains a constant, pressure-cooker tension between the vast outside world and the claustrophobic interior. “This is the story of a bloodstained boy,” writes Miéville in the book’s prologue; that boy, Sham ap Soorap, is an idealistic young doctor’s assistant who sets out on his first hunt, traveling on the moletrain Medes in search of the giant moles called Moldywarpes. With parallels to (and subversions of) Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Railsea is perhaps Miéville’s tightest novel in terms of plot, but it’s still suitably sprawling.

Something of a traveler himself, Miéville spoke with Clarkesworld about his writing process, his fidelity to the notion of planning, and how books can be methods of transportation.

Do you get much time to write while you travel?

No, no. I write in very intensive chunks at various times. I am not someone who is very good at writing a certain amounts every day. I know that’s what one is told one should do, but what I tend to do is kind of sequester myself away while I am in London for a few weeks at a time and become very antisocial and write very, very intensively over a relatively short time. I am much more of a burst writer than a steady-state writer.

Is there ever any anxiety between bursts that the words won’t come next time you sit down to write?

Not exactly. I wouldn’t say “anxiety.” I don’t tend to doubt that I will be able to think of things to write, but there can be a kind of low-level dread, because especially the early stages are quite hard. So I don’t have that existential dread so much of, “Oh my God, I am never going to be able to write another book,” but I do have that sense of this is going to be hard work, which is fine, that’s appropriate, but especially early on in a project. Once you’ve built up a certain amount of momentum, it rolls much more swiftly and is much easier to continue, so my heart needs a certain amount of bolstering early on in a project. That’s the definitely the case.

Does the writing that you do early on in the burst every need to be scrapped?

Absolutely. I’m ruthless with early drafts, as one has to be. As the general rule, although I am getting better about it, but as a general rule I write long first and then end up doing quite a lot of cutting. More and more as I get older and as I change as a writer, so what tends to happen is the first draft tends to be quite long and maybe quite flabby, then I’ll trim that down. There can be occasions when it’s very difficult because there are some sections that you really want to keep in, but, at the same time, you know that you probably ought to get rid of that bit. Sometimes, you have to be quite ruthless with yourself. But there is no question that I end up getting rid of quite a lot of stuff.

There is no easy read between the way things are written and what works. Sometimes, things that are written in a very exhausted, overnight state that you would think would be among the most kind of scrappy and worse stuff is actually some of the stuff that works best. You can’t narrowly says, “Okay, these five days because I was in such and such state, I probably will not use any of that.” You just never quite know.

How do you know when it works?

Well… sometimes you don’t. This is where you need to try and minimize your own ego and have friends you trust and editors who are prepared to look over stuff. But I think you can train yourself into a certain kind of rigor about your own work. There are all sorts of little tricks. You’ll often hear writers say that one of things you have to do is to read things out loud and that can be really helpful. You have to sort of read it as ruthlessly as possible and always with the possibility in your mind that you’re wrong. That’s why you really do need outside, especially on the second and third draft, you really do need outside people to come and give you thoughts about this. The short answer, I guess, that you don’t always know. You don’t. There are ways of getting closer to it, and I think the two key things are to try to have as much humility as you can in the sense of being aware that your own stuff might not work and of trusting certain people with earlier drafts that you wouldn’t want anyone else to look at.

Do you have a sense of where the story is going from the beginning, or is it a process of discovery?

No, I tend to be very much a planner. I mean obviously details veer in the telling all the time, that’s clearly the case, but in terms of the broad architecture of a book I plot carefully and if things start to veer halfway through, I tend to stop and either pull them back on course, or if I realize they are going in a better direction, I extrapolate and work out what effect this is going to have further down. I am not one of these writers who is able to enjoy flying by the sit of my pants. And there’s no value judgment there, incidentally. I am very well aware that some absolutely fantastic, wonderful writers do that. For me, no, I cannot do it. I have to plan quite meticulously, so often the first several weeks of a book, writing will consist of me grumpily chewing over notebooks and scribbling notes and that kind of thing and not actually putting pen to paper at all other than vague and incomprehensible notes to myself.

Were there any veering moments in the writing of Railsea?

Yes, absolutely. The ending changed quite a lot a couple of times. Again, what happen is I get halfway down and then I suddenly think, “Hang on a minute, this going in a different direction,” and I stop, and I tinker, and I do some more plotting, and I say, “Well, if I do that, then I am going to do this, and that’s going to mean that, and so on.” And I extrapolate it down. That did happen with Railsea not just the ending, certain details got added. Some things you can add without making a huge difference to the structure of a book, and other things break the structure much more. In a way, what you dread is suddenly realizing something that will make the book much better, but which will necessitate quite a big structural revisions because then you really ought to do it, but you know that it’s going to be a lot of work. I had a couple of those. You get them with all books. There was nothing unusual about Railsea in the sense that there was no more or less than usual. I think that it would be very rare that it stuck completely, rigorously to the plan all the way through. It’s not a question of fidelity to the plan as I have written it at the beginning, so much as a fidelity to the notion of planning.

Did I read somewhere that you wanted to do a book in every genre?

What happened there was that that was a throwaway comment I made in an interview some years ago, which as you know the Internet has a tremendous capacity to never forget anything. People have been asking me about that ever since, but what happened was, and this again is not that uncommon, as I said that’s a kind of throwaway line and then people kept saying back to me. The more I thought about it the more I thought, “Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I should probably do that.” It was an off-the-cuff thing, but it’s an off-the-cuff thing that has a certain truth and resonance.

The thing is I am really very, very interested in genres. I find genres fascinating. I’m very interested in the way they work and the way they put things together. That includes genres that I don’t have any strong tradition with, genres that I have to come in from the outside and learn how they work. I don’t have a checklist in my pocket and I’m not going to rush it through. Especially those genres that I don’t know so much about… when I wrote Iron Council, I took quite a lot of time to read a lot of Westerns and work out how the Western works. Genres like Regency Romances that I have read, but I am not steeped in, I do like the idea of taking some time and taking them apart and working out how they work. And I thing that that idea of slowly over the course of career travelling through these different traditions and trying to be respectful to them but also do something, bring your own stuff to that table, I think is a really exciting idea.

Your fondness for the notion of planning seems to be very similar to your fondness for genre. The plan is there, then you deviate from it, or you don’t.

It’s an interesting formulation. At a conscious level I cannot say that I am fond of planning. I would say it’s more a question of my psychological model requiring planning. I take neither pleasure nor displeasure from plans. I just need them to proceed. Whereas with the genres, I take a lot of pleasure with the genres and in the way they work and their protocols and so on.

But I think you are probably onto something in the sense that I tend to be quite a structured thinker. I tend to find structures very useful in ways in terms of organizing my thoughts and the things I do and so on. That clearly has some ramifications in both those fields. It’s not something that would have occurred to me, but I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, you’re probably onto something.

Do you ever experiment with not being structured at any point in the process? Does being structured become a limitation, or is it always a strength?

I think it varies writer to writer. There are certainly writers for whom being overly structured would not be a strength at all. I don’t doubt that one could probably make a strong claim that some of the things… The people that don’t like my stuff might say that some of the problem with it stem from this kind of care, some would say neurosis, about this sort of planning. It’s very difficult to say because it’s so kind of integral to my mental model that thinking outside of it is to kind of think in terms of a different me. I have on a couple of occasions tried writing things which don’t have a structure and don’t have a plan in mind. What I can do, I think, reasonably well, I think I can write good sort of very short, mood pieces, maybe a page long. These are not plot things. These are almost sort of prose poems. Those, I think, work very well, for me anyway. I like both. That can kind of tap into certain intensity, but for anything that’s longer that has a narrative, I just get a bit lost without a plan.

It’s also the case that having a plan and a structure does not negate the intensity. I think sometimes there is an anxiety that if you plan too much you will end up with something quite bloodless and that doesn’t feel urgent. I am sure that may be true for some people. I don’t feel it to myself at all. They’re two separate axes. I can very, very rigorously plan something over a couple of weeks and then I actually sit down to write it, I am rushing with that kind of buzz, that sort of high, just as much as if it had just spilled out of the pen there and then.

What is the secret to capturing mood so intensely?

I don’t know. This is the kind of thing that writers agonize over for centuries. I suspect that it’s something to do with a relatively unmediated sense presence. All these things that you do when you are trying to write something that’s very evocative of scene and you kind of sit back and close your eyes, you know it may look a bit ridiculous sometimes, but it’s perfectly reasonable thing to do. Writing and invoking images and that sort of thing are… You know, there is no division between the mind and the body, they are bodily acts. Putting yourself into a state of mind where you are very reflective of those moments may very well involve putting your body in certain place. This is why some writers write very brilliantly on drugs, which I don’t as it happens, it’s not my interest.

Certainly, a certain kind of very repetitive music, and a certain kind of close intensity can be very evocative. For me, I find often the most powerful writing that I think I do in terms of that moment, that kind of presence in a moment, is often very late at night when very few other people are awake and I am looking out of the window. I always work looking out the window. I am not someone who has my desk facing a wall. I am looking at the city and the lights are on in the windows. There is this great sense of being in a carapace of light. That sort of strangely dream-like moment, I think what you are trying to do when you get that kind of intensity is that you are trying to translate a sense that is basically like a dream in a waking moment. Anything you can do physically or mentally that gets you closer to that experience is probably good.

Is it harder in a non-urban setting to get into this state of mind?

I wouldn’t want to generalize it. I tend to get into it in an urban setting. That’s probably because I tend to be in an urban setting. I know perfectly well that some people find being in the wilderness, being in the woods, intensely hypnotic, hallucinatory, and intense. Certainly, I have written things that I love and that I think do touch that not in urban setting. I wouldn’t want to generalize that. It is the case, as I say, that I tend to do it in an urban setting, but that says more about me and about the projects that I’m interested in than it says about the countryside versus the city in general.

Railsea is your second young adult novel. What does this category require of you? Does it challenge you in different ways than, say, a more intricate book like Embassytown?

I don’t like the category of young adult very much. I think it’s not terribly helpful. It’s basically a marketing category. I am not having a go at marketers here. I work with marketers. They have to do their job. I understand that. These categories may be useful in marketing terms, but what it’s not, I think, is a psychological category or an aesthetic category or philosophical category or anything like that. It’s not my job to worry about marketing, so for that reason, I don’t particularly set much store by the category of Young Adult.

I am very aware that when I read books as a child—I would say as a child, not as a young adult–there was a different kind of intensity that I fell into. No matter how much I love a book now, I don’t read it in the same way, with that same kind of absolutely compulsive inhabiting of the book in a way that I did when I was a kid. And then there’s a shift. I think what Young Adult tends to mean is this blurry line, a very, very, very blurry line between that and “adult” book. I think essentially for me it’s simply question of not worrying about it. I don’t really care. What I always do, and I think probably a lot of writers would say this, you’re writing for yourself and you’re writing for yourself at a particular time in your life. Quite early on when I was planning Railsea, I realized that I was writing for my own, I would say roughly twelve-ish, maybe thirteen-year-old self. That doesn’t preclude reading it also when I am older, and it doesn’t preclude reading it when I am younger. But that was who I think I had in mind when I was doing the writing.

What does it mean? For me, it’s a question of the kind of voice that transports and transported me when I was that age, which doesn’t mean dumbing down or anything like that. You don’t have to do those at all. For me, because of the kind of books that I loved, it means a certain kind of relationship to language, a certain more kind of overtly playful relationships. I use things like punts, which I wouldn’t tend to use in a book written for an older me. It means a certain kind of playfulness about the structure and shape of the novel, so that the whole book is predicated on a silly joke about Moby-Dick. It’s a joke that’s hopefully kind of fun, but it’s the kind of thing that I wouldn’t feel secure writing with my thirty-year-old in mind.

That doesn’t mean that my thirty-year-old self wouldn’t read it and enjoy it, it just means that’s not who I am writing for in that moment. Different writers can do this very differently. For me, things like those jokes, those puns, that kind of playfulness about language tend to be the kind of things that get freed up. I keep repeating the word playfulness because that’s the fundamental difference that I am aware of. I know when my British publisher has published this book, and they haven’t called it a YA novel, it’s a “story for readers of all ages.” On one hand, that’s obviously a piece of marketing because they don’t want anyone to feel they shouldn’t buy it. And I am grateful to them for that, but I do honestly much prefer that as a description because that’s how it feels in my head. It feels like Un Lun Dun. I know some adults read and enjoyed Un Lun Dun. I am delighted by that. We can all read and enjoy books for younger readers. But that felt very much like a book for younger readers for me. Railsea feels more like a book is written for “readers of all ages.”

Is there anything that you read now or any particular writer now who gives you a taste of that compulsive inhabiting of a book like you experienced when you were younger? I keep thinking of drug-users trying to recapture that first high. Can we get that back? Can we still find that buzz?

Some people may be able to. I suspect not. I suspect that that particular kind of buzz is absolutely, fundamentally a function of reading as a young reader who doesn’t have a lot of, relatively speaking, a lot of reading under their belt and who doesn’t have a lot of life under their belt. But again, that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel a trace all the time. I think we do feel a trace of it. It’s one of the many things that we’re constantly hankering for. If there are readers who really do fall into books in the same way they did when they were eight, then I am envious of them. You also have certain new things when you read as an adult. It’s not all a loss. You gain some things, too. One of the things you gain as an adult is that every book you read, you are reading it through a matrix, through the kind of warp and weft of all the other books you’ve read and that number grows and grows and grows, so every book becomes more and more entangledly intertextual. That’s a lovely thing. You lose and you gain. There is definitely a melancholy to it, I freely admit that, but melancholy is not the worst thing. That hankering itself gives you a certain drive to read, which is good.

Are there any books that you inhabited when you were younger that changed you in a significant way? Books that you keep visiting in your mind?

Oh my god, so many! Absolutely heaps, and often when I am asked to list them, one forgets them because they are so close up. It’s like that thing when you look for your glasses, and you are wearing them. The paradox is a lot of the books that are most embedded in me are books that I sometimes forget to mention, which is a terrible injustice. The short answer is yes, loads. I mean there is no hard division between children’s books and adult books. I would say book that did that for me, hugely, was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which is not a children’s book. It’s an adult book, but I read it when I was probably eleven. It absolutely took up residence in my head. It’s one of the key texts in my head.

What was it about The Anubis Gates that captured you?

It’s always very difficult to sort of explain one’s affective reaction. I love the intricacy—and I get back to your structure point, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time—I loved the intricacy of the time-travel narrative. I love the way that it appeared to be exploding into this chaos, but then everything came together with this extraordinary neatness, this extraordinary kind of clicking into place. I thought that was beautiful. I loved the monsters. I loved the time-shifting visions of London. It’s magic, but it’s systematized magic. I passionately love that book. It’s difficult for me to host back there and explain why, but that’s a kind of groping towards it.

Lastly, what are you working on now?

I am doing a novel, which I will not say too much about because I am always very superstitious about talking about work in progress. I am very much looking forward to doing some more short stories. I love writing short stories, although I am not a very quick writer. I write one every so often, but I love them when I do. I’d also like to do some more nonfiction, which I haven’t done for a while. I really enjoy writing nonfiction. Other than that, I am doing a regular comic now for DC [Dial H For Hero]. That is something I would love to keep doing. That kind of depends on people continuing to buy and read it.

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: Plausibility and Truth

Daniel Abraham

There’s a puzzle I don’t know the answer to, but the more I look around for it, the more I see it. Most of the time, it’s amusing. Sometimes it scares the crap out of me.

So, funny story. Back in 1998, I was at Clarion West. One of my classmates turned in a story about a woman who worked from home, writing up recipes for the local newspaper. The essential problem in the story was that the protagonist’s dog kept digging up space-time wormholes. It was a light, comic piece, and one I remember fondly. But we were there for a workshop, and critics have to criticize. We came together for the morning critique, and our comments were very consistent. We all loved the wormhole dog, but no one was willing to believe in a woman supporting herself writing recipes.

I’ve known for as long as I can remember that the willing suspension of disbelief is something that science fiction and fantasy writers work for. Finding the details that make something feel not realistic—there’s nothing that can make, for instance, a psychic-power inducing space fuel harvested from a planet-wide desert inhabited by massive sandworms into mimetic realism—but plausible. It’s not truth that we’re looking for, but the tricks to make something seem true.

I’ve come to understand that it’s something mainstream and literary writers need to concern themselves with too. The thing I’m coming to see now, the one that moves me from amused to anxious, is that nonfiction writers, journalists, bloggers, and scientists (oh my God and scientists) have to worry about that too. Being true, it turns out, isn’t enough, even when you’re just trying to tell the truth.

The relationship between plausibility and truth is always a problem.

So, funny story. Given how much nonfiction I’ve read, I really haven’t written much, but now and then the occasion arises. A few years back, a good friend of mine was guest of honor at the local convention, and I got to write her biography for the program book. I had a scheme for how to approach it that would be fun, but for it to work, I needed a bunch of trivia about her life and history, and I was running a little short. As I recall, I was writing it pretty late at night and pretty close to deadline. I could have called her, rousted her out of bed, and quizzed her about herself. Or I could go to Wikipedia.

I went to Wikipedia, and it had everything I needed for my project. I whipped up a nice little biographical essay that was, I hoped, amusing and informative and fun to read. One of our mutual friends read it at the convention and whooped with delight. Not because it was such a great piece and not because I’d gotten something egregiously wrong. It turned out that one of the little bits of light trivia I’d harvested from her online bio was a ringer. And in fact, it was a ringer that our mutual friend had planted in the article as a joke.

It’s not the first time I’ve been gulled. It’s not even the first time I’ve been gulled by a friend. But the fella in question wasn’t laughing because I’d fallen for his trick. He was delighted because now that the false fact had been picked up, used, and put in print, the Wikipedia article could include a citation saying where the information had come from: me.

There are things that make a story seem real. Some of them happen inside the story itself. Concrete, specific details are more convincing than vague, abstract ones. Slightly surprising details are more convincing than expected ones, so a model with a zit on his earlobe seems more real than just a model. Other things exist outside the story. Things that are repeated are more believable, especially if they’re repeated by more than one source (for example, a citation in Wikipedia). Things are more believable when they’re presented by someone who seems not to have anything to gain by telling the story. Or when the folks listening already have a larger worldview that the story seems to bolster, so they’re predisposed to accept it.

But that’s not about being true. That’s about seeming true.

Most of us aren’t testing the world around us. We’re taking the word of people around us. We don’t evaluate whether something is true by going out and putting our hands on it, because most of the time, that would be irrational, right? I don’t even know from experience that it would be impossible to make a living writing recipes for a newspaper. I absolutely and unshakably believe it’s impossible, but the source of that certainty isn’t evidence. It’s a decision I made about a narrative (this seems unlikely) that was echoed back to be by a bunch of different sources (my fellow critiquers) and fit into a larger story that I was already disposed to believe (newspapers don’t pay well, especially for things that can’t be put under copyright). I didn’t call any newspapers or talk with anyone who puts together cookbooks. My time is a limited resource, and if I started tracking down and checking everything I came across and withholding judgment until I’d made my own investigations, I wouldn’t be able to do the things I actually want to do. Like make dinner or have a job.

So instead of judging facts, most of the time, I judge stories about facts. So does everybody. We don’t look for truth, because truth demands too much time and effort. We looks for plausibility, because it’s what we have time for. We suspend our disbelief at the drop of a hat for any number of reasons—because the person telling the story is a journalist, because the information matches what we already thought was true, because it’s a good story.

Most of the time, that’s close enough.

So, not-so-funny story. I have a friend who ran an oil-and-gas company in New Mexico, so she worked with a lot of geologists and engineers, most of them men, and most with a profound politically conservative bent. There was one man in particular, a fella who’d been in the industry for decades. An educated man and a professional with a wealth of practical, hands-on experience. He believes that anthropogenic global warming was a myth, but he also sees the drought that is slowly killing the American Southwest. He sees the fire seasons getting worse and worse. He came to the conclusion that terrorists in the Middle East have invented a weather control device that they’re using to destroy the United States.

And I can’t laugh at this guy. I want to. I’d love to call him an idiot and a rube and someone who is so blinded by the sins of his profession that he can’t handle the truth, and, oh my, do I think he is wrong about the weather-control thing. Only I can’t.

He’s using the same tools I am. He’s comparing the stories that are presented to him, maybe telling a few of his own, just like we all do.

The difference between plausibility and truth is that truth is objective and hard to find, while plausibility is subjective and easy. When the oilman says he doesn’t believe in global warming, what he’s saying is that however much the scientists insist that the data proves it, he’s heard some other story that’s more compelling to him. I can say that the idea that humanity can spend the time since the Industrial Revolution actively changing the atmosphere of the planet without changing anything doesn’t seem plausible to me. But neither one of us has easy access to the data or the expertise to interpret it for ourselves. Objective truth is difficult to come by, and even if you have it, what you can pass on to the next person is the story that you tell about it.

Stories—by which I mean novels, newspapers, the interpretation sections of scientific papers—aren’t a vehicle for truth. The things that make a narrative convincing are technical issues, and they don’t have anything to do with whether the picture they create of the world is true. The techniques are largely the same whether we’re talking about a detail of someone’s life in a program book biography, a light fiction piece about a dog digging up wormholes in the back yard, or whether our species is closing up our own ecological niche. In order for truth to be recognized as true, it has to be wrapped in plausibility. Just the same as lies.

And that scares the crap out of me.

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: Finding the Good in a Dark Day

Neil Clarke

Last month, my family and I filled the van with books and drove four-and-a-half hours to Burlington, MA for Readercon, one of my favorite conventions. After a nice dinner with Lisa and the boys, I walked over to the dealer’s room to get started on setting up the Clarkesworld table. After a team of volunteers helped unload my van, I started assembling my shelves. Halfway through, I began to feel overheated and nauseous. It felt like food poisoning, so I headed back to our room, but the situation worsened as time passed. Eventually, Lisa had to call the front desk for an ambulance. The paramedics arrived quickly, and after a series of questions, began to suspect that I was having a significant heart attack. They were right. I was rushed down the street to the Lehay Clinic, where they then proceeded to put two stents in my heart, in a location of my heart that they refer to as “the widowmaker.”

The day after, I recall asking Lisa to see if friends at the con could arrange to get all my boxes loaded back into the van. Later, however, she told me that when people heard what happened, they set up my table and arranged to have volunteers handle sales for the entire weekend. They were determined to make sure that I wouldn’t be carrying any boxes of books back with me. Cards were made from my promotional posters and people kept stopping by the table to sign and send me their best wishes for a speedy recovery. They even made arrangements to get some books from my personal collection signed for me. They handled every little detail. By the end of the weekend, they took what remained of the books, loaded my van and handed Lisa a stack of money. From my hospital bed, I checked in on email, Facebook and Twitter via my Kindle Fire. Every day, I was emotionally overwhelmed by the support and efforts of these people. I still am.

All too often, we only hear about the bad things that happen within fandom. It’s right to point out the creeps and other disturbing things that happen, but we can’t let those few outshine the genuinely good people that make up the majority. In many ways, it is a testament to fandom that I haven’t been able to track down all the names of the people that helped my family that weekend. Friends, acquaintances and even total strangers pitched in and gave up their own time when we really needed it. Even the smallest gestures added up and lifted our spirits when we needed it the most. For that, I will be eternally grateful. I can’t think of a sufficient way to thank everyone.

I’m told the following people are deserving of special thanks: Gavin Grant, Sean Wallace, Kate Baker, Jaym Gates, Genevieve Valentine, Eric Rosenfield, Molly Tanzer, and Sam Berman. These are good people. Treat them that way.

I wish the story could end right here, but unfortunately there’s more. Within eight hours of returning home, I found myself headed to the emergency room of Morristown Memorial Hospital with a kidney stone. Normally a simple procedure, my already weakened heart and the high level of blood thinners in my system complicated any attempts to fix things. Eventually, they decided to go in after the stone, but it proved too much. Instead they left a stent inside me to help prevent the stone from causing further pain until such a time that my heart can handle the strain of the full procedure. I have months of recovery ahead of me, but I am finally home and have the support of my friends and family. That’s enough for me right now.

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.