Clockwork Chickadee

Mary Robinette Kowal

The clockwork chickadee was not as pretty as the nightingale. But she did not mind. She pecked the floor when she was wound, looking for invisible bugs. And when she was not wound, she cocked her head and glared at the sparrow, whom she loathed with every tooth on every gear in her pressed-tin body.

The sparrow could fly.

He took no pains to conceal his contempt for those who could not. When his mechanism spun him around and around overhead, he twittered — not even a proper song — to call attention to his flight. Chickadee kept her head down when she could so as not to give him the satisfaction of her notice. It was clear to her that any bird could fly if only they were attached to a string like him. The flight, of which he was so proud, was not even an integral part of his clockwork. A wind-up engine hanging from the chandelier spun him in circles while he merely flapped his wings. Chickadee could do as much. And so she thought until she hatched an idea to show that Sparrow was not so very special.

It happened, one day, that Chickadee and Sparrow were shelved next to one another.

Sparrow, who lay tilted on his belly as his feet were only painted on, said, “How limiting the view is from here. Why, when I am flying I can see everything.”

“Not everything, I’ll warrant,” said Chickadee. “Have you seen what is written underneath the table? Do you know how the silver marble got behind the potted fern, or where the missing wind-up key is?”

Sparrow flicked his wing at her. “Why should I care about such things when I can see the ceiling above and the plaster cherubs upon it. I can see the shelves below us and the mechanical menagerie upon it, even including the clockwork scarab and his lotus. I can see the fireplace, which shares the wall with us, none of which are visible from here nor to you.”

“But I have seen all of these things as I have been carried to and from the shelf. In addition the boy has played with me at the fountain outside.”

“What fountain?”

“Ah! Can you not see the courtyard fountain when you fly?” Chickadee hopped a step closer to him. “Such a pity.”

“Bah — Why should I care about any of this?”

“For no reason today,” said Chickadee. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

“What is written underneath the table?” Sparrow called as he swung in his orbit about the room, wings clicking against his side with each downstroke.

Chickadee pecked at the floor and shifted a cog to change her direction toward the table. “The address of Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski.”

“Bah. Why should I care about them?”

“Because they are master clockworkers. They can re-set cogs to create movements you would not think possible.”

“I have all the movement I need. They can offer me nothing.”

“You might change your mind.” Chickadee passed under the edge of the table. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

Above the table, Sparrow’s gears ground audibly in frustration.

Chickadee cocked her head to look up at the yellow slip of paper glued to the underside if the table. Its type was still crisp though the paper itself threatened to peel away. She scanned the corners of the room for movement. In the shadows by the fireplace, a live mouse caught her gaze. He winked.

“How did the silver marble get behind the potted fern?” Sparrow asked as he lay on the shelf.

“It fell out of the boy’s game and rolled across the floor to where I was pecking the ground. I waited but no one seemed to notice that it was gone, nor did they notice me, so I put my beak against it and pushed it behind the potted fern.”

“You did? You stole from the boy?” Sparrow clicked his wings shut. “I find that hard to believe.”

“You may not, today,” Chickadee said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

She cocked her head to look away from him and to the corner where the live mouse now hid. The mouse put his forepaw on the silver marble and rolled it away from the potted fern. Chickadee felt the tension in her spring and tried to calculate how many revolutions of movement it still offered her. She thought it would suffice.

“Where is the missing wind-up key?” Sparrow hung from his line, waiting for the boy to wind him again.

“The live mouse has it.” Chickadee hopped forward and pecked at another invisible crumb, but did not waste the movement needed to look at Sparrow.

“What would a live mouse need with a windup key?”

“He does not need it,” said Chickadee. “But I do have need of it and he is in my service.”

All the gears in the room stopped for a moment as the other clockwork animals paused to listen. Even the nightingale stopped her song. In the sudden cessation of ticking, sound from the greater world outside crept in, bringing the babble of the fountain in the courtyard, the laughter of the boy, the purr of automobiles and from the far distance, the faint pealing of a clock.

“I suppose you would have us believe that he winds you?” said Sparrow.

“Not yet. Perhaps today.” She continued pecking the floor.

After a moment of nothing happening, the other animals returned to their tasks save for the sparrow. He hung from his line and beat his wings against his side.

“Ha! I see him. I see the live mouse behind the potted fern. You could too if you could fly.”

“I have no need.” Chickadee felt her clockwork beginning to slow. “Live Mouse!” she called. “It is time to fulfill our bargain.”

The silence came again as the other animals stopped to listen. Into this quiet came a peculiar scraping rattle and then the live mouse emerged from behind the potted fern with the missing wind-up key tied in his tail.

“What is he doing?” Sparrow squawked.

Chickadee bent to peck the ground so slowly she thought she might never touch it. A gear clicked forward and she tapped the floor. “Do you really need me to tell you that?”

Above her, Sparrow dangled on his line. “Live Mouse! Whatever she has promised you, I can give you also, only wind my flying mechanism.”

The live mouse twirled his whiskers and kept walking toward Chickadee. “Well now. That’s a real interesting proposition. How about a silver marble?”

“There is one behind the potted fern.”

“Not nomore.”

“Then a crystal from the chandelier.”

The live mouse wrinkled his nose. “If’n I can climb the chandelier to wind ya, then I reckon I can reach a crystal for myself.”

“I must have something you want.”

With the key paused by Chickadee’s side, the live mouse said, “That might be so.”

The live mouse set the tip of the key down like a cane and folded his paws over it. Settling back on his haunches, he tipped his head up to study Sparrow. “How ’bout, you give me one of your wings?”

Sparrow squawked.

“You ain’t got no need of ‘em to fly, that right?” The live mouse looked down and idly twisted the key on the floor, as if he were winding the room. “Probly make you spin round faster, like one of them zeppelin thingamabobs. Whazzat called? Air-o-dye-namic.”

“A bird cannot fly without wings.”

“Now you and I both know that ain’t so. A live bird can’t fly without wings, but you’re a clockwork bird.”

“What would a live mouse know about clockworks?”

The live mouse laughed. “Ain’t you never heard of Hickory, Dickory and Dock? We mice have a long history with clockworks. Looking at you, I figure you won’t miss a wing none and without it dragging, you ought to be able to go faster and your windings would last you longer. Whaddya say? Wouldn’t it be a mite sight nicer to fly without having to wait for the boy to come back?”

“What would you do with my wing?”

“That,” the live mouse smiled, showing his sharp incisors, “is between me and Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski. So do we have a deal?”

“I will have to consider the matter.”

“Suit yourself.” The live mouse lifted the key and put the tip in Chickadee’s winding mechanism.

“Wait!” Sparrow flicked his wings as if anxious to be rid of them.  ”Yes, yes you may have my left wing, only wind me now. A bird is meant to fly.”

“All righty, then.”

Chickadee turned her head with painful slowness. “Now, Live Mouse, you and I have an agreement.”

“That we did and we do, but nothing in it says I can’t have another master.”

“That may well be, but the wind-up key belongs to me.”

“I reckon that’s true. Sorry, Sparrow. Looks as if I can’t help you none.” The live mouse sighed. “And I surely did want me one of them wings.”

Once again, he lifted the key to Chickadee’s side. Above them, Sparrow let out a squeal of metal. “Wait! Chickadee, there must be something I can offer you. You are going on a journey, yes? From here, I can tell you if any dangers lie on your route.”

“Only in this room and we are leaving it.”

”Leaving? And taking the key with you?”

“Just so. Do not worry. The boy will come to wind you eventually. And now, Live Mouse, if you would be so kind.”

“My other wing! You may have my other wing, only let the live mouse use the key to wind me.”

Chickadee paused, waiting for her gears to click forward so that she could look at the Sparrow. Her spring was so loose now, that each action took an eternity. “What would I do with one of your wings? I have two of my own.”

The other clockwork bird seemed baffled and hung on the end of the line flapping his wings as if he could fling them off.

The live mouse scraped a claw across the edge of the key. “It might come in real handy on our trip. Supposing Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski want a higher payment than you’re thinking they do. Why then you’d have something more to offer them.”

“And if they didn’t then we would have carried the wing with us for no reason.”

“Now as to that,” said the live mouse, “I can promise you that I’ll take it off your hands if’n we don’t need it.”

Chickadee laughed. “Oh, Live Mouse, I see now. Very well, I will accept Sparrow’s wing so that later you may have a full set. Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski will be happy to have two customers, I am certain.”

The live mouse bowed to her and wrapped the key in his tail again. “Sparrow, I’ll be right up.” Scampering across the floor, he disappeared into the wall.

Chickadee did not watch him go, she waited with her gaze still cocked upward toward Sparrow. With the live mouse gone, Chickadee became aware of how still the other clockworks were, watching their drama. Into the silence, Nightingale began to cautiously sing. Her beautiful warbles and chirps repeated through their song thrice before the live mouse appeared out of the ceiling on the chandelier’s chain. The crystals of the chandelier tinkled in a wild accompaniment to the ordered song of the nightingale.

The live mouse shimmied down the layers of crystals until he reached Sparrow’s flying mechanism. Crawling over that, he wrapped his paws around the string beneath it and slid down to sit on Sparrow’s back.

“First one’s for me.” His sharp incisors flashed in the chandelier’s light as he pried the tin loops up from the left wing. Tumbling free, it half fell, half floated to rattle against the floor below. “And now this is for the chickadee.”

Again, his incisors pulled the tin free and let the second wing drop.

Sparrow’s clockwork whirred audibly inside his body, with nothing to power. “I feel so light!” 

“Told ya so.” The live mouse reached up and took the string in his paws. Hauling himself back up the line, he reached the flying mechanism in no time at all. “Ready now?”

“Yes! Oh yes, wind me! Wind me!”

Lickety-split, the key sank into the winding mechanism and the live mouse began turning it. The sweet familiar sound of a spring ratcheting tighter floated down from above, filling the room. The other clockwork animals crept closer; even Chickadee felt the longing brought on by the sound of winding.

When the live mouse stopped, Sparrow said, “No, no, I am not wound nearly tight enough yet.”

The live mouse braced himself with his tail around an arm of the chandelier and grunted as he turn the key again. And again. And again. “Enough?”

“Tighter.”

He kept winding.

“Enough?”

“Tighter. The boy never winds me fully.”

“All right.” The mouse turned the key three more times and stopped. “That’s it. Key won’t turn no more.”

A strange vibration ran through the sparrow’s body. It took Chickadee a moment to realize that he was trying to beat his wings with anticipation. “Then watch me fly.”

The live mouse pulled the key out of the flying mechanism and hopped up onto the chandelier. As he did, Sparrow swung into action. The flying mechanism whipped him forward and he shrieked with glee. His body was a blur against the ceiling. The chandelier trembled, then shook, then rattled as he spun faster than Chickadee had ever seen him.

“Live Mouse, you were rig — ” With a snap, his flying mechanism broke free of the chandelier. “I’m flying!” Sparrow cried as he hurtled across the room. His body crashed into the window, shattering a pane as he flew through it.

The nightingale stopped her song in shock. Outside, the boy shrieked and his familiar footsteps hurried under the window. “Oh pooh. The clockwork sparrow is broken.”

The mother’s voice said, “Leave it alone. There’s glass everywhere.”

Overhead, the live mouse looked down and winked.

Chickadee pecked the ground, with her mechanism wound properly. The live mouse appeared at her side. “Thanks for the wings.”

“I trust they are satisfactory payment?”

“Sure enough. They look real pretty hanging on my wall.” He squinted at her. “So that’s it? You’re just going to keep on pecking the ground?”

“As long as you keep winding me.”

“Yeah. It’s funny, no one else wants my services.”

“A pity.”

“Got a question for you though. Will you tell me how to get to Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski?”

“Why ever for?”

“Well, I thought… I thought maybe Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski really could, I dunno, fix ‘em on me so as I can fly.”

Chickadee rapped the ground with laughter. “No, Mouse, they cannot. We are all bound to our integral mechanisms.” She cocked her head at him. “You are a live mouse. I am a clockwork chickadee, and Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski are nothing more than names on a scrap of paper glued to the bottom of a table.”

About the Author

Mary Robinette Kowal is a professional puppeteer who moonlights as a writer. She has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures and founded Other Hand Productions. Her design work has garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve.

Mrs. Kowal's short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and CICADA. She is the art director of Shimmer and a graduate of Orson Scott Cards Literary BootCamp. She is a current finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The Secret in the House of Smiles

Paul Jessup

Jack cut up pictures of girls with thin razors and then glued the most pleasing body parts together onto a single white sheet of paper.

A leg, snip; an arm, snip. Eyes, snip. Perfect hair, snip.

And then the assemblage. Glue spread across the floor and the sound of glossy pages being stuck and unstuck together. Like Velcro and leather.

The trance was finally broken when the door burst open, slamming against the fragile dormitory walls. Jack jumped but did not stop. Snip, snip, snip. Stick, stick, stick.

Standing in the doorway was Alice in a black dress and green striped stockings. She had her bookbag slung over her shoulder. “Hey hot stuff. Want to go vampire hunting with me? I’ve got a good one.”

Jack did not turn. Did not move. His body was still, rock still, stone still. Meditation. Concentration. The last sorcerer’s apprentice. He had to reverse it, to change it back to what it once was.

Alice looked down and saw what Jack was doing. “This again?”

Alice sat down on the floor next to him Indian style, draping her arms across his shoulders. She felt his bones beneath his shirt, his skin hot and sweaty against hers. Jack did not respond. He had found a page with the perfect waist.

She walked over to his dorm window and looked at the campus outside. It looked cold. Night. The pathways between buildings were covered in a quilt of red and brown leaves, illuminated by the sparse golden light of the streetlamps.

Alice sat on his bed. Jack liked seeing her on his bed. Her body accented against the green blanket.Her stockings almost matched. Jack screamed. Alice jumped in surprise. He spit, he swore. He pushed the glossy pages across the floor. Kicked the half-finished girls in anger, destroying all his work. “It’s no good, it’s no good,” he said, “I can’t do it. I shouldn’t have performed that magic trick. It was all wrong.. Now pieces are missing. Gone.”

He looked up at Alice, her staring back. “Come on,” she said, “Let’s go and do something else. I hate it when you get like this.”

Alice picked up the phone, the music of the dialtone singing in her ears. It was time to make a call, time to get Jack out of the dorm room and do something important, something worthwhile. Some vampire hunting would do them all some good.

The walls were red brick and coated with posters. One advertised a local illusionist who was performing for the student government. He wore a top hat and cape, and a waxed moustache that curled to either side of his head like a cartoon villain. In the distance they heard the showers, splashing and laughter.

Jack looked at the wall and grabbed a poster. It was a girl in a bunny costume, holding up two connected brass rings. A simple trick. “Her ears! Her ears! I feel like I’m back on top again. I can almost see her in my mind— moving in and out of vision like a pale ghost. I have to cut off these ears. They are her perfect ears.”

Jack rubbed his stale glue laced hands together. It sounded like sandpaper grating. “It will only take a second. Just let me cut off her ears and shove them into my pocket. Come on pretty please, come on.”

Alice tossed the poster to the ground and glanced up and down the hallways. No one was here. This didn’t feel right. “Hurry up,” she said, “Before someone sees us.”

Eagerly Jack reached down, pulled out his razor. Snip, snip, a perfect ear for his pocket. Shaped like a conch shell.

“Ok, let’s go.”

They walked briskly down the hall, their footsteps echoing to the sound of the rushing water and bathing.

Jenny sat on a large orange beanbag chair, her legs crossed and her eyes staring at a large flat screen television she had on the facing wall. A circus show. With artistic clowns prancing about and bemoaning on the nature of existentialism. One threw a pie at the other, and proclaimed all actions absurd.

Jenny wore a dirty purple shirt, stained with ketchup and grease. Her hair was piled up above her head and tied in place with twine and wilted flowers. She wasn’t wearing any pants. Just panties and bare legs riddled with shaving scars. She nodded as they walked in. “Some fucked up sideshow,” she said, “Have a seat and watch it with me. They’re going to bring out the freaks next. My favorite part is when the geek cuts the Siamese twins in half. It’s akick.”

They all sat on the floor, facing the large screen television. Alice saw the fridge over in the corner, pushed up against the wall. It opened from the top, like a trap door to a stage. She heard it humming from across the room.

Jenny put her arm around Jack. Her skin was corpse cold, white and pale against his sprayon-tan skin, but she was not the true queen.

“Hey, sweetie. Want to do me a favor?”

Jack laughed, nervously. “Sure,” he said, pushing her arm away and standing up abruptly.

“Go and get me a beer from the fridge. And maybe take out a pizza and put it into a microwave. You guys hungry? Thirsty? Want a beer or something?”

They all grumbled sure, yeah, of course.

“Good idea,” Jenny said, “And Alice— stop looking at my legs. Got it? These are not for you. I’ve already told you that you’re not my type.”

Alice laughed a tittering hee hee hee laugh as on the verge of mania. She watched as Jack walked over the fridge. He wore a long yellow raincoat. Alice thought he looked ridiculous. Like a giant bumblebee detective.

The televised twins howled, and there was a sound of tearing meat. “Oh,” Jenny said, “This is my favorite part. It always gets me hot. Watching them tear these girls apart. Damn. I am so horny.”

Alice turned her face from the television and looked directly at Jenny, keeping her eyes on Jenny’s round and acne scarred face. “Did I ever tell you my major?”

Jenny scoffed. “Do I even know you? You just came along with the boy. Why do you think I care about you?”

Alice was unphased. She had done this a thousand times. “Come on,” she said, “Take a guess.”

Jenny sighed. “I’m missing the best part. I don’t care.”

“Just guess?”

Jenny tried to hide her anger. “Quantum Physics? You look like a super geek.”

Alice pointed to her nose. “Exactly. But not quite. It’s a branch of quantum physics. I’m a vampire hunter.”

Now Jenny was interested. She turned off her television and turned her gaze to Alice. “A vampire hunter? What does that have to do with quantum physics?”

Alice put her finger to her lip and chewed on the calluses as she spoke. “Well, it’s kind of like a vampire observer, really. See, reality is a binary state, right? You can be alive, or you can be dead. One or the other. Vampires, on the other hand, are a super position of both states. That are both and neither at the same time. Like a supernatural Schrödinger’s Cat.”

Jenny inched in forward. “I don’t get it. So vampires are, what? Super posit wats?

“Super position. See, in quantum computing a qbit can hold three states while a regular bit holds two. The third state is actually all states and no states at the same time. It’s kind of like the inverse of zero. Vampires are the same way— they are a qbit.”

Now Alice was excited. She reached over and grabbed Jenny’s hands. Her eyes were red. “So, the only way you can tell what a quantum particle is, is by observing it. When you observe it then it tells you what states it is in. But it changes depending on how you observe it. Isn’t that wild? That’s why I’m a vampire observer. I perform tests to see if the state of something living could also be dead. If they are just living or just dead, then they aren’t quantum vampires. If they are living with the possibility of being dead, then they are vampires.”

Jenny frowned. “I don’t get it.”

Jack put a pizza into the microwave and turned it on, and tossed a beer at Jenny. Jenny quickly spun around and grabbed it. “Thanks,” she said.

“It’s crazy, I know. But here. If I have a mirror, and I hold it up to you, and you don’t reflect I am performing a test. I am observing you, and if you have the possibility of being a vampire, then you would not have a reflection. Like this.”

Alice held up a small makeup mirror. The glass glinted in the neon lights that flickered on the ceiling, casting its own mirror light in the room. Jen stared at it, stared through it, trying to peer into herself. No reflection. Jenny ran out of the room screaming.

Jack hummed and rocked back and forth. Hummed like the freezer in Jenny’s apartment. He then darted beneath his bed and pulled out his little perfect pile of magazine parts and glue.

Jack ignored Alice. She did not exist to him. She’d been triying to get his attentionall day, all night, for the past month.

He had an ear to affix. He wanted to use his special glue stick for this. It was black and white, like a magic wand. Stick, stick, stick.

She looked at Jack, watched him drool over the perfect ear. No, she did not know why she was still with him. Maybe it was convenience?

Jack screamed. He threw the razor against the ground and scattered the pictures. “The ear is wrong! I thought I had seen her— a glimpse. But no, fading. Fleeting. A mist. It’s gone. This trick went south.”

He turned and looked at Alice. “There was an audience, you know? They watched the whole thing. Yet no one knew what really happened. And she was smiling the whole time.”

Alice did her nervous laugh. Hee hee hee. “Come on Jack. You’re just worked up, is all. Take a breath, forget about it all for a moment. You need to relax a little.”

Jack rubbed his hands together. Stuck pieces of magazine parts grinding. Arm and leg and stomach and mouth, pushing and rubbing between his hands in an orgy of glossy body parts. “I know of a secret. Hidden in the house of smiles.”

Alice leaned forward. “Yeah? What’s that? House of Smiles?”

Jack crawled under his bed. His head and waist disappeared under the mattress. Legs wiggled as he searched. Alice heard plastic boxes moving. More things moving. How could he be taking so long? There was barely any space underneath their beds.

Jack scurried out form under his bed. He had a shoebox covered in a plastic bag. He removed the bag, pulling the box out. It was decorated with pictures of rabbits running and a picture of a fox stalking in the green pine trees.

“Here,” Jack said proudly, “Here it is. Here, here, here. She smiled like a saw. Big teeth, cutting things apart. The last of the great stage performers. Queen vampire, in hidden stasis.” Jack pulled off the lid with a flourish and a tada! Inside was a diorama. Careful, tiny little pieces collected together. Hand made, hand painted. Perfect little pine trees. Perfect little cabin. With a large cartoonish smile painted on the side. And behind, bathed in a cold blue winter light was a perfect tiny freezer chest. Closed and grey.

Excited, Jack turned over the lid. There was a map. It was a detailed map, one written by hand, with directions scrawled across it. Strange directions, turn left at the burning towers, if you’ve walked past the giant’s legs, you’ve gone too far.

“Where is this at?” Alice asked.

Jack pointed, moved his finger. Made humming sounds. Like a low flying plane. “Not far, not far. Just the woods outside of the University. Could walk there from here. There is a shack and all these abandoned apple trees. A whole orchard left to rot and misery. Whoever owned it must’ve left in a hurry.”

Alice grunted. “Good.” She said, “Let’s get going then. I can collect everything we need and get going.”

Jack shook his head, slamming the book shut. “No, not yet. We can’t go yet.”

Now it was Alice’s turn to have a headache. She just couldn’t keep living life like this. Always on the edge of some strange madness.

“Why not,” she asked, exhausted.

Jack pointed at the mismatched photographs.

“Because she is not finished yet. I have to remember her, I have to love her. Then we can go back. Then we can use the freezer.”

Alice slouched his shoulders. Resigned. “Ok,” she said, “All right. Jackie boy, let’s construct your perfect girl, shall we? And then— then what? We go to the woods?”

Jack pounded his fists into the floor, drumming the wood. He spoke as he drummed. “You don’t understand. Ghosts are more important than food. Ghosts are more important than anything. If you forget them they are erased. Stolen, vanished. Faceless things looking for masks in the rain. You cannot deny me this. You cannot deny her this. Ghosts are more important than vampires. Than dreams. Than water or light. And the ghosts of the saw are the hardest to please. Half finished ghosts, covered in smiles and torn apart.”

When he stopped drumming they sat in silence for a minute. “Fuck Jackie,” Alice said, “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

She helped him find posters. Find magazines. She cut with him and glued with him and he was happy because he started to see her again. In the glimpse of still life, he caught her. Caught her in fleeting moments, flying and trying to escape.

Alice didn’t know it. She could not know what Jack was looking for, who Jack was trying to piece together out of old sticky pages and glossy photos. All she knew was that there was a vampire, in the woods, one that she could observe, one that she could hunt.

She helped Jackie-O Jack perform a bit of magic. Perform a bit of now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t. This was a special kind of magic. Backwards magic. Most magicians were in the art of taking things apart, taking things away, making them disappear and cut into tiny pieces. Not Jack — no, the Jack man had a plan. A new kind of trick. He was going to put someone back together. Reverse that saw, take the blade out and piece her back together again.

A little bit of Now-you-don’t-see-me, Now-you-do.

And she would be happy. She would be thankful. And she would say she forgave him, and say that he wouldn’t have to be sorry or feel guilty anymore. That was ok, what he did all those years ago. That she was happier now, better now. In a place where queens and puppets dance. And she would be whole again. Setting him free.

They each had pockets filled with picture pieces. Photograph slices, body parts and different snatches of text that Jackie-Jack man thought would come in handy. Special words. Magic words, printed on the page but not to be spoken aloud. When spoken aloud they lose their magic.

Out past the University. The lights and the towers dim glows behind them now. Like distant earth stars, slowly going supernova and fading out.

Pine trees. From his dream, no — his memory. They surrounded them. Sticky, they smelled of sap. The knotted and spiny branches webbed around them, catching them. Claustrophobic. Leaves plastered to their feet with mud. In the distance they heard dogs barking in the cold and Alice shrieked.

Jack did not care. Let Alice scream. Her screams would only echo through the air, and no one could hear them now. Not in the land of the saws. Not in the land of the dead.

Alice reached over and held his face. Her lips were like wet pomegranates. He smelled the seeds on her. Very slowly she said— “I think we are being followed. Do you understand? We are being followed by someone. I think it is Jenny. Vampire Jenny.”

Jack nodded, but didn’t care. He kept right on walking. Alice dragged behind him, her eyes looking out into the trees, searching and finding faces everywhere, blinking in and out of existence.

He was laying seeds along the ground, and everyone would have to come. Follow, follow. To the house of smiles!

Here was the place, the memory hole, the memory whole, the whole thing. The shack. Grey shack, shingles broken and smashed. Dead shack, undead shack, shack like a home brought back from the dead. Windows were holes, eyes like empty caves. Big smile painted on the side. Cheshire smile, haunted smile. Ghost smile.

Welcome, welcome it said. Welcome to the house of smiles. Welcome to the quantum gateway, the world between binary states. Let the saws sing out the chorus of the heavens.

Jack had a cape. Where did he get the cape from? Nobody knows but Jackie. So they laid the magazine parts down and asked him, now what? He walked over to the freezer in the back and inspected it. It hummed. He walked behind it, pulled out a saw and then approached Alice with heavy footsteps.

Everything fit together now.

“Open Your Pockets!” he commanded in his best magician voice.

She opened her pockets and let the cut up pieces flutter around like butterflies, like broken and dead leaves. He opened the freezer with a flourish and a Tada! And a wave of the magic wand. Inside, inside.

Queen of the House of Smiles. Cut up, wrapped in plastic. Each piece, each part. Crammed in. But some parts were missing. Some parts were always missing. He hated that. How could he remember her with all the parts missing? Sawed off and stolen. The trick that went south. The too sharp saw, grinning as it cut into her, and her all smiles the whole time, even in that pain, the audience applauding.

And then her asking him — Jackie — please, put me back together again. She whispered it as she smiled, teeth together. He wanted to stop sawing, that Jackie O did— he wanted to. Keep cutting as the crowd applauded.

The pages fluttered, stuck and unstuck. They flew over and stitched themselves onto parts, stitched everything together. The missing pieces made whole out of magazine skin and magazine eyes and magazine faces.

In the trees faces crawled out, sat down to watch the show.

Saw, saw, saw. The vampires applauded and Alice was all smiles. She could not stop grinning, could not stop laughing as each part of her body was removed, magazine pieces representing her waist, her eyes, her hair fluttering around her as he cut into her.

The body rose slowly from the freezer chest tomb. The body was her. The sorcerer’s last apprentice. Dressed in plastic, the distorted clear making her even more real in the moonlight. Living, alive.

Time to dance like half-dead cats. Presto!

About the Author

Paul Jessup has been published in many magazines, including PostScripts, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Digest, Farrago’s Wainscoat, Electric Velocipede, Psuedopod and the Journals of Experimental Fiction as well as many others.

In 2009 he has two books coming out. PS Publishing will publish his collection of short stories, Glass Coffin Girls, as part of their PS Showcase series that will include a reprint of this short story, and Apex Publishing is putting out his surrealistic space opera, Open Your Eyes.

Cheer Up Emo Kid: Being Depressed (or Gay) is Not All in Your Genes

Ekaterina Sedia

In recent years, popular science journals have been full of articles excitedly reporting “genetic markers” for depression, sexual orientation, alcoholism, IQ, and any number of other behavioral traits. The scientific journals cheerfully publish heritability statistics, which are often mistaken for estimates of genetic contributions to behavior, and used as justification to start looking for genes. And the common assumption is that there is a gene (or several) for just about everything.

Genetic explanations are a double-edged sword — on one hand, they remove the stigma sometimes attributed to a choice of an unpopular behavior; on the other, they have been used to justify mandatory sterilizations and other violations of human rights. The current fashion for uncovering genes underlying everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia is not exactly new, but quite pervasive. Without much proof, a sizeable chunk of the population is branded as “hardwired” for depression and other mental illness, and most of the population is convinced that genes affect human behavior in a straightforward way. They are wrong.

Sorry, but your depression is probably not due to your genes. It is a popular view seemingly substantiated with many news articles, but the evidence for this is a lot less impressive than what popular media would have you believe.

Behavior Genetics — History and Methods

Untold sums of money have been spent on research designed to demonstrate that complex human behaviors, be they alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia or even homosexuality (which, tellingly, has been mostly studied in the same manner as the aforementioned mental health conditions) are genetically predetermined or, at the very least, have a genetic component, and considering the investment, the results to date are slim to nonexistent. Moreover, the methodology of such studies is flawed beyond repair, since the main tools have not changed since the 19th century when Francis Galton, Darwin’s half-cousin, set out to prove that “eminence” is a trait that runs in families. To no one’s surprise, he demonstrated that relatives of well-known people also tended to be successful.

One obvious criticism of Galton’s studies is that they confound inheritance (”nature”) with environment (”nurture”), and to remedy the situation Galton sought to employ tools such as twin studies, and some very troubling mathematical models to separate the influences of genes and environment. The long-since discredited science of eugenics was founded on these. So why, even though eugenics was abandoned long ago, due primarily to its association with Nazi ideology (one of the largest twin studies was conducted by Mengele in Auschwitz, who personally experimented on, examined, and murdered close to 3,000 twins), do its methods still persist? Short answer: psychologists, who do a good proportion of these studies, tend to confuse  “heritability’”(a statistical variable which basically measures how well a given trait would respond to selection in a given environment, useful for agriculture) with “inherited” — determined by genes. (Lush, 1949)  It is not shocking when news reporters confuse the two, producing gems like “Intelligence is 60% Genetic!” It is much more troubling when the scientists performing the studies do the same. Really, no sane person should ever bother calculating the ever-evasive “heritability.”

There are two heritabilities — the broad and the narrow. Broad sense heritability (H) describes the total percent of the phenotypic variability (V) determined by genetic variability (G). So, we have H=G/V. The problem, of course, is that G is not simple — there are additive alleles (A), which exist for continuous traits, such as height. There’s also interactions between genes — epistasis (E) (when one gene masks or modifies the expression of another), and dominance effects (D) (when alleles of the same gene do not contribute equally). So, total genetic variability thus becomes G=A+D+E. Now, total variability includes G, environmental effects (N), and the interaction between them (I). So, H=(A+D+E)/(A+E+D)+N+I. Got all that?

The only thing scientists can actually measure are additive effects, as epistasis is virtually intractable and dominance effects are subtle enough not to be reliably measurable. So what do scientists do? They ignore both E and D, as well as the covariance between environment and genotype. For example, a musically gifted child of well-off parents would have his or her talent nurtured and will benefit from the parental affluence in form of music lessons. In the future, wealth will allow this person to select the environment that would continue to nurture the genetic predisposition — - an advantage an equally gifted child from poor background may not have.

If that wasn’t good enough, we then apply this formula reduced to the point of idiocy to twins — fraternal or dizygotic (DZ — share half genes, all environment) and identical or monozygotic (MZ — share all genes, all environment.) Any difference we observe between the two is attributed to genetics. The worst assumption here, of course, is that twins share all their environment. Environment is largely self-selected, and any differences between the twins of either variety will cause them to exacerbate those differences by seeking out different environments — or conversely to exaggerate their similarities. We never see headlines like “Twins Separated at Birth Are Nothing Alike!” because twins who receive media attention usually do so because of their similarities. Not all separated MZ twins are doppelgangers of one another.

And this is the broad sense heritability, so carelessly thrown about by people who do studies on human behavior. This concept is so flawed that I’m shocked that anyone still uses it.

Now, narrow sense heritability is a bit more empirical — it measures the response of a population to artificial selection. Basically, we have a population with some mean (M) for a trait — say height. Or milk yield. Or quality of wool. You select your best specimens, which will have a higher mean (M1) by virtue of being the best. You then breed them and measure the mean of their progeny (M2). You then compare M2 to M and M1. If it close to M, it tells you that selective breeding is futile. If it shifted closer to M1, breed away! Caution: it only applies to a particular population in a particular environment, and makes no claims about genetic or non-genetic contribution. Just that the response shifted — it could be just the better quality of parental care or fetal nutrition. It is also worth noting that in both cases we are dealing with variable traits. Most of human traits are genetic but show little variability — such as the basic human design of having two arms and two legs.

The concept of narrow sense heritability is what they use for adoption studies — comparing the mean response (depression, mental illness, weight) to the means of adoptive and biological parents. Any difference between adoptive parents and progeny is attributed to genes — not intrauterine environment, or early childhood experience. And certainly not to the fact that people who are allowed to adopt are screened very thoroughly, and fall far above the mean of general population in terms of income, education, and mental health. Or to the fact that studies in schizophrenia were performed in countries where forcible sterilization of mental patients was legal, and therefore adoptive children from such homes were marked for life.

So armed with this statistical approach flawed beyond belief, behavioral geneticists calculate heritability for everything under the sun — intelligence, depression, schizophrenia, homosexuality, you name it.

Is Homosexuality Genetic?

The studies of homosexuality are especially egregious in regard to the methodology and overreaching conclusions. Search for biological basis of homosexuality started back when it was still considered a disease to be “cured.” Current studies shifted in their ideological underpinnings but not their methodologies or general claims, as McGuire (1995) pointed out in his comprehensive paper.

At first, much of homosexual behavior was attributed to paternal alcoholism and maternal hormones; both theories neglected to define what constituted homosexuality as a trait. (It is a frequent problem with studies that focus on outcomes, such as sexual attraction or IQ scores, rather than behaviors — such as distinct sexual acts and, say, problem-solving strategies.) This lack of definition led to an interesting situation where a male rat treated with feminizing hormones and behaved as a female rat, posturing for coitus, was considered homosexual, but a male rat that mounted this homosexual male was not. Secondly, many of these studies hopelessly confounded sexual orientation and gender, oftentimes conflating heterosexuality with heteronormative behaviors, and vice versa. We still get headlines about how brains of homosexual men are more similar to female brains — regardless of the fact that the male-female brain differences are small to nonexistent to begin with.

The Kinsey scale was (and still is) used as a self-assessment tool, and a sexuality rating is determined by answering five to ten However, the Kinsey scale was meant to be descriptive, the questionnaire is administered by a trained researcher, and an entire sexual history is supposed to be obtained to arrive at the rating.  Even more inappropriately, the ratings are often obtained by interviewing family members about the deceased or inaccessible. In case of twin studies, still a popular tool of behavior genetics, the situation is even worse.

Because of the commonly held belief that sexual orientation is genetic, samples tend to contain many twins that are alike, and very few that are different, due to a strong self-selection bias. Moreover, much of the recruitment is not random, but occurs through GLBT publications, further biasing the sample. Finally, assignment of twins to MZ or DZ class is usually self-reported, and the error rate in those cases is close to 10% — that is, MZ twins who look different often think that they are DZ, and vice versa. The sample size usually tends to be too small as well — the sample size to produce a reliable twin study is 2,500 twins.

Hamer et al (1993) is considered a breakthrough paper — it discusses the genetic markers that were found in X chromosome and that gave start to the now famous “Hey Mom, Thanks for the Genes” t-shirt. The study focused on gay men (who received their only X-chromosome from their mothers). However, considering a small sample size involved, a correlation would not be difficult to find, considering that there are thousands of markers found in the human genome, and at least some of them are bound to correlate with pretty much anything — I could easily find a marker that would correlate with liking of color red or wearing of high-heeled shoes. Correlation itself is meaningless, and it only makes sense if the analysis is backed up by some other evidence — which is not the case here.

It is important to mention that I am not arguing that homosexuality or any other sexual orientation is chosen (although it can be), but rather that any simple explanation, such as a gene on X-chromosome, is likely to be at the very least incomplete. Also, nature versus nurture argument misses the point that much of human development is guided by idiosyncratic processes, which are biological but not genetic (i.e., they happen due to random events during development rather than to any specific genes) — and this component that is commonly overlooked when discussing human behavior.

If you consider the lack of consistent definition of homosexuality from one study to the next, built-in bias, and small sample size, throw in the untenable quality of “heritability”, problems with twin method and family studies, and the fact that correlation is not causation, it becomes clear that the confidence in genetic basis of homosexuality and many other complex human behaviors is not only misguided, it is downright foolish. When one looks at the history of biological research of human behavior, it becomes clear that the temptation to assign simple causes to complex phenotypes is as strong as it is destructive.

References:

Bailey, M.J. and Pillard, R.C. (1991) “A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation” Archives of General Psychiatry 48: 1089-1096

Galton, F. (1869) Hereditary Genius. London: Macmillan and Co.

Hamer, D.H.. Hu, S., Magnuson, V.L., Hu, N. and Pattatucci, A.M.L. “A Linkage Between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation,” Science 261 (1993): 321-327

Joseph, J. (2004) The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Miscroscope. Algora Publishing.

LeVay, S. (1991) “A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men.” Science 258: 1034-1037.

Lush, J. L. (1949) “Heritability of Quantitative Characteristics in Farm Animals.” Hereditas (Suppl.), G. Bonnier and R. Larsson, Eds., pp. 356-375

Marcus, G. (2004) The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. Basic Books.

McGuire, T. (1995) “Is Homosexuality Genetic? A Critical review and Some Suggestions.” in: Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference. J. P. De Cecco and D. A. Parker, Eds. Haworth Press, pp. 115-146

Moore, D.S. (2003) The Dependent Gene: The fallacy of ‘Nature vs. Nurture’. Owl Books, NYC.

Oudshoorn, N. (1995) “Female or Male: The Classification of Homosexuality and gender.” in: Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference. J. P. De Cecco and D. A. Parker, Eds. Haworth Press, pp. 79-86>

About the Author

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom and Clarkesworld, as well as Japanese Dreams and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies.

The Laird Barron Sequence: Defining the Undefinable

Jeff VanderMeer

Every few years a writer appears who re-invigorates or re-establishes the tradition of weird fiction in a way appropriate for the times but with an eye toward the past as well. Laird Barron, with his first collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, has put his own imprint on horror fiction. His enjoyably dense style is mixed with a keen recognition of the macabre and a wider sense of the enormity of the universe. As with writers like Thomas Ligotti, Barron has quickly gained a cult following despite having written very few stories. Currently, he is a multiple nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award. I interviewed him via email recently to get more of a sense of Barron both as a person and as a writer.

Can you describe for readers your surroundings as you answer these questions?

I work at a huge, elaborate rolltop desk. The desk was built in the late 1890s and my wife’s family shipped it to the U.S. not long after WWII. My printer anchors one end of the hutch; a small reading lamp shaped like a rampant bronze elephant brackets the other. A few books are lined up between — The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, The Medieval Reader, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and so forth. On my right, floor to ceiling bookcases dominate. These were made by my wife. The shelves are of varnished pine. They form an L that abuts my desk and fills the opposing wall. The shelves are freighted with historical treatises, all sorts of poetry, and reference books ranging from the mundane to the rather arcane and esoteric. Along the wall behind me are wooden filing cabinets, a world atlas globe, and hanging plants. To my left, an ancient couch where my two dogs and cat sleep while I work. My office overlooks the garage. It’s a nice, quiet neighborhood — lots of shade trees, a baffling array of bird species; deer graze in the ditch beneath the branches of the big maple in the yard. It’s a good space, this office. I laughingly call it the inner sanctum and it’s where I skulk off to whenever possible. I’ve composed the majority of my stories here.

How long have you been writing, and when did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

I taught myself to read at five. Ironically, the Reading is Fundamental commercials scared the hell out of me. Those spots regarding an epidemic of illiteracy among kids much older than myself made enough of an impression that I started decrypting cereal boxes at breakfast, labels on canned goods, you name it. Fear is one of the great motivators. After a bit, I began to scribble rudimentary stories that were more akin to a series of captions adorning vivid crayon drawings of monsters, burning buildings, and corpse-strewn battlefields. My parents were largely disinterested in the whole affair; they seemed to shrug it off as a phase, so I can only surmise my need to write is deep-rooted and independent of learned behavior. This was confirmed some years down the road when I discovered that my paternal grandfather was a failed novelist, something he and I’d never discussed. He maintained correspondence with several professional authors, received many letters and manuscript critiques from them. An amazing revelation.

My second grade class was given an assignment to compose a paragraph length narrative — mine bloated into a twelve hundred word epic; a cross between Star Trek and Forbidden Planet. In other words, a blatant rip off; or, as some authors are wont to say, a mimetic piece of fiction. My teacher took it home and typed it out, and that was that. Between the ages of nine and sixteen I wore my fingers to the nubs — working with pencils in longhand, I conservatively put three quarters of a million words on paper. This included two doorstop novels and a stack of novelettes, novellas, and enough unfinished pieces to jam one of those large wooden toy boxes. We were dirt poor, so I used every square inch of a page — people needed a magnifying glass to read my handiwork. Reams of paper were stuffed into cartons, bookshelves, in piles under the bed and underfoot In retrospect, it was a rather spectacular mess.

I got around to submitting a handful of stories in my late teens. No joy there; untutored, I didn’t possess the chops to publish by any stretch of the imagination. Chris Lacher of the long defunct New Blood is a saint for bothering to write some wonderfully encouraging rejections after putting up with 5k manuscripts single spaced in ten point font. David Silva of Horror Show  once jotted notes on a rejection form; ‘Unique Voice’ he said. Of course, at the time I didn’t know how generous these editors were. I’m grateful to both gentlemen.

I drifted away from writing for over a decade. I raced huskies in the Iditarod; later, I moved from the Alaskan wilderness to Seattle and studied martial arts quite assiduously, and toiled at a dreary string of jobs while sorting out my life. I met my future wife in 1998. She supported my long abandoned dream of becoming a published author, petitioned me quite relentlessly, in fact. I picked up a pen and in 2001 Gordon Van Gelder fished my Lovecraftian homage “Shiva, Open Your Eye” from the slush pile at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. That was my first big break. The next came in 2004 when Ellen Datlow reprinted my second pro sale, “Old Virginia”, in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror After that, I kept putting one foot in front of the other and this eventually led to Night Shade Books taking a chance on my debut collection The Imago Sequence & Other Stories.

You have a unique prose style. Who are some of your influences?

My mom owned a couple of enormous trunks of books. Everything from gothic romance to space opera was crammed into them. Unfortunately, they suffered water damage from a flood and about half the books exploded like cooked rice and we had to pry the cracked and yellowed pages apart. Reading a novel was often quite the adventure. Early on, I was hooked by Louis L’Amour, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard; that crowd. Later, I gravitated toward the likes of Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and the great Roger Zelazny. I also got a pretty steady dose of noir: Robert Parker, Donald Westlake, and John D. MacDonald, especially. Their particular brand of darkness has always resonated. The grit and grime, my fascination with antiheroes and losers, the underbelly of society, is directly attributable to the noir authors.

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, I’ve been profoundly influenced by Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Peter Straub, T.E.D. Klein and Michael Shea on the horror side. Martin Cruz Smith and William Goldman and Cormac McCarthy continue to fascinate me, as well. To this day, I keep Ghost Story , Dark Gods, and Blood Meridian at hand. I dissect them at paragraph level, sentence level, and I’m still unpacking what I discover.

How much revision do you typically do for a short story, and when do you know a story is finished?

Revision constitutes most of my writing effort; it’s an obsession. I’ve written and sold fourteen stories over a seven year span, which doubtless says something about how much time I invest in a given project. Generally speaking, getting a story from the initial concept to final draft is a battle. The novella “The Imago Sequence” came in at roughly 20k. To get the 20k I wrote approximately sixty thousand words, and that’s typical of my experience. I tend to write non-sequentially and revise sentence by sentence as I go. It’s a fairly tortuous process, and certainly inefficient compared to the methodology of many pros. Fortunately, I’m in a position to eschew maximum efficiency in favor of indulging an aesthetic ideal.

In my case, the creative process is significantly external; it’s analogous to adjusting a radio dial to apprehend whatever frequency carries the transmission, the particular narrative that I’ve latched onto. Once begun, a great percentage of time involves sifting through the static, searching for that original signal among a hundred other ghost broadcasts. As for when it’s done, I’ll keep adjusting and tweaking details until the story is pried from my fingers by an editor, until it’s published and safely out of my reach.

How has having a collection published changed your impressions of your own fiction?

Having lived for so long among these stories, I can’t say my impressions are dramatically altered. However, I can say a few things regarding the impressions I’d hoped to convey.

A few years into marriage, my mother had an epiphany and became a devout Christian. My father remained an equally devout agnostic. There developed, as one might expect, a whale of a schism in our household. I reconciled my personal issues of faith ages ago, but my parents’ fierce and highly intelligent arguments spurred a line of inquiry that I yet turn over in my mind. Over time, Lovecraft, Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany, and the like, inspired me to synthesize their varying interpretations of the nature of the universe and of reality with worldwide creation mythology of all kinds. The horrors encountered in The Imago Sequence draw as much upon the more fearsome depictions of a Christian God, Buddhist hells, and Moabite deities as they do Lovecraft’s ineffable Old Ones. I don’t shrink from the Lovecraftian label. Nonetheless, my interpretation of the Lovecraftian mythos merely serves as a convenient mode to explore the idea that the universe represents the macroscopic version of a microscopic cellular structure. I find brane theory of particular interest. I’ve undertaken the task of naturalizing cosmic horror, rendering it and the extra dimensional organic rather than strictly supernatural insomuch as “supernatural” equates the magical or metaphysical.

While putting together The Imago Sequence, I envisioned a mosaic of loosely related, yet thematically reinforcing, stories that would explore humankind’s insignificance when contrasted with the immensity of the cosmos. I chose as protagonists a gallery of hard-nosed men, eminently capable men, to confront unimaginable forces. A fondness for the conventions of noir aside, I chose spies and gunfighters, enforcers and soldiers because few things are more dreadful, more horrifying, than watching a supremely confident individual succumb to circumstances beyond their control, beyond their very comprehension. Indeed, the loss of control, the disintegration of competence, of self, is a thematic cornerstone. It has always been my intention to provoke disquiet, if not fear, to raise questions, to entertain. To what degree I’ve been successful is an open question.

Ultimately, the only impression that counts is that of the audience. I’ve had my say and it’s time to move on to the next story, the next collection.

What are some of the important qualities of the fiction you most love?

I could make a list of qualities that compel me to pick up a book and turn pages, but it comes down to poetry in all its glorious manifestations. I didn’t really begin to find my way as a writer until I learned to appreciate poetry. I’m a fan of Charles Simic, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, to name a handful. For exactly one year of my life I attempted a poem a day, and when I wasn’t writing poetry I devoured it, did my level best to absorb it by osmosis.

Noir is famous for this affiliation, but all of my favorite writing sings with poetry. Much of my admiration for Michael Shea, for example, stems from his lyricism, his ability to wield language in a manner that engages and enthralls — sometimes reckless and coarse, other times utterly mellifluous, but always layered, always multifaceted and as ornamental as it is functional. He’s not satisfied to employ language as a necessity. Shea demonstrates that it’s insufficient for prose to function as a utilitarian device when it can so readily transform literature, imbue narrative with a force capable of transcending the medium, of devastating the audience with a gesture.

What are you currently working on?

I’m in the midst of completing several stories for anthology invitations. I’ve two novellas in the works. Recently, I pitched a novel proposal to my agent. He was amenable, so after I clear the decks I’ll get cracking on that.

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning writer with books published in over 20 countries. He has collaborated on short films with rock groups like The Church, has had his fiction adapted for promotional purposes by Playstation Europe (by filmmaker Joel Veitch), and writes for the Amazon book blog, io9, New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, among others.

Jeff's novel Finch and writing book, Booklife, are forthcoming this fall.

Chicken Little and the Death of Short Fiction

Neil Clarke

Every few months, leagues of Chicken Littles run to the rooftop to proclaim the impending death of short fiction. Fueled by annually declining subscription numbers for the “big three” genre magazines or the announcement of the closure of another, these reactions have some grounding, but fail to take the big picture into consideration.

Let’s start with the “big three” since they are the most popular target in this saga. For those not in the know, we’re talking about Analog, Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), the three magazines you’re most likely to find at a newsstand or bookstore. Asimov’s, at thirty-one years, is the baby of the bunch and they all are, as a whole, the old guard, time-tested survivors of an age where genre magazine readerships were considerably higher. Today the concern is over their more recent declines and whether or not those numbers can sustain continued publication. From my position as an outsider, it certainly appears that there is reason to be concerned.

The Littles would have you believe that the recent problems with the subscription numbers are tied to the health of short fiction as a whole. After all, just look at the number of failed markets listed at Ralan.com. (Ralan.com is one of the best sites to check for information about genre short fiction markets.) While they choose to look at that information as the second sign of the coming apocalypse, I simply see it as a reflection of new market realities.

Changes in technology have made it increasingly easy for the average person to launch a magazine and as a result, there has been a boom in the number of new markets over the last few years. Decreased risk in launching magazines has led to some “interesting” endeavors and many have failed. This should not be a cause for alarm. What we are seeing is a move from a few well-planned entries into the market to more of a shotgun approach representing a variety of different business models and philosophies. This is particularly true with the online markets, where a “standard” or best model has yet to prove itself. I have no doubt that for some time the failure rate will continue to be stunning. That said, some attempts will hit the target and the market will be better for it. This is evolution at work.

As someone who publishes an online magazine, I’ll admit to having a bias, but I don’t think that anyone would argue with me when I say that online publications have made significant gains in the last decade. You’ll find a lot more established authors published in online venues, the best paying markets are online, and judging from conversations with other online publishers, our readership, while smaller than our print cousins, is growing. Here are some other interesting facts:

A significant number of print publishers have launched online publications: Baen (Baen’s Universe), Subterranean (Subterranean), Prime (Fantasy Magazine), Tor (not yet, but they say really soon now), and Wyrm (Clarkesworld).

Well-known authors Orson Scott Card and Rudy Rucker have launched their own publications. (Intergalactic Medicine Show and Flurb, respectively)

The magazine with the 2nd largest readership/listenership is EscapePod. It boasts a download rate of over 18k per issue. (#1 is Analog)

Online magazines do not have the distribution issues print magazines have. Issues are instantly available around the world and accessible by more people than they would have been in print.

It should also be noted within the context of this discussion that there is a greater variety of short fiction markets now than ever and not at the expense of print magazines. We have a wealth of excellent small press print zines (like Electric Velocipede, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, and Sybil’s Garage) and many good online magazines (like Lone Star Stories, Abyss & Apex, Strange Horizons, Farrago’s Wainscot, in addition those already mentioned). No, the market is certainly not hurting for good fiction, places to read it, or enthusiastic fans to enjoy them.

If it isn’t the market causing the “big three’s” woes, then what is it? I think it is safe to say that we can hold the publications themselves somewhat responsible. In the last twenty years, we’ve seen the rise of a new generation of readers that have had a very different entertainment experience than their parents. The market has been changed by these people. Have magazines been keeping pace, standing still, or falling behind? Let’s take a look at Weird Tales.

This magazine was much farther down the spiral than the “big three” is at present. They were bleeding subscribers at a near-fatal rate when the publisher woke up and realized that they had to do something. Weird Tales, like many others, had remained relatively unchanged during the last two decades, and the market had moved on. They had become a time capsule, a magazine for your father’s generation.

Over the last year, Weird Tales has virtually reinvented itself. They overhauled their design, reorganized and replaced staff, embraced the internet, and targeted their marketing. Initial reports indicate that their efforts are paying off. Their subscriptions are up significantly and they’ve been attracting positive attention from circles that might not have considered paying much attention to a genre magazine. It’s a very promising start and an excellent example of how to embrace change.

Obviously, any insinuation here is an oversimplification of the problems the “big three” face. Things are always more complicated than they appear from the outside. A good solution for one, may only be a first step for another. All we can do is hope that each is being proactive in dealing with their problems. In the end, however, each publication has the responsibility to deal with its own problems. We shouldn’t be so quick to blame the market if something bad happens.

So, this has been my turn on the rooftop. It’s up to you to decide if I’m just another one of the crazies screaming or someone who made a few good points. As a huge fan of short fiction, it’s distressing to see so many beloved magazines come and go, but I refuse to go to that dark place. I look to the new guard to move us forward and the old guard to rise to the occasion, but I don’t expect this to happen without casualties. It’s time to judge the health of the market by the successes, not the failures. We’re supposed to learn from failures, not make them the standard by which we judge things.

What do you think?

About the Author

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