“Worm Within”
by Cat Rambo

The LED bug kicks feebly, trying to push itself away from the wall. Its wings are rounds of mica, and the hole in its carapace where someone has tacked it to the graying boards reveals cogs and gears, almost microscopic in their dimension. The light from its underside is the cobalt of distress.

It flutters there, sputtering out blue luminescence, caught between earth and air, between creature life and robot existence. Does it believe itself insect or mechanism? How can it be both at once?

I glide past, skirting the edge of the light it casts, keeping my hood up, watching fog tendrils curl and dissipate. A large street, then a smaller one, then smaller yet, in a deserted quarter that few, if any, occupy. Alleys curling into alleys, cursive scrawls of crumbling bricks and high wooden fences. My head down, I practice walking methodically, mechanically until I find a tiny house in the center of the maze. Mine. Another LED bug is tacked beside the entrance, but this one is long dead, legs dangling.

Once inside, I linger in the foyer, taking off my cloak, the clothes that drape my form as though I were some eccentric, an insistent Clothist, or anxious to preserve my limbs from rust or tarnish. Nude, I revel in my flesh, dancing in the hallway to feel the body’s sway and bend. Curved shadows slide like knives over the crossworded tiles on the floor, perfect black and white squares. If there were a mirror I could see myself.

But after only a single pirouette, my inner tenant stirs. He plucks pizzicato at my spine, each painful twang reminding me of his presence, somewhere inside.

He says, They’ll find you soon enough TICK they’ll hunt you down. They’ll realize TICK what you are, a meat-puppet in a TICK robot world, all the shiny men and women and TICK in-betweens will cry out, knowing what you are. They’ll find TICK you. They’ll find you.

I don’t know where he lives in my body. Surely what feels like him winding, wormlike, many-footed and long-antennaed through the hallways of my lungs, the chambers of my heart, the slick sluiceway of my intestines — surely the sensation is him using his telekinetic palps to engage my nervous system. I think he must be curled, encysted, an ovoid somewhere between my shoulder blades, a lump below my left rib, a third ovary glimmering deep in my belly.

He says, You could go out with TICK a bang, you could leap into TICK the heart of a furnace or dive TICK from a building’s precipice, before they put you TICK in a zoo with a sign on the wall TICK, “Last Homo Sapiens.” Last Fleshbag. Last Body.

I do not reply. I gather my clothing back to myself and shrug my shoulders underneath the layers, hiding. He flows back and forth, like a scissoring centipede, driving himself along my veins.

In the kitchen, I stuff food in my mouth without thinking about it, wash it down with gulps of murky fluid from the decanter I fill each night from the river. The liquid glistens with oily putrefaction as it pours through my system.

He says, You disgust me. There are TICK hairs growing inside your body, there TICK are lumps of yellow fat, there are TICK snot and blood clots and bits of refuse TICK. Why won’t you die and set me free?

If only I could wash him away, I’d wallow by the riverside, mouth agape in the shallows, swallowing, swallowing bits of gravel and rusted bolts and the tinny taste of antique tadpoles.

I can’t, but even so he doesn’t like the thought. He saws at the back of my skull with fingers like grimy glass, until the bare bulb shining above the kitchen table shatters, rains down in shards of migraine light, my vision splintering into headache.

When I sleep, I lie down on a shelf beneath the window on the upper floor. I don’t know who used to live in this house — when I found it, the only closet was full of desiccated beetles and rows of blue jars. I fold the spectacles I wear — two circles of glass and brass that I found in a drawer.  I set them on the windowsill with the drawing of a clock face I have made. I slide my eyelids closed.

Even asleep, I can feel my parasite whispering to himself, thoughts clicking and ticking away. Turning the circuitry and gears of my brain for his own use.

I dream that I am dreaming I’m not dreaming.

The morning sky unfolds in the window, mottled crimson and purple, like marbled bacon, speckled sausage. Brown clouds devour it to the sound of morning shuffling. I get up. I take the mass transit, I go to the store and buy replicas of food, the same pretense everyone else makes, mourning the regularities of a lost life. I stand on a street corner with a pack of robots, looking at a wall screen. A few are clothed, but most are bare, moisture beading on their chrome and brass forms. Some are sleek, some are retro. No one is like me.

 I walk in the park. Where did all these robots come from? What do they want? They look like the people that built them, and they walk along the sidewalk, scuffed and marred by their heavy footsteps. They pretend. That’s the only thing that saves me, the only thing that lets me walk among them pretending to be something that is pretending to be me.

I sit on a bench by the plaza’s edge, a bend of concrete, splotched with lichen. Little sparrows hop along the back, nervous hops, turning their heads to look at me, one beady eye, then the other. I hold my hand out, palm upward. One hops closer.

 Inside my ears, inside my lungs, vibrating inside my bones, I hear him whispering. He tells me where I could throw my body in front of a tram, where I could undermine a bridge, where I could leap in a shower of glass, where I could embrace a generator.

The sparrow lands popcorn-light on my palm. My fingers close over it. The other sparrows panic and fly away as my hand clenches tighter and tighter, latching my thumb over the cage my hand has become, feeling the crunch beneath the fluff.

My fingers spasm before my thumb swings away to let them open. Tiny gears fall and bounce on the concrete, and fans of broken plastic feathers flutter down. I stand and try to walk away, but he keeps talking and talking in my head.

You disgust me, he says, and then for once he is silent, as another presence intrudes, as something touches my arm. It is the creature that raised me, it is my mother robot, made of lengths of copper tubing and a tank swelling for a bosom. Carpet scraps are wrapped around its wrists and ankles. It says through the grillework, its beetle-like mouth hissing and crackling with static. You are not well, you must come home with me, won’t you come home with me? I worry about you.

How can robots worry? I shake my skull, I turn away so it won’t see the meat, the flesh, the body.

You don’t know what you’re doing, who you are, what you are, it says. The voice is flat, emotionless. It stops, then begins again. You are wrong, it says. Something inside of you is wrong.

It pulls at me again, but I brace myself and it cannot budge me. It walks away and does not look back. It will come tomorrow and say the same words.

He begins in my head again and I make it only a few steps before crouching down in the middle of the plaza, feeling the passing robots stare at me. I must master this, must master him before the Proctors come and discover me.

I say to the insides of my wrists, the delicate organic bones of my wrists, clothed in blood and sinew, Listen to me, listen to me. Let me get home, home to safety and I’ll give you what you want, whatever you want.

He releases his grip on my sanity and we walk home quietly. I eat and drink and say What do you want?

Sleep, he says, and for once the voice is gentle. That’s all. Go to sleep. Things will be better in the morning.

At half past midnight, I open my eyes. On the floor are legs torn from an LED bug, dried shells, silver scraps. I watch and he lifts one, then another, drifts and clicks so quiet I cannot hear them. One, then another, and then both. As though he was practicing. As though he was getting better. Stronger.

I didn’t know he could use his telekinesis outside my body.  As the last shell falls, I feel him lapse, exhausted, into his own simulacrum of sleep.

Downstairs there are no knives in the kitchen, but there is a piece of metal molding that I can peel away from the counter’s edge. Slipping and sliding across the floor and the fungus growing on the ancient bits of food scattered there, I go into the living room, an empty box like every other room here, but here the walls are red, red as blood. The blood I imagine, over and over, in my veins.

I poise the knife before my belly and I say goodbye to my body, to the burps and the shit, to the unexpected moles and the cramps and the itches, and flakes of skin and hot sore pimples. To my good, hallucinatory-rich flesh. To my bones that have pretended to carry me for so long. To my delusive blood.

 He wakes and says What are you doing? And No. Even as the length of metal slides into me, and I look down to see my foil skin sliding away, to reveal my secret’s secret to the world, to show my gears and cogs and shining steaming lunatic wires, and in the midst of it, the clockwork centipede uncoiling, he is my brain seeing itself uncoiling and recoiling and discoiling, my mechanical, irrational brain saying No and No and No again.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives and writes beside eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish in the Pacific Northwest. She has had over two dozen stories published in venues that include Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and Chiaroscuro. Recently, her story “Magnificent Pigs’ was short-listed for Best American Fantasy and will be reprinted in Best New Fantasy 2, while “The Surgeon’s Tale”, co-written with Jeff VanderMeer, was recommended by Locus and Tangent Online. She is a member of the writers’ groups Horrific Miscue and Codex. She holds an MA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and was a member of the Clarion West class of 2005.

“Can You See Me Now?”
by Eric M. Witchey

Two miles of sea water overhead pretty well filtered out the ill effects of sunlight and mankind. Alone in her hard suit, lights on for safety, Lori’s boots settled and held in the pale, diatomaceous silt cover over the San Bernardino Highway. Helmet speakers trickled distant Vivaldi into her ears, and her feeder tube pumped nutrients in accordance with strict protocols for preservation of cultural authenticity. She’d gotten the job because she fit the restored hard suit and because her body was a perfect museum piece, a monument to the ancient submerged civilization of Los Angeles.

She was forty minutes out on her commute after leaving suburb dome one. She knew the route well enough. She walked it every day of the week except Sixth and Seventh. Evenings, Sixth, and Seventh she did H&H, Home-and-Hearth duty, in her Hollywood bungalow diorama.

First through Fifth, she did commute and hard-shell welding on oil pumps.

Her equipment was archaic. The cumbersome hard shell suit with its jutting bumpers and lights made for a slow commute, and sometimes she’d let herself keel over just to demonstrate how hard it must have been for ancient Angelinos to go to work every day — millions of them. No wonder traffic had often halted for hours at a time.

No matter how many times she read the old texts, data from laser-etched, polymer, digital disc fragments discovered in the silt, she couldn’t really imagine millions of people. Nobody could really imagine millions of people on the highway in hard suits, bumper-to-bumper, stretched up and down the highway heading off to serve in the major industries of the time: making films, drilling wells, making wars, and selling drugs. It was her job to represent all of them.

Sometimes, on special occasions — translate, when people who influenced funding came to inspect the cultural preserve — there would be five or six other hard suits on the highway.

Once, because of her careful and realistic stumbles, she’d been chosen to work with the famous decryptologist, Doctor Argos Chew. For six months, she worked side-by-side with the man who had first figured out how to read the ancient texts. They actually simulated a fender bender, including the road rage firefight and celebratory goat barbeque.

Not today, though. Today, she was on her own like most days; and she was, like most days, going to weld a support spar on a pipe fitting for upstream production of fossil fuels.

She flipped on her brights. The expected circle of white light appeared. An oarfish undulated slowly through her field of vision. Several tube worms retracted into the smooth, pale silt. The rocking, seahorse shape of an oil well pump, her destination, loomed ahead of her. By the numbers, she hit her turn signal, lit up her tail lights, and plodded along the restored off ramp.

“Lori.” The word appeared on the cell phone view of her faceplate display. She held her hand to her head like the texts said she would have.

The words scrolled across her faceplate. “Solo?”

“Yes,” she said. The words appeared in a separate response line. “Who?”

“Aaron here.”

“What?”

“GTTP?”

“Got Time To Play, NOT.” She moved up to her favorite pipe fitting, one that would allow full view of her work if there were any visitors to the observation domes or remote library viewing centers.

While appearing to clean the pipe fitting, she looked over the fusion splitter box at the base of the rocker pump. It provided the power to keep the pump rocking up and down like a steel seahorse bobbing for plankton. Tiny bubbles streamed up from the box, the oxygen by-product of sucking in sea water and separating hydrogen from oxygen.

The pump would rust and turn to silt before that little box gave up trying to convert the ocean into hydrogen fuel. It would run forever if nobody recycled it.

She ignited her torch finger. Her face plate darkened to filter out the blinding glare of her torch, and she set her finger to the pipes.

“Don’t be like that, babe.”

“Your babe, NOT,” she answered. Aaron was not part of the preserve. He was illegal, and he broke in on her channel while she worked. He tried to pretend he was part of the time/place illusion.

“Mall noon Starbucks?”

She almost broke character to laugh. Like he could get into the preserve. Still, he was on channel now, and she was working, and somebody might be watching today.

“Venice Beach noon. Skating. Sorry.”

“Meet sweet. Skate 4 2?”

“Natch.”

“Sweat and wrestle steady?”

“Your business, NOT,” she said. “WORK-ing.”

“Suit hot?” he asked.

She knew where he was going. Phone sex was not part of her work script. No matter that Doctor Argos said all California Girls loved to have phone sex and got paid for it. No matter that she was considered an expert because she had practiced with Argos.

Today, she wanted to be alone. She had hoped for the quiet place she only found in her hard suit while welding.

“Gawd, Aaron,” she said. “1 track mind.”

“Luvly Lori. 1 track. Repeat play 4ever.”

“Buh-bye.” She hung up. Vivaldi ended. Cold, green silence filled her helmet. She switched off her welder and lights and let the darkness of the deeps embrace her. Heartbeats echoed in her ears, and the cold outside her suit made tiny inroads into her flesh.

In the silence, she wondered what Aaron’s life must be like. She wondered why he wanted to talk to a historian like her at all. He went to some trouble to make his illegal calls.

She pretended to adjust her welding finger, as if her reproduction could actually break.

He must have one of those high-stress jobs — likely a Progeny Projection Consultant or a Future Futures Trader — one of those guys who sold his brain early on and lived in the ether fulltime. Maybe he had no body at all.

Phone sex wasn’t so bad, really. Sometimes on Bungalow duty she performed with her polymates. Terry, their norm geek-hubby, was pretty good at it. Anella, their bisubmissive accountant, was a true artist, though she wasn’t recognized for her work because she didn’t have Lori’s credentials.

She finished yaddaing her welder, checked her time out heads-up, and turned back toward the preserve dome complex. Twenty minutes of actual work was all the people of LA were allowed before they had to commute again.

Sometimes, she wished she could stay out forever, and sometimes she thought she might. She had a theory that the Angelinos would have too, and that was why they were only allowed to work for twenty minutes a day.

Going back to the noise and crowds of the domes and towers wasn’t the part of historical research that she liked. Still, she turned. She walked, trudged, and even threw in a potentially traffic snarling fall just in case somebody was watching her. She had to keep her rep as an obsessive for authentic detail.

H&H duty on Sixth: script said she was alone all day. Three-way phone sex at lunch. Waiting for Cableguy. Computer crashing. Neighborhood watch gunfight. Sixth was a no-brainer. Normal Angelino day. Mostly, she got to spend it eating, pacing, and cursing Cableguy — well, at least after ten she got to curse Cableguy.

By ten, she was up, caffeinating, and pacing in her terrycloth robe. She’d brushed her blond hair out so it feathered over her shoulder blades the way it was supposed to. Her sun bleaching was in. She was in the groove, and she hoped somebody was watching today, somebody to make all her research, training, and hard work worth it.

The doorbell rang.

The doorbell wasn’t supposed to ring. Cableguy wasn’t supposed to show up.

She went to the door, stood on bare tiptoes, and peered through the peephole. It might, after all, have been a random attacker. Sometimes, especially if dignitaries were on-site, Admin might budget in a little extra realism.

It was Cableguy. He had the truck. He had the uniform. She didn’t recognize the researcher playing him — a newbie.

Last thing she needed was a newbie to mess up the historical accuracy of her H&H shift. At least he had the hat and toolbox. He was, all-in-all, a great Cableguy: tall and lean; dark, short hair. His sharp jaw-line worked on chewing gum, and practiced glances at his watch and side-to-side made him look impatient.

He rang the doorbell again.

She opened the door.

“Sweet meet,” he said. “Cableguy.”

She caught the name on his uniform tag. “Aaron.” She almost broke character. She almost told him to go away, to get out of the dome and the preserve before he got arrested. Almost, but not quite. Breaking character would only draw criticism no matter how screwy things got. Criticism meant more training, less research, less time alone in her hard suit, less time pacing — less time to herself. Someone might be watching. No matter what, she had to look good, look her period LA part.

She flipped her hair, giggled, and said, “Come in. The sets are over there.” She gestured to her requisite five TV sets — one for each room of the house. They sat in a row on an altar at the far end of her tile-and-plush living room. At the end of the row, they even had a palm-sized, waterproof watchman for the bathroom. In addition to room support, each set represented one of the five major uses: gaming, webbing, dissemination of dissatisfaction, news obsession, and babysitting.

The watchman ran a constant loop of Mouse illusions.

“What’s the problem, ma’am?” he asked.

“Two hundred and fifty-six channels and nothing on.” At least he knew the Cableguy script. He might even make her look good.

“I’ll see what I can do.” He headed to the sets. Tools settled on the carpet, he pulled his pants down far enough to show his butt crack, then he bent and fiddled with the sets.

She began to think maybe Aaron was a professional, an actual historian. He seemed to know what he was doing.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.

“Bottled water would be nice.” He stayed focused on the sets. “Universal remote?”

“Yeah-huh.” She went to the kitchen for a bottle of water. When she came back, he acted like he had fixed the cable feeds. The sets flickered, each with their own representation of life in LA.

She handed him the water.

He smiled.

Fingers touched. He was definitely on script.

During their sex scene, she got her lips up to his ear. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can get recycled for this.”

“Research,” he said. “Grad school.”

She gasped and moaned slightly out of time, doing her breathless best to stay in character.

Afterward, nestled up against him, waiting for the five minutes before he would play out the “Got more homes to service” end to their scene, she whispered, “You aren’t authorized, are you?”

“Not.” He pulled her closer to him, tighter and warmer.

Two days later, on First, Argos told Lori she had a special assignment, but she hadn’t been given a script. She’d been told authenticity would depend on surprise. She was coming off shift and stripping out of her hard suit when a camera crew arrived. It was a full-on truck and uplink unit with roving cameramen and a blue-suited Talentbimbo replica. Lori was surprised. A Warhol Moment with a full-unit vid crew meant serious funding. Somebody had pulled strings.

Talentbimbo, a Sino-Hispanic homogenized, accent-free woman with silky, shiny, bouncy-flow hair stepped up and said, “Action.” Talentbimbo pushed a long-handled mike between them. “Lori Welder,” she said, “Do you have any comment on the capture of the Cableguy Rapist?”

She finished racking her suit. She hoped someone was watching, someone could see how cool she was, how authentic, how well she played for the crew.

This wasn’t planned history, but it was sure as hell funded. Good work could mean bigger things for her. More solitude. “No comment,” she said.

“Our sources suggest you had secret communications with him.”

She froze, suppressing a grin. Somebody had been watching.

“Who are your sources?” Lori asked.

“We have transcripts of your cell phone sex addiction extra-polyamorous affair.” Talentbimbo twisted her perfect, plastic face into a smirk. “Lori Welder, do you care to comment now?”

She squared off with Talentbimbo. “He isn’t a rapist.”

“He used a scanner to listen to dispatch calls, wore the Cableguy uniform, made a replica of a Cableguy truck, and used the public trust in Cableguy to gain access to the homes of young women like yourself.”

“Aaron would never rape anyone,” she said. “He’s a good man and a great Cableguy.”

“Now you admit that you knew him?”

She remembered a political axiom from her period polisci class. Denial causes downfall. If caught, become the victim to gain public sympathy. “Of course,” she said. “I knew him. I love him.”

“Well.” Talentbimbo pulled the mike back. “There it is. Another victim of this monster, but this one claims she loved him.”

Lori grabbed the mike. “Aaron!” she exclaimed. “Baby, if you can hear me, I’ll wait for you. I swear it. I’ll write. I’ll visit! I love you, Baby.”

Talentbimbo made a show of wrestling for the mike. She made the cut sign several times, then the lights went dim. Talentbimbo gave Lori a very real dirty look.

Lori realized she had adlibbed right off the map of her colleague’s education and experience. She squared her shoulders, made a show of standing up straight, then strode past the news crew. Passing Talentbimbo, she whispered, “Good girls who love bad boys.”

The news lady lit up. She had a new line of research, and she knew it. Lori had a new stage and likely some better diorama work coming up. No doubt, Aaron would get his degrees, and if she played things right they’d pull a grant for conjugal visits, letter reproduction, and maybe even an escape and helicopter chase.

She hoped someone was watching. History didn’t get more real than this.

About the Author

Eric Witchey’s fiction has appeared nationally and internationally in magazines and anthologies. He has published in multiple genres under several names. His how-to articles have appeared in The Writer Magazine, Writer’s Digest Magazine, Writer’s Northwest Magazine, Northwest Ink, and in a number of on-line publications. His fiction has won recognition from Writers of The Future, New Century Writers, Writer’s Digest, and www.ralan.com. When not teaching or writing, he restores antique HO locomotives or tosses bits of feather and pointy wire at laughing trout.

“White Girl”
by Alethea Kontis

Back in the heyday of the science classes I adored, I learned something very important about the color white: it isn’t actually a color. It’s the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum.  Now I’m talking light here, not pigment. Mix all your paints together and you get that green army sludge of frogs’ legs and primordial soups. The color — if one can even call it a color — of a six-year-old prodigy’s disappointment that her Crayola army, thus united, produces such a disgusting mess.

I used a slightly less-eloquent version of that same analogy in the tenth grade for my paper on A Separate Peace. I made a D. My mom took me to the bookstore the next week to buy Cliff Notes, in an attempt to force my brain to think the way my English teachers wanted me to think, to translate my thoughts in a world where no one cared that Army dress uniforms were the disappointing color of primordial soup, especially if a fourteen-year-old pointed it out to them.

But what did it matter what “they” thought? In the privacy of my home, my room, my mind, my words were my own. They were always the right words for me, if not for everyone else. And eventually, if I wrote enough of them, maybe some would accidentally get published. Some did. There was a picture book, an anthology, some short stories, some essays. Whenever I got an offer to do a strange and exciting project, I had the freedom to say “yes!”

And then at the ripe-old age of thirty-one events conspired to bring me something I hadn’t planned for: hitting the New York Times bestseller list with Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion. It spent two weeks in the same position, at number thirty-one, appropriately enough.

I don’t doubt that I deserved it; I had gone through a huge learning curve, a year’s worth of work, and several boatloads of stress. What puzzled me was why I couldn’t appreciate it. I’ve always been The Writer, as if I was born with a pen in my hand and an Elvish tattoo on the back of my neck. But I’ve never written for “them.”

I took a sample class during my audition for the Governor’s School for the Arts — a summer school of “intensive arts training” in South Carolina — where the instructor had gone on for an hour about “truth” and “slice of life.” (Whenever I hear that term I think of pie.) I will forever remember the sneers at the interview, as they looked down their noses at my writing sample — a ten-page section of the climax of my fantasy novel — and said, “Is this indicative of all you write?”

Would that a moth-winged fairy had descended from the clouds at that moment and bestowed upon me a sparkling tiara with “GENRE FICTION WRITER” written in pink rhinestones across the front. Alas, there were no luminescent bubbles or tinkling bells or showers of magic dust, only the bitter taste of failure in the back of my throat and the  compulsion to continue doing something at which I was doomed to never be successful. I imagined myself a twenty-first century Emily Dickinson, ahead of my time, destined to be posthumously famous after the trunks filled with my scribblings were discovered by a distant relative who miraculously cared enough to unlock them. And I was okay with that.

When I got the Governor’s School rejection, I took it out in the side yard and burned it. “If the writing doesn’t pan out,” I told my parents, “I can always go back to acting.” They were not okay with that. So I turned to science.

In physics, despite its own dependence on certain self-evident principles and impossible optimal conditions, the answers to most questions were pretty non-negotiable. The speed of light was always c. Diamonds were just trumped-up graphite. A mole was simply a mole, and it was far easier to assume a vacuum than to assume Thoreau was right and you were wrong. There was no “they;” there were just numbers.  Best of all, the rainbow was different here. Wavelengths ran from infrared to ultraviolet; there were slow colors and fast colors. Red and blue and green made up the primary palette. Green and red mixed to make yellow. The world reflected what it didn’t absorb. It all made perfect sense. And the entire spectrum, unified, created pure, blinding, perfect white. My little heart soared, and I was over the moon.

It was like scientists had always had this hidden, alternative, acceptable vision of the universe, and I had just learned their secret handshake. It intensified my fascination with the world. I questioned everything, because it was put on this earth to be questioned, and we were put on this earth to ask.  I majored in Chemistry. My parents were happy. There was only one problem. I was a writer.

My father — in an effort to help me find a “real job” — got me in to see a friend of his at the environmental labs of South Carolina Electric and Gas. It was a beautiful trek through the woods, and the office was situated smack dab in the middle of a dam. I paid rapt attention when Dad’s friend explained to me the types of analysis they were doing, and their large-scale implications. And the second he brought me in to tour the lab, I was struck dumb.  His voice faded to nothing as the whiteness of it all screamed in my ears. The walls were white; the ceilings were white; the countertops were white. The labcoats were white. White is important in a lab, because lives can depend on the second a liquid changes hue, or the location one drop of a highly reactive solvent is spilled. But it wasn’t beautiful white; it was industrial white. It was the white of a job that never changed, a white that bleached brains into zombification, a white that meant one pipette after another and another and another until your fingers blistered and your mind assumed that vacuum. The only thought in my head was: How long would it be before I snuck in at night and painted the walls rainbow colors? It wasn’t an if, it was a when.

I moved out of the house and never considered a career in Chemistry again. And a little over a decade later, I was scrolling down once again to see my name on that magical list that tells everyone in the publishing industry how fabulous you are. How successful.

The interesting thing about hitting the list was not what happened directly afterward, but what didn’t happen. There was no fanfare or choir of angels. There were no dump trucks full of money on my doorstep (and there wouldn’t be, since I was paid a flat fee for the project). My closest friends lived forty-five minutes away. Not that I was even in the mood to party, having been hit with a major personal trauma the very morning before. But I had paid my dues; I deserved my celebration. I had thrown my heart and soul into this wonderful thing.

And I hadn’t written a word in almost a year. Sometimes, when bad things happen to writers, they don’t write. Lacking that outlet for spontaneous catharsis, all that emotion builds up inside. It grows mold and starts to smell. I hadn’t lost the love for writing or the need to do it, but I had most certainly lost the romance. The motivation. What that bestseller list should have been was a confirmation of my talents, a reminder of how wonderful and special I was.  I tried to see it that way. Oh, how I tried. Eleven months into a depression, no one expects to just snap out of it. I had been born with all this contagious enthusiasm — couldn’t I use it on myself? Surely my friends and family would cheer me on. I’d be out of this funk in no time.

My parents popped open a bottle of champagne and emailed me a picture of themselves toasting my achievement. I made them my desktop wallpaper, because they looked as happy as I knew I should feel. Then I bought myself a bottle of sparkling pear cider and went to bed early.

I didn’t expect much at work — a major book distributor — but seeing as our department rolls out the full court press for everything from wedding announcements to thesis delivery, I kept one subtle eye on the congregational “snack shack.” It remained quiet and sheet-cake free. Perhaps people didn’t know? I just can’t assume that everyone in the book industry checks the New York Times list every week.

On Friday I printed out an 8×10 cover of Dark-Hunter Companion and pinned it to the wall outside my cubicle, with a little starburst that said, “New York Times # 31″ in happy pink highlighter. I announced it as a postscript in Monday’s staff meeting, to which someone responded acerbically, “Just in case you haven’t walked by her office and noticed yet.”

I took down the poster that afternoon.

I have done the con circuit for years. I was used to performing to large groups, answering questions and fan mail, receiving gifts, embracing complete strangers, and signing for hours on end, but I was passed up for promotion because I was “just not there yet.” I threw myself into my work, as if I might somehow prove that I was good enough. I wished there was a Cliff Notes of the corporate world — not so I could think like “them,” but so I could assimilate just enough to be left alone. Unfortunately, I had left that possibility behind a long time ago.

A few weeks ago, I was in a small meeting where I thought myself in safe enough company to make a self-deprecating remark regarding my copious use of the word “thingy” and that status on the New York Times. Five people laughed, but one said, “Aren’t you ever going to let that go?”  I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to.  It’s part of who I am now, like every Oscar Award winner on the planet. What do I have left to motivate myself to do great things if I let that go?

Joe Lansdale scolded me this summer on a panel for muttering “newyorktimesbestseller” in the middle of my introduction; I am supposed to sit up straight and say, “Hi. I’m New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis.” The crowd laughed, and made me say it again for practice. Ellen Datlow later reminded me that everyone in that room wanted to be me — including Joe. It was a humbling thought.

It’s a surreal double life that I lead, but it’s mine, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. A psychic once told me that I was destined for greatness, and that I had an aura that shone like a rainbow. I am not a color; I am a combination of all the colors. Only…it seems that one half of me lives in pigment, and the other half in light. Forty hours a week I hike up my waders and make my way through the primordial muck I’ve created around me. The rest of the time, my soul reflects the pure, blinding, perfect white of an empty document or a blank piece of paper, begging me to refract it into stories. And you can bet your ass that the next time I hit that bestseller list, there will be fireworks.

About the Author

A New York Times bestselling author and self-proclaimed Genre Chick, Alethea Kontis is responsible for a couple of picture books, an SF anthology, a paranormal romance encyclopedia, several short stories, dozens of interviews, and copious essays. She lives in Tennessee, where she works as a buyer for Ingram Book Company, a contributing editor for Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and a freelance editor for Solaris Books UK. Find out more about Alethea’s plans to be princess of the world on her website.

“An Interview with Richard K. Morgan”
by Jason B. Jones

Richard K. Morgan is the bestselling author of Altered Carbon (2002, 2006), Broken Angels (2003, 2007), Market Forces (2005), Woken Furies (2005, 2007), Black Man (UK) / Thirteen (US, 2007), and The Steel Remains (UK 2008). In 2008, Black Man received the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.

Black Man/Thirteen explores the concept of “virilicide,” a highly-speculative exploration of the idea that certain core aspects of masculinity are increasingly being defined out of modern culture. (Morgan’s acknowledged a debt to feminist writers such as Susan Faludi on this point.) “Thirteens” are genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned to be the purest alpha male imaginable, and as a result they’re wholly intolerable in society. The Steel Remains, meanwhile, provides a stylish noir update to the standard fantasy swords-and-sorcery plot.

In the wide-ranging conversation that follows, Morgan explains his perspective on heroism and masculinity, on the United States, and much else besides.

Is there an ethical dimension to inserting noir elements into swords-&-sorcery?

I suppose that that dynamic exists, but it’s not so much a conscious one. I tend to write what I want to read, and I’ve never wanted to read about kings and princes and great, glorious battles against a great evil, and definitely not about good-hearted farmboys who grow up to become warriors or wizards. Those kinds of narratives have never interested me. They’ve never held me.

The kind of fantasy that I’ve always liked has been very grim and gloomy. It goes back to the Norse stuff. If you were to ask me for the definitive fantasy novel, I’d have to say it’s Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, which is a 250-page novel published at the same time as the first of the Tolkien trilogy, way back in 1954. It’s got everything in it that Tolkien doesn’t. It’s very similar in the sense that it’s got elves and trolls and dwarves and the whole panoply of Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology that Tolkien borrows from. The point with Anderson is that he borrows this very gloomy Norse perception of what a hero is, what heroic deeds really involve, and what the ultimate price you pay is for such deeds. That was much more my thing.

As I’ve grown older, and matured as a person, one of the things that’s increasingly come to the fore in the way that I think about things is the way violence is never actually a solution to anything. Yes, sometimes it happens, and sometimes it’s unavoidable, sometimes it feels good even, but the truth of the matter is it’s not a good thing. Any fantasy novel where there’s this glory of trooping out there to fight against this great evil — that immediately repels me; I’m not interested in that. What I am interested in are the consequences of those battles. What happens afterwards? What about all the guys who come home from the wars scalded by dragon-spit and hacked and broken and screaming insane in some cases? What do you do with those guys, and what impact does that have on the society that’s just fought this war?

For me, there is a moral point I guess, but what The Steel Remains is saying is, for god’s sake get a grip! Just because you’re fighting with swords instead of machine guns doesn’t make the war any more pleasant or acceptable as a way of doing business. That moral is in there, but it’s not because I felt I needed to make some big point, it’s just that’s the way I think, and that’s the kind of fiction I’m interested in.

I absolutely take your point about writing realistically about the consequences of violence, but is there a balancing act with the tendency of readers sometimes to just say . . . ohh, that’s cool?

The whole thing about “hey, isn’t that cool”: I understand that. I go through that myself! I just got back from seeing The Dark Knight, on an IMAX screen — and that’s a movie stuffed with moments where you go, “ohhh, that’s cool!” That’s a dynamic that you have to take into account and that you have to accept, because it’s within you as well as everyone else. I don’t have this kind of superior vision complex that some writers seem to have.

It’s also the fact that there are these moments of extreme cool, and there’s something very exhilarating and thrilling about violence. I’ve talked with quite a few veterans of conflict, and one of the things that they will tell you, quite often, is how god-damned fucking thrilling it is to be there doing this shit. You can’t afford to ignore that, any more than you can afford to ignore the consequences.

One of the reasons men go to war is because, frankly, they like it. I’m not going to write a book in which any time there’s an act of violence it’s written in such a way that you really don’t enjoy it. What’s much more productive is to give the audience their act of violence. You give them the excitement of the fight or whatever it may be, and with that also comes a kind of sickness. Because you’ve got to face the facts that it might be astoundingly cool to stand off three guys with a sword, but at the same time there’s going to be blood and broken bones, and a mess. You have to take all of that on board. You have to try to do justice to all aspects of it.

In The Steel Remains, for instance, there are some cool moments, but inevitably there is the realization that what we’re talking about here is chopping human beings into bits with sharpened steel. However cool that might be at the moment you’re doing it, eventually you’ve got to come back down to the realities of what you’re doing, the flesh-and-blood truth of it.

And you have to live with the fact that you enjoyed it, beyond just living with the mess.

Always. I’ve spoken to more than one Vietnam vet who has said that part of the difficulty of life after the war was not just remembering what you’d done, but remembering how you’d felt about what you’d done. That can be hard to live with, because it’s one thing to have done something horrible, and it’s quite another to have done it and to feel at some level that you enjoyed doing it. That’s a very scary thing.

But, interestingly enough, again, I think one of the problems with the sickness, if you like, that we’ve got in Western culture is that we’re scared to acknowledge these things. We’re afraid to actually take them on board. That idea — that you sort of got a sick enjoyment out of killing — is just not acceptable currency, because we’re told we must see our soldiers in these glowing, honorable terms, rather than seeing them as human beings. One of the aspects of American policy having to do with military matters is that there’s an enormous amount of emphasis on the troops, as long as they are standing up and holding their arms, but as soon as you ship them back home broken or damaged or unable to cope, suddenly no one wants to know about them anymore. The amount of coverage there hasn’t been of all the post-traumatic stress, and the incidents of guys coming back from Iraq who just cannot cope with what’s been done to them — that stuff just isn’t covered. The media has no taste for it. But we are talking about human beings, and human beings are complicated mechanisms, and when they get damaged, that’s complicated, too.

You have to wrap it all up in a package and deliver it so that hopefully I’m providing a kind of cinematic thrill–not just in this book but in all the books I’ve written–there’s heroic stances and John Woo-style violence, but coming behind that is the whole point of, I’m not going to justify this on some moral level, I’m not going to pretend it’s ok to behave like this.

That’s really true — not only if you read the Norse mythology, but in any of the epics, the heroes are not people you would have to tea.

No, absolutely not! This has long been my contention with the whole superhero ethos. We kind of want to have our cake and eat it, because we want to have these guys doing heroic things, but at the end of the day we also want them to be able to go home, marry Mary next door, and get a house with a picket fence and a dog. You can’t do that. There’s a big compatibility issue there.

Men who excel at violence, especially violence on the battlefield, those will be the kind of guys who find it hard to give up, and they’re going to be the kind of guys who just won’t deal well with a society that doesn’t need a high level of violence in it.

The constant issue is, what do you do with your heroes when you’re finished with them? Norse mythology (and also the Greeks, I think) had a very clear sense of what you do with them: The heroes always have to die. The standard pattern for a heroic profile is that you fight in your great battle, and you succeed, and then shortly thereafter you go off to another battle, or very often to another land, and there you are betrayed or you die or you disappear from knowing and it’s assumed that you’ve died. In each case, the hero is off-loaded. Those guys don’t stick around — you don’t keep them.

I think that was a wisdom that a lot of medieval and more ancient societies had — I think they were a lot more sophisticated in their vision of violence than we sometimes give them credit for. Because we’ve developed a popular culture of wanting to give people everything — we want to give them the thrills, but we don’t want them to be upset — we’re neglecting that vision. Achilles is the case in point: He’s just this sulky bastard who would kill you as soon as look at you. Very handy to have on your side when you’re going up against the massed armies of Troy, but not so handy to have around when you’re having a dispute about a slave girl. That’s all written into the Iliad: Achilles won’t fight because he’s in his tent sulking about a slave girl.

There’s a truth to it, and I find it exasperating on a personal level, but also a little bit worrying on a cultural level, that we just don’t seem to be able to digest that. We seem very uncomfortable with it.

This is obviously a main concern in Thirteen as well with the whole idea of virilicide, and the need for the Thirteen figure.

I think Nietzche was drawing on the wisdom of more ancient societies, when he said in times of peace the warlike man destroys himself. You see this increasingly. We live in times when violence ceases to be a viable option, both at a personal level and a group, a corporate, or a national level. You get things done far better by trading with someone than you do by trying to invade them. Within that context, what you’re seeing is an awful lot of men, especially ill-educated, not-very-well-off young men, who are looking for that function. Since it no longer exists in the form of military service, they’re looking for it in some other way. Increasingly, these guys either kill themselves doing stupid things, or they take excessive amounts of drugs. Basically, it’s the whole risk thing — young males seem to have a high appetite for it. I already see that as a problem, as a dysfunction.

To me, the whole idea of virilicide is that, as we continue to develop societies in which violence is just not an option anymore, these guys aren’t going to go away. The tendency isn’t going to go away, so what will these people do? They’ll turn on each other, and on themselves. If it’s not conditioned very thoroughly out of them at a very early age, the societies that don’t will rip themselves apart.

That’s a feminist argument, and one of the interesting things is, once you’ve done a bit of feminist reading, it gives you a prism through which to view things. Once you start to view things through that prism, you then never stop.  You say, why is no one commenting on this?

Thirteen just sort of picks that up and runs with it. Genetically, young men are designed to not live very long, and to throw their weight around long enough to get a chance to impregnate some females, and then fade and die sometime before they hit thirty. That’s what they’re set up for at a genetic level, and if you don’t find a cultural way to deal with that, then they will tear themselves apart anyway, and they will tear you apart if you’re in the way. That was really the vision of it. All these societies in Thirteen have had to make a choice. They’ve had to decide, “right, we’re not going down this warrior path any longer, we’re going to accept that society’s a complicated thing and we’re going to deal in a complicated fashion with it, the issues are complex and so are the solutions.” The places that have refused to do that are the ones that then suffer horrifically from the things they impose on themselves.

You get JesusLand, actually.

I have to say that I’ve had quite a lot of e-mails from people about this. I’ve had e-mails from people who live there and who said, “oh, man, you’re so right.” But I’ve had an awful lot of people get in touch, mostly very polite, but really hurt and defensive. They say, “you’ve got us all wrong — we’re not a bunch of racist, lynching psychopaths.”

Usually with those guys I’ll try to explain somewhat more clearly what I was after, since I believe novel writing should be an act of communication.

First of all, I generally say, I know.  I have spent time in various parts of the United States, probably including where you live, and the Americans I’ve met there . . . they’re lovely people. They’re courteous, they’re friendly, they’re generous with their time and resources. In fact, they’re a lot like Americans in the rest of the country. But that is really not the issue. I’ve also spent time in various North African and Middle Eastern nations and found the inhabitants there to be courteous, engaging and hospitable to a fault - but if I’d created a theocratic state in North Africa, would you have been angry about that?

Jesusland is not an indictment of all the 200+ million Americans living in its territory, it’s a portrayal of certain ruinous socio-dynamic tendencies common to that region running amok, and the catastrophic impact they have had (that I believe, in fact, they are having even now) on America’s very great potential as a modern nation.

The only Jesuslander we get very close to is, ok, a little on the bad guy side, in a purely narrative sense — but he’s hard-working, loyal, courageous, honourable, sensitive, and he’s great in bed. Can’t say fairer than that, can you? Sure, he’s also fucked up by old-time religion and overpumped naive patriotism, but he’s not supposed to be the bad guy — he’s just someone who’s been stitched up. Scott ends up getting used and killed as a result of the way this narrow indoctrination has worked, but that’s portrayed (I hope) as a tragedy - to some extent, in fact, it’s the whole tragedy of lost American potential in microcosm.

Quite often people read the book and assumed that I share the main characters’ view of Jesusland, which is intensely critical. But it’s important, as in all my fiction, to dissociate the opinions and attitudes of the characters from the opinions and attitudes of the author. Tom Norton and Sevgi Ertekin are contemptuous (and frightened) of Jesusland because they too have their own prejudices and fears to contend with. Sevgi in particular, as a first generation American immigrant and an identifiable ethnic minority, bitches about diehard confederate agendas because quite frankly the Deep South terrifies her. This is also is an observed reality; for Ertekin’s character, I borrowed quite heavily from one or two New Yorkers I know who have a similar (if perhaps not quite as extreme) mistrust and fear of the southern fundamentalist tendency and, by association, the places it comes from. The very sad truth about bigotry is that it begets more bigotry in reaction. There is a whole sub-set of Americans who are very tired of being caricatured and despised as “latte-drinking elites” or godless queer-loving liberals, and their reaction, increasingly, is to step away from the places which emanate this intolerance. So Sevgi, for all she is the closest thing to a “hero” we have, is flawed and angry, just like the other characters in the book, Marsalis most definitely included. I don’t do white hats and black hats, good guys and bad. All the characters in Thirteen are flawed, all are damaged, none are safe as moral guides to the terrain.

Thirteen is not a dance on the grave of middle America or the south, it’s a howling lament for what is being done to your nation by willful ignorance and ruthless vested interests, and for all that could be lost.

Sure, although it must have been deliberately provocative to make Carl Marsalis the walking embodiment of Jesusland fears and anxieties. The sexually incredibly desirable . . .

Yes, yes, I had another e-mail very recently, last week, who I couldn’t get back, I couldn’t connect. I sent him my basic screed — what I’ve just said — and he wrote back to say he could see I’ve thought about this, and that he enjoyed various parts of the book, but really, wasn’t I pushing it a bit much: Carl Marsalis, the black superstud, and the white lady cop who can’t resist him?

I wrote him back and said, I fear you’re mistaken here: Sevgi Ertekin is not white! She’s Turkish American, with a stated admixture of Arab blood (the rest probably coming with her Turkic roots from somewhere out on the Central Asian steppes or Mongolia).  She’s not a “white woman” in the way that racist fantasy implies. There is no intent to make some race-based political point in the portrayal of the relationship between Marsalis and Ertekin - thought the fact you detected one does make me think America’s problem with race is embedded to a genuinely frightening depth.

Actually, though, it comes up in the book in other ways — I wasn’t worried about the interracial relationship with Sevgi, but, for example, you do talk in the book about how other males get kind of prickly around Carl, because there’s this recognition that he might be taking his place in the pecking order.

The idea is that he represents — both genetically and because of the training he’s gone through — he’s fundamentally going to provoke an automatic reaction from other males because they are going to see him as a threat. The book was not originally called Black Man in Britain, either, it was originally going to be called Normal Parameters. And I made Carl black — it was a thicket of choices. One of them was that I’d written a novel years ago where the central character was called Marsalis, and I’d always wanted to use the name. This was as good a time as any, and so I based Carl Marsalis loosely, physically, on the other Marsalis from this novel I wrote twenty years ago, nearly.

It was also partly the sense that if you look at the recruiting numbers in the US military, you get an enormous number of young black men going into the military, because they’re coming from a poor background, and so this looks like the best bet. That’s not race-based, either. It’s like the Steve Earle song ["Copperhead Road"] — ”they draft the white trash first around here anyway.” The sense that America’s wars are fought by these people from the poorest and most deprived of its cultural background.

There’s also the idea that any kind of genetic experimentation would find its easiest seeds in deprived populations. There’s this implication that the elites in Thirteen go to poor black women for their genetic material. All of this threw itself together, and somewhere in that is the idea that America definitely still seems to have this problem with the big black bogeyman.

Tom Norton doesn’t like Carl because he scares him, but his skin tone isn’t the issue, he scares him because of who he is. And I’ve met guys like this, guys who have been in British Special Forces. There is something to them. I don’t feel threatened by them, but that’s just because I’m pretty in touch with my feminine side and don’t kid myself about my masculinity, if you like. One my most interesting correspondents, a captain in the American military told me is that in America, we have a real problem because males who don’t do military service have a real issue with soldiers and ex-soldiers. They react badly to them, they prickle around them. The only exception is guys who have a strong social mission like priests or teachers. I said at the time, could it not be that the kind of men who become priests or teachers are probably the kind of men who aren’t into that whole headbutting business of fighting it out for dominance of the herd. If you choose to become a teacher, which is a tough job, with poor rewards, or if you choose to become a priest, it seems likely that the things that drive you are not the things that drive the average male.

Males are competitive, and if you wheel in a man who’s very good-looking, very magnetic, very strong, very tough, most other males are not going to have a good word to say about him. And nor would I!

Do you remember in Bloom County when Opus is going out with Lola Granola, and her ex shows up? Bart Savagewood, I think he’s called. He’s a test pilot for the US Navy, with a 3-inch waist and a 96-inch set of shoulders. Opus is introduced to him, and just hates him on sight, because he can’t compete . . . [laughter]

It’s another of those truths that no one wants to address, and especially in politically correct terms, we don’t like to think that we react badly when our masculinity is threatened, because we don’t like to think that we still have that trait or competitive display in us. But the trick is that you accept it, and you laugh at it, and then you have a handle on it.

I have to confess that I’ve taken a certain amount of flak for being anti-American, which is harsh. I’m a big fan of America both in general political terms and in terms of the culture. I really like it there. The books I read, the music I listen to — what isn’t American is heavily, heavily influenced by it. But what constantly perplexes me about American culture generally is the depth to which the race thing is buried, and how unbelievably charged it is.

There’s racism everywhere. I mean, we’ve got plenty of it here in Britain, and go to Europe and you’ll find it there, as well. It’s not like it doesn’t exist on this side of the Atlantic. But the levels to which it’s buried in the American consciousness are really frightening — such as the rapidity with which some readers leapt to the idea that Sevgi is white because A) she’s the protagonist and b) not African-American, and so, by definition, since she’s white, and he’s an African-American — that can’t be good.

Sometimes you talk about this issue in genetic — and thus quasi-racial or sexed — terms, but you also raise important environmental factors as well. It’s really not clear the extent to which this competitiveness is hardwired after all, even for the thirteens.

That’s right: The idea is that the accepted stance of 2107 is that this is down to genetics, but then you’re given insight into the way they were trained and conditioned from an early age, and you think, bloody hell! If I’d been put through this from the day I was born, I’d be pretty psychotic as well. And right at the end, Sevgi’s father says if it’s true that this is written into your genes so deeply, why did they bother to train you the way they did? They didn’t trust you to turn out the way they wanted, so they made damn sure of it.

What I was trying to do there was to flip-flop the way things are now, which is that there is an underlying assumption that genes don’t determine anything, it’s all conditioning and environment. We’re still living with the heritage of the lurch to the left in the social sciences over the past sixty years, and so there’s an assumption it’s all about environment. And underlying that there’s a little bit of evidence and there are a few people saying, hang on a minute, maybe this is about the genes. So I wanted to flip it: everyone’s going to assume it’s about the genes, but underlying that would be some people saying, wait, what about environmental factors?

The truth as far as I can see it is that it’s always going to be about an interaction between the two. You’re not made by your genes, but your genes will give you the predispositions, and the environment will then tick them off one way or the other.

But the book is speculative in the pure sense of the word. If pressed by someone who said, look, you wrote it, is it about the genes? I would say, well, I don’t know.  My personal sense of it is, I’ve read a lot of Steven Pinker, and I think he makes an awful lot of sense. And generally speaking, when I’m reading science, if it’s bad news, then I tend to think they’re probably right. The universe is not a nice place, and we’ve survived in it as a species which means we’re probably not very nice in many ways either.

However, I tend to think that if the explanation is simple, it’s probably wrong. So this is never going to be a simple case of, yes, it’s these genes that do this. It’s going to be a question of, do these genes get expressed or not? How is it influenced by diet? What happens if the woman who gives birth to this child has previously given birth to this child? All this stuff comes into play, and it’s never going to be straightforward. But I do think we’re going to have to wake up, and shed our old-style leftist pretensions, and take a hard look at what human beings actually are.

This may seem like an odd connection, but one thing that’s striking about the difference between the world of Thirteen  and the Takeshi Kovacs world is the strong sense of embodiment, and living with the body that you have.

The Kovacs books were enormously fun to write, and I had a lot of fun playing with that concept. (It’s not my concept, I borrowed/stole it from many other practioners over the years. I think the first person I can give an official credit to is Robert Scheckley, whose Immortality, Inc was written in 1958 or something. ) It does let you off the hook in terms of consequences. I made a fist of showing that eliminating death doesn’t solve your problems; in many ways it just gives you more. But there’s always the thing that you can get out of this body. And that, regardless of how easy or difficult it is, does change the game. And the point with Thirteen was, I wanted a situation where you were locked into your physicality, and there’s nothing you can do about it. A point I tried to leave lying around for those who wanted to find it is that Marsalis has more in common with ordinary humans than either humans or he have with the coming generation in 2107, because those guys were going to have gene platforms that can be switched on or off more or less at well, and you can take a chemical and cure a tendency more or less for a generation or so, and you can choose not to have a tendency your parents gave you expressed. And that’s something ordinary humans don’t get to do, nor does Marsalis.  He’s locked in to what he is.

One last question: One of the things that I’ve always noted in your books — right from the beginning of Altered Carbon, and I’ve got dozens of these marked across all of them — is the way you write about mirrors. You write about them a lot — characters are always seeing themselves in them . . . . What’s interesting about mirrors?

I think the essence of noir — I think this is something I borrowed wholesale, and not really consciously, so I’m making this up on the fly — is that it’s quite introspective. That’s one of the joys of it. It can be really violent and headlong narrative, but always at the heart of a genuine noir narrative, you have this issue of where is the evil really coming from? Most noir heroes tend to be pretty self-loathing. Again, I think that’s a wisdom that the noir genre has and has kind of stumbled on in some sense. Especially if you’re male, and maybe female but I don’t know because I’m not female, but if you are male and have the slightest bit of self-knowledge or honest intellectual sensitivity, sometimes you’re going to be in the position of that Turkish guy who says, “sometimes it shames me to be male.” That’s an extreme way of expressing it, but if you’re paying attention at all you become aware very early on that males are pretty second-rate when it comes to social mores. Behaving well, if you like. They may make worse parents, they’re not as reliable. We score low on all the stuff that nowadays we would say makes good citizens. Now, that’s a huge generalization, but, in general terms I think that we males are not set up for citizenship in the same way that females are, and that’s something that comes up in the book.

Noir writers detected that, maybe without even consciously realizing it, and so you have this very strong male protagonist in most noir fiction, but he’s keenly aware of his own thuggishness, if you like. He’s keenly aware that it’s not like he’s the white knight and the stuff out there is dark and evil. He’s aware that this is in all of us. And so I suspect that mirroring happens a lot in noir because it’s a genre that’s concerned with what’s inside, as well as what’s outside. In noir plots the assumption tends to be that the system is corrupt: what appear to be the bad guys might be the bad guys, but what appear to be the good guys might be bad guys, as well. There’s a sense that things are rotten, and that this is the human condition.

I think I borrowed all of that. I just carted the whole lot out of the shop without looking at it too closely. I suspect that somewhere woven into that is the idea of the protagonist taking a long hard look at himself, and having to acknowledge what’s in the mirror.

One of the things I’ve been really delighted about over the years is the number of female readers that I’ve got. I was told, especially when I was writing Altered Carbon, even before it was published, most people who read it and liked it said, it’s such a boy’s book. And I keep getting reviews like this. One of the British reviewers for Black Man, for Thirteen said something similar — this is Andy McNab on steroids, this is riproaring Boy’s Own Adventure and stuff like that. But the truth is I’ve got a huge number of female readers, and I’m delighted by that, because I would hate to think I’m only talking to the male sex. I would hesitantly lay that at the door of this introspection. If you’ve got a hero who just thugs his way through the story, he’s utterly convinced of his rightness, and he wins the day — I think a lot of women aren’t interested in that. Whereas if you’ve got a guy who thugs his way through the story, but is constantly conflicted, and is aware that there’s something wrong with him — I think the female sex is far better at understanding that kind of introspection. Maybe that’s what works for them. It’s funny because I don’t think I’ve ever had — I have had a few complaints about the violence, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a woman complain about the violence. It seems to me that women will wear an enormous amount of violence and unpleasantness in their fiction, provided that something else is there as well. And where it doesn’t seem to work for women is when all you’ve got is that violence. This is why mainstream comics tend to be dominated by male readers, because they tend to flush away everything except that gleaming edge of violent capacity. It’s very hard to get interested in characters like that. The female readership (and there is one in comics, as well) is scraping around looking for the sophisticated interpretation, the angle or sense that there’s more than meets the eye, that inside these characters there’s something going on. And increasingly, of course, it’s women who buy books rather than men. So I’m very glad that I appeal to a female readership too, and not least because I genuinely believe that, without wishing to condemn any individual male anywhere, as a species, males very much are the problem. Say I had a child a one-year-old son or something, and I was dying. Given the choice between giving it to a male to rear and giving it to a female to rear, and this is a blind choice, with no other parameters or information to work from, I will give it to the woman every single time, and I think most courts, both in America and in Britain work off a similar assumption: Generally women will be better at bringing up children. The reason they’re better is that women are less likely to cave the kid’s skull in if he screams! It’s caveman stuff, but unfortunately it is what we carry within us. I think the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can get on with running the world far better than we do at the moment.

And pretending we don’t feel like that only makes it worse . . .

Exactly! It’s crazy. It’s insane. We’ve nailed ourselves to these ludicrous images of who we’re supposed to be, who we think we are, and they’re impossible to live up to both for men and women. Women are nailed to this thing of having to be the whore in the bedroom, the cook in the kitchen, and the perfectly demure and presentable housewife everywhere else. This is the whole maid/mother/crone thing. But also males are nailed to this ludicrous vision of implacable strength, where you can’t be weak, and can’t show weakness. They’re such counterproductive stereotypes, because there’s no way anyone could live up to them. And if you did live up to them, it would destroy you. That’s a theme I think running through a lot of my work: If you really do live up to the male archetype, then you’re dead in an alley somewhere, because it will destroy you. Even if it doesn’t kill you physically, it will destroy you from within. Leaving aside actual functioning genetic psychopaths, I think if you look at most men who have survived a lot of physical violence, it does something to them

We’ve come full circle, haven’t we, to the untold cost of heroic deeds. This is what happens to you if you stick to that ridiculous image of manhood. It will wipe you out. And the same holds true for women who try to live up images of femininity. I’m a big fan of bringing everything out warts and all — let’s really have a look at this. That said, you’ve also got to tell an entertaining story, and there’s a balance to be struck there, obviously.

About the Author

Jason B. Jones teaches Victorian literature at Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain. His interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such venues as PopMatters, BoldType, the Kenyon Review Online, and Bookslut. His website is The Salt-Box.