“Idle Roomer”
by Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn

The room was on the second floor of the dilapidated old building, overlooking what had once been a garden and now was a concrete parking slab filled with cracks and potholes. It had a narrow bed next to a small nightstand with a cheap lamp and an old, battered desk by the single window. A rickety wooden chair, a phone, an ancient dresser, a tarnished floor lamp, and a small closet completed its uninspired furnishings.

And, thought Maria, Mr. Valapoli has lived here for sixteen months. How could anyone live in this cheerless place for sixteen days, let alone months?

Maria surveyed the room from the door. She’d been cleaning this room five days a week for sixteen months, and she’d still never laid eyes on him. His bed was always made, the top of his desk always barren. The only way she knew he actually existed was the nightstand, which had a different library book almost every morning, and the bathroom, which held a dozen bottles of pills that were replaced with new bottles from time to time.

Oh — and the statuette on the top of the dresser. She didn’t quite understand what it was. Sometimes she thought it might be a woman, holding her arms out to the viewer. Other times she wondered how she could have been so mistaken, for clearly it was a small animal with large trusting eyes, possibly something from the deepest jungles of Africa. Once she even thought it was a twisted tree. Maria shook her head; she would never understand modern art.

She would never understand Mr. Valapoli either. Every day she plugged the phone into the jack, and yet the next morning the end of the cord always lay on the floor. She checked the dial tone; it was functioning. Why did the man pay for a phone if he had no use for it?

She never liked Sherlock Holmes much, but she thought it might be interesting to work at being the Miss Marple of housemaids and see what she could deduce about the mysterious roomer. He had to have a beard, because there was no shaving equipment, manual or electric, in the bathroom. Yet she never found any hairs, from his head or his chin, on the bed or the floor. He was probably color blind, for there was nothing blue, or purple, or violet in the drawers, no shirts of those tones in his closet. When she thought of it, she couldn’t even remember a blue cover on any of his books.

She swept the floor, which hadn’t seen a carpet or even a rug in perhaps half a century, went through the motions of dusting the desk and dresser and nightstand though as always they were as clean as if they’d been on display in a store.

Every other tenant was a transient. Even those who were down on their luck never stayed more than a week. And here was this poor man spending sixteen months of his life here. No matter what misfortunate had befallen him, he didn’t deserve this. No one did.

Her heart went out to him, and on an impulse, she took a piece of paper out of her pocket and left a note on his desk:

Don’t give up hope, Mr. Valapoli. People do care. I care.

                                                               Maria

She thought about the poor man all day. It was only when she was on her way home that she realized that he would have no idea who she was.

Maria’s hand hovered just above the doorknob, hesitant and expectant. Last night she agonized over whether she should have left the note. Surely it wasn’t wrong to let another person know that she felt for the predicament she saw him in? But then again, he could be a proud man who might see her sympathy as pity.

She shook her head, dispelling uneasy thoughts as she coaxed the creaking door to open. No, the note was well-meant and surely Mr. Valapoli would understand that.

At first glance the room appeared the same as always. As she absentmindedly plugged the phone cord into the jack again, the statuette caught her eye. Now it seemed to mildly resemble a curious owl, the eyes tracking her everywhere she went in the room.

You’re being ridiculous, Maria Saviari, she reprimanded herself.  Next you’ll be jumping at shadows.

She continued cleaning the room, pausing only to pick up her daily tip from atop the immaculately-made bed. As she placed the dollar bill in the pocket of her apron, her keen eyes noticed something different on the nightstand. This time there were two books upon it instead of the usual lone library book. Curious, she moved around to the nightstand, automatically smoothing the bedspread as she went.

Wondering fingers traced the cover of the second book, resplendent with its rich burgundy leather and gold foil embossed title: A Meeting of Minds. Gingerly she picked it up — ostensibly to dust underneath it, but actually to look more closely at the cover — when she noticed a piece of paper lying beneath the book.

“For Maria” appeared in a childlike scrawl — it was as if the writer had trouble forming the letters into legible shapes. Suddenly she realized that the book she now held in her hands was actually for her. It was his reply to her note.

Curious, she carefully opened it, the musty smell reaching her nostrils as she leafed through the first few pages. She stopped at the title page to discover more words written by the same hand as the note, but other than her name and a touchingly clear “Thank you” at the bottom of the inscription, the rest of the words were composed in a language she didn’t recognize. She stared at it. Somehow the words looked neither awkward nor badly scrawled; rather, they seemed to possess some indefinable cogency and even beauty.

How do I reply without knowing what the inscription in the book means? The phone started ringing, breaking her train of thought. She jumped, startled, and for the briefest instant it seemed to her that the statuette jumped as well. Get ahold of yourself, Maria, she thought; it’s only a gift. No need to be so jumpy, or to feel guilty because you’re looking through it, After all, he wants you to.

Aware that she still had six rooms to clean before the end of her shift, she reluctantly placed the book in her apron pocket and continued working, the feather duster making short work of an already clean dresser and desk.

On an impulse she went back to the bed and replaced the tip there before she left. It felt wrong to take it now that they’d exchanged communication and she’d accepted his gift, and she hoped he’d see it as the small gesture of friendship it was.

As she finally closed the door behind her, the phone began ringing once again, as if impatient to be answered. Maybe Mr. Valapoli had some friends after all, she thought as she pushed her cleaning cart into the next cheerless hotel room, one hand unconsciously checking to make sure that the book was still safe in her pocket.

Maria watched tenderly as her grandmother leafed through the book, smiling when she saw her bring it close to her face, shut her eyes and breathe in the scent of the leather binding. Golden light filtered in through the window, dancing on the last auburn strands to be found in almost snow-white hair, the years of hard work and laughter defined on her face by the late afternoon sun.

 ”Smells expensive” was her first comment as she glanced up to look squarely at her granddaughter.

“I very much doubt that.” Maria smiled. “It’s a gift from someone staying at the boarding house.” She reached over and turned the pages until she came to the inscription. “This is what I came here to ask you about. What language do you suppose this is?”

“My dear,” said her grandmother, “this wilted English Rose might have married a Sicilian but that does not make me an expert in other people’s languages. However,” she continued, as one finger traced the letters softly, “it’s definitely not a romance language,

and I don’t think it looks Oriental. In fact, it doesn’t look similar to anything I’ve encountered before. Those elegant pictographs are quite distinctive.” She looked up sharply. “Who did you say gave this to you?”

“I didn’t say. This book is from a man I’ve told you about previously Grandma; Mr. Valapoli, the one that’s had the misfortune to stay in the boarding house for the last 16 months.”

“Is it normal practice for guests to give you inscribed gifts?”

Maria sighed. “No, it’s not, but…”

“Let me guess: You want to help him.” She closed the book quietly, setting it down on the table in front of her. “You can’t help every lost soul you come across Maria — no, don’t interrupt me.” She reached out and placed a hand on her granddaughter’s cheek, gently brushing an errant ebony lock back as she did so. “You have too generous a heart; it makes it all that much easier for someone to break it.” Abruptly she stood up, her hand shaking as it moved to pick up her walking stick. “And if you don’t leave now it will be dark by the time you get home. Besides, you can’t keep a frail old lady up past her bedtime,” she intoned, the twinkle in her eyes still bright despite darkness falling outside.

Replacing the book in her uniform pocket, Maria laughed softly, and arose to kiss her grandmother on the forehead. “You are eighty-eight years young and definitely not frail of mind. Thank you for your advice, Grandma.”

“If it’s my advice you want, I’d take that gift of yours to the university tomorrow before you work. There’s bound to be someone there with enough degrees to translate it.”

Seemingly endless rows of books towered over Maria as she made her way to the back of the university library, feeling more insignificant with every step she made. As her fingertips ran feather-light along the spines of the books, she looked up at the ornately-carved bookshelves in awe. Every dust-filmed tome seemed to hold a wealth of knowledge, representing privilege to her uneducated eyes.

An officious library clerk had told her that she’d find the man she was looking for with his class at the back of the library. She suddenly spotted him at a circular table already surrounded by students, one of whom was draped nonchalantly over a huge padded chair at the side of the table. He appeared exactly the way she thought a professor should look: peppered black hair, a neatly-trimmed silver beard, and glasses perched low on a nose that he buried deeper into a book the closer she got to him.

“Professor Albright, may I have a moment of your time?” she asked politely, her eyes focused on the top of his head.

“Certainly,” came the aloof yet slightly amused reply from the direction of the armchair. “In fact, you can have several.”

She started in surprise, turning to stare at the man now confidently vacating the chair. This young man is a Professor of Linguistics? She knew appearances could be deceptive and she’d seen all types come and go at the boarding house, but this man with his surf-blond hair and cornflower blue eyes was not what she was prepared to meet.

 Professor Albright addressed the older man firmly. “Mr. Tripoldi, the class, if you please.” Without waiting for a response he strode over to the partially-secluded corner of the library, Maria scurrying in his wake.

“How can I be of service to you?” he inquired, eyebrows raised as he turned to look at her. “I really only do have a few minutes to spare you, so please be concise.”

“I’ve come across a language I cannot identify,” she said. “It’s  an inscription in a book I’ve been given.” She began rummaging through her work bag, wishing now that she’d thought to put the book on top of her change of clothes.

“Why don’t you simply ask the person who gave you this inscribed gift?” he asked, staring at her with mild annoyance.

“I could. Or” — Maria matched his stare — “I can politely ask a  leading academic on dead languages his expert opinion rather than hurt a considerate friend’s feelings by asking what it means.”

Surprise and a hint of respect flickered briefly across Albright’s face before he once again adopted a mask of detached boredom. “You could indeed.”

She held out the book to him, feeling suddenly more comfortable when his eyes left hers and refocused on the leather binding of her gift. “The inscription is on the third page,” she explained, “and it’s…”

The book was all but snatched out of her grasp, the Professor unable hide his excitement over what now lay in his hands. “It couldn’t be… could it?” The Professor opened the book to the copyright page, and began reading intently, then turned the page again. Suddenly there was a sharp intake of breath. “Do you realize what you have here?” he exclaimed, not waiting for an answer. “This is a numbered first edition! Do you know how rare it is? It must have cost a fortune!”

Maria was confused. “What does that mean?” Surely Mr. Valapoli didn’t have the money to buy her a rare and valuable book — not if he had to live in a boarding house.

The Professor sighed suddenly, calming himself by sheer force of will. “It means that before this book was desecrated by an inscription, it was one damned expensive book for your friend to buy. It’s worth a lot less now though — it’s no longer in its original condition.”

While she tried to assimilate all this startling information, Albright leafed through the pages to find the inscription. Suddenly he looked as surprised as Maria felt.

He started pacing up and down with the book, an intent look in his eyes, his brow furrowed, his veneer of smug superiority completely vanished. Suddenly he looked up. “This is not any spoken language — and I can tell you that this is not adead language either.” He paused, squinting excitedly at the page again. “In fact, this appears to be an extinct language. It’s certainly alien to anything I’ve ever encountered. The structure is…let me put it this way: I’ll bet a week’s pay that not one word of this can be translated into English, and if it was a dead language I’d be able to do so, or at least see how to attack it.” The book snapped shut as if to emphasize his point. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Maria was dumbfounded. She gave Albright permission to photocopy the inscription before leaving for work, filled with more questions than before. Money was clearly not a problem if Mr. Valapoli could buy and inscribe this book regardless of its worth, simply because it made the gift more personal.     

So why was the man living in that rundown boarding house if he could afford better? She didn’t know then, and she still had no idea when she finally went back to work.

Just as she was about to reconnect his phone line yet again, Maria paused and decided instead to roll the cord up neatly into a bundle and place it beside the handset on the desk. She might not understand what Mr. Valapoli had against receiving calls, but after receiving such a present it was time that she started heeding his wishes.

Having finished dusting the desk and nightstand, she moved over to clean the dresser, and her gaze fell upon the statuette. It  looked different again today. The change was subtle as always, but she thought she could almost discern the vague shape of an elephant, the trunk curving gently around the base, serene and contemplative. Even the color had subtly changed to match that of a pachyderm.

Mr. Valapoli was such a tidy tenant that she rarely had to use more than a feather duster to keep any surfaces clean. However, she couldn’t remember the last time she had actually picked up the statuette to clean it properly, or indeed if she ever had. Possibly the greyish tone was simply the result of accumulated dirt.

Maria reached out to pick it up. The instant her fingers came in contact with it she felt some kind of joining, something she had never experienced before. She blinked very rapidly as she was suddenly overwhelmed by a sensation of otherness. 

Suddenly a montage of images appeared, not before her eyes, but inside her mind — but they were like no images she had ever seen,  or even imagined before. She saw three moons racing across a coal-black sky, their trajectory reflected in the murky waters of a silent ocean, and a sense of tranquility swept over her. Pastoral pictures followed, not of anything she had ever seen, but lovely nonetheless.

And then she felt an air of foreboding, of dread, and the images, blurred beyond recognition, turned blue, became larger and bolder without taking any discernable shapes, and seemed to be converging on her.

She screamed, just once, and pulled her hand back — and the instant she did so, all the images, all the emotions, vanished, and she was alone in the room, her forgotten feather-duster still clutched in her left hand. She held up her right hand and studied it, as if it was no longer part of her, as if it had somehow betrayed her. There were no marks on it, no burns or bruises, and she knew instinctively that it wasn’t the hand that had taken her out of the here and now, it was the contact.

And now she turned her attention to the object that she had been in contact with. The statuette looked harmless enough, a peaceful, tranquil, not-quite-elephant, not-quite-anything. Had she imagined it? And if so, what exactly had she imagined?

She extended a forefinger and reached out to touch it lightly, then drew back before she made contact. Four more times she tried to work up the courage, and then, finally, her finger gingerly touched the statuette.

An image appeared in her mind, not of too many moons or flowers that didn’t exist or oppressive blue somethings, but rather of a bookstore. A not-quite-human hand was thumbing through the pages of a book. Her book.

This time statuette didn’t hold her against her will. She withdrew her hand, stood back, stared at it once again, and waited for her heart to stop pounding so hard against her chest.

If I’m not imagining this, what does it mean? And what have I stumbled into?

Evening and midnight came and went, and she still didn’t know. She barely slept, and made up her mind to finally confront Mr. Valapoli and get some answers. She knew he was always gone when she arrived at nine o’clock, so she showed up at six thirty, just as dawn was breaking.

Probably he’s asleep, she thought, staring at his door. I’ll just wait for some sound of movement.     

She learned against the wall for five uneasy minutes, then stood erect. This was too important to wait. She had to get some answers now.

She knocked at the door. No response. She turned the knob and gingerly tried to open it. It was locked. She knew that using her master key was against regulations, probably against the law, but she didn’t hesitate. A moment later she was inside the room.

Mr. Valapoli wasn’t there. The bed hadn’t been slept in. She looked in the closet to see if he’d packed and left. It was filled with his clothes.

Was it all an hallucination? There was only one way to find out. She walked over to the statuette, summoning her courage to touch it again. It had changed again, no longer vaguely elephantine, no shape that she could identify…but she could identify an emotion, its every line seemed to project: fear.

It couldn’t be afraid of her. All she wanted were answers. What could be scaring it?

And suddenly, instinctively, she knew. It was the blue, shapeless things she had sensed yesterday. They were not part of her life, or even her world — and that meant that the fear was Mr. Valapoli’s.

She laid her hand on the statuette without hesitation now. Images, blue and garbled, flooded her mind, and she seemed to hear voices inside her head, not human voices, not speaking any language she had ever heard, but somehow she understood what they were saying.

A voice that sounded blue (how was that possible?) was saying, “You hid well. But now you must come back with us.”

And a gentle voice, a voice she instinctively knew was Mr. Valapoli’s, a very tired, very weary voice said, “It’s a big galaxy, and this is such a small world. How did you find me?”

“We have our methods,” said the blue voice. “Will you come peacefully or must we use force?”

“These are decent beings, these people. They are without malice. Do them no harm, and I’ll come back with you,” said the tired voice.

“I do not envy you when we get home,” said the blue voice.

Maria withdrew her hand. They were going to take him away, back to something awful! She raced to the window to see if they were in the yard. There was a hint of something large and blue beneath a tree, but she couldn’t make it out.

“No!” she yelled, turning and preparing to run to the door.

And the statuette, suddenly more human — or at least humanoid in shape — raised a hand as if to tell her to stop.

She froze, shocked, and the gentle voice spoke inside her head.

“It’s all right, Maria.”

She stared at the statuette, and its expression seemed to soften. Finally, after another minute, it lowered its hand.

“Thank you for caring.”

She walked to the window, and the blue shape was gone, and somehow she knew Mr. Valapoli was gone too. Forever.

Sunlight streamed in through the single window of the bedroom, bathing the statuette in warm golden light as it sat on the dresser, the focal point of the small, uncluttered room.

Still half asleep, Maria stretched languorously, thinking of all she had experienced over past few weeks. Ever since Mr. Valapoli left and she had brought the statuette home, it felt like it truly belonged with her, and she liked to imagine that the statuette itself felt comfortable on her dresser.

Its shape had continued to change. Each morning she would wake up to see the magic that had been wrought overnight, and each day it became somehow less alien in its form and more distinct in its features, softening into the image of a man, with eyes as kind as Mr. Valapoli’s voice had been gentle.

She no longer questioned how the statuette could change. She knew. Every time she touched it she could sense him. The connection was very faint, and growing fainter with each passing day, but she took comfort in the fact that it was there.

Until the morning she touched it and didn’t feel anything but the cold contours of the statuette itself. Not sure of what was happening, she reached out to make contact with it again, but before she could, her eyes widened in wonder as she realized she was witnessing its very last change, her unseen friend’s final parting gift to her, the one that let her know he also cherished their strange connection.

There upon the statuette’s face was a smile, and in her mind she clearly heard the echo of Mr. Valapoli’s voice for the last time.

“Thank you for caring, Maria.”

About the Author

Mike Resnick is the winner of 5 Hugos and numerous other major awards in the USA, France, Japan, Spain, Croatia, and Poland, and is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He is the author of more than 50 novels, 200 short stories, 14 collections, and two screenplays, and the editor of more than 50 anthologies. His work has been translated into 22 languages. He is currently the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe. 

Lezli Robyn is a science fiction and fantasy writer who lives on southern-east coast of Australia. A fan of the field since she was old enough to read, she travelled to America for her first Worldcon in Denver and had the privilege of meeting authors she had grown up reading. Since going to Denver she’s made her first two solo sales as a professional writer. She’s also sold two stories in collaboration with Mike Resnick with an assignment for a third to be written together. As both a fan and a writer she looks forward to spending her future exploring the fictional worlds she creates with her words; she hopes her readers will enjoy them as well.

“batch 39 and the deadman’s switch”
by Simon DeDeo

You have Ted Kaczynski down the hall — the Earth Firster who quit tree-spiking to pipe-bomb a forestry convention — the abortion nut who gunned down three girls in Missouri — a half-dozen Arabs, half of whom again you have on phony evidence. I suppose I’m in good company. Or I would be if we could talk to each other.

You want to talk about the anima device. Devices. Of course. Everyone wants to know about Kazinsky’s time at Harvard, but MIT doesn’t rate. Yes, I understand the difference. Mail bombs don’t usually fit on a postcard.

This all started with my boyfriend. You figured he was behind it all, which just makes you sexist. He turned out to be tougher than expected, but then again, librarians always do. I understand that the American Library Association is filing a lawsuit on his behalf. It may even finish up before the courts collapse.

Mack worked for a library that handled rare manuscripts. Not exciting manuscripts, rare manuscripts. The Gutenberg Bible is not rare enough for them. Five copies in circulation is at least two too many. Like the Federal Government: lender of last resort. We think he got it from a Russian treatise from 1930 they uncovered after the Mafia blew a hole in the University of St. Petersburg because they wanted land for a new hotel. Where the Russian got it I don’t know. But we know the connection: Plotinus. The treatise was on the iconography of a Plotinus manuscript the Reds had looted from the palace. Before they shot the Romanovs.

Did you know the anima in Plotinus has been an open problem for historians of philosophy? Nobody could figure out what it meant. “Soul”, if you look in the lexicons, but that kind of Christian term doesn’t take you very far. Nor it is pnuema, the in-breathing of the gnostics, or any of a dozen other ways people talked about the sorts of things we run an MRI for today. The best clue we have is a passage that talks about illumination.

Which is, in the end, how I found it in batch thirty-nine. The thirty-nine steps. Two more than the most random number between one and a hundred. Terms two and three in a geometric series based on the Trinity. Not the bomb site. That came a little later.

Unlike the two Trinities, batch thirty-nine did not come out right. All the previous ones we had, through a combination of cross-breeding and radiation-bombardment, gradually taught to clip and reassemble proteins. We were solving the travelling salesman problem in a massively parallel form. As a test case. Biological computing. Batch thirty-nine, despite being the most advanced system yet, turned the vats to gel.

I was the graduate student and I was both curious and bored, so I reduced the gel, tipped it out on the bench like a birthday cake, clipped a corner, dropped it in universal solvent — water, to you — supersaturated the solution, and triggered a crystal. Which, unsurprisingly, did not look like the standard Frank Gehry bolt-on. I autoclaved the rest, and got time on the micrograph over in Systems.

Systems was a joint university-Air Force project. It was headed — de facto, not de jure — by Rachel, who was always in the pressed uniform of her branch. Rachel was a grump, but she was efficient in the comforting way civilians imagine all military types to be, and she booted up the micrograph, plated the crystal surface, parked me at the screen, and left. That’s when I saw the anima.

They were a few microns on a side. On the surface a few brute-force levers, but clearly doing something more than Archimedes: the whole surface was electrically active, strong enough to make the images shiver in the electron beam. Wherever they sat in the crystal, the surrounding proteins twisted into new patterns. I tweezed one up with a ion probe, put it down. The ion probe is pretty brute force; a bunch of them fell onto the bench.

Then I put the crystal in the fridge, and went out for a late dinner. I was starved. Or, at least, I thought I was. It was then I caught a glimpse of what is, at this point, planet-wide. Little things, but strange. Crossing Mass Ave, the traffic lights went red and green together. The ATM in the student center dumped three grand into the tray, irritating enough because I had checks I needed to clear.

I headed back to Systems and pulled the batch again. I looked at the levers on the surface, and used the ion probe to nudge the largest. The contraption fit together like a Victorian toy and in an instant the cube had crumbled away. I looked on the plate for the machines I had dislodged, and destroyed a few more before I felt guilty.

Outside the door, I heard weeping, and I stepped into the corridor; it was Rachel. Her uniform was in shreds all along the hallway; she herself was naked. I held her head while she choked on mucus and told me what Systems was for. It’s above your paygrade, I’m sure, but it can’t hurt to tell you that the august institution that funded the travelling-salesmen problem was keen for a dual-use.

It turns out, out in Iraq, that the U.S. military used to leave booby-trapped bomb components in volatile areas. They guesstimated that about ninety percent of the casualties were bona-fide insurgents trying to scrounge up enough wire, cord and shell casings for the next IED. It was the biggest success of the occupation, and Systems was going for the next stage. The biological analogy.

It didn’t make much scientific sense — this is the same military that tried to leverage paranormal Uri Geller types to spy on the Kremlin, after all — but Rachel had an inkling of how the various products of Systems were tested: back out in Afghanistan and Iraq, on people we disappeared off the streets. Rachel’s arms and face were bloodied by self-inflicted scratchings, but this was apparently nothing compared to what went down in a retrofitted Abu Gharib.

The court martial, six weeks later, was not exactly advertised on the Internet. But I knew why Rachel had disappeared from the lab, and I knew where to find her. I gave her a shard of the crystal, and she duly dropped it on the prosecution’s table. In his coffee, actually; Rachel was a very angry woman. The next morning, I turned on NPR for the commute in time to hear Lakshmi Singh interviewing both sides of the court martial after a joint statement. What then became known as the Systems Trial — formally, Afshordi et alia v. Department of Defense — ran for three months. It took time, because the alia were twelve rows deep in the visitor’s gallery.

I’m a reasonably good scientist — for a girl, as my freshman advisor told me — so it took a few more test runs before I understood the anima devices. A police brutality case in Chicago and two resignations in Congress made the news. It was about this time that I took Mack in to the lab and we eventually traced it to Zukankov’s Plotinus book. That gave our cubes the name.

We soon figured out the lever combinations that produced more — I thought about the backstory quite a bit. The anima devices were bizarrely complicated, practically sentient. We soon discovered that we didn’t need an ion probe; various chemical combinations — like the supersaturations I started with — would trigger them. Mack pointed out that simply distilling a healthy alchemist’s urine would be sufficient to get them running at full steam.

The anima, you see, is a fail-safe. Systems would never have found them. You need to be a little more curious than Industry, a little cleverer than a dilletante, and have a little more spare time than someone doing work-for-hire. And, of course, you have to like old books. As Mack says, you need to be an intellectual: a Plotinus, a John Dee. Or at least John Dee’s graduate student.

I don’t know who made them. Not any of us. And obviously not the people who came before us. But they work, and even pre-Enlightenment science would be enough to figure out what they did.

Before you picked up Mack outside his office and hit him with something even harder than waterboarding, he pointed out that fail-safe was not quite the right word. Neither of us wanted to release them on a global scale. We figured we’d keep them safe, use them sparingly. Neither of us had finished the Brothers Karamasov, but we had read the Grand Inquisitor section, and both of us were keen on Free Will. We voted for Howard Dean, not the Sparticus League.

The anima devices are not weapons. Only a particular kind of person can find them, and it’s the kind that doesn’t go in for world-scale domination. But now Mack is gone, and I’m in a supermax in flyover country.

It took a long time for the Roman empire to collapse under the weight of a confused and strangely altruistic religious ideology. Plotinus was long gone. Things happen faster these days, but there’s no way you’re going to let me out of here to turn it off, and it’s rather too late. Our apartment is a crime scene and seven liters of the stuff has been divided up and sent to every branch of the government, known and hidden, for analysis. Rachel tells me that it will hit the Israelis, the Russians, and the Chinese, in that order, within the next few months.

The anima device; we know what it is.

A deadman’s switch for nerds.

About the Author

Simon DeDeo is a scientist, writer and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. His essays and criticism on poetics, epistemology and anarchism have appeared in The Continential Review, absent, and on his blog rhubarb is susan, and are forthcoming in Mantis and The Chicago Review. batch 39 was completed during a stay at the Santa Fe Institute.

“Writing with One Hand Tied to the Death Star: Award-Winning Authors and Media Tie-In Fiction”
by Jason S. Ridler

Peruse the genre section of any bookstore and you will see a large chunk of shelf-space bending under the weight of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Lucrative and popular, media tie-in fiction is a sub-genre all to itself. It even has its own professional organization, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. At the same time, tie-in fiction has a reputation for being hackwork, a mercenary-gig writers do for money for a pre-set audience, creating fiction that doesn’t require much more skill than those of the pulp forefathers who gave it birth.

So it may be surprising that many award-winning genre writers have also tried their hand at tie-in fiction. Some have done it for money, some for love, most for both. Jeanne Cavelos (World Fantasy award, editor) wrote four Babylon Five novels. Bruce Holland Rogers (Pushcart Prize, Nebula, Stoker and World Fantasy award winner) wrote a novel based on the card game Magic: the Gathering. Jeff VanderMeer (World Fantasy, Rhysling award) just completed a novel based on the Predator film franchise, and the experience led him to produce the writing book How to Write a Novel in Two Months. And Elizabeth Hand (Tiptree, Nebula, World Fantasy) has published more tie-in fiction then the above combined, from the popular Star Wars franchise to the universally panned Catwoman flick. Bruce Bethke’s (Philip K. Dick award) is unfortunately best known for the novelization of the box office disaster Wild Wild West.

This is not a screed for or against tie-in fiction (if you love or hate reading the continuing adventures of anybody-who-is-not-real, great!), but instead a sample of experiences of award-winning authors writing for worlds not their own. Some experiences were good, some were bad, and some were downright fugly. 

THE TIES THAT BIND

You don’t have to be a fan of tie-in fiction to write it, but it helps. Jeanne Cavelos adored the well-regarded tie-in fiction James Blish had done for Star Trek (eleven volumes from 1967-1975). While a senior editor at Dell Publishing in the 1990s, she also became a fan of the SF series Babylon Five (B5), in part because it seemed smarter than your average TV series in its attempt to use a novel structure for the series. After securing the rights to have Dell publish B5 novelizations, she left editing to pursue her own fiction, only to have Dell ask her to write a B5 novels. She did both a stand alone (The Shadow Within) and trilogy (The Technomage Trilogy). She pitched her novel idea to B5 creator and chief writer/director J. Michael Straczynski, which he loved. For the trilogy, she worked from an outline Straczynski provided. “Joe’s outline had as its centerpiece a great revelation about the techno-mages,” Cavelos said. ”My heart jumped when I read it. That was a thrill, to be handed material like that.” She was thrilled to be adding to the story of a show she respected.

Jeff VanderMeer was also weaned on Blish’s Star Trek work. When the opportunity arose to write a novel based on the Predator franchise, he grabbed it. He’d enjoyed the films and this was a chance to write a different kind of fiction than his usual fare. “I love Joyce and Nabokov, but I also love action-adventure movies and really good thriller novels and pulp noir. So this just seemed to me like exploring some aspect of my tastes I’d never worked on in fiction form before. It’s bloody, violent, has some sex in it, and it’s amoral. Period.”

Rogers had gone to Wizards of the Coast to pitch an original novel and instead was offered the opportunity to write a novel based on the new and massively popular Magic: The Gathering card game. He loved the game, thought it would be an intriguing challenge, and the money was good.

Elizabeth Hand, however, had no interest to explore but the bottom line. “I’m a working writer,” Hand said. “I don’t teach or have a tenured position anywhere, or a pension, or a 401K. This is my day job, and doing media work has been a way to help pay the bills and underwrite my serious fiction. Period.”

STRUGGLING AGAINST RESTRAINTS

Tie-in fiction is largely defined by its limitations. You can’t just kill Captain Kirk or give Chewbacca a sex change, no matter how awesome a story might result. Your work must be consistent with the original source material, and this consistency is referred to as the “continuity.” Depending on the property, continuity can be light or heavy, and such limitations can be a pillory box for creativity. “I would blow my brains out if I had to write in the Star Trek or Star Wars universe,” said VanderMeer, “… they have such a huge bible and backstory, I wouldn’t have the patience and I personally would feel horribly claustrophobic.”

Both VanderMeer and Rogers worked on properties whose continuity had few limitations. VanderMeer had a few Predator movies and novels, but otherwise was left to create the story he wanted for Predator: South China Sea. The approach was the same as his other work “write for myself and hopefully people will like it.” Still, he needed to keep in sight what “the core Predator audience would like.”

For his novel based on a card game, Rogers had almost no narrative to work with. “I actually saw this as positive… As long as I wrote fiction that used creatures, settings, and props from the game world, I could tell pretty much whatever story I wanted to tell.” The result was Ashes of the Sun, written under the penname Hanovi Braddock, a fantasy novel that found appeal with the gaming and non-gaming fans. Normally a slow writer, Rogers felt he could just “write and write without deciding on every detail. The editors might want to change everything I did, in any case, so I might as well commit to the first ideas that I thought of. As it turned out, the editors wanted minimal changes. And the novel was pretty good.”

Cavelos, on the other hand, dealt with the breadth and depth of B5′s continuity limitations. “I wrote my first B5 novel, The Shadow Within, while the TV series was still on the air. Major revelations about my main character, Anna Sheridan, and the novel’s antagonists, the Shadows, were forthcoming on the show, though I didn’t know this. I only found out when some B5 fans in the UK (where the show aired about a month ahead of when it aired in the US) emailed me. This forced me to make a bunch of 11th-hour changes once I did get the information.  Luckily, these changes were generally minor, but chasing down the information caused a lot of anxiety and extra work.”
For Cavelos, writing her B5 novels was “harder than writing my own fiction in many ways.” Her original plots smacked against the continuity of the B5 universe, and again she had to scramble. But in the wake of this aggravation, she found ideas that were significantly better. “The limitations forced me to be more creative, to not go with my first thought (which was usually a familiar plot device) but to come up with something better. I feel that, in many ways, the more limitations I have, the better I write.” But Cavelos conceded that her B5 experience was also exceptional. Other properties are jammed with rules. “At some point I think the rules can become overwhelming.”

Even in the continuity-thick Star Wars universe, Hand found some room to breathe. “The four Boba Fett juveniles were all original books that I wrote, with original storylines and some original characters. I might receive directions to have various Star Wars characters make an appearance, but that was it. So it was fun. I wrote Hunted as a Jack Vance juvenile and had a great time with it.” George Lucas and the Gang were generally supportive, great to work with, and hands off. Not like Chris Carter, who demanded all the adjectives and adverbs be removed from her X-Files movie novelization. She also had the unenviable task of translating the awful script of Catwoman into something readable, only to have several more versions of the script arrive at her door, each with a different ending, each forcing her to do a re-write of a bad story that kept getting worse and worse.   

Still, such frustrations were water off a duck’s back. For me,” Hand said, “tie-in work is work for hire and nothing more. It’s hack work, and I’ve never pretended otherwise… I have no emotional investment in media work, and no artistic investment save that I try my best to produce something worth the cover price.” While never substandard work, it wasn’t her best.

FROM GOOD TO BAD TO UGLY

All these complaints pale compared to the tsunami of ruin that accompanied Bruce Bethke’s efforts to novelize the film The Wild, Wild West. This cautionary tale is fully recounted at his website, so here is a summation of his self-described Faustian bargain. Bethke, the man who coined the word cyberpunk in 1980, had won the Philip K Dick award for his SF novel Headcrash in 1995. While acclaimed, it had mediocre sales, so when Bethke attempted to sell his next original novel, his editor said that while she loved the book, they could only make an “insultingly low” offer for it.

But, if he wrote a bestseller, he’d have more stroke with the publisher, and his future work would likely get a lot better advances. The editor said she had a tie-in project that would do the trick, the novelization of an action/comedy film staring Will Smith that would guarantee sales of an estimated 250,000 to Smith’s large fan base.

Bethke respected the original script and signed on to do the project so he could do his next novel with the promise of a solid advance. In doing so, he walked into a creative and imaginative bramble bomb. The original scriptwriters were fired, and a rotating door of replacements was brought in. Plot, character, setting and tone changed monthly as new scripts arrived. Eventually, Bethke was receiving faxes on a daily basis regarding script tweaks, and was expected to change the entire book at the same pace. The deadline approached before final script approval was made and the book went production with many continuity breaks from the final movie.

Then, the film tanked. Warner Brothers lost $180 million. The book sold in the mid 30,000. The film’s failure was a tar-baby that glommed onto Bethke’s name. When he pitched his next novel to Warner, he received a letter saying they could no longer afford to buy novels from him at all.

Ten years later, the experience still stings. Yet, the field is not all doom and gloom. “I’ve talked this business over with a lot of writers over the years,” Bethke said, “Dragonlance writers, Star Trek writers, game spinoff writers, screenplay novelization writers — and in the end, I have to conclude my experience with Wild Wild West was exceptional.” He also noted that many people can write good and fun media tie in work, and novelizations have many more restrictions and headaches attached to them.

Still, he warns against tie-in fiction if your real heart in fiction is to compose original, compelling work. “In the long run [tie-in fiction] will only anger and disappoint you, and sap the energy you need to chase your idiosyncratic vision, whatever it may be.” In short, stick to your original-fiction guns and “don’t quit your day job.”

CONCLUSION

Jeanne Cavelos, Elizabeth Hand and Bruce Holland Rogers have largely given up writing tie-in fiction, each one feeling their time is precious and best spent on their own fiction. VanderMeer may or may not take up another property in the future. And Bethke won’t touch one with a ten-foot clown pole. Each one looked at the sub-genre a bit different than when they started, for good or ill.

VanderMeer had his expectations challenged. “I’m on record as saying I think tie-in fiction is crap. But it’s easy to say that if you haven’t written one… Would I have thought to do a Predator novel without luck and chance? Would I have done one without being paid up front? No. But from the beginning I thought of it as an interesting challenge… All I can really say is, like always, I tried to write an honest book and to invest it with the sense of beauty and horror I find in the world. And that it truly gets stranger and stranger as it goes along. You’ll find many VanderMeer signatures.” Plus, it has a Predator in it!

Jeanne Cavelos acknowledges the field has problems. “While there has certainly been plenty of bad tie-in fiction (and I mean plenty), there has also been some great tie-in fiction. It’s sad that tie-in novels are dismissed by critics and by many writers of ‘real’ fiction. A writer of a tie-in novel is doing the same job that a writer of an episode of a TV show is doing. The writer of the TV show episode can be celebrated, can be awarded an Emmy. The writer of the tie-in novel can’t even get reviewed… We could value [their work] a bit more.”

Rogers enjoyed his experience, but won’t dip back in. “At this point, I’m not sufficiently motivated by money to be interested in any work but work that is entirely my own.” Hand has given up writing tie-ins, focusing on her own work. She never pretended tie-in was anything other than hack work, though she had no problems with writing it, nor disdain for anyone else who takes up the work, whatever their motivation. “I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve kept the two streams of writing separate in my own professional career, but I’ve never written under a pseudonym, or denied having done media work. Still, I prefer not to. It takes time and energy from the work that matters most to me.”

Bethke concurs. Despite his experience, though, he offered this final does of pragmatism. “There are good media companies to work for. There are insane idiots who treat writers like migrant bean-pickers. The best advice I can offer to any writer who is thinking of tackling this kind of work is, do your due diligence. Contact other writers who have written for this media company before. Don’t believe the hype, ever. Try to get some sense of what you’re getting into before you sign anything.”

Writers come to tie-in fiction for different reasons. Some dig contributing to a mythos they love, adding their unique voice to the existing choir. Others desire a fistful of dollars and just get the job done. Most are stuck somewhere in between, just as the work itself is caught between the large and enthusiastic demands of readers and the disdain of the sub-genre from those outside its boundaries. Wherever you fall in the spectrum, tie-in fiction is too popular to die. Just like Spock!

About the Author

Jason S. Ridler's fiction has appeared in such magazines as Nossa Morte, Big Pulp, Crossed Genres, New Myths, Necrotic Tissue, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. “Billy and the Mountain” appeared in Tesseracts Thirteen, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell. His popular non-fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

“Voodoo Economics: How to Find Serenity in an Industry that Does Not Want You”
by Catherynne M. Valente

In the antiseptic, sour-smelling halls of psychology, there is an entire wing devoted to Anxiety. Within that wing is a dingy corner containing a dry mop and a broken drinking fountain bearing a sign that reads “Please Love Me.” This section is wholly devoted to Writer’s Anxiety.

There is a hierarchy of Writer’s Anxiety, and since this is a magazine which splits its favors more or less equally among the tiers, it is this hierarchy which concerns me as I sit down, fresh from my latest rejection, to tell you all how I keep the temptation to rip up paperback copies of The Sword of Shannara and choke myself to death on their pulpy remains at bay.

The first tier of Writer Anxiety can aptly be described as “Oh, God, Let Me Get Published.” This pupal stage in the development of the author is fraught with misery and self-doubt, characterized by a willingness to do any number of unsavory things for the chance at a stapled, mimeographed contributor’s copy and a steadfast conviction that publication vindicates all.

The second tier falls under the fluttering banner of “Oh, God, Let Me Keep Publishing.” This intermediary stage is full of dread and attempts to scry the market using arcane methods of haruspicy and blog-reading in order to keep oneself relevant and employed. These tiers often snipe at one another in a morbid kind of Misery Olympics — is it more wretched to have no credits to your name and a burning, thwarted desire for them or to have to deal every day with a hostile market that could dump you onto the landfill at any arbitrary moment? Meet me at the con. We’ll compare ulcers.

It was not so long ago — about four years–that I was squarely in that first tier, just hoping against hope someone would see in my work what I saw, that someone would reach down from the gold-paneled heavens of New York City and say: yes, you are what we want. That didn’t happen.

How can I say that, when I, in fact, did get a two-book deal with Bantam Spectra, followed by a third, when I’ve gone from total unknown to multi-award-winning author on the cover of Locus in less than four years? Because the industry doesn’t want me. And they don’t want you, either. The word industry is applicable here only with squinted eyes and foil-wrapped antennae affixed firmly to the skull. Imagine, if you will, that instead of the effete, latte-sipping literati we surely are, that we all work together in a steel mill in, let’s say Ohio, oh, round about now.

The glory age of our employers is long past. Most of the field has either gone out of business or merged or found other, cheaper workers who will not insist on decent pay and benefits. The world is actively, eagerly looking for some way to completely replace what we make with something more energy-efficient, modern, and interesting. Every once in awhile our employers land a big contract, and that keeps the rest of us afloat for awhile, but it’s been on the downhill for a long time. Take a look at some of the steel towns in Ohio. It’s a metaphor, but it’s also a mirror. The difference is, if steel production ground to a halt today, it would be a problem.

There are more writers today, producing more text, than ever before in the history of the world. It can’t have escaped notice that this entire article is pregnant with the assumption that its audience is primarily other writers and aspiring writers. More books, more blogs, more everything. If everyone with literary aspirations were to, at this very instant, wake up, laugh, and get a banking job, the publishing industry could go for decades, even a century, on just those who are working now, reprints, and endless new editions of the ten most popular books of all time. No one would even notice.

We’re selling steel to the steel barons, kids.

So when I say it didn’t happen, what I mean is that the barons will never look down at me and say: yes, you are what we want. Let’s be honest, I don’t even sell machine-grade steel. I sell Damascus steel, folded and intricate, dug up from the earth, practically useless, desirable only to lovers of the arcane, the beautiful, the old. No one slammed a fist down onto their desk and shouted: what we need here is a woman writer with too much education to natter incomprehensibly about fairy tales! It doesn’t work like that. It’s a ghastly game, trying to predict how an author will perform, betting on her like a horse. And how she runs! As long as she can, she runs. But usually, it’s not that long.

I’ve been questioning myself a lot lately. Questioning my steel, if you will. I choose to write the aggressively strange, almost virulently outside the mainstream. Does this hurt me? Does it, slowly, kill me? I can’t tell. I just can’t. I try to recall Ted Chiang’s words as I was working on this article: “I once heard that, on average, published novelists earn only slightly more than migrant laborers. With prospects like that, why not just write what you want?”

It doesn’t always get me to sleep at night.

I contracted to write this article at the beginning of the summer, when I felt like I had something to share about finding serenity, finding the zen of choosing yourself over your industry, of pursuing your strange, unseemly niche until it carries you where you ought to go.

But a funny thing happened. I got rejected. A lot. A couple of projects I believed in made the rounds and went precisely nowhere. Now, I know we’re not supposed to talk about our failures — we manufacture a propaganda of success that promotes a narrative where every worthwhile book gets published, but Virginia, it just ain’t so. But it’s a funny thing to stare at the title to this article for a couple of hours when all your awards and buzz add up to the same rejection letters you got when you were waltzing with the mop in the Anxiety Museum. Kind of like the universe smirking in your direction. How does that serenity taste now, kid?

And it’s taken me a couple of days, it really has. But I’m here to tell you: it tastes fine.

When you work in a steel town, you either cling to the mill and drink for all you’re worth or you embrace the new world: new technologies, new economies, niche markets and products no one has thought to want before. The only other option is death. And proximity to death brings clarity: they don’t want me. They don’t want you. There are no job openings and there are lay-offs by the thousand, every day, that you never hear about and no pundit weeps over. We are the ones full of want, full of desire. We transmit our want to them like to fickle gods and like gods they accept us or turn away for reasons we cannot scry.

I would like the equation to be simple. Want made manifest in glorious books = success. Straight-to-RPG Tolkien knock offs = failure. But we all know otherwise. There is no equation, unless it’s spin around three times, sacrifice a chicken, shut your eyes real tight, throw your book into the air and hope it was the right chicken. In the face of that kind of chance, that kind of future, where every book is an act of voodoo and faith with no hope but a fool’s hope?

You spin around three times. You sacrifice a chicken. You close your eyes and write your book. There’s nothing else. Nothing else possible. And there is a zen to be found in embracing that, even if what you were put on this earth to write isn’t a bestseller that engulfs you in praise every day. Life is a lot like a publishing contract: a thing full of promise, a cauldron into which we throw all our best ideas and acts, and out of which comes utterly unpredictable results. Children with eight arms, Chinese gymnastic teams, even recursive books about folklore and griffins. Yes, and bestsellers, too, but you can never be sure if it was the onion or the eye of newt that did the trick.

Every book is an act of voodoo, gorgeous voodoo, sympathetic magic, of stupid, blind faith. Our job is to maintain that faith just long enough to produce about a hundred thousand words. And that’s as it should be. Faith is not always answered. That is also as it should be. We are wicked fairies, all of us. We must pay our tithes to hell, and some of those tithes come in the form of failed books, rejected manuscripts, bad reviews.

When I got my first acceptance — not a short story, not a poem, but a full-blown (and largely forgotten) novel called The Labyrinth back in 2004, I sat very delicately on my couch and closed my laptop. I realized something in that moment that I am trying very hard to remember right now, when I fear for my ability to keep working in the steel town I have chosen: publication was never the point. The point was the work, the book, the voodoo, the faith. The point was the sheer joy of creating something out of nothing, crystal out of gross matter. They will never really want what I have to give. My job, insofar as I have one, is to make what I have to give glow so brightly that they cannot turn away from it.

And that’s your job, too.

That’s it, right there. That’s the serenity that this life will offer, and not too much more. There is never a time when you are not scared for your next contract, never a time when you do not fear for your future, when you stop praying to the motley gods of union-workers and Ohio steel towns to let you keep working, please, just a few more years. Even J.K. Rowling, she of the blessings and grace you hope for, worries about what she’ll do next. It’s a serenity that is hard to hold on to, it requires steadfastness and a world-champion grip.

I talked to a few of my friends about all of this, trying to wrestle my conscience with regards to writing what I believed in as opposed to what I believed would sell. And they talked to me about not caring about anything but what you love — Hal Duncan used the word “fuck” a lot. It’s a golden thread, maybe even a cliché, but back when I was unpublished, I still thought a byline would fix everything. Nobody told me that every couple of months someone would ask you to sell your soul and you’d have to seriously check the bank account before saying no.

Hal told me: “If it sells, it sells; if it doesn’t, fuck it.  It’s worth trying, at least.  I like Joyce, Borges, Pinter, Davenport. I’ve bought their books.  Lots of people have bought their books.  Fuck, look at Heller’s CATCH-22 and you find this totally non-linear absurdist narrative that’s probably garnered as much cash as it has kudos.  So why the fuck not just go for it and hope for the best?” 

“As a writer, there’s so much that I don’t have control over!” said Theodora Goss.  “How my work is packaged, marketed, distributed. There’s really only one thing I do have control over: the quality of my writing. I can’t always make it great, but I can always do my absolute best. I can hold myself to what I consider a high standard. The things that we can’t control can bother us so much. It sounds like a cliché, but sometimes it is genuinely comforting to say, when things spin out of control, that what I could do, I did…remember Dickinson and Van Gogh. I think in the end all you can do is write to the standard that you’ve set for yourself, write the way you think you should, and hope that the work will be meaningful. The rest is up to whatever fate controls writers.”

And fate, all three of them, are stone cold bitches. They laugh at awards and ash their cigarettes on them, they gobble up all your fervent hopes and ask for more, always more, without giving a damn thing back. It’s their nature. And it is ours to be fodder for them. The only other option is death.

And you know what? Even if you don’t feel it, even if you’ve had your baby chucked out of the big city this very week, especially if you have, you say these things anyway. When someone asks you silly questions for an online article. When your spouse is tired of your lack of income. At night, when you’re sure you’ll never sell another book. You say it anyway. Everything true bears reminding. It’s a mantra, it is specifically designed to heal the broken soul. And it becomes true again in less time than you think.

About the Author

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of Palimpsest and the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Spectrum Award was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs. Her crowdfunded novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, can be found at http://catherynnemvalente.com/fairyland