“Herding Vegetable Sheep”
by Ekaterina Sedia

I herd the clouds as I do every day. Their ghostly protuberances wrap around the wings of the plane, obscuring the blue AOL logo with their wispy fingers, and then retreat under the stream of air from the props, swirling and compacting into tight white formations that remind me of those queer plants — what were they called? Vegetable sheep. I’ve seen them on my vacation in New Zealand, years ago, when there was a New Zealand. These plants are related to daisies, the tour guide said. It was hard to believe that.

I watch the columns of numbers that scroll across my retinal implant, with an occasional commercial interruption from my employer, only nowadays they call them ‘congressional communiqués’. I suppose they are. I wish I could save them to reread them later, but preserving such trivia is not worth getting arrested for.

The clouds swirl, tighter and snugger, their color deepening into grey, and my plane circles them this way and that, herding them together, making them coalesce like vegetable sheep in the New Zealand mountains. The plane growls like a sheep dog, and the clouds gain mass and finally weep. I circle them again, strangely uneasy about their watery release. Rain is good, I remind myself. Rain is power, rain is electricity, rain is new juice in the batteries.

The radio implant buzzes and I wince.

“Anita,” it says, and for a moment I believe it is speaking to me — the radio, I mean, not just the person on the other end. The illusion fades. “You better come down — you’re running low.”

“Okay,” I say. “I was just about to.” I touch the pads and spiral downwards, like a falling leaf, with grace and dignity.

It is raining hard when I land, the black wings of the generator’s membranes thrumming, vibrating up and down, giving birth to electricity that feeds the city around it. It is like a giant diaphragm, its undulations under the insistent drumming of the raindrops betraying its thoughts to the world. The Greeks used to think that the diaphragm’s movement generated thoughts, and I am almost ready to believe that. The membrane thrums, its dark thoughts enveloping the city with fog. I glance at the time indicator of my heads-up display and rush away from the airfield, through the iron gates of the energy factory. I am running late.

The rain is pouring now, and my yellow slicker caves under the coalescing and dividing rivulets of rainwater, presses against my shirt, cooling my skin, crushing my chest with its weight. It is hard to breathe underwater. I cross the streets, knocking over the mushroom caps that have colonized every sidewalk and almost skid on the patch of green algae, camouflaged treacherously between the white stripes of the pedestrian crossing, but right myself. I have an appointment to keep. I enter the cafe, and wedge my body into a narrow booth, and look out of the window until a tall mermaid-like shape swims from out of the rain. My granddaughter.

“Hi, Anita,” says the girl as she slides sideways into the booth, keeping her head down, as if afraid that someone would recognize her. She is afraid that someone would recognize her, I think. This is why she never calls me grandma.

“Hi, baby. Does your mother know you’re here?”

She scoffs. “I’m not a baby, Anita.”

I know that. I just want to find out if my daughter ever asks about me.

She softens, and smiles at the waiter who brings us a pitcher of cold water. “We’ll need another minute,” she tells him, her eyes green and vacant, like those of a cat. New contacts, I guess. Then she turns those hollow eyes at me. “I wanted to talk to you, Anita,” she says in a caring voice. As if she’s the grown up.

I nod. “Go ahead, Ilona.” I know what she’s going to say.

She leans in, her narrow palm pressed against the plastic of the table between us. “How old are you, Anita?”

“Sixty-eight.”

“It shows.”

We stare at each other, not blinking, and under her gaze I feel every blemish and wrinkle pucker up, turn purple, leer.

“I don’t mean to be cruel,” she says, “but you don’t have to look this way.”

“I know.” If I change, will you be less embarrassed of being seen with me? “I’ll think about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about,” she says with a beam of confidence only pretty teenage girls can muster, and starts flipping through her menu.

I do the same, all the while wondering why am I not ashamed of my face? Instead, I cringe at the thought of my optimized heart and metal joints, of my eyes that can see so well because of lasers, of my new healthy lungs. I can only bear these artifices within me because my old skin is covering them up. I could not imagine separating from it. But the love, the love… my eyes skim over the lines in front of me, as I imagine what it would be like to have my daughter back, my granddaughter not ashamed.

My granddaughter looks up and frowns. She pulls out a handkerchief tucked in her wristband, spits in it, and rubs my cheek, as intrusive and unselfconscious as a parent with her child. I submit. She looks at the handkerchief, incredulous. “What’s that?”

It’s a green smudge. “Algae,” I say. “They grow everywhere.”

“On your face?” She doesn’t bother to hide her disgust.

“It’s even wetter up in the clouds,” I say. “They look like vegetable sheep from up there. You should — ”

She interrupts. “Vegetable sheep?”

“Big white and grey cushions — millions of tiny plants wedged together, all the same height. They grow high up in the mountains, where it’s cold. If one grows taller than the others, it dies of frostbite.” I’m not making sense, and I change the subject. “Anyway. How’re things at school?”

“Boring.” She gives a little laugh. “I can’t wait until I’m out of there.”

“Why do you think it’ll be better once you’re out?”

She jerks her shoulder and gives me a smoldering look. “Oh, don’t start. Just ’cause you’re depressed, doesn’t mean everyone else has to be too.”

“Sorry,” I whisper. I am.

“We’re ready to order,” she tells the waiter who’s been hovering nearby. After he departs, she gives me a cheerful smile. “You’ll feel better once you get your face fixed up.”

Beauty is fleeting, I want to say, but think better of it. “It’s good to see you, sweetie. Everything will be okay.”

At night, I lie awake listening to the rain’s whisper outside, thinking of love. I believe it is my failure that my daughter would not talk to me, and my granddaughter treats me as a child. I wish I knew how to fix it, how to fit into the snug world of the people I care about. Instead, I leave them behind, on the ground, as my plane sputters and spits jets of dust into too-warm, moist air. I don’t just herd clouds, I make them on occasion. The dust is called ‘condensation nuclei’, but they’re just dust. Tiny grains lodging under my fingernails and making me cough, the grains that already cost me a pair of lungs. I don’t really mind, as long as they make clouds appear out of thin, oversaturated air. I wish I could show my granddaughter that, and perhaps she would love them as much as I do, and by extension love me. I almost weep with joy when the morning comes, grey, weeping along with me.

At the factory, I flash my badge at the security guard, who nods back — a sad little ritual we exchange for the past forty years. I don’t give him a second look — my gaze travels past the undulating membranes toward the airfield.

“Wait,” he calls. “I have something for you.”

I open the manila envelope he gives me, with a panicked strumming of the heart against its cage. This is it, I think. They are finally going to let me go.

“Some girl dropped it off this morning,” the guard says.

I shield the piece of paper with the envelope, and the raindrops splash and slide down the smooth yellow surface. It’s just some photographs. I look closer, and my frantic heart seizes up: it is a picture of the vegetable sheep — just like I remember them, white, snug, content. There’s a close up of one, and on the next frame there’s a bird’s eye view of them, scattering in groups and solitarily across the green mountains. I swallow hard.

“A pretty girl,” the guard says. “Didn’t tell her name or anything, just that you’d know.”

“That’s my granddaughter,” I say, and turn away, stuffing the pictures back into the envelope, to hide them from moisture.

I wonder where she got them as I walk to my plane. There are none on the govnet, just like there is nothing there that would remind us that there is a world outside of our shrinking rainy continent. There are no kangaroos, Coliseum, Aegean Sea, or Sahara. Things she will never know about; yet, she found me the vegetable sheep. I am grateful, and surprised, and a bit sad that I have underestimated her.

The plane rises, and there are almost no clouds. I find a pocket of wet, warm air — I don’t need the sensors to tell me that, I can see the way it shimmers — and turn on my dust cannons on full blast. At first, there are only streams of grey refuse, but then, without warning, a thick fog condenses into white tufts, and soon there are enough of them to nudge gently with the jets of air, until they are compact and round. I pull the pictures out of the envelope and spread them across the seat next to me. I cannot wait to see her, to tell her how much those clouds trapped among the green mountains mean to me.

I never get a chance. I call her as soon as I land, from the soaked airfield. She does not answer her phone, even though I know she never detaches it from her ear.  I am starting to worry, but then my ear-piece buzzes.

“Baby,” I say, “are you all right?”

There’s sobbing, and it’s not Ilona. “Anita?” Finally, in a halting, hoarse voice. It is my daughter.

“Petra,” I whisper. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. But Ilona’s missing.”

I count breaths. The joy of hearing my daughter’s voice is dissolved in her tears, and I don’t know what to say.

“Will you help me find her?”

“Of course.”

“Can you come over?”

Of course I can. She lives too far to walk, and I grab the first velorickshaw who idles by the gates of the factory, waiting for the pilots and the engineers to leave for the day. I settle into the rickety, leaking cab, and think, trying to ignore the water splashing in my face with every turn of the rickshaw’s feet on the pedals.

I think of what I can do — the friends to talk to, the old favors to call on. I’m not like Petra, who — I can feel it, I know — is sitting in her kitchen, crying, tearing her heart out imagining every pain, every violation that Ilona could’ve suffered. She’s always been too quick to grieve.

She left the door unlocked, and I find her in the kitchen, her shoulders heaving.

“Petra.”

She flings herself into my arms, with a fierceness of one who missed comfort.

I stroke her hair, dyed deep auburn. “Calm down. It’s not that bad. When did she disappear?”

“She didn’t come home from school.”

“Maybe she’s with some friends.” Even I know it’s a lie; another teenager might run off, but not dutiful Ilona, who took it on her thin shoulders to be the link between me and her mother, the only one who was young enough to not be burdened by old hurts.

Petra doesn’t even bother to argue. “I called the police, and they said they’ll look into it. They don’t return my calls.”

This is bad. “I’ll call Jeremy,” I tell her. “Blow your nose and make me some tea.”

She nods, and fusses with the kettle. If she were younger, she would’ve blamed me for everything.

I call Jeremy. He’s a cop and a good friend, and Petra hates him. But not today.

“I need a favor,” I tell him. “My granddaughter’s missing.”

He doesn’t seem surprised. “Can’t help you,” he says, and lowers his voice. “This is Federal jurisdiction.”

“BLIPs?” I see Petra flinch, and lower my voice. “What did the kid do?”

“Downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials.”

I think of the pictures in my plane. Vegetable sheep, so harmless. Who would’ve thought that the Bureau of Licensing and Intellectual Property would be interested in a sixteen-year-old kid? Unless she already has a record.

“We made the arrest, but the BLIPs took her off our hands quickly.”

I hang up, and look at Petra. She looks back, guilt shining through her tears like stars. I warned you, didn’t I?

I get a hold of Maria. She is a high school friend, and thus our relationship combines a gradual distancing with an exaggerated sense of obligation. But even she cannot help me.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into the phone. “I can’t do anything. The computer on which download has occurred has been tapped for a while. We were just waiting for something serious enough to occur.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know,” she hisses. “Sorry, got to go.”

Petra is fiddling with her hair. “It’s my fault.”

No point in arguing — we both know she is right, but I’m not going to gloat. It was hard enough for me to lose her to the misguided rebellion that offered no action and no escape. She was only fourteen when the entertainment conglomerates first ran for presidency, and eighteen when they won. She still remembers when the information was not screened or regulated by the government, when there was no such thing as a govnet. Ilona doesn’t.

Petra was not the one to ignore it, but she was not a fighter. Her anger manifested in small acts of disobedience, which gave little consolation and even less meaning. One can talk shit about the government all one wants, but in the end is trapped worse than those who are oblivious.

“But what was I supposed to do?” Her voice gains a cracked quality. “My own mother was working for them.”

So your daughter pays for the sins of your mother. Only you are untouched. “What exactly did you do?”

Petra tells me that she had her computer hacked, connected to the other net, not the govnet. She used it to read the news; she never knew that Ilona had any interest in using it, but didn’t make much of an effort to hide it, or to explain to her daughter the intricacies of the Declaration of Copyright. Of course the kid is going to see a picture and print it, never realizing that that constitutes intent to distribute, jail time mandatory. She had no way of knowing that everything is copyrighted in perpetuity, regardless of where it appears. Free net or not, it’s BLIP jurisdiction.

I drink the lukewarm tea as Petra cries and talks, cries and talks. Her sobs and babbling create a soothing rhythm, and it is easier to think to it. I think of the Federal penitentiaries in the area, and I think of how many of them I have flown above. No reason not to do it again.

“Tomorrow,” I tell Petra, “I’m going to do some reconnaissance flying.”

She stops sobbing. “Isn’t it dangerous?” Her eyes glitter, anxious. “I don’t want to lose you too.”

You threw me away years ago. What other loss are you afraid of? “It’s a government plane, baby, remember?”

“They let you fly anywhere you want?”

“As long as there are clouds.”

She stares at me, and I tell her of warm dry winters when clouds are hard to find, and there’s not enough moisture in the air to make them. I tell her of the quilt of the fallow fields and the green silk of the ocean, its foamy crests like tiny clouds. Of the tedious azure of the sky and the thrill of the hunt as I spot a white wisp of a nascent cloud, still unsure whether to come into being, its transparency both a promise and a threat. I chase them across the sky, over land and over sea, and whatever lies beneath is not my concern.

I let the clouds lead me. It is neither faith nor superstition, but a voice of experience — as long as I follow the white fluffy shapes, they will lead me where I need to be. It may be a round about way, blown by winds and air currents, convection and condensation, but we will get there in the end.

I follow them, but for the first time I let them be. My plane swoops down, closer and closer to the bejeweled patchwork of the ground, until I can discern tall grey cement and low greenery, and almost lose my way in the vapor rising from the oversaturated ground. I rise again to safety, but descend again, circling, looking. I disconnect the communication system and turn the scopes to the ground, and search it.

I watch the yards of the penitentiaries, and I look for women. At the Austin Federal Penitentiary, I find a group of young girls, in identical orange jumpsuits, as they circle aimlessly through a grey cement yard, and I look for the familiar face. It is hard to see in the grey rain, even with the scope, until one of them tilts her head upwards and smiles.

A day passes like that, and another one. It’s raining fine without me, leaving me free to look like a hawk. On the third day, I am denied entrance to the airfield.

I think of making a dash — the guard would never catch up with me. Instead, I ask why, even though I know the answer. The security guard looks at me with pity in his eyes, and it belies the banality of his words — subversive element in the family, security risk, retirement age.  They don’t even bother to pick one excuse; they lump them all together, without an appearance of respect.

“I’m sorry,” he says in the end. “She was a real pretty girl.”

I lean closer to the plastic of his booth, and he doesn’t flinch away. “Listen, Thomas,” I say. “I left some personal belongings in the cockpit. Think I can run in real quick and get them?” And add, to ease possible suspicion,  “Or you can get them for me.”

He sighs and shifts in his narrow stool, his bulk sloshing from one side to the other. He peers at the grey rain, coming down in glassy sheets. “You go right ahead,” he says. “Just don’t dawdle.”

I have no intention to. I cross the airfield in a quick walk, my boots sliding on the wet grass. Other pilots pay me no mind — they never do; I am too old to be looked at with any comfort. They don’t seem alarmed when I grab the prop and pull it, desperation tripling the weight of my frail body. The engine starts, its metal heart beating in a faster rhythm than mine, and the plane glides down the field. I catch up to it in a run and vault into the cabin, just as I hear someone call out, “Hey!”

The air is wet in my face, until I slam the door shut, and we’re off, spiraling, ascending on the warm currents, the clouds moving down to greet us, like sheep greeting their shepherd. I look at the clock — 8 am. I have an hour to get there. I need forty-five minutes.

The girls are in the yard again. It is raining hard, and they wear yellow slickers, the hoods obscuring their faces. There are two female guards, watching from the cover of the tall wire fence; there are probably others.

One of the yellow hoods tilts back, and I see a pale face and dark hair, a small mouth opened in hope and wonder. She is the only one left standing as my plane drops into the yard, like a bird of prey. I land by the fence, and hope that the yard is long enough to stop.

There are gunshots, and the white panicked faces of the guards through the windshield. I turn the dust cannons on full blast, and they are lost in the grey cloud of searing particles. A small fist pounds on the door, and I swing it open. Ilona clambers into the seat next to me and the plane turns around. There’s not enough space for a proper takeoff and I gun it, taking off the top of the fence.

Ilona gasps next to me, and then regains her usual composure. “Did you like my pictures?”

“Yes. Thank you very much.”

“I thought you would.”

I point at the approaching tight cluster of white clouds, and my granddaughter laughs. “Just like in the pictures.”

I aim the plane into the center of it, and cut the engine. We fall, weightless, surrounded by the celestial vegetable sheep. One of them takes us into its soft arms and smiles, cradling the plane.

The engines rev back to life, and Ilona lets out a long sigh. “I could fall like this forever.”

I nod. She is strong and she will learn to fly.

About the Author

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

“The Loyalty of Birds”
by Rachel Sobel

She is so afraid that he will die that she cannot bear to watch his restless hands stilled upon the fine sheets; instead she sits at his bedside and watches the sunlight creep across the wall, abandoned tea cupped awkwardly between her palms. There are crickets singing in the garden, but beyond their mild whirring music, the world is still, as if it too is holding its breath.

Or perhaps she has merely forgotten the quiet of this place. It has been so many years since she came here last, preferring the convenience and lively bustle of the city to her family’s isolated peace, and she finds it disconcerting to be surrounded by so much silence, though she rarely lets herself think why. She tries not to remember the city; it is too painful to think that everything she once loved has been destroyed by the Dauphim’s war.

As remedy to her smothered grief, she savors the smooth stones of the pale villa, walks the gardens of the inner courtyard and helps her attendants sort out the complicated trousseau of half a hundred generations that has come to rest in her attic. In the evenings she can sit in the fading light, keeping her hands busy with some necessary task or other, and watch the nest of fledgling starlings in the apple orchard scream at the farm cats with neighborly fury when the kittens draw too near them.

It is easier to be practical than to think much about anything else, because while there are irises beneath her bedroom window and lilies in the woods, there is still a civil war on her doorstep and a man who has destroyed himself lying in her second-best guest bedroom, his face drawn tight with his sleeping pain.

“It will be worse before it gets better,” Gilos warns her, the truism as strange in his mouth as is the grimness in his light eyes. He is her physician, and like all of her people who have stayed, he is loyal more to her than to the honor of her name or any ideal of king or country. They were lovers once, long before he came to serve her, and the distance of that time makes her wonder if she has become old.

She looks at him now without expression, and he adds: “If it gets better.” His eyes are hard. She remembers belatedly that he too loved the man who lies in dreaming agony in the second-best guest bedroom, and she is sorry.

But she doesn’t believe him. She isn’t sure she can afford to believe him. They have lost so much already, and all that has been left to them are the ancient faded linens in the attic and the bright birds in the garden; if they cannot save him, she thinks, perhaps these things too shall be destroyed when the civil war comes to this place.

“I don’t believe you,” she tells Gilos, and his smile is as hard as his eyes, bitter and self-mocking, but he spends none of his violence on her, and his voice is as mild as ever.

“Then don’t, my lady,” he says simply, and his gaze does not stray to the doorway to the sickroom. He hesitates. “I will lessen the laudanum tonight,” he says at last. “It must be done, but — it will be worse.”

“I’ll come,” she assures him, and goes to take refuge in her garden among the weeds she hasn’t had the time to pull.

She is not sure if his screams are worse than his stillness.

There is no way to know if the war will come here, but she knows it is her duty to make preparations as if it will; she helps her people to repair the walls until her hands are scraped raw with a new set of calluses. They are far from any significant territory, and for all the beauty of this place, it is still only a rambling mountain valley, hidden between the cliffs and fed by spring and rain, but there is always the chance someone will remember the name she used before they ever knew her.

They eat still-warm bread with goat cheese spread liberally across it, and choose to save the sausages for winter, which is only common sense. Instead they slice tomatoes and cucumbers while the solemn black-and-white kitten rubs against her ankles, his dignity apparently forgotten. Her eldest brother loved to steal garden vegetables when they were children, and she cannot eat here without thinking of him.

In the night, she sits beside the man she loves and watches him fight sleep with every lingering strength in his body; he barely speaks even to her, and then only when he wakes from his nightmares.

“I dreamt that my hands were made of molten gold,” he murmurs once, his chest heaving with his gasping sobs; his face shines with tears in the light of her candle, and he flinches away from the touch of her hand on his face, looking sick. “I dreamt….”

“You’re safe now,” she whispers, stroking his dark hair back with a gentleness that surprises her. “There’s no one to hurt you here.”

She doesn’t look at his hands until he has fallen asleep again, his exhaustion too strong for him, and only then does she rest one hand lightly on his right wrist, well above the careful bandages.

His hands are ruined; the left is burnt beyond repair, and Gilos is still afraid he will have to cut it. She knows that he did it to himself in the fire that took his power from him, and it frightens her when he cries out in his sleep with such anguish that she cannot bear to touch him. Laudanum or no, there are no easy answers to his pain.

She finds in the attic a slender book bound in brown leather, and opens it to reveal pages covered with marvelous illustrations in colorful ink: dragons over warm seas, banquets and menageries, camels aboard flying ships and smiths shoeing horses; the paper is fine and dry beneath her fingers, and she brings it downstairs with her almost absently. On a whim, she takes it to show him, and sits beside him, tracing the shape of a sparrow’s wing with the tip of her little finger.

She stays for more than an hour, turning the pages for him when he tilts his chin at the book, and leaves only when duty forces her to. His eyes are overbright as he follows the trailing line of a willow, but he sits leaning against the pillows, shaking slightly. It is not until after she leaves that she remembers his fondness for books and paper, for drawings and paint as well as other stronger things. Perhaps she has only been cruel after all.

But that night he asks her to read to him; the request comes haltingly from his lips, strange in a mouth that has said so little voluntarily, and she brings an aging volume of peculiar foreign philosophy for his approval. Apparently it is good enough, because he settles back, his eyes closing so that the lashes lie along his cheeks. She reads aloud for hours, trying not to let him catch her watching the tension flow out of his body like very lethargic water, until at last she is sure he is asleep.

It takes a long time, even though once he would have teased her mercilessly for her horrible taste in literature; he has found philosophy boring for as long as she has known him, and that is half of why she chose it. She is afraid for him, and he sleeps so little and eats even less. She sits by his bedside long into the night, watching her candlelight flicker across the hollows of his gaunt face. If she is lucky, she falls asleep in the chair at his bedside, with only the crooked pains of age and grief to greet her in the morning, but as often as not, she awakens to midnight and the sound of his ragged breathing as he tries to keep from waking her.

She is so tired, so often, now; there are not enough of them to pull in the harvest, and likely not enough harvest either, and the summer is waning so fast that she is very hard-pressed to think how they will survive the winter. If the soldiers do not come, she thinks, then perhaps they will make it, and she goes over the records again with her steward, searching for some slight excess they can depend upon.

It is such hard going that every other task is easy by comparison, all the grueling physical work she lends a hand to when she has a spare moment made nothing in the face of this last, most brutal fact. She knows she cannot spare the time to go to him, but equally she cannot leave him alone with his nightmares, and so she goes, and is worn thin with exhaustion.

And now he sleeps without dreams, and even knowing that she is likely being far too much the optimist, she comes back to him as soon as she can the next day with a small green silk case of books and an expression he would call determined. She needs him so badly, now, worse than she ever has; she needs his strength and his courage and his wit, and she cannot ask him to spare anything for her. He has so little for himself.

To her surprise, his mouth twitches upwards, almost a smile, and while he is still so thin that his bones show clear through the bandages at his wrists, she is strangely reassured, and cannot quite keep the answering smile from her face.

“I will be damned before I spend the rest of my life reading horrible philosophy,” he whispers. “Poetry, madam, or at least a play, for the love of all things merry.”

She brandishes the green silk books at him with mock ferocity, displaying the gilt-lettered title. It is a set of mythological poetry, rife with firebirds and wishes, precisely the sort of foolishness that he once loved, and she is rewarded for the trouble it took to find it by the ghost of a smile on his face.

 ”Heathen,” she says, as fondly as she dares, and he leans back into the pillows and closes his eyes as she pages delicately through the first of the thin volumes, her voice low and easy, soothing him into sleep.

She comes back the next day, as soon as she can be spared from directing the defenses, and after that again, and together they make their way through all the long slow poems of their history in the little time she cannot really justify setting aside for him, until at last they come to the tragic cycle of the sorcerer Theine. Once upon a time, it was his favorite, and even she, who has always hated poetry, could nearly tolerate it, but now she cannot help but find it cruel.

But as she starts to flip past, her fingers brushing lightly over the pages, he frowns, and shakes his head.

“Please,” he says, his voice soft and harsh around the edges, and she knows that he is afraid.

She starts slowly, pausing more often than she needs to, to take a breath or sip of water from the blue clay cup beside his bed, and every time she looks in hope he has fallen asleep she finds him watching her, his gaze unnervingly still.

And now she’s gone and laid him down,
His body limp upon the green.
His strength of limb has been and flown;
The stars are hid behind her screen. 

He lies beneath a storm-torn beech
His mind grown dark with loathsome lies,
And all his gift for song and speech
Has died before her golden eyes. 

His birds are slain, his master’s dead,
The school of wizards burnt and lost.
His brothers from the land have fled
And left him here, to face the frost.

She binds him now with chains of light,
Within the shadowed sleepless hill,
To live so long as day flees night
And listen to the dead winds’ will. 

She pauses then, and turns to gaze,
Upon this shattered sorcerer
Whose mind was caught within her maze
Though once he sought to conquer her.

 ”My lord,” she whispers ‘gainst his cheek,
“In days when men may hear thy doom,
Dost think they shall my secrets seek?”
Her eyes are bright within the gloom.

She does not wait on his reply,
But opens her bright-feathered wings
And casts herself into the sky,
And as she goes away she sings.  

They let the words drift away into the silence, and after a long time he stirs in his bed, half-restless and half-thoughtful.

“It isn’t like that at all, you know,” he murmurs, and for a moment there is a shadow of bitter mockery in his voice. He looks at her so steadily she is afraid. “I had thought that it would be like that, a queer dream of winds and stars, but poets,” he says, the bitterness stronger now, “are liars all.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she does not think she has ever been so sorry in her life. “I left you to die,” she says, and cannot bring herself to go on.

His mouth quirks painfully, and he looks away.

“My staff burnt to dust and ashes in my hands,” he says, at last, as if he is confessing to her, and his voice is colorless. “I felt myself break, and then there were shards of glass in my heart and nothing in my head but fire, and the world was gone.”

She touches the gilt lettering on the green silk lightly, with the tips of her fingers, and cannot think of anything to say.

 ”Nothing mattered very much anymore,” he says, quietly, his face terrible to look at.

The next day she brings only lesser poetry.

The summer is fading, and soon it will be gone entirely and the harvest will have to be brought in. The apples on the trees are fat and tempting, smooth sides dappled pink and gold. The children collect them in baskets and eat themselves sick, and at night foxes chase each other drunkenly through the garden, made bold by fermenting berries. The breath of autumn touches everything with bronze.

The ploughman’s daughters, sturdy dark girls with solemn faces, have adopted him as their own, unafraid of his scars. They bring him half a hundred little presents clasped in their chubby hands, bright-colored leaves and scraps of golden silk and, once, the entire branch off an ash tree, sheared off in an early storm. It takes all three of them to carry it into his bedroom, and even so the wide branches near the top get stuck in the doorframe. Even Harra, her steward, has trouble maintaining her stern expression while she scolds them, as she has to do it from behind a screen of half-dead ash leaves.

And even he smiles.

But he is quiet still, so reserved that it is sometimes hard to remember his presence at all, and much harder to remember the young man she first met, a wizard as strident as ever his crows were. Sometimes she thinks that it would be polite to ask the fate of his birds, but she is not sure even he knows. If they were not destroyed by the wizard he fought, they may have starved by now, or fled to some other wizard’s hand, perhaps even the one that ruined him. She has never been assured of the loyalty of birds.

Most days, now, he drags himself from bed to sit in the chair beside his window; his broken strength is returning slowly, but as yet he can do little more than sit and sleep and watch her farmers struggling to get their wheat in. And he leaves bread crumbs on the sill every night, scattered as if it is accidental.

 ”I’m sorry,” he whispers once, his eyes dark with exhaustion, and for a moment she cannot think what he means.  “I’ve returned to you so useless,” he says, his mouth twisting a little with a merciless humor.

She bends to kiss his cheek, cupping her hand about the back of his neck, as reassuring as she can. “But you returned,” she says, and he is silent.

Sometimes she dreams that she went back for him herself. In the dreams, she steals a horse from her peasants and rides as fast as she can to find him. She swings down off her horse into an empty field of grass, golden stalks waving gently in the breeze as far as the eye can see, and walks for miles as the red sun sets behind her. There is never anyone there.

In the evening, she brings him honey and raspberries, and sits beside him to watch the sun set beyond his window. The light falls across the hills like spilt wine, wakening dim colors in the mountains, and she closes her eyes against its warmth.

“I thought it would come back,” he says, after a long time, his voice gentle and almost idle. All but the last of the sun has disappeared behind the mountains, the land fading into the evening, and she turns to look at him and finds him hard to see. There are no candles in his room, but she thinks his eyes are closed.

“It might,” she points out. Her hands clench tight around her wine-cup until she is afraid she will break it, and she very carefully does not think of all the history she knows which says that it will not. Broken wizards do not heal.

“It won’t,” he says, quietly. Out the window, the moon is rising noiselessly behind the mountains, and it too is touched by the warmth of autumn, its luminous shine turned harvest orange. “I’ve known that for a long time now,” he admits, and she does not know what to say.

He hesitates in the face of her silence. “I wanted to die,” he says after a moment, so lightly that it is as if he is trying to diminish his honesty by flippancy. “I didn’t think that I was the sort to — ” But he stops again, and does not go on.

“Do you still?” she asks him, quiet and grave despite her fear, and his face is suddenly shy. He looks at his hands.

“No,” he says, and nearly smiles.

Early one morning while she is making bread with Harra, he comes limping to the door of the kitchen and leans heavily against the wall, his good hand curled around a rough staff which Gilos got from the orchard for him. His face is pale and drawn with even this short walk, and she hurries to bring him a stool, her arms covered in flour to her elbows.

She watches him out of the corner of her eye as she works, and when it is time to take the bread out of the oven, she cuts off a thick slice — too early, of course, and it crumbles into the napkin, a mess of steaming bread bits against the blue of the linen.

He picks at it while she and Harra clean, the color returning slowly to his face, and when she brings him an apple and a slice of cheese, he eats these as well, not speaking. When he moves as if to rise, she is beside him at once, offering an arm and his staff. He makes a face, nose wrinkling in disgust at his own incapacitation.

“Heroic of me,” he says, very dry, but takes her arm, and together they stumble back to his bedroom. She cannot stay; there are half a hundred absolutely vital things she must do today, and besides that she wants to check on the irrigation that leapt its ditch three days ago and was beaten back only with great effort, so she leaves him curled in the seat beside the window with most of the remainder of the loaf.

She returns much later to find the room chilly: the window open, bread eaten, crumbs scattered across the sill. He’ll be stiff later, she thinks; he has fallen asleep in his armchair, and she wakes him with a touch, keeping her hand on his shoulder. He is still prone to nightmares, and often wakes with the edge of terror sharp in his face, but today there is only a great weariness.

First thing as he wakes, he glances to the window, his face still and nearly afraid, but there is nothing there. He runs his hand through his hair, staring out at the hills rolling up to the mountains beyond, and is silent for a long time.

“I am a fool,” he says at last. “They will not come.” She cannot disagree. Not even the local sparrows will come to him, though they grow fat begging crumbs off the children, and so she looks at him and cannot find anything to say. She smoothes his hair back from his face, and kisses his cheek before she must leave him.

One night he joins her outside on the patio for dinner, a little dazed by the chatter of even half a dozen people but there nonetheless. It is nothing like their old life, but it is a life, she thinks, and curls her hand possessively around his elbow as she helps him back to his room. For a moment, she thinks she sees a fleeting shadow, sharp-edged and quick, but the light of her lamp shows nothing.

It’s grown chilly, these past few nights, and the room is tense with cold air from the open window. She leaves him sitting on the bed, hands useless in his lap, and crosses the room to close it.

“Don’t,” he says, and she pauses. He looks up at her as she turns to him, and his eyes are clear and distant. “They came to their fate only for love of me,” he says, and hesitates, searching for words. “They may leave me for whatever reason they must,” he says at last, “but I will not lock them out, no matter how unlikely their return.”

It’s the longest speech she’s heard from him in a very long time, and she is taken aback; after a moment, she nods, and lets the window be, coming to sit beside him. She will have to bring him an extra blanket, she thinks, but that is scarcely a hardship.

“Will you be all right?” she asks him, and he shrugs, rubs his face with his good hand and does not speak.

They sit together in silence and wait for the sound of wings.

About the Author

Rachel Sobel is a biology student at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a recent graduate of the Alpha Writer’s Workshop. She lives in a house full of people who consider her a dangerous lunatic, and generally manages to prove them right. Someday in the far future, she is going to be a scientist if she manages to survive her own education.

“An Interview with Tobias Buckell”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Like Nashara in Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffin, readers will be propelled across zero-gravity space by the power of the mini-guns found in Buckell’s first short story collection, Tides from the New Worlds. This collection of 19 old and new stories does much more than offer a retrospective of a young writer’s career.

Certianly, these stories do show Buckell exploring the infinite possibilities of the genre, but more than that they show the range of his abilities, his fearlessness, and his line-by-line control of the craft.

Imagine all the Caribbean-flavored world-building, all the action and characterization of his novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose, compressed into the dozen pages of a short story. This isn’t squeezing coal into diamonds; this is squeezing diamonds into… something hard-edged, new and brilliant.

Buckell and I spoke recently about his short fiction, novels, zero-gravity action scenes, and the future of the writing business.

The release of Tides from the New Worlds reminds a lot of fans of your novels that your earliest publications were very compelling, very powerful short stories. How is writing a short story different than writing a novel?

A short story is a dash, or a sprint, and a novel is a marathon. The writing muscles and training and approach are about as different, even though some of the basics are still the same.

In that regard, the time and effort involved in writing a novel vs. a short story are vastly different. The novel is a year of commitment and focus. A short story a week or so.

A novel also involves a great deal of juggling: plotlines, characters, things you’re trying to achieve. This is different from the arrow-like focus a short story is for me.

To be honest I enjoy the novel a bit more. I like the room it gives me to play, and I prefer reading novels, so I tend toward enjoying the way things play out and come back to surprise you later. I like the room for character growth and change.

The novel is really a far more immersive experience, so I find it a great deal more freeing.

Has the writing of novels changed the way you write short fiction?

Well, it certainly has reduced the time I have for writing short fiction! I do notice that it’s harder for me to reduce all the elements down to the one piece of focus, I still have an urge to want to spread out that I really trained myself out of when I was writing short fiction (more proof I’m more of a novelist).

But I really appreciate the gratification of finishing something in a week or so, something I don’t get very often anymore.

Did creating Nashara challenge you as a writer at all? Did she surprise you at all during the writing process?

Nashara begins Ragamuffin as a very focused action/adventure character: she’s on the run, she’s a soldier/cyborg with a wide range of skills. Where she got fun to write was when I got to show her thinking outside the box (the 0-gravity fight with the minigun), and when she begins to fracture all her various personalities.

As for surprising me, I’m very much an outline-oriented writer, so I don’t have a lot of that ‘characters changing narrative’ sort of thing happening to me. All of that is taken care of in conception, so I had a solid idea of who she was from page one.

What did John deBrun of Crystal Rain and Nashara teach you about character development in time for you to write Timas and Pepper of Sly Mongoose?

Well, I wanted a lot more struggle between Timas and Pepper. Timas struggles back against Pepper a lot more actively, he’s also a lot more questioning of Pepper’s actions, something that I’ve been developing over the series.

Do you connect with any one character more than the others?

Oaxyctl, in Crystal Rain. He was the antagonist, the bad guy, but I felt like he had the toughest journey, and when he faces the Teotl at the end I felt like he’d had the best journey of all the characters and changed the most, and was the hero in his own little world.

You mentioned earlier that you’re an outline-oriented writer? How do you go about building the plot of a novel?

It’s a messy organic bubble for me. I start creating lists of things I want in the novel. They range from concepts, to specific scenes, to characters, to an emotion. They’re all just things too cool not to use. As the list grows, I start working on how to connect them all into some form that makes sense and figure out linearity. After that, I start looking at stuff that no longer fits in the emerging picture to cut it, or possibly to bend it to fit everything else.

I remember in Crystal Rain I wrote down wanting to have a blimp chase sequence. That’s specific. I also wanted to have a sequence in which three people were in flight, with two of the people knowing something the third doesn’t, which creates tension. That’s an emotional note I wanted, I eventually worked that into the polar chase scene more specifically, but at the organizational stage it was just “I want to write a scene with this kind of tension in it.”

Once the rough linearity is laid out, you can see the early skeletons of a plot, and that’s when you have to start figuring out rising and falling action, how the scenes will break down and hook into each other in a way that keeps the reader flowing from one to the other.

Your novels and stories are filled with action — action that is far from gratuitous. How do you make violence meaningful?

A really good action scene is something that you’ve integrated into the plot so that it makes sense and that raises the stakes a bit, I think. It should add depth to what you’re trying to create. This could mean the character is put more at risk; whether their psyche, relationships, or just their life (although putting their lives in danger is the easy route).

The action can build the world around them: it could reveal what another character is about, it could reveal the nature of the world these characters are in, and so on.

In the first draft of Ragamuffin, in order to get the characters from one side of the space station to the other in my original outline they battle their way across. I even wrote a rough draft of that scene that ran 15,000 or so words. But as I was looking at it later, I realized I could strip those out, and propose the “rocketing through the weightless middle of a space station using guns to propel themselves” scene. It has slightly less action/adventure hand to hand combat, but it would add more to the SF-nal nature of the book.

I love reading crazy action/adventure that is integral to the story. Particularly in SF/F, where you have characters in situations that could only occur in that particular milieu the novel posits.

My two favorites are the zero-gravity gun battle from Ragamuffin and the destruction of the floating domes from Sly Mongoose.

What was the process of creating Nanagada and the larger universe it inhabits?

Nanagada is mainly a world-building vehicle for the Caribbean. It’s a world settled by Caribbean expats that I created to allow me to set up a Caribbean themed and infused science fiction novel.

The larger universe is developed out of a series of short stories I was playing with in college: a set of worlds all connected via wormholes in orbit. I wanted to introduce my readers to the Caribbean peoples and their place in things, and then spin it all out in following books. But there are also a lot of other worlds lurking around.

In terms of introducing readers to the Caribbean, what does science fiction allow you to do that mainstream fiction wouldn’t?

SF/F allows me to say that there is a future out there, and Caribbean people are invited. A focus on the mainstream means a focus on where things are now, or where they were. That’s necessary, yes, but SF/F I think is the daydreaming and imaginative side of literature, right? So everyone should have a place in the imagination of our species. The sense of wonder, the fun, the think tank experiments and so on of SF/F, that should be granted to peoples of the whole world.

Did the Teotl develop much from your original conception of them?

The Teotl were this alien race representing themselves as Aztec gods, but I really wanted to make them really alien. In books we keep getting humans with bumps on their foreheads. Or someone will read about a culture somewhere in the world and give those attributes to some aliens. When I created the Teotl, I really worked hard to make them as alien as I could without making things too hard for readers.

So some of their actions and reactions are hard to ferret out. They don’t even look the same from individual to individual because they can reshape themselves by cocooning, so it’s all up for grabs. Why they created the Azteca is even somewhat vague, though I hint that it’s because they wanted human foot soldiers bred, and thought that reinventing the Azteca and their culture would serve their needs.

When it’s “all up for grabs” how do you balance things so that the reader isn’t completely lost?

That’s a tough act. In my first novel I went out of my way to set it on a planet, make it accessible. No ’sf-nal’ stuff really leaps out until further into the book. It’s an easier book to give to my friends who don’t read SF/F.

I somewhat eschew that in the next two novels, just jumping into the weird and enjoying it.

SF/F always has a problem, in that SF/F readers are well trained to puzzle out the differences and figure out what they imply. They love it. Mainstream readers don’t appreciate that as much, so trying to walk between the two is a tightrope act. I have no idea if I pull it off, to be honest, I just try to be entertaining!

In what ways have you used the internet and other technologies to shape your career?

I started a blog back in 1998 to chronicle my attempts to become a published writer. I owe a lot to the blog. It allowed me, living by myself and not knowing any writers in Bluffton, Ohio, to meet and network online with a large group of upcoming writers. It gave me all sorts of leads: like me discovering the Clarion SF/F workshop, which helped me learn a great deal about writing and helped jump start my career a bit. After I started selling pieces, people started finding me online and following the blog, and rooting for me. And that support has found me all sorts of gigs and extra readers. I doubt I’d have a career if it weren’t for that whole online presence.

How do you suppose a novelists’ job will be different ten years from now, twenty years?

Probably a lot more being-the-head-of-your-own-fan-club type activity, or direct interaction with readers, as we’re seeing today.

The truth is, we’re in a turbulent period, and it’s hard to see what’s on the other side. I think that whatever happens, if a writer wants to make a living at writing, he’ll still spend a significant chunk of his time writing words of some sort for delivery to some sort of content box and/or boxes (be they online, phone, reading device, for audio, or what have you).

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

“Remake Love, Not War”
by Daniel M. Kimmel

As soon as the remake of the 1951 classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” hit the theaters, the knives were out. The movie failed on numerous levels, but not because it was a remake. Like the snap judgment on a film adaptation that the book has to be better, the notion that remakes are automatically bad is demonstrably false; some of those remakes are good, or even great.

Often remakes are done simply because a studio owns a property and thinks that if an idea worked before then it will work again, as in the proposed remakes of “Logan’s Run” and “Westworld” currently in development. That may make good business sense, but it’s the wrong reason to tell a story. A good remake needs a valid purpose to justify retelling the story.

One such reason is when someone sees the opportunity to correct and revise a flawed original. Take “The Fly.” Based on a George Langelaan story that had originally appeared in Playboy, it was a melodramatic potboiler about a scientist (Al [David] Hedison) whose experiment goes horribly wrong. His teleportation device leaves him with the giant head and arm of a fly, while the fly, discovered at the end, has a tiny human head and arm. It was good for some screams in the 1950s, even with Vincent Price in a relatively sedate role but, as future director David Cronenberg noted, the story made no sense. If the machine simply swapped body parts shouldn’t the scientist have a tiny fly head? Where did all that extra mass come from?

In his brilliant 1986 remake, Cronenberg attempted to address those issues. The film takes advantage of three decades of scientific advances to make the combination of man and fly more credible, if not actually believable. As Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) notes, his transporter has turned into a gene splicer, merging the DNA of man and fly. Some chose to read Seth’s deterioration into “Brundlefly” as symbolic of AIDS, but Cronenberg explicitly rejected that notion, arguing that it would imply he somehow caught it from science journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis). He preferred to see it as the equivalent of the aging process, something Baby Boomers were just beginning to experience as they started to find that their bodies didn’t work like they used to.

Simply revising the science of the story might have been reason enough to do a remake, but the film goes further, becoming a chamber piece in which Seth, Veronica and her editor/ex-lover Stathis Borens (John Getz) are caught up in a complex series of betrayals and misunderstandings. In the ‘58 film the key job of the wife (Patricia Owens) was to scream at the big reveal of her husband’s transformation. Veronica is much more of an active player. As a reporter she is the one who stumbles on to the story of Seth’s research and then aggressively pursues it, even over his objections. She successfully negotiates access to his experiments as the price for sitting on the story. She deals with both Stathis and Seth as equals, not always prevailing but not taking a passive role either. In the film’s final act her ordeal is every bit as important to the story as Seth’s. She realizes she is pregnant by him and seeks an abortion. It is Veronica who is the pro-active character in the film’s climax, with both men finally overwhelmed by events. Coming five years before Davis’s role in the overtly feminist “Thelma and Louise,” it’s a powerful reflection of just how different women in the ‘80s were from their mothers in the ‘50s.

The lesson here is that, while jazzing up the special effects may be part of the process of doing a remake, the focus has got to remain on the story and characters. John Carpenter knew that when he set forth to redo another ‘50s classic, “The Thing.” The original was directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks, himself a major director. In it American scientists and military personnel at a remote Arctic location discover a spaceship whose vegetable-based passenger thrives on our blood. The arguments between the scientist, who wants to seek knowledge for its own sake, and the colonel, who wants to shoot first and ask questions later, is the mirror image of the debate in the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which came out that same year, only this time the military is proven right. The movie is fondly remembered for several “sense of wonder” moments, including the closing warning to “Keep watching the skies.”

For his remake Carpenter largely ignored the Nyby film. He instead focused on “Who Goes There?” — the short story by Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym for legendary SF editor John W. Campbell, that served as its source. As good as the 1951 film was, it used very little of that story. Instead of turning the film into another Cold War parable, Carpenter’s version is an exercise in paranoia. The scientists and military men, now in Antarctica, are isolated by a storm when the alien starts to attack. As in the short story, the alien is not a giant carrot but a shape shifter. Who can you trust when one of your colleagues — or even a sled dog — might be the alien in disguise? The movie provided scares (courtesy of make effects wizard Rob Bottin) that would never have been permitted in a movie three decades earlier but, more importantly, it transformed the political and intellectual dilemmas of the ‘51 movie back to the psychological and existential unease of Campbell’s story.

Some stories are so timeless they can be told again and again, with new variations and interpretations introduced each time. Consider the variations on a theme in the three versions of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. The 1964 Italian film “The Last Man on Earth,” starring Vincent Price, is a melancholy tale of loneliness and futility as the last survivor of a plague fights vampiric zombies. Seven years later Charlton Heston starred in “The Omega Man,” in which numerous changes were made so that Heston’s heroic stature could be preserved. The zombies were transformed into strange and deadly cultists; other survivors were found; and, most importantly, the macho Heston saw plenty of action. The 2007 “I Am Legend” ups the ante even more with amazing effects of an abandoned Manhattan slowly returning to wilderness. It makes its hero (played by Will Smith) into a combination of Price and Heston. The loneliness is slowly driving him mad, but he gets to kick some zombie butt while also trying to find a cure for the plague.

While one can have preferences among the stylistic or narrative differences of the films, or note the fact that Smith’s film had much more money to play with than either of its low budget predecessors, what’s interesting is that none of these films is universally hailed as the definitive adaptation of Matheson or a masterpiece in its own right. Just as no one complains when a show is revived on Broadway, and different performers and directors bring their own ideas and interpretations to older plays, the “I Am Legend” films demonstrate that a good story can be told again and again, provided that no one version completely overshadows the others.

The key question for any director contemplating a remake is figuring out why you want to tell this story now. Consider “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which has been filmed four times. The 1956 original, based on Jack Finney’s novel, is a classic that still has the power to shock audiences. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns to his sleepy California town of Santa Rosa to find that numerous people are complaining that imposters have replaced family members. We learn of pods from space, which absorb the lives and memories of humans, killing off the real people in the process. It’s a scary take on conformity in 1950s America, whether you see the pods as stand-ins for Communist infiltrators or for the witch hunters. For his part director Don Siegel said it wasn’t really about politics at all but about letting others do your thinking for you.

The film was remade in 1978 by director Philip Kaufman and was greeted with initial skepticism by fans of the original. However both McCarthy and Siegel did cameos in the remake, implicitly giving their blessings. The new film was still about conformity, but it now reflected the concerns of the “Me Decade.” Bennell’s psychiatric colleague (Leonard Nimoy) became the author of pop psychology self-help books. The action had moved from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, with the anonymity of big city life aiding the pods in their conquest. When McCarthy showed up for his cameo, he was shown running down the street shouting, “They’re here! They’re here!” almost as if he had been screaming out warnings since the end of the last film. Indeed, the close of the ‘56 film, in which Miles is finally believed, was added only after the distributor freaked out over the original downbeat ending. Twenty-two years later — after assassinations, Vietnam and Watergate — moviegoers had grown more cynical, allowing Kaufman to offer a chilling conclusion in which one of the remaining humans is outed by the pod people. Rather than simply rehashing the original film in color and with bigger stars and effects, Kaufman’s version reflected the malaise of the late ‘70s.

The two subsequent remakes provide counterexamples of how not to do it. Abel Ferrara’s 1994 “Body Snatchers” sets the action at a military base, which is also being taken over by the invaders. As Don Siegel might have noted, if you set this story in a situation where everyone is supposed to conform and obey orders, how can you tell who the pods are?  Even more disappointing is the 2007 “Invasion” which was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (the German director of “The Experiment” and “Downfall”). It was defeated by the real life pod people at the studio. Much of the film is a thoughtful retelling, with the renamed Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) now a psychiatrist and mother living in Washington, D.C. with her young son. Instead of pods the film posits an infectious goo transmitted by one person to another, almost as if it’s a sexually transmitted disease.  However, the downbeat film Hirschbiegel intended was never released. Instead, James McTeigue was brought in to do reshoots including new scenes written by the Wachowski Brothers (of “Matrix” fame), providing a wholly unbelievable happy ending. The studio was less interested in what story was being told than in giving the public what they wanted. As it turned out, the public didn’t want it.

So, with so many examples of how to do a remake right, why did the new “The Day the Earth Stood Still” fail? The 1951 film featured Michael Rennie as the alien Klaatu who arrives on Earth with a message he wants to deliver to all of Earth’s leaders. The problem is that getting all of Earth’s leaders in one place proves impossible. Instead, after numerous difficulties, Klaatu delivers his message to a group of the planet’s great scientists and thinkers, led by Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe channeling Albert Einstein). His message is this: there’s a vast interplanetary union out there that lives in peace which has no intention of letting Earth export its wars. Humans can kill each other, but once we start putting our weapons into space they will have no choice but to destroy us. Coming in the midst of the Cold War, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only six years in the past, “Day” was a cautionary fable about the choices in front of us: war or peace, life or death.

The new film keeps the framework of the original but now has Klaatu concerned about pollution and global warming. That makes it timely, but the filmmakers seem never to have asked why this story was necessary to address those issues. The political content of “Day” is not simply a modular chip that can be replaced by an upgrade. The fear and suspicions of the Earth authorities in the 1951 film were reflective of the anxieties of the time. We get little sense that the authorities in the new film are in a post-9/11 world. When the new Klaatu finally delivers his message, it is that he’s come to destroy all human life on Earth. Mankind is not given the chance to make a choice. Where’s the educational value of that? Indeed, if the whole point of his mission is to destroy humanity, why even bother to land? Just send a drone ship with the new robot Gort and be done with it.

By turning the alien’s warning into a special effects attack on the planet it defeats the whole purpose of the tale. The original movie is about humanity being given a chance to change before it’s too late, to see if the wise scientists and thinkers can overcome the paranoia and defensiveness of the political and military leaders. When Klaatu wins the trust of a widowed mother and her young son, we know there’s hope. Although these elements are retained in the new version the meaning is lost. The boy, now her stepson, is simply a brat while her goal is no longer helping Klaatu complete his mission but trying to convince him to abandon it. Instead of a superior alien race warning us, now we get a destructive one that is no better — and arguably worse — than humanity. There may be some interesting points to be made about how our environmental troubles are possibly beyond our ability to cope, but “The Day the Earth Stood Still” wasn’t the vehicle to deliver it.

In spite of the failure of “Day,” we shouldn’t give up on the potential for a remake to be as good as or better than the original film. For those still not convinced, the clinching argument falls outside of SF. The 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective novel The Maltese Falcon marked John Huston’s directorial debut and helped make Humphrey Bogart a star. For many it is one of the essential film noirs. Not as well known is that the movie was actually the third film version of the book. When Huston announced it as his chosen project, the executives at Warner Bros. thought him foolish, since it had failed twice before. Why remake it? Huston told them it was because he was going to do it the right way. The result was a classic film that totally eclipsed its predecessors.

Are good remakes the stuff that dreams are made of? No, they can be quite real. The secret is this: it has to be put in the hands of filmmakers like Huston or Kaufman or Carpenter or Cronenberg who know why they’re doing the remake in the first place.

About the Author

Daniel M. Kimmel is past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. He reviewed in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette for 25 years, and can now be found at NorthShoreMovies.net. He is a correspondent for Variety and teaches film at Suffolk University. He regularly appeared in The Internet Review of Science Fiction and contributed to the SmartPop book, Batman Unauthorized (2008). He is the author of an award-winning history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network (2004) and of the history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team (2006). His most recent book is I’ll Have What Shes Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies. Upcoming projects includes an essay in the SmartPop book on “True Blood” and a forthcoming collection of his essays on SF film.

“2008 Reader’s Poll Results”
by Neil Clarke

At the end of February, we closed things up on our 2008 Reader’s Choice Poll and started evaluating the data. In comparison to last year, we had a significant number of stuffed ballots. Our standard policy in these situations is to delete all votes made by anyone who votes two or more times for the same item. We had to delete a lot of votes.

The final results are:

Best Short Story

A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antartica by Catherynne M. Valente (May 2008, Issue 20)

The Completely Rechargeable Man by Karen Heuler (December 2008, Issue 27)

Idle Roomer by Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn (November 2008, Issue 26)

Best Cover Art

TIE Floating Fish by Matts Minnhagen (April 2008, Issue 19) and “Colorless” by Patipat Asavasena (July 2008, Issue 22)

TIE Nomad by Pascal Blanche (March 2008, Issue 18) and Into the Depths by Patrick Reilly (September 2008, Issue 24)

TIE Fractured Thoughts by Ray Toh (January 2008, Issue 16) and The Traveller & the Chook by David Renn (November 2008, Issue 26)

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who voted!

About the Author

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