Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 23

Table of Contents

Blue Ink

by Yoon Ha Lee

Tetris Dooms Itself

by Meghan McCarron

Her Mother's Ghosts

by Theodora Goss

Writing My Mother's Ghosts

by Theodora Goss

An Interview with Gene Wolfe

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

086

Art by Dan Hazelton and Jesse Smith

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2008
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

“Blue Ink”
by Yoon Ha Lee

It’s harder than you thought, walking from the battle at the end of time and down a street that reeks of entropy and fire and spilled lives. Your eyes aren’t dry. Neither is the alien sky. Your shoulders ache and your stomach hurts. Blue woman, blue woman, the chant runs through your head as you limp toward a portal’s bright mouth. You’re leaving, but you intend to return. You have allies yet.

Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.

This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet.

Blue is more than a fortunate accident. Jenny Chang usually writes in black ink or pencil. She’s been snowed in at her mom’s house since yesterday and is dawdling over physics homework. Now she’s out of lead. The only working pen in the house is blue.

“We’ll go shopping the instant the roads are clear,” her mom says.

Jenny mumbles something about how she hates homework over winter break. Actually, she isn’t displeased. There’s something neatly alien about all those equations copied out in blue ink, problems and their page numbers. It’s as if blue equations come from a different universe than the ones printed in the textbook.

While her mom sprawls on the couch watching TV, Jenny pads upstairs to the guest room and curls up in bed next to the window. Fingers of frost cover the glass. With her index finger, Jenny writes a list of numbers: pi, H_0 for Hubble’s constant, her dad’s cellphone number, her school’s zip code. Then she wipes the window clear of mist, and shivers. Everything outside is almost blue-rimmed in the twilight.

Jenny resumes her homework, biting her nails between copying out answers to two significant figures and doodling spaceships in the margins. There’s a draft from the window, but that’s all right. Winter’s child that she is — February 16, to be exact — Jenny thinks better with a breath of cold.

Except, for a moment, the draft is hot like a foretaste of hell. Jenny stops still. All the frost has melted and is running in rivulets down the glass. And there’s a face at the window.

The sensible thing to do would be to scream. But the face is familiar, the way equations in blue are familiar. It could be Jenny’s own, five ragged years in the future. The woman’s eyes are dark and bleak, asking for help without expecting it.

“Hold on,” Jenny says. She goes to the closet to grab her coat. From downstairs, she hears her mom laughing at some TV witticism.

Then Jenny opens the window, and the world falls out. This doesn’t surprise her as much as it should. The wind shrieks and the cold hits her like a fist. It’s too bad she didn’t put on her scarf and gloves while she was at it.

The woman offers a hand. She isn’t wearing gloves. Nor is she shivering. Maybe extremes of temperature don’t mean the same thing in blue universes. Maybe it’s normal to have blue-tinted lips, there. Jenny doesn’t even wear make-up.

The woman’s touch warms Jenny, as though they’ve stepped into a bubble of purloined heat. Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father’s house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won’t find in any astronomer’s catalogue.

Jenny looks at her double and raises an eyebrow, because any words she could think of would emerge frozen, like the world around them. She wonders where that hell-wind came from and if it has a name.

“The end of the world is coming,” the blue woman says. Each syllable is crisp and certain.

I don’t believe in the end of the world, Jenny wants to say, except she’s read her physics textbook. She’s read the sidebar about things like the sun swelling into a red giant and the universe’s heat-death. She looks up again, and maybe she’s imagining it, but these stars are all the wrong colors, and they’re either too bright or not bright enough. Instead, Jenny asks, “Are my mom and dad going to be okay?”

“As okay as anyone else,” the blue woman says.

“What can I do?” She can no more doubt the blue woman than she can doubt the shape of the sun.

This earns her a moment’s smile. “There’s a fight,” the blue woman says, “and everyone fell. Everyone fell.” She says it the second time as though things might change, as though there’s a magic charm for reversing the course of events. “I’m the only one left, because I can walk through possibilities. Now there’s you.”

They set off together. A touch at her elbow tells Jenny to turn left. There’s a bright flash at the corner of her eyes. Between one blink and the next, they’re standing in a devastated city, crisscrossed by skewed bridges made of something brighter than steel, more brilliant than glass.

“Where are we?” Jenny asks.

“We’re at humanity’s last outpost,” the blue woman says. “Tell me what you see.”

“Rats with red eyes and metal hands,” Jenny says just as one pauses to stare at her. It stands up on its hind feet and makes a circle-sign at her with one of its hands, as if it’s telling her things will be all right. Then it scurries into the darkness. “Buildings that go so high up I can’t see their tops, and bridges between them. Flying cars.” They come in every color, these faraway cars, every color but blue. Jenny begins to stammer under the weight of detail: “Skeletons wrapped in silver wires” — out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees one twitch, and decides she’d rather not know — ”and glowing red clocks on the walls that say it’s midnight even though there’s light in the sky, and silhouettes far away, like people except their joints are all wrong.”

And the smells, too, mostly smoke and ozone, as though everything has been burned away by fire and lightning, leaving behind the ghost-essence of a city, nothing solid.

“What you see isn’t actually there,” the blue woman says. She taps Jenny’s shoulder again.

They resume walking. The only reason Jenny doesn’t halt dead in her tracks is that she’s afraid that the street will crumble into pebbles, the pebbles into dust, and leave her falling through eternity the moment she stops.

The blue woman smiles a little. “Not like that. Things are very different at the end of time. Your mind is seeing a translation of everything into more familiar terms.”

“What are we doing here?” Jenny asks. “I — I don’t know how to fight. If it’s that kind of battle.” She draws mini-comics in the margins of her notes sometimes, when the teachers think she’s paying attention. Sometimes, in the comics, she wields two mismatched swords, and sometimes a gun; sometimes she has taloned wings, and sometimes she rides in a starship sized perfectly for one. She fights storm-dragons and equations turned into sideways alien creatures. (If pressed, she will admit the influence of Calvin and Hobbes.) But unless she’s supposed to brain someone with the flute she didn’t think to bring (she plays in the school band), she’s not going to be any use in a fight, at least not the kind of fight that happens at the end of time. Jenny’s mom made her take a self-defense class two years ago, before the divorce, and mostly what Jenny remembers is the floppy-haired instructor saying, If someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, give him your wallet. You are not an action hero.

The blue woman says, “I know. I wanted a veteran of the final battles” — she says it without disapproval — ”but they all died, too.”

This time Jenny does stop. “You brought them here to die.”

The woman lifts her chin. “I wouldn’t have done that. I showed them the final battle, the very last one, and they chose to fight. We’re going there now, so you can decide.”

Jenny read the stories where you travel back in time and shoot someone’s grandfather or step on some protozoan, and the act unravels the present stitch by stitch until all that’s left is a skein of history gone wrong. “Is that such a good idea?” she asks.

“They won’t see us. We won’t be able to affect anything.”

“I don’t even have a weapon,” Jenny says, thinking of the girl in the mini-comics with her two swords, her gun. Jenny is tolerably good at arm-wrestling her girl friends at high school, but she doesn’t think that’s going to help.

The woman says, “That can be changed.”

Not fixed, as though Jenny were something wrong, but changed. The word choice is what makes her decide to keep going. “Let’s go to the battle,” Jenny says.

The light in the sky changes as they walk, as though all of winter were compressed into a single day of silver and grey and scudding darkness. Once or twice, Jenny could almost swear that she sees a flying car change shape, growing wings like that of a delta kite and swooping out of sight. There’s soot in the air, subtle and unpleasant, and Jenny wishes for sunglasses, even though it’s not all that bright, any sort of protection. Lightning runs along the streets like a living thing, writing jagged blue-white equations. It keeps its distance, however.

“It’s just curious,” the blue woman says when Jenny asks about it. She doesn’t elaborate.

The first sign of the battle, although Jenny doesn’t realize it for a while, is the rain. “Is the rain real?” Jenny says, wondering what future oddity would translate into inclement weather.

“Everything’s an expression of some reality.”

That probably means no. Especially since the rain is touching everything in the world except them.

The second sign is all the corpses, and this she does recognize. The stench hits her first. It’s not the smell of meat, or formaldehyde from 9th grade biology (she knows a fresh corpse shouldn’t smell like formaldehyde, but that’s the association her brain makes), but asphalt and rust and fire. She would have expected to hear something first, like the deafening chatter of guns. Maybe fights in the future are silent.

Then she sees the fallen. Bone-deep, she knows which are ours and which are theirs. Ours are the rats with the clever metal hands, their fingers twisted beyond salvage; the sleek bicycles (bicycles!) with broken spokes, reflectors flashing crazily in the lightning; the men and women in coats the color of winter rain, red washing away from their wounds. The blue woman’s breath hitches as though she’s seeing this for the first time, as though each body belongs to an old friend. Jenny can’t take in all the raw death. The rats grieve her the most, maybe because one of them greeted her in this place of unrelenting strangeness.

Theirs are all manner of things, including steel serpents, their scales etched with letters from an alphabet of despair; stilt-legged robots with guns for arms; more men and women, in uniforms of all stripes, for at the evening of the world there will be people fighting for entropy as well as against it. Some of them are still standing, and written in their faces — even the ones who don’t have faces — is their triumph.

Jenny looks at the blue woman. The blue woman continues walking, so Jenny keeps pace with her. They stop before one of the fallen, a dark-skinned man. Jenny swallows and eyes one of the serpents, which is swaying next to her, but it takes no notice of her.

“He was so determined that we should fight, whatever the cost,” the blue woman says. “And now he’s gone.”

There’s a gun not far from the fallen man’s hand. Jenny reaches for it, then hesitates, waiting for permission. The blue woman doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no, so Jenny touches it anyway. The metal is utterly cold. Jenny pulls her fingers away with a bitten-off yelp.

“It’s empty,” the blue woman says. “Everything’s empty.”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny says. She doesn’t know this man, but it’s not about her.

The blue woman watches as Jenny straightens, leaving the gun on the ground.

“If I say no,” Jenny says slowly, “is there anyone else?”

The blue woman’s eyes close for a moment. “No. You’re the last. I would have spared you the choice if I could have.”

“How many of me were there?”

“I lost count after a thousand or so,” the blue woman says. “Most of them were more like me. Some of them were more like you.”

A thousand Jenny Changs, a thousand blue women. More. Gone, one by one, like a scatterfall of rain. “Did all of them say yes?” Jenny asks.

The blue woman shakes her head.

“And none of the ones who said yes survived.”

“None of them.”

“If that’s the case,” Jenny says, “what makes you special?”

“I’m living on borrowed possibilities,” she says. “When the battle ends, I’ll be gone too, no matter which way it ends.”

Jenny looks around her, then squeezes her eyes shut, thinking. Two significant figures, she thinks inanely. “Who started the fight?” She’s appalled that she sounds like her mom.

“There’s always an armageddon around the corner,” the blue woman says. “This happens to be the one that he found.”

The dark-skinned man. Who was he, that he could persuade people to take a last stand like this? Maybe it’s not so difficult when a last stand is the only thing left. That solution displeases her, though.

Her heart is hammering. “I won’t do it,” Jenny says. “Take me home.”

The blue woman’s eyes narrow. “You are the last,” she says quietly. “I thought you would understand.”

Everything hinges on one thing: is the blue woman different enough from Jenny that Jenny can lie to her, and be believed?

“I’m sorry,” Jenny says.

“Very well,” the blue woman says.

Jenny strains to keep her eyes open at the crucial moment. When the blue woman reaches for her hand, Jenny sees the portal, a shimmer of blue light. She grabs the blue woman and shoves her through. The last thing Jenny hears from the blue woman is a muffled protest.

Whatever protection the blue woman’s touch afforded her is gone. The rain drenches her shirt and runs in cold rivulets through her hair, into her eyes, down her back. Jenny reaches again for the fallen man’s gun. It’s cold, but she has a moment’s warmth in her yet.

She might not be able to save the world, but she can at least save herself.

It’s the end of the school day and you’re waiting for Jenny’s mother to pick you up. A man walks up to you. He wears a coat as grey as rain, and his eyes are pale against dark skin. “You have to come with me,” he says, awkward and serious at once. You recognize him, of course. You remember when he first recruited you, in another timeline. You remember what he looked like fallen in the battle at the end of time, with a gun knocked out of his hand.

“I can’t,” you say, kindly, because it will take him time to understand that you’re not the blue woman anymore, that you won’t do the things the blue woman did.

“What?” he says. “Please. It’s urgent.” He knows better than to grab your arm. “There’s a battle — ”

Once upon a time, you listened to his plea. Part of you is tempted to listen this time around, to abandon the life that Jenny left you and take up his banner. But you know how that story ends.

“I’m not in your story anymore,” you explain to him. “You’re in mine.”

The man doesn’t look like he belongs in a world of parking tickets and potted begonias and pencil sharpeners. But he can learn, the way you have.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Sybil’s Garage. She was one of the section editors at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Currently she lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband and daughter.

“Tetris Dooms Itself”
by Meghan McCarron

Andy kidnaps me at 11:12 PM. I see the time on my microwave. He clamps a hand over my mouth while I’m making a pot of coffee, and I scatter the grounds all over the floor. It’s late, and I have work to do, but that doesn’t matter now. “I have a gun,” he says in a movie-villain voice. He forces a blindfold over my eyes. I giggle.

When I go to see Catherine, she cuts off my hands. She likes to take off the left one first because it’s more useful to me. She uses a hunting knife that she’s never sharpened, and when she saws into my wrist she hisses, “Sinister! Sinister!”

When I first came home with a bloody stump, my roommates shrieked, What did she do to you? Now they roll their eyes and go back to playing Scrabble. They like Andy better. It takes a lot of effort to kidnap someone, they say.

Usually Andy kidnaps me at some bright sunny hour when his wife is at work. But tonight she is sick, “from stress, mostly,” he says. Also from the flu. “She looked so sad tonight,” he says. “So sick and sad.” He tells me this as he tightens my blindfold, and then waves his hands in front of my face to make sure I can’t see. Air fans my cheeks.

He takes my hand, then changes his mind and takes my wrist instead. He pauses at the door, checking for roommates; the apartment is silent, though sometimes roommates are just hiding. He leads me out the door and down my creaking stairs to a car. It’s not his car; it smells new, or fake-new, a smell achieved only through the relentless application of cleaning products. The seat fabric feels cheap to the touch and the anemic motor sputters and kicks. A rental. Economy size, if I had to guess.

He buckles me in and says, “Now you’re mine,” but in Andy-voice, not movie-villain voice, leaving me unsure how to take the line.

Once my roommate Marcia came home with a hunting trap clamped on her leg. We heard her coming all the way up the stairs, step CLANK step CLANK step CLANK. She said she and her boyfriend were playing cops and robbers in the woods, and she stepped in the wrong place. No one asked why her boyfriend didn’t help her home. Other roommates whispered that he must have been the robber. I was not convinced. At the very least, he must have caught her cheating.

Andy and I drive for a long time, probably in circles, since Andy barely leaves this neighborhood. Not that I blame him — things get weird further out. There’s downtown and mountains and a desert, somewhere. While we drive, he tells me about his latest career developments. He has an agent now, or is it a manager? I don’t understand the music business. I thought it was better than the writer and his prizes, or the lawyer and her golf tournaments, but now they all sound the same.

I ask Andy about his music, instead. To him it’s a color or a smell or even a different kind of sound, like bees or sandpaper. I love when Andy talks like this. His voice is the color of mahogany. I forget I can’t see where we’re going.

The car rolls to a stop on what sounds like gravel. My calm breaks, and I clutch my hands on my knees. Why am I nervous? Andy gets out without a word and opens my door. The night air is sharp; it smells like forest fires.

Every time Catherine cuts off my hands, they come back smaller, so when Andy takes my hand in his I feel engulfed. I smell rust, and something chemical, in addition to the faint tang of burning wood. It’s the smell of the river. I wish I could take off my blindfold, because I love staring at the river’s concrete expanse, but I’m pretty sure the blindfold is a rule.

Andy pulls me toward him and kisses me, hard; if someone could hit someone else with their mouth, it would feel like this. He shoves me away and takes off at a run. His footsteps fade, PAT PAT Pat Pat pat pat patpat… and I’m out in the open, alone.

“Bet you can’t find me!” Andy calls.

“Andy, is this blind man’s bluff?” I say. “That’s so lame.”

He shoots his gun off, which until now I didn’t believe he had, and I realize it’s something a little different.

Once, Catherine and I tried to have sex. She bit my nipple so hard I yelped; it took me days to find her clit. There were snippets that approached loveliness, and I could maybe see why people fumbled towards the good parts. But I could still taste her in my mouth when she turned to me and said, “Let’s never do that again.”

Andy and I have fucked on any number of occasions, but we always set rules ahead of time.

Andy is shouting and shooting at the same time, which is half annoying and half terrifying. I thought he said, “Take off your shoes,” but when I did he just started shooting again. I throw myself on the ground until he figures out what he wants from this game.

The shooting stops.

“Goddamnit! Get up!” Andy shouts.

“I can’t — understand — you!” I shout back.

“Oh,” Andy says. Then he gets gruff again. “Take off your shirt!”

I half-heartedly throw my shirt off and hold my arms against my cold, naked skin. Andy likes strip games. I don’t. I thought he had a better idea than this.

I’m still on my knees, half-naked, when one of the bullets hits me in the shoulder. The pain explodes outward from the point of impact, I am cold with it, then nothing, then hot hot hot.

I pop the bullet out of my wound — they were cheater bullets, thank god — and hurl it at Andy. It clatters on the gravel. “Fuck you!” I cry. There is a moment of silence as I double over, panting with pain. Just my breath, my heaving chest, pant pant pant. It is gorgeous, this silence. It is such a relief.

“Fuck you,” Andy says, and starts shooting again.

The first time Catherine cut off my hands, it was to free me from handcuffs. I was chained to her refrigerator and we wanted beer. We could have picked the lock, or dislocated my thumbs, but those methods seemed too obvious. Which is funny, because cutting off my hands is really obvious.

The hunting knife was sharp then, left over from a knife-throwing game with one of Catherine’s exes. When it cut into my skin, pain welled like pleasure. The sensation built as Catherine sliced through muscle and tendon, cracked through bone. When my hand dropped to the ground, I saw white light. I screamed.

Now the pain is ragged, the relief the barest break. I grunt. I’ve begged her to sharpen the knife, or to get a new one, but she insists that the knife is a rule. My forsaking pleasure is a rule, too. Someday, if she gets her way, it’s just going to hurt.

When all my clothes are gone, I throw myself on the ground again, by the car. The gravel is gritty against my bare skin. The little pebbles against my nipples are strange and uncomfortable, but uncomfortable like lace panties, not like splinters, or the cuts on my feet. Despite this, I don’t feel remotely turned on.

The tall, dead grass rustles.

“Aw, baby, look at you,” Andy says. “Stand up.”

I pull myself up, and the cool air shocks my bare skin. I hear the wind again. I touch the wound on my shoulder and clean away the gravel, though I let the stones stick to the rest of me. I feel covered, that way.

Andy takes a few steps towards me, and I can feel the edges of his heat, his halo. His breath washes over my forehead, and his clothing whispers as he takes his gun out of his pocket.

“You’re all dirty,” he says, like I’m a little girl, brushing the gravel off my breasts. His fingers are light and loving. They flick the gravel off with ease.

I imagine what we must look like, a naked, blindfolded woman and a clothed man standing in the dead grass. I try to imagine his wife standing here instead of me and almost laugh. I wish I understood why I’m the one who can be blindfolded, stripped, and shot, and then gently cleaned — gently kissed. The standard answer is that wives are boring, but I don’t buy that. Wives will kick your ass if you give them the chance.

But if you shoot your wife, you have to listen to her toss and turn because her shoulder aches. Or you have to wonder if she’ll pull a gun on you at breakfast. Andy can walk away from me. So maybe the real question is — what about me makes it so easy to walk away?

He puts the gun against my back and prods me. “Let’s go,” he whispers in my ear. His voice is warm and, again, I’m not sure how to take the line.

Everyone plays the same game. I’m not just talking about the trends that go around — cartwheel contests, speed eating, naked relay races. Those games are sham games, fakes for people with nothing better to do. But when you find a naked roommate giggling to herself outside your building for the fourth time in a month, and she’s not even running with a baton, or running at all, it’s more like a jog, you get suspicious. If you can play a sham game wrong and it still gets called a game, what the hell kind of system is this?

I march barefoot towards the sounds of whirring generators and rustling trees. I step on metal, on glass. My feet must be a bloody mess.

“I didn’t do too good at this game,” I said. “Did I?” It’s a canned line. One he likes. I want to please him, suddenly.

“No, you didn’t,” Andy says. The gun is getting warm from being pushed against my skin. The sound of rustling is actually water rushing. Where is the water coming from? It builds as we walk towards it, until I lose the sound of my footsteps, of Andy’s footsteps, of anything but this impossible sound.

He puts a hand on my shoulder and pulls me to a stop. The sound roars below me. It has to be the wind, whistling through the concrete. I can smell the forest fires again.

“What now?” I say.

“Take off your blindfold.”

I’m standing on the edge of the concrete wall, where I expected to see ancient graffiti, cracked concrete, slow, dirty water. Instead, a river rushes below me, dark except for where the moon is reflected in a distorted circle. The river is deeper than the channel ever was, like the concrete was ripped up to expose a secret below. It smells like acid rain.

“Jump in,” Andy says.

I look over my shoulder so fast I almost fall. “What?” I say.

Andy softens his tone and puts a hand on my ass, cupping it like it’s his favorite thing in the world. “Come on, baby. Jump in.”

“That’s not even supposed to be here,” I said.

“I found it last night. A friend sent me photos.” He gazed at it, the midnight-dark water, the splotches of electric light.

“You’re not jumping in?” I say.

“Baby,” he says, patting my ass. “You lost the game.”

The river can’t be real, and yet it looks more solid, more dangerous, than anything that is. The second-to-last thing I’m doing is wasting the river on Andy, and the last is getting shot in the gut for refusing to jump in.

I turn around and snatch the gun from Andy’s hand.

I have always known I could do this, but from the look on Andy’s face he hasn’t. He gapes at the gun like I pulled it out of thin air.

“You jump in,” I say.

“Me?” he says.

“You’re the loser now.”

Andy’s face collapses, then hardens into a glower. “You cheated.”

I have cheated. If he walks away, I’ll let him.

“I changed the game,” I say.

He looks down at his shoes, screwing up his face like this is a huge problem, one that takes mighty effort to solve. He shifts back and forth on his feet and screws up his face. I keep the gun pointed at him. I’m still cold.

He bends down and unties his shoes. He removes his pants, shirt, shocks. He climbs up on the wall next to me and looks out on the river with his hands on his hips, like it’s his newly conquered domain. Like I’m not even there. The gun is close enough for him to snatch back, but he doesn’t even look at it. He just stands there, staring at the water.

I thought snatching the gun would make it like on of those childhood games, where I grant myself invisibility so he gives himself invisibility goggles, I call lightening so he turns himself to metal — perpetual one-upmanship until one of us runs out of ideas. Andy stares down the river, naked and silent. Every so often he shuffles his feet, or peers down farther, as if readying to jump that never comes. My hand aches from holding the gun, and the cuts on my feet burn. Andy ignores me, frozen between fear of the river and fear of not finishing the game. Is he out of ideas?

I keep telling myself a little longer, just stay a little longer, but finally I give in. I hunt and gather my clothes from the scrubby field; Andy is still standing on the ledge when I finish. I dress behind him, shaking the dirt off my underwear, easing my shirt over my bloody shoulder. Andy twitches once or twice, but otherwise does not move. I force my bloody feet into their shoes.

I pick up Andy’s pants from the pile of clothes and fish out the car keys. I jingle them, to see if that catches his attention. He peers down into the rushing water again. I think about climbing up on the ledge with him to see what he’s looking at, even bending my knees, diving in. But I called bullshit on the game, and it felt wrong to step back in.

I looked back at him, once, on my way to the car. He raised a hand. At first, I thought he was waving me back, and I stopped in my tracks. He was waving goodbye.

I take the rental car back to Andy’s house on the east side of town. He lives in an ancient craftsman bungalow with a long low porch and two giant palm trees in the front yard. I walk in the screen door and find his wife playing Tetris, crumpled tissues surrounding her in white clumps. I try to introduce myself, but when I open my mouth she rolls her eyes and thrusts the other controller in my direction. I sit down next to her on the couch and play at manipulating shapes, finding a place for everything. Andy’s wife kicks my ass at this, but that’s kind of the point.

Around three AM, Andy comes in. He’s sopping wet and, weirdly, drunk.

“I got cold,” he says, as if this was an explanation.

He shuffles into the kitchen before I can even open my mouth. His wife doesn’t look away from Tetris, as if her husband shows up soaked and wasted on a regular basis. He comes back with three beers and hands them out. I have ignored my side of the game, and bricks are choking the top of my screen.

Andy looks as if he’s undergone a religious conversion. Perhaps it’s just the wetness, my mind adding in a false baptismal glow. Did he really go in? My whole conception of Andy changes, struggling to imagine him diving into the river, fighting the current, pulling himself ashore. But he had been naked, standing on that edge. I try to imagine him stepping down, putting clothes on, and getting back up. Maybe he was afraid of losing them?

No, Andy is still just Andy.

He plops down on the easy chair by the couch and, without a word, flips the TV off. My disaster Tetris, and his wife’s high score, disappear. We sit in silence. Not-new Andy, his sniffly wife, and me.

“How was the water?” I say to him.

Andy takes a sip of beer. “Excuse me?” he says, as if I was some rude stranger.

“How was the river?” I repeat, trying to sound casual.

Andy takes a swig of his beer and looks at the blank television. He takes on an expression he imagines is deep. “Real,” he says.

“Oh really?” I said. “How’d you get back here, then?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Andy says.

“A real river would chew you up and spit you out — ”

Andy looks away, as if ignoring me will make me disappear.

“Do you know why he’s like this?” I say to his wife. She’s blowing her nose, and looks at me from behind her tissue. I take off my shoes, my socks, and show her my filthy, scabbing feet. I pull back my shirt, where the blood on my shoulder was starting to soak through. “He did this and then tried to get me to jump in this… river. Now he’s pretending like he went in, lying to us — ”

“I’m not lying!” Andy says.

“Why in the hell are you clothes wet?”

“I took them with me,” Andy says.

His wife stares at her husband. “What is she even doing here?” she says, guesturing at me with her controller.

“Returning your car,” I say.

“She stole it,” Andy says, as if this trumps anything I might say.

“What did you do, rent one of the public showers?” I say. “Jump in the ocean? You kinda smell fishy — ”

His wife groans and drops her controller. “I’m going up to bed,” she says, standing up. She leaves her pile of tissues on the couch.

Andy’s head snaps up. “So am I,” he says, and gets up a little too fast. She looks at him like he’s crazy, but doesn’t say anything to deter him. He pretends to ignore the look. His wife walks a step ahead of him towards the stairs so she can’t see him following her. Their feet move in perfect unison up the stairs, step. step. step. Andy’s footsteps squelch. Neither of look down at me, once.

This was my cue to leave, but I stay on the couch. I turn the TV back on and watch Tetris bricks pile up on both our sides. I find it comforting to watch it play itself. When both sides clog up, I hit the controller with my least-cut toe to start another round.

Plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Plunkplunk plunkplunkplunkplunk plunk. GAME OVER. Click.

Andy and his wife start snoring upstairs; Tetris keeps dooming itself. I feel like an asshole. Why do I even care, if Andy lies? Why waste my time, barge in on his wife?

I wonder if the river’s still there. I wonder if I could make myself jump. Would I float out somewhere, wet but still me, still here? Would I drown? Or would I dive for the dark, rushing water, and hit a dirty puddle on concrete?

About the Author

Meghan McCarron’s work has recently appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons and Best American Fantasy. She has been a rare book wrangler, a Hollywood assistant, and a boarding school English teacher. She has just moved to Brooklyn, where she will be something else completely.

“Her Mother’s Ghosts”
by Theodora Goss

Her name is Ilona. The other children at school call her Smellona. She is not me, but I have been her. Here are the things I remember most clearly:

She lives in a townhouse in Washington D.C. with her mother and younger brother, whose bangs are always cut crooked. It is the seventies. She and her brother wear clothes they will later call hideous in photographs, but now, today, they are not hideous, because brown is still a respectable color. They are playing under the cherry trees. The blossoms are everywhere, lying on the asphalt in heaps like pink snow.

In the kitchen drawer are silver spoons, smuggled in socks, the sleeves of pajamas. They are heavy, dulled with use. They are older than her mother, her grandmother. One is much worse for having slipped into the garbage disposal. In the kitchen cabinet are margarine tubs, more than ten, perhaps more than twenty, washed clean, ready in case the world runs out of margarine tubs. Don’t laugh. It could happen.

Since Ilona turned seven, she has been haunted by her mother’s ghosts. Once, late at night, she saw a train conductor coming out of the bathroom.

“Do you have your visa?” he asked her.

She shook her head. She was in a pink nightgown, and her feet were bare. The floor was cold.

“Then you can’t cross the border,” he said, looking down at her sternly. “You’ll have to get out here, and speak to the station master.”

She nodded. She really needed to go to the bathroom, but she was afraid that if she tried to slip past him, he would grab her. Then she would scream, and her mother would wake up. She would have to explain that she had had a nightmare. She could never tell her mother that she had seen her ghosts.

Once, when she was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework, a man in a green plaid suit said to her, “You can’t go to medical school. You’re not qualified.”

She stared at his tie, which had a pattern of wheat sheaves and small tractors. His neck turned red. Above his mustache, his cheeks and nose also turned red.

“Why haven’t you joined the Party?” he asked with barely suppressed rage. She had not known that a question could sound so angry. She was afraid he was going to slap her.

After he disappeared, she could not think about her homework. Instead, she went out to the back garden and sat on the bricks, staring at the ivy that grew up the sides of the house. Sometimes sparrows built nests there, among the leaves, and in the mornings, especially, the ivy cheeped and stirred. Last spring, one of the stray cats had brought a baby sparrow in to breakfast and laid it down on the linoleum, like a gift.

At first she thought the stray cats were ghosts. They came in the evenings and sat on the bricks in the back garden. She would take them up to her bedroom. After they had stayed in her bedroom for three days, living on milk and chicken left over from the paprikás, they were allowed to stay.

Sometimes they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. These, she decided, where ghost cats from the streets of Budapest. But others stayed, and during her childhood there were more and more cats, sitting on the sofa, scratching the legs of the dining room table, curling beside her when she slept at night, one on her feet, one at her side, one with his chin on her shoulder, purring into her ear. In the middle of the night, he liked to pull her hair with his claws. She would wake up, and that was when, more often than not, she would see the ghosts.

At first, she thought the voice on the telephone was a ghost. “Traitor!” it said. “We’re coming to take your children. Why did you leave your parents? They miss you, your husband misses you. We’ll put you in prison, with rats, and sewer water seeping over the floor!”

Soon after, they moved to the country. Her brother began a series of collections: stones from the streambed, insects, a selection of rusted nails. He kept them in shoe boxes, in his closet. The insects crawled out. Spiders began to spin webs in the corners of his room. Sometimes they would eat dinner with fireflies crawling over the ceiling. The stray cats kept leaving half-eaten caterpillars on the stairs.

More than once, Ilona saw her grandmother, an old woman with short gray hair and delicate wrists. As a girl, she had studied art. Later, she had been forbidden to sell her paintings. They arrived at holidays wrapped around boxes of chocolates. Her mother hung them in every room of the house, even the bathroom. If you stood close, you could still see creases where her mother had ironed the folds.

She always appeared as a thin wash, like one of her watercolors of the light over Lake Balaton. Through her, Ilona could see the banister, the dining room table, the swing hanging from an oak tree in the garden.

Once, she thought she saw her father standing by the oak tree. He was wearing a uniform, like the train conductor but with a red star on his cap. She thought he looked handsome, but he vanished quickly.

There is something I have forgotten to tell you. When she was twelve and still living in Washington D.C., day after day for a period of three months she saw tanks driving down the streets. On her way to school, on her way to the dentist. During these months, she could not sleep. She threw up everything but a slice of birthday cake at a party for a girl from school. She lost weight and developed dark circles under her eyes. Her mother took her to the doctor. She began to believe she was turning into a ghost.

You are angry with me. You say, this is not a story. It is merely a series of scenes, and of manufactured scenes at that. Your name is not Ilona. You never saw your mother’s ghosts.

And of course you are right. When Ilona was seventeen, her mother died of breast cancer. After that, she never saw ghosts. Her brother grew up to be a famous entomologist. He is now a professor at Harvard. She grew up to be a writer, but not of stories. She writes about art, and sometimes architecture. She would never write this story, so I am writing it for her.

My mother did not die. Last year, she finished law school. My brother, a computer programmer, went to her graduation. They live by the ocean in California, where it is always sunny.

I rarely see them. I am haunted by ghosts, invisible, impalpable: the ghosts of silver spoons and margarine tubs, the smell of paprikás cooking on Sunday afternoons. The ghost of a country.

Sometimes, in my Boston apartment, I see her: the ghost of my mother, walking along the hallway, running her fingers over the piano. I see her from the back, wearing a dress with light blue and white checks. She made us both dresses out of that fabric, in Brussels. Once, a policeman stopped to ask me, with a wink, if I liked taking walks with my older sister.

When I see her, she is always walking away from me. And her back tells me, some things you can’t understand, even by writing about them.

Originally published in: The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories Small Beer Press, 2004

About the Author

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a PhD in English literature. Her short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, a poetry anthology and critical analysis, was published in 2008.

“Writing My Mother’s Ghosts”
by Theodora Goss

This essay was presented as part of a panel called “Reeling Beyond Realism: But to Reel in What?” proposed by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn Publishing for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in New York City.  I’m grateful to Rusty and Ken for proposing such a fantastic panel, and for inviting me to participate.

When Rusty and Ken asked me to be on this panel, for some reason I thought of a story I had written several years ago called “Her Mother’s Ghosts.” It begins,

Her name is Ilona. The other children at school call her Smellona.

The other children at school call her Smellona because the children at my school called me Snora. I spoke with an accent and wore hand-me-down clothes, which in elementary school are very good reasons for calling someone Snora. Ilona is a version of me. I even gave her my grandmother’s name. Before I tell you more about Ilona, I should tell you that I was born in Hungary in 1968. It is obvious, in my story, that Ilona was as well. I thought this presentation, short as it is, should have the dignity of a title, so I’m calling it “Writing My Mother’s Ghosts.”

This is my favorite part of the story:

In the kitchen drawer are silver spoons, smuggled in socks, the sleeves of pajamas. They are heavy, dulled with use. They are older than her mother, her grandmother. One is much worse for having slipped into the garbage disposal. In the kitchen cabinet are margarine tubs, more than ten, perhaps more than twenty, washed clean, ready in case the world runs out of margarine tubs. Don’t laugh. It could happen.

So far, I’m being a stark realist. My mother really did collect margarine tubs. Sometimes I thought they were going to take over the house. (There, you see, as soon as I begin to exaggerate, realism slips and the story turns fantastical, as in my vision of an apocalypse without margarine tubs.) But the next paragraph begins,

Since Ilona turned seven, she has been haunted by her mother’s ghosts.

And there I am, writing fantasy. Her mother’s ghosts are party officials, who threaten and cajole her. Ilona’s father appears briefly, identifiable as a party official by the red star on his cap. (I made that up. I have no idea what sorts of uniforms party officials wore in Hungary at that time, or even if they wore uniforms. Sometimes it is when I seem most realistic that I’m fantasizing.)

Several years ago, soon after I set up a website, because I had been told that all writers needed websites, someone wrote to me. I think he was in the writing program at Boston University, where I teach. It is a prestigious writing program. But I don’t think it has much regard for the fantastical in literature. He said that he had read my biography.

The biography on my website begins with a description of growing up in Hungary, of living in an apartment building in Budapest that had probably once been the residence of an aristocratic family, but was now divided into small flats. (I think our apartment had once been a double parlor, because its two rooms are still connected by a large door with panes of glass.) We would fetch coal from the cellar to heat water. In the bathroom, there was an alcove where my mother and her sister could have hidden if, in 1956, the Russians had come into our apartment. That was good writing, he told me. Good enough for a prestigious literary magazine. But why, after describing how we left Hungary, with two suitcases and the equivalent of twenty-five dollars, did I talk about disappearing into books, and specifically fantasy books? I came to the United States and disappeared into Narnia and Middle Earth and Earthsea. I exchanged real for imaginary geography. Why? he asked me. He was not asking me why, as a child, I had escaped to imaginary countries, but why, as an adult, I remained there. Why I wrote fantasy when I could, evidently, write realism.

There, you see, I have used the dreaded word “escape.” I was an escapist. That was what, finally although implicitly, he was accusing me of. For a long time I felt vaguely ashamed of being an escapist. But recently I have decided to reclaim the word. I am not, after all, ashamed of being a feminist, which is also one of those words ending in —ist that has acquired, I’m not sure why, a negative connotation. But, you might say, an escapist is more passive than a feminist. A feminist chains herself to the White House gates. An escapist allows herself to be taken somewhere else, where political engagement is not necessary. That is certainly part of our definition of an escapist, but in reclaiming the word I want to redefine it. Think of how we define a capitalist, or a communist. One actively accumulates capital and attempts to create a world in which the accumulation of capital is possible; the other actively agitates for the collective ownership of capital. Both attempt to change the world. Think of a bicyclist. She bicycles, joins bicycling clubs, agitates for paths. Why, then, should an escapist be passive? I have decided that I am an active escapist, an advocate of escape. Remember that I was born in a country that one could not leave, that one could only escape from. Escaping was, in a sense, the first important act of my life.

Of course I didn’t think of all this back then, when I had someone to answer. I don’t remember what I wrote to him, but it was something vague and unsatisfying. I had not realized, then, that escape is my ideology. I believe that imaginative escape allows us to look back at the country we came from, whether it is a geographical country or the country of literary realism, and do what exiles have always done: offer a critique. That’s what I did in my story about Ilona, in which I say,

There is something I have forgotten to tell you. When she was twelve and still living in Washington D.C., day after day for a period of three months she saw tanks driving down the streets. On her way to school, on her way to the dentist. During these months, she could not sleep. She threw up everything but a slice of birthday cake at a party for a girl from school. She lost weight and developed dark circles under her eyes. Her mother took her to the doctor. She began to believe she was turning into a ghost.

Once, when my aunt was telling me about being in a car accident, she said, “I was so scared, almost as scared as I was in 1956.” In my family, everything, finally, goes back to tanks rolling down the street. My brother and I grew up haunted by the ghosts of tanks rolling down the streets of Washington D.C.

My mother had rejected communist ideology but had left it only imperfectly behind, in the way you reject, but never entirely leave behind, what you learned as a child.  So communists and capitalists were both fantastical creatures. They might as well have had horns coming out of their heads, and tails. One would come in the night to take you away to prison, the other would corrupt your soul. Perhaps one reason I write fantasy is that I grew up in a fantastical reality. But didn’t we all? What fantasy allows us to escape from is, in part, the illusion that the world we live in is entirely real, when there are significant parts of it that are really make-believe. We are surrounded by unreality: parts of our political system, the stock market, the fashion industry. There are even people, like Princess Diana, who are partly make-believe.

I think what I’ve said, among the tanks and margarine tubs, is something like this. That I write fantasy because the reality I see around me is fantastical, so that fantasy becomes a new realism, representing our reality, the reality of the twenty-first century, more accurately than the old realism, which was formed in the nineteenth. That fantasy is important because it offers escape, which allows us to leave our countries, the countries where we are citizens and understand the language, to become at least temporary exiles. As exiles, we can look back at the countries we have left, to see them again more clearly. Literary realism is one of those countries. Escapist ideology allows me to see that realism is also an ideology, one that can obscure reality as much as it can illuminate it. It can also turn into escapism, the passive kind that allows us to evade reality without looking at it closely, without reflecting and critiquing.

“Her Mother’s Ghosts” ends by acknowledging that I am an escapist, that my story is fantasy, that the story I am telling is not my story:

When Ilona was seventeen, her mother died of breast cancer. After that, she never saw ghosts. Her brother grew up to be a famous entomologist. He is now a professor at Harvard. She grew up to be a writer, but not of stories. She writes about art, and sometimes architecture. She would never write this story, so I am writing it for her.

My mother did not die. Last year, she finished law school. My brother, a computer programmer, went to her graduation. They live by the ocean in California, where it is always sunny.

I rarely see them. I am haunted by ghosts, invisible, impalpable: the ghosts of silver spoons and margarine tubs, the smell of paprikás cooking on Sunday afternoons. The ghost of a country.

And there, although I am talking about ghosts, I am back to the starkest realism, because these are the things by which I really am haunted. But it is a different kind of realism, a truthfulness to psychological facts. That is what I mean, I think, when I talk about a new realism. All literature is a representation of reality, because we have nothing else. We have ourselves and the world around us, that is all. Fantasy represents that world, in a different way than literary realism, but it represents it nevertheless. It also, and this I have not said, allows us to imagine new possibilities that do not exist in our current reality. It is fantasy that allows us to imagine the world we want to create. Perhaps a world without tanks, which a realist might tell you is stark fantasy.

About the Author

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a PhD in English literature. Her short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, a poetry anthology and critical analysis, was published in 2008.

“An Interview with Gene Wolfe”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Gene Wolfe will tell you the truth, in conversation and in fiction, whether you want to hear it or not. He is perhaps best known for his novels set on Urth, including the four-part Book of the New Sun and the four part Book of the Long Sun. He writes fantasy and science fiction, and a grim blend of both that he insists is not horror.

Overall, he writes a story the way it needs to be written and he does so in rich, textured prose that delights on a first and rewards on a second reading.

“The high quality of Gene’s prose guaranteed him critical attention,” said David Drake, a long-time friend of Wolfe’s and author of The Lord of the Isles series and the Hammer Slammers series. “He’s also a commercial success, though, which is a very different thing. He’s seen enough of life to be able to write about hard places in a fashion to both [speak] to those who’ve been in them, and to make them vivid to luckier people who haven’t personally seen what Gene has.”

It’s those “hard places” and unacceptable truths that inform even the lightest of Wolfe’s narratives. His stories, long and short, can be relentless, brutal, grim, and, word for word, maddeningly beautiful.

I interviewed Wolfe while he was entrenched in the writing of An Evil Guest, which was released earlier this year.

What do you enjoy about writing?

Primarily revision. I like to polish and tidy up, like trying to make good stuff great. First drafts are work. Are fighting, really. I know where I’m going, but I know too that I mustn’t get there too fast.

What happens on the way? How to make the reader see, smell, hear, and feel it?

I struggle against easy writing. Long ago somebody said, “Easy writing makes damned hard reading.” He was right. “Nick was a bad man and a cruel man.” That’s easy. I know I can’t say it at all. I have to show [Nick] being bad and cruel in the context of the story. That’s always hard.

Does there ever come a point when you have to accept that a particular piece is no longer worth fighting with or for?

There comes a point at which I’m no longer sure that what I’m doing is improving the piece. That’s when I stop working on it and send it in. Usually — not always, but usually — I get there after four drafts. A fifth draft may find me reverting to the second or the third, and that’s a bad sign.

You don’t happen to have any examples of, say, a first draft of a sentence and the final draft of a sentence we could compare, do you?

I don’t have a sample sentence now that would tell you anything, although I could make one up:

“That’s good.”

“It certainly is. We’ll have a bigger cast and more advertising. It will take two or three months to get the new people and get our advertising campaign into high gear. After that, we’ll play here in Kingsport, opening in December.”

Revised:

“That’s good.”

“You bet it is. It’s wonderful, and don’t you forget it. The ship gets ten more sailors and Tiny gets twenty more natives. Fifteen girls and five boys. The whole damned show gets a big ad campaign, featuring you. I figure a couple of months, maybe three, to hire the new people and rehearse. Then we play the Tiara for the rest of the year.” India licked her lips. “We ought to be able to open the week before Christmas. There’s nothing like Christmas.”

That’s from, An Evil Guest. Can you see what I’ve done? I turned generalities into hard facts. I made India talk the way she talks. I made it personal to Cassie, the star of the show and the central character in the novel, who was the first speaker: “featuring you.” India licks her lips because her reputation is riding on this show; she’s the director.

Besides, she’s down for a cut of the receipts. It’s longer, but it has a lot more meat.

I was surprised that you made the second version longer. I have been conditioned to think of revision as cutting excess words in order to achieve more effect with fewer words.

Often I tend to write synopsis. When I do, I have to flesh it out in revision.

I write that way when I don’t intend to, trying too hard to get everything down and move the story ahead. When I revise, I realize (sometimes) what I’ve done and fix it.

In general terms, how does a short story work?

By engendering expectations and satisfying them. I told a student once to letter a sign and put it where he’d see it when he wrote: “I AM GOING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING COOL.” Later he reported that he had done it, and it had helped immeasurably.

[For instance:] “Long ago in a land now sunk into the sea, there was a brown-skinned boy with eyes like topaz…”

At which point do you realize that a set of ideas would make for a good story? Do you have some sort of litmus test?

When I get a set of ideas that seem worth exploring, I do it. Usually I end up with a short story. Now and then, with a book. Right now I’m working on a novel. The original idea [for An Evil Guest] for was a consultant everybody says is a wizard who really is a wizard.

Style and voice seem crucial to a short story but are easily turned into abstractions.

Style has become a bucket of worms, thanks to the deteriorating standards of the public schools. The chief style I see in student stories is American Illiterate. It shows up in published stories sometimes too. “Should an enemy warrior cross that line, kill them!” Well, that’s okay if the order-giver is an illiterate. Unfortunately, the illiterate is just about always the author. Other than that, the style should suit the story. Imagine The Wings of the Dove as told by Huck Finn. It would be funny for ten pages, but…

If you’re asking about the author’s voice, or the narrator’s, it’s so closely linked to style that I see no point in discussing it separately. If you mean the voice in which each character speaks, each must be different. The butler mustn’t sound like the footman, even though neither is an important character. This is one of those truths that students reject out of hand. They reject it because everybody sounds alike.

To them.

Can you describe the process of characterization — from the first glimmers of a character to fully rounded character?

Characterization is easy and rare. It’s rare because so many people can’t be bothered. You characterize by showing the character acting, talking, or thinking in characteristic fashion. That’s all there is to it. Read Dickens, for whom characterization was as natural as breathing.

What makes for effective dialogue?

Oh, my! It must entertain the reader, forward the plot, and characterize the speaker. All pretty much at the same time. It must not be too wordy or too telegraphic; it must sound natural — that is, like something that speaker might say at that time to that person.

Dialogue is action.

“Darling I love you fit to bust, but it’s a week in Paris and I’ll love you just as much when I get home. Ta!”

What are the stories that are done to death by novice writers of speculative fiction?

The archetypical one ends when the hero and heroine reach the pristine planet and are found to be Adam and Eve. Everyone sees this over and over.

Students write these because they think the idea brilliant and it’s an idea they have never seen in print. They never see it in print because editors are so sick of seeing it in the slush.

Another proverbial beginner’s story is the “Mary-Sue,” so named because a woman with that name wrote novel-length Mary-Sues and sent them to every house in the business. The princess (or queen) has a lovely and fantastic name: “Goldenshower of the Stormless Isle.” You know.  She is the hereditary ruler of Everything. She is also the universe’s leading scientist and as brilliant as she is beautiful. Everyone is in awe of her. But we never see why. Her brilliance, wisdom, leadership etc. are only talked about. Never shown. This is, of course, female fantasy packaged as fiction.

Male wish-fulfillment is rarer, but you get that, too.

Then there’s the propaganda story, usually for animal rights. Often the causes are good. If the stories were good, too, they would be publishable; but the story is not what the author’s thinking about.

The thinly disguised gay story isn’t so much bad as pathetic. The hero wins the deep and abiding friendship of a young, strong, handsome, rich man who toward the end of the story ditches his wife or girlfriend. It’s a wish fulfillment story, too; but it deserves its own category because critiquing it is so touchy.

The worst student stories as far as I’m concerned are the PC ones. All southerners (sometimes, westerners) are mindless gun-toting slobs and all military officers are evil. So are all corporations, etc. The students have learned to write these because they get good grades from their creative writing profs. The stories get published now and then, too. I read one not long ago in which Italians hated President Bush so much that they killed American tourists to get even with him. In the hope of escaping, some tourists wore buttons: I AM A DEMOCRAT. I’m not terribly fond of Bush myself, but come on gang! Get real.

Your fantasy seems much truer to reality, truer to what we humans experience in this life than most of what passes for realistic, mainstream fiction.

Because fantasy is nearer the truth, that’s all. Realistic fiction is typically about a married couple, both college teachers. He’s cheating on her with a student, so she cheats on him with whoever’s handy. Angst abounds. How true is that story for the bulk of humankind? Realistic fiction leaves out far, far too much. How old is realistic fiction? How old is fantasy?

So mainstream fiction has a tendency to represent a reality that the general public is willing to accept, whereas good fantasy is a reality so near the truth that it must be presented as “make believe” in order to get people to accept it? The only acceptable fantasy is old or distant fantasy. If you are going to look at the sun directly, wear shades — rose-colored sunglasses. Or, you can look at the beautiful image of the sun reflected on a rippling lake.

If you restrict “the public” to the upper middle class, I’m in agreement. I might add that it’s far safer to look at the sun reflected in the lake.

Do you enjoy teaching writing? When you walk into a creative writing class as the teacher, what is your role, your job?

Yes, I enjoy teaching writing. (Unfortunately, most students don’t enjoy having me teach them.) My chief job as teacher is (usually) to inspire the students to write. I must make them understand that they can be successful if they are willing to work hard enough. My secondary job is to get them to write better.

The hard part of teaching anyone to write is getting him to believe you. It’s very different from teaching (say) differential calculus. The calculus teacher is never in doubt; his problem is to get the ideas across. The writing teacher is presenting very simple ideas — which are generally rejected whenever they disagree with the student’s preconceptions.

Most would-be writers fail because they’re not willing to do the work and learn. They have a computer with a spell checker, and what more do they need? Everything they write should be bought and published. Almost anybody who’s willing to write a lot, to try to write well, and to market what he writes succeeds.

Most of writing is easy. Characterization and plotting, which seem to scare a lot of beginners to death, are easily learned and soon become almost automatic. The hard things are telling a good story and writing graceful grammatical prose.

My frustration has been getting anyone to say anything of substance and to say it directly.

Academics make a fetish of speaking in abstractions; I suppose they like it because it’s unnatural. Like poetry and song, fiction demands the concrete.

Not:

“The vessel, bearing fuel to the New World, met with misfortune shortly before its arrival. The command structure was nearly decimated.”

Instead:

“He was the captain of the Nightingale,
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal.
We could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale,
When he drowned on the hard-rock shoal.”

This stuff is what got  me into trouble [at a conference a few years ago]. Some of the students were writing publishable material. I tried to encourage them to keep at it. (One of them now has a multi-book contract.) Some were writing unpublishable material. I tried to show them what was wrong with what they were doing.

One young man was writing pornography under the impression that he was writing fantasy; that is to say, the main interest in his stories was in sexual adventures which had little to do with the fantasy background. I explained to him that he was writing one genre under the impression that he was writing another.

A man of sixty or so was clearly avenging some wrong (which I suspect was largely imagined) done him by a middle-aged woman. I told him that his writing might be therapeutic, but it could not be sold. To put it briefly: I Made Enemies. I’m not sure how many.

A good bit of what you and David Drake write about is difficult for people to accept. Much of what Mr. Drake experienced in Vietnam is difficult for him and for others to accept. It seems to me that there is, on your part and Mr. Drake’s part, a realization and acceptance of those unacceptable truths, those very things left out in much literary and mainstream fiction.

Perhaps when you were shot at in Korea you were forced to accept what the vast majority of the population has the luxury of not accepting? And it is written all throughout your fiction.

Certainly my writing was very different after I left the Army. I was twenty or so the first time and twenty-six the second. Those are a long six years. (Remember, I spent two and a half years at the U. of Houston getting a degree after I left the service.) I was much more mature, and what had been a sort of hobby had become a serious attempt to augment my salary.

The biggest difference combat made is difficult to describe. A lot of it is fatalism, “I’ll fight this thing until it’s as good as I can make it. When it is, I’ll send it out, reload, and resume firing. I’ll keep on doing that as long as I can.”

There’s only one good thing that comes out of war. It is that the people who fight it are forced to see the lies that others tell them and the lies they tell themselves for what they are. It can be hard on some people — very hard. I wish I could say that it lasted for life; quite often it doesn’t.

The overall effect of your fiction on me is exhilarating — perhaps because it gives me access to truths I did not have to learn about on my own the hard way…

Thank you! That’s a great, great compliment.

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.