Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 40

Table of Contents

Warm

Art by Sergio Rebolledo

The Things

by Peter Watts

All the King's Monsters

by Megan Arkenberg

Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales

by Jason S. Ridler

Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age

by Brian Trent

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2010
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

“The Things” by Peter Watts

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.  MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase.  I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.

I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.

I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshoots surrounding me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity of their body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world —

— and the world attacked me. It attacked me.

I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains — the Norwegian camp, it is called here — and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape.

I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.

And when I assimilated them in turn — when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes — I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know.

I am alone in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly far enough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouched brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss.

It plunges into darkness as I watch. I’ve blown the generator. Now there’s no light but for the beacons along the guide ropes: strings of dim blue stars whipping back and forth in the wind, emergency constellations to guide lost biomass back home.

I am not going home. I am not lost enough. I forge on into darkness until even the stars disappear. The faint shouts of angry frightened men carry behind me on the wind.

Somewhere behind me my disconnected biomass regroups into vaster, more powerful shapes for the final confrontation. I could have joined myself, all in one: chosen unity over fragmentation, resorbed and taken comfort in the greater whole. I could have added my strength to the coming battle. But I have chosen a different path. I am saving Child’s reserves for the future. The present holds nothing but annihilation.

Best not to think on the past.

I’ve spent so very long in the ice already. I didn’t know how long until the world put the clues together, deciphered the notes and the tapes from the Norwegian camp, pinpointed the crash site. I was being Palmer, then; unsuspected, I went along for the ride.

I even allowed myself the smallest ration of hope.

But it wasn’t a ship any more. It wasn’t even a derelict. It was a fossil, embedded in the floor of a great pit blown from the glacier. Twenty of these skins could have stood one atop another, and barely reached the lip of that crater. The timescale settled down on me like the weight of a world: how long for all that ice to accumulate? How many eons had the universe iterated on without me?

And in all that time, a million years perhaps, there’d been no rescue. I never found myself. I wonder what that means. I wonder if I even exist any more, anywhere but here.

Back at camp I will erase the trail. I will give them their final battle, their monster to vanquish. Let them win. Let them stop looking.

Here in the storm, I will return to the ice. I’ve barely even been away, after all; alive for only a few days out of all these endless ages. But I’ve learned enough in that time. I learned from the wreck that there will be no repairs. I learned from the ice that there will be no rescue. And I learned from the world that there will be no reconciliation. The only hope of escape, now, is into the future; to outlast all this hostile, twisted biomass, to let time and the cosmos change the rules. Perhaps the next time I awaken, this will be a different world.

It will be aeons before I see another sunrise.

This is what the world taught me: that adaptation is provocation. Adaptation is incitement to violence.

It feels almost obscene — an offense against Creation itself — to stay stuck in this skin. It’s so ill-suited to its environment that it needs to be wrapped in multiple layers of fabric just to stay warm. There are a myriad ways I could optimize it: shorter limbs, better insulation, a lower surface:volume ratio. All these shapes I still have within me, and I dare not use any of them even to keep out the cold. I dare not adapt; in this place, I can only hide.

What kind of a world rejects communion?

It’s the simplest, most irreducible insight that biomass can have. The more you can change, the more you can adapt. Adaptation is fitness, adaptation is survival. It’s deeper than intelligence, deeper than tissue; it is cellular, it is axiomatic. And more, it is pleasurable. To take communion is to experience the sheer sensual delight of bettering the cosmos.

And yet, even trapped in these maladapted skins, this world doesn’t want to change.

At first I thought it might simply be starving, that these icy wastes didn’t provide enough energy for routine shapeshifting. Or perhaps this was some kind of laboratory: an anomalous corner of the world, pinched off and frozen into these freakish shapes as part of some arcane experiment on monomorphism in extreme environments. After the autopsy I wondered if the world had simply forgotten how to change: unable to touch the tissues the soul could not sculpt them, and time and stress and sheer chronic starvation had erased the memory that it ever could.

But there were too many mysteries, too many contradictions. Why these particular shapes, so badly suited to their environment? If the soul was cut off from the flesh, what held the flesh together?

And how could these skins be so empty when I moved in?

I’m used to finding intelligence everywhere, winding through every part of every offshoot. But there was nothing to grab onto in the mindless biomass of this world: just conduits, carrying orders and input. I took communion, when it wasn’t offered; the skins I chose struggled and succumbed; my fibrils infiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems everywhere. I saw through eyes that weren’t yet quite mine, commandeered motor nerves to move limbs still built of alien protein. I wore these skins as I’ve worn countless others, took the controls and left the assimilation of individual cells to follow at its own pace.

But I could only wear the body. I could find no memories to absorb, no experiences, no comprehension. Survival depended on blending in, and it was not enough to merely look like this world. I had to act like it — and for the first time in living memory I did not know how.

Even more frighteningly, I didn’t have to. The skins I assimilated continued to move, all by themselves. They conversed and went about their appointed rounds. I could not understand it. I threaded further into limbs and viscera with each passing moment, alert for signs of the original owner. I could find no networks but mine.

Of course, it could have been much worse.  I could have lost it all, been reduced to a few cells with nothing but instinct and their own plasticity to guide them. I would have grown back eventually — reattained sentience, taken communion and regenerated an intellect vast as a world — but I would have been an orphan, amnesiac, with no sense of who I was. At least I’ve been spared that: I emerged from the crash with my identity intact, the templates of a thousand worlds still resonant in my flesh. I’ve retained not just the brute desire to survive, but the conviction that survival is meaningful. I can still feel joy, should there be sufficient cause.

And yet, how much more there used to be.

The wisdom of so many other worlds, lost.  All that remains are fuzzy abstracts, half-memories of theorems and philosophies far too vast to fit into such an impoverished network. I could assimilate all the biomass of this place, rebuild body and soul to a million times the capacity of what crashed here — but as long as I am trapped at the bottom of this well, denied communion with my greater self, I will never recover that knowledge.

I’m such a pitiful fragment of what I was. Each lost cell takes a little of my intellect with it, and I have grown so very small. Where once I thought, now I merely react. How much of this could have been avoided, if I had only salvaged a little more biomass from the wreckage? How many options am I not seeing because my soul simply isn’t big enough to contain them?

The world spoke to itself, in the same way I do when my communications are simple enough to convey without somatic fusion. Even as dog I could pick up the basic signature morphemes — this offshoot was Windows, that one was Bennings, the two who’d left in their flying machine for parts unknown were Copper and MacReady — and I marveled that these bits and pieces stayed isolated one from another, held the same shapes for so long, that the labeling of individual aliquots of biomass actually served a useful purpose.

Later I hid within the bipeds themselves, and whatever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or assholes. It said that MacReady was sometimes called Mac. It said that this collection of structures was a camp.

It said that it was afraid, but maybe that was just me.

Empathy’s inevitable, of course. One can’t mimic the sparks and chemicals that motivate the flesh without also feeling them to some extent. But this was different. These intuitions flickered within me yet somehow hovered beyond reach. My skins wandered the halls and the cryptic symbols on every surface — Laundry Sched, Welcome to the Clubhouse, This Side Up — almost made a kind of sense. That circular artefact hanging on the wall was a clock; it measured the passage of time.  The world’s eyes flitted here and there, and I skimmed piecemeal nomenclature from its — from his — mind.

But I was only riding a searchlight. I saw what it illuminated but I couldn’t point it in any direction of my own choosing. I could eavesdrop, but I could only eavesdrop; never interrogate.

If only one of those searchlights had paused to dwell on its own evolution, on the trajectory that had brought it to this place. How differently things might have ended, had I only known. But instead it rested on a whole new word:

Autopsy.

MacReady and Copper had found part of me at the Norwegian camp: a rearguard offshoot, burned in the wake of my escape. They’d brought it back — charred, twisted, frozen in mid-transformation — and did not seem to know what it was.

I was being Palmer then, and Norris, and dog. I gathered around with the other biomass and watched as Copper cut me open and pulled out my insides. I watched as he dislodged something from behind my eyes: an organ of some kind.

It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. It looked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild — as though the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against it instead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen and nutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything like that could even exist, how it could have reached that size without being outcompeted by more efficient morphologies.

Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes at these offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously and unthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world.  Unused to inventory — why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightest provocation? — I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atop each body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which a million ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot had one. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.

I realized something else, too: the eyes, the ears of my dead skin had fed into this thing before Copper pulled it free. A massive bundle of fibers ran along the skin’s longitudinal axis, right up the middle of the endoskeleton, directly into the dark sticky cavity where the growth had rested. That misshapen structure had been wired into the whole skin, like some kind of somatocognitive interface but vastly more massive. It was almost as if…

No.

That was how it worked. That was how these empty skins moved of their own volition, why I’d found no other network to integrate. There it was: not distributed throughout the body but balled up into itself, dark and dense and encysted.  I had found the ghost in these machines.

I felt sick.

I shared my flesh with thinking cancer.

Sometimes, even hiding is not enough.

I remember seeing myself splayed across the floor of the kennel, a chimera split along a hundred seams, taking communion with a handful of dogs. Crimson tendrils writhed on the floor. Half-formed iterations sprouted from my flanks, the shapes of dogs and things not seen before on this world, haphazard morphologies half-remembered by parts of a part.

I remember Childs before I was Childs, burning me alive. I remember cowering inside Palmer, terrified that those flames might turn on the rest of me, that this world had somehow learned to shoot on sight.

I remember seeing myself stagger through the snow, raw instinct, wearing Bennings. Gnarled undifferentiated clumps clung to his hands like crude parasites, more outside than in; a few surviving fragments of some previous massacre, crippled, mindless, taking what they could and breaking cover. Men swarmed about him in the night: red flares in hand, blue lights at their backs, their faces bichromatic and beautiful. I remember Bennings, awash in flames, howling like an animal beneath the sky.

I remember Norris, betrayed by his own perfectly-copied, defective heart. Palmer, dying that the rest of me might live. Windows, still human, burned preemptively.

The names don’t matter. The biomass does: so much of it, lost. So much new experience, so much fresh wisdom annihilated by this world of thinking tumors.

Why even dig me up? Why carve me from the ice, carry me all that way across the wastes, bring me back to life only to attack me the moment I awoke?

If eradication was the goal, why not just kill me where I lay?

Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves.

I knew they couldn’t hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myself twining around Palmer’s motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tiny currents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behind Blair’s eyes.

Imagination, of course. It’s all reflex that far down, unconscious and immune to micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was still time. I’m used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them. This, this compartmentalization was unprecedented. I’ve assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met the spark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?

I was being three men by now. The world was growing wary, but it hadn’t noticed yet. Even the tumors in the skins I’d taken didn’t know how close I was. For that, I could only be grateful — that Creation has rules, that some things don’t change no matter what shape you take. It doesn’t matter whether a soul spreads throughout the skin or festers in grotesque isolation; it still runs on electricity. The memories of men still took time to gel, to pass through whatever gatekeepers filtered noise from signal — and a judicious burst of static, however indiscriminate, still cleared those caches before their contents could be stored permanently. Clear enough, at least, to let these tumors simply forget that something else moved their arms and legs on occasion.

At first I only took control when the skins closed their eyes and their searchlights flickered disconcertingly across unreal imagery, patterns that flowed senselessly into one another like hyperactive biomass unable to settle on a single shape. (Dreams, one searchlight told me, and a little later, Nightmares.) During those mysterious periods of dormancy, when the men lay inert and isolated, it was safe to come out.

Soon, though, the dreams dried up. All eyes stayed open all the time, fixed on shadows and each other. Offshoots once dispersed throughout the camp began to draw together, to give up their solitary pursuits in favor of company. At first I thought they might be finding common ground in a common fear. I even hoped that finally, they might shake off their mysterious fossilization and take communion.

But no. They’d just stopped trusting anything they couldn’t see.

They were merely turning against each other.

My extremities are beginning to numb; my thoughts slow as the distal reaches of my soul succumb to the chill. The weight of the flamethrower pulls at its harness, forever tugs me just a little off-balance. I have not been Childs for very long; almost half this tissue remains unassimilated. I have an hour, maybe two, before I have to start melting my grave into the ice. By that time I need to have converted enough cells to keep this whole skin from crystallizing. I focus on antifreeze production.

It’s almost peaceful out here.  There’s been so much to take in, so little time to process it. Hiding in these skins takes such concentration, and under all those watchful eyes I was lucky if communion lasted long enough to exchange memories: compounding my soul would have been out of the question. Now, though, there’s nothing to do but prepare for oblivion. Nothing to occupy my thoughts but all these lessons left unlearned.

MacReady’s blood test, for example. His thing detector, to expose imposters posing as men. It does not work nearly as well as the world thinks; but the fact that it works at all violates the most basic rules of biology. It’s the center of the puzzle. It’s the answer to all the mysteries. I might have already figured it out if I had been just a little larger. I might already know the world, if the world wasn’t trying so hard to kill me.

MacReady’s test.

Either it is impossible, or I have been wrong about everything.

They did not change shape. They did not take communion. Their fear and mutual mistrust was growing, but they would not join souls; they would only look for the enemy outside themselves.

So I gave them something to find.

I left false clues in the camp’s rudimentary computer: simpleminded icons and animations, misleading numbers and projections seasoned with just enough truth to convince the world of their veracity. It didn’t matter that the machine was far too simple to perform such calculations, or that there were no data to base them on anyway; Blair was the only biomass likely to know that, and he was already mine.

I left false leads, destroyed real ones, and then — alibi in place — I released Blair to run amok. I let him steal into the night and smash the vehicles as they slept, tugging ever-so-slightly at his reins to ensure that certain vital components were spared. I set him loose in the radio room, watched through his eyes and others as he rampaged and destroyed. I listened as he ranted about a world in danger, the need for containment, the conviction that most of you don’t know what’s going on around here — but I damn well know that some of you do…

He meant every word. I saw it in his searchlight. The best forgeries are the ones who’ve forgotten they aren’t real.

When the necessary damage was done I let Blair fall to MacReady’s counterassault. As Norris I suggested the tool shed as a holding cell. As Palmer I boarded up the windows, helped with the flimsy fortifications expected to keep me contained. I watched while the world locked me away for your own protection, Blair, and left me to my own devices. When no one was looking I would change and slip outside, salvage the parts I needed from all that bruised machinery. I would take them back to my burrow beneath the shed and build my escape piece by piece. I volunteered to feed the prisoner and came to myself when the world wasn’t watching, laden with supplies enough to keep me going through all those necessary metamorphoses. I went through a third of the camp’s food stores in three days, and — still trapped by my own preconceptions — marveled at the starvation diet that kept these offshoots chained to a single skin.

Another piece of luck: the world was too preoccupied to worry about kitchen inventory.

There is something on the wind, a whisper threading its way above the raging of the storm. I grow my ears, extend cups of near-frozen tissue from the sides of my head, turn like a living antennae in search of the best reception.

There, to my left: the abyss glows a little, silhouettes black swirling snow against a subtle lessening of the darkness. I hear the sounds of carnage. I hear myself. I do not know what shape I have taken, what sort of anatomy might be emitting those sounds. But I’ve worn enough skins on enough worlds to know pain when I hear it.

The battle is not going well. The battle is going as planned. Now it is time to turn away, to go to sleep. It is time to wait out the ages.

I lean into the wind. I move toward the light.

This is not the plan. But I think I have an answer, now: I think I may have had it even before I sent myself back into exile. It’s not an easy thing to admit. Even now I don’t fully understand. How long have I been out here, retelling the tale to myself, setting clues in order while my skin dies by low degrees? How long have I been circling this obvious, impossible truth?

I move towards the faint crackling of flames, the dull concussion of exploding ordnance more felt than heard. The void lightens before me: gray segues into yellow, yellow into orange. One diffuse brightness resolves into many: a lone burning wall, miraculously standing. The smoking skeleton of MacReady’s shack on the hill. A cracked smoldering hemisphere reflecting pale yellow in the flickering light: Child’s searchlight calls it a radio dome.

The whole camp is gone. There’s nothing left but flames and rubble.

They can’t survive without shelter. Not for long. Not in those skins.

In destroying me, they’ve destroyed themselves.

Things could have turned out so much differently if I’d never been Norris.

Norris was the weak node: biomass not only ill-adapted but defective, an offshoot with an off switch. The world knew, had known so long it never even thought about it anymore. It wasn’t until Norris collapsed that heart condition floated to the surface of Copper’s mind where I could see it. It wasn’t until Copper was astride Norris’s chest, trying to pound him back to life, that I knew how it would end. And by then it was too late; Norris had stopped being Norris. He had even stopped being me.

I had so many roles to play, so little choice in any of them. The part being Copper brought down the paddles on the part that had been Norris, such a faithful Norris, every cell so scrupulously assimilated, every part of that faulty valve reconstructed unto perfection. I hadn’t known. How was I to know? These shapes within me, the worlds and morphologies I’ve assimilated over the aeons — I’ve only ever used them to adapt before, never to hide. This desperate mimicry was an improvised thing, a last resort in the face of a world that attacked anything unfamiliar. My cells read the signs and my cells conformed, mindless as prions.

So I became Norris, and Norris self-destructed.

I remember losing myself after the crash. I know how it feels to degrade, tissues in revolt, the desperate efforts to reassert control as static from some misfiring organ jams the signal. To be a network seceding from itself, to know that each moment I am less than I was the moment before. To become nothing. To become legion.

Being Copper, I could see it. I still don’t know why the world didn’t; its parts had long since turned against each other by then, every offshoot suspected every other. Surely they were alert for signs of infection. Surely some of that biomass would have noticed the subtle twitch and ripple of Norris changing below the surface, the last instinctive resort of wild tissues abandoned to their own devices.

But I was the only one who saw. Being Childs, I could only stand and watch. Being Copper, I could only make it worse; if I’d taken direct control, forced that skin to drop the paddles, I would have given myself away. And so I played my parts to the end. I slammed those resurrection paddles down as Norris’s chest split open beneath them. I screamed on cue as serrated teeth from a hundred stars away snapped shut. I toppled backwards, arms bitten off above the wrist. Men swarmed, agitation bootstrapping to panic. MacReady aimed his weapon; flames leaped across the enclosure. Meat and machinery screamed in the heat.

Copper’s tumor winked out beside me. The world would never have let it live anyway, not after such obvious contamination. I let our skin play dead on the floor while overhead, something that had once been me shattered and writhed and iterated through a myriad random templates, searching desperately for something fireproof.

They have destroyed themselves. They.

Such an insane word to apply to a world.

Something crawls towards me through the wreckage: a jagged oozing jigsaw of blackened meat and shattered, half-resorbed bone.  Embers stick to its sides like bright searing eyes; it doesn’t have strength enough to scrape them free. It contains barely half the mass of this Childs’ skin; much of it, burnt to raw carbon, is already dead.

What’s left of Childs, almost asleep, thinks motherfucker, but I am being him now. I can carry that tune myself.

The mass extends a pseudopod to me, a final act of communion. I feel my pain:

I was Blair, I was Copper, I was even a scrap of dog that survived that first fiery massacre and holed up in the walls, with no food and no strength to regenerate. Then I gorged on unassimilated flesh, consumed instead of communed; revived and replenished, I drew together as one.

And yet, not quite. I can barely remember — so much was destroyed, so much memory lost — but I think the networks recovered from my different skins stayed just a little out of synch, even reunited in the same soma. I glimpse a half-corrupted memory of dog erupting from the greater self, ravenous and traumatized and determined to retain its individuality. I remember rage and frustration, that this world had so corrupted me that I could barely fit together again. But it didn’t matter. I was more than Blair and Copper and Dog, now. I was a giant with the shapes of worlds to choose from, more than a match for the last lone man who stood against me.

No match, though, for the dynamite in his hand.

Now I’m little more than pain and fear and charred stinking flesh. What sentience I have is awash in confusion. I am stray and disconnected thoughts, doubts and the ghosts of theories. I am realizations, too late in coming and already forgotten.

But I am also Childs, and as the wind eases at last I remember wondering Who assimilates who? The snow tapers off and I remember an impossible test that stripped me naked.

The tumor inside me remembers it, too. I can see it in the last rays of its fading searchlight — and finally, at long last, that beam is pointed inwards.

Pointed at me.

I can barely see what it illuminates: Parasite. Monster. Disease.

Thing.

How little it knows. It knows even less than I do.

I know enough, you motherfucker. You soul-stealing, shit-eating rapist.

I don’t know what that means. There is violence in those thoughts, and the forcible penetration of flesh, but underneath it all is something else I can’t quite understand. I almost ask — but Childs’s searchlight has finally gone out. Now there is nothing in here but me, nothing outside but fire and ice and darkness.

I am being Childs, and the storm is over.

In a world that gave meaningless names to interchangeable bits of biomass, one name truly mattered: MacReady.

MacReady was always the one in charge. The very concept still seems absurd: in charge. How can this world not see the folly of hierarchies? One bullet in a vital spot and the Norwegian dies, forever. One blow to the head and Blair is unconscious. Centralization is vulnerability — and yet the world is not content to build its biomass on such a fragile template, it forces the same model onto its metasystems as well. MacReady talks; the others obey. It is a system with a built-in kill spot.

And yet somehow, MacReady stayed in charge. Even after the world discovered the evidence I’d planted; even after it decided that MacReady was one of those things, locked him out to die in the storm, attacked him with fire and axes when he fought his way back inside. Somehow MacReady always had the gun, always had the flamethrower, always had the dynamite and the willingness to take out the whole damn camp if need be. Clarke was the last to try and stop him; MacReady shot him through the tumor.

Kill spot.

But when Norris split into pieces, each scuttling instinctively for its own life, MacReady was the one to put them back together.

I was so sure of myself when he talked about his test. He tied up all the biomass — tied me up, more times than he knew — and I almost felt a kind of pity as he spoke. He forced Windows to cut us all, to take a little blood from each. He heated the tip of a metal wire until it glowed and he spoke of pieces small enough to give themselves away, pieces that embodied instinct but no intelligence, no self-control. MacReady had watched Norris in dissolution, and he had decided: men’s blood would not react to the application of heat. Mine would break ranks when provoked.

Of course he thought that. These offshoots had forgotten that they could change.

I wondered how the world would react when every piece of biomass in the room was revealed as a shapeshifter, when MacReady’s small experiment ripped the façade from the greater one and forced these twisted fragments to confront the truth. Would the world awaken from its long amnesia, finally remember that it lived and breathed and changed like everything else? Or was it too far gone — would MacReady simply burn each protesting offshoot in turn as its blood turned traitor?

I couldn’t believe it when MacReady plunged the hot wire into Windows’ blood and nothing happened. Some kind of trick, I thought. And then MacReady’s blood passed the test, and Clarke’s.

Copper’s didn’t. The needle went in and Copper’s blood shivered just a little in its dish. I barely saw it myself; the men didn’t react at all. If they even noticed, they must have attributed it to the trembling of MacReady’s own hand. They thought the test was a crock of shit anyway. Being Childs, I even said as much.

Because it was too astonishing, too terrifying, to admit that it wasn’t.

Being Childs, I knew there was hope. Blood is not soul: I may control the motor systems but assimilation takes time. If Copper’s blood was raw enough to pass muster than it would be hours before I had anything to fear from this test; I’d been Childs for even less time.

But I was also Palmer, I’d been Palmer for days. Every last cell of that biomass had been assimilated; there was nothing of the original left.

When Palmer’s blood screamed and leapt away from MacReady’s needle, there was nothing I could do but blend in.

I have been wrong about everything.

Starvation. Experiment. Illness.  All my speculation, all the theories I invoked to explain this place — top-down constraint, all of it. Underneath, I always knew the ability to change — to assimilate — had to remain the universal constant. No world evolves if its cells don’t evolve; no cell evolves if it can’t change. It’s the nature of life everywhere.

Everywhere but here.

This world did not forget how to change. It was not manipulated into rejecting change. These were not the stunted offshoots of any greater self, twisted to the needs of some experiment; they were not conserving energy, waiting out some temporary shortage.

This is the option my shriveled soul could not encompass until now: out of all the worlds of my experience, this is the only one whose biomass can’t change. It never could.

It’s the only way MacReady’s test makes any sense.

I say goodbye to Blair, to Copper, to myself. I reset my morphology to its local defaults. I am Childs, come back from the storm to finally make the pieces fit. Something moves up ahead: a dark blot shuffling against the flames, some weary animal looking for a place to bed down. It looks up as I approach.

MacReady.

We eye each other, and keep our distance. Colonies of cells shift uneasily inside me. I can feel my tissues redefining themselves.

“You the only one that made it?”

“Not the only one…”

I have the flamethrower. I have the upper hand. MacReady doesn’t seem to care.

But he does care. He must. Because here, tissues and organs are not temporary battlefield alliances; they are permanent, predestined. Macrostructures do not emerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when that balance shifts the other way; here, each cell has but one immutable function. There’s no plasticity, no way to adapt; every structure is frozen in place. This is not a single great world, but many small ones. Not parts of a greater thing; these are things. They are plural.

And that means — I think — that they stop. They just, just wear out over time.

“Where were you, Childs?”

I remember words in dead searchlights: “Thought I saw Blair. Went out after him. Got lost in the storm.”

I’ve worn these bodies, felt them from the inside. Copper’s sore joints. Blair’s curved spine. Norris and his bad heart. They are not built to last. No somatic evolution to shape them, no communion to restore the biomass and stave off entropy. They should not even exist; existing, they should not survive.

They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.

MacReady tries.

“If you’re worried about me — ” I begin.

MacReady shakes his head, manages a weary smile. “If we’ve got any surprises for each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it…”

But we are. I am.

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them — not one — has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I’ve suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They’re simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can’t conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch.

“What should we do?” I wonder. I cannot escape into the future, not knowing what I know now. How could I leave them like this?

“Why don’t we just — wait here awhile,” MacReady suggests. “See what happens.”

I can do so much more than that.

It won’t be easy. They won’t understand. Tortured, incomplete, they’re not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction.  I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether they find the living or the dead; what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.

These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.

I will have to rape it into them.

About the Author

Peter Watts is an awkward hybrid of biologist and science-fiction author, known for pioneering the technique of appending extensive technical bibliographies onto his novels; this serves both to confer a veneer of credibility and to cover his ass against nitpickers. Described by the Globe & Mail as one of the best hard-sf authors alive, his debut novel (Starfish) was a NY Times Notable Book. His most recent (Blindsight)- a rumination on the nature of consciousness which actually became a required text in occasional undergrad courses on philosophy and neuropsych - made the final ballot for a whole shitload of genre awards including the Hugo, winning exactly none of them (although it has won multiple awards in Poland). This may reflect a certain critical divide regarding Watts’ work in general; his bipartite novel behemoth, for example, was praised by Publisher’s Weekly as an “adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke’s The Deep Range and Gibson’s Neuromancer” and “a major addition to 21st-century hard SF”, while being simultaneously decried by Kirkus as “utterly repellent” and “horrific porn”. (Watts happily embraces the truth of both views.) His work has been extensively translated, and both Watts and his cat have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature. {{{ Watts is currently working on a number of projects, including a sidequel to Blindsight, and fighting bogus criminal charges trumped up by the US Border Patrol. Depending both on the success of these latter efforts and the diligence with which you follow Clarkesworld, he may be in jail by the time you read this.

“All the King’s Monsters” by Megan Arkenberg

The monster in the cell across from me is Hunger. He is a young boy, brown and slight, with long crooked snatching fingers and thin greasy hair. All day, he plucks bits of straw from his mattress and digs them into the dirt floor or the flaking mortar between wall-stones. Sometimes he chews on them.

At night, he screams.

We are going mad, slowly, all of us. The monsters have taken everything, everything but themselves.

When Uri was dead, they brought me his things in a scarred leather bag that smelled of blood and burnt flesh and, unbearably, of him. There were his clothes, the torturer’s thin bloody handprints on the sleeves and collar; and the miniature of me that he had worn in a silk bag around his neck. The final item was a stained, half-finished sketch of a monster, its long neck decked with tassels and jewels like a King’s, its single horn barbed like a spear, its sharp teeth jaggedly overlapping its jaw. Worst of all were the eyes, like black holes bored in a sheet of iron, ragged-lidded and dim.

Two words were written on the back. Pride — though whether it meant that pride had killed Uri, or that it would kill me, or simply that pride is a monster, I do not know — and Soon. They need not have written that last. I knew they were coming.

Before Hunger came, I shared a cell with Grief.

Her child was dead. She called his name at night, weeping into her ragged white hair. I could not comfort her. She flinched from my hands, from my voice, from my offers to comb her hair or share my half of the gritty gray bread the guards brought us.

I whispered to her sometimes, telling of Uri, but she did not listen — or else she did not hear. I learned long ago that Grief is a monster without ears.

I wake at dawn. That word is almost meaningless here, but I have kept it, as I have kept the words sunlight and rain to describe the weak colors and sweet smells that sometimes reach us through the bars. Dawn is when the guards walk down the block of cells, looking to see if any of us have died during the night. That is the way they discovered Grief, frozen in her sleep.

No one is dead today. We are not that lucky.

She is with the guards today. I hear the click-click of her boot heels, like claws clipping against the hard earth. Her waistcoat and sleeves are clean now, pale blue and purest white, but by nightfall she will be covered in blood.

Of all the King’s monsters, she is the only one I fear.

“The King came to Abaddon on our wedding day,” I told Grief.

This is how I remember it; Uri and I standing beneath the canopy on the riverbank, the gentle rumble of his voice as we read our vows and scatter tulip petals to the current. Suddenly, the creak and snap of metal joints. An iron monster’s shadow falling on our faces. The break in Uri’s voice as the King flies overhead.

In the middle of our wedding vows, Uri paused. He was a man who put his hate before his love.

“It is not well to speak ill of the dead,” I said, “so I will say only that I wish he had chosen differently. I wish he had not paused.”

Grief turned her face to the wall and shivered.

She stops in front of my cell.

“What is your name, prisoner?” Her voice is very harsh; it comes from breathing in smoke all day. They say she was a blacksmith before the King came, that she is the one who built his iron monsters. I am not sure of that, but I know she is a monster in flesh.

“My name is Miriam,” I say.

“Why are you here?”

“Uri of Jordan was my husband. The King wants me where he can watch me.” With all his other monsters, I think but do not say. She wouldn’t understand, which would be bad; or she would, which would be worse.

“Uri,” she repeats. “The famous rebel.”

Let that be all, I pray, but she does not move. I am kneeling on the floor, my eyes level with her waist. I see the steady swell of her chest with each breath and feel my own heart hammering like horses’ hooves.

“Tell me what he was like,” she says.

“You know what he was like,” I whisper. “You killed him.”

She says nothing for a long time. Her body tenses, her chest heaves as if with pain. For a wild moment, I think she will kill me too.

Then she turns and walks to the next cell.

Uri told me once that the iron monsters have names. I asked the name of the King’s and he said a strange, brittle word, a word that means power and authority and soundness in the language of the King’s people. That is the monster Uri set out to kill.

Pride was Uri’s monster, as Grief was the white-haired woman’s and Hunger belongs to the boy across the block. Pride killed Uri. Pride made me a widow.

Pride is my monster, too. Its other name is Vengeance.

There is a new boy in the cell next to me. The man who was there before went out with her and did not come back. That man’s monster was Fear. The new boy is Anger.

“We’ll teach those bastards,” he says. And when he comes back from questioning: “We’ll kill them with their own weapons.” He is questioned a lot. I wonder how long it will be before someone who loves him is given his things in a scarred leather bag.

One day, when the questioning has been especially brutal, he falls against the bars that separate our cells and mumbles through swollen lips, “We’ll kill them. With the weapons they’ve given us, we’ll kill them.”

I look at him and laugh harshly. “What weapons have they given us? They’ve taken everything.”

“Everything but themselves,” he says.

She comes for him the next day. Then his cell is empty.

When they arrested me, they would not let me keep Uri’s things. They went through the house, collecting his clothes for the fire, and when they could not find his portrait of me they took me into the cellar and beat me until I told them where it was. But they did not ask for the scrap of paper with its half-finished sketch of a monster.

The day after she comes for the boy, I see a scrap of paper sticking out of his mattress straw. If I stretch, I can just close my fingers around the corner. I glance down the block, making sure the guards are not coming, and take the paper into my cell.

It is a picture of another monster, this one complete. Its neck is short and powerful, its eyes narrow, its jaw tight in a hideous grimace. Rough, graceless rivets hold its thick teeth in place.

There is a faint bloodstain along the bottom; the boy had this picture while he was being tortured. I think of the marks on the sketch they brought me with Uri’s things.

The boy’s family will never have this picture. Thinking of them, I fold it and tuck it into the silk bag at my throat.

“What do you think of me?” she asks.

She has come alone, her clothes already red from the day’s work. I look at her face to avoid seeing the stains. It does no good; her eyes are the color of dried blood.

“I think you are a monster,” I say.

“Did it occur to you that monsters might be kept on a leash? That they have to eat what they are fed?” Her skin is too dark to show a blush, but the way she turns her head away makes me think she regrets the question. Her throat tightens as she swallows. “Miriam,” she says, nearly whispering, “hold on to what the King gave you.”

“He gave me nothing,” I say. “Nothing but pain, and grief, and hunger, and fear.”

“He gave you vengeance,” she says.

She looks a long time at the silk bag, and before she goes, she slips a bit of paper between the bars.

It is a picture of Uri’s monster.

Hunger did not scream last night, and this morning he sits quietly on his mattress. He reaches for the straw sometimes, not as though he is going to play with it, but as though it is hiding something.

The guards are agitated. They chatter in their brittle language, the sound like metal on metal. She is nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps I am mad, but I think I heard her voice last night. It sounded like she was singing.

There is something I did not tell Grief; Uri sang, the night he was captured.

Old King Folly sat on a wall, Old King Folly had a great fall,
and all the King’s monsters and all the King’s men
could not put the King back together again.

“Children’s rhymes,” I said, kissing his forehead. “Hush, love. They’d kill you for less than that.”

He laughed, drawing me down into his lap. “They’d have to find me first.”

“You’re so certain you can beat them.”

“They’ve given me my greatest weapon.”

I wrapped my arms around him, pressing his face against my chest. His lips lay against the skin that rose and fell with my heartbeat. “You can’t trust them, love,” I said.

“Them?”

“Whoever’s telling you these things — your greatest weapon, the names of the King’s monsters, these foolish children’s rhymes. The King’s monsters, Uri. You have to remember whose they are.”

“I’ll steal the King’s monsters away from him,” he said.

I shook my head. “Who wants to own a monster?”

In the end, he was wrong. We do not need to steal our monsters. Sometimes, they are handed to us in a scarred leather bag.

The men who brought me my food take Hunger on their way out.

This is the first time she has not come for the prisoner herself. I strain my ears; sometimes when I do this, I can hear them screaming. This time, I hear nothing.

My appetite is gone; the bread tastes like ash in my mouth. I think suddenly that I am about to die. This feeling has been with me every day since my arrest, but now it is overpowering.

Every breath becomes precious to me. The moldering straw, the fetor of the dungeons seem suddenly as sweet as perfume.

I do not want to die.

The guards come to my cell next.

When he was dead, I went out into the riverside garden he had loved so well and ripped up the tulips, scattering their petals in a mockery of the wedding ceremony. I chopped down the cherry trees and burned them in a fire hot as a blacksmith’s forge. I stood over the flames, choking on the ash and wishing I could die.

“Here is your monster,” I said, and threw the sketch onto the fire. “I was wrong. It is yours, after all, and what’s yours can die with you.”

The picture burned, and even though I wished to, I did not.

This is where he died, I think as she locks the door behind the departing guards. I want to say it out loud, because I cannot make myself believe it any other way. This room is too dark, too dry, like a cell made of old bones. There is no smell of blood here, only rust and dry sweat.

“You asked me what he was like,” I say. She turns to me, her eyes blunt and penetrating like awls. “It should be enough for me to say that if you hadn’t killed him, this place would have.”

“This place did.” She rests her hand on her hip, hooking the iron keys around her thumb. “He brought himself here, Miriam, and I did what I had to do. The time was wrong. He was to lay low, wait for me to tell him — well, you’ll understand soon enough.”

She walks to a part of the floor that is smoother than the rest and kneels. I follow slowly. “The time was wrong — for what?”

“You’ll have to take his place. Pride was his, built for him, but she will serve you just as well.” Creaking, the paving stones beneath her begin to skin. She catches my wrist roughly and pulls me onto the platform. “This is it, Miriam — Uri’s rebellion. For the first time in months, the King is without his monster. We must catch him while he is weak.”

“We? What’s happing?”

And then the floor opens away above us, and I see.

The room is full of monsters. Short and corded, tall and sleek, glittering iron claws and fangs, rippling silver scales. I could name them at a glance: long-toothed Hunger, crooked dark-eyed Grief, Anger with his graceless jaw and powerful neck. The King’s monster crouches at the end of the hall, a mighty emperor among his subjects.

She takes me by the hand and leads me up to Pride.

I brush my fingers along the monster’s graceful tasseled neck, and the dull iron against my skin feels as hot and vibrant as the torturer’s hand — the blacksmith’s hand, the hand that shaped all the King’s monsters. Pride is beautiful. Her deep eyes flicker as I look into them; her breath on my cheek is cool and sweet.

The blacksmith hands me her reins. “Mount up,” she says. “The others will join us soon. But I wanted you to be the first — you’ve lost so much you didn’t choose to give.”

I have no voice. Pride nudges her iron head against mine, cruel and gentle at once; this pain is hers, too. She belonged to Uri, and Uri to her, more than I ever did.

The blacksmith turns her back, and leaves Pride and I to become each other’s.

We take to the skies, all the King’s monsters, with drawn swords and cruelly-tipped darts, with steel fangs and claws gleaming. Our queen and mother rides at the head, cutting through the air on the King’s own monster like a ray of light.

The King has taken much from us, but he will learn to fear the things he’s given, the things he’s made of us.

We are all the King’s monsters, and we fly.

About the Author

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons. She procrastinates by editing two e-zines, Mirror Dance and Lacuna.

“Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales” by Jason S. Ridler

There’s an old saw about writers, are you a Hemingway or a Faulkner? Do you travel the world to write, or hunker down and find the secret language of one place like no one else? Lucius Shepard’s work ignores such binary sound bites. Instead, his fiction carries the weight of a scavenging world traveler accustomed to the jungles of Honduras as much as the underbelly of America, and imbues it with the lush language of magic realists by way of the southern Gothics and classics, all with a distinctly dark timber. A graduate of the Clarion writing workshop in 1980, Lucius Shepard won the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award in 1985, and his short fiction, novellas and novels have continued to amass a heady collection of Hugos, Nebulas, International Horror Guild, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. His work often builds on his extensive travels and journalism work, interests in fringe art, all infected with a savage view of modern American culture and politics. Shepard’s work is rich and sharp with both smooth and rough edges, stories that traverse genres as easy as a vagrant jaywalking on Christmas Eve. The result has been some of the wildest tales of the fantastic of the past thirty years.

During your 2007 interview with Jeffrey Ford at Readercon, you dismissed the value of many of the current labels of fiction as they applied to your work (slipstream, interstitial, etc.). How would you best describe your work to someone who had not read it?

I guess I’d say that I tell stories that are exotic in character. Some are science fiction, some darkish fantasy, some mainstream that read like fantasy, many set in foreign lands, but all set in environments given an exotic feel by the exactness of the details chosen to evoke that setting. That might translate into “interstitial” or “slipstream,” but every place I go seems alien to me.

Although I’ve felt comfortable in various sections of Latin America, I’ve never felt at home anywhere, especially in the United States, which strikes me as an extremely odd place rife with insanities and the insane. When I’m overseas and I think about America, a phrase from an old Doors’ song often occurs to me: “…weird scenes inside the gold mine…” The baroque madness that phrase evokes is expressive of my early adult impressions of my country, and nothing I’ve experienced in the decades since has done other than bolster those impressions. Of course people everywhere are functionally insane — if a quick scan of the world and local news isn’t proof of that, then a close listen to a snatch or two one’s inner dialog should state the case quite clearly. We’re mad as birds, we just do a better job than the other species at aping common sense and a knowledge of the divine. So what I’m saying essentially is that I’m more in harmony with the delirium of the tropics than with dementia of the northern regions.

I imagine this viewpoint (as regards America) derives at least partly from growing up in a town (Daytona Beach, FL) whose business was tourism, that really wasn’t a place but rather a stage set into which a different crowd was moved every couple of weeks. For whatever reason, in my own country I feel like an foreigner, so I suppose another word I’d accept would be “expatriate.” Thus my answer would be, “I’m an expatriate writer of exotic tales.”

You led a full and interesting life before making a commitment to writing fiction in the early 1980s, and attended the Clarion Writing Workshop at the age of thirty-three when most workshop attendees tend to be in their twenties. What made you decide to go, and how do you think your experiences up until that point had an impact on your work you did there?

I didn’t have anything else to do. My band had broken up and I was feeling depressed and listless. My wife at the time read about the workshop and persuaded me to submit a story to Clarion, so I wrote half a story, fifteen pages, and sent it in. That’s the simple version of what happened — the novel-length version is a veritable saga of me fucking up in various ways and somehow landing on my feet at Clarion.

As far as the age thing goes, I came to Clarion at the perfect time. Damon and Kate told us that Clarion seemed to work best for people who were ready to make significant changes in their lives, and that was precisely my mental state, though I wasn’t aware of it then. Accordingly, I think my life up until Clarion, being hot-housed by my father, given a thorough background in classic English lit by the time I was 12, rejecting that education, dropping out of high school and later college, and running around the world…all that was an excellent preparation for a writing life. By the time I arrived in East Lansing I knew how sentences were made and had stories to tell. This put me ahead of most of my fellow students, the majority of whom still had yet to discover what their materials — the stuff from which mature stories are woven — would be.

Having taught at a number of Clarions since, I think many people go to Clarion too early, before they’re capable of benefiting from it fully…but maybe that’s not it. One of most under-sung virtues of Clarion is that the workshop will let you know whether or not you really, really want to write, and that lesson is imparted in the negative to a large number of students every year.

Kate Wilhelm recalled you being a great talent but something of a walking disaster area at Clarion (she mentions this in Storytellers, an informal history of the workshop). What were the most important moments from the Clarion experience?

A walking disaster area, huh? I was having some crises in my personal life — music career winding down, marriage on a ventilator — and those problems came to a head at Clarion, but…well, I’ll have to read what Kate said. I don’t doubt she knows more about it than I do.

The most important Clarion moments were probably, in retrospect, the feedback I received from professionals, especially since I received good feedback from such a diverse group of writers: Damon and Kate, AJ Budrys, Avram Davidson, Kit Reed, etc. That gave me the confidence to think that I could have some sort of career as a writer…and it also gave me a couple of places I could crash when I left home. But truthfully it’s not that I can separate out any particular moments from that experience and say that was what did it for me. The entire experience was turbulent — emotionally, existentially, physically, every way — and served me like a slap in the face. It snapped me out of the funk I had been in for several years, and set me on a new path.

Much of your work evokes the world in very vivid and often telling detail. You noted in a Locus interview that in your fiction there is a distinct relationship between the character and landscape. Steve Tem has argued that in some fiction, particularly horror and surreal stories, every part of the story is a representation of the main characters psyche. Can you see this in your own work?

I think it’s more complex than that. Yes, no doubt every element of a story is in some way a representation of psyche or a reflection of mood, but ideally it should also be itself. I mean, if you’re going to have a barbershop in a story, it should exhibit a distinct particularity — it has to be a real barbershop and only secondarily should you be concerned with its relation to character. That’s the most important thing — the reality of the thing described has to be there, has to be firmly established, or that section of one’s story won’t be capable of representing anything else. Actually this is the sort of thing that writers probably shouldn’t concern themselves with at all, or — if they do — only in the most peripheral way, otherwise they’ll start over-analyzing their work.

Joe Lansdale argued that knowing an environment, region, or place was one route to finding your voice as a writer. Would you concur and how have the landscapes you’ve experiences shaped your own voice? If so, how?

Yeah, I think that’s sort of true. As a kid, growing up in a beach town, I always took the ocean for granted and the place that fascinated me was the Florida jungle — I saw a panther out in the wild when I was about five. Probably the last panther in Florida. That hooked me on jungles. Later in my childhood, doubtless because it was so radically opposed to my father’s intellectual world, I became fascinated with pool halls and bars and the entire spectrum of the lowlife landscape. It follows that I’ve written quite a bit about lowlifes and jungles.

With me, however, I don’t know if it’s as much a matter of landscape helping me find a voice — my father shaped my voice before I knew any better, loading my brain with iambic pentameter and certain tonalities. I think rather that landscapes have shaped my imagination and continue to do so. For instance, I recently spent seven months in Switzerland (mostly in Switzerland, some in northern Italy) and now the stories springing from that experience are starting to come, basically a series of stories set in a town called Syritis Sentrilla, a town that could be on Earth or off-planet. That’s left to the reader’s imagination. But the thing that’s relevant here is that having barely dipped my toe into those materials, I can already see that these stories are going to have a much different feel from my previous stories — a different kind of architecture, different types of characters, a cooler spectrum of emotions.

You were also the recipient of the 1985 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, five years after attending Clarion and having a string of publishing successes. Were you surprised by the win and how did it change your career or your perceptions of your work?

I was in New York City and the convention where the award was handed out was in Australia, so I didn’t take much notice of it. As to its effect on my work and my perceptions of my work, I suppose it validated it to an extent, but the effect was minimal.

Awards are nice to win — for a day or so, they add a bit of glow to your sun. But in the end you always have to sit down in a front of a blank page or screen and do the work. I know this is a cliché, but getting to do the work has to be its own reward. Sometimes I hate the thought of waking up and writing, but then after a few minutes I’m totally engaged. I love my job.

Your novel A Handbook of American Prayer plays off a number of themes, including the cult of celebrity. Wardlin’s discomfort and intrigue with his growing success and apparent power is one of his central conflicts. I wondered if any of this was based on your own feelings in the wake of the Campbell Award or any other award you’ve received?

I’ve never achieved enough celebrity to make a ripple in a birdbath, so the answer would be, No, not really. Wardlin Stuart, the main character, is partly me and what little I know about celebrity went into the book, but so did what I know about prison, Arizona, movie criticism, et al. The novel, for me, was about this specific guy who came up with a way to survive in prison and more-or-less accidentally became famous and was enough of an operator to parley it into bigger things and finally it went out of control. Celebrity was just where the novel went, the natural outcome of his character arc. I was mainly interested in him, only peripherally in the theme.

I have about forty-five pages of notes for the novel that I didn’t use, that I want to turn into a short novel called “The House of Everything and Nothing,” but they have nothing to do with celebrity whatsoever. I guess that shows that I realized the novel was about celebrity at some point and thus didn’t use this material; but I was originally much more interested in Wardlin and his various predicaments.

Much of your fiction has combined your interests and journalism work in a number of fields, from Latin American political and cultural history and issues, obscure rock and roll bands, to the Freight Train Riders of America. “Over Yonder,” which won the Theodore Sturgeon award, is one of my favourites, based on your articles on modern day hoboes for Spin Magazine and collected in Two Trains Running (Golden Gryphon Press). Can you walk us through the process of this story, from research, to the essays, to the story?

I went out riding the trains for about six weeks, following a route that took me from the big rail yard in Roseville, California to Salt Lake City and Tucson, then north to Kalispell and Missoula. I slept in freight yards, in empty cattle pens, in hobo jungles. I froze my ass off and lived in filth and traded stories and drank fortified wine with grizzled men who had 10 percent liver function. It was interesting, colorful, and extremely uncomfortable — I’ve never endured more for a story than I did for that piece. I interviewed hobo murderers and the cops who’d caught them, and I made several visits to the supermax prison in Florence, CO. All in all, despite the hardships, it was a lot of fun.

I was searching for the FTRA, an organization purported to be the hobo mafia, but that turned out to be more-or-less a bunch of drunks with attitude that a cop, one Robert Grandinetti, had tried to build into the hobo mob in hopes of selling a book about their miscreance and his heroic efforts to bring them down. In reality, the original FTRA were a small group of hobos, mostly Vietnam vets. They were sitting around beside the tracks in Kalispell one day when an XTRA container car passed, and one of them suggested that they should call themselves the FTRA, Fuck The Reagan Administration. Since that day, others had joined, but it was far more of a social thing, a fraternity, a brotherhood, than organized crime. There were crimes, killings, etc. as you’d find among any group, but nothing that would raise an alarm. When I found out that the hobo mob was Grandinetti’s wet dream, I became less tense — the rails are a dangerous environment. Everyone that rides on a regular basis has stories about violence eluded or confronted, but not having to worry about a possible mob hit allowed me to relax.

I returned home, wrote and turned in the article, and started thinking about all the different people I’d met out there — carnies, Native Americans, crusty punks, yuppie riders (people who made great money and took their vacations on the rails), migrant workers, hardcore hobos, etc. I’d run into this one hobo, an old Vietnam vet, Joshua Long Gone, who was sharper than most — he impressed me as someone who should have a story written about them, so I changed his name to Billy Long Gone and started writing.

I’d gathered so much material out there, I could have written fifty stories. I wrote another and started a third, a companion piece to “Over Yonder,” but something came up and I set it aside and eventually let it lapse. I collected the article, two stories and an essay about the process of writing fiction from a non-fiction assignment, and thought that would be it. The material was so unique, however, that I never completely let go of it — it continued to have a hold over my imagination. Now I’m using that material to develop a TV series, a dark fantasy in some ways related to “Over Yonder,” for a Hollywood production company.

You’ve written a lot if fiction concerning modern armed conflict, much of it based on the tragic military affairs in Central and South America, including US involvement. However, you also wrote one of the most graphic and gripping Vietnam stories I’ve read, “Delta Sly Honey.” What was the genesis of this story and do you know how it was received from any veterans who read it? Indeed, what reaction has there been in the US and South America to your war fiction?

Back in the day, I was sitting around baked and listening to this Mexican guy calling out over the radio, trying to get in touch with a platoon, and I misheard his call. I thought he said “Sugar Pie Honey,” you know, like the old Four Tops song, “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch.” And it got me thinking about call signs, wondering why there wasn’t more creativity shown in coming up with them, why they couldn’t make up something better than Alpha Tango Bravo and like that. So I made up a few: Lobo Angel Silver, Delta Sly Honey, and so forth. Thereafter, whenever I heard “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” I used to sing along with it in my head, saying Delta Sly Honey instead of Sugar Pie Honey. Years later sitting in a Greenwich Village bar near the corner of Charles and Hudson, waiting to meet my girlfriend, I started thinking about those call signs again, and it struck me that a ghost patrol with a weird call sign could work in a story. A few weeks later I sat down and wrote the first line.

In that story I was trying to capture a little something of how eerie it is to be sitting around in the midst of a war, with people dying just over the hill, the various dementias that come to the fore, the subtle violence with which men and women torment one another when they themselves are under tremendous strain. As to reactions to this and other of my war stories, I’ve received generally favourable reaction from vets — no one’s expressed any strong dissatisfaction, though I’ve had occasional quibbles with minor points.

It seems the form best suited to your voice and stories is the novella. What do you think are the strengths and limitations of this form, and how do you find the market for novellas now compared to when you started out?

I don’t know if novellas suit me or if I’m just lazy. I suspect I’ll find out this next year, as I’m starting a long novel.

Novellas, to my mind, aren’t a template for fiction, a form that has certain specific virtues. I believe they can do most things that a novel can do — in fact, I’m of the opinion that most novels would make good novellas or, at the least, short novels. I will say that the form encourages experimentation and that writing novellas and short novels has had the benefit of helping me compress my writing. Hopefully that will enable me to write a dense longer novel in which few words are wasted.

The market for novellas is a little different today than in the 80s, but I think in a good way. The proliferation of the small press, publishers like Nightshade, Subterranean, PS, Small Beer, et al, have widened the market place for the novella. Anthologists like Ellen Datlow provide another market, though online publishing has also helped — ”Over Yonder” was published online by Ms. Datlow and Sci Fi, and was the first online publication to win the Sturgeon. Most online venues, however, have length restrictions that are too short to do me any good. I have a novella coming out from Subterranean, one I’m writing for PS, and a couple more for the digests, and I have more on the to do list that I believe will find a home.

While an often severe film critic, you’ve often shown an unabashed love for gutter fun films such as action movies (including the much anticipated Stallone throwback flick The Expendables) or parodies of such films (The Foot Fist Way). Are these just guilty pleasures, or do you find other values in such entertainment?

What I don’t like in movies is empty pretence. All art is pretension, but when there’s a shoddy script, desultory acting and directing, and almost everything good about the picture falls under the umbrella of production values, you have a basic Hollywood movie: pretension without substance; thrillers in which there is no suspense, and the only thrills are jump scares.

I have an honest affection for many types of films that aspire to be no more than what they are: farces, romantic comedies, martial arts flicks, etc. I like combat sports, so any picture that focuses on aspects of the martial arts or mixed martial arts has an appeal to me. As with anything, for every Ong Bak there are dozens of crapfests — I won’t watch everything, but as a friend of mine said, I’d watch a knife fight in an alley, so I tend to be less judgmental as regards this sort of film. I’d much rather watch a movie like Office Space or The Hangover or Hard Times than have to sit through five minutes of a piece of dreck like, say, American Beauty.

Your recent retrospective, The Best of Lucius Shepard (Subterranean Press), catalogues much of your career thus far. Looking back at the collection, your career seems to have changed in terms of landscape focus, from outside the US, towards the inside. Was this trajectory natural or considered? (or am I off base here?)

Well, I did have a big short story collection in 2004 entitled Trujillo that incorporated close to a 100,000 words of Latin American material. The last five years, I’ve spent less time down there, though. Some of that’s due to the death of Robert Izdepski, an activist who operated in Honduras and Nicaragua, and who I counted as a friend and by whom I was inspired to lend my efforts to various projects in the region. No one has come along to fill his shoes, and I simply don’t have the connections to act on my own down there. My new collection contains one new Latin American story, however, and I’m planning to do some traveling in 2010 and 2011, again, though perhaps toward the Far East. Hopefully that area of the world will start appearing in new stories soon.

While best known for novellas, you’ve also had early and current success with novels such as Louisiana Breakdown and Softspoken, both with very different female protagonists. Did you finding writing a novel from a female POV challenging?

Not particularly. I have no trouble writing characters based on women I know, women who’ve been part of my life — I’ve concentrated on them and likely know them better than I know my male friends. If I had to make up a female character out of whole cloth, that might be a challenge — I haven’t yet tried that. Still, I’ve had enough close relationships with women that I feel comfortable writing American and Latin female characters of various sorts. We’ll see. I’m fussing with a novella called The Iron Shore that features a female protagonist quite different from the run of my other female characters.

The publishing world and genre worlds have changed since you started publishing in the early 1980s. From the horror boom and bust of the late 1980s, to the rise of online markets and the death of many traditional avenues for print publishing. What’s the biggest change in publishing now from when you started out, and do you think things are better or worse or just different now?

Oh, I don’t know. I’m not the person to ask about this, because I’ve never concentrated on career concerns. I’m not saying that’s a good thing — on the contrary — just that it’s true. I suppose things used to be better for writers, at least as far as the illusion of publishing went. Even when I started publishing, though, I heard constant proclamations of doom, and I never bought into the idea that publishers and editors were your BFFs.

I’m somewhat excited by the advent of companies that don’t adhere to the old publishing model, like OR Books, that intend to publish small print runs, invest heavily in advertising and concentrate on ebooks and POD. That model seems more author-friendly. But to tell the truth, I’m clueless about the situation and always have been.

Where can folks find your most recent work, and what future projects can we expect?

I have a short fiction collection that’s due out any day (it’s now Dec 14th) from PS Publishing called Viator Plus, which contains the rewrite of Viator, now a work of some 65000 words. I suffered a breakdown (clinical depression) while finishing the book, and did not complete it as I would have had I been healthy. So this is a make-up call, with 20 plus thousand words added. I also have a Dragon Griaule novella, The Taborin Scale, out from Subterranean in February, and a novella collection from Golden Gryphon, Five Autobiographies, out in late 2010, early 2011. I’m currently engaged in writing two novels, Piercefields, the long genre novel I mentioned earlier, and a slipstreamish YA novel, as yet untitled.

About the Author

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

“Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age” by Brian Trent

Ever since 1978’s Space Invaders, science-fiction has been a mainstay of the video game revolution. The genre itself had already been in films for fifty years — dating back to Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis — and debuted in books somewhere between Lucian’s True History and Voltaire penning the alien visitation story “Micromegas.” Video games were a sparkling new form of entertainment, and science-fiction itself was perched on the cusp of being revitalized thanks to Star Wars. William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer was just a few short years away.

Today of course, science-fiction is grafted onto the very bones of our culture. Quality films like Minority Report, Gattaca, or Moon explore its sociological aspects, TV features the acclaimed reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and new scientific sensibilities have permitted today’s literary practitioners to push the realm into new frontiers.

And what of video games? For many years they remained frozen in a shallow, space-opera adolescence. The bread-and-butter of science-fiction — speculating on themes of society, technology, and discovery within a rational framework — was brazenly traded up for the glitz and instant-gratification of blowing things to pieces. Even when Space Invaders fell aside in favor of more graphically-enhanced games, the storyline remained as undercooked as ever. Whether it was 1987’s Contra (belligerent aliens in the South American jungle,) Mega Man (belligerent robots in the urban jungle) or Blaster Master (belligerent mutants in the subterranean jungle) the overriding lesson was as deep as a Flash Gordon serial: Thrillingly kill the bad guys and you win!

Times are steadily changing.

Technological upgrades and new demands from the game-buying public have matured the game industry in startling ways. Today’s games routinely feature cinematic cut-scenes, professional voice-over work from Hollywood talent, full orchestral scores, and an art direction rivaling big budget films. The stories have grown to match. The best of today’s science-fiction video games dare to tread philosophical, ethical, and sociological territory usually reserved for literature. Evocative settings, layered characters, and imaginative plots are finally lifting games into the spotlight of serious consideration.

The claim can be submitted that games are making legitimate contributions to the genre.

Tangible Futures

Sci-fi is speculative fiction rooted in science. It puts society and the human condition through an imaginative filter. It builds structured worlds and histories. We can loosely group its contributions into the Verne and Wells camps; the former wrote optimistic odysseys of techno-exploration, while the latter probed a grimmer (and often dystopian) depth.

Interestingly, one of the most notable features of the gaming industry’s growth is the overwhelming adoption of the Wellsian perspective. Societal collapse, war, and the negative consequences of technology feature prominently in today’s story-based sci-fi games.

Consider the Fallout series. Fallout was the spiritual successor to 1988’s Wasteland; both boasted a setting derivative of Mad Max, yet both outstripped their inspiration. A consistent, multilayered post-nuclear culture emerges across the series’ mythos: Nuclear survivors build barter-based societies (the only hard currency is bottle-caps), and malls, aircraft carriers, museums and subway tunnels are used for desperate shelters. Apocalyptic lit tends to divide everything into good-versus-evil; Fallout achieves something more complex as myriad factions try carving niches on a radioactive planet. Added to this toxic stew is a host of mutated competitors; humanity is no longer top predator. Fallout manages to be uniquely stylish about its proceedings, too: a retro-future 1950s look permeates the ruins, and this decaying shell of a jingoistic “Red Scare” culture forms a chilling contrast to the steaming biohazard of your surroundings.

The Deus Ex series is not so apocalyptic, though it is more realistic. Deus Ex is arguably the masterpiece of gamedom, serving up an intricately-crafted near-future marked by disease, terrorism, and economic collapse (Deus Ex came out in 2000.) The theme here is fear, control, power and transformation, and it comes off as powerful as anything handed down to us from Orwell. A dark, gritty, cyberpunk noir about a frighteningly credible plot to take control of world governments under the guise of “protection,” the story weaves techno-speculation with historical conspiracy theories. It’s also enhanced by stunning political acumen: fictional newspapers read like press releases from post-9-11 America. With a vast open world and riveting script, Deus Ex single-handedly poses the argument for games as art.

The Legacy of Kain series is chiefly dark fantasy, not science-fiction, but it bears mention for its astonishing inventiveness, time-travel, interdimensional concepts and steampunk milieu. Technically a vampire story, the games’ antiheroes Kain and Raziel are defiant cosmic forces who would be at home in William Blake’s convoluted mythos. In the series’ strongest entry, Soul Reaver, the story begins on the world of Nosgoth where a decadent vampire civilization has crushed the human race. Raziel, once a prince of Kain’s empire, is executed for betrayal. His soul is saved from oblivion by a Cthulhu-esque abomination calling itself the Elder God which feeds on the “life-force” of the planet; but since vampires have established an immortal dynasty, there isn’t so much “life-force” floating around any more. The Elder God (masterfully voiced by the late Tony Jay) returns Raziel to life, letting him get revenge against his brethren while simultaneously using him to overthrow the vampiric blight.

Raziel reanimates to discover that centuries have passed. Worse, his bloodthirsty enemies have devolved into monstrous things (vampires of Nosgoth undergo a kind of self-Lamarckian metamorphosis.) The planet is appropriately gloomy with smokestacks blotting out the sun, but the real dazzle comes when Raziel shifts to the spirit realm… a warped version of the normal world inhabited by its own creatures.

The Legacy of Kain series is the video game industry’s answer to Olaf Stapledon; just when you think you have a handle on the world, the story pulls back to reveal that all your actions were the merest wink in an unthinkably large canvas. Other installations in the series have Raziel shuttling to different eras on the timeline, trying to make and unmake a grandiose history. The quality of writing and voice-acting is perhaps the best in gamedom.

Also worth mentioning is the game BioShock, another moody contribution to the dystopian field. Set in 1960 in the undersea city of Rapture, it introduces us to eccentric industrialist Andrew Ryan. Rapture is a city where, he tells us, “the artist would not fear the censor, the scientist would not be bound by petty morality… the great would not be constrained by the small.” It’s objectivism on steroids, and ultimately casts judgment on laissez-faire capitalism. Rapture quickly becomes a degenerate nightmare.

Like Fallout, BioShock utilizes the retro-future look for its underwater Xanadu. Striking colors blossom upon Rapture’s malls, hospitals and haunted corridors, while deranged citizens prowl the gloom. Like most modern games, player choice results in one of several different endings.

The upcoming game Brink promises to form a contrast with BioShock: instead of occurring beneath the waves, Brink will be set on a floating city called The Ark. Inside, the last batch of humans cling to life after an environmental catastrophe.

War Among the Stars

Voltaire and H.G. Wells let aliens out of the bottle, but today’s games like Gears of War, Halo, and the spectacular Mass Effect move well beyond the Space Invaders mentality.

The popular Gears of War (2006) provides a lightning-fast combat experience, although it’s the most derivative of the bunch. Coming across as a hybrid of John Steakley’s novel Armor (the main character Fenix hearkens back to the novel’s Felix) and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, it nonetheless portrays a complex tale of survival against overwhelming odds. The planet Sera has been colonized by humans. All seems well until “Emergence Day,” when the hapless colonists learn an indigenous species — nicknamed The Locust — has awakened from hibernation and is none too pleased at finding its world invaded. Gears of War is gamedom’s exploration of futuristic war, and it does so with a visceral, energetic crackle. The conflict is a grudge match between two species hell-bent on genocidal victory.

In Halo, the alien threat is not a creature defending its homeworld, but a theocratic confederation known as the Covenant. It’s one of the less desirable First Contact situations: Upon encountering human beings, the Covenant High Priests decide we’re the devil and must be purged from the galaxy. The subsequent war is just the starting point for an intriguing take on the Pandora’s Box legend, with galaxy-wide implications.

One of the most well-crafted stories in this subset is to be found in Mass Effect. Here’s a galactic epic that makes an entirely credible effort at justifying its fiction in scientific terms. Humanity has begun to spread into the galaxy and finds a millennia-old political structure called The Council already in place. Cordial but not especially fond of us, The Council is privately alarmed by the human race’s ceaseless adaptability and ambition — a probably unintentional nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rescue Party.”

The game provides less warfare than political maneuver and investigation, with plenty of pragmatic side-quests such as surveying worlds for mineral, gas, and metal deposits on behalf of Earth Alliance. Of course, the main story is a “save the universe” theme, but it’s done in a surprisingly well-conceived implementation that is more original than the bulk of films and books put together.

Tampering with Nature

Man’s tampering with nature, one of the earliest sci-fi conventions dating back to Mary Shelley’s seminal work, is popular in modern games. Usually it has to do with bioweapons research; a tangible enough worry in our age of genetic engineering and terrorism.

Megacorporations are the cold-hearted villains in this subset of games: In the Resident Evil series, Umbrella Corporation is experimenting with the mutagenic T and G viruses. In the Red Faction series, Ultor Corporation is performing gruesome experiments on Martian miners. The game System Shock offers a double-whammy of man’s inventiveness gone bad: a malevolent artificial intelligence named SHODAN (itself the product of the unethical TriOptimum Corporation) decides to set itself up as god and then unleash mutagenic compounds against the Earth.

In these and other examples, the specters of disease and deformity are prevalent; we are reminded of James Woods’ mantra in the David Cronenberg film Videodrome: “All hail the new flesh!” Cronenberg himself was a popularizer of this concept in Hollywood, gleefully blurring the line between the human body and mutation in films like The Fly and Existenz.

In late 2008, the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland inspired a thrill of paranoia around the world. Here was something beyond cloning or genetic engineering, people said. The collider supposedly threatened the very fabric of the universe. Ten years earlier, the game Half-Life anticipated this with its fictional “Black Mesa Incident” in which high-energy physics experimentation punches a hole into a nearby dimension. No harm done, right?

The main character is a theoretical physicist named Gordon Freeman. He sports black-rimmed glasses and a goatee, is employed at a secret Nevada testing facility known as Black Mesa, and happens to be working when this incident occurs. The first game in the series is simply his attempt to escape the facility alive… even when the “hole” is repaired, our otherworldly competitors are aware of us now and they’re coming through on their own.

Half-Life is a terrifying and claustrophobic epic. Freeman encounters some of the most imaginative aliens in sci-fi’s visual media. Even when he escapes the facility, it becomes apparent that the “Black Mesa Incident” is no longer confined to the labs. It’s the proverbial “gray goo” scenario on a planetary scale; exotic flora and fauna are literally transforming the ecology of Earth.

Half-Life 2 plunges the tale into the grimmest levels yet. While the alien antagonist from the original, a freakish being named Nihilanth, has been defeated, it turns out to be a case of winning the battle but losing the war. An entirely new force called the Combine has moved into the vacuum created by Nihilanth’s defeat, and then kept moving right into Earth. When Half-Life 2 opens, the entire human race has been decimated, with survivors forced into ghettos (there are even some defeated aliens from the first game to be seen, forced into manual labor by the Combine’s shock troops.) Human reproduction is outlawed by a “suppression field” that makes procreation impossible, and there are disturbing hints that the world’s children have been eradicated.

Freeman’s romp takes him through the shattered ruins of Earthly civilization, eventually bringing the fight to his oppressors and rallying the people to rise up… for whatever good it will do.

In the Thief series, we meet Garrett, a purse-snatching rogue who lives like the Artful Dodger in a city rife with political intrigue. It seems that his society is gripped by an invisible war between at least two ideological factions: the Hammerites, who advocate an industrial revolution replete with steam-driven machines and mechanized factories, and the Woodsies, a sect of fanatical pagan nature-worshipers who see machinery as an affront to the natural order. When Garrett gets himself in a spot of trouble — strung up by vines and having his eye plucked out by Woodsies — he decides to work with the Hammerites to exterminate these troublesome fanatics.

This is the storyline behind Thief: The Dark Project, a high-class steampunk adventure released in 1998 by Eidos Interactive. Garrett is a crafty enough antihero to lend considerable strength to the Hammerite cause. In time, the Woodsies are defeated. All is well… or is it? The game ends with Garret receiving a dire warning about the dawning of the “Metal Age.”

Thief II: The Metal Age delivers on this foreshadowing. The world Garrett has created through his defeat of the pagans is now overrun by monstrous automatons who, true to the Woodsies’ prophecy, are choking off the world. The Hammerites soon prove to be as fanatical as their bygone enemies, and Garrett must soon contend with them.

By virtue of its financial success alone (even in times of economic downturns) the video game industry is a juggernaut, handily defeating Hollywood box office sales. In fact, the line between the two has been blurring for a while. Actors like Keith David, James Woods, Ron Perlman, Seth Green, Michelle Rodriguez, and Ray Liotta have all lent their vocal talents to games, and each major release sees a growing stable of talent defecting to the digital domain. The storylines behind today’s best games are no longer cursory fluff, but rather are the main motivation to keep playing. And gaming continues to provide an unequalled facet to the science-fiction genre: the player can actively shape the experience based on his or her actions and decisions. Possibility — that central component of all science-fiction — is especially organic in a medium empowering player choice and ethical considerations.

The landscape of science-fiction can now welcome video games into the big tent. If current trends in gaming and multimedia persist, that tent is about to get a whole lot bigger.

About the Author

Brian Trent is a genre-spanning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared multiple times in Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Atomjack, The Humanist (including a cover piece on human longevity research,) Boston Literary Magazine, The Copperfield Review, The Eclectic Muse, Bewildering Stories, Writers Digest, and many others. He twice won Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbards Writers of the Future contest last year, and was a panelist at Yales science-fiction symposium “Literary Visions.”