Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 77

Table of Contents

Gravity

by Erzebet YellowBoy

The Wanderers

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Vacant Spaces

by Greg Kurzawa

The Great Leap Sideways: SF and Social Media

by Mark Cole

Always a New World: A Conversation with Karen Lord

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Reading and Writing and Moral Judgment

by Daniel Abraham

Editor's Desk: Upgrades and Reader's Poll Winners

by Neil Clarke

Concrete 9

Art by Yang Xueguo

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2013

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Gravity

Erzebet YellowBoy

It starts how it always starts, with a kiss on the cheek, goodbye.

All my life my mother had pushed for this, and now here we are. I look down and see her scalp through her thinning gray hair. Her hands are spotted, the veins are blue and raised, and the knuckles are swollen and sore. She is not well, but she will not go into suspension. She has told me so. She will not wait for the world to renew. She will not see the sun through the clouds. Mulch, she says. I want to mulch, and then I want you and your daughter to plant flowers on my grave.

Oh, mama. I have no daughter and I never will.

I leave her at the door with damp eyes and a beatific smile on her face. Her daughter has achieved—is achieving—greatness. Her daughter is going to save the world. I wave as I step into the copter. She waves back as we fly away.

“Are you ready, Field Captain Mair?”

I steal a glance at Hijo, who will save the world with me. He is calm; his eyes give nothing away. “I am, Field Captain Hijo,” I say. “I am ready.” I have been ready since I was four years old.

In these last minutes before the real work begins, I have time to reflect on the path that brought me here. This is not something I allow myself very often. Long reminisces waste time. I am where I am, I always tell myself. How I got here is done. Where I’m going—that is what matters. But now I’m confronted with it, I feel the need to acknowledge that I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for her.

My mother pretends to recall a time when the sun shone and the flowers bloomed and the planet wasn’t covered in ice. When I was a little girl, she told me stories about trees—how they filled the atmosphere with clean oxygen for us to breathe. She told me about the sun, a bright gaseous ball of light in the sky that warmed the soil and nurtured life on our now frozen world. I believed every word, even though I couldn’t imagine what a tree was. And then she sent me to the Academy, because she wanted me to put flowers on her grave.

There I learned that my mother’s landscape was long vanished. I was crushed, but she’d done her job too well. Already, I was ready to do anything to melt the ice and see my world covered in the trees my mother did not, could not, remember. I, on the other hand, finally understood what a flower was.

When I graduated from my first year, my mother was there. She held my hand as we walked between the instructors, thanking them for their hard work. When I tried to run away because I’d failed a test, my mother—ill at the time—came to comfort me. When I graduated from my third year, there was no holding of hands. She stood proudly in the audience, tears of pride on her face, and clapped louder than anyone else in the room. Every time I fell, she picked me up. Every time I went home, she tended my wounds before sending me back again. She has only ever asked for flowers in return.

I will give her flowers, even if I can’t be the one who plants them on her grave.

As Hijo steers us over the black rooftops of the city, I wonder how many people care about, or even know what we are going to do on this very ordinary and yet extraordinary day. I hook my little finger in the corner of my mouth, a nervous habit I can’t seem to break even though I know I do it. Of course I am nervous, I tell myself, but that’s no reason to look foolish. Thankfully, Hijo doesn’t notice. Stone cold, that man is, and deep as the frozen sea. In a different life, I might have loved him. Whether or not he would have loved me is another matter, but I sometimes like to pretend, too.

Above us, the sky is gray. It is always gray, in varying shades, unless it is white with falling snow. I am grateful it is not snowing now.

We arrive. We are greeted by the members of our crew: Captain Ahab (his idea of a joke), Captain Verma, Field Captain Durant. Hijo and I shake their hands, and then we go in for our final briefing.

Once on the ship we’ll be equal in rank, but we have chosen to defer to Ahab. He is the oldest, has studied the longest, and has the largest family and therefore the most to lose. We have worked this out amongst ourselves, breaking rules even before departure. We are reminded now, in a stern lecture, that we are equally responsible for the success or failure of our mission.

The briefing, if I’m honest, is boring. We’ve heard it all before—we’ve heard it since the day we five were chosen for this mission. “A great service to humankind.” “Our survival rests on your success.” Etc. What no one wants to admit is that our going to the sun is little more than a bureaucrat’s whim. We are setting off on what must be the most ridiculously thin hope ever conceived in the minds of men. And we know, all five us, that none of us are coming home.

It will take us precisely two hundred and fifty-one days to reach our destination (assuming everything goes well on the way there). Most of those days will be spent collecting data. Very few of those days have anything to do with the sun. None of us have ever seen the sun, not with our own eyes. We are quite excited.

Captain Verma is anxious to depart. She does not like long-winded ceremonies, and she hates the word goodbye. Captain Ahab is happy to shake hands and play the star during these last moments. He is a very social man. Hijo and I stand back and let him get on with it. FC Durant smiles when she needs to, but we who know her can see she’s had enough.

When the briefing ends, we are led through a brightly lit hall full of dignitaries, celebrities, politicians—anyone who could afford to see the spectacle. We are not expected to stay and chat, thank goodness. We are all ready to go. Finally, after what feels like forever, we are ushered into the loading room to prepare.

No one speaks. Captain Ahab has sweat on his brow. We don our suits and seal them up tight. I wish my mother was here to draw her thin hand across my forehead, to tell me everything is going to be fine, just fine. Don’t you worry yourself none. I wish I could see her one more time.

Last minute checks are carried out by the technicians, and then we are shuttled to the ship. We board.

We want the sun to burn bigger, to burn brighter, to burn hotter. We want it to warm the ice our planet has become. We know this is not how it works, but we have tried everything from our tiny rock among the stars, and this insanity is all we have left. We are dying. We need the sun to warm the oceans; we are running out of food and we are running out of the means to produce more. We are running out of the means to heat our homes. If we do not succeed in our mission, the ice will encase us. If we do succeed, the sun might crisp us all. When you are dead anyway, you are willing to take such a risk.

Day 21: I hear my mother’s voice on the comms. “Hello?” she says. She will have sent this message moments, or hours, ago. My mother and I no longer exist in quite the same time. “Have you seen it yet? Is it as I told you it would be? I am so proud of you.”

I am crying. “Yes, it is everything you said it was and more,” I say, even though she cannot hear me.

The sun is white, and immense, and beautiful. We can see it through one, tiny window. It looks hot. It looks like it should be hot enough, without our intervention, to burn our planet to ash. In the future I’m sure it will. It is only we who are tired of waiting. And I will do anything to get those flowers on my mother’s grave.

At the Academy I learned about how we sent men to the moon. Then we sent men and women, and finally we put someone on Mars. Shortly afterwards, the snow began to fall. It didn’t stop for a hundred years. The world as my ancestors knew it vanished. Not everyone survived. The ice age came upon us. We do not know when or if it will ever end.

Hijo has taken to smiling at me. I don’t know what he’s thinking and I’m not going to ask. Captain Ahab has gone silent. It is very unlike him.

Day 45: Hijo, for one brief moment, holds my hand. I think we’re all feeling cramped and claustrophobic. No one is sleeping well. FC Durant has taken charge. She tries to make us laugh by taking off her boots and doing cartwheels. I think she’s gone a little mad. She sends our reports back to base once every twelve hours. Today she almost forgets. I do it for her. A message comes in as I’m sending out. It is for me.

“Your mother,” the voice says, “is very ill.”

I panic. Was this sent a day ago? A week? How is she now? The disconnect is killing me. I don’t want yesterday’s news.

My mother was already old when she birthed me. Impregnation doesn’t come easily to us these days. Even this most primal urge is stunted by the cold. I always did have a hard time believing there were fifteen billion people on earth when the ice came. There are only a few hundred million now. Old maps show land where we have ever only known a frozen ocean. What will happen when the ice melts? Will the old cities rise up with towers broken, streets cracked, entire districts swallowed by sinkholes? Will we find bodies, preserved by the cold? Suddenly I’m glad I won’t be there to see it. I am not sure humanity is prepared.

And my mother is ill. I send a short message back with the reports: please update me on her condition. There is nothing for it now except to wait, just like they are waiting back home. I can see Venus. It looks like it is covered in snow.

Day 92: Captain Verma is dead.

We each have a kill-pill. Things might become unbearable, there at the end, but whether we bite the pill or not is our choice. This is a difficult journey. The small cabin, the low ceiling, the hard bunks into which we strap ourselves for our sleep shifts are minor inconveniences compared to what lies ahead. We spy on each other, checking for symptoms of despair. We have all been trained—we know the right words, we know how to bring a shipmate back from the brink, and we know how to keep our own thoughts from traveling down the darkest paths.

Verma had shown no signs of depression. We are all surprised to find her gone. We put her body in cold storage so it won’t smell. Captain Ahab says a prayer—non-denominational. None of us have gods. He files the report in silence. What we often require is silence, both from ourselves and from others. No one speaks for the rest of the day.

I have heard nothing about my mother. It is only natural, I tell myself, that I’m thinking about her now. Loss cuts close to the bone.

The other day Hijo cornered me. He put his arms around me and we shared a long, intimate hug. I pretend we are falling in love, even though we’ve only shared that one moment. I remember how my hand felt in his. Captain Ahab and FC Durant both saw us. I expected Ahab to lecture me on the futility of romance, but he did not. FC Durant seems more stable these days. Her face is always stern and she keeps herself occupied reading data, or staring out at the stars.

Day 121: I feel unsettled. We have no privacy here, and our suits never come off. I want to take Hijo into my bunk and lose myself in his body. I crave the feeling of his flesh against mine, but there is no way for me to reach him.

It is Hijo who brings me the latest message. “Your mother,” he says, “has advanced signs of dementia. She has been moved into a clinic.”

I stare at him, wondering how such a beautiful mouth could have spoken such foul words. He shocks me by leaning forward. He takes my head in his hands and kisses me. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Do you think she still knows my name?” It is not the thing to say after a kiss. It is not something anyone ever wants to say.

On a planet of ice, disease is taken seriously. Old resistances are gone. New illnesses have arisen where ancient ones are unable to thrive. My mother will at least be safe in a clinic. She will be taken care of. If we are lucky, the doctors will be able to suspend the dementia long enough for me to hear her speak my name again.

I send a message back: ask my mother to contact me. I hope she remembers who I am.

Mercury is beautiful. It is much smaller than I thought it would be. Its surface is cratered and blue veins pour out of the pockmarks. A dead god has scrawled its name there in a language we have forgotten.

Day 147: this is when things change. Captain Ahab is efficient and steadfast. He is immersed in the reading and transmission of data. He has taken to shouting “I don’t give reasons. I give orders!” even though there are no orders to give. What has felt like a long stasis is over. We will now begin our orbit around the sun.

FC Durant pulls me aside. “Things are getting real. I’ve seen you and Hijo. You know it can’t end well.”

I almost laugh at her. Does she really think I expect a miracle? But perhaps I have been brooding. She is simply concerned. “I know,” I say. “Don’t worry, it won’t affect my performance.”

She does laugh. “We’re beyond performance. This ship could fly on its own.”

“But the data,” I begin to say. She cuts me off.

“The people back home need heroes. We are here to keep the fires burning, nothing more. You know how it goes.”

No, I don’t. Durant drifts off and I immediately reach out for Hijo. He has heard the conversation, I can tell. “Do you think it’s true?” I ask him.

“Does it matter?” he says. He has a wistful look on his face, as though he is thinking the same things I am. Opportunities lost. Friends forsaken. Love never able to bloom. He will not be thinking about my mother, but I am.

Day 162: finally. Captain Ahab calls me over to the comms. Her voice is faint, but the first thing she says is my name. Anna, can you hear me? I am so very cold. I can’t wait to see you again.

I won’t cry, not this time. There are too many miles between us. I am too far gone.

Hijo has told me he loves me. He told me it happened the day Verma died. There was a look on my face, he said, that broke and mended his heart at the same time. At first, I was upset. He should have told me immediately—we have lost precious time. We have so very little of it left that my anger did not last for long.

We meet in corners and steal kisses. We let our hands brush against each other’s hips, or rest gently on each other’s backs. Our love, just like our lives, is confined to these small moments. These moments are all we have.

I tell Hijo about the flowers. He holds me, but I still do not cry.

The message I send to my mother is simple. I will bring your flowers home.

Day 191: we are halfway around the sun. I wish my mother could see it now, but even we can’t look directly at it without our helmets on. The flares look like molten light, spiraling and cresting waves of light crashing into a hydrogen sea. Comets speed toward the gaseous mass and vanish in plumes of fire. I almost believe I can feel the heat of it on my skin.

Solar models haven’t changed much since the ice came. We have the old data and images, but the much of the technology itself was lost. In many ways, our ancestors had to start again. Our ship is a result of two hundred years of painstaking research and cautious allocation of resources. The theory is a simple one: if we can decrease the core’s hydrogen, we will increase the output of energy from the sun. It seems outrageous to me, but I was not trained in these things. I was trained to read numbers and codes, to withstand solitude and a lack of gravity, to eat composite foods, and to wear a stifling suit for most of a year. I know what has to be done to keep our ship going. What happens when we reach our destination is a mystery. I’m not sure even Captain Ahab knows.

In many ways our ship is as primitive as the legendary Vostok 3KA. It has been hundreds of years since our ancestors launched that into space. So much time has passed I must know how Valentina Tereshkova felt. She is my hero—the first woman in space. I wonder if she ever worried about her mother, and the risk of never seeing her again. I think she was very brave. I would not have undertaken this mission alone.

Day 210: FC Durant is unwell. I often find her looking out the window, talking to herself. At least, I think she is talking to herself. Sometimes it seems she believes there is someone standing beside her. I wonder if she misses her family. She has a younger brother back home. I never disturb her when she’s in these moods. I keep watch, just in case she needs someone else to talk to.

We become Ouroboros in twenty-five days, when the head of our orbit eats its tail.

Hijo and I are in my bunk. He is strapped in on top of me. We are crowded, but I find his mass comforting. The flares are soaring and his breath is hot on my face. His kisses are deep and sharp. Captain Ahab watches us, but I don’t think it’s us he sees. During his sleep shifts, he calls out for his wife. All of those years together—how can he do it? Why did he accept this mission? I cling onto Hijo. I inhale him. I run my hands over as much of him as I can reach. These fires are a mere precursor. For now, they are enough.

All too soon, our time is up. FC Durant calls to me from across the cabin. It is time to send the reports. “Why don’t you do it?” I say to her, but she turns away.

“I can’t be bothered.”

There, that is what we were told to look for. Despair creases her face. She looks as though she has aged twenty years since we left base.

“It’s nearly over,” I tell her. “Just hold on for a while longer, and we’ll be done.”

She laughs hysterically, and then begins to weep. Day 230.

This is the last day we have to send or receive communications—day 235. Our orbit has come to a close. We’ve collected as much data as we possibly can. From this point forward, we are on our own. I refuse to leave the comm console. Not even Hijo can pull me away. All I hear for hours is static, and then . . .

“This message is for Field Captain Mair. We regret to inform you that your mother’s condition has deteriorated. She has been placed in a secured unit for her own safety and for the safety of others. The diagnosis is terminal. She is very frail. We wish you all success on the completion of your mission. End.”

I feel suddenly empty. Hijo approaches. I raise my hand—no. I want to be alone with this. I want to be alone with my mother, the woman who was always there for me, who tended my wounds, who cheered for me, who wanted me to plant flowers on her grave. I should be there. I should be there right now, taking care of her. I have left her in the hands of strangers, and I am too far away to do anything about it now.

Captain Ahab tells us all to strap in. We are about to begin our descent.

Our ship has been fitted with autocatalytic recombiners housed behind carbon-composite heat shields. It is one of a kind and why shouldn’t it be? We fondly call her The Last Hope. She is, in fact, the only hope humanity has. It is day 251 and there is no hope left in me.

I hear my mother’s voice everywhere I turn. Anna, she says, are you there? Yes! I want to shout. I am there.

I am in a great house made of metal. It has one room, and four occupants. FC Durant hasn’t spoken since we left orbit. Captain Ahab has been muttering about the whale. Our ship is his harpoon.

Our ship will pass through the chromosphere, the photosphere, and the zones. Inside, the recombiners will begin the work of depleting the core’s hydrogen. All of this will happen without our assistance. We are heroes. We will save the world.

Hijo comes to me; he holds me. He whispers love songs in my ear. I begin the arduous process of unsealing my suit. A zipper here, a snap there, five buttons at the chin—my fingers fumble. They do not remember their way. Hijo helps me. His eyes are determined. He is stone cold, just the way I like him.

I am at gravity’s mercy. Her words grow fainter, and their pull stronger, with every stroke of his hand. He grows bigger, and brighter; he blots out the sun. I want both and can be with neither, and I will not plant flowers on my mother’s grave.

About the Author

Erzebet YellowBoy was born in America, but now lives in a tumbledown cottage in rural France with her husband and a posse of wild cats. She is the co-founder and long-time editor of Cabinet des Fées, an online journal of fairy tales, and the founder of Papaveria Press, a micro-press specializing in hand bound, limited editions of mythic prose and poetry. Her work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Not One Of Us, Electric Velocipede, and Behind the Wainscott, and in the anthologies Japanese Dreams (Lethe Press 2009), Running with the Pack (Prime Books 2010), and Haunted Legends (Tor 2011). Her novel Sleeping Helena was released by Prime Books in 2010. Erzebet is also an artist and a bookbinder.

The Wanderers

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

We came to your planet because we knew that you, the peoples of Kill Bill and Saw and Vietnam and Columbine Massacre would understand us. You could not call us monster, as our subjects had done, and you would not call us morally reprehensible, arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct. We had watched your entertainments, our satellites catching your transmissions from so many fog years away, through so much space we marveled at the quality of transmission. The other planets never sent out such good entertainments. Yours we liked to watch most, the four of us, as our subjects screamed from the metal chambers which we had locked them in and which we never strayed from so we could hear them as they cried.

Names of our own place would not fit in your world of dirt and blue sky, our names too convoluted, too garbled in the throat, so we gave ourselves your names. Joker and Samara and Alexander Great and Corleone. We matched them to personalities and memorized them and learned your language from the entertainments and from a red book Webster’s the weight of a rock that had made it through the satellites and into the entertainment machines. We used a laser to transfer it across our skin and we soaked the words in through our bodies which, we now know, would look to you like extended shadows in too little sun or ghosts, blank of mouths except when we need them and they open in our skins. Our stretched translucent bodies full of fog inside.

Once we had our names and were bored of our own subjects, who begged us not to go, not to go, because much like in your world, in ours we of violence are royalty. We launched ship despite their grabby hands and watched out the window as our subjects bowed low in our absence and wailed like the dying birds on your planet as our ship sunk down into your earth and broke the bird bones to pieces. Crows, our eye scans told us, for we had rigged them to match word to physical scan. It seemed when we landed that we had arrived in realm of crows, which was not what we had desired, and so we walked on from that place, black sand beneath and hot ball of roiling gas sun above so we would no longer hear the shriek song of crow throats.

Before you mention it, I will admit that yes, we had come to be your leaders. We had come to slay the ones you called leader before us and to take your whips and reins into our ephemeral hands. This is metaphor, we think. Your red book is unclear on metaphor. But we knew from your entertainments, which like all good entertainments must be based of truth, that you would not fault us this. That you would open your mouths in complaint and tell us you would destroy us but that it would delight you to be forced to try. Yes, we knew we had found people who would fight back, would claw their way past us to trade places, to be us, to be top. Our subjects let us lead too long. No resistance. They screamed but never tried to flee. Called us names and meant them because they did not have in them what we four have in us: need to dominate. Need to be on top. Need to press our metaphor feet into metaphor peoples and metaphor grind them into metaphor dirt.

We wandered until we came to dirt. It was same as black sand but made us sink less when walking. Around us the sky turned hazy orange and then cold. We had heard of cold. We loved it, loved how it rattled us inside, how we shook without meaning to.

Finally in our shake we decided to speak, to try our hands at voice in the strange air we did not breathe for fear it might be poison to us. We used the breath we’d stored inside, enough for two fog years at least, more waiting in the ship for refuel.

“That place was like Iraq War,” I said. The voice surprised me, shrill and unsure. I was of Corleone name. I was of that name because I stood tallest, reddest, not strongest of body but strongest of mind. It was me had absorbed most of red book, me who writes this now to you so you will know our reasons for coming.

“Is like war,” Alexander Great said. “Cold is shaky like Cloverfield.”

Alexander Great, she strongest of body, made comfort comment, as there in the cold we remembered the best part of you and your planet. You were expecting us, had been expecting us for years. We saw Alien and War of Worlds and Roswell Area 51 Alien Autopsy Revealed. Maybe, we thought, you had met us before, those of other planets. We knew you did not have the ways to leave your planet and visit ours, your technology too primitive, too much of it spent on production of entertainments. We also saw your entertainments of Moon Landing and Mars Rover Mohawk Man and these were not as entertaining and we knew they must be true. You could not go as far as us. You would not be able to escape. And you would accept us more because of this.

As we walked over black dirt we heard humming. The fog in Joker’s body cavity swirled and bounced. He curved his mouth, twisted it. He mimicked the laugh of your entertainment royalty for who he had been named.

“Hear them,” he said. “Hear them, hear them, hear them?” We did not know if words were question or answers, if they required response. We all looked to Samara, who had yet to let out her voice, always so quiet. We gave her chance. Nothing.

“Yes,” Alexander Great said. “Yes,” I repeated. It was good exchange. Fair. Each of us had turn to speak and all but one took it. We would respect each other, for we were closest of kinfolk. We would not hurt our siblings.

We walked then until on horizon there were boxes taller than us, taller than what we had seen in entertainments. Boxes that reached up higher than sky. The humming increased as we came upon what we called city of boxes. Dirt hardened so much there was no sinking when walking, just perfect lighter black dotted with piles of chalky ash. Streets. Lighter black then faded to lighter lighter black in two thin lines to both sides, which in the entertainments we used to see your kind walk upon as the metal beast machines you call cars zipped down the hard dirt middles. Now there were none of you walking, and the metal beast machines slept still, some pulled to the side, some stopped right in middles, each one inches away from the other, nearly touching faces. We were wary of these beast machines, for had seen them in entertainments, fast running into one another, always chasing, explosions that made no sense to us as physics and so we concluded that beast machines must be weapons.

“Stay back from beast machines,” I said. “This is weapon they can use against us when we declare us leaders. We must dismantle them.”

“How?” Alexander Great asked. She is only one willing to show her brain weakness. Joker would never ask such question, and Samara, she is different in this landscape. At home she was quiet but aware. Here she looked unable to find the way, her face all bunched up like wrinkled water, digging through the ash piles as if she was looking for you in there.

We bent and searched beneath beast machine for clue as to dismantle device. I ran hands along backside and did not feel its breath, did not feel energy inside waiting to be released. I looked through window and saw ash inside too, one pile in each seat. I wondered if beast machine decomposing.

“Dead already,” I said.

“Already?” Joker wavered in a circle, turned around and around, and the air followed him, rippling as if mirage. “Already dead, already dead.”

Samara looked down at surface below us. We waited, eyes on her. When nothing came, I tried next beast machine. It too no energy inside. No breath, no battery life, no fog to animate its metal casing. All down and down streets metal beast machines sleep like the fishes.

Sleeping beast machines were first thing. Second thing was sky, for as sun came up again sky was not blue of entertainments. It was same color as hardened dirt, lighter black, foggy like our insides. The sun burst through the fog but did not clear it. We should have felt kinship with fog, so similar in eye scan to our fog energy inside. But it was different sort of fog. Darker fog. Dirty. Too dirty to swallow.

Third thing was you. There were none of you. We searched streets but nothing. We went inside buildings, pressing our hands to doors until we felt how they opened, but none of you there, either. No explosion marks like of Comet Extincts Dinosaurs or Deep Impact but more like The Road or I Am Legend, only not like those at all because there was not even one of you left and no monsters in the shadows. Your buildings full of empty chairs and desks and the reek of rotting sustenance.

Outside again we found the humming come from moving picture screen suspended across building in middle of other picture screens that did not move but proclaimed in bold red letters, “Say No To Loneliness—Playmatez Are Here To Warm You In The Night.” Accompanying the words, a picture of two of your people twisted together in strange dance. The moving picture screen showed us image like entertainments but not as good; just one people fascinated with her own head fur, shaking it, running hands through it, closing one eye at the screen as if dirt in it. Words flashing at bottom which we translated with book skin: relating to one that possesses or exhibits a quality in abundance as if in concentrated form of a seed-producing annual, biennial or perennial that does not develop persistent woody tissue but dies down at the end of a growing season.

“Must be religion,” Alexander Great said. “We pay tribute to you, goddess Herbal Essence,” he shouted at moving picture screen.

I hoped that her loud words would call you out, but the picture people were all there was of you.

We have come to conclusion as to your whereabouts now, after searching city and suburb and finding it all empty, not even your bodies there to rot in sun. I wish you had not frightened so easily. I wish you had not hidden yourselves away. We would not have ruled you poorly. We would have given you the things you need: food, water, boxes, and screens to compose your entertainments. So we would have worked you until you bled. So we would have turned your undergrounds to torture chambers; we would have given everyone equal turn. Everyone not worry anymore about these money things and sickness. We have technology for this. No more like bad entertainments Patch Adams and It’s a Wonderful Life, which were not your best, I’m sure you know. No fun in these. No time for violence when worried with sick and money. We would make sure there was time.

When we went to suburbs, we found smaller boxes all empty there too. Ash piles in driveways and ash piles in food rooms and ash piles in dead grass outside. We looked at each other out in hazy sun and I told them you had gone.

“These people smarter than we thought,” I said. “They saw ship come down and they turned on invisibility devices. Their technology better than we imagined. Like Harry Potter. They used cloaks to hide from us.”

“Why hide?” Alexander Great asked.

“Hide,” Joker said. “Hide hide.”

“They hide because stubborn. They do not like idea of being ruled. They want rule themselves. They do not understand that we rule them better. That bring peace by giving violence. That our own people loved us. That they would love us too.”

“Come out,” Joker yelled.

“That is not way,” Samara said. “They won’t come out. Can’t.” She bent and stuck her hand into pile of ash, let ash fall through fingers. When she held palm out for us to see, small chunks of white remained and flattened piece of metal with red gem attached. “Is bodies,” she said.

We said nothing, just stared, then burst laughs. “Perfect joke,” Alexander Great said. “Is good. Worthy of entertainments.”

Samara let the pieces fall to ground. Nodded but did not laugh with us. “We are alone,” she said. We laughed again.

“We will figure out invisibility,” I said, sensing Samara’s distress despite her attempt at brightening mood. “Do not worry, Samara, rest of kinfolk. Will all be as planned soon.”

Inside the box we found empty rooms with frames on wall showing people smiling too wide to be true, and your own entertainment box, and portable entertainments which we loaded in and let scan. There were few we had not seen. We explored rest of house and found entertainment boxes in two more rooms, portable entertainments of many shapes. Joker likes your Grand Theft Auto and your Silent Hill, thinks these are every bit as good as the entertainments we grew up with, maybe better because interactive. I did not watch him do these for long. I explored the rest of the box.

There were many items I could not find sense for. Little wooden blocks, couch covered in so many pillows you could not sit on, though this is what I understand couch is for. I poked at pillows in case they had special power, but they seemed just pillows. There was dead flower in glass vase and pictures on wall that did not move. These were things rarely noticed in your entertainments. I had not thought of them before, of their what and why. I touched unmoving picture and nothing happened. I touched frames where little kinfolk picture lived and nothing there too. I tried to match confusion to red book, whys to red book, but could not find reasons for objects’ existence. I sat on couch with too many pillows, on top of all pillows, and thought maybe we do not understand you as well as we thought.

We are willing to compromise. If you show yourselves, we will try our best to be gentle and make lonely disappear like unmoving picture in square that promised PlayMatez for lonely like us. Where are our PlayMatez? We see only empty city. Please come out. Come out, wherever you are.

In your room of bath I found Samara turning knobs for water. She looked up when I came in, left knob on. Water poured from faucet and disappeared down drain. I sat on edge of tub and watched as fog filled room. Looked like fog inside us. There was one window in room, and the fog went toward it, as if trying to run. It warmed our bodies and we watched as it swirled toward light. I thrust my hand into the air and touched it. Never had I touched the fog before. It made hands wetted and clammy and moved around me as I stood up into it. I wanted to open my mouth and breathe it in, but was not right kind of fog for breath. Wanted part of your world inside me for understand. Wanted to feel as if some part of you were still here to be consumed and ruled. But I let the fog drift toward window. And when it had collected and hung there, I opened window and let it out.

About the Author

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Denton, Texas, with her fiancé and two literarily-named cats—Gimli and Don Quixote. She has work forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Goblin Fruit and has had fiction appear in Expanded Horizons. She’s currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Follow her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle.

Vacant Spaces

Greg Kurzawa

Shepard ducked into the tug’s four-man cockpit, wincing at the strain on his knees. His assigned jockey for the day’s salvage was already hunched over his pre-flight checks at the console. Glancing up at Shepard’s entrance, he made a disappointed grunt before resuming his work.

“Fantastic,” the jockey said. “I get the geezer.”

“Hello, Caine,” Shepard said. “How deep today?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

A jockey’s usual sentiment.

Behind the chair, Shepard placed his hands in the small of his back and stretched. Soon enough, Caine folded up his charts and spun around. For a long moment he watched Shepard at his calisthenics. He asked, “You’re not going to complain about your knees again, are you?”

“My knees are fine,” Shepard lied.

“Because you did before. It was a lot of complaining.” He watched a moment more before shaking his head. “You’re too old for this.”

“Better than obsolete,” Shepard said. “Don’t these things fly themselves?”

“That’s what all the graybeards say.”

Under Caine’s observation, Shepard leaned first to one side, then the other.

“Are you done now?” Caine asked. “Can you be done? Because there’s work to do. You’re reminding me of that thing your dad always said.”

“‘Do your work?’”

“No, the other one.”

“‘Don’t be stupid?’“

Caine tapped his nose. “A wise man, your father.”

Although mostly engine, the tug crawled from her dock as though incapable of mustering speed. She was an ugly sight, her flanks blistered from high-temperature encounters with unstable artifacts. She was scored with heat discoloration and pitted with impact scars. She had been a shuttle in a past life, before being retrofitted with scavenged alien engines and put to work hauling junk. These bulbous additions had been bolted on aft, and accounted for two-thirds of her mass. She looked unimpressive, but she hauled wreckage.

Eighty kilometers above Earth’s moon, Caine and Shepard abandoned the cockpit for the tug’s passenger cabin. All but two facing rows of seats had been removed to make room for the biology of the engines. Like the roots of a tree, piping and conduits ran from floor to ceiling and all along the bulkheads. From inside, it seemed the engines had not so much been bolted to the tug, as grown into it. When stoked, they would sweat something like a mucus-blood mixture, which stank like burning fat, and sizzled on the floor.

Strapping in opposite one another, Caine and Shepard made themselves as comfortable as possible in the limited space. For a little while, the only sound was the heating.

“What’s it like to be you?” Caine asked with a shudder. “So old.”

Shepard craned his neck toward the cockpit. “Did you forget to press start?”

“Patience,” Caine admonished. “They’re warming.”

Relaxing into the headrest, Shepard gazed at the ceiling. “You should check.”

Reaching back, Caine banged the conduits over his head with a fist.

Shepard winced. “That’s not—”

The engines came alive with a slow lurch. Turbines began to spin in lazy revolutions, ramping up with no apparent sense of urgency.

Caine grinned. “That’s why you need me.”

As the reactors warmed and the turbines gained speed, a vibration crept over the edges of everything, shivering hard lines to obscurity and numbing Shepard’s extremities. Then the banging began, and the violence of it threatened to shake the little tug apart. Across from Shepard, Caine leaned forward to vomit expertly into the bucket between his feet. He came up grinning, his teeth red, blood coursing from both nostrils.

Shepard mimed wiping his mouth.

The jockey touched his lips and blinked at his bloody fingers. Then he bent forward and vomited again.

The engines disengaged with a sudden concussion, jarring Shepard to the bones. Immediately afterward, the banging ceased, and the turbines began their slow unwinding.

Shepard pressed the heels of his hands to his throbbing eyes. He felt as though he’d been ripped open and stuffed with tar. He felt sewn up with bootlaces. Tasting blood, he wondered if his teeth were cracked. Across from him, Caine remained leaning over the bucket, his mirth beaten out of him.

Shepard tilted his head back and closed his eyes against waves of nausea. Around him, the tug creaked and groaned, as though relaxing into unfamiliar pressures. Only when the engines had fallen silent did Shepard allow himself to breathe deeply. Across from him, Caine seemed engrossed in the act of drooling blood into his bucket.

Shrugging off his harness, Shepard pushed to his feet and went to the jockey. “Hey,” he said, nudging Caine’s shoulder.

“Fuuuuu,” the jockey complained.

Shepard put a hand to Caine’s forehead and lifted. The jockey gaped up at him with a vacant, startled expression.

“Sngkaaa,” Caine muttered. Seemingly surprised by his own voice, he blinked rapidly, then sprayed blood on Shepard with a violent sneeze.

“Damn,” Shepard replied, and let Caine’s head drop.

In the cockpit, he switched on the external cameras. The array of monitors came alive with a dozen murky viewpoints of local space, all of them the same. Drifting through the exterior floods were thick flakes of what appeared to be snow, but which Shepard knew to be hydrogen. By this, he knew they had indeed traveled distances that he failed to understand. He flipped on the closed-circuit intercom while watching the hydrogen snow obscure his monitors. “Hello,” he said into the microphone. He heard his own voice ringing from the speakers throughout the tug. “We’ve arrived.”

He paused to listen for a response. Thinking he might have heard a voice in the static, he raised the volume and leaned closer. “Hello,” he repeated into the microphone. “Hello?”

He searched the whole tug. Everywhere he went felt as though someone had stepped out the moment before. He checked the stateroom, in which there were two bunks. He flipped the lights on and off rapidly, as though to wake a late sleeper. “Hello?” he said. “We’re here.”

He stood in front of the mirror in the head, and through it peered into the corners. While doing this, the power flickered, and a tiny burst of static emerged from the overhead speaker. He looked up, and his own voice came through dim and crackling.

“Hello?” it said. “We’re here.”

Shepard passed Caine on his return to the cockpit. Still trapped in his harness, the jockey made a pathetic grab for him. “Nnga!” he said.

“Patience,” Shepard soothed him.

When he got to the cockpit, no one was there.

Shepard sat with Caine in the passenger cabin, which reeked of vomit and auto-release disinfectant. The jockey reminded him of a newborn, baffled by its own flailing. Nothing worked like it was supposed to; everything had a mind of its own. His head rolled, and his eyes widened at every new thing in perpetual astonishment.

Leaning forward, Shepard patted Caine’s knee. “You’re going to be fine,” he said.

In fact, Shepard believed Caine would die. Such misfortunes were an accepted occupational hazard. They’d all watched the videos, all signed the papers.

In a little while Caine stopped fighting with his harness, and took on a look of stern concentration. A dark smell pervaded the room, bold and foul.

“You’ve shit yourself, haven’t you?” Shepard said.

“Sssmmn,” Caine said dreamily. “Mmnaaaah.”

Shepard braced his hands on his thighs as though to rise. “Here’s what we do,” he decided. “I’m going to leave you as you are, because you seem mostly comfortable. Are you comfortable?”

Caine arched his back and rolled his head. He threw his free arm up in a grand, incomprehensible gesture.

“Good,” Shepard said. “I’m going to go ahead and find the derelict and start the procedures without you. I’ll be—”

Caine kicked out his legs and gave a wordless shout. It was clear to Shepard that he disapproved, but his arms and legs weren’t cooperating. The jockey slammed his head against the headrest, mouth gaping.

“Hey now,” Shepard said. “Go easy.”

When the fit subsided, Shepard continued. “I’ll be careful with the tug, I promise. After the derelict’s secure we’ll see about getting home. Okay?”

“Mmfaugh!”

“I know,” Shepard sympathized. “But I can’t do it. You’d only hurt yourself.”

Caine banged his head again, straining against the confining harness.

“It really is for the best,” Shepard said.

Minutes later, Shepard had settled into the cockpit and was nosing the tug through the windless blizzard. He couldn’t see the derelict, but he knew it was close. Then it loomed in one of the monitors like the peak of a black mountain. The tug reported it as roughly wedge shaped, one hundred and thirty-seven meters long by twenty-two wide. Impressive, but not too much for the tug to manhandle.

Having found his target, Shepard initiated a sequence of activities that, for the next twelve hours, involved him hardly at all. A swarm of softball-sized drones poured from the tug to descend on the derelict, intent on inspecting every square centimeter of her hull. Any evidence of life within—or breach without—and it was a hard abort. Either required teams with military-grade skills.

Shepard relaxed into his chair to monitor the continuous feeds from the drones. A dozen angles of the derelict drifted by on the bank of screens, a landscape of sweeping features, protrusions, and the sudden, irregular angles of alien armaments. The husk showed no signs of life. Things so deep seldom did.

“Hello?” said a crackling voice from the bank of monitors. The image of drifting hydrogen overlaid a version of his own face peering through at him. “Are you speaking now? Where have you been?”

“Here the whole time,” Shepard said. “Is Caine with you?”

“Somewhere,” his image said.

“Something happened to him,” Shepard said.

“Something?”

“It looks bad.”

The image twisted and rolled, giving way to static before solidifying again. “ . . . here,” it said.

Shepard squinted at the screen. “What?”

“He’s fine. He says to tell you that you look fatter. Older, too.”

“Tell him something happened to him here. Tell him—”

“You tell him.”

The screen rolled, struggling with waves of persistent static. But when it stopped, there were only hydrogen flakes drifting over alien architecture. Shepard waited. Though he heard echoes of echoes and incomprehensible whispers through the air ducts and the intercom, no one reemerged.

Hearing a voice in the cabin, Shepard went back to find Caine standing over himself. The jockey had fallen asleep leaning forward in the harness. The Caine that stood over him looked more disappointed than anything. Shepard kept his distance until Caine noticed him.

The jockey pointed at the limp form in the harness. “This is terrible,” he said. His voice emerged from the ship’s speakers rather than his mouth. It was out of sync with the rest of him, which broke apart when looked at sideways.

Shepard agreed: terrible.

Caine gestured at himself in disgust. “Would you just look at this shit? What now? I can’t go back like this. Without a body. . . ” He gestured again, this time kicking his own foot. “Such shit,” he said.

When Shepard didn’t reply, Caine looked in his direction, but not directly at him. “Are you still in here?”

“Here,” Shepard said. But even after he waved a hand the jockey couldn’t seem to find him.

Caine raised his voice, as though addressing someone in another room. “You could’ve at least moved me to a bunk.”

“You shit yourself, Caine.”

The jockey looked sharply in a direction that was not quite Shepard’s. “What?”

“You’re fine in the harness.”

Caine adjusted his gaze, but came no closer to finding Shepard. “What did you call me?”

Shepard sighed and left the jockey alone with himself. It was easier to watch the slow progress of the derelict’s inspection than to argue with ghosts. When he returned forty-five minutes later, there was only one Caine, snoring contentedly and smelling like an open latrine. Shepard left him in his harness and retired to the stateroom. He locked the door behind him, though he knew it wouldn’t keep anything out, not this far from home.

Because there was little else to do, Shepard slept. He hadn’t been at it long when he woke to someone sitting on the edge of his bed. The speaker in the ceiling hissed gently, and his own voice came through garbled and indistinct, as though filtered through a fathom of water.

“I have a theory,” his voice said.

Shepard threw an arm over his forehead and stared at the ceiling. “It’s my theory, too,” he reminded himself.

“We have a theory then. It’s a decent theory.”

Shepard didn’t feel he needed to vocalize his agreement.

“It’s a matter of pressure,” his ghost continued. “Not physical pressure, like air or water. A different kind. Out here there’s not enough pressure to keep a body and soul together. It’s like bringing one of those crustaceans up from a deep-sea trench.”

“Except they die,” Shepard said.

“They die,” Shepard nodded in agreement. “But we don’t die. We get . . . this.” He opened his arms as though presenting himself for exhibition.

“It makes sense,” Shepard said.

“It does. But it also makes you wonder. If I can live without you, and you can live without me. . . . ” The ghost looked at Shepard over his shoulder.

“But we don’t really know that,” Shepard said. “Long term, we don’t know. I might just be a soulless bag of meat remembering how humans are supposed to act. I might forget after a while. And you: you might just be a collection of memories too afraid to let go of the idea of being real. You’ll lose shape after a while.”

“So we need one another.”

Shepard shrugged. “It’s just a theory.”

The Shepard sitting on the edge of the bed continued to stare down at the Shepard lying on his back. He said, “Caine’s right: you do look old.”

Shepard turned to the wall.

“We have a problem,” his ghost said a little later.

“What problem?”

“Caine’s dead.”

Shepard looked over his shoulder. “You’re sure?”

The ghost gave him a pointed stare.

“Okay,” Shepard conceded. “How bad is it?”

“He doesn’t want to go back. I wouldn’t either.”

“He’s going to cause problems?”

Shepard shrugged. “He’s just scared.”

“He’s had a bad day. He’s allowed that.”

“We need to talk to him.”

Shepard got out of bed and stepped through the narrow door to the head. “You need to talk to him.” When he came back, still zipping up, the stateroom was empty.

In the cabin he found Caine slumped in his harness, gaping at the ceiling while the little auto-injectors farted disinfectant from the corners.

“Caine,” he said, as though to wake him. “Hey Caine.”

He listened for any sound from the internal coms, then decided the wisest thing was to leave the corpse alone. Stepping into the cockpit to check the monitors, he saw an estimated nine hours remaining before completion of the integrity check. Had no one died, it would have fallen to Caine to set the course for home. Not that Shepard couldn’t—he’d been trained. It was just that the jockey had adopted a sense of ownership over the physics, and didn’t like to see anyone else handling them. The physics, he’d enjoyed saying, belonged to him. Now that the jockey was dead, Shepard hoped he would be willing to relax his possessiveness.

Shepard sat at the bank of monitors and began to work out the details of the return trip. After a little while, a hazy image struggled to clarify on one the screens.

“What are you doing?” it asked.

“Hello, Caine. It’s good to see you.”

“Is that my physics you’re doing?”

“Someone’s got to.”

The image rolled fretfully. When it steadied, Caine’s tone had turned scornful. “—cking longtooth,” it said, completing an insult Shepard hadn’t heard the start of. “What do you know about anything?”

“I’m just doing my job, Caine.”

“No. You’re doing my job.”

“It’s easier than I thought,” Shepard said, and was immediately sorry.

Caine’s livid response was lost in a burst of static. When the jockey perceived he wasn’t being understood, the intercom crackled, and his voice blared through the tug. “You’re a prick,” it said. “You were always a prick.”

“I’m sorry, Caine. That was unfair of me.”

“Unfair? No one says unfair.”

“Okay, Caine.”

“Taking us home will kill me.”

“You’re already dead, Caine.”

“I’m not fucking dead!” the jockey shrieked.

“Try to relax,” Shepard advised. “We’re going home, and I know that upsets you. I understand that. But I can’t—”

“You don’t understand.”

“I can’t do anything about that now.”

“You have no idea what this is like,” Caine said.

“You’re right,” Shepard admitted readily.

A long silence followed, during which they stared at one another through the monitor. It seemed there was nothing more to say. Then Caine gave a curt nod, as though a decision had been made.

“Okay,” the jockey said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s just the way it is, Caine.”

“You’re right,” the jockey replied. “You’re always right.”

Then his screens went dark, and Shepard was left eye to eye with a dim image of himself in the monitor. They had been right, he saw. He did look old. After a moment, he attended to the physics and tried not to dwell on the underhand tactics of slighted ghosts.

Caine wasn’t gone long. The screens came alive while Shepard was still working, and he only glanced up before continuing. The jockey’s sullen image slid from one screen to the next, looking for the best vantage point from which to judge.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Caine said.

Shepard switched off that monitor, only to have Caine leak into another. “Let me help.”

But Shepard knew better. Covering his work with an arm, he feigned deep concentration and pretended not to have heard. When he looked up at long last, Caine was gone, and the bank of monitors showed only obscure angles of fat snow and alien engineering.

Shepard had fallen asleep in the jockey’s chair when a gentle chime sounded, and the calming female voice of the tug informed him that the derelict’s integrity was one hundred percent. More importantly: lifeless.

For twenty minutes, Shepard nosed the tug around the perimeter of the derelict in search of a flat plane. Between an intake valve deep enough to park the tug and a cluster of blocky protrusions, he bumped against the hull and engaged the coupling links. A warm buzz vibrated the hull; the vessels were bound.

Shepard switched on the intercom. “Homeward,” he announced. Without waiting for a reply, he initiated the return sequence and abandoned the cockpit. Back in the cabin, he settled in opposite Caine’s corpse while the engines struggled sluggishly toward an unknown speed. When they had attained a comfortable scream, he pushed a little deeper into his seat, knowing it would get worse before it got better. Outlines shivered as the engines sang. The air gelled, becoming difficult to breathe. He stretched his mouth wide in an effort to relieve the building pressure.

And then something new. Something wrong. It manifested as the sound of marbles bouncing in an empty tank. In a matter of seconds, two became twenty, twenty became thousands. Barrels of marbles poured into the rotors. The pitch of the engines took an ugly turn, refusing to quit in the face of this new difficulty.

Shepard popped the buckles of his harness and leaned forward to stand, but spilled out of his seat instead. Beneath him—all around him—the tug shook in the grip of the laboring engines. Shepard pushed to his feet. If he could get to the deck, if he could abort the return sequence and cut the engines . . . one step toward the cockpit and a monstrous bang kicked his legs from under him.

He found himself on his back, breathless and gasping for air. A klaxon blared while strobes sprayed emergency lighting across the bulkheads. Somewhere, metal twisted in anguish. The last of the marbles were bouncing away. Shepard rolled to his feet and stumbled toward the cockpit.

Everything had failed, or was in the process of doing so: internal atmosphere, hull integrity, flight coordination; all of it dying in front of him.

“Alarm,” reported a soothing female voice.

Shepard slapped off the audibles, silencing the klaxons. Amber lights raced up and down the deck, screaming for attention.

“Assessment,” he said to himself in a failing effort to remain calm. “Step one: assessment.”

“Alarm,” repeated the patient voice.

“I know,” Shepard said, and directed his attention to the monitors, where reports from the exterior drones were beginning to post. The same drones that had scoured the derelict were now running looping circuits around the tug, relaying information back to the deck. Trying to watch everything at once, Shepard saw his atmosphere venting from a dozen torn seams. He felt empty space creeping in, forcing open rifts with icy fingers even as the auto-sealant blossomed outward like cancerous growths to stanch the hemorrhage. Things were at wrong angles. Other monitors were populating with overlays of the tug, helpfully directing his attention to malfunctioning systems.

Shepard stood ready to act, but there was nothing for him to do but watch. Struggling to stabilize itself, the tug needed no help from the likes of him. After long moments, lights began winking off, whether from the passing of danger or an awareness of futility, Shepard didn’t know. In time, he realized that the tug would not turn inside out; he would live at least a while longer.

He sank into the jockey’s chair, face in hands.

“Alarm,” the gentle female voice reminded him.

Shepard lifted his head to see what fresh disaster had visited.

Out there in the blizzard, the derelict had come alive. The drones, with nothing more to report about the state of the tug, had turned their attention elsewhere, and found much of interest in the derelict. Racing up and down her length, they streamed continuous video back to the deck. Running lights underscored aggressive angles and matte black assets. Shepard saw the tug attached to its hull, a sucker-fish latched to the belly of a leviathan.

One of the screens blinked shyly, drawing Shepard’s attention. Caine’s face was barely there, a ghost of an image all but lost in the snow.

“Shepard, look at it,” Caine breathed. The jockey then turned an accusing glare on Shepard. “What did you do?”

Affronted, Shepard sat erect. “I didn’t—I want to talk to myself,” he demanded. “Where’s me?”

Caine looked offended. “I don’t know. Where do bluehairs go?”

“Caine . . . ”

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

A sick dread turned Shepard’s stomach. He couldn’t look at the jockey anymore, so moved his attention back to the derelict. The massive glory of the alien vessel filled the monitors, a landscape of bristling armaments and eldritch lights. It seemed endless and impossible—alive and awake.

The heating didn’t work as well as it had before the incident, and the tug bled warmth into space at an alarming rate. Pulling the thin blankets from both stateroom bunks, Shepard wore them over his shoulders as he watched the derelict on the monitors. He slept for a little while in his chair, but woke suddenly to an ominous bang. He listened for a bit before deciding it had been imagined. For a little while, he tried to raise Caine and Shepard on the intercom, but found only static.

Shepard knew something from outside had found its way into the tug when—all bundled in his blankets—he lifted the lid of the head and startled something that had come up through the drain to get comfortable in the bowl. With a splash, it pulled back down the pipes. Shepard slammed the lid and fled.

Back in the cockpit, he turned the intercom all the way up. “Caine,” he said. “Shepard. Something’s in here with us. Something got in.”

But the static wouldn’t talk back, and no one came to the monitors. Shepard called into the ventilation ducts. He tuned the com channels to empty space and listened for voices that weren’t speaking.

A faint rhythmic pounding leaked from the ductwork, bringing him the shouts of an event taking place elsewhere. He thought maybe the cafeteria, so he started that way, but met something massive in the corridor. It blocked his way like a mass of bone-white webbing plastered to the walls, floor, and ceiling. It moved as though breathing. Shepard retreated to the cockpit and locked the door.

He switched off the intercom and crawled beneath the panel, packing himself among the insulated cables and sweating conduits. He clutched his blankets tighter around himself, praying that whatever had come into the tug wouldn’t hear him breathing.

During the initial hours of hiding, Shepard was haunted by the slow, agonized groaning of the tug. It penetrated the bulkheads and came up through the grating in the floor. It was the sound of something invasive working through the tug’s guts, forcing itself into and through all the private spaces. For a little while he heard faint voices from elsewhere, a terrified, incomprehensible litany that swelled and faded to the rhythm of unseen currents. “Oh God,” he heard it declare once in a tone both exhausted and horrified. It was hard to tell, but it sounded like Caine.

Twelve hours later the internal temperature had dropped to minus five degrees Celsius. Having heard nothing for a long while, Shepard emerged from beneath the panel, blanket clutched around him. He felt stiff and burdened, as though bundles of wire had infiltrated his blanket to loop themselves about him. Painfully, he hauled himself up to peek over the panel, upon which a hard white frost had formed.

Images of the derelict had been wiped from the screens, replaced by an unfamiliar face. Seeing him, it loomed closer. Shepard watched its mouth move before remembering he’d killed the sound. With stiff fingers, he tweaked the volume until the voice came through.

“—ear me?” it shouted at him.

“Shh,” Shepard whispered. “I hear you.”

“Where have you been?”

“Here. All the time here.”

The face studied him. “Which one are you?”

“Shepard.”

“We’re on your port.”

Shepard glanced at an exterior view. He saw a military frigate bathed in its own lights, dim in the deep hydrogen blizzard. “I see you.”

“Where’s Caine?”

“Dead.”

“Both of him? How?”

“I don’t . . . ” Shepard shook his head. “There hasn’t been any communication for a long time. The engines failed. Something—I don’t know what—something went wrong.”

Having turned aside to read from another monitor, the jockey nodded absently. “I see that. The derelict didn’t want to move. Tug couldn’t handle it.” Looking back to Shepard, his expression changed.

“What’s that?” the jockey said, pointing.

“What?”

“On your neck. There.”

Shepard brought a hand out from under the blanket to touch a long, hard lump under the skin alongside his jugular. It had come up from under his collar, and retracted from his fingers like a living thing. With great apprehension, Shepard opened his blanket to assess himself.

There were no bundles of wire around his legs, no cables or conduits. Pale white tendrils, like roots, had snaked up through the grating to coil intimately around his thighs. The larger ones had worked their way under his clothes; the smaller ones had already burrowed painlessly into his flesh.

“What’s happening there?” the jockey asked, angling for a better view.

Too quickly, Shepard snatched his blanket closed. “Nothing.”

The jockey gave him a reproachful look.

“It found me,” Shepard confessed.

The jockey slumped. “Sit tight,” he said, and the screens went dark.

Beneath the blanket, Shepard felt pale tendrils worming under his skin, pushing things aside to make room. He didn’t want to see what they were doing to him, but it afflicted him with a sickening heaviness.

Having been gone hardly a moment, the jockey returned to all monitors at once. He didn’t seem to want to look at Shepard. He scratched behind an ear, looking truly regretful. “This is breach,” he said, then cleared his throat as though to read a prepared statement. “Standard operating procedures were probably violated. Mistakes were almost certainly made.”

The jockey stopped to look at him directly. “I won’t lie to you. Yours is a bad situation.”

Shepard swallowed thickly. “You’re leaving me here?”

“No,” the jockey said, then again, but stretched out, as though Shepard were not simply wrong, but very wrong. “No, they want you back. You and your guest.”

Relieved, Shepard struggled to his feet, tendrils weighing him down like shackles. “Please hurry.”

“We need you to drop your coupling with the derelict.”

With shaking hands on frigid controls, Shepard disengaged the links. A hollow bang echoed through the tug upon release.

“Now get me out of here,” Shepard said. “Please.”

“I’m afraid extraction at this point would only complicate things,” said the jockey.

Shepard stared at the screen. “You can’t leave me here. I can’t be here with it when we go back. Where will it go?”

“You should lie down,” the jockey said. “I think lying down would be best.”

The tug shivered when the frigate took hold.

“This wasn’t our fault,” Shepard objected.

The jockey made a face to express that such matters were beyond his jurisdiction.

Shepard felt the frigate’s grown-on engines bunching up. He felt it in his teeth, and in his groin. As the outlines of everything solid shivered away, others became clearer. A crowded latticework of bone-white webbing piercing the bulkheads, stretching through the fabric of the tug. He opened his mouth to protest, but the frigate’s engines banged, and both vessels were gone. Flakes of hydrogen swarmed to fill the vacant spaces.

About the Author

Greg Kurzawa studied theology without purpose before being handed a career in information technology. He and his incredible wife are busy building a happy family. Some people mistake him for Gage Kurricke, with whom he co-authored Gideon’s Wall.

The Great Leap Sideways: SF and Social Media

Mark Cole

Science Fiction isn’t always about the big things.

Nor does it get it right all the time.

Consider the first SF visions of the internet: for William Gibson and the other pioneer Cyberpunks, the online world was home to a chosen few—the corporate elite on one hand, the radical fringe of cowboys and hackers on the other.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Instead it became something far more democratic, a vast virtual space filled with countless millions of users who had no idea how their computer worked or how to create new programming for it. Far from the secret data caches Johnny Mnemonic carried, most of that traffic is entertainment, commerce and even idle chatter. The gleaming city on a hill that was cyberspace had become sprawling suburban subdivisions within a generation. Perhaps the measure of how prosaic it has all become is that it is now possible to talk or write about social media without the once obligatory references to SF.

Not that SF has exactly ignored social media. Once it became a major force in our modern world, SF writers got busy extrapolating it into their future worlds. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2005) came out only a year after Facebook launched (although parts of it are already badly out of date!). You can even find its precursors as far back as 1909, in E.M Forster’s “When The Machine Stops,” in which everyone lives in his own little hexagonal box in a monstrous hive. They can chat with their friends or carry out their day to day activities without ever leaving their cubicle—one character even delivers a speech to her club from within her room.

However, no one guessed just how popular sharing the private details of our lives with the world would be, or how eager people would be to make virtual friends online. Reality had left SF in the dust. Social media burst into the consciousness of SF at about the same time it seized the attention of the rest of the world. And, curiously, it is one of the few realms in the world of SF which movies began exploring at the same time—or even before—the print media did.

One of the earliest appearances came in legendary anime director Mamoru Oshii’s live action film, Avalon (2001). Set in a rundown future, Avalon is an illegal MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) and one of the few ways to escape the harsh realities of the world. The greatest players, like the film’s protagonist, Ash, can actually make a living playing Avalon. The idea seemed strange at the time, but now many MMORPGs tie their currencies to real dollars. A select few Second Life players earn over one million dollars a year.

VR games have appeared in a lot of SF movies—and yet very few of them offer anything like a convincing cinematic portrayal of a computer game. The gameplay in movies like Existenz and Nirvana makes little sense and hardly seems playable—let alone like the work of a master designer. Avalon, however, seems reasonably plausible, with its “Boss” characters, lag time, character stats and game economics, where players must earn points to buy their equipment. Part of Avalon’s authenticity stems from all the hours that Oshii spent playing Wizardry during his bouts of unemployment in the eighties.

In 2009, Mamoru Oshii returned to the world of Avalon in a new film, Assault Girls, although it explores little new territory.

MMORPGs were one of the earlier forms of social media: while its predecessors go all the way back to the Seventies, the first true MMORPG, Meridian 59, appeared in 1996, only a year after the NSFNET lifted the restrictions that had previously prevented their development.

Video games have remained a constant source of inspiration for movie makers since Tron, although few of them have soared to the heights of lunacy reached by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer. The directors first made their mark with Crank, an absurd, non-stop action film that feels as hopped up on meth and adrenalin as its lead character: Gamer gives no indication that they ever intend to slow down to let the audience catch its collective breath. This of course makes it even more of a surprise to find a movie that is crammed full of intriguing SF ideas, centering on a frightening—and particularly perverse—new form of social media.

Billionaire inventor Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) created a self-replicating nanite which, when injected into someone’s brain stem, allows someone else to control all his motor functions. Using this technology, he created a game called “Society,” in which online players can take control of a real person within a real environment. There, they interact with real people controlled by other unseen players. While it resembles William Gibson’s idea of “meat puppets,” Neveldine/Taylor have taken that idea and carried it to new and even creepier heights. In one deliberately disgusting scene, we see a guy putting his moves on a beautiful woman avatar, unaware that she is being controlled by a fat and enormously grotesque man.

The avatars within “Society” are all paid actors (if that’s the right word). However, this is not true of Castle’s other hit game, “Slayers:” its human avatars shoot at each other with real weapons, and when hit, they really die. While all the players are “volunteers,” Castle recruits them from death row, promising them their freedom if they survive thirty games. These death matches are then televised, so the millions who cannot afford to control one of the slayers can also enjoy the game.

“Kable” (Gerald Butler) is the most popular player in the game, the only one so far to survive twenty-seven games, and an odds-on favorite to actually win his freedom. However, Castle does not want Kable freed, so he brings a ringer into a game, a vicious psychopath who does not have a controller. This gives him a tremendous edge over the other avatars, as he is not affected by computer “lag” or the reflexes of his controller.

While many reviewers argue they stole this plot from Rollerball (a more apt comparison might be Peter Watkin’s Punishment Park), Castle is not so much worried about the political or societal repercussions should anyone survive the game, as he is about what Kable will do if he gets free. “Kable,” whose real name is John Tillman, was one of the first nanite test subjects—and under their control, Castle forced Tillman to kill his best friend. In the end, Tillman gets the upper hand by planting a suggestion in Castle’s mind by far more traditional means.

Ultimately, much of Gamer is absurd and improbable. Yet its imagined world still feels uncomfortably real: perhaps it is because the horrible people in it are all too recognizable—and perhaps because it is closer to the real online world than we care to admit.

“Society” bears more than a passing resemblance to Second Life, although what happens in the “adult” zones of Second Life may actually be far more perverse than anything in Gamer.

Ironically, Second Life succeeded because it rejected one of the mainstays of cyberpunk: when Phillip Rosedale started Linden labs in 1999, he tried to develop “the rig”—a massive VR suit with twin shoulder-mounted monitors. However, by 2002 he had discarded the VR hardware and launched his 3-D Linden World as a PC application (it became Second Life later that year).

Most SF attempts to portray the social media of the future end up resembling Second Life, perhaps because it offers not traditional game play, but a virtual world that the user can shape and restructure as he pleases, a vast array of 3-D chat rooms and even a virtual economy, tied to the real one. Many of these features can be found in other social media—particularly in the MMORPGs, but when one watches a movie like the French thriller, Black Heaven, one has no trouble recognizing the fictional “Black Hole” as a darker and creepier version of Second Life.

Reviewers routinely describe Black Heaven (2010) as an SF film and yet its status as SF is far from clear. The CG sequences depicting the world inside the game “Black Hole” are both strikingly beautiful and highly detailed. They exceed our current videogame capabilities—but not by much. Perhaps it might be more accurate to describe it as a crime thriller in the vein of French Auteur Claude Chabrol.

When young lovers Gaspard and Marion attempt to find the owner of a lost cell phone, it leads them to an attempted double suicide by a couple who apparently met online but had never actually met in person. Only the girl, Audrey, survives.

Gaspard meets her again a few days later and finds himself becoming more and obsessed with her—and with her mysterious tattoo. She invites him to meet her in “Black Hole.”

Players start out naked and have to find a job to buy clothes, which Gaspard does by selling balloons on the street for another player. He discovers that Audrey’s tattoo marks her as a slave of the exclusive nightclub in the heart of the virtual city. There, he finds “Sam,” a mysterious blindfolded singer with Audrey’s tattoo.

Nothing in the world of Black Hole is what it seems, however, and the mysterious “Sam” slowly drags Gaspard deeper and deeper into her deadly illusion.

Like Chabrol, director Gilles Marchand seems obsessed with the question of human evil. It flourishes in the anonymity of Black Hole’s virtual world in ways that mirror real world stories about online predators. Black Heaven may not be SF, but it understands far too well the ways the darker side of our nature misuses our new technologies.

Not all portrayals of social media are quite as dark, however.

A large part of Mamoru Hosada’s incredible anime, Summer Wars (2009) takes place within Oz, a 3-D online environment which might best be described as the internet 2.0. Not only does it offer a place to meet other people, to buy and sell, or play games—but business, government offices and utilities all do business through Oz.

Summer Wars is at once an entertaining family film and a masterful work of SF. Its vision of Oz seems a real possibility, firmly rooted in the current realities of the World Wide Web. Oz is parti-colored, stunningly modern in design, and yet inviting, a world we would all love to explore. But in the end, it is tradition and the warrior way that turns the tide against a reckless test of a new weapon.

Most of these films came out between 2009 and 2010, at roughly the same time that the mainstream media finally took notice of social media. Ben Mezrich’s account of the founding of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires came out in 2009, followed a year later by movie based loosely on it, The Social Network.

SF took notice of social media at about the same time, with the release of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End in 2007, and Daniel Suarez’s Daemon in 2009. Ernest Cline even sold Ready Player One (2011) to Hollywood before it was published. A panel at the 2011 SXSW conference boldly declared that Social Media was science fiction, although most of what the panelists discussed sounded very much like what SF writers have said about computers for years, with a lot of the discussion revolving around our becoming mere neurons in an online hive mind.

Perhaps the furthest extrapolation of the idea to date appears in Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (2012): in a radically transformed society on Mars, everyone’s thoughts are permanently linked to the collective consciousness, and some people have developed new organs to isolate themselves from it.

Ultimately, Social Media remains a somewhat uncomfortable fit for SF: the whole notion of SF brings to mind far more heroic visions of the future, built on some wild-eyed extrapolation from the current speculations in advanced physics. Instead, we find the real world pioneers of the new media tossing out some of the most beloved predictions of the old future.

And yet the new ways in which we entertain ourselves could radically change our world, whether they end up as the underpinnings of our future society, as a safety valve for a decaying future, as a way to deal with convicted criminals—or as yet another place where human evil can flourish. In the end, it is the social changes a new technology brings with it that have the greatest effect on us—and these often reflect our own needs and interests far more than they do the technology. More than any other technology ever devised, the online world reflects not just the machines running it, but the patterns of our minds.

It is quite possible that the next new development in that online world will carry us even further from our expectations, in which real life will take us places no SF writer has yet to visit.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

Always a New World: A Conversation with Karen Lord

Jeremy L. C. Jones

A man emerges from the sea with news of death. “Our home is no more,” he says.

It’s that simple, at first. Complete catastrophe; total loss. But it’s not the end for the characters in Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds. It’s merely the beginning, as the men of a once powerful culture, decimated and humbled, must reach out to people they think of as inferior.

Lord wrote The Best of All Worlds while struggling with a sequel to her award-winning debut, Redemption in Indigo, which was a re-imagining of a Senegalese folktale.

“Most SF readers detect that Redemption in Indigo is influenced by another literary tradition,” said Lord, who was born in Barbados. “The Best of All Possible Worlds is sci-fi familiar, maybe too familiar, and genre readers will have expectations. I am a West Indian writer; my purpose and my style are different in ways that aren’t always apparent. There will be surprises, but I can’t reliably predict what readers will find unusual.”

The situation might be “sci-fi familiar” but Lord’s focus isn’t. More relaxed, but no less moving or eloquent than Redemption, The Best of All Possible Worlds is not a tale of cultures clashing and wars breaking out. The Sadiri and Cygnian cultures do not come together with armies and space ships, guns blazing; they come face to face as individuals trying to comprehend and adapt to new lives.

There is Grace Delarua of Cygnus Beta and Dllenahkh from the Sadiri settlement, and they must first understand themselves and their relationship to each other before they can grasp the greater implications of their respective situations.

Throughout The Best of All Possible Worlds, Lord’s prose is subtle, witty, and vivid. She knows, as the narrator of Redemption might say, how to really “seize the tale.”

“A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily,” says the same narrator. “I am willing to admit to many faults, but I will not burden my conscience with that one. All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing. It is a half-tamed horse that you seize on the run and ride with knees and teeth clenched, and then you regretfully slip off as gently and safely as you can, always wondering if you could have gone a few meters more.”

While the lives of Lord’s characters may be untidy, the writing is anything but. Below, Lord and I talk about travel, writing, and her new novel.

Why’d you make us wait so long? Okay, that sounds a wee bit selfish and melodramatic. When did you start working on The Best of All Possible Worlds and what is the story behind the creation of it?

I started the first draft in summer 2009. I was working on the sequel to Redemption in Indigo (still am, getting close) and had a bit of writer’s block, so I created another world for the purpose of writing exercises. Then I got attached to my new characters, so when the sequel began to get grim and bloody, I could retreat and relax with Delarua and Dllenahkh and the rest. I was thrilled when the manuscript won the 2009 Frank Collymore Award (Redemption in Indigo won the 2008 Colly). I added some tweaks and rewrites after that.

The long wait happened because I wanted to have an agent negotiate my second book’s contract. I held onto the manuscript for almost a year before I found Sally Harding of the Cooke Agency. I made the right choice. I’m extremely pleased with the support I’m getting from Sally and her colleagues.

And in what ways did you stretch yourself, artistically, in the writing of The Best of All Possible Worlds?

I experimented with voice and précis, and I played a bit with time and motifs.

Delarua’s voice isn’t literary. She loves words and language, film and stage, but she’s not overly elegant when expressing herself in writing. I allowed her a certain level of clichéd speech—uncommon enough to show her wit, but familiar enough to be close to conversational norms. Dllenahkh’s voice is the voice of someone who is suddenly immersed in a foreign language, but by the end he is so comfortable that he can be more colloquial and playful. There are other ways in which his character’s development is revealed in the evolution of his voice, but I don’t want to spoil the story.

Time—a brief play with non-linear narrative in the first person proved an interesting experiment. Motifs—some symbols are obvious, some are subtle.

Précis—I allotted myself a certain number of words and fraction of plot per chapter and I stuck to it. In some ways this book is tighter than Redemption in Indigo and with both books if you skim you’ll miss out. Everything is there because it is meant to be.

How do you determine what’s “meant to be”? I guess this is a question about editing but also about . . . instinct?

Pure instinct. You might back up each choice to cut or add with theory and research, and seek justification for that sense of “rightness”, but there’s a point at which writing is more music than maths. You cultivate an ear for it instead of calculating frequencies.

As novelist Kate Elliott says, The Best of All Possible Worlds “breaks out of the typical conflict-centered narrative paradigm to examine adaptation, social change, and human relationships.” What’s at the heart of the book for you–what questions did it force you to ask or help you to answer?

The book is entirely about the balance of power in relationships between individuals and between groups. The former is illustrated in the interactions between the two main characters, and the latter in the encounter between Sadiri and Cygnian cultures, particularly in the vignettes of the taSadiri diaspora. What makes a culture consider itself superior, and what makes a person believe that they are strong? What happens when the things that you think make you superior and strong are taken away or warped?

Did you build the cultures and then put them in conflict or did you start with the conflicts and build the culture? How did these to cultures shape each other?

That’s a very linear question. As creator of this universe, I don’t have to be linear. I can create a culture with characteristics that will naturally lead to a particular kind of conflict, but I might also desire a particular kind of conflict to occur and go back and add a cultural quirk that will support those consequences. I prefer to start with the culture then tweak until I get the conflicts the plot requires rather than imagine the conflicts then form cultures around that. Conflict as the main inspiration for culture doesn’t sound sustainable or realistic.

How much of world-building is about planning and how much is about surprise and spontaneity?

That’s not an easy question because not everyone will have the same approach, nor will the same approach work every time. For now I like to start with scaffolding and gradually fill in the gaps, all the while leaving myself open to the creative opportunities provided by surprise and spontaneity.

Which of the characters in The Best of All Possible Worlds reveals the most about you?

I believe Dllenahkh and Lian show most of my personality!

Can you elaborate on that?

A non-Barbadian reader commented on Dllenahkh’s speech. “Who talks like that!” Well, I do! Not all the time, but I do, and many of my friends do too. He goes on retreats, meditates, and would rather talk than fight (though he can fight too). He takes the role of mentor seriously but he can sometimes be a little impatient. A lot of my teacher-days are distilled into Dllenahkh’s character.

Lian was my avatar for moments when I wanted to laugh at my characters, disapprove of their actions, or just give them a hug.

In what ways (if any) are writing and traveling similar for you? And how are they different?

They are similar in that you have to be alert. You’re no longer surrounded by the familiar. You have to observe and analyze, see how things fit together and figure out the unspoken rules. The difference is that with writing you have to pay even more attention because the conscious and unconscious levels of your brain are working to make your created world into something believable and navigable.

What does home look like (and feel like) to a “global nomad”?

Extremely minimalist! You can’t carry much with you and if you stay any place long enough to accumulate stuff, you’ll have to throw out a lot of it when you move on. To a certain extent, you learn to carry a sense of ‘home’ with you: for example, particular foods, rituals or music you can’t do without. (Please note, food is never a burden to carry and rituals and music weigh little or nothing.)

Can you expand a little more on the rituals? Are there any writing related rituals? Also, I’d think the imaginary worlds you create would offer a certain stability as you move from place to place.

I’m constantly reinventing my rituals so I don’t become dependent, but they can be as simple as regular mealtimes and bedtime, exercise, sunlight and conversation with friends.

I don’t rely on my imaginary worlds for stability! There’s always the next book and a new world.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Reading and Writing and Moral Judgment

Daniel Abraham

“I am a firm believer in whatever gets you through the night.”

—William “Bill” Boettcher, my high school Biology teacher.

A while ago, I was talking to a woman who is a Much Bigger Name in Genre Fiction than I am. She’s been publishing since I was just learning how to do all this, and some of her books and short stories were things I read while I was figuring out how to write. While we were talking, we stumbled on the subject of a workshop she’d taught recently, and how much it had dismayed her. Her students would, as part of the critique, point out flaws like, “the female characters are passive.”

Now, this was a weird conversation for me. I’m talking to this woman who is way more experienced, way more accomplished, and someone I’ve looked up to, and the problem that’s got her exercised is that there are too many strong women characters? I didn’t get it. So we talked some more, and slowly, I started to understand what upset her. Her students weren’t drawing any kind of line between questions of craft and questions of morality.

Since then, I’ve put the argument to a few other folks, and the way I phrase it raises hackles sometimes, so hang with me for a second, and let me walk you through it. I’m using strong female characters for the example, but there are as many different issues as you’d care to pick. The argument the students were making was this: Sexism is bad shit. If you write a book that really embraces sexist stereotypes, you’ve written what one critic of my very own called “an objectively bad book.” If you’re studying how to write, that pretty much means you don’t want to make an objectively bad book, right? It follows as the night does the day, that you shouldn’t write stuff with passive women, or women in need of rescue, or men who are motivated by grief over the death of a woman because those are sexist clichés, and sexism is bad, and don’t be bad.

Which is to say (and here’s where folks I like and respect start giving me the side-eye), fiction is best when it is morally instructive.

Let me elaborate a little. Let’s talk about Spiderman. The big quote that comes out of that project is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The inversion of that is, “With utter impotence comes radical freedom.” If what you do matters, then what you do matters. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. So does fiction have power? If it does, shouldn’t some responsibility come with it? Or can we say it’s powerful when it has the effect we like and say that artistic freedom is more important when it comes out wrong-way-round?

I know a lot of readers. None of us come here because the books are empty and meaningless and carry no weight in our lives. We learn about some of the most important things in our lives vicariously through fiction. I don’t know about you, but my opinions about love and fairness and what it means to be cool and what it means to be sad—how to grieve, how to love, how to think about God—all have roots in books. How Peter Wimsey saw Harriet Vane was actually important to me. I still have some verbal affectations I lifted off characters I read about in high school. My ideas about right and wrong track back to Senior English.

I’m not an outlier on that. I’ve known a lot of people for whom books have been profoundly important, and not always books I like. I know a fair number of folks who imprinted on the novels of Ayn Rand, for instance and the short stories of Anais Nin.

Fiction isn’t powerless. And if the author just ignores the politics of their work, that doesn’t mean the book becomes apolitical. It just means they wrote their own defaults. Think Black people are lazy and violent, but your work isn’t about that? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts it’s in there.

Reading is the same way. Aidan Moher over at A Dribble of Ink, set himself a public challenge to read as many books by women as he did by men. That’s a moral statement. Just by doing that, he’s said that gender equality is important, and that work by women deserves the same attention and audience as work by men. And more than that, he’s said—again, just by doing it—that his own internalized sexism needs a conscious override. He’s trying to be a better man and to create (in a small way) a better world by the way he chooses what he reads.

I did something similar when I was in my twenties. For me, it wasn’t about gender, but race. It’s how I first read Langston Hughes, for instance and Colson Whitehead. I’d already read some Walter Mosley and Maya Angelou, but it was a good excuse to revisit them. And it was a moral statement, even if it was mostly a private one.

How we read and how we write will always have moral and political implications. The only choice we’ve got is whether they’re unconscious or considered. Period. End of story.

Only it’s not the end of the story, right? Because that lady I was talking about before? The Much Bigger Name? She’s not stupid, and she’s not narrow, and so there seems to be a contradiction there. And truth is that I’m large. I contain multitudes. I believe absolutely what I said. But that’s not all that I believe.

There are two movies, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They’re talky, intellectual romances that I love so much I almost don’t want to see the third one when it comes out in case they biff it. In the second movie—Before Sunset—Ethan Hawke’s character draws this beautiful and damning distinction between trying to be his best self and trying to be his authentic self. I don’t know if that speaks to other people as powerfully as it did to me, but I’m still a little devastated by it.

Wanting to live in a better world is great. Working for a better world is great. It only becomes a vice when it keeps us from loving the world we’re in—warts and all. My experience is that life is full of strong women and weak ones. Venal ones. Active ones. Passive ones. Complicated ones. Unhealthy ones. Men are just as varied and complicated and screwed-up. Their lives aren’t our societal best self, but they’re who we are, and losing sight of that is dangerous.

When I say that fiction is best when it is morally instructive, the image I get—and the one I’m betting most of you get too—is of an iron-spined Victorian woman who only reads Nice books. And the books I imagine her reading are thin, cardboard stories where everything comes out the way it ought to in a Miss Prism, The good ended happily, the bad unhappily; that is what fiction means kind of way. And because her imaginary morality isn’t mine, I find the thought horrifying. We’re right to distrust morally hygienic fiction, even when we approve of the morality that it’s championing. Hell, maybe especially then. It’s easy to forgive shallow arguments you already agree with.

I think there’s a tricky stretch when you’re starting out on something new, like learning how to write or paint or make art. The danger of fighting for moral standards in a writing class is that you might win. New writers are still forming themselves and their literary projects. Treating moral issues as if they were craft is asking for a literature of beautiful sermons.

Now, I love a good sermon. I reread Camus’ The Plague every few years, and it’s nothing if not a sermon. But I think Lolita is a good book too. And reading projects that pull you out into different kinds of authors and stories are wonderful so long as the moral aspects of your reading list don’t become more important than the joy you take in reading. It’s a fine line between thinking you should read something for moral reasons and thinking you should like it too.

I would never argue that the power of story—and it’s a real power—comes without responsibility. But I would say that responsibility is both to the better world to which we aspire and also the broken, compromised one we live in now. Both to the broader, deeper, sophisticated readers we would like to become and the guilty, familiar, selfish pleasures that brought us here in the first place.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Upgrades and Reader’s Poll Winners

Neil Clarke

A few months ago, I found out that my heart attack had placed me on the path to becoming a cyborg. Last month, my wife and I drove to the hospital and within a few hours the transition was complete. It’s considered minor surgery when they implant a defibrillator, but anytime they snake a wire into your heart, there follows an over-abundance of caution. I am happy to say that the procedure went smoothly and I was back at home the next day. My recovery is moving along and I feel good.

The oddest thing so far? The defibrillator has a built-in speaker. Yes, music can play from my chest, though it isn’t a good sign when it does.

In the interim, I’ve had a lot more couch time. I took the opportunity to play catch up on a few projects:

- The third annual volume of our Clarkesworld anthologies (titled Clarkesworld: Year Three) is now available in ebook, with a trade paperback coming by the end of the month.

- The fourth and fifth volumes of the Clarkesworld anthologies are 95% complete.

- Four more back issues are now available in print. (September 2011-December 2011)

- Clarkesworld subscriptions are now available in Germany and France via Amazon. (in English)

During my couch time, I've also been enjoying people’s responses to our annual reader’s survey, for which I am happy to announce the results:

Clarkesworld Reader’s Survey—Best Story of 2012

1. “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard

2. “Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente

3. “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson

The voting was close at the start, but in the end, “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard won by a comfortable margin. Aliette also deserves congratulations on her BSFA Award nomination for this piece. Something tells me it won’t be the last time we’ll be mentioning “Immersion” and “award nomination” in the same sentence.

Clarkesworld Reader’s Survey—Best Cover Art of 2012

WINNER: “New World” by Ken Barthelmey

2nd Place: “Sci-Fi Farmer” by Jessada Sutthi

3rd Place: “Breaking Through” by Julie Dillon

As the voting in this category progressed, several artists traded the top spot, but towards the end, “New World” by Ken Barthelmey ran away with the top honor and never looked back.

Congratulations to all of our winners!

One of the things that often came up in the survey comments was a desire to see us publish more fiction in each issue. As you know, I’ve expressed a strong desire to be able to make Clarkesworld my full-time job. I believe that in order to make that goal a reality, it requires that we continue to expand our offerings as opportunities arise. Previously, we’ve tied expansion to subscription levels and I think it is time to do that again.

To that end, I’d like to announce the first of our 2013 milestone goals:

Increase the number of stories per issue to four, when we pick up five hundred new subscriptions.

Our goals for the year don’t end there, but I still have minor details to work out. Hopefully, I can tie up all the loose ends at Boskone later this month. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

I’d like to close with a bit of a public service announcement: If you can nominate for the Hugo Awards this year, you should know that the requirements for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine have changed. While Clarkesworld is still eligible in this category (just as I’m still eligible in Best Editor Short Form), some familiar names seen on past ballots are not.

In an attempt to help with the transition from the old rules to the new ones, I’ve repurposed semiprozine.org as a place you can find information about the category and a growing list of magazines with their eligibility status. This unofficial resource is a good place to learn about some the many worthy contenders for this award. Check it out sometime and don’t forget to nominate!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.