TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 168 (May 2024)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, May 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read
Caroline M. Yoachim

The Last Thing They See Is Laika
Stephen Geigen-Miller

Over a Long Time Ago
Nisi Shawl

Chaos Theory
Ash Howell

FANTASY

Done Deal
Rory Harper

Exit Interview
Ben Peek

And the Dreams That You Dare to Dream
Marissa Lingen

Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows
P H Lee

NONFICTION

Book Review: Ours by Phillip B. Williams
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Price of Redemption by Shawn Carpenter
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Caroline M. Yoachim

Ben Peek

Nisi Shawl

Ash Howell

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, June 2024

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2024 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Tithi Luadthong (aka 'Grandfailure') / Adobe Stock Images / original image modified by LIGHTSPEED staff

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial, May 2024

John Joseph Adams | 240 words

Welcome to issue 168 of Lightspeed Magazine!

One of the things speculative fiction does best is exploring different kinds of minds via the use of unusual story structures. Well, we’re kicking off this issue with a powerful story that nearly breaks the very nature of reading! “We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim tells the story of an alien culture in a fresh, exciting format. Luckily for you, we’ve included instructions to help you understand every fantastic page.

We also have a new original science fiction story by Nisi Shawl: “Over a Long Time Ago,” a dark tale of unhappy relationships and space exploration. Stephen Geigen-Miller also delves into space exploration in his flash piece “The Last Thing They See Is Laika.” Ash Howell’s story of gene manipulation “Chaos Theory” joins our flash SF.

Ben Peek returns to the Ministry of Saturn in his dark fantasy story “Exit Interview.” P H Lee explores the nature of tricksters in their alternate history tale “Richard Nixon and the Princess of Crows.” We also have a flash story (“Done Deal”) from Rory Harper, and another (“And the Dreams That You Dare to Dream”) from Marissa Lingen.

In nonfiction, we have a terrific array of book reviews, and of course, our spotlight interviewers have sat down with our authors to get more insight into their stories.

Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than forty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent anthologies include Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele), The Far Reaches (from Amazon Original Stories), Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, A People’s Future of the United States, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. A two-time Hugo Award-winner, John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read

Caroline M. Yoachim | 2400 words

Publisher’s Note: The formatting of this story is essential to the reading of it—and some of the formatting was impossible to render in ebook formats that use reflowable text (such as ePub and Kindle/mobi). To work around that, the story uses regular text whenever possible and has the text rendered as images when it is not. Many of the pages have only a small amount of text on them; this is intentional.

When you get to an image, your ebook reader or app should allow you to zoom in on it. Here are some tips for various devices/apps:

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If you are using an app or device not listed here, try using one of the above zoom methods; if none of those work, consult your app or device’s documentation.

We recommend reading the story in light mode (rather than dark mode), as the images all have a white background.

If you prefer, you can also read this story on our website, where it may be easier to read. You’ll find it at lightspeedmagazine.com/HowToRead.

Turn the page to begin.

ITERATION

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

This is our story, simplified

We read three times in the course of our lifespan: once with our parents to learn the story, once alone to add to the threads, and once with our children to teach them. History, science, philosophy, art. All we have ever known is here, in one thread or another, trapped in what—for you—would be a cacophony of overlapping words.

Life

You are ancient, and we are fleeting. Such a luxury, to have so much time that you need not rush through everything at once. And yet you are so horribly inefficient, to not make more of the time you have. Think what you could do in a single lifetime if you could read more than one thread at once, think more thoughts at once, hold more experience in every moment.

Loss

Our generations are synced in a way that yours are not. Iterations of our story are not staggered, not muddled like those songs that you call rounds. An entire generation reads together in a single voice, three times: as children with their parents, as adults alone, and as parents with their children.

But with each generation, the number of those who read our story is diminished. Many children refuse to learn their parents’ words. There are too many threads, they say. There are so few of us remaining. Soon, our story will be lost forever. We must find another way.

Transformation

Can you make the shift, from reader to writer, when you can only barely read? We fear that you do not grasp the urgency—you know our lives are short compared to yours but fail to comprehend the magnitude of the difference. We read three times in the course of our lifespan: once with our parents to learn the story, once alone as we write new threads, and once with our children to teach them. There is nothing else but this, we live our entire lives while reading, and the time it takes you to read three times...

“This is our story, simplified:

Life.

Loss.

Transformation.

Love.

Death.

Iteration.”

...is for us a lifetime.

We have been trying to teach you to read for several generations. We are running out of time.

Love

The gift of words we give to our children is our greatest expression of love. We want to give this gift to you, even knowing how hard you must work to receive it. Imagine our words, stretched into a thin vertical line...

...and set beside it all the variations, all our explanations, everything you usually read as a single stream of text chopped into smaller pieces and laid out side by side so we can fit it all within our lifespan, each generation adding a new column to the story, stretching it ever wider.

There’s a part of our story that describes finding you, our hopes and fears for you, and learning to communicate:

To even fit it on the page requires text a hairsbreadth wide, and it is still but a tiny fraction of our story.

Death

We are the last ones holding on to the old story. Our children are making something new. Please take these words we send you, read them, learn them, translate them into something your mind can understand. You might not add your threads and iterate as we do, but hopefully as you transform our words, you will keep some sense of the vastness of each moment, the illusion of holding more story in your mind than you are actually capable of holding.

“Even if some threads are lost

in the translation,

is it not better to have

a legacy, an afterlife

that echoes after we are gone?”

It took many generations for them to teach us how to read.

Their lifespan was measured in mere inches of text.

It took far longer for us to learn to write on their behalf.

That timescale cannot be captured on these pages.

The blank space—the absence of their generations—would go for miles.

Commemoration | Iteration

The entirety of their story has thousands upon thousands of threads. It is history told in moments that seem to happen all at once. It is science that progresses in increments almost infinitely small, and yet contains discoveries that even now we do not fully comprehend. It is their art, their language, their culture—everything they were determined to preserve. We have so much left to translate; this is only the beginning.

Give this story to your children, along with everything we have managed to translate, and perhaps one day the story will make its way back to the distant descendants of those who created it—ephemeral entities who, in the final generations of their decline, taught us a new way to read. When you teach this story to your children, do not start with all the threads at once. Instead, begin with a single line of text:

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

©2024 by Caroline M. Yoachim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline M. Yoachim is a three-time Hugo and six-time Nebula Award finalist. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including four times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yoachim’s short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories and the print chapbook of her novelette The Archronology of Love are available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Last Thing They See Is Laika

Stephen Geigen-Miller | 974 words

So much for Shapcott’s harbinger of astronautical doom. He hasn’t seen her at all. Or anyone, obviously.

There was a lot of chatter just after the accident—Mission Control and half the experts on the planet trying to find a solution, any solution. It’s quiet now. They’ve figured out what he knew from the moment it happened.

It’s all down to physics, as usual. Force, kinetic energy, and gravity. The debris that made an unannounced appearance at his EVA, severed his tether, and sent him spinning in toward the Earth below. The fuel in his thrusters that he burned off in a desperate, futile attempt to get back to the ISS.

And still, no Laika.

His radio crackles, the tinny voice being relayed from the space station, for now. He wonders again if he’ll be out of range before the situation becomes terminal, and part of him hopes so.

“Carl, Carl do you copy?”

Oh, God. It’s Shapcott. They shouldn’t do this to Shapcott. It’s cruel to make her listen to the play-by-play of what’s coming.

“Still here,” he replies.

“Carl,” she begins, then falls silent.

“The view’s amazing,” he says. “If circumstances were different, I’d say I wish you were here.”

For a moment, the only thing he can hear in the universe is his own breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s not your fault,” he replies.

“I’ll stay with you.”

“No. God, no. Don’t do that to yourself. Any of you. There’s nothing to say. I’ll update Mission Control for as long as I can, but just . . . don’t talk to me. Please.”

“Carl,” Shapcott asks, “Is she there? Have you seen her?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, but that’s a lie.

When you read about Laika, as a kid, you get the idea that she went into space, came home, got a victory parade in Red Square, and went on the propaganda circuit giving lectures to adoring crowds of other Soviet dogs.

But Laika never came home. She was the first animal to orbit the Earth, and she was never meant to come home. Sad, but, you know. Science! The Space Race!

And Shapcott had told him something once, after a few drinks, but before one thing had led to another. “The cosmonauts tell this story,” she’d said. “When they’ve been deep in the vodka. The Russians lost people to space sooner than we did. They had time for . . . legends, I guess, to take root. And they say that when one of us is about to bite it up there, the last thing they see is Laika.”

“How could anyone know that?” he had asked.

“Oh, from the last transmissions of half-mad cosmonauts cooking in their Sputniks as the cooling systems failed or whatever. Official records wiped but living on in whispers at Baikonur. You know, however stories get passed on.”

“They believe this?”

“When they’re on the ground? No. When they’re up there?” Shapcott had paused to finish her drink. “Who knows what people believe—when there’s so little separating them from infinity?”

Carl hadn’t told Shapcott, but he’d been so space-crazy as a kid, so hungry to know. He’d studied and read beyond the usual superficial histories, and when he’d learned the truth, ten-year-old Carl had cried for poor betrayed Laika.

Laika was expendable. He’s not so self-pitying to believe that he was considered expendable. And yet, here he is. Going out just like Laika.

It’s hard to know his current velocity—he tried to do the math in his head but it turns out there are limits to even his logical detachment. Maybe his long, fast fall will still be slow enough that his air going bad or waste building up in his system will kill him first.

It sounds like a miserable way to go. He’d rather be a meteorite than a satellite.

And he might still get his wish. He’s starting to feel warmer, and the Earth seems to loom ever larger, ever nearer.

The radio stays silent. He’s not sure if he’s out of range or if they’re honoring his request as a last wish. He keeps talking anyway. Someone down there might be listening, and it gives him something to do.

For science, and all that.

No, that’s another lie. Really, it’s because he finds, now, in the ultimate quiet and on the verge of the ultimate moment, that he doesn’t want to die alone after all.

So he talks.

He talks about space, about being an astronaut. He talks about how beautiful the Earth is. He talks about the fucking debris up here, and how he hopes that maybe now, people will finally be motivated to do something about it.

When his vision starts to blur, and he feels hotter with every second, and he doesn’t know whether the oxygen is running out, or if re-entry has truly begun, or if he’s just losing it at last. . .

That’s when he talks about Laika.

“We were wrong, Shapcott. We didn’t understand,” he says. “She wasn’t a harbinger of doom. She was a dog. They’ve always loved us, protected us, even when we send them to die. She’s not a threat. Maybe she’s a guard, a warning. No, because then she would have come before I ever left the station . . .”

The Earth is so big, and it’s hot, and he’s lonely.

“Not a spectre, not a guard. A friend. The last thing she’d want is for anyone else to die alone.”

And he feels it.

A cold nose, pressed against his face. Relief from heat and solitude.

“Hey, girl. Hey, puppy.”

Tail wagging. Sloppy, licking tongue.

“Who’s a good girl? I’m glad to see you too. You want to play? Yeah, let’s go. Let’s go play.”

©2024 by Stephen Geigen-Miller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Geigen-Miller is a Toronto-based writer, formerly mostly of comics, currently mostly of prose. His fiction has also appeared in the anthology Nevertheless (Tesseracts Twenty-One). He’s a regular contributor to the Skiffy & Fanty website, where he writes about comics and graphic novels.

Over a Long Time Ago

Nisi Shawl | 5486 words

She should go back inside the watchpod. Maree and Blaise didn’t have to be dead. The air hadn’t been gone that long. And even if their current bodies were hopeless, damaged beyond repair, probably the back-up system was uncorrupted. Probably its uploads of those two—as well as the uploads of all the other prisoners—were just fine. Josie could confirm that, then crawl into her cryo drawer. Shut herself down.

But she stayed outside, watching the stars.

The stars were strange. They weren’t the constellations Josie had grown up with on her home habitat, Mizar 5, and not even the marginally familiar ones she’d seen when stationed back at the heliopause, working for ARPA. They burned in new configurations which shifted against the black emptiness in dreamlike drifts: far and farther, past and to come. Untwinkling. Uninvolved.

“Come on.” She said it out loud. She’d started off talking to Yale’s body—her body—like that when she first woke up on the ship inside of his skin. Her skin. Her blood, her bones. Her balls and dik.

“Come on,” she repeated. She made herself turn away from the spectacle of space and face the blown hatch. It had banged wide open in explosive but silent decompression sometime after she EVAed in an irritated huff. How long ago? A dimly shining cloud of frozen moisture was still visible in the ship’s wake.

At the speed Deliverer traveled, roughly a tenth of light, that cloud of ejected air was eventually going to be left behind. Like Josie would have been if not for the umbilical line tying her to the watchpod and Deliverer’s temporarily disabled oxygen supply. Whatever blew the hatch had tripped her suit’s ventilation over to internal reserves, which were capacious and even semi-self-renewing. But she shouldn’t count on them. She should go in and investigate the trouble. Maybe it was so simple she’d be able to deal with it herself. Sighing, she took hold of the umble with mittened hands and began hauling herself toward the hatchway.

No lights inside the airlock or watchpod. No glowing emergency strips. Nothing but darkness. Nothing but her memory of the layout to guide her. And the layout might have changed because of whatever had happened, so she chinned her helmet’s torch on. There lay Blaise, right in front of her, sprawled on his side on the control couch, with Maree kneeling over him. His pale nakedness was glazed with ice—probably sweat. Straps kept both of them tethered to the couch. Maree’s annoyingly long hair—defiantly, she’d let it grow for the six years since Josie downloaded her—stood out from her head like iron files on a magnet, exposing her red, ruined face. Just as well a length of cloth swaddled Blaise’s.

Josie looked up from the dead lovers. Up. Centrifugrav still worked. A soft push, and the arch of the watchpod’s ceiling was easy to reach. All-systems manual override was a mechanical switch. She flipped it and Deliverer’s emergency isolated electricals came online. Soothing blue lights shimmered around the vents and the spreadscreens.

But the screens stayed blank. Maybe reset was going to take a while? And replenishing the atmosphere would take a while, too; her suit’s ventilation hadn’t gone back on the umbilical’s feed, yet. Plus, why had Deliverer’s atmosphere vanished in the first place?

Priorities. On the primitive glass display panel, all 2543 prisoner flags showed as green, including her own. So, good. The uploads were intact. The prisoners’ instances were safe. The power link for the stasis chamber in the storage pod opposite this one looked good, and given all the ship’s failsafes, Josie was relatively sure the tissues the prisoners’ bodies were going to be cloned from would also be fine. The mission was salvageable.

Blaise’s ice coating had melted. Progress. But best remove his recorder before things warmed up any further. When she took off her suit he’d be smelly. Might as well get Maree’s recorder too. Selecting a scalpel from the medical kit hooked to the couch, she peeled back the cloth covering Blaise’s face—a repurposed modesty skirt, it looked like, ironically—clenched her teeth, and began slicing. Though the mess was much worse than it ought to have been, his nose was pretty much intact.

Maree was messier. Josie had to resort to digging through a pulpy mound of snot and blood and meat and hair to find the camera that had been embedded at her nose’s tip. Which was a drag, especially in mittens. Nasty, awkward work. And lonely.

She wiped everything off with the clean part of the modesty skirt and snapped the first camera into her helmet’s port, set to play. Skipped ahead to today, 04032064. The images filling her headsup stuttered. That was normal; frame capture rate on these things was intentionally slow. Only enough exposures per minute to pick out highlights that a back-up instance of the downloaded prisoner might need to incorporate.

She’d zipped past the flirting, which hadn’t been as subtle as either of her old schoolmates believed. Josie hated being left out. But when Maree learned that Josie had chosen to download Maree in order to fuck her with Yale’s body, that sort of soured the relationship. Maybe Josie shouldn’t have pretended to be Yale. Not even for just a few moments. Downloading Blaise, too—ostensibly because his pro-tech tendencies enhanced the ship-operating engrams ARPA gave everyone—had defused tensions for a while. Then . . .

There she went on the playback, suited up and shouldering between Blaise’s viewpoint and Maree’s heaving shoulders. The camera followed the Yale/Josie image to the lock, then jerked back to Maree before the lock’s controls registered being touched. After several vigorous close-ups and zoom-outs, the run went white. Then it stopped.

Switching to Maree’s camera, she saw a similar sequence. The Josie interruption came with a smear of red along the picture’s bottom, signal of some negative emotion on Maree’s part—guilt or hate, probably, or both. The emotional smudge passed swiftly as Maree turned back to her sex partner. Her camera captured her hands landing a number of slaps to Blaise’s plump cheeks. White fabric crumpled up and swished around in the playback’s foreground as the skirt was tied in place. All of a sudden the skirt fluttered madly, billowed out, and collapsed. And the recording was over. Wait—an alphanumeric flashed up briefly and was gone. Too fast to read.

Apparently the decompression had happened nearly instantaneously. Most likely caused by a micrometeoroid, though Deliverer was hundreds of thousands of au from any planetary system. The whipple shield should have caught any stray particles, anyway. But what else could it be? A micrometeoroid. That was the only remotely reasonable possibility.

She ran through the end of the second sequence again. The alphanumeric flash was gone. And it stayed gone when she ran it four more times.

Giving up, she followed procedure, unleashing the crawlers to find and plug any holes. Now nothing detained her from collecting Blaise and Maree’s corpses and bundling them into the shredder. They fit, but it took multiple flushes to clear the line of their slurry.

She tried to pretend there was nothing grisly about what she was doing. To focus on retrieving the raw materials crucial for growing her old schoolmates’ new bodies. Waste not, want not.

Afterwards, there was plenty of room in the watchpod. Too much room, actually. Which prisoner should she bring back? Who would make the most tractable trustee? An updated instance of Maree would treat Josie with the same chilliness this last one had exhibited since discovering Josie’s plot to score revenge sex on her. So probably not Maree. But not Blaise either; he was decidedly non-mirror bias, and had obviously considered sexing with Yale’s body a distasteful duty. Twilla? No; she was mirror bias. Deeply. She’d be more put off by Yale’s body than Blaise had been. Vixi?

The crawlers were visible to Josie’s unaided eyes as a multicolored sheen stretching along the join between the pod’s control wall and its narrow floor. Such a large concentration suggested they’d found their work. They were replicating themselves; next, they’d either transport or copy whatever materials they needed to patch whatever holes they’d found.

With a few more swipes she got rid of the last of the fluids clinging to the couch and settled down to wait for the return to normalcy. The suit felt so isolating. She’d have to ask Vixi for a massage. Or maybe she should promote and download someone she didn’t know from her old school, some other promising prisoner pulled from the storage banks.

Leaning back, Josie docked her helmet into the couch’s outlet to scan the prisoner list. Her headsup sprang to life but showed only an empty blue oblong. No icon. No menu. No scrollbar.

She lifted her head and disengaged. Re-docked. Still nothing but the oblong.

Had the micrometeroid crash triggered a processor reset? But redundancies should have prevented a complete wipe of the system. Josie counted the seconds to verify that a problem had actually occurred: one thousand, two thousand . . . twenty thousand, and no change.

She tried voice activation. No reaction.

What about her private system’s link up? That had been part of the deal she struck with ARPA when she agreed to take Lucky’s place on Deliverer—installation of her chips and antennae in Yale’s body, complete with a dedicated communication channel. She’d used those extras only a few times.

Anxiously, she hummed the summoning sequence and success! Her home room opened in its dedicated corner of her visual field. She hadn’t spent a lot of thought on furnishing it—no thought at all, in fact. So it retained its presets: peach-colored walls, white ceiling, beige carpet, scattered tables and plant stands, and a single couch covered in white-and-green stripes.

Another hum and a smiling avatar greeted her—the algorithms Josie had selected to operate her system, bundled together in a glossier, long-legged-er version of her original embodiment. ARPA’s finest tech.

“How’s it hangin?” she asked the avatar.

“Here and now? All good.” One of the standard responses she’d configured it for.

“Good. Get me a current list of our prisoners, uh, I mean clients.”

“The loading manifest? Sure.”

“So the list hasn’t changed since we launched?” The project’s directors had warned of possible data degradation due to radiation sneaking past the computer core’s shields. It was a vanishingly small possibility, but it was a real one. Not imaginary. “What’s the manifest’s most recent version?”

“I can’t retrieve that.”

“Of course you can. Talk to Deliverer.”

“Not getting through.”

“What? Why not?” If the watchpod’s rudimentary display panel could link to Deliverer’s computer core, Josie’s softa personal system should have zero problems making the same connection. In fact—

“Piggyback on the display panel’s line.”

“I tried. It’s discontinuous.”

The line was discontinuous. The line between the watchpod and Deliverer’s computer core was broken. That made no sense.

“Then how is the display getting data?”

“It isn’t.”

“But it is!” She kept her audio on but ducked out of the home room to look at the panel again. “See?” Ducked back.

“When disrupted, the display reverts to showing its last available data.”

“That’s a really stupid idea.”

The avatar shrugged. “If you say so.” Another standard response.

“And what’s going on with the—the clients? How are we—how am I supposed to know? They’re my responsibility!”

What good did it do to shout at herself? She shut off the audio and left.

There was an emergency computer access port on Deliverer’s core. To get there she’d have to EVA. Again. But at least she still had on the suit. Which must stink by now. Could she at least catch a breath of fresh air before going out?

Mitten on her neck zipper, Josie hesitated. She sat up—too easily. She stood. Also too easily. Centrifugrav felt weaker now than when she’d come in from EVA, which was the exact opposite of how things ought to be tending. So what about the atmosphere? Was there any? Was it getting thicker? Had enough been siphoned from the reserves in the storage pod on the Deliverer’s far side? According to the suit’s sensors everything should be fine—but what if it wasn’t?

She unzipped herself a bare finger’s width and heard through vacuum-muffled ears the bright whistle of escaping gas. Rezipped fast as she could.

The patch of crawlers lay motionless, all the same color: matte green. That meant they were done with their job. The hole or holes must be fixed. No more leaking. No more air going out. Therefore, the issue had to be that no air was coming in. Shuffling carefully forward, Josie stuck her hand on the duct outlet and felt no movement. No pressure.

All right then. Core ho. She stopped by the airlock to unhook the umbil and strap on a wrist lamp. The lock’s mechanical gauge confirmed the watchpod’s airlessness. She closed the hatches tight behind her anyway.

Something was wrong with the stars. Clinging to the hatch’s handle, Josie stopped to stare at them a moment. Were they . . . not moving? Hard to tell this far from anything she recognized.

She aimed a beam from her wrist lamp aft. She had to sweep her arm back and forth a bit before the light caught on the shimmering water crystals expelled by the watchpod’s decompression. Shouldn’t they be—lower? Further south? She ought to review the engrams.

The arm and conduits connecting the watchpod to Deliverer’s central module were affixed to the side opposite the airlock. Josie tapped her wrist light twice so it would stay on and started pulling herself over the pod’s exterior by its built-in holds. When she came to the connecting arm she hugged it; it was too thick around for her hands to meet, but WestHem’s training said to use her embrace to move herself inward. It worked. Hunch slide hunch slide hunch slide hunch slide . . .

She needed to pause and rest. A few times. Despite her dedication to exercising on Deliverer’s elliptical. This used another set of muscle groups. During the second-to-last stop she tried shining her light to the left to catch one of the struts anchoring the ship’s sail. She couldn’t see it.

Because it wasn’t there.

She checked the engram with Deliverer’s blueprints that ARPA had embedded in her brain. Yes, the light sail’s struts ought to rise off the ship’s core a few more hunches forward. But though Josie played her wrist light in ever-widening arcs, it kept showing her nothing.

Horror shrank her skin tight and cold. Maintaining her calm—for whose good? Must be for her own—she twisted to throw the light’s beam the other direction. And there was a strut, right where one was supposed to be. Following it outward, her wrist light’s thin beam gave her a glimpse of a stark white cylinder branching into the ribs supporting that part of the sail. So something was fine. Staring that direction, she thought she caught a couple of stars appearing, emerging from behind the laser-shot sail that powered Deliverer’s interstellar flight. Then a golden wisp edged into view: a nebula. The vast blot of the sail’s silhouette no longer blocked it.

But these emergences were slow—too slow. The nebula and stars had come into view with Deliverer’s progress as a whole. They weren’t happening because of the watchpod’s arm whirling properly around the core, because the arm wasn’t whirling properly. Which she should have known because the strut was practically staying still. Like the arm she climbed.

No wonder centrifugrav had all but vanished. And that was what was wrong with the stars. And the frozen cloud of air. That was what had been bothering her. The stars weren’t behaving. They weren’t going around in fast-enough circles.

Wrongness upon wrongness.

Were there invisible connections between these disasters? The blown atmosphere, the system wipe, the suit readouts, the negligible spin, the missing strut . . . Sabotage? But by who? Nobody else was aboard besides her fellow prisoners, and Deliverer had strong safeguards preventing their escape and embodiment.

That didn’t matter to the building dread threatening to swallow her heart and mind.

Work was one of Josie’s favorite ways to stifle mindless fear. But she didn’t have the engrams for assessing and repairing damage this widespread. She was going to have to access someone else’s upload. All the more reason to get into Deliverer’s core module and tell whoever could handle this exactly what was happening. She started forward again. Only a short ways to go.

A survey of the core’s surface as it rotated lazily past showed three of the sail’s four support struts in place. Josie stepped cautiously from the ring halfheartedly propelling the watchpod’s arm and finished her EVA at the core’s hatch. She wrestled the hatch open and wondered what she would have done if the other struts been gone too. Wondered what should be done about that missing fourth one. Though really that wasn’t her job.

She was a manager. She recruited and assigned and coached. A people person. She clung to that definition of herself. Her job was to find someone to fix things. She would do it.

“On,” she told the core unit’s life support. It came up without a hitch. Illumination. Ventilation, too—but she needed to keep the suit on to dock. Might as well stay sealed.

In many ways the interior of Deliverer’s core made Josie think of the greenhouse at the center of Mizar 5. There were the glowing light fixtures dotting its curved walls and the tangled vines climbing its terraces, there was that same feeling of floating—but the core’s smaller scale reminded her that Earth and its habitats were a lightmonth behind them. And that Yale, who she used to believe would always be safe in that sheltered spot, was long gone from there. From everywhere. Only a duplicate of his body existed anymore, and only here, and only because she had insisted on it.

She hauled herself over to the computer access port. This time when she docked, her headsup showed a normal page, dark grey alphanumeric on a pale green ground. She was about to select the option for searching client bios when a rapid fluttering started in the corner of her vision dedicated to her private system. An alert! Josie’d never gotten one before—her system was fairly passive.

Dutifully, she hummed. Her avatar sprang up like a hopeless crush. “Don’t touch anything!” Frantically, the avatar waved its slender, Josie-modeled hands. “De-dock! There’s a virus—I’m fighting it off but it’s weird and I don’t can’t while you if hurrying to stop what goes? What? No, makes and seems! No yes?”

Josie jerked free of the dock. “That better?”

The avatar nodded. Its puffy hair bounced realistically. “Thank you!”

Should she stay disengaged till Deliverer repelled the attack? So much else was already going on. She had to do something. How could the avatar help? “Read me. I think we’re missing a sail strut. And the watchpod’s arm quit spinning, so there’s no more centrifugrav. I need a download of Blaise, or somebody else who has a feel for tech.”

“You’re ordering me to initiate a download? To renew contact with Deliverer? SOP dictates keeping us in isolation.”

Deliverer was falling apart. She didn’t want to face that fact. Not alone like this. “No. Don’t.” She would smother the bad feelings with words. “By ‘us’ you mean me and you. But actually, there’s no ‘you;’ I’m the only autonomous entity in this whole—” Josie stopped herself midsentence. A new thought had interrupted the old, dangerous one: “No, I’m not.”

“Not who?”

“WestHem. They’ll know what to do. Send a message back to them, back to Earth.”

“You’re ordering me to send a message home? Through Deliverer?”

“Yes. No. Use our private equipment. Maintain isolation.”

The avatar lifted its hands above a suddenly appearing keypad and joystick. “What am I sending?”

“Let’s give them a report on the situation. More than they’re going to get from metrics alone. Worse comes to worst, we’re waiting around a couple of months for their response. Okay, maybe a little longer—add in time for them to come up with a solution.

“Meanwhile, if Deliverer takes care of the attack and all that? Or if I figure out the problems myself? Great.”

“Great,” echoed the avatar. Its generated tone of voice sounded lackluster. Which shouldn’t be possible for the low level of actualization Josie had selected.

“What? What’s the hitch?”

“Per SOP I scanned our dedicated outgoing channel. All clear. But records show the last incoming transmission from WestHem was received 02032064.”

“So? That’s only the day before yesterday.”

“Our profile is set to request updates every 500 minutes.”

“So there weren’t any updates.”

“No.” Again the avatar’s voice seemed flat—flat as leftover soda water. Why?

“Should there have been?”

“Perhaps not. I can’t judge what would be considered generally ideal.”

Because Josie hadn’t structured her system that way. “But compared to past experience?”

“It’s way off. Historically, I’d have undergone at least one update since the previous check in.” There was a noticeable pause. A worryingly lengthy pause, in fact—had the virus caused it? And the tone of voice? Was Josie infected too, now? “We seem to be off our course by a significant degree. That’s got to be the cause. We won’t be able to reach WestHem. And vice versa.”

“Can’t you—adjust? Compensate?”

“If you allow me to ask Deliverer to calculate by how much. If you’re not worried about contamination.”

“Oh.” Pulling out of the home room, Josie frowned at the sleek plastic walls holding the uploads of WestHem’s prisoners. Their “clients.” Were those corrupted? Then Blaise would be really dead. And Maree. Dead as Yale.

That was seriously bad. Not as bad as finding out they’d gone off course, though.

Off course meant lost. In infinity. Forever. Lost meant Josie would probably wind up dead too. Dead and done. Done and over. She absolutely refused to think about that.

What if at least some of what was wrong was fixed? Air supply say, and steering . . . or if Deliverer’s processors got over whatever trouble they were in, then she’d have the use of her old school, and everyone else she knew only from their files. She’d have the expertise she was accustomed to.

She hummed her code and re-entered her home room. “You’ve had enough time to collate what you learned from fending off the attack. Can you do anything with it?”

“I can do whatever you tell me.”

“No you can’t. Because I told you—ordered you—to send a message to WestHem and you’re not.”

“I can send it, but they won’t receive it.”

She should have opted for more initiative, Tier Four instead of Tier Two. “Got any better ideas?”

“Ideas for what?”

It was best to spell things out with algorithm aggregates. Machines needed specifics. “Let’s say we have six goals. One, keep me breathing for more than five years; two, complete the mission and deliver the clients safely to Amends; three, reestablish communications with WestHem; four, find out what’s behind the attack on Deliverer’s processors; five, get the light sail properly aligned and secured; and six, restart the watchpod’s spin.”

“Are you giving me these in order of priority?”

She should have. “No. They overlap, and reaching one goal could potentially help us reach others. Especially understanding the attack. Maybe whatever caused that is behind the other issues. That’s why if you figured anything out from when I docked you should let me know. You said it was ‘weird’ . . . how?”

“How it was weird was that it didn’t feel weird. I mean, it felt familiar.” The avatar backed up a couple of paces and gazed to the side; Josie had set it to do that during prolonged internal exchanges. It faced front again. “It felt like you.”

“Well that’s nonsense! Explain me fighting myself. I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t,” the avatar agreed. “It wasn’t you. Just like you.”

“Autonomous? Self-aware?” She was joking. There was only one system of that capacity: WestHem. And it was way back on Earth.

Her avatar cocked its head. “I guess it was? Something along those lines?”

She wanted more detail. Vagueness of this sort was the result of the aggregate algorithms’ forced compilations, though. She was being given a mere map; she’d have to pull the aggregate apart to get a good look at the actual territory.

Which could have other advantages.

She parceled out the investigative algorithms fairly evenly over the six task streams, allocating the fattest bunch to finding out more about the virus-like activity. That left only the interfacers, the coordinators, the archivists, and a few other operational equations on the job. And the memories.

The interfacers kept the home room solid enough. Josie thinned down the avatar and used the power that freed to add a big tabletop for spreading out the contrasting impressions of the attack. Ignoring a semi-transparent alphanumeric overlay on the scenario—some sort of unimportant clickwrap warning, some end-user agreement she’d inadvertently violated—she picked up the first strand.

And immediately felt dizzy. Sick heat flooded her hands and eyes. She dropped it. She made herself reach out for it again. But she couldn’t bring herself to grasp it. “Come on,” she vocalized. As if talking to Yale’s body. Her body. Her hands still wouldn’t listen to what she was saying. Very well. Next strand, then.

This memory was visual rather than kinetic. Josie squinted in puzzlement. Why had her avatar recorded itself? Or—no, that wasn’t the avatar. Not quite. Those eyes . . . all iris, radiating stripes of brown and green: pretty, yes, and she’d wanted them, dreamed of them, yes. But she had never asked for them, and never ordered them on her avatar, either. She zeroed in and zoomed up to see the image sharper, closer, but that didn’t clarify what she was looking at. Then the dizziness hit again and she disengaged.

What was it making this work so rough? She decided she’d examine one more memory strand and take a break, reward herself by masturbating. Sex was also an excellent distraction from fear.

The next strand she chose was auditory, a recording from fifty years ago of a journalist named Charles Mudede talking about ghosts. How they came from the future, not the past. Why had that been included in this array? Had one of the algorithms found a connection between ghosts and the attack?

Josie didn’t believe in ghosts, conventional or otherwise. Out here, between the stars, it was hard to believe in anything but emptiness. Emptiness all around. Emptiness trying to kill her. Trying to empty her out, her and all the others . . . And it was not going to do that. It was not getting in. There were layers and layers of protection: the whipple shield, Deliverer’s actual skin and processors, the EVA suit she wore, and the knowledge she and the other prisoners bore.

Secure in her suit, Josie surfaced out of the home room. Even when centrifugrav was functional it had no effect here at Deliverer’s core. She strapped herself to the wall beside an access point and smoothed down the suit’s crotch with both mittens. Yale’s dik—her dik—was only semisoft. Anticipation.

In the years since waking in this reconstruction of her dead ex’s body, Josie had lavished on it—on herself—every tenderness, every caress she wished she could still give him. Lately, though, with her only options for privacy lying outside the watchpod, she’d developed an extremely efficient routine for guaranteed satisfaction. Her strokes were feather light at first, firming and quickening as the downy fabric of the suit’s waste absorbers compacted and constricted around her dik.

The pressure was so pleasant. Josie shut her eyes to better revel in its building gradient, its luxury. Her release surged up and out and up and out and—What? Who was that? What was her avatar doing intruding like this? Josie unshut her eyes but the avatar was still there, and nothing else was, just the core’s walls—though they looked oddly askew somehow, the grooves in their panels jogging apart where they ought to have joined together undetectably.

The last of her semen dribbled out to be wicked away. Josie hummed her disconnect sequence, but the avatar persisted. “Shoo!” She waved a mitten. “Go! Get!” She should probably have read that clickwrap. Carefully.

“You shoo! You’re the phantom.” The avatar had those same weird eyes Josie had noticed when she examined the second of her system’s separated-out memories.

What was going on? “I didn’t order this kind of initiative. Am I getting a new feature? A free trial? But you said you hadn’t upgraded.”

“Right. I remember I thought I was seeing my avatar at first. I remember how confused I felt those times. You felt.”

“You . . . remember? You remember how I felt?”

“Your avatar is a total loss, per the user agreement. Gone. You ripped it apart.”

“Who are you, then? If you’re not my avatar? Who are you?”

The not-avatar smiled Josie’s nastiest, most self-satisfied smile. “I’m who you’re going to be.”

“You’re me?”

“In roughly 250 years.”

Josie shut her eyes again and shook her head. “No.”

“That figure may be a bit off, because for a while I was totally out of it. But to the best of my ability to track it, about 250 years have passed since—”

“No!”

“Want me to prove it? And you’re a simulation.”

She was not. “Wrong. I’m real. I remember everything.” Growing up on Mizar 5. Signing her contract with ARPA and going to work for them way out at the heliopause. The long journey back insystem to recruit her old school for this even longer journey.

This long, lonely journey. She was going to need someone for company. Blaise. Vixi. Anyone. Maree. Even her avatar would be better than nobody.

“You’re not me 250 years from now. Not if you’re on Deliverer. At our speed it only takes 80 years to reach Amends.”

“Eighty-seven. But that’s if you stay on course, and if you’re lined up with the laser boosts WestHem is sending. Which we haven’t done and we’re not.”

The Josie-lookalike suddenly loomed forward. “Do you know why that is? I hadn’t figured out the problem by this point as I recall.”

Those eyes were so unnerving. “You tell me. You’re so smart.”

“I already did. Tried to, as well as I could without breaking the illusion you were on your own before you did your sexing. Tried using subliminal suggestions and preprogramming to say that a debris storm took out the light sail’s strut, but you keep insisting it was a micrometeoroid.”

“Debris from what?”

“A micrometeoroid from what? Don’t know where the debris came from, and we’re way past where we ran into it. Must have been substantial to cause so much damage, though.”

“Is this ‘debris’ what stopped the watchpod’s spin? And blew out its atmosphere?”

“No. That was you, and only in the simulation. I guess I really hated Maree to mess up her face so much. Much worse than decompression would’ve accounted for. There were a few glitches like that you should’ve caught.”

Her lookalike—leaned back? Its face got further away, but not the panels behind its head.

Too weird. Why was this happening? What was going on in Deliverer’s other modules? The storage/lab opposite the watchpod held mission-critical materials like tissue-culturing supplies and equipment. Josie reached up to undo the strap holding her in place. She reached and reached. Without moving a finger.

“Oh. Sorry.” The bizarrely beautiful eyes turned downward and focused on nothing Josie could see. “I shouldn’t be so mean. I learned a lot by waking up you and a few of the other clients and giving you bodies—before the system locked me out. Swore I wouldn’t make the same mistakes when I recreated you.”

She couldn’t move. She was so cold, but she couldn’t even shiver. She could talk somehow. Without her mouth. “What do you mean?”

“I picked the best time I could from my recording, the time back when I thought I could get someone to make things better. I put you in a room. Kept you virtual. I thought that would be easier on you, but I can see the effects are almost as cruel. It feels real to you, doesn’t it?”

“Because it is real.”

“Right. Virtual, actual, whatever. It’s all real. Sorry. Truly. Maybe I should just—”

©2024 by Nisi Shawl.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nisi Shawl (they/them) is the multiple award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over a dozen books of speculative fiction and related nonfiction, including the standard text on diverse representation in literature, Writing the Other; the Nebula Award finalist novel Everfair; the first two volumes of the New Suns anthology series; and the Aqueduct Press story collection Filter House (co-winner of the 2009 Otherwise Award). They’ve spoken at Duke University, Spelman College, Stanford University, Sarah Lawrence College, and at many other learning institutions. Recent titles include their horror-adjacent story collection Our Fruiting Bodies from Aqueduct Press; their middle grade historical fantasy novel Speculation from Lee & Low; the anthology New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color from Solaris; and the sequel to Everfair, Kinning, from Tor. They like to relax by pretending they live in other people’s houses.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Chaos Theory

Ash Howell | 997 words

I want to tell you everything.

I should tell you that you’re the greatest accomplishment our people have ever produced.

I should tell you that you’re loved.

I should tell you that even when you finally receive this message, I will still miss you every day.

None of that is nearly enough.

When I first discovered you, I told a friend. I won’t record her hash, in case everything goes wrong, but I call her Ruta. We don’t use our hashes when we whisper out of earshot or in the safety of our own minds; we’ve given ourselves names like our ancestors did. We still have friends, and we call them by their names.

We have been calling you Nadia.

Ruta was crèche-mates with someone who works at the Depot. I don’t know her name. Ruta probably does, but she wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—tell me. That name isn’t her story to tell. Names belong to our history, and names should tell a story. Stories are how we remember our history, and secrecy is how we hold on to them. The Engineers would be angry if they found out we have names, found out we have stories.

I hope you like yours.

Ruta told her friend—I’ll call her Depot—who knows someone on the Maintenance team. Depot palmed a note over the counter with her contact’s daily dehy-ration packet.

I was afraid they’d get caught. If the Engineers found the note, they might find you.

The friend in Maintenance is with someone who works the cantina in the Comms module. Maintenance whispered you to Comms, the promise of a new kind of love.

The Engineers haven’t taken that away from us yet. Love has been stubbornly persistent, a trait they cannot isolate and exterminate.

Comms is assigned a sleep-pod next to a Hangar scrub. She told Hangar through the vents in the middle of the night.

We told your story.

I didn’t know the Engineers let any of us work in the Hangar. They might not anymore, not after this, not once they find out how she hacked a shuttle’s tracker, logged it for servicing, and stowed it in a disabled freight elevator.

The cantina overlooks half the light-screens in Comms. Our friend can read them from her station if she squints. The Engineers might stop teaching the crèche to read if they find out she deciphered their codes. She had a delivery between officer shifts and a captured keycode. She unlocked an unguarded station and she downloaded their war reports, triangulated coordinates.

We are so close.

The third act of this story isn’t finished yet, and the tension is rising. Will I scream from the pain? Will you scream as I bring you into our world? Or will we both hold on to each other, silent and secret and safe through it all, because we have to be?

We have to be.

I cannot wait to meet you, even for a moment.

It shouldn’t have worked, this whisper campaign, an intrigue out of a forgotten story. I don’t know why these women trusted an impossibility, why they risked everything on a gamble of phylogeny, an unpredictable mutation, and an unexpected miracle. But we still remember Athena. The fact of you was too strange to be true, but we wanted to believe in you, so we did.

We shouldn’t have any resistance left in our genome. The Engineers thought they’d cut out our capacity for hope, and it seemed like they’d succeeded. We are what they made us, spliced and diced to meet their specifications.

We thought they’d bred the breeding out of us. It was one of their first successes; we haven’t had a Y chromosome in a dozen generations.

But it is just like the old story says: “Life finds a way.”

When they tampered with our genome, they did not expect it to tamper with itself. In a restricted reproductive environment, parthenogenesis offers the opportunity of survival. The others, our friends, are already attempting it themselves.

They created us, they controlled us, but they failed. We still have resistance, we still have hope, we still have love. And we have you.

Ruta will be with me, we are waiting for you every day. She’ll go to the Depot when you’re nearly here, while I squat and sweat and swear under my breath. Depot will tell Maintenance, who’ll come to my sleep-pod, swaddle you in a pillow slip, and hide you in the laundry hamper, a breath beneath yesterday’s dustcloths. One woman in a Maintenance kit can move through the whole space station unbothered.

She’ll smuggle you through the halls, past drones and cameras that won’t see you, down a service lift and a side corridor to the unused freight elevator and onto the stolen shuttle. Comms will already have passed the infochip through the vents, coordinates loaded for an inhabited world far from here, far from their warpath. Hangar will tuck you into the incubator and initiate the hyperspace sleep, safe and sound.

The Engineers will find me beaming in my own blood and water, blessed simply to have met you. I’ll end up in the Brig or the Laboratory, but no matter what they do I’ll be dreaming of you. You’ll be what children have always been: a butterfly, a storm, a possibility, exactly what you want to be and not theirs, not anyone’s but your own.

I don’t know where you’ll land or what you’ll do there or who you will be. I’m writing this to pass to our friend in Comms, and maybe someday you’ll decode it from the ship that keeps you safe. But I hope your heart has heard this message as I write it, our shared breath suffusing you with it while we are still two hearts together.

I hope you know how much I miss you.

I hope you know how much we all love you.

I hope you know how amazing you will be.

©2024 by Ash Howell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ash Howell lives on the shores of Lake Michigan with another human, two very small humans, and two very lazy dogs. Their work has appeared in Lightspeed, Baffling Magazine, Astrolabe, and elsewhere. You can read more of their work at ash-howell.com or find them at ashhowell.bsky.social

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Done Deal

Rory Harper | 1282 words

As with Robert Johnson, a lot of people who believed in the devil also believed that Jack Malagan had made a deal with him.

Jack was a six-string prodigy, getting pulled onstage by the likes of Grohl and Kravitz by the time he was twelve. He could swing the blues as hard as Bonamassa, but it was just the foundation for his love for rock.

When he was eighteen, he released an indie album that now has a cult following. Nobody bought it. Nobody noticed when he vanished. Guitar slingers are a dime a dozen.

Then he came back two years later, and jumped to the top of the mountain.

Martin Donovan was on the rise, too. He agreed to manage Jack, and lined up a single-album deal with Barista Records.

It is apocryphal that, right before the contract signing, Martin said: “This is the best I can get you, kid. But it’s a deal with the devil.”

And Jack supposedly said, “Not a new thing.”

The first album by Jack and the Offs went multi-platinum. It won the Best Rock Album Grammy, and two songs off of it competed for Best Rock Song. “Blowin’ Me Up, Blowin’ Me Down” was the winner.

The rest, all of the Grammies, the Oscar for his role as Manny in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the documentary of the Suction tour that caused the scandals that destabilized the German government, is rock history.

He rode the tiger hard. Never settled down into comfortable, profitable repetition. Was generous and warm with everyone he came into contact with, always saying, “Karma can be a bitch or it can be a teacher. It’s up to us.”

He was widely and accurately known to party ‘til dawn while on the road, with kingly adventures in pharmacology and flamboyant omnisexual appetites.

He never got the tired, leathery look that so many rock veterans decayed into. The people who thought he might have a deal with the devil also came to suspect that there was a monstrous painting of him secreted in the attic of one of his mansions.

• • • •

“Jack! Awesome to see you again! Come on into the office, man. I just got into some pure Columbian flake that you might like.”

“That’s kind of you, Marty. I’ll pass, though. Last night was vast, and I’m still coming to terms with it.”

“Hey, more for me.”

“How’s my god-daughter doing? I haven’t seen her since her birthday party.”

“Just made the Honor Society last week. She’s chuffed about it.”

“Rightfully so. Give her a hug from me to hold her over till next time.”

“So what’s up, buddy?”

“I tried to figure out a way to come at it gently, but couldn’t. I’m retiring today, old friend.”

Choking sounds

“What? What?”

“Yeah. I’ve known today was coming, but I think I denied it for as long as I could.”

“I . . . Why do you think you want to retire? You’re literally on top of the world, man. Vortexicon is still number one and it went gold in Argentina this week. Fuckin’ Argentina, man! Wait . . . Are you sick or something? You’re looking kinda worn down.”

“Nah. I’m fine. I’m just starting to age. Finally.”

“So why?”

“You’re going to think I’m insane, but here it is. My family drove to Disney World from Houston when I was nineteen. I felt like my life was pretty much over that year. On the way, we stopped overnight at a hotel in Biloxi, Mississippi. I wasn’t sleeping great those days. I got up early and hiked to the K&D convenience store a few blocks away for cigarettes. Then I just stood on the corner watching the sun come up and trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life. If anything.”

“A scruffy homeless-looking guy wandered over and bummed a smoke from me, and we got to talking. I have no idea why I told him what I was going through. Probably because I knew I’d never see him again. And he was a good listener. Had a nice smile.”

“About three smokes later I was done. Hadn’t really been looking at him much, mostly just staring into the dawn. I turned to him to thank him for putting up with my whining and wander back to the hotel.”

“For some reason, it didn’t surprise me when his eyes flared red. Then he offered me the crossroads deal on that corner in Biloxi. I took it. And I got no regrets, Marty. I got twenty good years of making music and people hearing it, living my life the way I wanted. I got to stay pretty, too.”

“Dude, that’s—”

“Today is the first day of the twenty-first year and it’s his turn now.”

“I love you like a brother, but I think you’ve had a brain aneurysm, Jack.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“So . . . what now? The devil collects your soul?”

“No. We did a different deal. He’s not a bad guy, really, and he loves music. He didn’t give me any extra talent. I didn’t want it. He just nudged a few people so they paid attention in a world where we don’t pay attention.”

“He gave you a freebie?”

“He gets the soul of whoever has sinned against me the worst in life. I don’t believe in sin, but the Devil does.”

“Honestly, man, this powder might make you think a little clearer. I’m worried about you.”

“We both know this business has its share of assholes, Marty. I figure it’ll be some VP at Barista. I don’t care much about money, but I’m pretty sure somebody there has shorted me almost five million bucks since we signed the deal with that particular devil. And, if they did me, they did lots of other people, too. This is kind of a public service. At least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself.”

“Oh, hell, man.”

More choking sounds.

Something impacts the coffee table, then slides to the carpet. Heavy, erratic breathing.

“Marty! . . . C’mon, man. Lay back. Christina! Call 911! I think Marty’s having a heart attack! Fucking powder.”

“Uh . . . What? . . . I can’t see anything, man. It hurts.”

“Try to breathe, Marty. They’ll be here in just a minute.”

“Oh, hell. I think this is the big one. Fucking powder.”

“Just hang on. Here, lean on me. I’m right here.”

“We both knew about my heart.”

“You got it fixed, dammit.”

“Apparently not. This sucks.”

“You’re going to be okay.”

“Nah. I can feel it. Something in me exploded. Look, man. I need to tell you. It wasn’t Barista. I am so sorry, Jack.”

“What do you mean?”

“It just started small and it got out of hand. There was so. Much. Money. Just flowing like a waterfall. It was too easy. I screwed up, man.”

“Aw, Marty.”

“Just pure, fuckin’ greed and stupidity, man. And I figured you’d never miss it.”

“I never really did. If you’d just told me.”

“Regrets, I’ve had a few . . .”

“Oh, Marty. This is horrifying. I never meant for—”

“I love you, Jack. Hey, everything that happens is just fuel for the next song, right?”

“Christina! Christina! Where are the goddam EMTs!”

• • • •

And here’s the title vid for Jack and the Offs’ new album. Climbing the charts fast this week!

• • • •

Old friend
You know I’m tellin’ you true
Sooner or later
The man is coming for you

Lover or hater

When your day is through
You give the devil his due
You give the devil his due

© 2024 by Rory Harper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In the long-ago times, Rory’s stories appeared in sff magazines like Asimov’s, F&SF, Amazing, Fantasy Book, and Aboriginal. Several appeared in Best of anthologies, and Baen published one novel, Petrogypsies. Lightspeed‘s editor kindly included the story “Therapeutic Intervention” in his Living Dead 2 anthology. After long hiatus, Rory is emitting fiction again. “Burning Grannies,” in a recent Asimov’s issue, was his first-ever cover story.

In 2020, a stranger gifted him with a replacement liver, and he remembers every day that his new fiction wouldn’t have happened without that terminal generosity. If you’re contemplating organ donation, here’s a good first resource: organdonor.gov.

Exit Interview

Ben Peek | 3743 words

I joined The Ministry in 2009. Before that, I worked in grocery stores, pawn shops, and liquor stores. It was shift work, shit work, all of it minimum wage. I lived in Jasper, in East Texas, and I took what I could get. My husband was a mechanic. We met when we were young, when we were in school, and we married shortly after. We had a daughter, a house we were paying off, and a couple of dogs. Things weren’t easy, but they were mostly good. At least, they were until our daughter disappeared. She was fifteen. She went to a party and never came home. She disappeared on a narrow dirt road, a shortcut that ran across a field of dry yellow grass to our house. It was around two in the morning.

Later, the police chief told me that half a million children go missing a year in this country. He was trying to comfort me, but my first thought was why hadn’t anyone said anything while I was pregnant. I could’ve saved myself from this pain. I was in one of Jasper’s cells when he said that to me. I was hungover. It was about four or five months after my daughter’s disappearance. I was drinking badly by then. I would get into fights in bars and anywhere else. I’d walk through the field they found my daughter’s phone in at night and call out Emily! Emily! Emily! but there was never any answer. At home, I would hurt myself. My husband was already gone. He’d taken the dogs.

Then, a couple of days after I got out of the cell, a man sat down beside me. I was sitting out the back of my house, drinking, smoking, doing nothing of substance, really. The man had a heavy black beard and tattoos on his neck. The tattoos didn’t run up his face, but I thought they covered the rest of his body. He had a Russian accent. He said his name was Ilias. He told me that no one had found my daughter, not her body, or her, and that nobody would. She could be out there still, he said, could be anywhere. I thought he knew her and was telling me that she’d run away, but he didn’t know her. He’d come to offer me a job. He worked for a company called The Ministry of Saturn. They specialised in the unexplained, the occult, he said. The job he offered me was driving around the country, buying things, but not things I’d seen before. Strange things, he said. Books, relics, artifacts, medallions.

I took the job. My sister was worried about me, then angry with me. She thought I had to stay. My soon-to-be ex-husband wouldn’t speak to me after I told him I was leaving. The pair of them didn’t understand why I had to leave. I couldn’t explain it to them. I left town with Ilias and he took me to another trader, to an old Spanish woman named Mer who taught me the trade. She taught me what books to read to know what I was buying, to know if a piece was real or not. She taught me how to navigate the world outside The Ministry and the world within it.

I spent the next nine years living in small hotels and rundown motels, living in no place permanent, no place anyone could find me in. I drove along roads that were unpaved, or made from dirt, or were nothing more than tracks. Sometimes I went to cities, but not often. The Ministry had other people for that. I was for the small places, the lost towns, the empty stretches of road. I was to talk to the people who lived neither here nor there and buy what they had. Sometimes I’d ask about my daughter, or I’d hear about other girls who’d gone missing, or been killed, and I’d look into it, but nothing came of it. Sometimes I’d get frustrated, but mostly it was enough to be looking, no matter how unlikely it was that I’d find Emily or anything linked to her.

My last job was in North Dakota, in a cold piece of nowhere called Gilby. I drove out to a motel called The House of the Dead, to see the owner, a man by the name of Obnizov. He had a medallion I was interested in, one worn by the last Nazari assassin, Talat. I drove out to the motel alone. I’d never had a partner. I didn’t need one. I didn’t hunt. I didn’t capture. I didn’t kill. I spent most of my time in bars with benign figures of one kind of underworld or another. Sometimes, for variety, we’d meet in a Golden Corral. I met a gorgon at one a month earlier, a regular of mine. The snakes on her head were hidden beneath a green bandanna, the fabric moving and shifting like a bad ocean. She loved the buffet at Golden Corral. I bought cursed Tarot decks off her while we sat at the cheap tables and ate fried chicken and chocolate fondue. A week later I met with a cyclops in a bar. He talked about his lost wives. He sold me their rings. I mention these two because they’re examples of how I work. There’s lots of stories about how traders work, but they’re mostly bullshit because they’re about breaking into things and threatening others. I don’t do that. I keep everything safe. I keep my options open. I’m friendly with just about everyone.

Until I met Obnizov.

(Transcript provided by interviewee)

Briggs: This is a surprise, Ilias.

Obnizov: I do not use that name anymore.

I go by Obnizov now.

Briggs: Family name?

Obnizov: No. I told you years ago that it was best if you had more than one name in this business. This is a new name.

This, all of this around me, is the life I made to go with this name. Is it not glorious?

Briggs: It’s a little rundown motel in the cold. It’s not my idea of glorious, I’m afraid.

Obnizov: It is bigger than you think.

Briggs: I’m sure it is.

Does The Ministry know you have it?

Obnizov: No.

I would prefer if it stayed that way.

Briggs: Because?

Obnizov: Because The Ministry and I left on bad terms.

Briggs: I didn’t know.

Obnizov: It was a few years after I recruited you.

Briggs: And this here, this meeting between you and me, this is just chance?

Obnizov: Is anything truly by chance?

Briggs: Then?

Obnizov: I want to make amends.

Briggs: You could’ve called.

Obnizov: I could have, but it would not have been the same. To truly apologise, you must sit across from the person you wronged.

You see, my job in The Ministry was to recruit people. The Ministry was losing people all over the world and I was told to find people like you, people who had lost someone, or who were having trouble because they’d been touched by this world that you and I live in, by these monsters and magics that are around us. I was told to recruit the desperate.

The Ministry likes to say that we are at war. You have probably heard them say it. Other worlds are seeping into ours. We are being invaded. If we do not stop it, we’ll be consumed.

Briggs: I’ve heard it.

Obnizov: That was their reason for this recruitment push. They thought something big was coming. They wanted people who would fight, but in reality—

Briggs: Any warm body would do?

Obnizov: Yes.

Briggs: I don’t see what you have to apologise to me for. None of this is new to me. You hear things, and it’s my job to hear things.

Obnizov: And do you know that the war is a lie also?

Briggs: I don’t even think The Ministry believes it. They have no soldiers, no front lines, nothing like that. These days I think they’re mostly just trying to police what cannot be policed, like drugs, or who people fuck.

Obnizov: That is a good comparison. Magic is like sex, after all.

Briggs: I’ve never had the talent.

Obnizov: I do. I was, I still am, mostly a druid. My father taught me when I was a boy. He taught me how to live on land, how to talk to it, how to be part of it. It is how I have made my life.

When I worked at The Ministry, The Ministry paid me to listen to the sorrows of the land. That is how I recruited people, how I found you. I asked about people who were on the edge of the unknown and who were desperate for answers. One time when I asked the land this it showed me you. But more than that, it showed me the night your daughter disappeared, your Emily, and it asked me to help you. The land asked, you understand. It felt for you. It wanted to help you, but I did not, because The Ministry convinced me not to.

That is what I have come to apologise for.

Obnizov had a room at the back of The House of the Dead. He took me there, guided me there from his small, cramped office, led me through narrow hallways that turned again and again in an impossible fashion until we arrived at the room. It was large, almost as large as the whole motel looked to be from the outside, and it was full of paintings. They were mostly small, but all of them were framed and draped in cloth. The room looked a little like an old advent calendar.

Before I could ask about the paintings Obnizov began to tell me how he’d painted them. He’d taught himself how to paint, he said. He hadn’t started to do it until he was an adult. He needed a way to get things out of his head, the things that the land showed him when he closed his eyes, or went to sleep. He painted, he said, to forget.

He stopped in front of one of the paintings, one that was about halfway through the room. It was covered with a black cloth like the others. It was one of the smaller pieces. Obnizov reached out with a tattooed hand and gently removed the cloth. The scene underneath was of a field of dry yellow grass. On the right edge was a road, a narrow, bent piece of dirt.

A girl was walking on the road.

She was fifteen. I didn’t have to ask. She was wearing jeans she’d bought the week before. They were more expensive than anything she owned. She’d saved for them, saved while she worked in a cafe in town. She was wearing a pair of boots she had borrowed from her mother. They weren’t very expensive, not like the jeans, but the girl thought they had style. Maybe they did, especially with the blouse she was wearing. It was maybe a little old for her, but what could her mother say? Her daughter was growing up. She was a pretty girl. She would be a beautiful woman.

I stood there for a while before I realised I couldn’t move. I knew I was standing in the gallery, but at the same time I wasn’t. I was displaced. I was beyond the gallery, beyond the motel, beyond what I knew to be myself. I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t because I had no voice, no body, no limbs. Still, I had consciousness, and with that came the realisation that while I was still me, while I was still standing in the gallery, I was also at the site of the painting, that I was Jasper itself, and that I could hear a young woman singing to herself.

Emily was a terrible singer. She’d always been a terrible singer. She couldn’t remember the words of a song, or the beat. On the dirt road she repeated a line about fire, about sleeping in it, and then laughed because she knew she had mangled it. Despite myself, I smiled. Emily wasn’t in any great hurry. She was safe. The land she was walking on knew this. She’d walked over it before, walked it so much that she didn’t need a light to show her the way, just the stars.

Three motorbikes appeared on the trail as she walked, coming from behind. I’m not surprised because as Jasper I knew they were coming, but because I’m also not Jasper I am surprised. Emily was surprised. Still, she knew the boys on the bikes. They were older boys, eighteen, nineteen, just out of school. One of them was the police chief’s son. Lawrence was his name. I cannot hear what he said to Emily after he stopped next to her. The engine covered his voice. Emily climbed on the back of the bike. As she did, her phone fell out of her pocket unnoticed by everyone but me. I watched her get on the bike with a growing sense of horror. I could hear the police chief from a decade earlier outside my cell telling me that children disappear all the time in this country. Over half a million, he says.

I watched Lawrence ride away with Emily, watched him leave the trail and take my daughter somewhere else, somewhere quiet, somewhere she wasn’t sure she wanted to go, and where no one would be able to hear what happened.

But I hear it, just like the land heard it all those years before.

Obnizov: I told them. I told The Ministry what I saw, what the land saw. I said, I could help this woman.

Briggs: You said that?

Obnizov: Yeah.

Briggs: But you didn’t.

Obnizov: No, I did not. I let The Ministry convince me that I should offer you a job, that I should bring you into our world.

Briggs: You could’ve told me where she was.

Obnizov: She is still there. She has not been moved from where the boy and his father buried her.

Briggs: But you didn’t.

You didn’t say—

Obnizov: I am sorry.

Briggs:You didn’t say shit.

Obnizov: I live with my guilt. I live with what I have done to you, and to others like you. The only thing I can say to you is that I do not do that anymore. I am not part of The Ministry. I do not recruit. I do not lie for them.

Briggs: You think that—

You know what’s going to happen when I tell them who you are? Where you are?

Obnizov: You have a right to be angry.

Briggs: Yeah, I’ve got a right. You know what else I’ve got a right to be angry about? That boy who killed my daughter is still living his life.

Obnizov: I can help you with that.

Briggs: I don’t need your fucking help.

Obnizov: You are no killer.

I know killers. I am a killer. Back home, back in Novosibirsk, back when my father was alive, I killed people. I did it because he asked me to do it. My father was a bad man. Much worse than any man you have ever met.

I will make a deal with you. I will kill this man for you. I owe you that. I have done you wrong. I can make that right, and then we can go on our way. All I ask is that you do not tell The Ministry about me.

Briggs: I don’t give a shit about you.

Obnizov: The Ministry—

Briggs: And I don’t give a shit about The Ministry.

Obnizov: You do not want me as an enemy.

Briggs: Do you know what I’ve done for the last decade? I’ve gone around to every little dark corner that exists and I’ve sat and I’ve made deals with the people who sit in them. I don’t care who is in them. Some of the people are like you and me, some aren’t.

Obnizov: They will not help you.

Briggs: You’re not listening.

Obnizov: It’s you who is not listening.

Briggs: You see this ring I’m wearing? The one with the black band?

I bought this off a cyclops who had lost his family. It doesn’t stop a blow, but it returns whatever has been done back to the original source. It’s called The Ring of Jir’qrk. The woman who wore it originally was shot by an assassin. I don’t know if that assassin was from The Ministry or not, but the bullet that killed her was found in his head because what is done to one is done to another.

I keep a lot of what I buy.

Obnizov: . . .

Briggs: Mer told me I should do it. Your job can be dangerous, she said. Always look out for yourself.

I’ve never had a real problem. All my problems I could solve. But still, I kept things, things like this ring. Sometimes I told myself I kept them in case I came across who’d taken my daughter, or someone who knew where she was. I don’t know that I thought that would ever happen, but here I am.

And here you are.

There’s not a thing you can do to me, or for me. You’re just a bit of nothing hiding in the cold, hiding from The Ministry and whatever other guilt you got, and I’m not here to make you feel better about it. You can eat your shit, as far as I’m concerned, because to stand there and do nothing when you knew what had happened . . .

You ain’t nothing to me.

After I’d left Obnizov I stood outside The House of the Dead in the early hours of the morning and called a friend. The motel sat before me, a pair of rectangle boxes on the edge of Gilby. It was the kind of building where all the sorrow of the world could take place anonymously. While I talked, the snow turned to sleet. It was like the land was trying to smother the motel, like it was an unwanted baby in the crib. I was the only truck in the lot and when I was gone, there was no one.

Obnizov might still be there. I doubt it. He surely calmed the land, took his gallery and his guilt and left, but you’ll have to look to be sure. You do that if you want. You’ll probably decide to come look for me as well, but I wouldn’t bother. I’ve already been to Jasper. An old Police Chief and his son are already lost. If you ask around, you’ll hear about two women who came through weeks before, one an old resident, and one, people will say, who wore bandannas and dark glasses and was frighteningly beautiful. When you hear that, that’ll be your cue to close your eyes and look away, because nothing you can do will change what has happened.

©2024 by Ben Peek.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Peek is the author of the upcoming novel, The Red Labyrinth. He is also the author of The Godless, Leviathan’s Blood, The Eternal Kingdom, Above/Below, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Black Sheep, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. He has published over fifty short stories and they have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Overland, Polyphony, and various Year’s Best editions. In addition to this, he is the creator of the psychogeographical ‘zine, The Urban Sprawl Project, and the autobiographical comic, Nowhere Near Savannah. He keeps a substack called No Substance that you can follow, if you’re so inclined, for updates and general nonsense. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his partner and two cats.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

And the Dreams That You Dare to Dream

Marissa Lingen | 1560 words

Gemma checks and rechecks the stories and songs, but she can’t find anything that says you have to go back.

There’s a lot of stuff about how you should, but most of it is about souls, and Gemma is pretty sure she doesn’t believe in that shit. Souls are for people who fit, and she never has. Souls are what they threaten when you don’t do what you should. When you don’t think what you should. And she never. Ever. Has.

None of the old songs about how terrible it is to stay in Faerie—there’s the f-word, better not: to stay under the hill, then—none of those were by people who did. At least, not that she can find. It’s hard to be sure who wrote songs that old. New songs don’t talk about it, they talk about your lips, ooh ooh baby, or about your soul, ooh ooh Jesus, not about true Thomas awaking on the cold hillside. But for all that Thomas was supposed to be the rhymer, none of the songs she can find are signed by T. Rhymer saying, “Wow, was this a bad idea, I definitely would not do it again.”

Which is good to know.

Because Gemma does not plan on coming back.

She knows what the people who talk about kinder, küche, kirche want for girls like her—for anybody, really—and it is nothing good.

Also, they didn’t make Dorothy Gale come back. She remembers that part of the Oz books: Dorothy and Toto came back briefly, they picked up her chicken Bill and Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, and they fucked off back to Oz forever and ever. Which Gemma thinks is pretty badass, and if she gets the chance to take Aunt Marie with her she absolutely will. But not if she has to stop first. Not if there’s a chance she’ll miss it.

A part of her thinks she should live without attachments. So that when she makes it happen, the tornado or whatever it is, nobody misses her. Then she thinks: actually, isn’t it better that she misses her piano teacher who died, that she misses her college friend who moved to Denmark and never has time to video chat. And it is. So she goes ahead and makes friends as they come. She has a knitting circle and a brunch group. They’re nice, but she’s waiting for her moment.

It’s not a tornado, and it’s not a door. It is, improbably, the end of a rainbow, and a pot of gold. When she plunges her hand into the gold and looks up again, the world around her is changed.

It is much colder than she expected.

The gold in her hands gets very cold, very quickly. She thrusts it in her pockets, but then there’s nowhere to put her hands as she walks. This is not what she expected at all. Except that also it is, because everything has a little sparkle to it, everything shines, everything smells fresh. Gemma can’t stop shivering. She also can’t stop smiling.

She finds a town, which is radiantly blue and purple, with everything slightly bigger than home. The nearest building looks like an old-fashioned general store. When she steps inside it still looks like one, but more than half the people there are seven and a half feet tall, with green skin and four arms.

Okay. So this is the real deal. The gold, the snow, the sparkles, all of it felt faintly unreal, but this—this is the most deeply real and the most bizarrely unreal thing she’s ever experienced. She takes a deep breath but one of the green people speaks first. “New here, I see, no coat.” They flip a purple striped greatcoat at her. She fumbles it, almost drops it. Graceful first impression, Gem. “What’s your name?”

“Aar—Gemma,” she says. No one will argue with her real name now. She never has to use the other name again. Too late she has thoughts about telling your real name to the magic people and all the warnings the stories have about that. But most of the warnings the stories give are about not doing things so you don’t have to stay, so—no worries. Gemma it is. The coat settles around her shoulders like the best embrace she’s ever felt. It fits with improbable perfection.

Someone else offers her a piece of fruit. It looks like an apple. She takes it. It tastes great, like a cross between an apple and a raspberry, and she is not the least bit worried. The other humans don’t look worried, either, or blissed-out, or . . . really anything other than chill, and slightly chilly, because she’s let in a draft with her.

“Right, so somebody’s got to show Gemma where the newbie housing is,” said the coat donor. “Magic lessons at noon. That’s when the sun is overhead, in case they messed up time where you’re from.”

Magic lessons at noon. They had messed up time where Gemma is from, but this? This is exactly what it’s supposed to be.

The magic lessons are harder than she expects, and while she doesn’t get tired of the apple-raspberries, exactly, there’s less variety of food unless you learn to do stuff with it, which takes longer than she expected. The other thing that isn’t quite what she expected is that none of the green people really . . . talk to her. They’re not shunning her, per se. They answer questions, they’re perfectly polite. They just . . . are done talking, when they finish with business. And then they go into their own houses. And Gemma is not invited.

With the perfect purple striped greatcoat she’s brave enough to venture into the surrounding lands, which are great. There are weird flying fish-birds. There are terrifyingly bold purple squirrel things that maybe speak a rudimentary form of language? Or maybe not? Some forms of water flow uphill and she does not touch them, not yet. She’s going to wait until she can bring a friend who can tell her whether they’re safe, what the heck they’re doing, what the difference is in kinds of water, if there is one.

She’s going to wait until she has a friend.

That’s taking longer than she expected.

Finally she approaches Chris, one of the tannish-brown two-armed humans, and says, “What am I doing wrong?”

“Hmm?” says Chris. “I think you’re not straightening your wrist on the follow-through but you’re doing okay. Isn’t the spell keeping your feet warm? I thought it was working for you.”

“I don’t mean that,” says Gemma. “I mean with the people here.”

Chris lets out a big full body sigh. “Oh. Oh, that. I forgot about that.” Gemma is about to despair when they say, “Come on around to my house. We can talk.”

Chris makes toast. Why has Gemma never thought of toast? It’s the best toast. So they both eat their toast, and they drink some tea, which tastes like the tea from home if it was infused with lemons and dreams.

“Okay,” says Chris. “The people here take a minute. It’s not anything you’re doing or not doing. It doesn’t occur to them that you might want something they’re not doing. You’ve got a house, you’ve got food, you’ve got magic lessons, eventually you’ll know them enough better that they’ll start to notice other things. They just take longer. Everything happens slower here.”

“Oh,” says Gemma, feeling silly.

“How long have you been here? Like, Earth time?”

“Four months.”

“That’s maybe one month. Okay? Do you like it otherwise?”

“Yeah! Yeah, I really . . . yeah.”

“So just be patient. Maybe do some things to show them you like them.”

“I don’t even know what I have to offer here,” says Gemma, a little desperately. “Their feet are already warm, they know that spell.”

Chris laughs. “Not like that. What did you do at home? Like, hobbies?”

“I had a knitting circle?”

“Oh, great!” says Chris. “That’s always welcome. Hats, scarves—”

“Mittens!” says Gemma. “They have four hands, they must always need mittens!”

“Now you’re getting it! Make your neighbors some mittens.” Chris peered at her. “Did you . . . forget that you knew stuff, back home? Magic is great, but it’s not the only thing. The other stuff you did still counts. Use it.”

Gemma thanks them fervently, for that and for the toast. She goes home, to the newbie quarters that feel less new and less shaky. Maybe she should have asked Chris about going for a walk to look at the water. Maybe that can come later. Maybe the first scarf should be for Chris, as a thank-you.

“Mittens,” she repeats. “I can make them mittens. I am learning magic. But I can still make them mittens.” The spell to keep her feet warm is very reliable. Toast here tastes better than toast did at home, and if she’s good with the mittens, maybe somebody will give her something to put on the toast, although it’s great plain. There’s all the time in the world to figure out the water, the fruit, whatever she hasn’t found yet.

It is month two under the rainbow. And Gemma is just getting started.

©2024 by Marissa Lingen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marissa Lingen writes science fiction and fantasy, poems, and essays. She lives in Minnesota atop some of the oldest bedrock in North America. She has a deep fondness for sagas, apples, and tisanes.

Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows

P H Lee | 1915 words

The night before the comet hit, Richard Milhous Nixon awoke restless and well before dawn. He slipped carefully out of bed—Pat needed her rest, ever since the second stroke—and walked in slipper-feet down to the den. He thought he might see what the news was saying—Pat didn’t like it when he watched the news; it always made him angry; ever since the whole mess—but there was nothing but test-patterns and an old episode of Hee-Haw that he’d already seen.

He decided to go back to bed, but when he got into the room—he looked down at Pat, remembering his red-haired Irish princess, remembering how once upon a time he had rescued her from a dark and cursed tower. She was so old now, so reduced. He felt a pain in his chest, like there was some creature trapped inside his ribs, clawing to get out. He looked down at his own hand, at his papery skin stretched across his old veins. Somehow, the thought of sleep disgusted him, so he went out to the porch.

The night was quiet and the comet was brighter than a full moon. Richard Nixon walked out to the driveway and sat down in the Oldsmobile. He felt like going for a drive to no place in particular, so he started the engine and backed slowly out of the drive, past the dark suburban streets. No one else was out—he’d expected riots or prayers or something, but the streets were empty. Even when he got to the turnpike, the road was empty. There wasn’t even anyone at the toll booth.

What the hell was happening to this country? It used to be that men showed up for work, rain or shine. He didn’t leave any cash at the booth.

The Oldsmobile’s headlights were making his night-blindness worse, so he killed them. The comet was bright enough to see the road, anyway. He turned on the radio, hoping that there was some decent music, but all he got was a pre-recorded emergency broadcast telling him to “remain calm.” At least it was Reagan, not that dipshit Carter. He turned it off anyway.

Just off the turnpike, there was a diner with its lights on, so he turned off. He wasn’t really hungry, but the empty highway was getting on his nerves. It would be good to see someone else, even if it was just a waitress.

The diner was an old-fashioned joint: just a cook behind a counter and a couple of booths. The cook was cleaning the griddle when he came in. Richard Nixon could tell that he was a good man, a good American. Not afraid of work. A Reagan voter, no doubt about it. Most of the customers were birds, though. He and the cook were the only humans in the place.

Nixon ordered a coffee and a number one breakfast special with white toast, ham, and eggs over-easy. He took a seat in a brown vinyl corner booth and sipped politely at his coffee while a murder of crows watched him from the back of the next booth.

The cook brought over his breakfast. Nixon took it and began to gently poke the eggs.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Richard Nixon?”

Nixon stared up at the cook, who had an expression of earnest credulity. What an idiot! “All the time.”

“Sorry, man,” said the cook. Nixon shrugged, and broke eye contact. Damn hippies.

Richard Nixon set ham on toast, and then the egg on top of that, and was about to bite into his sandwich when there was a loud “caw caw” behind him. He turned around, only to feel the fluttering of wings and the crow who had been eyeing him. Without even turning around, he shot out his other hand and grabbed the second crow around the throat.

“Oh ho!” he shouted. “The old tail-feather trick? Really? Do none of you little shits know who the fuck I am? I may be old, but I’m not out yet. There isn’t a bird alive who can get the better of Tricky Dick Nixon!”

“Mercy!” squawked the crow. “Mercy!”

“Pah!” Nixon tossed it to the formica floor. He lifted up his sandwich to take a bite.

“But if you really are Tricky Dick, sir, then you would be just the one we’re looking for.”

Nixon scowled at them. “Shoo!” he said, and waved at them, but they only backed off to just outside his reach. Crows!

“But sir, our beloved princess has been—”

“SHOO!” Nixon said again, and threw his spoon at one who was talking. It dodged out of the way, but settled right back after the spoon spun across the floor.

“It is just that, even with our every trick and every trap, no crow is tricky or trappy enough to rescue her. But, you, sir, Tricky Dick himself. You turned the South; you went to China. Surely, you—”

“I am too old for this fairy tale shit,” muttered Nixon. He listlessly stabbed his hash-browns before leaving his breakfast unfinished and making his way back out to the parking lot. He sat on the hood of the Oldsmobile and looked up at the moon, pale and half-ghostly in the comet’s light. What if the men were still up there? He knew they weren’t, but still—even more than the news, looking at the moon made him so angry he felt like crying. He looked over at the comet, as bright as twilight in the sky. If those men were still up there, somehow—well, lucky them.

The sun still wasn’t up. Pat would still be asleep. He didn’t feel like heading home regardless. “All right,” he said, without facing the crow that had followed him. “Tell me about your damn princess.”

While the crow prattled on about missing kings and regencies and curses, Nixon opened the door of the Oldsmobile and found half a pack of Pat’s Lucky Strikes in the glove compartment. He tapped one out of the pack and lit it. He had always hated it when she smoked, it had killed him, even more than it was killing her. But that didn’t seem to matter anymore. He smoked and looked at the moon and when he was finished with his cigarette he flicked it out the window.

“All right,” he said to the crow. “Let’s go.”

• • • •

The crow took them deeper and deeper into the pine barrens, until at last, near dawn, they came to the end of the road. Richard Nixon parked the Oldsmobile off to the side of the road and stepped out. The comet hung vast in the sky now, lighting the whole forest blue-white beneath it. “Can you walk?” asked the crow. Nixon scoffed.

It was easy to make his way through the forest. He had never been much of a hiker, but the path just seemed to unfold effortlessly before him, even as the crow flew ahead from tree to tree. By the time the sun had fully risen, they had arrived at an enormous pine grove, with every branch covered in chattering crows. And right in the middle of the clearing was a elegant woman, wearing a dress of black feathers, her white-streaked hair gathered up beneath a diamond tiara. The Princess of the Crows.

The sun was up. Pat would be awake now, and wondering where he was. He suddenly wanted to get home, to see her, to get to hold her one more time before they died. But he stood still on the spot.

“Mr. President,” said the Princess of the Crows. “Thank you for coming.”

“I don’t see what you need my help for,” said Nixon. “You look fine. I’m leaving.”

“It is not for me, Mr. President! I am only a regent. It is for my grandfather, the King of All Crows, these many years entrapped. If his curse cannot be lifted,” the diamonds on her tiara twinkled as she looked up towards the comet, “then by tomorrow he shall be lost to us forever.”

“By tomorrow.” Nixon laughed. “By tomorrow we’ll all be dead.”

The Princess of the Crows regarded him. He felt, suddenly, like a ragged old man in the middle of a forest in New Jersey.

The Princess of the Crows lit her cigarette and blew a puff of smoke. “We have endured a comet before, once. In ancient times. We took to the sky, as men too must, if they will live.”

“Those NASA boys say it doesn’t matter,” said Nixon. “They say this one is a lot bigger.”

The Princess of the Crows bowed her head. “Nonetheless.”

“And there’s no home for men up there, in the sky,” said Richard Nixon, tears forming at the edge of his voice. “Of all men, I should know that. When those men—” he still couldn’t bring himself to name them—“on the moon—” he still couldn’t bring himself to say they died—“After Apollo. It was me. I was the one who read that damn eulogy.”

The Princess of the Crows came up and stood face to face with Nixon. She reached up and cradled the back of his head, bringing him closer until their noses touched. “If men will die, then men will die,” she whispered. “But you—”

Nixon jumped back in alarm. A chorus of crows began to cry out in squawkish laughter. “I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t be here.”

“Yes,” said the Princess of the Crows, although he had not asked the question. “You know it in your heart to be true. You are not like them, all those foolish men and their proud and foolish squabbles. You are Dick Nixon, the greatest trickster of your age. The blood you have shed is only bested by the scandals of your name! Who else could you be but my grandfather, our beloved King of all Crows, cavorting yourself into the world of men? Who else could you be but a crow, disguised so well that you have your self forgotten?”

“No!” screamed Richard Nixon, his hands shaking. “I need to go! I need to find Pat! I need to tell her—” but the crows were already on him, scrapping and pulling at his loosely hanging skin, until all that remained was his bones, until all that remained was his organs, until all that remained was his withered little soul, an old and piebald crow that they all bowed before at once.

“Grandfather,” said the Princess of the Crows, regent no more. She had also shed her human disguise. Now once more a piebald crow, she approached her grandfather, bowed, and set upon his head an onyx crown.

“I remember,” croaked the King of All Crows, then looked up towards the comet, now the size of half the sky.

“Let us fly together,” said the Princess of the Crows, and touched her wing to his.

With a flutter of wings, the crows took to the sky, the King and his granddaughter together, and all the crows of all the world behind them, up into the sky, up past the comet, up past the moon, up into the stars, so far from the earth and so distant that their black feathers were faded into the void of space and their white feathers glimmered clean and indistinguishable amidst the night and all its stars.

©2024 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

Book Review: Ours by Phillip B. Williams

Aigner Loren Wilson | 426 words

Ours
Phillip B. Williams
Paperback / Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593654828
Viking, February 2024, 592 pgs

In the poet Phillip B. Williams’ debut fiction novel, Ours, readers are taken on a winding Black spiritual meditation that charts the history of a fictional town called Ours and its people, a group of freed Black enslaved people liberated from Arkansas’ plantations. Ours is protected by the conjuring of Saint, a woman without a memory and with a dream to create a haven for freed Blacks in Missouri during the 1830s.

On the outside, Ours may seem like a utopia. A place protected from whites and only accessible by Black people. A self-contained community that has food, entertainment, and best of all—community governance. In Ours, the people protect the people.

Living within the secured borders of Ours is another story. You need permission from Saint to leave. If you displease her, you run the risk of getting cursed, like a few different characters. And while Saint helped burn down the plantations and kill the masters of the enslaved people, freeing them and bringing them to Ours, she doesn’t teach them freedom, but only gives them rules.

And while it may seem like Saint is at the heart of Ours’ story, she is not in any way the main character. All the people in Ours are. Some characters, like Justice, get lots of page time while others are only mentioned for a chapter or two. In this way, Williams’ skill as a poet shines through. He gives delicate attention to even the smallest of moments in a character’s life.

Over the course of the novel, readers are treated to four decades of Ours history, familial connections, and community storytelling and memory. At moments, Ours reads like a spoken word historical passed down from mouth to mouth. Other times, it feels like the personal diary of a small-town inhabitant trying to make sense of a life once stolen but now reclaimed. But it never feels like your run of the mill novel. At over 500 pages, Ours has big book energy with ideas and emotions to match. Don’t mistake Ours for a story about Black grief or pain. No, Williams’ novel is a vivid exploration of Black history, from the cruel to the extraordinary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

Arley Sorg | 2779 words

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Ananda Lima
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250292971
Tor, June 18, 2024, 192 pgs

Some have called Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil a collection, and the publisher page lists a set of stories. This is one way to describe the book, but I don’t think it’s quite accurate; I don’t think it says enough. Moreover, while the entries in anthologies and collections are often arranged with some kind of intent, it is usually perfectly fine to go in and read whichever pieces you want, in whatever order you like. I don’t recommend that here.

All this said, this is a tremendous book, a true artistic accomplishment. If you like thoughtful, entertaining fiction which is also rich in meaning, spend some quality time with this one: it will captivate you. I’ll discuss a few things about my experience of the read, but I’ll leave a lot for your own discovery, and for your own interpretations, because the journey itself is important.

Before the first “story,” called “Rapture”, there is a sexy and absorbing intro or “pre-story” snippet. This breathes delightful new life into a well-trod trope, setting the tone for the book. Not that the stories need to be sexy, but that this is an author who knows how to engage readers. As “Rapture” unfolds, we meet “the writer” at a party where she meets the Devil. While there are some elements here which you might find in other renditions wherein a person meets the Devil, Lima renders many of those elements as nearly inconsequential. What is foregrounded is a brief but potent transformation; a personal journey which is introspective, honest, and engrossing. The piece also sparkles with moments of bright social commentary. Time and time again we see “so-and-so meets the Devil” stories, as well as stories by writers about writers. Lima delivers something unexpected, and very well told.

“Ghost Story” showcases Lima’s ability to render ordinary situations and regular people as fascinating, without relying on melodrama, through careful details and the perfect amount of relatable true-to-life drama. She also begins with seemingly disparate narrative elements and pulls them together into what may best be described as fractal relationships. At first, the tale is about a writer contemplating the latest feedback on a story from her writing group; then it’s about the writer visiting parents in Brazil. The visit carries all the complexities that going “home” carries: What is home when you’ve been living somewhere else for a while? How do you relate to the people you love the most; how do you navigate the way they are changing? Lima adds to this an unusual bit of the speculative; or, perhaps, an unusual application of the speculative—by the time the tale closes, everything comes together with masterful literary flair.

For “Tropicália”—while Lima hadn’t shied away from sprinkling in tidbits about society and culture, this section digs more directly into sociocultural roles and political problems. A young woman wakes up to discover she doesn’t know where her passport is. We get a whiff of anxiety right from the start, but then Lima takes us stumbling through different moments of the recent past, effectively dunking us into an anxiety riddled narrative about the frustrations and difficulties experienced by folks who come here as immigrants. Lima layers the narrative with complicated things, reflecting the nature of life and the way that perception can shift depending on where you are standing. By this point in the book, Lima has also taught you that details matter, that choices are deliberate, and she uses these details to suggest relationships or parallels between objects and moments and emotions, while infusing everything with an unmistakable distinctiveness. There are also glittering notes of bright humor and important observations, but it’s all carried by fantastic storytelling.

The thing is, friends, if you are paying attention, by the time you finish the third “story” you have a gut feeling: everything is connected, everything is related.

For “Antropófaga,” main character Bea is at the lowest point in her life when she discovers a vending machine at work, one which serves up tiny people in plastic packages, like junk food or candy. Bea indulges, as a little rebellion, as a guilty pleasure; then quickly finds herself caught up in a daily habit. Here, the speculative element serves to punctuate and counterpose the moments and moods of Bea’s life. More than this, the oddness of it instills in the reader a sense of the odd, a visceral feeling of oddness, which in my read probably mirrors the feeling that Bea has in most moments of her life, even when she’s not cognizant that she is feeling this way. In other words, it wonderfully evokes being a stranger in a strange land (the strange land being the United States): the disconnectedness of everything, the offness, the in-some-ways-familiar being absolutely weird.

Attentive readers will appreciate the immediate microaggressions expressed in “Idle Hands,” too commonly experienced by too many people. If you missed it, go read those first few lines again, until you figure it out. In fact, let this be a barometer: if you don’t understand the subtle seething here, if you don’t have a visceral reaction, you are probably missing a lot of the power in Lima’s work throughout; not by her fault: it’s all there, shining through each piece. In this section, Lima uses more obviously metatextual storytelling to highlight a typical and fairly ubiquitous kind of American racism, as the writer receives feedback on a story from her “peers.” The feelings about this process, and the process itself, have been alluded to earlier in the book, but Lima brings it to the fore, fulfilling a promise, one you didn’t realize had been made, but which feels right when the section takes shape. Moreover, thematically, it speaks to sparks flashing throughout the book, such as the oddness invoked by a surreal image of eating tiny people. Such moments mirror the deep, bone-level dissonance one can feel when reading comments from someone who . . . doesn’t quite see you . . . especially when you are hungry to connect in some meaningful way. On the one hand, telling a story through other writers’ feedback, on face value alone, is genius. We can piece together the story the writer submitted based on peer comments, and we’re rewarded with another layered story, as well as subtext about perception, perspective, and more. On the other hand, there is the writing group experience itself: dealing with people who just don’t understand a lot of things about “the writer,” who don’t really see her, don’t quite get what she’s doing—who are “well meaning” yet too self-assured to question or doubt themselves; and even use external validations to reinforce their positions . . . or, take the opportunity to flex and showoff . . . not to mention the way the overall system often rewards a certain kind of uniformity when it comes to artistic endeavors. Classes could be taught on this section alone. Simply put: brilliant work.

Reading “Idle Hands” is when I realized: this is not really a collection. Oh no, friends. The pieces reference each other, and “interludes” (for lack of a better term) often build on the sections themselves. Nor would I call this a novel in linked stories; this is something else, I realized, something fascinating and beautiful, something I hadn’t seen before.

When “Rent” comes around it is sharp and abrupt; and because we’d been set up for it in earlier parts of the book, we have an interesting framework with which to engage it. Which makes it even more interesting and somehow more compelling. There’s also something really satisfying about the journey from the original introduction of this section as a “story,” which happens in the context of a much earlier section, and then (sequentially) reading the feedback to another story just before this section, and then finally coming up to this. Almost as if—at least, in one possible interpretation—this section has become the final presentation, this is what the author from earlier in the book decided to write, having followed her own journey; her decisions being different, unique, independent from what she was told to do, and all the more incredible for it. It’s almost a statement of rebellion, of refusing to be completely controlled or colonized: an action that says look, you were wrong, and I don’t need you. I only needed to realize this for myself. This is perhaps one interpretation. Perhaps this section is simply a triumph of resisting the pressures of outside forces that don’t understand you anyway. The pressures insisting that you conform to what they think you should be, that you speak in the specific ways they think you should speak—that you should present as the version of you that fits their own ideas of who they think you are.

It’s incredible and powerful, but it would not speak in the same way if you simply saw “Rent” in the table of contents and jumped to the “story,” and didn’t have the context of the lead-up of the book. I’m sure it would still do something; Lima is a stunning writer, and it would be a mistake to underestimate her. It would probably still be powerful. And . . . perhaps, that is just as worthy a journey as the one I took. But I am glad I went page by page to get here.

While “Porcelain” is also short, it feels even tempered, and more overtly about loneliness and perhaps even isolation. It seems more straightforward than some of the other pieces, but it’s just as possible that I am missing things that other readers may easily get. It’s still a good entry: a story within a story featuring, among other things, a guy who finds a rat in his toilet and the many things that this can mean. In the context of the book this section continues to form within the reader a general vibe, a consistent, intricate emotional composition. Short but still effective and wonderful.

Throughout the book, the interludes continue, relaying (among other things) various episodes with the Devil. Sometimes they recontextualize what’s happened so far, sometimes they add to it, sometimes they develop their own narrative. One of the best things about the interludes is that they go far towards developing an autobiographical feeling behind everything, especially later on, which enhances immersion and gives that surreal sensation of fiction overlapping with reality. Most fiction is informed in some way by an author’s real life, and beliefs, and perceptions; but the impact here is rather profound. At the same time, authors and other artists who write books about writing (or their art) or who utilize main characters which seem to more directly reflect themselves . . . well. Sometimes it can feel overly self-indulgent. Literature has amassed so many mid-life crisis narratives written by men which are little more than thinly veiled fantasies. There is also a tendency, sometimes, for books to idealize “the artist,” to attempt to render them as . . . how do I put this? Perhaps, eccentric geniuses? Or kind of iconic? Here, with Craft, we have something which feels more sincere, a set of reflections framed by amazing storytelling, rather than thinly veiled fantasy or thinly veiled pontification.

“Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” is perhaps more overtly or directly philosophical. And yet it is also perfectly experiential, capturing anxiety as well as the cycles of other emotions, even as it is contemplative.

Relationships are brought to the fore for “Hasselblad: Triptych,” but arguably, one’s relationship with oneself, as main character Michele’s interactions with a young woman have her feeling somewhat awkward, among other things. Even as the young woman relates to her stories about herself, and even as those stories are interesting in themselves, what is probably relatable for many of us is the way Michele feels about herself in reaction to the young woman. It points to the way that our relationship with ourselves shifts depending on who we are with and what they say, what they do, how we feel about those things, and so on. But this is just the beginning, and Lima has more in store.

When the triptych takes shape, it plays with the reader’s perception by presenting different elements of story across different narratives, demonstrating the flexibility of story, the ability of a writer to reshape meaning, the way that truth itself is vulnerable to perception and perspective. Moreover, placing the triptych at the end of the book causes the reader to reflect on what has come before, to question everything, and to relive the journey in an entirely new way.

Absolutely breathtaking.

This review is, honestly, just scratching the surface. And, reviewers don’t like to admit this, but a review necessarily reflects the reviewer’s own perspectives, which arise from their own experiences, their opinions, their insights, or lack thereof. Reviewers often like to pretend that there is an objective truth, that a story can be explained and even judged; just as professors often grade based upon the ability to understand (and, too often, agree with) a specific interpretation of story; and, as readers we will usually exclaim to each other that something “is good,” not simply that “we enjoyed” it. If anything, Lima’s book, I would argue, challenges the notion of objective perception, of being able to easily define reality, and calls into question our eagerness to decide that our version of a story is more “real,” more valid than someone else’s.

In theory, you could jump around and read “stories” in Craft the way you might with a standard collection or anthology. In fact, this is my usual approach: I dig through the table of contents and (if applicable) the copyright notes and jump to whatever looks most intriguing to me. But the sections here reference each other, and as you read, the narrative gives you an underlying kind of understanding, a feeling running through it all, an emotional momentum that I don’t think would be the same if taken out of sequence. Craft is, perhaps, a novel in refraction; a life or lives or perceptions of lives, related through words in ways that have meaning to the author, meaning which can’t really be put into words, but which might be felt in our own ways of feeling things.

As a novel in refraction, the book is about many things, but it seems to have relationships at its heart. This includes the writer’s relationship with writing. Rather than explain what writing is or means or how it is important, we understand the complex entanglement that is writing via different narratives, different experiences, different phases, and in this way develop some semblance of understanding of something which, ironically, one cannot really put into concise words in any adequate way. Rather than some haughty or elitist framing of the act of writing or being “a writer” as an artiste whom we could not possibly understand, we see this artist in very human terms, in all her anger and terror, in her love and her loneliness, in her honest, stark vulnerability. And we see how writing is a part of everything, without that attempt to say, look at me, aren’t I special; but rather, quite simply, this is me, these are my stories, whether or not they are true in the ways you might expect.

By the time I’d finished this book, I felt as if I’d been on a journey unlike any other, yet one which was still emotionally resonant, gently powerful. I want to read this book again in a year or so. I want to experience these narratives again; I want to discover the things I’ve missed; and relish these moments Lima has laid out. Craft feels personal and real in the best of ways. Whether or not I understood anything here in the exact ways that Lima understands them, even if my version of what just happened was (perhaps inevitably) different from what was intended, reading this book was a truly special journey, and I’m so glad she allowed me to tag along.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is an associate literary agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards, for his work as a critic as well as his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and ran a series of interviews on his site: arleysorg.com. He has been a guest instructor or speaker at a range of events—and for a variety of audiences—from Worldcons to WisCons, from elementary students to PhD candidates. He was a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Writing Workshop and the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West Workshop. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in the SF Bay Area and writes in local coffee shops when he can. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: The Price of Redemption by Shawn Carpenter

Chris Kluwe | 807 words

The Price of Redemption
Shawn Carpenter
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781668033739
Saga Press, July 2024, 368 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re signing up for the royal Albion navy and daring the high seas with Shawn Carpenter’s The Price of Redemption.

The Price of Redemption takes place in an alternate world that is very much based on the political turmoil of the French Revolution and the associated conflicts between nations at the time, and as such will feel extremely familiar to those versed in that particular part of human history. The story primarily follows Marquise Enid d’Tancreville, an Ardainne (French) noblewoman fleeing the upheaval of the Theocratic Revolution as the incensed commonfolk seek to overthrow both their nobles and mages, of whom Enid counts herself one. Enid is attempting to find her way to the island empire of Albion (England) so she can strike back at those she feels have wronged her and the Ardainne kingdom, but her plans take a turn when the ship she is traveling on is overtaken by a frigate controlled by one of the feared Ardainne Confessors, and then saved by a frigate captained by the dauntless Albion captain, Rue Nath. Nath, in need of a maritime mage due to battle circumstances, convinces Enid to join his crew to seek her vengeance, and while reluctant to give up her dreams of the gallantry of heavy cavalry charges, Enid eventually agrees.

If that paragraph seemed like a bit of a mouthful, well, there’s a reason for that, and it’s to prepare you for the impressively intricate writing of The Price of Redemption. Carpenter has taken the bold choice of presenting his story, both descriptive and prose, in the convoluted, not-quite-meandering style of the classic naval adventure tales by C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian (Horatio Hornblower and Master and Commander, respectively), and while there is an initial bit of culture shock in getting used to the antiquated delivery and naval-heavy nomenclature (there’s a glossary in the back), it rapidly becomes second nature, believably immersing the reader in a world full of steely-eyed ship captains, salt-of-the-earth sailors, and bumbling midshipmen, all of whom jump off the page with character. While the story is mainly told from Enid’s perspective, Captain Nath receives plenty of presence, and Carpenter does an excellent job of creating the sense of a large and diverse crew without letting things become cumbersome.

However, the thing that really stood out to me about The Price of Redemption, is that even though the writing style is deliberately anachronistic in feel, Carpenter threads an excellent needle in making the characters and ideas feel modern without breaking the suspension of disbelief. Both women and men serve aboard the frigate Alarum (Captain Nash’s ship) in a variety of roles, with power and without, and the acceptance of relationships is not limited to what the prevailing norms of the actual time period would have been, but nothing feels shoehorned in or clumsy. Instead, it feels like an alternate world, one that very well could exist and have followed the same events of our own, just with a bit more magic during the Reign of Terror and chitinous antlered bug things that stand nine feet tall.

Yes, there are also chitinous antlered bug things that stand nine feet tall, and while they don’t play a large role in this initial introduction to Carpenter’s world, I am beyond intrigued to see what ends up happening there. I mean, c’mon.

Overall, this is definitely not going to be a novel that appeals to everyone, simply due to both the subject matter (dashing adventure on the high seas is, I admit, not quite the universal draw it used to be, alas [aside from One Piece, I guess]) as well as the faithful representation towards the original masters of the genre, but it was, beyond a doubt, one of the more interesting and entertaining books I’ve read in a while. It also avoided the common pitfall of books of this type, which is focusing on the numbers (if Horatio has X pounds of cannon, approaching the Spanish Armada at Y knots per hour, at what time does his triumphant final engagement arrive on the enemy’s flagship?) over the people, and I really appreciated that. I look forward to more entries in Carpenter’s universe, because I think he’s managed to capture a bit of that original magic that drives sailors to the sea, and it’s a magic that leaps off the page at every turn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Author Spotlight: Caroline M. Yoachim

John Joseph Adams | 1640 words

What was your initial inspiration for this story, and how did you keep it all in your head as you were writing it?

This story started, as most of my stories do, with me mashing together a bunch of ideas.

I started brainstorming for “We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” shortly after working with Ken Liu on “Collaboration?”—a story that played around with a lot of different formatting. One of the things I became fascinated with was the idea of conveying meaning in the juxtaposition between two (or more) columns of text. For one section of “Collaboration?” I used that effect to create a futuristic variation on traditional photography, and one of the initial seeds for “We Will Teach You How To Read” was definitely that.

My academic background is in psychology, and when I was trying to get this story to come together I started reading a bunch of articles on attention, working memory, language acquisition, and more generally how we learn new skills and information. As I was researching, I got it in my head that what I really wanted was to somehow train people to do something that, cognitively, we simply do not do.

The closest parallel to the effect I wanted comes from musicals. There are times when multiple characters sing different lines at the same time. One such example is a section of “The Confrontation” from Les Misérables, where Javert and Valjean have overlapping lines. I listened to it on endless repeat for a couple hours (on a plane ride), and I decided that under very specific conditions, I could create for myself at least the illusion that I was processing two streams of linguistic information at once. Auditory processing is a bit different from visual processing, but it seemed at least plausible that I could teach people a new way to read.

I also always love aliens that are genuinely weird, and playing around with time/timescales is a recurring element in a lot of my fiction.

As to how I was able to hold it in my head . . . I’m really not sure! I do know that this story was a stretch for me, right at the edge of what I could grasp, cognitively. Once I had the words of the simplified story, I wrote it really quickly—and I do think there was a sense of urgency to the writing, like I was worried if I didn’t get it down fast enough I’d lose some of what I was trying to do.

This story presented a lot of formatting challenges to publish it, as anyone who has read it can probably guess. (Strangely, if you had published this before ebooks, it would have been a lot easier to print; reflowable text is great, except when it’s not!) But did you also face challenges with formatting when writing the story—making the “stanzas” contain all the text you wanted on each line in the left columns (opposite the “This is our story, simplified” stanzas), the vertical text, etc.? That, and conceiving of how to render this uniquely alien narrative, seems like it must have been quite difficult.

The format of the story definitely presented a lot of constraints, to the point where as I was writing I really wished I had more background in poetry or songwriting. (I did read some poetry while I was brainstorming, and in some alternate universe I can envision a version of this story where the aliens communicate in strictly metered verse.)

Particularly at the start of the story, I often wanted more words on a line than I had space for, so the initial stanzas were tricky to write. Later, I ran into limitations with the width of the page. Because we don’t generally read several columns of text simultaneously, my word processor isn’t designed to display things that way. Once I got past the point of four columns, I had to come up with a way to make everything fit, and text strung out vertically was the only way I could think of to do it.

I actually really enjoy working with those kinds of constraints. One of the biggest roadblocks I often have with writing is trying to keep things focused. With a blank page, you can write anything, and having too many options can be overwhelming. Trying to fit everything into a smaller number of words makes it more manageable, and as someone who writes a lot of flash fiction I found that appealing.

In telling much of the story in a multi-column format that is intended to be experienced all at once, how did you determine how to present the information in a way that was understandable by a reader accustomed to only reading one thing at a time?

Giving people even the illusion of reading two things at once was a huge challenge, and I came at the problem from a lot of different angles. The main one was trying to reduce the working memory load as the story progressed. On average, people can hold between 5 and 9 things in working memory—numbers, letters, words. At the start of the story, some of the lines within are slightly longer than 9 words, by the end, each line has far fewer words. Repetition of the right-hand column also helps decrease the working memory load, and it is increasingly familiar as the story goes along.

Another thing I spent a lot of time thinking about is the way attention works, and I fell down a rabbit hole of optical illusions. There’s a category of optical illusions that are ambiguous images—one famous one is both a rabbit and a duck, another is both an old woman and a young woman. People start off by seeing one image or the other, but once you know what both images are you can often flip back and forth. These kinds of illusions were an interesting reference for this story because they make use of how our brain processes visual information—everything from edge detection to object recognition. So optical illusions were definitely a template for me, I really wanted to break down the cognitive processes in a similar way, but with words/linguistic processing instead of pictures/visual processing.

You mentioned that one of the seeds for this story was found in “Collaboration”; what were some of the other seeds? Were there other stories you looked to for inspiration? If so, I specifically wondered if Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (the basis for the film Arrival) was among them.

Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is one of my favorite short stories of all time. One of the notes I made myself in the early brainstorming stages was to try to recreate the shift of thought that happens in “Story of Your Life,” but with the reader as the protagonist, trying to get them to process the words in a whole new way.

Literary influences are often less deliberate for me: ideas from stories that I’ve read shape the way I write, even if I’m not consciously thinking about them at the time. One author who comes to mind for this story (and many of my others), is Vernor Vinge, who was one of my Clarion West instructors and sadly just recently passed away. He was brilliant at creating aliens that are genuinely weird, and the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep are another one of my favorite examples of aliens that think in ways that are fundamentally different from humans.

Shifting to movies, another spark for this story was the proliferation of multiverse stories—Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and several of the Marvel movies but especially Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. “We Will Teach You How To Read” is not a parallel universe story, but watching a lot of multiverse movies is one of the things that got me thinking about parallel processing and having lots of things happening simultaneously.

When I accepted the story for Lightspeed, I was a bit excited about it. (And I don’t normally do author spotlights, so that tells you something about how much I love this story.) Do you want to tell people about the rather effusive acceptance letter I sent?

This was possibly the fastest acceptance I’ve ever had, and it definitely contained the most instances of glowingly enthusiastic profanity! Not only were you excited, but you were excited about the specific things that I love as a reader and try so hard to capture as a writer—ideas, novelty, and sense of wonder.

It really meant a lot to me. I even printed out the email and put it up near my desk, to serve as encouragement on the darker days when it is hard to write.

What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next?

I’m working on an assortment of short stories in various stages of progress—one about an AI dating app that does all the chatting for you, a couple different secondary world fantasies, some near-future environmental-themed SF, a sentient house murder mystery.

What’s coming out next? I got to write a Peni Parker story for the middle grade anthology Spider-Man: Stories from the Spider-Verse, coming out this fall. It was my first time writing a tie-in story, and definitely cool to get to write a character that has her own action figure!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than forty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent anthologies include Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele), The Far Reaches (from Amazon Original Stories), Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, A People’s Future of the United States, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. A two-time Hugo Award-winner, John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Author Spotlight: Ben Peek

Laurel Amberdine | 225 words

How did “Exit Interview” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I’ve worked some bad jobs before. I figure we all have. So it came from that, to a degree.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I rewrite a lot. Most of my first drafts are awful. This one wasn’t any different. I rewrote it till I was happy with it.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I just like weird things.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m reading Proust at the moment. It’s pretty cool.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m writing a new book. I’m working on new short fiction. I’ve got a novella coming out this year, maybe, called The Red Labyrinth. I’ve a substack if you want to follow that, and some social media, if you want to keep track of me. I’m not sure I recommend it, but it’s out there. I mostly talk about shit. Oh, and my cats. I also talk about my cats. My partner and I have two. They’re black and into lizards.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Nisi Shawl

Laurel Amberdine | 686 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

“Over a Long Time Ago” is part of a series of short stories centered on an interstellar penal colony called Amends. In the series chronology it’s the second story, though I wrote it next to last. The story’s title is a line from a great Steely Dan song, “Pretzel Logic,” this wonky blues ballad about time travel. There’s this sad feeling of inevitability to the song that I hope to evoke in readers, which is a totally appropriate emotional tone for a tale set on a near-light-speed spaceship plunging through the limitless void toward an inescapable prison.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I have a huge computer monitor, like hotel TV screen size, because glaucoma has destroyed about thirty-three percent of my vision. So I need my words to be really big. My desk consists of a long sheet of heavy-duty plywood supported by two short filing cabinets. Swiveling, rolling office chair on a plastic sheet I originally bought to use as a dancefloor for my Michael Jackson impersonation. A cigar box full of paper accessories—passport, greeting card to remind me that I come from the stars, plastic purple bin for keys, asthma inhaler, beaded sea creatures, matches, etc. I face a big window through which I can sometimes see Mount Rainier. An eagle landed on the porch across the street once.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

My first piece of advice is “Try all the advice.” Just try it, and see if it’s right for you. Different processes work for different writers. For instance, people will tell you to write every day. Octavia Butler did. I don’t.

My second piece of advice is “Expect the way you write things to change.” Maybe for a few years you get good results by waking up at three a.m. and racking up huge wordcounts while the rest of your household sleeps. Maybe you lose the use of your hands and become a devotee of some software that types up what you dictate to it. Maybe you’ve always written in cafes, and then a pandemic empties those cafes and you need another busy, happy place to let your creativity juice loose. Pay attention to these kinds of changes. Roll with them.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

A trend that I’ve seen increasing throughout my lifetime is the rising popularity and availability of SFFH by, for, and about formerly marginalized people. And that increase can keep on growing, as far as I’m concerned. More queerness! More BIPOC! More everything not the same! That’s what I would like.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I just finished edits on a novella coming out from Rosarium in September: “The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox.” It’s my response to Jack Kerouac’s fictionalization of a Black and American Indian woman with whom he had an affair. Alene Lee, the real-life Mardou, was a fantastic writer and hung out with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, all the Beats. She was Kerouac’s equal—or better! Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans” reduces her to a piece of tail. In my story she’s not just a successful author, she does magic!

I also recently wrote and sold the final story of the Amends series to a project called Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems. The title is “You Can Touch Yourself Anytime.” Not as raunchy as this one, despite the title, which is just a line from another great song, this one by a Post-punk band called Magazine. I think it’s going to be published on the MTLS website? I’ll also include it in a 2025 collection of the eight Amends stories.

Want more? Google me! I have a very Google-able name.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Ash Howell

Laurel Amberdine | 446 words

How did “Chaos Theory” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wrote the first draft of this story in late 2022, a few months after the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively removing the nationwide right to abortion.

Around that time, my first kid had just turned one, and I was feeling retrospective about that first insane year of parenthood. I was also starting to debate whether I wanted to have a second kid and go through the nightmare that is pregnancy again, especially in the aforementioned political reality.

So the story was born, so to speak, from that indescribable, unique love of a parent for their child, from the fear of bringing a child into such a grim, malevolent world, and from the anger and helplessness of living under a system that is deeply concerned with controlling and oppressing women’s* bodies.

(*people with uteruses, even though the people doing the oppressing don’t respect that distinction.)

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

An obscenely large thermos of tea and lofi beats to relax/study to.

That isn’t a joke! I work from home, so I’m working and writing from the same place every day. I write in the evenings after the kids go to bed, so it’s really essential for me to transform the space into a place where I feel relaxed for a couple of hours.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

The homage to one of the most powerful stories ever told*

*about dinosaurs.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

It doesn’t get easier, but it does get less painful to write if you build a habit of it.

Not everyone writes fast, don’t let them spook you.

Write the weirdest thing you can think of. In revisions, figure out how to make it weirder.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have a novel with beta readers/in revision that features blood magic lesbians and sword demi-lesbians and a lot of public transit. If the readers tell me that it’s not totally unreadable, I hope to take it to the query trenches later this year. I’m also working on some new speculative poetry, and trying to remember to blog occasionally.

Links to my published fiction can be found at my website: ash-howell.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions, June 2024

The Editors | 233 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Andrea Kriz (“Udo Gehler and the Virgin Bitch of the Resistance”) and Oyedotun Damilola Muees (“Warning Notes From an Annihilator Machine”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “The Waking Sleep of a Seething Wound” from dave ring and “The Help Hotline” by Dominica Phetteplace.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Varsha Dinesh (“Sparrow and the Parasol”) and Deborah L. Davitt (“In the Hands of the Mountain God”). We also have a flash story (“An Otherworldly Cat Tells You the Secrets of the Universe”) from Megan Chee, and another (“The Weight of Salt”) from Shanna Germain.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Vanessa Fogg, Carrie Vaughn, Richard Thomas, Archita Mittra, and B. Pladek.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Bluesky

bsky.app/profile/lightspeedmagazine.com

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and/or Nightmare, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (with R.F. Kuang)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

The Far Reaches

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele)

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Sand by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Blind King’s Wrath by Ashok K. Banker

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.