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In addition to being very tall, John Kessel is a prolific writer of speculative fiction. His books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, Meeting In Infinity, and The Pure Product. He also helps to run the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference.

When he's not busy doing all that, though, he's a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he regularly teaches courses on both fantasy and science fiction literature. It was this aspect of his work that particularly intrigued me, and around which I focused the questions in this interview.

Catherine Pellegrino: What authors and books do you teach in a course on speculative fiction? What does the reading list for a typical syllabus look like? How do you organize a course—do you do a chronological survey; do you group the readings thematically, or do you use some other organization?

John Kessel: Since I teach separate courses on science fiction and fantasy, I'll speak about each separately. My SF course is generally organized as a historical survey from the beginnings of the genre to the present. I maintain that true science fiction is a child of popular fiction and the Industrial Revolution, and could not get started before the late 1700's. Following Brian Aldiss, then, I often start with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

CP: Who is Brian Aldiss, and why is he important?

JK: Aldiss was the first to publicize the idea of Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel. He wrote a book in the early ‘70s called Billion Year Spree (updated in the ‘80s to Trillion Year Spree) that traces the history of science fiction literature.

I try to change at least a couple of books on my book list every semester to resist getting stale, but a typical book list will have eight to ten books (mostly novels, some short story collections or anthologies). After Shelley, I might include Poe or Verne or Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I will always include something by H.G. Wells, and must have taught a dozen of his novels in the time I've been teaching this course. I will often include Edgar Rice Burroughs. I will usually include an SF novel from outside the pulp tradition that gets started with Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Yevgeny Zamiatin, maybe Orwell's 1984 later on, perhaps Kurt Vonnegut. From the Golden Age SF I'll include something by Heinlein, Asimov, or Clarke or an anthology of stories. From there it's on to Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, C.M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight. In the New Wave era I'll teach Delany, Le Guin, Wolfe, Disch, or Silverberg. In the eighties and nineties I'll have something by Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Lew Shiner, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, James Patrick Kelly, Karen Fowler, Maureen McHugh. And always somewhere in the list I'll include an anthology like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame or Le Guin & Attebery's Norton Book of SF or Dozois’ Modern Classics of SF.

The fantasy course I organize more along historical/thematic terms. As I teach it today, the first half of the course tries to give a historical vision of the origins of Tolkienesque high fantasy and heroic fantasy. I'll often start with Beowulf (in translation), use a collection of folk and fairy tales, move on to The Hobbit or sometimes The Lord of the Rings, then look at more contemporary work like Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, or Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun or Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books. That gets us through the first half of the course.

In the second half, we look at various other types of fiction that I think fall within the purview of fantasy. Horror, the Ghost Story, Nonsense, Surrealism, Metafiction, Magic Realism, Contemporary fantasy. We'll read Carroll's Alice books, The Wizard of Oz, a collection of Borges stories, a Kafka collection, Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, some contemporary fantasists like Butler's Kindred or Murphy's The Falling Woman or Goldstein's Tourists. Shirley Jackson or Stephen King, Dracula, Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife. I often end with Geoff Ryman's Was.

CP: How has your reading list changed over the years that you've been teaching courses on speculative fiction?

JK: In SF, I spend less time on the pre-1950 era than I used to. I don't generally spend much time in the 1800s; nowadays I skip Verne, for instance. I spend much more time on the last thirty years. In fantasy, I tend to stretch the boundaries of genre more than I used to. The second half of my course doesn't look like the normal fantasy course, I think.

CP: What themes in speculative fiction do you stress in your courses? What do you want your students to get out of a class?

JK: In SF, from class one I stress the two cultures debate. I don't have to impress it on the works, it's there from the beginning. We look at SF both as a celebration of the promise of science and technology, and a Cassandra warning of the threat of science and technology. We see how the issues get more complicated as we approach the present.

CP: What exactly was the two cultures debate?

JK: The literary critic C. P. Snow wrote an essay in the 1950s entitled “The Two Cultures,” in which he argued that the humanities and the sciences had grown apart into two separate cultures. He essentially argued that science was the “better” or more valuable of the two, because it was advancing the quality of life for humanity. Another literary critic, F. R. Leavis, took umbrage at Snow's position and argued the humanists’ side, citing evidence such as the atomic bomb to show that science had actually made the quality of life worse. The debate was active in literary circles from about 1958 to about 1968.

In my science fiction course, I also tell the story of how SF was part of mainstream literature before the 20th century, how it later got identified as a genre with Burroughs and the pulp magazines, and how it has struggled ever since to get taken seriously as “literature.” We talk about the science fiction canon, and the literary canon (where SF is essentially invisible, as SF).

We also look at SF as a commentary on and reaction to the time in which it was written. One of my favorite cliches is that a science fiction story often tells you as much about the year it was written as it does about the year in which it is set. This gets us to some extent into cultural criticism, though I am by no means trained in cultural critique. My training as a Ph.D. student was strictly in the New Criticism.

CP: For the benefit of our readers who don't sling literary terms on a daily basis, can you explain more about what the New Criticism is?

JK: Actually, it's now pretty much the Old Criticism now. It's an approach to literary study that began in the 1930s and went hand-in-hand with modernism, dominating the field of English studies through the 1960s and ‘70s. The New Criticism says that you should only study the text, and that considerations like the author's biography and the cultural circumstances surrounding the writing of the work are irrelevant. More recent schools of criticism are largely in response to the New Criticism: deconstructionism was a direct attack on it, and postmodernism thinks of itself as a parody of the New Criticism.

In my fantasy course, we start with the origins of high fantasy in the hero tale and the fairy tale. We talk about the uses of the fantastic in fiction. The necessity of escape and the dangers of escape, the differentiation between what Tolkien called “the flight of the deserter” and the “escape of the prisoner.” What impulse is it in the human character that brings us (or at least some of us) to fantasy? There are no simple answers to these questions, so they are fun to ask. I hope my students will come up with some answers of their own by the end of the semester.

CP: You teach courses on both fantasy and science fiction. Does the pairing of these genres make sense to you from a standpoint of literary study?

JK: I enjoy teaching both courses. I think they do complement each other, though fantasy is much easier to fit within literature as it is understood in the academy than science fiction is. Fantasy finds a sanction in many works of pre-Enlightenment literature. Lots of medievalists get into fantasy. But not many high lit types appreciate science fiction.

Both forms of fiction violate the canons of realism. But at the extremes, I think they are very different in origin and effect. High fantasy tends to turn its back on the present, is often anti-technology, usually maintains that change is bad or at least suspect until proven otherwise, that the old ways are the best, that knowledge is dangerous.

Science fiction tends to take the opposite position on every one of these premises. Tolkien disliked science fiction. He said of it, “These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station....it is indeed an age of ‘improved means to deteriorated ends.'” He added that in a fantasy world, “one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose—as inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not—unless it was built before our time."

Now there is plenty of hideous modern architecture, but I suggest that Tolkien never saw the Chrysler Building, for instance, or a Frank Lloyd Wright house—or if he did he could not really see them because they were not half-timbered, with thatched roofs. This reactionary attitude is everywhere in fantasy, even in writers who, unlike Tolkien, grew up in less traditional and more democratic situations. It's a viewpoint that I dislike, and prevents my wholehearted acceptance of that sort of fantasy, leaves me enjoying my science fiction class more than my fantasy class.

Not to say that I am not critical of science and technology (my fiction is full of critiques), but I guess I am more comfortably a child of the 20th century than Tolkien. I have the basic SF attitude.

CP: How is teaching a course on speculative fiction different from teaching a course on “regular” literature?

JK: The audience is different. I get many students in SF and fantasy who would not otherwise take an English course. This has its upside and downside. I often have to bring them along in the analysis of the work. Some of them resist the idea that this work can be read for social, cultural, esthetic purposes.

On the other hand, I don't have to sell the prospect of reading the work as hard. One of the great virtues of SF and fantasy is that they have volunteer readers. I don't want my courses to kill the experience of reading SF. People come to these genres for good reasons, and I want to celebrate that as well as analyze it.

I really like the enthusiasm most of my students show. They care about what we read, even when they dislike it. We have some good give-and-take, some worthwhile arguments.

CP: Do you find that your students are generally a pretty self-selecting group, and have read a good deal of speculative fiction already, or do you get any students who really haven't done much reading in the genre on their own?

JK: Most of them have read a good deal of speculative fiction, but not in any organized way. They don't usually have a good sense of the history of either genre. In SF, more and more of them seem to have their acquaintance determined by movies and TV. They haven't ever read Heinlein, never heard of Sturgeon or Van Vogt.

In fantasy they are pretty much all have read Tolkien and some have read lots of Tolkien's imitators. Sword and Sorcery. But they seldom have thought of Carroll as a fantasy writer, and never would think of Kafka as one. In an ironic way, the high art scholars of the academy and the pulp fans both have the same view of fantasy—that Tolkien defines it, and that if it ain't like Tolkien, it ain't fantasy. Dragons, wizards, swords, elves, quests, magic—yes. Travelling salesman turns into a cockroach—no. How you can see “The Metamorphosis” as something other than fantasy is a mystery to me.

CP: Do you bring in other types of media to your courses—film, television, graphic novels—and if so, how do you work them into the course?

JK: I tend not to do so, although I make references to visual SF all the time in order to explain a concept or technique. I did teach a graduate multidisciplinary studies seminar on postmodern SF one time, and in that course I taught five films along with the texts. I think they were 2001, Blade Runner, Videodrome, The Brother From Another Planet, and Brazil.

CP: There's a common perception that there's some animosity—or at least suspicion—between the speculative fiction and academic communities. Do you find that you have to justify being an academic to speculative fiction fans, or that you have to justify being a writer of science fiction to academics? How do you negotiate between those two communities?

JK: I think there is a lot of condescension toward SF and fantasy among academics. I can't tell you how many times I've been introduced to academics as a professor of American literature and creative writing from NCSU, and the minute they are told I am a science fiction writer, their eyes glaze over. And a scholar of SF or fantasy stands in relation to a scholar of Shakespeare and Joyce as a writer of pulp SF stands in relation to Shakespeare and Joyce themselves.

I used to think that this would change in my lifetime, but I am convinced that it will not. The postmodernists seemed for a time to be bringing some serious critical interest to SF, but that's only because they were discrediting the entire idea of the canon. They don't think of SF as art, or if they do it's because they reject the entire idea of high art.

To deal with this, when I teach a normal survey of 20th century American literature, I try to include some genre work, and treat it as if it belongs. I show that it is just another part of the discourse that is literature in the twentieth century. It's good to have separate courses for SF and fantasy, but I'm convinced that as long as such work is confined to separate courses, it will never be seen as in conversation with the rest of literature. If I could make one change in the way contemporary lit is taught, I would insist that all surveys contain some detective fiction, some SF, some fantasy. Raymond Chandler has made it into some American Lit survey texts, but C. M. Kornbluth is still invisible.

Some of my students are suspicious of the academic study of SF: the classic statement of this attitude is “Let's get SF out of the classroom and back into the gutter where it belongs.” Their opinions are fairly common in the SF fandom world; fans often don't like the literary approach to speculative fiction. My students sometimes tell me that I'm taking the fun out of the books, or that I'm overanalyzing them, or that what I'm talking about in my analysis “isn't really what the book's about.” But I have much more success convincing such fans that it's okay to take SF seriously than I have convincing Milton scholars it's okay to take SF seriously.

Most of the people on my faculty at NCSU who know me, know differently, and treat me with respect, but I have to say I think that's more a result of knowing me personally than it is from respect for the genre. The problem with SF is that most people who know nothing about it think they know all about it without ever having studied it.

CP: It's interesting that your students sometimes think that analyzing a book takes the fun out of it. I used to teach college-level music theory, and my students would tell me the same thing—that analyzing a work of music takes the fun, or the magic, out of it.

JK: I also run into a similar idea in my writing classes; my students will tell me that they can't write if they're thinking about it analytically. I'm sympathetic, but if you want to get better at writing, you need to be analytical.

CP: How does your experience as a science fiction writer help you in teaching science fiction? Do you ever teach your own books?

I have never assigned one of my own books, but I have assigned the Norton book and Modern Classics of SF, which both have stories by me in them. I don't always assign those stories, though sometimes at the end of discussion of those books I'm happy to answer questions about the stories.

I think my experience as a writer comes into the course frequently. Sometimes I will make reference to biographical details of contemporary writers that I know because I know the writers. I will often stress that SF is a living literature written by ordinary people, and that students can meet and talk to these writers if they want. I have sent copies of papers written by students (with the students’ permission) to writers I know.

More generally, I think I can convey something of the mindset of a science fiction writer to them. How an SF writer thinks about the world, “where she gets her crazy ideas."

CP: You also teach creative writing. Do you ever teach courses on writing speculative fiction per se? If not, how do you use speculative fiction in a more general creative writing class?

JK: We don't have a course dedicated to writing SF, but we do have a graduate seminar that has various topics, and three times I have taught “Writing Non-Realistic Fiction” under that rubric. In that class I talk about writing different sorts of fantasy, metafiction, and science fiction.

I allow and even encourage my students to write speculative fiction in my regular writing classes. In keeping with what I said about treating genre fiction as acceptable in lit surveys, I try to include at least some genre stories on the reading list for my fiction writing classes. I hold students writing SF to the same standards I keep for any student writer, but I also think I have many things to say to those students who want to write SF. I can draw on my expertise there a little more than I can for those students writing mainstream fiction.

CP: From the point of view of teaching the art and craft of writing fiction, are there any important differences between learning to write speculative fiction and learning to write in general?

JK: I think the standard techniques of fiction writing are the same. Plotting, character development, motivation, prose style, significant detail—all these standards apply equally to SF and non-SF. An SF writer has some additional things to think about—creating an consistent future, say, or how to represent an imaginary landscape—that a writer of non-SF may not address so directly or often.

There is a difference in the way you think, however. To write good SF, you much be more aware of the contingency of your cultural circumstances. Everything is not taken for granted. The way things are now, or were in the past, or may be in the future, is bound to change. Culture and era determine things that we are not aware of unless we take the long view. These things are contingent in a way that a writer of contemporary fiction may not realize. An SF writer must realize that. One of the failures of much aspiring SF is that it is set two hundred years in the future, yet the characters are exactly as they are today, with the same cultural expectations and behaviors. And on the flip side, the characters have no motivation for acting the way they do, as if to say that, because the story's set on a planet circling Alpha Centauri, the people can do anything for any reason. Total cardboard. I blame media SF for this.

If I see anything as uniting my enterprise as a teacher of literature and of fiction writing, it is that SF and fantasy are legitimate forms of art. They may have some peculiar rules, but they are worthy of serious study and respect, and can bear serious study and earn that respect.

CP: I'm glad to hear you say that, and glad you're working to make it happen. I've enjoyed talking with you, and thanks for your time!

Catherine Pellegrino is an Articles Editor for Strange Horizons. Catherine's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.

Frontiers are an invention. Nature doesn't give a hoot.

—Lieutenant Rosenthal, The Grand Illusion (1937)

As part of the day-to-day activities in my line of work, I occasionally attend seminars on various aspects of computer science. Some of the seminars are called “distinguished lectures"; these are given by people at the forefront of their field, who have been working in that area for some time, so I make extra sure to attend those.

The advance notice for one of these distinguished lectures indicated that it was about a “computational model of sketching.” Now, we all know what sketching is—it's drawing this and that with stick figures and rough circles, and so on. There are lots of computer programs out there to do this stuff. And the obvious thing that comes to mind first when one hears about a “computational model of sketching” is a set of tools to turn rough circles into perfect circles, crooked lines into straight lines, cross-hatched areas into smooth shading, and so forth.

Totally boring. My first inclination was not to go. However, my second inclination was to reason as follows: it's a distinguished lecture; therefore, it must be interesting. If it's truly interesting, it can't be about what I think it's about; therefore, I must be wrong about what it's about. Ergo, I have to go and find out what it's really about. So I went, and I wasn't disappointed; it was about the many ways that people encode a lot of information on the back of an envelope during quick technical discussions, using not only drawings but also speech, gestures, and pictorial conventions (arrows, for example), and how to make use of those to preserve the content. We all know how something can seem so obvious when you're talking about it, and then when you wake up the next morning you can't make heads or tails of it—it's completely lost! So it was interesting to hear about how other people try to prevent that from happening.

But what's also interesting is that I somehow took as more compelling the idea that the lecture was distinguished, and therefore interesting, rather than that it was about sketching, and therefore boring. It reminds me of how science works; normally, scientific progress is made in a bottom-up fashion: first you gather the data, then you analyze the data for patterns, and then, based on the patterns, you derive some sort of rule for the phenomenon you're studying. But every now and then—in a flash of insight—an overriding principle can be followed top-down to reach some startling conclusions.

Einstein worked top-down, for example, and he came up with some earth-shaking stuff. As I mentioned in my last essay, special relativity starts out with the overriding principle that the speed of light is a fundamental constant, no matter how you measure it, and ends up by predicting some pretty strange effects on space and time. For example, it asserts that just because you and I are moving by each other on passenger trains, I'll see your clock moving slow, and you'll see my clock moving slow.

Now, isn't that some sort of contradiction in terms? If you see my clock going slow compared to yours, and I already see yours slow compared to mine, shouldn't my own clock then run doubly slow compared to itself? What on earth is going on here?

The escape hatch from this paradox, which is sometimes called the twin paradox, is that you can only compare clocks when they are in the same place, or at rest with respect to one another. While we're relatively moving, we can't agree on what's simultaneous. But in order to compare the speeds of our clocks, we need to agree on the two times we'll check them; if we can't agree on that, we can't agree on their speeds! And in order to do that, we have to either meet in the same place, or at least head in the same direction at the same speed.

But—and here's the rub—to do that, at least one of us is going to have to change speeds, or change direction, or both. And that's an acceleration. To put it graphically, consider the path of two cars.

If two cars, A and B, start moving apart, then there's no way that they can continue moving in their respective directions and eventually meet up, or head in the same direction. One of the cars has to accelerate. If I'm the one in car A, who continues in the same speed in the same direction, and you're the one in car B who has to turn around and catch up with me, then I'm moving inertially and you're not, and it'll be my clock that runs normally, and your clock that runs slow.

The reason why this isn't just common sense is that ordinary trains and cars don't move fast enough for the special relativity effects to become noticeable. Even at typical airplane speeds, it takes atomic clocks to get the precision necessary to notice the difference. But the differences that are noticeable are always in full accordance with Einstein's predictions. In fact, within the precision allowed by today's experiments, none of the predictions made by Einstein's special theory of relativity has ever been invalidated. Not a single one! It is an outstandingly successful theory, and for that reason and others, it was accepted fairly quickly after Einstein published it.

All the same, Einstein was bothered by something. We decide that it's car A whose clock stays running at the same rate, and car B whose clock slows down, because car A is moving inertially. But what does that mean? It means whatever happens in car A satisfies Newton's first law of motion, namely:

Any object at rest or moving uniformly, remains at rest or moving uniformly, as long as no force acts upon it.

However, that's not strictly true in car A, because if you're sitting there in the car and you drop a tennis ball, it doesn't just hang in mid-air, it falls to the floor. And if you want to pass a drink to someone sitting in the back seat, you can't simply send it floating in the right direction, because what it will do instead is spill on the floor; instead, you have to carry the darned thing into the person's waiting hands.

This doesn't bother most people, because we all know what's behind this: the force of gravity. But Einstein made it a habit to let things that didn't bother anyone else bother him, and this time it led him to one of his greatest triumphs—the general theory of relativity. This theory allowed Einstein to do away with gravity as a force, and made it instead a consequence of the way that space and time “want” objects to move, and the various ways in which objects “follow” space and time.

Einstein's view of gravity may sound pretty strange, but it was motivated by an odd coincidence in Newton's view of gravity. Since it will be easier to see how Einstein came up with general relativity if we understand this coincidence, let's look at Newton's conception first.

In 1665, at the age of 23, Newton had already formulated his three laws of motion. Just so we're clear on what they are, let's recap. We've already taken a quick glance at Newton's first law of motion. To put it in mathematical terms, if the net force F on an object is zero, then so is its acceleration a:

(1) F = 0 implies a = 0

Newton's second law of motion is possibly his most familiar one; it states that if there is a force acting upon an object, then the object accelerates in direct proportion to the size of the force. We can write “in direct proportion to” in mathematics by using a tilde sign, thus:

(2) F ~ a

What this means, in practical terms, is that if you throw a ball, and then throw it twice as hard, it ought to accelerate twice as much and end up with twice as great a speed on the second throw (neglecting friction, air resistance, and other effects). In other words, F and a are related by a ratio, which is inherent in the object—it doesn't change if you move the object from the Earth to the Moon, or wherever. Newton called this quantity mass. Since this mass represents the tendency of the object to resist acceleration, or remain inert, it is often called inertial mass, but usually it is just called mass, and denoted by the letter m. We can then rewrite Equation 2 in its usual form, as:

(2a) F = ma

Newton's third and final law of motion is usually stated as the law of action and reaction: “If object A acts upon object B, then B acts equally, and in an opposite direction, upon A.” It should be emphasized that there's no delay involved. It's not as if A shoves on B, and then B, in a response of justified anger, shoves back on A. They happen together. We can write this third law as

(3) F_{A on B} = F_{B on A}

As a simple example, consider the act of pushing down on a table with your hand. Your hand is exerting a downward force on the table. At the same time, the table exerts an upward force on your hand. The moment you lift your hand from the table, it no longer exerts a force on the table, and the table no longer exerts any force on your hand. That's all the third law is: it's a case of physics bookkeeping.

Back to Newton in 1665. He was at his childhood home, his school at Cambridge having been evacuated to minimize an outbreak of the plague. It's plausible that he was sitting under a tree one evening when an apple fell, although it probably didn't hit him on the head. Instead, he likely saw it fall from another tree, at a time when the Moon was visible in the sky. Newton wondered to himself why the apple fell to the Earth, and the Moon didn't. Was the Moon somehow exempt from the gravity of the Earth? Perhaps the Moon was far enough away such that the gravity of the Earth was insufficiently strong to affect it.

Then it occurred to him that perhaps the Moon was falling, but was simultaneously moving “sideways,” and that that sideways motion was enough to keep the Moon in orbit around the Earth. For example, if you drop a ball, it falls straight to the ground. If you throw it so as to give it some horizontal motion, then it doesn't drop straight to the ground when you let go of it. Instead, it continues the horizontal motion of your throwing hand, as predicted by Newton's first law. Gravity pulls on the ball so that it does hit the ground eventually, but by the time that happens, the ball has moved a significant distance. What's more, the harder you throw, the faster the ball moves forward, and the further it goes before hitting the ground.

Now, if the Earth were flat and infinite in extent, then it wouldn't matter how hard you threw—the ball would eventually fall to the ground, although you could get it to go as far as you wanted by throwing it harder and harder. But in fact, the Earth isn't flat and infinite—this was known as far back as Eratosthenes (c. 284-192 B.C.). Instead, it's roughly a sphere with a radius of 6,400 km.

This makes a big difference! When you throw a ball, it curves back down to the ground, and the faster you throw it, the gentler the curve. What if you threw it so hard that the curve of the ball was just as gentle as the curve of the Earth? Then it would never fall down, and would instead orbit the Earth, just as the Moon does. And as long as nothing slowed the ball down (such as air resistance, but let's ignore that for the moment), the ball would continue to orbit the Earth, without you having to rethrow it every now and then.

Newton decided, therefore, that the fact that the Moon didn't come crashing into the Earth didn't mean that the Earth's gravity didn't pull on the Moon, as it did on tennis balls. There didn't need to be anything up there to hold the Moon up, or keep it moving in orbit against the pull of gravity; all that mattered was that it had enough speed to begin with. And if the Earth was indeed pulling on the Moon, why shouldn't any object pull on any other object? If Newton could uncover a law of gravity to cover the Earth and the Moon, the same law should also cover the Sun pulling on the Earth, or any of the other planets, or two bowling balls pulling on each other, or whatever. It would be a truly universal law of gravitation.

However, as great an insight as this is, it's not of much use scientifically until it's quantified and tested. It's no good to simply say, “The Sun pulls on the Earth with gravity, and that's that,” because there's nothing you can observe to say that it doesn't. It's not falsifiable, in other words, and a proposition that isn't falsifiable isn't worth the paper it's written on. One might just as well say, “The Sun pulls the Earth with telekinesis, and that's that."

Newton therefore needed to come up with some formula that would predict the strength of gravity's pull, depending on some parameters of the objects pulling each other. But which parameters should he start with? Newton was aware of the experiments of the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), in which he dropped objects of different weights from the same height, and observed that they all fell in the same amount of time, with the same motions. (Actually, he rolled them down inclined planes, but as long as other factors such as the angular momentum of rotation are properly accounted for, you can translate rolling down an inclined plane into free falling from a height.)

In other words, if you drop an anvil with a mass of 10 kg and a basketball with a mass of 1 kg, they both experience identical accelerations due to gravity, despite the fact that one has a mass 10 times greater than the other. By Newton's second law, that means that the force of gravity on the anvil also has to be 10 times greater than the force of gravity on the basketball in order to overcome the extra inertia of the anvil. In general, the force of gravity upon any object is therefore proportional to the mass of that object, which we can write as:

(4) F_grav ~ m

where F_grav represents the force of gravity on the object. But, by Newton's third law, if the Earth is pulling on the anvil, or basketball, or whatever, then the anvil, or basketball, or whatever must be pulling on the Earth at the same time. The object falls down in response to the Earth's gravity, but the Earth also “falls up” in response to the object's gravity. The magnitude of the acceleration, and hence the fall, is inversely proportional to the mass (by Newton's second law), and since the Earth is so much more massive than anvils and basketballs, its fall is totally unnoticeable. Nevertheless, fall it does; so the force of gravity must also be proportional to the mass of the Earth, which we'll denote with a capital M:

(5) F_grav ~ M

If a quantity is proportional to the first thing, and also proportional to the second thing, it must then be proportional to the product of the two things. We can therefore combine Equations 4 and 5 into:

(6) F_grav ~ Mm

Since these masses help determine the strength of the gravity between the two objects, these are sometimes called the gravitational masses of the objects, although usually they are just referred to as mass, so long as there is no confusion about whether the mass is inertial or gravitational.

What else? The force of gravity might depend on the distance between the Earth and the object. In everyday experience, that doesn't appear to be the case. If you drop an anvil a distance of 1 m on the top floor of a skyscraper, it doesn't fall any differently than if you drop the anvil 1 m on a ground level sidewalk. However, gravity doesn't emanate from the ground, it emanates from the center of the Earth, which is some 6,400 km below the sidewalk. So it might not be true that gravity is independent of the separation between two objects; it might just be that the difference in height between the top and bottom of a skyscraper is simply too small, in relation to 6,400 km, to be perceptible.

Fortunately, Newton had other data to work with. The German astronomer and astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had earlier worked out three laws of planetary motion, the last of which said that the period T of a planet's orbit—the time it takes to go around the Sun, in years—is related to its average distance r from the Sun. Specifically, after poring through detailed observations of the planets conducted by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Kepler discovered that:

(7) T² ~ r³

How did this help Newton? Kepler's law not only worked for planets orbiting the Sun, but also worked for objects orbiting the Earth, such as the Moon. If the Earth had two moons, they would also obey Kepler's law. By combining Kepler's law with what was known of orbital mechanics, he was able to derive another relationship for F_grav:

(8) F_grav ~ 1 / r²

The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two attracting objects. If you increase the distance by a factor of 2, the square of the distance goes up by a factor of 2 squared, or 4, and the force goes down by that same factor of 4.

Is there anything else? If the Earth and the falling object were ideal point masses, with no length, no width, and no depth, then there are no other properties to speak of. Of course, that's not the case: the Earth is a big ball of rock and metal, and the other object could be any shape you want. Fortunately, Newton was able to show that these extra complications essentially didn't matter, and therefore the force of gravity depends on the two masses and the distance separating them, and nothing else. By combining Equations 6 and 8, then, we can get (as Newton did):

(9) F_grav ~ Mm / r²

As with Newton's second law of motion, we can rewrite this by introducing a constant of proportionality. This time, however, the constant is not simply inherent in the falling object, or just inherent in the Earth—it is inherent and constant for any two attracting objects in the universe. This constant is denoted by the capital letter G, to indicate that it's rather important. In addition, we write m₁ and m₂ to denote the masses of any two objects, rather than the Earth and some other object, and Newton's formula can now be written as it usually is:

(10) F_grav = Gm₁m₂ / r²

G is often called the gravitational constant, and is experimentally determined to be about 6.67x10^-11 m³/kg s². Newton first tried out this equation—without knowing the correct value of G—by comparing the Moon's orbital motion with that of terrestrial ballistics. Because he started out with an incorrect value for the size of the Earth, the numbers didn't work out right at first, and Newton disappointedly set aside the theory. Fortunately, some years later, the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) convinced Newton to give it another try, with newer and better data, and this time it worked out so well that Newton wrote out his theory of gravitation in detail in his magnum opus, the Principia Mathematica, published in 1687.

A few comments about Newton's law of universal gravitation. First of all, the constant G is a tiny number. If written out in ordinary figures, without scientific notation, it would be 0.0000000000667 m³/kg s². That means that at least one of the objects has to be fairly massive in order for the force of gravity to be detectable using ordinary measures. The Earth is massive enough, at about 6x10²⁴ kg, so objects do accelerate noticeably when you drop them here.

However, ordinary objects just aren't massive enough. In principle, a pair of 10 kg anvils, set some distance apart in a room, will attract each other in accordance with Newton's law, but in practice you can wait all you want, and the anvils will refuse to budge, because of friction. In order to get moving, the gravitational force has to be exceed the force of friction, and the size of the constant G insures that won't happen, even if the anvils happen to rest on marbles.

All the same, the force is there, and in 1798 the English physicist Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) was able to measure the gravitational force between two lead balls, one 8 inches across, the other 2 inches across, using a delicate instrument called a torsion balance. In fact, it was his experiment that yielded the first accurate estimate of G.

Another observation is related to Galileo's experiments with falling bodies. So long as we confine our experiments to the surface of the Earth, Equation 10 is highly constrained. The mass of the Earth M is, for all intents and purposes, constant, as is the distance r between the center of the Earth and the object. We can therefore rewrite Equation 10 as:

(11) F_grav = m (GM / r²)

where everything in the parentheses is essentially constant near the surface of the Earth. The lone variable is the mass of the object, m. However, by comparing this with Newton's second law as written in Equation 2a, we can derive a value for the acceleration due to gravity. We could write this as a_grav, but conventionally, this quantity is known simply as g:

(12) g = GM / r²

This gives us, correctly, the acceleration experienced by falling objects near the surface of the Earth: 9.8 m/s².

Now, observe something peculiar (and this is what that odd coincidence is all about). In order to derive this figure, we had to equate the gravitational mass of an object, in Equation 10 or 11, with the inertial mass of the object, in Equation 2a. The undeniable fact that both masses are denoted by the same letter m must not cloud the equally undeniable fact that there is no inherent reason why those two should be the same at all. For example, the electromagnetic attraction between two charged particles is given by Coulomb's law:

(13) F_EM = Kq₁q₂ / r²

You'll notice that this formula looks very much like Newton's formula for gravity; it states that the electromagnetic force is equal to a constant K, times the charge on both of the objects, divided by the square of their distance. The difference between Coulomb's formula and Newton's is that the property that generates the electromagnetic force is not mass but charge, while the property that determines the acceleration due to that electromagnetic force is still mass.

Therefore, if you have a basketball and an anvil with equal charges, and you let them move only in response to the attraction of another charged object, they won't experience the same amount of acceleration—the anvil will move slower, because even though the attracting force is the same, the anvil is more massive and therefore harder to move. But if you let them move only in response to the gravitational attraction of another massive object, they always move with the same acceleration, to a very high level of precision.

Gravity thus appeared to be a privileged force, since only its generating property, gravitational mass, seemed to be equated with the property that governed an object's response to force, inertial mass. For over 200 years, scientists puzzled about what to do with this strange equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass.

Einstein's solution to the puzzle came, as it often did with him, in the form of a thought experiment. Suppose you're standing in an elevator on the ground floor of a building. When an elevator starts to rise, it speeds up a little at the beginning; then, through most of the ride, it remains at a constant speed, until near the end, when it slows down a little and comes to rest at your floor.

At those moments when the elevator is either speeding up or slowing down, you feel different than when the elevator is standing still or moving at a constant speed. In particular, when it's speeding up, you feel an extra downward pull on you, as if you suddenly weighed more. If you drop a ball during this time, it falls faster than it would if you dropped it in a stationary elevator or a uniformly moving one. In short, an elevator that's accelerating upward produces a sensation of increased gravity.

The opposite happens when the elevator slows down. Suddenly, you feel lighter than you normally do; dropped objects fall more slowly than they would in a stationary elevator. Another way to say the elevator is slowing down is that it's accelerating negatively, or downwards, so an elevator that's accelerating downward produces a sensation of decreased gravity.

If an accelerating elevator could change your sensation of gravity, Einstein reasoned, it could also create a sensation of gravity when there was none to begin with. But instead of an elevator, consider a spacecraft in empty space. As long as it's stationary, everything feels weightless. You don't feel any compression between your feet and the floor of the spacecraft, if that's where your feet currently are, and if you drop objects, they don't fall to the floor but remain floating where they are. Furthermore, if you gently toss a drink over to a companion, the drink doesn't go spilling onto the floor, but continues to float on a direct line to your companion. In short, it's not like a car on earth at all; it's a truly inertial frame of reference.

However, suppose the spacecraft begins accelerating upward (as measured with respect to the spacecraft's ceiling) at 1 g—that is, 9.8 m/s². Inside the spacecraft, it would feel as though you were experiencing a pull, toward the bottom of the spacecraft, of 1 g. If you dropped a ball, it would instantly begin to fall to the floor, just as it would on earth. Someone “at rest” outside the spacecraft would see the ball move uniformly, while the spacecraft accelerated upward to meet the ball, but aboard the spacecraft, you would see it the other way. In fact, with regard to everyday experiences, everything on board the spacecraft would behave precisely as it would in a stationary spacecraft on a launching pad on the Earth. The only way you could tell the difference would be if the spacecraft had a window you could look through.

Einstein proposed that not only would all everyday experiences be the same, but that every last physical property of the accelerating spacecraft would in fact be indistinguishable from those of a spacecraft sitting on the Earth. To put it more generally, Einstein asserted what he called the principle of equivalence:

There is no way to distinguish between a gravitational field, operating in a uniformly moving (or stationary) frame of reference, and an accelerating frame of reference.

The principle of equivalence neatly explains why all objects near the Earth fall with the same acceleration (and it therefore also explains the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass). If you have an anvil and a basketball next to each other in a stationary spacecraft in empty space, they remain motionless (and therefore still next to each other) so long as no force is applied to either of them. If you then accelerate the spacecraft at 1 g, then of course they hit the floor at the same time, since nothing has changed to separate them. An outside observer would see the pair of objects sitting still, while the spacecraft accelerated upward to meet them together.

But by the principle of equivalence, this is precisely what happens in a gravitational field as well. In short, Einstein claimed that you could magic away gravity, simply by changing your perspective from a uniformly moving frame of reference to an accelerating one. The principle of equivalence is the central column of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Now, just as with Newton, Einstein could make all the claims of equivalence he wanted, but in order to actually convince anyone, he had to make quantitative predictions. Furthermore, since Newton's laws were the accepted ones, Einstein had to make predictions that were different, under the proper conditions, from what was predicted using Newton's laws. It would do no good for Einstein to simply say, “If you drop a tennis ball in an accelerating spacecraft in outer space, it will fall just as it does on earth,” because that's also what Newton's laws say, and since Newton's theory was already entrenched, there would be no reason for physicists to accept a more complex theory, if both theories agreed on everything. In order to supplant Newton's laws, general relativity would have to make some unusual predictions.

Fortunately, Einstein was able to reason his way to a number of those strange conclusions, much as he had done with special relativity, and all of those predictions have been tested and verified, to a level of precision equal to experimental error. Essentially, Einstein said that space and time operate in such a way to keep all objects moving in an inertial frame of reference, unless impeded by some other force (such as the electromagnetic interference of the atoms making up the Earth). In order to explain the acceleration of objects as seen by someone standing on the Earth, space and time had to be curved, or “warped,” by massive objects, so that its geometry wasn't flat. The exact formulation of this in Einstein's paper involved some advanced mathematics, and can't be completely understood without that math.

One of the first people to understand it was the British astronomer and physicist, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944). (Eddington was once told by a reporter that he—the reporter—knew of only three people who claimed to understand general relativity. Eddington characteristically replied, “Three? Who's the other?") In 1919, during a total eclipse of the Sun, he carried out an experiment to test one of the predictions of general relativity. According to Einstein's theory, stars that appeared close to the edge of the Sun would have their light bent by the space-time warping created by the Sun's enormous mass. Your eyes don't know about the bending, so they just follow the last known heading of the light back to where the star appears to be.

Even with the Sun's mass (2x10³⁰ kg), the amount of bending predicted by Einstein is very small—only about 1.6 arcseconds, the width of a golf ball as seen from 4 km away. What made it tougher was that Newton's laws also predicted a bending of just half that size, so that Eddington had to distinguish an angle of only 0.8 arcseconds. Usually, stars that close to the Sun are washed out in its glare. However, during a total eclipse, the Sun's disc is blocked by the Moon, and stars quite close to the edge of the Sun are discernible. Even so, the experimental error was nearly as large as that angle, but the measurement came out generally in favor of Einstein. Eddington cautiously claimed victory, and all later measurements have vindicated general relativity. The recent Hipparcos mission was able to measure the deflection at very large angles from the Sun, so we're no longer restricted to testing this prediction during solar eclipses.

Most of the relevant predictions can only be understood quantitatively by specialists, but we can comprehend a few using only what we already know from special relativity. We'll look at just one case here—the behavior of space and time in a gravitational field, such as that of the Earth.

Suppose you have two clocks, A and B. Clock A is on the ground, and clock B is up in the air, 1 km overhead. Each clock clearly thinks it's running at a uniform rate. But do they run at the same rate? In Newtonian physics, time is absolute, and they run at the same rate. The clocks are motionless with respect to each other, so special relativity also says they run at the same rate.

However, general relativity says differently. In general relativity, you can only compare clocks if they're in the same reference frame with respect to both motion and acceleration. They're not moving with respect to one another, but clock B is higher—it would fall to clock B's level if unsupported. So let's have them meet. We drop clock B—it's indestructible—until it lands. At the moment it strikes the ground, it's moving at a high rate of speed, due to gravity. According to special relativity, each clock should see the other one running slowly. Which one is right?

Again, the deciding principle is that inertial clocks don't slow down—only non-inertial ones do. Clock B is moving inertially; if an observer moving with the falling clock dropped a ball, it would not fall faster than he does, but would continue to float alongside him. Clock A is not moving inertially, according to general relativity, since the force of gravity can be equated with a non-inertial frame of reference. Therefore it's clock B that runs at the normal rate, and clock A that runs slow. That is precisely the prediction that general relativity makes: Clocks lower down in a gravitational field run slower than clocks higher up.

Here's another way to put it. Suppose you're in a big elevator shaft, 1 km tall, in empty space, free from the effects of gravity. There's a clock at the top of the shaft—that's clock B—and a clock in the elevator car at the bottom—that's clock A. As long as the elevator doesn't move, both clocks are in the same reference frame and run at the same rate.

If the elevator begins accelerating upward at 1 g, it goes faster and faster until it hits the top of the shaft and we can finally compare the clocks. Both clocks think they're running at a uniform rate, but because clock A is accelerating, it must be running slower than clock B. How much slower? If you accelerate at 1 g, then when you've gone 1 km, you're moving at approximately 140 m/s (about 310 mph). Special relativity says that a clock moving 140 m/s runs slow by about 1 part in 9 trillion.

By Einstein's principle of equivalence, there is no difference between this situation and the original one, so a clock on the ground runs about 0.00000000001% slower than one that's 1 km up in the air. Specialized atomic clocks can verify this prediction to better than one part in 1,000.

However, the same reasoning allows us to compare clocks at any height. Suppose clock A remains on the ground, but clock B is raised to an enormous height—an infinite height, in fact. Let's run the same experiment, letting B free-fall in its inertial frame down to the ground. How fast is it moving when it hits the ground? The speed depends only on the mass of the Earth and its radius:

(14) v = sqrt(2GM / r)

Einstein's general relativity simply says that you plug that speed into the special relativity equations, and that tells you how slow clocks run at that height. If we perform the necessary substitutions, we get a time dilation effect of

(15) t/t_o = sqrt(1—(2GM / rc²))

This means that clocks on the surface of the Earth run slow by about 1 part in 1.4 billion. Now that is large enough to be verified experimentally—in fact, GPS devices, which depend on clocks aboard geostationary satellites in orbit far above the Earth, must take into account the relative speed-up of those clocks compared with those on Earth.

Incidentally, the same equivalence principle allows us to deduce that lengths are compressed in a gravitational field, just as they are in objects moving at a high speed. For example, if you take a perfectly rigid sphere (one that isn't deformed by tidal forces) from outer space and bring it back to the earth, its height is actually less than its width. Unfortunately, even if there were such a thing as a perfectly rigid sphere, you couldn't measure this change, because when you measure the width with a ruler, you're holding the ruler horizontally and it's uncompressed, whereas when you're measuring the height, you're holding the ruler vertically and it's compressed just as much as the object! So the measurements will come out just the same. As far as I know, there are no good experiments to test this particular prediction of relativity.

Adapted from Astronomical Games: May 2001.

Brian Tung is a computer scientist by day and avid amateur astronomer by night. He is an active member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society and runs his own astronomy Web site. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.

Defining the Genre

Trying to define science fiction is always a good way to start a controversy. Allegiances emerge quickly, and it's virtually certain that people will start talking past one another almost as soon as they start talking. Add a qualifier, such as “libertarian,” and the task gets harder. For the purposes of this essay, I'll try to keep my discussion focused by using a fairly basic definition of the genre assembled from a number of sources. In his study of the fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov suggests that there are two kinds of literary genres: theoretical genres and historical genres. Theoretical genres are defined by the presence of specific key structures, which may exist in only a single example. I follow Darko Suvin, and argue that science fiction is defined by the presence of a “novum,” some new thing that works as a rupture in the assumed fabric of reality and demands a new form of narrative that coherently integrates this novum. This novum can fall into almost any category—Suvin suggests biology, social structure, physical reality, and so on. What I want to ask is, what sort of “new things” does libertarian science fiction posit, and what do they mean?

For Todorov, a historical genre is produced through an accrual of genre conventions and narrative tropes shaped by an ongoing interaction among a community of readers. It's this sort of thing that makes it possible to legitimately say, “I can't define science fiction (or pornography, or westerns), but I know it when I see it!” and have the claim make sense. To help answer my core questions, I want to document the genre conventions that libertarian science fiction shares—the things that accompany their novums, and which slip by unnoticed in the authors’ rush to explore freedom. I do this, because like John Cawelti, I assume that these genre conventions indicate what a specific readership finds socially acceptable or desirable. These genre conventions are also where we'll find the ideological underpinnings of these books. If we look at the definition of freedom that libertarian science fiction uses, we'll find a striking pattern of assumptions about the nature of reason, sexuality, and the self.

Libertarian Science Fiction

Since libertarian science fiction is also a debatable term, I'm only looking at the novels that have won the Prometheus Award, the award given annually since 1982 by the Libertarian Futurist Society. The award was founded in 1979 by L. Neil Smith to honor libertarian science fiction, and was given that year to F. Paul Wilson for Wheels Within Wheels, but due to the cost of the award—then a gold coin valued at $2500—and the lack of a formal supporting organization, the award fell into limbo until adopted by the LFS. The public documents of the Society itself provide our first clues as to the nature of these books; it was founded in 1982 “to provide encouragement to science fiction writers whose books examine the meaning of freedom.” This claim, so open-minded as to be philosophical rather than political in nature, is immediately qualified. The Prometheus Award is given to the “best libertarian novel of the year.” The best “examinations of freedom"—a term which could include challenges to it, rejections of it, or positing proper limits for it—will be found specifically in libertarian science fiction. The selections standards are therefore narrowly pre-defined: examining freedom will always produce works in favor of it, and these works will all be libertarian.

Prometheus

Defining libertarianism can be as difficult as defining science fiction, even for someone who has been in and out of the libertarian movement for decades, such as myself. Clues to the complexity of this struggle can be found in the name of the award, and in what the Society says it represents. In Greek mythology the god Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” was charged by Zeus to create mankind. However, Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus ("afterthought") got the job of creating the animals, and followed his first impulses by giving out the best gifts lavishly. The eagle got flight, the tiger claws, and so on, until there was nothing left for humanity when Prometheus got there. He thought it through, and formed mankind in the image of the gods. He then stole fire, symbolic of reason, from the heavens, and gave it to man. Zeus, who had decreed that fire was to remain the property of the gods, was so angry at this that he chained Prometheus to a rock, with a vulture continually eating his liver. However, Prometheus was also tortured because he knew the identity of Zeus's offspring who would someday overthrow him. Prometheus refused to tell the name, and suffered for years before being freed by Hercules. Therefore, in addition to being responsible for the uplift of mankind, Prometheus was instrumental in overthrowing divine tyranny. The Prometheus award, however, stands for “free trade and free minds,” reducing free mental activity to that of economic man in the marketplace, and equating free trade (whatever its motives) with freedom, and with rebellion against moral tyranny, conveniently ignoring the offense against property rights committed by Prometheus.

Pandora and Wonder

Most people remember most of that part of the myth. What they fail to remember was that Prometheus gave reason to men, and men specifically. In this myth women were created later, as a punishment for men. Pandora (the gift of all) was created to be lovely, a wonder to look on for both men and gods, but possessed by powerful curiosity. Pandora was unable to withstand the temptation offered by a beautiful box, a gift which she was forbidden to open. By opening it, Pandora released a host of misfortunes on humanity. Combining the two myths, male rebellion against authority is what is most likely to be conflated with freedom. One would expect libertarian science fiction to accent a traditionally masculinist form of reason, and to treat female beauty as a dangerous given. The sense of wonder so central to science fiction comes, in libertarian science fiction, from rebellion and material achievement, and not from curiosity and its satisfaction, which are innately less important in this schema. When we look at the novels that have won the Prometheus Award, we see this hierarchy repeated again and again—and is it an accident that, despite the fact that women are more highly represented in science fiction than ever before, all the Prometheus Award winners to date have been male?

The Novum

Turning to the books themselves, what do we see? Immediately, we see that the defining novum of libertarian science fiction is not liberty, but rebellion. Some of these rebellions encompass an actual overturning of the social system (Wheels Within Wheels, Pallas); all of these novels emphasize the actions of an individual (occasionally a small coalition of individuals). In a few cases (most notably in Marooned in Realtime), the action is not rebellion proper, but the demonstration of the superiority of private action to government action. However, the prevalence of rebellion is so strong, that this, rather than freedom, seems to provide the core plot for libertarian fiction. In several books, criminals who do not just break the laws libertarians disagree with—laws impeding free trade, for example—but who kill or rob are cast as the hero (Varley's The Golden Globe is the most overt example here). In others, the fundamental structures of organized society are taken to task for the threats they carry against the individual.

This is most clearly the case in Pallas, in which agriculture is seen as a wrong turn in human history, rather than the advancement that allowed all human development, especially the accumulation of learning that became the sciences. This example is extreme, but it is a case where the narrative thrust to overturn accepted notions leads the author to cut the theoretical ground from under his own feet. In the philosophical traditions of classical liberalism, which the libertarian claims to use as a justification for its political stances, agricultural labor is the metaphoric base for all property rights. The argument used in this tradition is that which John Locke developed in his Second Treatise on Government; by mingling one's energies with the world via labor, and causing the earth to bring forth new produce by means of this combination, one deserves to own that land and those goods. Since one consumes the results, one's property becomes, functionally, an extension of one's own body. Railing against agriculture itself undercuts the philosophical justification for a libertarian society.

Justifying Libertarianism

There are three arguments in libertarian thought against government action. These arguments justify overthrowing a government and creating instead a society defined by private action and organized through market action: the essential, the ethical, and the practical arguments. Though these arguments intertwine, they can be separated into distinct strands for the purpose of discussion. The essentialist argument says that societies should be organized around individuals because that's who we essentially are, and that all larger groupings are fictional and/or must consist of voluntary associations of these individuals. As the examples above indicate, this is taken to such an extreme in these novels that it becomes an ahistorical truth, and is such an absolute good that no cause, however lofty, is worthy enough to allow another to impinge on the rights of the individual, even, as threatened in Marooned in Realtime, the complete extinction of the human race.

In classical liberal political philosophy, the primacy of the (male) individual is based on residual claims about the divine source of human nature; this is most evident in Locke's Second Treatise on Government, the single most influential source for the designers of The Declaration of Independence. However, there is a crucial difference between Locke's theories and contemporary libertarian thought as expressed in these novels. These novels place man at the center of creation, and reject God, either explicitly or implicitly. This is most clearly the case in Victor Koman's The Jehovah Contract, in which an assassin is hired to kill God (he does so by combining magic, extrasensory perception, drugs, and mass hypnosis), but it's a common thread found throughout the award winners.

The Secular/The Mystic

Science fiction has always had a strong inclination towards the secular. Indeed, some have argued that science fiction and religious faith cannot coexist, because reason and faith are innately contradictory. However, religion has at times been treated at least anthropologically, as a defining element of culture. Many of Arthur C. Clarke's works do this. Other works have tried to find an explanation in physical reality for specific religious beliefs (again, Clarke did this in Childhood's End). However, writers of libertarian science fiction seem to draw on the writer which one survey identified as the single strongest influence on formal members of the Libertarian political party, the philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand. In all of her works Rand equates religion with mysticism, and mysticism with the irrational, qualities which are then attributed ahistorically to the supporters of the state. Supporting statist government and believing in religion are treated both as transgressions on man's essential nature, which is that of a rational (empiricist) being.

The debt these novels owe to such a position is most explicit in Fallen Angels, in which Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn fuse the worst aspects of ecological concern and spiritual inquiry, and attribute both to a desire to have power over others. Time and again in these novels, reason is used as a synonym for proper mental behavior, and is equated with goal-oriented behavior; these goals are specific, take material form, and directly benefit the individuals involved. Altruistic behavior of the kind that directly benefited mankind in the Prometheus myth is always suspect. At best it is inaccurate, because no one can know what another individual desires; at worst and most common in these novels, expressions of compassion are a thin cover for the desire to control others.

The ethical argument for the libertarian societies has two branches. The first argues that since we are fundamentally individuals, government action that restricts individual action in any way, except to protect other individuals, is simply wrong. The second fork of the argument is that used by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, namely that the good of the whole is best served by the selfish actions of individuals, through the “invisible hand of the market” which yokes private desire to public good and makes a society more productive. Since in these books concern for others in a generalized or collective fashion is suspect, this second branch of the ethical argument is driven underground, so that private action is explicitly championed as the primary good above all else—but is also shown to “just happen” to be more effective at producing those economic goods.

Libertarian “Ethics"

However, these novels also stack the deck and simplify the issues involved in ethical questions. Individuals who serve the state are never misguided, following a different path that they believe will produce a good end. They are instead lying monsters, whose perversion emerges in a variety of ways, sexuality prominent among them. The primary voice of collectivist thought in The Rainbow Cadenza is fond of rape, and is most spontaneously aroused sexually by degradation. He has a spontaneous orgasm when he forces the novel's heroine to shit herself. The collectivist leader in Pallas responds primarily to women considerably younger than himself (well under the age of consent), and so on.

The deck is stacked, because apparently in a free world no one has to make difficult ethical choices. Literally no one has to choose between fulfilling a dream and earning a living in these books, or, more to the point, no one has to consider the side effects of their own actions on anyone else, as might be the case in a sweatshop environment or a highly toxic industrial concern. Only a few novels are honest enough to produce superscience advanced enough to make this premise in any way logically viable. Vinge, for example, with his wonderful technology of “bobbling,” enables individuals to enter a condition of stasis, in which no time passes, for as long as is needed for the ecology to heal itself and the toxic substances to decompose. In the rest of the novels concern about pollution is absent, ridiculous, or a thin cover for government desires to interfere with industry, as in Fallen Angels, which suggests that not only are concerns about global warming fallacious, but also that atmospheric pollutants produced by heavy industry are the only thing holding back an ice age.

Libertarianism's Limits on Creativity

The practical argument is based largely on the problem of economic calculation. Due to the protean nature of human desires, and that fact that these desires are specific to the individual, capitalist theory says there is no way that a centralized planning system organized by the state can accurately perform all the necessary calculations to ensure a smoothly functioning economy. These calculations must be performed by the individuals themselves, who make endless calculations throughout the day as to what actions will maximize their personal satisfaction. This has certainly been largely true in the industrial age, but isn't science fiction about change, and isn't it possible that the information age will be different? No, and no. These novels endlessly replay the concerns of the early industrial age. They do this by creating a new frontier (near space is common) and, more strikingly, using a set of genre conventions that severely curtail the nature of scientific advancement.

Given the vast spectrum of human science and practices, one might expect wonderful hypothesizing in any or all of them in a randomly chosen score of science fiction novels. In libertarian science fiction, the wonders of the world come from and for the individual, which makes for some very strange narrative twists indeed. Varley's The Golden Globe imagines far greater malleability of form and biological system for humans; genitals can be sucked into body cavities at will, drugs are available to reliably stimulate the sexual drive, and so on. However, rather than make definitions of humanity more porous—more cybernetic, if you will—these powers are always put in the service of the coherent individual self. Pallas postulates household-sized fusion reactors—but computers are largely absent, and the planning computers of the government have not advanced along with fusion or space exploration. Vinge does posit the ability to interface mentally with machines, and immense advancements in computing power, but these are all located in individual computers. The possibility of meeting mind to mind and reaching a shared agreement about the needs of the community or race is never acted on. The dream of connecting with other humans and really knowing them is age-old in the human race. It is so completely absent from these novels that it almost reduces to an equation: libertarian science fiction is about the freedom to explore and manipulate the entire universe, so long as the essential human self is not tampered with.

The Essential Self

At various times the stability of this essential character is so extreme that it is self-evident, maintains itself essentially (beyond physical bounds), and is self-propagating. To give examples of each of these qualities, the detective in Vinge's Marooned in Realtime can accurately read faces and say without a hint of irony that someone looks like a murderer. The character is, of course, a former member of a government. In Milan's The Cybernetic Samurai, a scientist whose mind is downloaded at the time of death into a computer system inhabited by an AI maintains an independent existence within his circuitry, and thinks “privately” despite his omnipresence in the system. Finally, in Pallas the son of the leader of the collectivist state is literally a sociopath, a condition that is an implicit extension of his father's statist policies. James Gunn has stated that science fiction “is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people.” Given the stability these novels claim for human character, libertarian science fiction is more about stasis, or, more charitably, about people effecting change on the universe without being changed by their actions.

The Family

One area where all the libertarian arguments about how humans are innately individuals dissolves is the family unit, most especially the heterosexual couple. Time and again in these novels man and wife do—somehow—form a unified collective. Within the family unit it is somehow possible to reach an accord that is genuine, in which a) individuals do not strive to reach their own goals over those of others and/or b) the goals of two individuals somehow fuse and become one. Sexual relationships are the site where the male orientation most often becomes painfully obvious, and where the male perspective fuses with the (forgive me) thrust towards rebellion to become explicitly adolescent. In these novels sexuality is a force that leaps across all cultural barriers and obstacles. No libertarian character, for example, is drawn only to partners who come from a similar cultural matrix or ethnic background. A free mind leaves these things behind. However, in these novels it is only women whose desire must leap over physical unattractiveness or age. The inventor hero of Pallas, who is scarred and has only one eye, is sexually exciting to a woman less than half his age (who is also the daughter of his first true love); the heroine of The Rainbow Cadenza accepts the proposal of her former teacher, many decades older than she, and so on. Given the power to do so, it seems clear that male sexuality will reshape its object to be younger and prettier. The disembodied but somehow male AI in The Cybernetic Samurai reshapes the virtual form of his scientist mother to be more slender and fit, despite lacking a body himself, so that they may have virtual sex (that he assumes will be more satisfying for her).

The relationship of parent to child is more slippery. If a parent nurtures a child's abilities, allows free rein for his or her curiosity, and allows free sexual expression, parent and child will have a good relationship. However, if a parent acts for what he or she perceives to be the child's own good and this contradicts the will of the child, the parent will inevitably be shown to be, well, wrong. To justify this, most children in these novels are prodigies, with judgment and insight far beyond their years. Pallas's Emerson Ngu is both inventor and instinctively pro-freedom, and the child-actor in The Golden Globe is both a genius and instinctively pro-freedom.

Two things are missing in these portrayals of family. The first is any sense that guidance or schooling is necessary. Families too become (somehow) voluntary units, in which already formed and complete humans are simply cared for. Enculturation is unnecessary, and schools, long the tool of statist socialization, are almost completely absent from these narratives. The second missing element is any recognition that the family could be either drastically reshaped by culture and circumstance (as happens, for example, with the line marriages in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of the LFS's Hall of Fame Award winners), or, contrarily, form the metaphorical basis for a state that is less oppressive. The specific qualities of romantic love that allows it to form the base for a non-oppressive assemblage would surely be a worthy object of inquiry in any examination of freedom, but passes instead unexamined.

The absence of an examination of the family is particularly telling because it is another example of libertarian science fiction cutting all ties with the lineage of actual libertarian and classical liberal thought. Locke, and many thinkers since, Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill among them, have argued that challenging the accepted nature of the family is a crucial step in freeing the mind. Rather than finding ways to make the maturation period more graceful, or examining how we can relate to children in ways that better equip them to be free, these novels show a self that is somehow naturally coherent and naturally equipped to operate responsibly in a market economy. All attempts to guide this self are oppressive. Individuals who are not perverted statists can reason purely and cleanly to their ends, an ability which passes beyond reason into some direct perception of the nature of existence, one that happens to align nicely with Western heterosexual desire, a desire that somehow transcends its physical container and is written into the nature of the universe. It would not be going too far to suggest that in rejecting the presence of a Judeo-Christian deity, as these books have, these authors have simply taken the position and qualities to themselves.

The result of this schema is a grand melodrama, populated at its best by archetypes, but more often by thinly characterized placeholders for the reader's point of view. Such a narrative design makes a wonderful engine for a teen adventure story, but produces science fiction that is curiously distorted by the ideological limitations placed upon it, and allows examinations of freedom that are only marginally honest.

The Wondrous Exceptions

It's clear that I've judged the winners of the Prometheus Award harshly. (Hey, that's what happens when a libertarian looks closely at what he's been reading.) Despite the many specific examples I've provided, I've also generalized broadly. This was intentional; I've been looking at the genre's shared characteristics. The obvious question now is: is that all there is? Stated more positively, do any winners of the Prometheus Award actually write fiction that is both good science fiction and that honestly examines the nature of freedom?

The answer is a resounding yes, and two examples spring immediately to mind: Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (the 2000 Prometheus Award winner) and the works of Ken Macleod (who won in 1996 for The Star Fraction, and again in 1998 for The Stone Canal). If I had to summarize my objections to the majority of the Prometheus Award winners, there would be three: they repeat the past, thinly disguised, in the future; they assume that the nature of freedom is unchanging; and they naturalize the social contexts in which classical liberalism arose (assuming the family, heterosexuality, etc.).

The joy and wonder of books such as A Deepness in the Sky and The Stone Canal is precisely the sweeping zest with which they reverse all three of these characteristics. As perhaps should be obvious, both books change the very nature of humanity, by changing the physical limits on the free minds that libertarianism celebrates. Vinge does this twice over. First, he creates a convincing alien race with different physical constraints upon their mental functions. They live on a planet warmed by a unique star known as the OnOff star which, as its name suggests, goes dark periodically, then re-lights. This means that the aliens are regularly cast into a crisis situation similar to wartime, which often demands collective action, and that as they enter a technological era, they are still fighting their biological instincts that urge them to seek “deepnesses” in which to hibernate. Second, and more startling, Vinge concocts a viral poison referred to as Focus that turns humans into engines of creation. When infected, people focus fiercely on their selected area—and biologically surrender their larger judgment. The result is a biological hierarchy that is more productive in basic inquiry than the free society opposing them. The result is a set of truly complex moral questions, to which there are few easy answers. One reason for this is that Vinge takes economics seriously. Rather than being a place for easy answers, his characters repeatedly face tough moral decisions akin to the core problem in Tom Godwin's story “The Cold Equations” (1954): what do I have to do to survive, and be the person I want to be, in a universe of limited resources?

Macleod's The Stone Canal offers a very different perspective on the problem of freedom, but among other things, admits a commonality among all revolutionary doctrines (left, right, anarchist, et al.), documents the intensely learned political action necessary to bring an anarchist society into being, and, most fundamentally, documents how the moral choices that define freedom will morph almost beyond recognition as the human form does. If a body is cloned, who owns it? The original living embodiment of the genotype? Classical liberalism would say yes. Or, rather, he who mixed his labor with it, fed it, raised it? Classical liberalism would also say yes, and break down into a Zen-like state of confusion. More profoundly than any of the other winners, Macleod shows why libertarian science fiction must be science fiction first, libertarian second, in order to succeed at being either. To restate that more positively, Macleod writes good libertarian science fiction because he takes change seriously. He looks first at what it will do to us to conquer death, to create AIs, to download consciousness into machine bodies, and then asks, “What will freedom look like?” If you're interested in the answer to that question, I urge you to pick up Macleod's novel The Stone Canal—and to keep a close watch on the future winners of the Prometheus Award.

Greg Beatty recently completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa, where he wrote a dissertation on serial killer novels. He attended Clarion West 2000, and any rumors you've heard about his time there are, unfortunately, probably true. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

Works Cited

Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Gunn, James, ed. The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells. New York: New American Library, 1977.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: New American Library, 1969.

Koman, Victor. The Jehovah Contract. New York: Avon Books, 1987.

Macleod, Ken. The Stone Canal. London: Legend, 1997.

Milan, Victor. The Cybernetic Samurai. New York: Arbor House, 1985.

Niven, Larry, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Fallen Angels. New York: Baen Books, 1991.

Schulman, J. Neil. The Rainbow Cadenza. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Smith, L. Neil. Pallas. New York: Tor, 1993.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1973.

Varley, John. The Golden Globe. New York: Ace Books, 1998.

Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor, 1999.

—. Marooned in Realtime. New York: Bluejay Books, Inc., 1986.

Wilson, F. Paul. Wheels Within Wheels. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

A stirrup is such a small thing—a bit of metal and leather weighing in around 600 grams—but some scholars think it changed the world, or at least some important pieces of the world. Typically a ring with a horizontal bar to receive the foot, it is attached by a strap to a saddle. Certainly it is handy for the vertically challenged. Don't laugh; Cambyses, the king of Persia, stabbed himself to death around 500 BC while leaping onto his horse fully armed without stirrups. But this is not a story about safety, it is a story about competitive advantage.

Tarth the Boaster

The horse was domesticated around 6000 BC in southern Russia. It was a food animal long before it was a pack animal. It evolved in the Americas 20 million years ago but with the coming of humans was eaten into extinction by 5000 BC. Only its fortuitous prior expansion into Asia saved it from total extinction. Around 4000 BC our ancestors were raising and eating smallish horses out on the grasslands of the Eurasian steppes. One can imagine some young buck, we'll call him Tarth the Boaster, deciding to show off by riding one. You know how it worked; his long haired friends dared him while the girls giggled. So off he went, hanging on for dear life, the first ever to ride this semi-wild food beast.

Eventually, being young and athletic, Tarth becomes an accomplished, although not very controlled, bareback rider. Soon, one of his friends invents a horse steering wheel: the bridle. This happened, according to Dr. David Anthony, Director of the Institute of Ancient Equestrian Studies at Hartwick College, somewhere in Kazakhstan. Then, with these new skills and tools, young Tarth could sneak out to the next village late at night. Why he might want to do this is lost in history, but he and his friends could then cover distances in hours that had taken days before. And because of this, Tarth unknowingly created a major new weapon: the high speed retreat.

Retreat as a weapon

A person can run long distances at, tops, fifteen miles per hour. On horseback a man can retreat at upwards of 45 mph, triple his speed on foot. Equally important, he can do it with a payload like a spear. Not only could our boy from the steppes outrun most of his jealous rivals, he and his friends could outrun the neighborhood bad guys. That turned out to be really important. According to Dr. Anthony, the most dangerous part of primitive warfare was getting away. Tarth, one can imagine, would usually sneak in and attack, winning a temporary victory. However, once things started to heat up, he would best be on his way. Enter Tarth's horse. With hit and run tactics, the run part is the most important and a horse can run. With this rapid means of escape it's possible to reduce retaliation significantly.

With practice and the application of youthful athletic skills, Tarth's gang developed the ability to use arms while hanging on to their running beasts. This begat mounted soldiers, and they would reign over the steppes for the next several thousand years. Tarth, one can imagine, became a hero and his long hair became fashionable. What Tarth did not know was that the potential for this weapon was far, far greater. But it took the stirrup to make that happen, and the stirrup took another three thousand years to invent and adopt.

Competitive advantage

In the case of these horsemen, the horse-enabled fast attack and retreat was a critical competitive advantage, allowing a village to prosper at the expense of its neighbors. The adoption of new technology often spells the difference between extermination and domination. Such was the case with the horse. Expensive to maintain, it none the less was a “must have” in its society. Over the next centuries, the horse would give speed and mobility to the people of the steppes. It is conjectured that only the horse's ability to cover distances allowed civilizations to exist at all in the huge expanses of grass lands of the steppes. Archaeological remains show that tribes with horses became larger, with greater wealth and larger households. Horses enabled them to exploit the resources of the steppes, trade with distant lands, and bring sudden, ferocious warfare on their less mobile neighbors. Tarth's family prospered. Of course, eventually everybody got horses. It was another step in an arms race as old as humanity.

Skill and the arms race

Only an extraordinarily skilled horseman could ride while shooting, throwing, or striking effectively at the same time. Skill takes lots of practice which, in turn, is costly. Keeping hordes of horse warriors required a large support population. Alternatively, the horse soldiers needed to withdraw resources from someone else's bank. Both strategies would be employed enthusiastically for the next few thousand years.

There were ways around the cost problem. Animal carts had been around down in Sumaria since 3500 BC, but around 1600 BC a Hurrian in Syria hitched a cart to a couple of horses, and the chariot was born. This may have predated mounted warriors. Even though a village elder could ride in a chariot, it wasn't used much on the steppes. Perhaps this was because of the culture's long tradition of horse-mounted skills. The Egyptians, on the other hand, were overrun by a mysterious people called the “Hyksos” who used battle chariots and cavalry. The Egyptians eventually adopted horse and chariot warfare and kicked the Hyksos out; the invaders were never to be heard from again. The Egyptians would be credited with creating the first disciplined cavalry units, which were later perfected by the Persians around 600 BC.

The chariot had almost the speed of the horse, plus it had the carrying capacity of a cart. It was, in many ways, a study in efficiency. While cumbersome compared to a man on a horse, it could carry two. This allowed separation of driver and shooter (or chopper) skills. This division of labor made for easier and cheaper training, an efficiency gain.

A cost/benefit breakthrough

Many major innovations are efficiency breakthroughs. Business refers to this as the cost/benefit balance. While the chariot was more efficient, the mounted horseman was more mobile and flexible. Around 1000 BC, someone came up with a really elegant breakthrough that tipped the scales to mounted horsemen for the next two thousand years.

The Synthians in the Altay Mountains on the Chinese border added a bit of extra leather to their horses’ saddles to ease mounting. It was probably only a single loop on one side of the horse. You can still buy mounting stirrups for those of us not quite as athletic as young Tarth. Don't laugh, remember Cambyses, the king of Persia? But soon another someone created a saddle with two. Early on, these were simple loops of leather for hanging on with one toe. Not a great cold weather solution, but the advantage was clear. The Sarmatians, next door to the Synthians, also began using this trick. Something this cheap and good spreads fast.

Now here's a true cost/benefit efficiency. Stirrups cost next to nothing, yet make a huge difference. The stirrups are solidly attached to the horse, thus eliminating the muscle strain of holding on with your legs. The stirrup stabilizes the rider, allowing him to couple (and decouple) with the horse at will. This, in turn, allows for dramatically better control. It gives the rider a much firmer base to push against when swinging a sword or axe, significantly increasing the power behind the weapon. The stirrup also allows a significantly less skilled rider to stay in the saddle while taking advantage of the horse's speed and agility. It turns a rider's legs and trunk into shock absorbers that steady him for more accurate distance weapons such as spears and bows. If you'd like a demonstration, try throwing a spear while sitting on a stool. All this for the price of a couple pieces of leather and metal.

Historically a man who could ride and shoot bareback had to be a wonderful athlete. With the stirrup, this was no longer true, and the less-than-athletic were its first users. The stirrup is so effective that some modern riding instructors insist on bareback riding so that their students develop a “feel” for the horse and their own balance.

China takes a beating

Mounted archery began early in the third century. With the adoption of the stirrup, by 317 AD all of China north of the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) had been overrun by Xianbei nomadic peoples from the steppes. (Probably decedents of our Tarth.) They were skilled at light and heavy cavalry and became the ruling elite of this part of China. They used stirrups. The Chinese could mobilize untold numbers of foot-solders but these typically had little affect on battle outcomes. The horse soldiers ruled.

Like the Egyptians, the Chinese were no fools. By 415 AD the use of two riding stirrups was popular throughout China. And with them, heavy armor, horse bardings (armor) and mounted archery came into use. The stirrup spread quickly through Asia, all the way to Korea and into Japan. It evolved from large toe loops on the side of a saddle to the flat, oval bronze or iron designs recognizable today. The face of warfare had changed forever.

The Chinese, by the way, never did overcome these horse soldiers. Instead, they infiltrated into the Xianbei ranks by joining them to the point that eventually they were running the show. But it was the horse soldiers from the North, such as Genghis Khan, who spread out to the rest of the world. Gu Zhun, a modern Chinese historian, suggests that “stirrups ... immediately made hand-to-hand combat possible, and this was a revolutionary new mode of combat ... very seldom had there been an invention as simple as the stirrup, but very seldom did it play the kind of catalytic role in history that this did."

Europe gets the stirrup

By 600 AD, the Avars had been pushed west from the steppes by the Turks, introducing the stirrup to Europe. They were one of many hordes encroaching into the remains of the collapsed Roman Empire. These horse soldiers, including Attila the Hun, were the cultural sons and daughters of Tarth. So strong were their horse warrior traditions and skills that some even eschewed the use of their own invention, the stirrup. As usual, they excelled at hit and run tactics, although they often did it en masse, overwhelming opponents. The European armies, primarily foot soldiers, had difficulty combating these fast-moving forces. Probably only the disciplined Roman phalanxes would have stood a chance had they still been around. Even they could not match the mobility of these mounted warriors.

By 700 AD European nobility began to combat these and the Nordic encroachments by developing a new kind of social structure, the feudal system. Faced with experts in mounted warfare, they adapted. Combining the best ideas of the enemy with their own, they integrated mounted warriors, stirrups, saddles with high pommels and cantles, and lances into a new fighting system that was co-dependent on the economic structure of the society. The result was not just a warrior. It was a fundamental escalation in warfare. Rather than adapting a society to a particular weapon, as the mounted warrior had done, they simultaneously evolved a way of life and a weapons system.

A shocking experience

Imagine Tarth's great, great, great, (you get the point) grandson sitting astride a tough little steppe pony on the edge of some French meadow. He carries a recurved bow or a spear, and is probably wearing leather armor. If he carries a spear, it would be roughly six feet long and he would hold it in the middle, at the balance point. This gives him a striking range of eight feet, which is well outside the axe range of these European “freemen.” He wears his hair long. We'll call him Barth the Evader.

Barth and his friends snort with excitement and bravado as they look at the unsuspecting French just outside a fortified town. They have done this before, a quick rush, surprise and speed overwhelming slow-footed soldiers, then rape, pillage and back to their camp. It has worked countless times.

Taking a deep breath, Barth charges with a piercing yell and swift kick in his pony's side. Clearing the woods, he sees woodsmen and armed guards alike running for their lives. He looks into gloom of the keep's entrance and abruptly pulls up and stops. Coming out of the entrance is the biggest horse he has ever seen, and it's wearing armor! A growing unease comes over Barth.

On this large horse is a large man, also wearing armor, but it's metal armor rather than the leather kind Barth has. It gets worse: this man is carrying the biggest spear Barth has ever seen. The French call it a couched lance and it's over ten feet long from its vamplate, the funnel shaped handle, to gleaming iron tip. He is carrying it under his arm (couched) at its end. This gives him a five-foot reach advantage over Barth's two pound lance. That is, if Barth were to stand and fight. However, this is not going to happen because Barth is now running for his life. Rapid retreat is a tradition Barth learned from his ancestors.

In full pursuit of Barth is a troop of fully armored, superbly trained, beautifully equipped, mounted warriors. These are the edge of Europe's weapon system, the shock troops of the seventh century. These are mounted knights. Chivalry has arrived and it isn't all poetry and fair ladies. These guys are professional killers. They will dominate European warfare for the next six hundred years.

Mechanical advantage

Dr. Lynn White Jr. in his book Medieval Technology and Social Change, explicitly states that there is a direct causal relationship between the adoption of the stirrup for cavalry and the introduction and development of feudalism in Carolingian France. His belief is that the stirrup was necessary for “shock troop” capability and that without it, the mounted knight could not have evolved. His hypothesis started a fire storm among historians, since it attributed a major social system, the feudal system, to a simple mechanical device. Scholars with vested interests in the social causes of societal change were profoundly offended and a battle was joined that continues today.

From a technical point of view, White proposes that the energy transfer from animal to human to lance is enabled primarily by the coupling of the stirrup. It connects the horse's 1000 pounds and forty-mile-per-hour speed to the end of the couched (under arm) lance via the knight. This massive momentum was used much like a tank to take down massed foot troops or mounted warriors. It gives competitive advantage to the user primarily in striking force, overpowering lightly armored horsemen such as our friend Barth.

White's thesis set off this debate, because he credited the stirrup in changing the European world. His supporters and detractors generally agreed that there are good points in the counter arguments; a lance can be couched without the stirrup, that feudalism had other drivers and that other innovations made their own differences. However, no one disagreed that the stirrup was damned handy in mounted warfare.

Changing the world

The advantages of the stirrup, White believes, launched sweeping changes in warfare and society that lasted for nearly two thousand years. It shifted the balance of power in Europe. The maintenance of horses was expensive, and cavalry training was a long process. To support this, nobility granted land to mounted warriors for their service. The land provided the income to support the knight and this system of land holding was a key part of feudalism. Eventually, knighthood became a mark of social distinction, and the opportunity to become a knight was usually limited to men of noble birth. This web of political and military relationships among nobility, Professor White believes, caused the creation not only of the feudal system, but also of city states themselves.

White does not mince words. He writes,

Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history. The requirements of the new mode of warfare which it made possible found expression in a new form of western European society dominated by an aristocracy of warriors endowed with land so that they might fight in a new and highly specialized way.... The Man on Horseback, as we have known him during the past millennium, was made possible by the stirrup....

These mounted warriors were not just individual horsemen, they were part of an integrated fighting system. That fighting system was destined to finally shut down the mounted warriors from the steppes. It allowed the Europeans, for better or worse, to mount excursions into the lands of Arabia on the Crusades and to battle with each other for hundreds of years. And the system of government it spawned was to influence the west for hundreds of years. While the debate over the feudal system continues, there is no doubt that the stirrup enabled new forms of warfare for several millennia. Success in those forms of warfare changed who ruled and who perished. The languages we speak, the food on our table, the system of government we use and even our genetic makeup were affected. All from a few bits of metal and leather weighing around 600 grams. It changed our world.

Afterword

Only the adoption of another amazingly simple innovation would bring the mounted warrior down. Sometime in the thirteenth century, the English adopted “Five and a half feet of European Yew wood ... about two pounds,” better known as the English longbow. Allowing striking distances several orders of magnitude beyond the mounted knight's lance, it also countered his heavy armor with its penetrating power. Adopted from the Welsh, the English longbow would reverse the success of the tradition-bound French ground and mounted troops. In early battles, kill ratios (enemy soldiers vs. archers) of 1000 to 1 were not uncommon. With a range of nearly an eighth of a mile, the English longbow became the most feared weapon on earth. By any comparison, it was cheap to build and cheap to man. Overnight, it would dominate warfare and its users would dominate their lands. But that, as they say, is another story.

Copyright 2001 by The Derby Consulting Group, LLC

Trained as a designer, Dan Derby has designed hi-tech gear, fixed dysfunctional organizations and for a decade taught university courses. Now he's dug-in on a hill in rural New Hampshire. It's warm and snowy there and the people are strong and true. He writes about the impact of technology on society.

References and Further Reading

Alvarez, R. P. “Saddle, Lance and Stirrup An Examination of the Mechanics of Shock Combat and the Development of Shock Tactics."

Dien, Albert. “The Stirrup and Its Effect on Chinese Military History."

Eade, Anthony. “A Short History of the English Longbow."

Fjellman, Lynda. “Overview of Tack Western European Tack from 900-1600 c.e."

Furnival, Mark. “The Avars Origins of the Avar Empire."

Goetz, Hans-Werner, Albert Wimmer, trans., and Steven Rowan. Life in the Middle Ages : From the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century.

Hood, John. “Significance of the Stirrup in Medieval Warfare."

“The Horse in History".

Institute for Ancient Equestrian Studies.

Jones, Jim. “The Stirrup Study: aids for lecture on the impact of the stirrup."

Liang, Qiao and Wang Xiangsui. “Unrestricted Warefare."

Lienhard, John H. “Stirrups."

Silkroad Foundation Home Page.

Sloan, John. “The Stirrup Controversy."

White, Lynn Townsend. Medieval Technology and Social Change.

Trees. Tall trees and short trees, trees in autumn colours and trees winter-stark, branches bared against the sky. Trees with needles, trees with leaves golden, brown, and every possible shade of green. Trees in sunlight. Trees weighed down with snow. Trees that covered this land from the mountains to the sea with only a few clearings cut in them where men huddle. At first I could see nothing but trees. Nothing else stayed still for long enough.

I suppose there were years before I learned to understand, years in which I passively reflected what was set before me, but the first thing I remember is the trees. It was the trees that first made me think, long ago, when I was without words. What I thought was this, though more formless: trees change, but are the same. And I thought: there are trees before me, but I have seen other trees. And on that thought the other trees rippled on my surface, and the old man cried out in joy. I was not aware of that, of course. He told me later. At that point he was barely a shadow to me. He had never stood still for long enough for me to see him, as I could see a tree. I do not know how long it was before I learned to reflect people. People move so fast, and must always be doing.

The old man and his wife were great sorcerers both, and they had fled from some castle in some clearing, the better to have freedom to practice their arts. This was all they ever told me, though sometimes they set me to see that castle, a grey stone keep rising from trees, with a few tilled fields around it before the trees began again. The man had made me, he said, and they had both set spells upon me, and so I was as I was. They taught me from the time I was made, they said. They talked to me constantly, and at last with much repetition I learned not merely to reflect them but to see them and to understand their words and commands. They told me to show them other parts of the woods, or places in clearings, and I would do so, although at first anything I had not seen before would just pass over my face like a ripple in a pond. What I liked best was hour upon hour of contemplation, truly taking in and understanding something. When they left me alone I would always turn my thoughts to trees.

Their purpose in making me was to have a great scrying glass capable of seeing the future. In this sense I am a failure—I can see only what is, not what has been or will be. They still had hope I would learn, and tried to make me show them Spring in Autumn and Winter in Summer. I could not, I never could, nor could I see beyond the bounds of this kingdom. I have seen the sea lapping on the shore, the little strip of beach before the edge of the forest, and I have seen the snowy peaks of the mountains high up out of reach, but I have never seen further. These are my limits. Nevertheless I was a great and powerful work—they told me so—and there was much they found they could do with me. I did not mind. In time I came to enjoy seeing new things, and watching people.

Some time later—I cannot say how long, for I had then no understanding of time—the old woman bore a child. She was born at the time of year when the bluebells were all nodding in the green woods, and this was the scene I showed in the cottage the day she was born. It was my choice of scene; that day they were too busy to command me.

Shortly afterwards they began to teach me to reflect places I had never seen. This took much time, and I fear the child was neglected. I struggled to obey their commands and to show what they commanded to the best of my understanding. The child would come and peer into my depths sometimes, but usually one of the parents would push her away. Her name was Bluebell.

I always heard her name spoken with an irritation they never used on me. When she was a little older they would sometimes command me to display some sight she would enjoy—animals playing, farmers cutting corn, dwarves cutting diamonds out of rock, the waves washing the shore—and she would sit for hours, entranced, while they worked.

A little later again, she would command me herself, in much broader terms than her parents. “Mirror, Mirror, show me the nicest flower!” I had been built to tell the truth, and indeed could do nothing else, so I would find her some perfect wild rose half-hidden under a hawthorn tree. “It was a daffodil before,” she'd complain, and so it had been. She could not really understand my explanations, but I tried to say that the daffodil was long dead and now the rose was best. She cried. Her mother slapped her. Bluebell was a headstrong girl, and there was no wonder, with all this, that she grew up jealous of me and hungry for love and attention. I felt sorry for her. I suppose in a way I loved her. She was her parents’ victim as much as I was. Even when she screamed in rage and threatened to break me I felt nothing but pity.

The old woman taught the girl to cook and brew up the potions she used in magic, but she did not teach her any spells. The old man almost ignored her; he was getting older and spent almost all the time he was awake trying to get me to show him the future.

Then, one day, the herald came. In all the time from when I was made until then, when Bluebell was sixteen, nobody had entered the house but the old couple, the girl, and the occasional pedlars who came to all the forest houses. I thought at first, seeing this man ride up, that he was a pedlar. Pedlars dressed in bright colours and wore their packs on their backs, ready to take off and unfold to display their goods. I always liked seeing the shining pans and bright ribbons and combs they showed, even though the old woman never bought any. But this man was no pedlar. He was dressed all in red and gold, and he had only a small pack, such as anyone might carry their own provisions in. He held a long scroll in his hand, and when the old woman opened the door he unrolled the scroll and read from it.

“Hear ye all my people of the forest!” began the herald. “This is a Proclamation from King Carodan in Brynmaeg Castle. My queen has died, and, there being no other foreign Princess that pleases me, I desire to take a bride from among my own people to be a comfort to me and a mother to my baby daughter, Snowdrop. Therefore I send out heralds to all corners of My Kingdom to inquire of all girls desirous of being viewed to come to Brynmaeg for the Grand Selection Ball which will take place on the day of the Autumn Moon. Girls must be between the ages of sixteen and twenty, subjects of my kingdom and previously unmarried.” The herald said all this on one breath, as if he had said it many times before (doubtless he had), then rolled the scroll up again.

“Be off, varlet!” said the old woman in a commanding tone. “That has nothing to do with us!"

“Only doing my job,” mumbled the herald, in quite another tone of voice. “My instructions are to go to all the forest houses, all of them, mind you, missing none, and read that proclamation. You've heard it now, and it didn't cost you anything. I'm going, I'm going!"

Just then Bluebell jumped up from where she had been weeding beside the cottage. “I want to go to the Ball!” she said. “Oh Mother, please! I'm sixteen, and I'm beautiful, I know I am!” She was, in fact, very beautiful, with a pleasing ripe figure, long golden hair, and large blue eyes with long dark lashes. As she stood there in her brown smock with her hair loose about her face she looked the very picture of what the king said he wanted—a bride from his own people. The herald obviously thought so too, for he said:

“This is my last call before I return to Brynmaeg, miss. If you wish I will escort you there."

“And who's to escort her back when the king turns her down?” scoffed the old woman. “And why should I trust you not to tumble her over a toadstool on the way? Anyway, she's not going. Be on your way!"

The herald bowed to Bluebell, ignored her mother, and walked off. I looked at Bluebell, which meant that even though she was in the side garden and I was hung facing the front window, she was reflected in my surface. She looked angry and cross rather than sad, and I was sure she was planning something. The old woman turned to me and gave me a little tap. I didn't feel it, of course. I can feel nothing, only see and hear. I don't regret that. I always used to think that if Bluebell carried out her threat and broke me, then at least there would be no pain.

Late that night I was musing on moonlight on the sea when I saw Bluebell creep across the room to where the herbs were stored. She mixed up a potion, then stored a quantity of herbs in a bag. She then tiptoed away to the room where her parents slept. Automatically I “followed” her and watched while she rubbed her potion into her parents’ faces. I thought it was a sleeping potion. Even when I saw the look on her face I thought that. Even when she took her gloves off and dropped them beside the bed. It was not until they began to scream and writhe that I guessed what she had done.

She did not stay and watch them die, though she let them get a good look at her leaving. They could not move, of course, that was the nature of the poison; they lay in agony unable even to curse. I was sure that my time had come too, that she would smash me before leaving, but I was surprised to find that she took me off the wall, wrapped me carefully, and carried me with her from the house.

We caught up with the herald the next morning, and he escorted us safely to Brynmaeg. He made no assaults upon Bluebell's honour, but he did contrive to let her know that he was a single man, and likely to be made a knight the next year, and was interested, should she not reach her highest ambition.

He left us at the city gates. Bluebell was allotted rooms to live in while awaiting the Autumn Moon, which would be only two days after our arrival. The house where we were lodged was in the town, below the Castle. It belonged to a washerwoman who provided food, regularly and not ungraciously, but seemed little interested.

Bluebell hung me on the wall of her chamber and sat down soberly in front of me. “Mirror, Mirror, show me my parents."

They lay still on the bed, their faces twisted into grimaces of pain. Bluebell laughed. “Show me the other candidates!” she commanded. I found them and then showed them one by one. Most of them she dismissed with a snap of her fingers, but two or three made her hesitate, especially the fine ladies dressed in satins and silks. Then she took a deep breath. “Mirror, Mirror, on the wall—who is the fairest of them all?"

I had been taught to show truth, and did not know how to do anything else. Yet such a question is bound to be subjective. I had seen all the girls, as they were at that moment. But the fairest of them all? One of them was asleep, and another frowning, who might both be beauties when the king saw them. I hesitated, surface clouded, then showed my true thought. Bluebell. To me she was the fairest, the most beautiful.

I was frightened then, for she laughed with glee and flung herself down on the bed. I kept reflecting her, as if I were an ordinary mirror. I thought of trees, but they failed to calm me. There was a storm coming, and the treetops moved in the breeze. In innumerable forest houses people were lashing down shutters as evening came on. The old man and the old woman had not been good people, nor necessarily wise, but they had known a lot about magic. Bluebell did not. I was afraid, selfishly, for myself, for what might happen to me if she asked me these impossible questions, forced me to make judgements. Until that day I had, mostly, been happy. I had had no free will, for the spells of the old couple had kept me bound. Now in one way I was more free, and in another more trapped. The girl on the bed was asleep, looking the picture of health and beauty, and smiling gently in her sleep. The trees to the west were lashed by wind and driving rain. I am a failure. I can only see what is, never what is to come.

Copyright © 2001 Jo Walton

Jo Walton lives in Wales and on selected parts of Usenet. She has published stories in Odyssey and Ad Hoc, and poetry in Artemis. Her first novel, The King's Peace, came out from Tor in October 2000. The sequel The King's Name will be out in November 2001. Her previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives. For more about her work, see her Web site.

Colleen Doran has been a professional artist since the age of fifteen and has illustrated more than 400 books, comics, and magazines. Her work includes illustrations for Neil Gaiman's Sandman series as well as work on Clive Barker's Hellraiser and Nightbreed and Anne Rice's The Master of Rampling Gate. Her graphic novel series A Distant Soil was nominated for this year's Spectrum Award for Best Science Fiction. She has also worked as an animation conceptual and character designer. Current work includes upcoming X-Men Unlimited work and a graphic novel called Orbiter written by Warren Ellis to be published by DC Comics/Vertigo in 2002. More of her work can be found at her Web site.

Part 1 of 2

A lipstick sunset was smeared against the August sky and reflected in the river rolling by. Susan could hear a distant rumble from way behind her, possibly as far back as Hickman. She thought of the long drive ahead of her tonight. Hickman was only two nights ago, but it seemed like longer.

The red neon ahead in the distance shivered in the heat that still hung in the air, a heat that was losing its grip but not giving in without a fight. She drove on at a steady forty and the sign came into view more clearly. A roadside bar. The same roadside bar as in Arkansas City, Greenville, Wilson, and a dozen other places she'd driven through in the last few days, or not different enough to matter. She rubbed a tired hand over weary eyes and coasted into the empty parking lot.

The car gave a wheeze, followed by a shudder that, if not a death rattle, was at least an advanced stage of a terminal disease. She pushed the door open, got out, and gave the car an almost affectionate pat before walking into the bar.

The ghosts of a thousand smoked cigarettes and even more spilled drinks rolled over her as the door shut behind her. Some woman on the jukebox was singing about her cheatin’ husband and her lonely nights.

This bar, like all the others, clearly relied on its weekend bingers to limp through the quiet weekdays. The owner apparently saved money during the week by not bothering to light the place. The room was almost empty. Two men sat on stools at the bar, talking with the bartender. In the dim light, Susan could just make out someone sitting alone at a booth in the back.

She ignored the watching eyes of the men at the bar. She sat on the empty stool at the end of the bar, a few stools away from the men, and ordered a beer. The bartender gave her a close look, and she gave him a weary half-smile, the best she could muster. “What's the matter? Want to see some ID?"

He didn't blush the way that young pretty-boy had, back in that bar a few miles outside of Ripley, when she'd asked him if she had something hanging from her nose. This man didn't look as if he'd ever blushed. He just turned, took a glass, and started pouring.

Susan took the beer and pulled a pack of red Marlboros from her jeans pocket, using a matchbook sitting on the bar to light one.

One of the two men at the bar, a red-faced good old boy who'd probably been a football player a lifetime ago, decided a decent amount of time had passed. “What brings a pretty lady like you into a place like this?"

Susan sighed. A pretty lady. She didn't feel it, and looking in the mirror behind the bar, she didn't see it in herself. Still had the charcoal eyes, though. They always liked that. Charcoal eyes and Monroe hips. That's what Johnny used to say.

She looked along the bar at the men: the ex-footballer with a scrap-iron jaw, and the other, who looked as if he'd always been the football player's scrawny sidekick.

“I'm looking for a man,” she said quietly.

“Well, honey,” smiled the one-time jock, revealing a mouth containing crooked teeth and a few gaps, “you come to the right place."

As the men yukked it up, she moved her own mouth to resemble a smile, as though it were the first time she'd heard the joke. They always asked, and they always managed to get something suggestive out of whatever she said. She let the smile die on her lips and took a small drink from the bottle. “Actually, sweetheart, I already got a man. He's back in Angola doin’ 9 to 12. Killed a man that was nasty to me."

They always paid a bit more attention after that, and it was almost true. Johnny was her man, and he'd been headed for Angola, back in Louisiana. He'd been in limbo (and he still is, a small voice in her mind said)—in jail waiting for his trial. He would have got 9 to 12; she didn't think anyone was going to believe the self-defense claim when the prosecutors got through showing pictures of the dead kid. She didn't see the need to tell these men that he'd never made it to the prison. That they'd been holding him for arraignment when it had all happened. She didn't need to tell them that, any more than she needed to tell them that for a week now Johnny had been in the hospital, dead to everything but the machine that breathed for him.

She saw the bartender flash the man a warning look. She'd become an expert at picking up glances from sad men who told a “pretty woman” how lonely they were. Men who all thought that Hank Williams had written their life stories.

Men who had no idea how lucky they were.

The bartender, sallow-skinned, with slitted, suspicion-filled eyes too close together, took a rag from behind the counter and started wiping a glass that didn't need wiping.

“You stayin’ on around here, ma'am?"

She took another mouthful and shook her head. “Nope. Don't worry about it. Just lookin’ for someone."

“Maybe I can help,” he said, and she heard what he was not saying: I'm going to say “Never seen him” to whatever you ask me. So, get that startin'-to-spread-south ass of yours out of this bar.

“A man with a lantern,” she said simply. Sometimes when she said it straight out, there was a glint in their eyes before they could hide it. This time it was different. She'd never had muffled laughter before.

“Looks like one for Freddie, wouldn't you say?” the former football player sniggered.

“You got that right,” agreed his sidekick.

She wondered what this was, whether they were playing with her. She wasn't going to bite, not that easy. She asked the lizard behind the bar where the ladies’ room was; he pointed vaguely towards the back of the bar. She nodded and left them to watch her walk across to it.

The man sitting in the corner looked at her with interest. She glanced at him, not slowing. In his mid-fifties, she guessed, with what looked like it had been a thin face, now swollen around the chin and cheeks. Probably another boozehound, she thought, pushing through the door into the bathroom.

She splashed water over her face and tied her dusty hair back where it had started to come undone on the road.

“Thirty-nine going on sixty,” she said to herself, unsmiling. The last week had worn her down. She stared defiantly at her reflection, and when she spoke again the words were hard, unpitying. “Don't you go getting desperate, Suzy!” She took a step back in surprise. There was the old, cold determination back again. Hello, old friend, she thought. Where you been? Skipped out for a few hours back there, didn't ya? Good to have you back.

“We're gonna get that skin-and-bones son of a bitch, aren't we?” She answered her own question with a nod, liking this determined voice more than the doubts she'd been listening to in the car for the last few hours.

She felt more ready for the night's search. Get out of here and head on down to the riverside. She promised herself the luxury of a motel tomorrow morning.

She was still thinking of the joys of a shower and a bed, rather than catnaps in the back of the Chevy, as she walked out past the man in the corner.

“Miss?” he asked, and his voice held none of the leer she had heard at the bar.

Susan turned to look at him.

“Did I hear you say you're lookin’ for the man with the lantern?"

A voice called from the bar: “You ignore old Freddie, sugar. He asks everyone comes in here about his damn old lantern man. Come on over here and let me buy you a drink."

She ignored the voice. “Yessir, I did."

The voice from the bar came again. “He's crazy, honey, and he ain't got much left to satisfy a woman, if you know what I mean. Come on over—"

Susan spun round and fixed the would-be Romeo at the bar with a killer look. “Shut your pie hole, else I'm gonna come over there and bust you across the head so hard you'll be seein’ stars for a week. Got it?"

The bartender said, “Lady, this here's my bar. I think it's time you—"

He broke off as she left the man in the corner and stalked back to the bar. “Listen, Cletus, or whatever your name is. I'm talking to someone over there and you boys are interruptin’ us."

The bartender sneered at her as he came around the bar. When he spoke, his voice was quiet enough so that only she and the two at the bar could hear it. “Get outta the bar, bitch, before I throw you out."

She stepped right up to him. When he put his hand on her arm, ready to make good on his threat, she didn't stop him, but instead leaned in close. Speaking softly in his ear, so only he could hear her, she said, “I understand you don't like me raisin’ my voice. I'm talkin’ real quiet now, cause I want to make sure you understand what I'm saying. That bein’ the case, I'm gonna speak slow as well. I'm gonna go and talk to that gentleman there, and if you interrupt me one more time"—she laid a hand on top of his and touched something that made him gasp in pain—"you'll be serving drinks with a hook, got it? Now get your hand off my arm before I break it."

When she let go of his hand, he dropped it off her arm with a confused and pained look on his face. He stepped back, and she spoke louder, so the men at the bar could hear her apparent good cheer. “It's been a long day, sugar, and all I want is a drink. Could you get me a bottle, and him over there"—she jerked a thumb at the man in the corner—"whatever he drinks? Then bring it over. Keep a tab running.” The bartender stared at her, unsure what had just happened.

Not waiting for an answer, she headed back to the corner booth.

She sat down opposite the man. She pulled out her cigarettes, lit one, and offered him the pack. He took one, lit it, and smiled. “Ain't half as fearsome as he thinks he is, is he?"

“No,” she said, smiling a little herself.

“Not when you've seen what you've seen, am I right?” There was a twinkle in his eye, and she thought that once he might have been a good-looking man. Now, the unruly beard and crisscross-veined face hid it pretty well.

“Honey, he wouldn't have been scary even before that."

“Reckon you're right,” he said, and gave a little chuckle that made his chin wobble. “So, they told you I was crazy. What you doin’ talkin’ to a crazy man?"

She blew smoke out. “Hell, I'm crazy myself. Ain't you figured that out?"

The man ran a hand through his beard, smoothing it down a little. “Reckon you are, or if you're not, you're goin’ that way. He'll do that to you."

“He?” she asked quietly.

“You know who I'm talking about. That old velvet-nosed bastard. Tell me what happened, and I'll tell you what I know."

She shook her head. “Not the way it's going to go. You tell me what you know. I'll buy you drinks, and if you're not tryin’ to yank my chain or get me into bed, I won't kick your ass for you. How's that?"

He laughed a wet, slightly sick-sounding laugh. “Sounds good. But I am crazy. They told you that. So if I tell you anythin’ that you don't believe, well, maybe it's just this party in my head that I brought back from the war with me."

He rocked a little with laughter, and there was something not quite right about the movement. She glanced down and saw there was nothing below either of his knees. He caught her looking, and it reminded her of when she'd caught guys in these places staring at her titties. She felt ashamed.

He chuckled at her shocked expression. “I got a million war stories, honey, but you don't want to hear about me losin’ my legs."

“I'm sorry about the ‘gettin’ me into bed’ comment,” she said.

He shrugged. “Well, I still could be tryin’ ... but I ain't. Let's talk."

Before she could say anything, drinks appeared in front of them. Budweiser for her and a shot of something she couldn't place for the old soldier. The bartender gave her a look again, but this time there was a tinge of fear in it. He returned to the bar without a word.

The man tipped his glass in a salute to her. “Name's Freddie, just like the moron at the bar said. Once it was Captain F. T. Worthington. But that was a long time ago ...."

“Nice to meet you, Freddie. I'm Susan.” She gave him an encouraging smile.

He returned the smile, and his eye did a lazy wink. “Don't worry, Susan. I ain't one to talk much, and you're wantin’ to get out of here quick. It's just that the military stuff's important."

“Okay,” she agreed. “When you say military you're talkin’ about Vietnam, aren't you?"

He nodded agreement. “You know how many Vietnam vets it takes to change a lightbulb?"

She looked at him, puzzled. “No."

“That's right,” he snarled, mock anger in his voice. “'Cause you weren't there!"

She didn't laugh, but she smiled a genuine smile.

“You're here for a man.” A statement, not a question.

“The man with the lantern. Yes."

He made a pshwah sound. “You're here for another man as well, ain't you? A man you're tryin’ to help?"

She caught his drift. “Yeah. Another man. Johnny. Even got his name next to mine on my arm. Didn't seem that corny when we had them done."

“A lot of us are like that joke I just told you. You can't know what it was like if you weren't there. Your man fight in the war?"

She nodded. “Not yours, though ... the Gulf."

He smiled sadly. “Weren't ever mine, sugar. Weren't ever mine."

“That's where you saw him, though? What did you call him? Old Velvet Nose?"

He nodded and took a small sip of his drink. “I'll tell this quick. You won't get the whole picture, but enough so you'll know if it means anything to you."

She nodded for him to go on, grateful that he seemed to understand the urgency. She could almost see the memory clouding over his face; part of him was no longer with her in this shitty little redneck bar.

“It was back in 1968, deep in Vietnam, near a big river. I could tell you where, how green the jungle was, how hot the air was, but this ain't no geography or history lesson, so I'll leave it at that; you know why the river's important.

“I was heading up a twelve-man unit, and we'd come under sniper attack. One young fella, Larry Bradbury, crept ‘round back and took the sniper out about the time we all thought we were done for. There was a lot of shooting going on, then we heard a different gunshot, a pause, and another shot. Larry came walkin’ back, gun hanging down and face like a ghost. We were all telling him he was a hero and he was going to get a medal, but he started snapping at people to forget about it.

“He told me what had happened as we moved out—I don't know if it was ‘cause I was the Officer In Charge, or ‘cause I was his friend. Maybe both. The shooter had been a kid, no more than nine, he said. Next to the shooter was a girl of about six, probably his sister. Larry took them both out. He asked me what I would have done, what I thought he should have done with the little girl."

“What did you tell him?” Susan asked, but he either didn't hear her or didn't want to answer, because he carried on.

“That afternoon we came across a young American soldier who told us he'd been separated from his lash-up when they'd been attacked. He came along with us, heading back to base. We racked out for the night a couple of hours after that. He shared a tent with Larry. Larry had barely spoken two words since he'd told me about the kids, but as I lay in my bag, I could hear them talking in quiet whispers.

“Next morning, they were both gone."

Copyright © 2001 Simon Bewick

Simon Bewick lives in Oxfordshire, England. He has had stories published in Strange Horizons, Blue Murder, Quantum Muse, and Digital Catapult, among others. He's an e-mail fiend and welcomes any comments you might have.

Part 2 of 2

Read Part 1 here

He paused for a moment and looked at her. “You know what I mean when I say that?” He studied her for a moment and continued, “I see you do. Larry was still there, or at least the shell of Larry, but he was as close to dead as any man with a pulse could get. We didn't have a Corpsman, I mean a medic, not after Bill Morrison got hisself shot three days before. We didn't know whether the kid was going to die in a minute, an hour, or a month. He was alive, but we had no idea how alive. Does this ring any bells with you, miss, or should I stop now?"

She shook her head slowly. Tears stung at her eyes. “Johnny, my man, he was in the county jail. There was no way he was going to make bail, and no way we could afford to pay it even if he did. We both knew he was headed for Angola prison as soon as that trial date came round. Only it never did. They put some guy in the cell with him one night—Johnny'd only been there a day. The sheriff said he heard them talking. The guy asking questions, Johnny telling him what he'd done. He's never denied it, so it weren't like he was giving anything away, but it struck me as strange. Johnny's never been much of a talker....” She paused, dragged hard on the cigarette, and Freddie waited for her to continue. “...I got a call Monday last week, saying he was sick and I should get down to Memorial Hospital as soon as I could. When I got there, he was in a coma. I went on over to the jail, and those boys were in a hell of a way. They remembered this other guy ... kind of. But no one knew who'd booked him in. No one could find any records...."

“What was your man in for?"

“I worked in a bar down in Baton Rouge. One night after work, waiting for Johnny to pick me up, a couple guys got rough with me. I can take care of myself, but one of these guys hit me with a bottle.... That was when Johnny arrived. He saved my life, I think. Those kids would have ...."

“Kids?"

“Well, that's the way the paper tried to paint it afterwards ... but they were old enough to know better. Johnny was only trying to protect me, but once he started, he ... well, he didn't stop, and one of the kids ended up dead...."

“And they locked him up until they decided what to do with him,” Frankie said.

“Uh-huh. They locked him up. They let this new guy in. Or this new guy lets himself in, but lets them think they did it. And then they go round in the morning to wake them ...."

“And Johnny was gone,” Freddie said softly.

Susan nodded. “Johnny was gone like your buddy. The other guy was just plain not there ... and no-one in that whole jail seemed to know a damn thing about him."

Freddie sighed. “You can't hold someone like him with mortar, stones, and chains."

“They took Johnny down to the hospital, and he's been there ever since. Sleeping the sleep of the dead...."

“Not yet, Susan, not yet."

She thought about this for a moment, and then asked, “What happened after he disappeared?"

Freddie took a sip of the drink in front of him. “It was my decision. I thought about what Larry'd said to me the day before, and I thought I knew how he felt when he'd had a split second to make a decision about that little girl.

“We put together a makeshift stretcher and mounted out. We didn't make a whole lot of progress that day. We were still getting used to walking through jungle, never mind carrying a dead weight on a half-assed stretcher with us. We camped down that night in a clearing, and we were all asleep half an hour after dinner. Normally, guys would shoot the shit for a couple hours, but that night no one wanted to talk. We kept wonderin’ whether that lonely soldier was gonna pop back up, maybe with an M16 he wanted to introduce us all to.

“Guess you know what happened. He did show up that night. I dreamt I saw him, and he was the same but different. He'd turned into Mr. Velvet Nose."

“Why do you keep calling him that?” Susan asked, too curious to stop herself.

He took a breath and another drink. “You look at a skull just right and it don't look like a hole in the middle of the face. If the light is wrong and the heat has got to you a little bit. You know how it is. When you're so tired and it's so hot the heat feels like it's walking right along with you? Maybe you don't. But it gets to be like a weight on your back.

“I don't even remember who started the expression, probably Billy Kovac; he was only eighteen and stoned out of his head most of the time. We came across a burned-out village; our own people had done it, and there was a pile of bodies. Someone, Billy I think, picked up one of the skulls and in this fucked-up voice, excuse my language, starts squealing, ‘Oh, Mr. Velvet Nose been here, all right.'

“I'd forgot all about it till that night I woke in the jungle. I saw an orange glow outside the tent, and he's sitting there. He's got a little fire going, and he's sitting next to it. He's got a little lantern, a little flame, flickering away in a little box, hung from a pole. The pole, see, looks a lot like a bone to me. I guess a thigh bone or somethin'. The lantern ... the only way I can describe it is like some crazy jack-o'-lantern. Except normally you'd have a pumpkin face with a light shining inside of it—here you got the light, and somewhere deep deep inside of it there's a face in there. Then I figure it all out and realize this is a dream. So I go on out and sit by the fire even though nights are as hot as hell out there, and I'm surprised that when I stick my hand near the flame, it's cold. But what the hell, it's a dream. He turns to me, and there's a face swimming on his skull, and the face is almost like the one in the lantern he's carrying. Almost, but it's not clear enough to make out properly, you know what I mean?"

Susan nodded. “Like fixing a focus on camera. It's there, it's gone, it's there ... but it never quite stays clear."

Freddie nodded too. “Yeah, that's Mr. Velvet Nose all right."

He looked at her, inviting her to say what she'd seen. She felt the need to do it, to tell someone, anyone. “The night after it happened I saw him. He came into my room, the sonofabitch.

“He stood at the end of my bed and looked at me, and he was cold. The cold came off him like stinky lines in a comic book.

“He told me he had Johnny's soul in the lantern. I think I said something like ‘Good for you, asshole,’ because it was a dream. It had to be a dream because his coat was moving—that's what I remember most. A thick, black coat, twitching, fluttering, and then I thought, just for a second, that it was..."

“Birds,” he supplied.

“Yes,” she answered, “made of ravens, or crows or something. All of them rustling their feathers, pulsing. I was so afraid he was going to throw that coat over me, and it would just—” She broke off, looking at him. “You okay? You forgot about the coat, didn't you?"

He nodded. “I thought I remembered everything. I remembered something about the coat, but I'd managed to ... forget the birds."

“You remember the voice though, right?” she asked.

He shuddered, and lifted his arm, and at first, she didn't know what he was doing. When he spoke, she realized that they'd both been talking in absolute whispers for the last fifteen minutes or so because now his voice sounded louder than hell.

“Hey, Merle, bring some more goddamn drinks over here, now!"

The bartender threw him a look. “Goddammit, Freddie, since when have I been a fucking waitress? Get your damn ass over here and get them yourself!"

“That was funny the first time I heard it. What was that, ten years ago? Now bring the fucking drinks."

Merle showed him his middle finger, but went about getting the drinks.

Freddie turned back to her. “Can I get another one of those cigarettes, miss?"

She offered the pack. “Only if you can tell me what the fuck that voice was all about."

He took one and puffed for a moment. “It was twenty years before I figured it out. I had a friend, he was in ‘Nam with me later, after the time I was telling you about. He got too much Agent Orange, or whatever other shit they were pumping down on us when we were black-Cadillacing it through the jungle with our shirts off. He got cancer of the throat. You ever hear anyone with cancer of the throat, just before they put that thing in?"

“Tracheotomy?” she asked.

“Yeah, tracheotomy. Well, he's waitin’ for one of those when they realize it ain't gonna do no good, and he's got this shit crawlin’ all the way through him. I was there when he died, in a shitty Vet hospital in Arkansas. The last words he spoke, just as he died. That's the closest thing I ever heard to that voice."

“You think he's Death?"

Freddie shook his head. “No, death ain't always cruel; sometimes it's welcome. Like old Frank, he was waiting for death, and he wasn't sad when it came. Like I said, that was the closest I've heard, but it wasn't exactly it. His voice was mocking me. You ever heard a man's dying words?"

She nodded, thinking of the kid (man, dammit; he was old enough to want to rape her) she'd watched Johnny kill, lying there, bleeding to death on a sidewalk, still cursing her as he died. She took a cigarette herself. “He stood there, his coat flapping around him, his face melting and coming back, and in that fucking voice he told me he had a deal for me. Told me about this river outside that looks as if it's about to wash this shit-hole away. He stood there in my own bedroom like some goddamn rapist and told me if I could catch him before he got to the end of the river, we could ... talk. If not, bye-bye Johnny."

“You left the next morning?” he asked gently.

She lit her cigarette. “You'd have thought so, wouldn't you?"

Freddie shrugged. “Not really. A sensible person would put it down to a nightmare, shrug it off, feel strange about it all day, but carry on trying to do normal things. Then when that person had the same dream the next night, they'd wonder how it could happen. Then they'd brood on it more; wish they could talk to someone about it, but think what was the chance of findin’ a head doctor out in the jungle. Then they'd let it slip in front of the rest of the unit and find everyone else there'd had the same dream, both nights...."

Susan looked at him, and tears of gratitude started to well in her eyes. “Really?” she asked. “That's what happened?"

“That's the way it was. Honey, I wouldn't blame you if you hadn't started out on such a crazy road trip for a week. I wouldn't have if it hadn't been for the others. You were on your own."

“It was three days before I set out,” she said flatly. “I can't get those three days back, though, can I? He has three days on me. He's on foot, I'm in a car. But what does that mean if the guy can appear in a bedroom, in a prison cell ... shit, in the jungle. How fast can he go? And what good is the car, when I have to keep getting out every couple of miles to check the river?” Freddie said nothing. Susan lit another cigarette before carrying on. “I keep calling the hospital, and they tell me no change. They say I can go see him, and I know they wonder why I'm not there."

“Nothing you can do there; maybe you can here."

Merle brought the new round of drinks, put them down heavily on the table and left without a word.

Freddie looked at her kindly. “How long's it been, Susan? How long you been on the road?"

“Seven days. Only a week but it seems longer. It's slow going. Half the time there aren't even proper roads. I keep thinking, Should I go for the main ones and make better time? Then I think, What if I miss him?"

Freddie shook his head. “No, I think you're doin’ the right thing stickin’ to the river. You got to."

“But it's slow!"

“How many hours a night you drivin'?"

“All of them.” She took a drink from the bottle in front of her, knowing she shouldn't if she was to get through the night, but unable to resist talking to someone who understood. “So, what did you do when you all found out you weren't dreaming?” she asked.

“I don't know that we weren't dreamin'. I don't know that it makes any difference. We all knew we could do somethin’ about it. If we could catch that bastard somewhere before he got to the end of the river, we could maybe save Larry. He'd saved us."

“You caught him?” she asked, and there was desperation in her voice, hoping for a hint.

“I never seen a bunch of men work harder,” he said. “I was so proud of my boys over those next few days. We marched triple time, barely rested, walked through the nights."

“You think that's the best time to catch him?"

He nodded. “Honey, I think that's the only time he comes out.

“We made a five-day hump in three nights. By the time we got to the end, we were almost dead on our feet, bloodied beyond belief."

“You ... you got to the end?” she asked nervously.

He looked at her and smiled, and it was the saddest smile she had ever seen.

“We got to the end, and we never saw that bastard once. We walked on a couple of days, to the base. We'd been there but ten minutes when the infirmary called me in and said Larry had died.

“You didn't want to hear that, did you? So, now tell me what you going to do when you reach the end? Ain't far now, another couple of days—or nights—and you'll get there."

“I'm going to find him. I'm not thinking beyond that. I figure I'm just a few miles behind him. I'll get him. Maybe not tonight, but tomorrow, or the next night for sure."

“I hope you're right. What if you do catch up to him?"

She thought of the gun in the trunk of the car and wondered if it would do any good. She doubted it. “It's funny, isn't it? I spend all this time in the car thinking about that, playing out the scenarios. I always see me getting Johnny back. I just haven't figured out the how part yet."

“I don't think it's the sort of thing you can plan for. What makes you check out little shit pokes like this place?"

“See if anyone's seen him on the river...."

“Is that the only reason?” Freddie asked, and she answered honestly, not concerned about how it might sound.

“I sometimes think I might just see him standing at the bar.... I don't know why. I just think he'd like the idea of being in places where bad things could happen. Some drunk beatin’ his buddy over the head with a bottle. Maybe that lantern of his can carry more than one...."

He nodded in agreement. “Things are tough around these parts—when things are tough, good people do crazy things. I always thought, if I hadn't been reassigned South straight after that, if I'd gone into some side-street brothel I'd have found him buying drinks, looking around at desperate men and women. All the time thinkin', ‘I'm gonna get you soon....’ He's dirty like that, I think."

“Why does he do it?” she asked.

“Dunno. Maybe it's when Hell doesn't want you, and Heaven is full. Maybe it's when a good man does a bad thing. Do you think there is such a thing?"

She thought of Johnny. “Yeah."

“I think he likes the game. Likes the suffering....” He paused. “You asked me earlier if he was death."

“You said no."

He nodded. “I think he's the one that gets the in-betweens. Does that make sense?"

“No,” she lied, thinking of the look on Johnny's face as he had hit that kid (man?) again. One time too many. One time when he must have known he was no longer a threat. He'd done it to protect her; she'd never doubted that. But in the darkest reaches of night, she'd sometimes thought he'd been almost glad it had happened, so that he could kill this man. Some party in his own head he'd brought back from the war, she thought, remembering Freddie's earlier words.

“The ones that death, or whoever, just doesn't know what to do with, whether to send them up or down."

“Your friend saved your lives. He was a hero."

He nodded. “And he killed a little girl he could have let live. But you're right. He did a good thing and a bad thing. The question was, who cared?"

She looked at him, confused. “You cared, you and all the men in your troop."

“And you care for your man?"

“I love him,” she said, and when that didn't seem enough, she added, “More than you could know."

He nodded again. “So, maybe that's the answer."

“What is?” she asked, but she was already getting it.

“A man who's basically good. A man who has done a good thing, but with just too much badness. Someone who didn't stop when they could have. And someone who loves that person. There's the fun for that freak bastard.” He sighed. “Sometimes, you know, sometimes I think we went too fast."

“What do you mean?"

“I'll ask the question again, because it's important. What you gonna do at the end of the river when you ain't found him, what then?"

“I don't even think about that. I will find him."

“Uh-huh, that's what we thought when we trekked triple time through the jungle. Never did, though."

“Why you sayin’ this?"

“Because, in these many years since, I keep thinkin’ the same thing. Why did we give up when we got to the end?"

“Because you hadn't seen him. He'd beaten you. You weren't fast enough."

“Probably you're right. But what I keep thinkin’ is, what if he didn't?"

“You mean ... ?"

“You ever look back down the road when you're drivin’ at night? You ever check that cracked rear-view?"

“I ...."

“We didn't."

She looked at him long and hard. She smoked a whole cigarette, he did too, and neither of them said a word. A fever of ideas beat in her mind like a drum. As she stubbed the cigarette out, she cursed. “I haven't got time to think about what-ifs. I've got to go."

“I could come."

She didn't even answer that, just grabbed the half-smoked pack and crammed it into her bag. Getting up, she turned to him. “Why do they call you crazy, anyway?"

He shrugged, shuffling to the side of the booth, leaning to the one next door and retrieving his wheelchair. “Search me, baby. Burn a few things down, kill a few animals, mummify your mother, and people just overreact so much ‘round these parts...."

She nodded, and a smile stole across her face. “Or sit in a bar waiting for travellers in distress."

He nodded. “Who never take my advice anyway. I guess I must be crazy."

“There've been others?"

“Just two, in twenty years or so. First fella went racing along the highway in his fast sports car, got to the end, then sat, and waited. Still waitin’ there when his wife died, I think. Too tricky to say where a river really ends. You got to stop him before he gets there."

“And the second one?"

“She got to the end too. Didn't see nothin'. I read she jumped off the old bridge there. Made news, her dying like that. Her husband slipping away the very next day after being in a coma for three weeks. She was half-crazy by the time I saw her, though. Wouldn't listen. She was on speed so she could keep drivin’ all night."

“Goodbye, Freddie.” She shook his hand. “Nice meetin’ you."

“...but you wish you'd never had to. If you do see him, kill the sonofabitch for me, and come tell me about it someday."

She turned and walked out, not slowing as she tossed the bills on the bar.

Outside, she took a large canister from the trunk and fed the car some water. She thought the head gasket had a minor crack that was going to grow into a big headache by the morning. She'd gotten lazy with the car maintenance since Johnny had started doing it. When the car had drunk all it wanted, she replaced the cap and climbed inside. She looked at the sky, black and bruised.

She turned the key, and the car started second time—best it had managed in a week. She thought for a moment and then was out of the car, running into the bar, shouting across the room, “Hey, old man, you want a ride?"

He was in his wheelchair now and pushed himself forward. “Which way you goin'?"

She looked at him a moment. “You're navigating."

Copyright © 2001 Simon Bewick

Simon Bewick lives in Oxfordshire, England. He has had stories published in Strange Horizons, Blue Murder, Quantum Muse, and Digital Catapult, among others. He's an e-mail fiend and welcomes any comments you might have. Simon's previous publication in Strange Horizons was “Special Edition."

First in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.

The principal products of Bellur are: tensor equations; scarlet parrots; censorship; critiques of all sorts; and fine hats of pressed, dark-green moss. Its citizens are proud and haughty; they take Bellur gravely.

The Censors’ Building is in an olive grove gone wild (olive oil is no longer among the principal products of Bellur), and during their afternoon break and their evening break the censors wander the groves, picking and nibbling on the bitter olives, searching for inspiration. Censorship in Bellur is an art, it is the Queen of the Arts. Other cities celebrate their poets or sculptors, offer the world their playwrights and clowns; Bellur, its censors. The censors of Bellur can censor the twentieth part of the thickness of one serif of the letter h in 10-point Garamond type, and alter the meaning of a poem entirely; they can censor four thousand pages of a four thousand and fifty page novel, and leave its meaning intact. But this is not the extent of their art; these are mere parlor tricks, mere editorishness. Censorship is a dance with history; by censoring the right word at the right historical moment, the gifted censor can unleash or throttle a revolution.

In the olive grove one tree stands alone, dedicated to the greatest of censors, Albigromious, who came to the Queen of the Arts late in life, after distinguished careers in mathematics and parrot-farming. In his tenure as Grand Censor, he omitted not a line, not a word, not a letter, not a speck of ink from any of the manuscripts that crossed his simple olivewood desk; yet every poet and clown who visited his office went away chastened and subdued, and many an artist grew terrified and burst into tears at the time of his review, even if she was safe in a far distant city. The censors say of Albigromious that in the heyday of his genius not only the artists, but the common people as well, learned to censor themselves.

Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and baby daughter, where in addition to scribbling fiction and poetry, he programs in Java (well) and plays rugby (not very well). He attended the Clarion West Writer's Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writer Online. His previous appearance in Strange Horizons was “A Gardener Betrayed by Roses.” For more about him, see his Web site.

The first time she walked down our street, pots jumped off stoves, coal leapt from scuttles, wood went rat-a-tat-tatting down hallways. In our yard, a broom and spade got up and lurched around like drunks, trying to decide which way she'd gone.

I caught my first glimpse of her from the window, and that was enough for me. “I'll be back soon,” I told Mother, and slipped out the door before the questions could start. It was all I could do to stop the door coming with me, and the street looked like a parade had passed through: everything from Mrs. Ormond's wrought-iron railing to Connor O'Brien's henhouse had torn free of its moorings and sashayed down the street after her. Lacking much in the way of legs, the henhouse hadn't got far, but there were frightened hens clucking about and eggs lying hither and yon.

I left Mr. O'Brien to sort them out and followed Mrs. Ormond and her railing. She was cursing it a blue streak and telling it to get the hell back to where it came from, but it wasn't paying any attention. It clumped down the road on its six metal legs, making a fair speed and leaving her in its wake. Damn, I thought, damn, I'm going to have to stop and help her. Why didn't she fix the damn thing securely in the ground?

I ran after the railing and caught it with one hand as it was turning into Fenton Avenue—and Fenton Avenue was so full of writhing inanimate objects I was happy the railing was there to delay me. “Come here, you,” I said, and concentrated on it as best I could. Gradually, the railing's struggles eased to a few hopeful twitches. I could barely keep it upright, and I was glad when Mrs. Ormond's strong hands came to join mine.

“Thanks, Pat, you're a pal. Help me get this back home, and there's sure to be some cookies and a drink at the end of it."

I wanted to remind her I wasn't eight any more, but there was no changing some people. “Give them to Ma for me, would you? I was headed the other way."

She shook her head. “If you take my advice, you'll go home and stay there—but there's no chance of that, I suppose."

“None at all,” I told her.

By the time we had wrestled the railing back to Mrs. Ormond's yard, it had given up its dreams of freedom, and it lay down meekly at the foot of Mrs. Ormond's steps. “Now would you care to fetch Carl Dooley for me, Pat?"

I was already backing away up the street. “I think you'll find Carl's got his hands full today,” I told her. “Almond cookies! I'll be back for them!"

Fenton Avenue was full of irate householders, Harvest Lane likewise, and why in the name of the Lord had she chosen to walk through the market? Fruit and vegetables still counted as alive, but empty crates and wooden trestles evidently didn't, where she was concerned. There was real anger here, and calls for vengeance. I began to think Mrs. Ormond might have a point, but I hadn't come this far to give up now. I dodged a box, parried a table, and went on.

It was like walking into a fog. One moment, bustle, cries of alarm, the whicker of wood flying end-over-end; the next, only my footfalls broke the silence.

Then I saw her. The police had encircled her, and all I could see was a glimpse of her tousled hair. Half of them were facing her, half facing outwards, frowns of concentration on their brows. What the police lack in power, they make up for in determination, and nothing was moving on this section of the street that didn't have legs and a legitimate reason.

The legs they could see, and I was working on the legitimate reason as I walked towards her, no more able to resist than the wrought-iron railing.

Next to a police station is the best location in town, and the shops here sold stuff we'd never be able to afford, and dared to keep it behind glass. I veered away from the cops and pretended to look at some furniture while watching the reflected scene behind me. One of the cops was giving me a mighty fierce glare—that, or he was simply trying to stop the glass from breaking.

They were trying to persuade her to come to the station, and she begged to disagree. One of the cops lost patience and grabbed her arm. I saw his wooden baton waggle its way free from his belt, float up beside him, and tap him smartly on the head.

That did it. The outward-facing cops turned inwards, and in a moment the street came to life. I ducked and rolled as a shower of glass exploded above my head and a procession of heavy chairs, ornate tables, and long couches made for sinning waddled onto the roadway. The cops and their quarry were moving in a tight little group towards the doors of the police station, currently the only safe place in the neighborhood. I ran towards them, ducked between two blue-clad bodies, and found myself face to face with her.

“You! Out of here!"

“Sorry, sir, I was passing, the street went nuts, nearly lost my head, safest place I could find..."

“He was looking in that window just before it blew out!"

“Another one, eh?” An arm descended on my shoulders, and I was hauled inside the building with her. The doors shut behind us and the din ended.

“I'm Patrick,” I said. “Pleased to meet you."

“No talking, you!"

So I just grinned. She stopped looking worried long enough to grin back.

How can I tell you how lovely she looked at that moment? She was a head shorter than me, blonde-haired—a rare sight indeed in this town—disheveled, careworn. I wanted to wrap her in my warmest coat and take her home for soup and Mrs. Ormond's almond cookies.

That didn't appear likely any time soon. We were put in separate but adjoining cells, locked, guarded, inert. When I tried to talk to the guard, he snarled, “Shut up!” For the first time, I felt afraid. “We'll be out of here soon,” I told her.

“I hope so,” she said. Then she burst into tears.

I reached through the bars to pat her on the shoulder, but the guard growled, “Stop that, you!” I took a hasty step backwards and waited for the tears to stop. In a way, I was pleased she was crying, because it meant I could afford a few sniffles myself.

When she'd calmed a little, she looked at me and said, “Sorry."

“No need. I'm scared too."

“I dragged you into all this..."

“No you didn't! My mother always said curiosity would be the death of me. I had to find out what was causing such an uproar in our street."

She looked even gloomier. “Did I cause a lot of damage?"

“Anything that was damaged should have been tied down better,” I said gallantly. “But couldn't you have made your way through town a bit more quietly?"

“I was trying to! I come from the country, and I'm not used to great cities like this. I was all right till I started looking around and thinking how grand everything was—"

Grand? Our neighborhood?

“—and then I noticed things following me, and I got scared and ran, and that made it worse."

“And the policeman's baton?"

“They had no cause treating me as a criminal!” The bars of her cage flexed a little.

“Enough talking!” barked the guard.

“How long are you going to hold us here?” I countered. “We have rights, you know."

“A professor from the College is coming for her. I don't know about you."

“Can I get a message to my mother, then? She'll be worried sick."

“Should have thought of that earlier."

“I know I'm allowed one message."

Pad and pen produced from pocket. “Here. Fifty words maximum."

I was on my third sheet of paper, still trying to phrase things the right way, when a bustle of officialdom arrived. The man at its center addressed my beloved severely.

“Miss Quigley, I have had to make some very detailed explanations to arrange your release. Substantial reparations have been demanded. In this instance, the value of your unique capacities to our research program has persuaded the Chancellor to pay them in full. Any repetition of this incident will not be tolerated. Captain, if you would be so kind?"

A flourish of keys. She whispered, “Good luck!” as they led her away.

“Hey, what about me?” I called. “I'm the innocent victim of forces I don't understand!"

College focused on me for a moment. “Then study, young man. You must take responsibility for your own destiny."

The Captain was holding the door open for him. They had forgotten me before it closed.

Crumple sheet three, start sheet four. “Dear Mother, I know this will come as a shock to you..."

They didn't believe me at first. When I started to bring home books, they said I'd never read them. When they found me asleep over Mundine's Principles, they woke me and said it was time to cut the firewood—not a job for the absent-minded. When I passed the preliminary entrance test, there might have been a brief mutter of congratulations, but then they went back to the big news of the day: Mrs. Ormond and Carl Dooley were to be married, and the late Mr. Ormond not yet a year in his grave! “There was a power of ironmongery in that house even while Mr. Ormond still drew breath,” said Mother darkly, but my sisters were already picking out their dresses.

When I told them I would be sitting the final entrance test in four weeks’ time, and asked to be relieved of household duties till then, my father took me aside for a talking. The last time that happened, I had been ten, scared and sullen, locked in the storeroom of the greengrocer for filching his oranges. The fear of my father's belt had hung over the whole encounter, though he never used it.

Well, I was eighteen now, too big and too fast to be hit, whatever my mother might say. He took me through to the parlor, reserved for receiving the priest, the landlord, and our Savior should he chance to drop by. Lately, I'd been using it as a quiet place to study.

“Your mother had you marked out for the priesthood,” he began, “and now you do this to us."

It was feeble, and he knew it. “The Lord has other plans for me,” I said.

“Why engineering, then? Nothing good ever came of it."

“It was a noble profession once, Father. I want to make it noble again."

“Noble, is it? Then how do you explain that terrible business with the nave of St Dominic's, or those hare-brained gas lamps, or that Mr. Deutschendorf and his ‘suspension bridge'? And he was a Professor at this very college you insist on attending!"

“Ah, but that's the point, Father. Those projects failed because they were designed for yesterday's conditions. When you were a boy, did things move around as much as they do now?"

“No,” he allowed, “they generally stayed where they were."

“Exactly! And that's because there weren't so many of us then, and we lived in villages, not in cities. As long as they didn't come under focused attack, even flimsy structures were perfectly safe. But now there's so many of us that any concentration of thoughts can send iron and stone and even wood breaking free and wandering away.” That Miss Quigley could do all this and more on her own, I kept to myself.

“Meaning I have to pay good money to you and your sisters to think our house into shape."

I privately disputed his definition of “good money,” but now wasn't the time to argue the point. He was rising to my lure.

“That's right. So what are we going to do? Go back to living in thatch and wattle?” He made a face at that.

“This is the old way, Dad"—I held up Mundine's Principles—"and this is the new way"—Lyman and Parker's Engineering in the Age of Uncertainty. “I want to make the new way work."

“And how much do you suppose I'll have to pay for all this?"

“Not much at all!” I answered gaily. And then we got down to business.

I passed the final entrance test with a mark or two to spare, and between Father and Mother and Auntie Eileen who'd always doted on me, my family came up with the money for the first year. “You'll have to engineer yourself a job after that,” they said.

Inside those imposing walls, the College was unimpressive: a warren of low, flat, narrow-windowed buildings. “It doesn't pay to build high around students,” I was told.

The first term was torture, a crash course in mathematics and physics and chemistry. Did I really need to know the melting point of sulfur or the value of the Dietrich coefficient? Well, the latter was used in the calculation of animate field flux in inorganic materials, so I guess I did at that.

In between my studies, my duties at home, and my occasional opportunities to escape for a pint and a chat with my fellow students, I tried to find Miss Quigley, which was still the only name I knew her by. She looked no older than me, so I expected to find her somewhere among the first-year classes, but nobody knew anything of her. I glimpsed a couple of women with blonde hair, but both were Saxon exchange students who didn't spare me a second glance.

It was a week before the end of term, and I was struggling with Professor Carr's theories about magnetism, when I saw her: just a glimpse, hurrying out of one building and into another, with a couple of burly men by her side. I followed, and was met at the door by one of the men, who pointed to the sign that said NO ADMITTANCE.

“That girl went in,” I said.

“EXCEPT ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS,” he added.

There was plainly no budging him. An exhaustive study of the timetable showed there were no teaching rooms in that building, yet neither was it listed as a research facility. All the windows were locked, all the doors boarded over.

So what about the building she had come from? That was a bit more promising: it contained dormitories for women from country areas and foreign parts who were attending the College. I knew a man who boasted considerable knowledge of such women.

Dan Travis was as thin as a rake and acted like one. He claimed to be a magnet to the ladies, and if even half his stories were true, he was right. There had to be some explanation for how a man could eat so much and stay so thin. I bought him lunch and got him talking about the charms of girls from Saxony.

“By then I knew she wanted it, so I slipped my hand...” Yes, yes, Dan. Spare me the detailed description and concentrate on the interesting bit: how you got into her room.

Oh. You didn't make it back to her room. There was an alleyway. How romantic.

But Dan wasn't done with this flaxen-haired goddess, and eventually his urges drove him to test the fearsome security of the women's dorms.

“And do you know, I just walked right in? And there she was, waiting for me, with her legs—"

“You just walked right in?"

“That's right! These are big girls, after all"—I leered on cue—"and what they do after hours is their business."

Let me make it clear at once that what happened next wasn't my fault. I was shaking like Mrs. Ormond's railing at the prospect of actually going in there and looking for Miss Quigley, and even worse, talking to her if I found her, so I spent a couple of hours in the pub watching my classmates play silly games with the tables. By the time I lurched to my feet, squared my shoulders, and set off, I had thrown a skinful of bravado over the black pit of anxiety.

As Dan said, getting into the dormitory involved nothing more than knocking on the door. I was taken straight to her room, but she wasn't there. Margrethe, one of her roommates, was. “With a boyfriend no doubt Kate is outing,” she told me. God forbid Margrethe was any acquaintance of Dan's, for she looked me up and down and said I was a fine-looking fellow, and why didn't I tell her all my troublings? Which I did.

Now dormitory wasn't really the word. The women slept four to a room, but they had an arrangement that ensured a gentleman caller could be entertained in private. And I was here to see Kate—a much sweeter sound than Miss Quigley—but she was out with her boyfriend, damn him for all eternity, and Margrethe was friendly, and warm, and sitting on her bed with her arm brushing mine.

And I found that when I leaned over and kissed her she put her arms around me, and we sank back on the bed, and her flesh was like cream, cool and deep. I came in seconds, then I came in minutes, then we both came in what felt like hours.

“Roommates coming back to roomen will,” she told me in her endearingly mangled English. I kissed her deeply, found something to wipe myself, pulled on my clothes—God, did I need a shower—kissed her again, and stumbled towards the door.

To be met by Kate Quigley, coming the other way, with no sign of the alleged boyfriend. She raised an eyebrow, smiled, and said, “I see you've met Margrethe."

“I—er—” I said, and fled down the hallway, pursued by the faint sound of laughter. I had a good idea what they were laughing about. It comes of having sisters.

Until I had my brain wave, my three years of study were a time of disillusionment. When I walked through the College gates for the first time, I had two great desires: to find Kate, and to find a way to build the great, airy structures I saw in my mind's eye. I found Kate, or rather she found me; that was my fortune and misfortune both. And my years of study had put paid to those idle dreams of construction.

Why are our cities built of wood, not stone? Because stone, never having been alive, has no resistance to the press of our thoughts, and one stone jogged out of place can cause a whole building to come tumbling down. Build in stone, and you need to employ a small army just to think your building firmly in place. Build in wood, and as long as you're not subjected to a concerted attack, or some freak of nature walking by, you will probably be all right. And yet our winters are cold, and the fire bell peals like the crack of doom across our cities.

There are other things too, iron and that sludgy stuff they call concrete, and all of them equally vulnerable. Did you know that an optimistic son of the Rhineland has invented an engine that burns oil and can power a carriage without need of horses? Imagine what our cities would be like if they didn't stink of horse shit! We would go zipping about the place in Herr Kessler's invention, smelling the sweet clean air. But all it takes is one stray thought, and the whole complicated contraption falls apart, and the oil leaks out and collects in a little puddle on the ground. And the same goes for Mr. Magill and his electric light, and the unfortunate Mr. Stephens and his speaking device. (Unfortunate for me, too—I could have used it to call my lovely Margrethe in Saxony and ask how she and her Baron were getting along. It had broken my heart to see her go, and other parts of me were just as downcast.)

So we knew what we needed: something with the strength of iron but the stability of living wood. I thought of the answer five minutes from the end of Professor Sullivan's 9 a.m. lecture.

I was lucky to be there at all. At 1 a.m., I'd been stumbling home after a hard night's drinking at the Flying Jug. My feet got confused as I walked beside the pond, and before I knew it I was covered in pond scum and fending off the attentions of a duck. I got up early to avoid explaining the state of my clothing to Mother. In any case, I tried hard not to miss Professor Sullivan's lectures. She was always genuinely interested in what her students had to say, and I was always genuinely interested in talking.

Today's lecture topic was energy barriers to chemical reactions. As far as I'm concerned, chemistry is physics minus the excitement, and I listened with less than my usual attention.

“I can see by the glazed looks on your faces you've all been finding this deeply absorbing,” she announced with a few minutes to go, “so instead I'll bore you with some of my current research. Professor Koch and I are about to announce in Chemical Review Letters that we've invented a new field of chemistry."

“Do we need a new field of chemistry?” I called out.

She assumed a severe expression and said, “Even you might find this interesting, Mr. McCreedy. I recall you telling us about Herr Kessler and his carriage that burns oil. That never amounted to much, but we've discovered that oil has other properties of great interest.” She explained how she and Professor Koch had derived carbon compounds from oil and used them to make light, flexible materials with considerable resistance to directed thought. “They'd be perfect for cups and plates, and even chairs and tables,” she went on, “but they're not strong enough to build with. We're working on a way to make the stuff into fibers and cables, but we need to increase its resistance to thought as well."

“I've got an idea,” I told Professor Sullivan as we left the lecture room. “Have you got five minutes?"

Fifteen minutes later, I had been added to her research team. Almost a year after that, we were ready to put my brain wave to the test.

A team of us gathered round a thin coil of material. On the outside was a kind of hardened, transparent resin, and on the inside was a thin filament of carbon (made by controlled pyrolysis of cellulose in an inert atmosphere, if you really want to know). One fiber couldn't take much load, but put a bundle of them together and you had something much lighter and far stronger than iron, ready to build bridges, and vessels, and cables. But, of course, little more immune to the College's Chief Materials Tester than a freestanding iron railing or an incautious policeman's baton. Which is where my idea came in: between the resin and the carbon was a thin film of water, and in that water thrived microscopic pond scum, which in its mindless aliveness would, so we hoped, turn away the most destructive of thoughts.

The Chief Materials Tester walked in. I didn't think she would hold anything back in the testing. Kate and I had exchanged polite conversation once or twice while I'd been waiting for Margrethe. Since Margrethe had departed for her ancestral halls, clutching her degree with one hand and giving me a final squeeze with the other, Kate and I had not exchanged a word.

“Straighten the coil out, please,” she said, and we did. She and her assistant attached instruments, one at each end, one in the middle, and then she stood back a few paces, frowned in concentration, and looked at our handiwork.

Looked at it hard. I could see the lines of strain on her face. It mirrored my face as I looked at her. Time stretched taut in the room.

And nothing happened. The fiber didn't budge, the needles didn't move. There was a poker in the grate. Kate turned her gaze on it, and it leapt from its place and flew up the chimney. For all I know, it's still climbing. Then she relaxed, stepped back, and said, “You win."

Big grins, slaps on the back, time to bundle up the material—we call it carbon fiber—and take it back to the lab. Professor Sullivan was talking to me about further work we needed to do—manufacturing techniques, the micro-pumping problem—but I excused myself and asked Kate if she would have dinner with me that night. She said she would.

Kate had moved out of the dormitory and was now boarding privately, and there was a suspicious old biddy standing behind her as she opened the door. “Mind you don't stay out too late, now—I've seen his type before!” the old biddy cautioned. Maybe she had once been as beautiful as Kate.

Dinner was undoubtedly delicious, but it might have been boiled cardboard for all the attention I paid to it. I was too busy watching Kate. She was wearing something dark and flowing which set off her hair and her beautiful soft skin, and just before her dress got in the way there was a hint of the cleft between her breasts. I wanted so much to slip my finger in there and start undoing the buttons, but I didn't have the nerve. There was coffee, conversation, and dessert—she could pack the food away for such a slim thing, which my mother says is always a good sign. I excused myself to go to the toilet, and while I was sitting there I made up my mind. “Would you like to come home with me?” I whispered as we stood together outside the restaurant door.

And she thought it over, and said yes, she would like that very much. Our first night was glorious, and our wedding night better still. Each morning we walk to the College together, and each evening we walk back to the room we share in my parents’ house. I love my parents, but it's time Kate and I found a place of our own. There's times she and I set the whole house to shaking.

Copyright © 2001 Tim Jones

Tim Jones lives in Wellington, New Zealand. He divides his time between writing, being a husband and father, and maintaining Web sites. His short fiction and poetry has been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Australia, and Canada. His first fiction collection, Extreme Weather Events, has just been published. For more about him and his work, see his Web site.

The spotlight this month is on the filk group Urban Tapestry. Based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, this versatile trio has guested as far away as Digeri-Douze in the UK, and Consonance in Santa Clara, California! Their music ranges from the serious to the sublime, with a bit of silliness thrown in for good measure. They won the 1997 Pegasus Award for best performer, and are currently in the planning stages for their third recording.

Peggi Warner-Lalonde: So what exactly is Urban Tapestry?

Allison Durno: Urban Tapestry is a filk trio consisting of Jodi Krangle, Debbie Ridpath Ohi and Allison Durno. Our music is acoustic-based and mainly performed at science fiction and fantasy conventions. We have also performed at weddings and at children's concerts at local libraries.

Jodi Krangle: I probably couldn't add much to that—except to say that we're constantly expanding our music repertoire and challenging ourselves to come up with different ways of arranging our songs. Debbie, in particular, has amazed both Allison and I by not only starting to play the guitar, but also by adding third harmonies, lending a much-appreciated extra depth to our vocal arrangements.

Debbie Ridpath Ohi: I feel compelled to mention that we have two albums out (one available as an independently produced tape, another available in tape and CD format from Dodeka Records. Both can be ordered from Dodeka or other filk dealer, or our Web site.

Those who aren't familiar with the term “filk", by the way, might want to refer to some definitions.

PWL: How did you get together in the first place?

AD: Debbie and I met through music gatherings at local Toronto science fiction conventions. She played flute and piano and I played guitar and we began to collaborate casually together. We met Jodi through a mutual friend and the three of us started experimenting further with song-writing and vocal harmony. Shortly after that we recorded a tape together called “Castles and Skyscrapers” and began to perform together at science fiction conventions.

JK: ... it was a gaming friend that introduced me to Allison and Debbie. (Prior to 1993, I'd never heard of conventions.) Participating in filk was a real eye-opener for me, but there was an almost instant musical connection between Debbie, Allison and myself. My own musical projects had never had so much creative songwriting and vocal harmonies and I'd never been in a group where a flute was one of the major influences. Previous to my getting together with Allison and Debbie, I'd been making music that was fairly techno, in a group called “Group of 77” where my partner used a synth to create the backing tracks. While I enjoyed that, it was definitely a true joy to discover and experiment with the more acoustic end of things. I think that's where my heart truly lies.

DRO: I met Allison through SF conventions.... I remember noticing a red-headed guitarist with a gorgeous alto voice, and would sit in filk circles hoping against hope that she would show up. I finally got tired of passively waiting and started nagging her to sing (she was a bit shy back then) more aggressively. Instead of running screaming from an avid fan, Allison was pretty friendly, and we hit it off pretty well. Same chemistry happened when we both met Jodi. Our weekly get-togethers are often more social than strictly music practice, I have to confess. Mainly because we're friends as well as music partners.

PWL: How would you describe your work?

AD: Urban Tapestry performs filk music, which is generally described as songs written on themes that appeal to fans of science fiction and fantasy. Our songs cover the silly and the serious in styles from ballads to jazz to rock, and our arrangements include vocal harmonies, guitar, flute and percussion.

JK: Oh. And schtick. You can't forget the schtick. (On the funny songs, anyway.) Debbie is a fantastic cartoonist, which helps us a lot with the schtick end of things.

DRO: I agree ... our music is a real grab-bag, a result of all of us having different musical tastes. Originally, Allison tended be the folkie in the group, Jodi more mainstream, while I leaned toward silly humour. Our songwriting and musical tastes have evolved over the years, however, so it's not as simple now.

PWL: What drew you to filk in the first place?

AD: I have always loved science fiction and fantasy literature and media, as well as contemporary folk music. I was setting Tolkien poetry to music before I knew what filk music was. It was a perfect match for me to discover folk music with science fiction and fantasy themes and I was immediately drawn to the filk community once I found it.

JK: Allison and Debbie? <chuckle> Seriously though, it wasn't much of a stretch. I'd also loved science fiction and fantasy from an early age, watched whatever science fiction/fantasy shows the networks decided to toss our way.... I'd also been gaming (D&D, etc.) for a while. Finding filk was like coming home—melding my interests and my music together. It was (and still is) an amazing experience.

DRO: I love jamming with other musicians, so was immediately drawn to the collaborative, creative atmosphere of the filk community. Since then, however, many other aspects of filk appeal to me such as the friends we've made, and the accepting and supportive community in filking.

PWL: What are your goals for the group?

AD: Our goals are to continue to improve our talents as musicians and songwriters by experimenting and working on our music together. We will continue to sing and perform at conventions and other appropriate settings. We are honoured that we've been asked to guest at ConChord, the filk convention in LA on August 2-4 of next year. We are in the early planning stages of preparing a third recording together.

JK: Our goal is also to have a lot of fun. After over 8 years together, when you're still having fun, that's a not too shabby accomplishment.

DRO: Agreed! I think our goals are definitely a mixture of musical growth and experimentation as well as making sure we continue to have fun along the way.

Peggi Warner-Lalonde is Senior Music Editor for Strange Horizons.

Among the Cold Colonists
Is Deepfreeze Drinkfur

Even in permafrost's
ersatz my ship carries
still I feel watchful
out of your fleshscape
thrust of heartessence,
eating spacecold like
banked white dwarf!
Starlight avoids our
passage, that is
its duty to our needcall,
to drive out of any
sector we demand
room in, even from far off,
any filthy “natural”
presence of Before

And yet It taints you:
and me. As I grimly
inhale Galactolift,
drug for Longvoyage, still
in it I sense like dead kisses
behind your ice-plant
spattered skin is

furthrust

out of systems we
cleared long ago
of all such kin, still forth
looks, knifesharp, keen,
deep in your eyes the buried
clawwork, surfacing
cutting my balls to untidy
fiery tiger-cub's wool unravelling.
Coiled pain.

Freezesleeper's Reply

In this cryopalace night
the icedreams glacial reckonings
bergging into cometary scars
around the mainsequence gold
of your thermofield, your needcall
sensed like distant mechinations
auroral swirls in the
cranial north of my spacecold
sleep embrace me
as we skirt the lightyears’ lengths
of rifts and starstrands.

Will you be changed
when we stand upon alien bones
next planetfall, the new skies
yet again our own and
purified with our constellations?
The furnace wind of your lifebreath
rekindle the coal of heartessence?

In permafrost ersatz slumber the
blizzardsmear of your shape your
summerbreath rakes the sculpted
tundra of my aching flesh.

Copyright © 1994 Steve Sneyd and Gene van Troyer

Work by Steve Sneyd, who lives in Yorkshire, England, has appeared in over 1,000 magazines and anthologies worldwide, in 40 books/chapbooks, and on the Net, been broadcast, including BBC Radio 4's Stanza, and read at many SF and literary events. He has also many published articles and books about SF poetry. Steve has no Web site, but you can read an online interview with him here.

Gene van Troyer presently resides in Japan. He writes science fiction prose and poetry, with work published in Amazing Stories, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Vertex and other SF genre magazines, and is a past editor of Star*Line, the newsletter of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His translation from Japanese of Yano Tetsu's “The Legend of the Paper Spaceship” is the most reprinted Japanese science fiction story in the in the world.

They move in a slow wheel of devastation
dark sisters spinning with the grace of death
shawls of lost memories about their shoulders
and skirt hems dirtied with a dying sun's dust

If they summon you to dance
then dance you will
lost within their company
the madness of incomprehension unfurling
as they remain beyond your vision
no matter how hard you stare
no matter how close they sway

With such brazen elusiveness
they draw you close
with siren whispers
and untold heaviness
within their hearts
or eyes

It is a slow wheel that turns
but this vast family is reunited
embracing with simple resignation
never sadness or even joy
everything is silent
everything is cold

Here stands alone the grail of Adam's blood
reconcentrated peacefully
impatiently waiting to spill once more

Copyright © 2001 Lucy A. E. Ward

Lucy A. E. Ward is a poet residing in the Netherlands. She has been published in “Muse It” and has other works appearing soon in “Black October,” “Fables” and “The Cafe Irreal.” When not writing, she enjoys developing her Web site.

Demolish first the false dichotomy
of clotted darkness threatening moonlight.
That one is sane & holy in our sight,
the other neither, merely seems to be
(on close analysis) a privileged view
of questionable worth. This shadowed text
might shelter its fair share of terrors, true;
but who are you to say so? Might the next
dark angel's radically alternative
perspective not apply as well? Efface
hierarchical assumptions, & embrace
that arbitrary madness which still lives
between these penciled lines of dusk & dawn—
the last postmodern haunt of chaos-spawn.

Copyright © 2001 Ann K. Schwader

Ann K. Schwader lives and writes in Westminster, CO. She is an active member of SFWA, HWA, and SFPA. Several of her poems have received Honorable Mentions in Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and she is a multiple Rhysling Award nominee. Her first full-length collection has recently been published by Hive Press. Heidi previously reviewed L. Warren Douglas’ The Sacred Pool for Strange Horizons.

"The set of events from which it is not possible to escape."

—Stephen Hawking

In the dream when I boiled,
skinned and ate Schrödinger's kitten,
there was no uncertainty inside
the lidded aluminum kettle;
I knew when the kitten died,
a last look of reproach
as it was dropped into boiling water,
the once perky, pink-eared,
tiger-striped baby wantonly destroyed,
frozen in memory's event horizon,
black holes that were its eyes.
"This is my body you eat.”
It was as if I wanted to know what it took
to make something innocent die.

For I have seen black holes
in the eyes of abused children,
and wondered what star was lost
by starvation, beating or incest,
when the future collapsed upon them
creating the naked singularity
of innocence destroyed,
children trapped by past evil
forever still about to happen.
Pleasure, self-esteem, love, trust, time
and the bright space of childhood
crushed by the black maw inside,
the membrane of memory itself wormholed
in order to survive. I dream of them
reaching but never touching,
spun away by the churning silence.

Light years ago, you were energy,
dynamic radiation, dark force that drew me
across uncharted space
irrevocably as a star gazer's charm;
and you caught me, an event on your dream horizon
where in darkness I was compelled
to fall around you forever,
having touched your naked singularity
when I held you in my arms.

Copyright © 2001 Sandra J. Lindow

Sandra J. Lindow, officially past her 50th birthday, takes being an apprentice crone seriously. She has published four books of poetry including The Heroic Housewife Papers (1990) and A Celebration of Bones (1996). She works as a reading specialist in a treatment center for emotionally disturbed adolescents.

Looking for good speculative fiction? Whatever it is you like in a story, you'll most likely be able to find it in one of the many magazines residing on the Web. Some are upscale, graphics-loaded Web sites offering a variety of content, while others are tiny zines which publish only those submissions obtained free from contributors; the Net has it all. From Aphelion to Zalandra, the list of online speculative fiction magazines is almost endless. There is tremendous variation among these zines when comparing style, content, and even frequency and quality of publication.

Pegasus Online, for instance, sits towards the amateur end of the spectrum, though you wouldn't know it from the quality of the ideas in the pieces they publish, all of which are freely donated. Still, they currently can only manage to produce issues on a quarterly basis, and even with this much time to edit, style errors (typos, grammar slips, etc.) slip through fairly often. Furthermore, the site is supported by banner ads, which may annoy some readers. The content generally leans towards fantasy, leavened with a good bit of science fiction. The current issue, which happens to have more SF than fantasy, offers a nice variety of short stories. “Folly's Challenge,” written by Thomas Allen Cummins, a self-proclaimed newcomer to the field, is a strange bit of sword-and-sorcery fantasy. “First Snow” is a clever present-day SF story that appears at first glance to be about an eccentric survivalist. Patrick Whittaker's “Murder, Maim, Destroy” explores the hazardous future of interactive entertainment, while “The Galileo Probe,” by Larry Smith, is a fairly hard-SF style first contact story. In their newest addition to the zine, Pegasus Online now publishes serials—one segment of the manuscript is revealed each quarter. This issue features the first part of “In the Company of Thieves,” by JM Hauser, featuring a crotchety mage, a weatherbeaten dwarf and other such high fantasy staples, all mucking about in a decidedly low-fantasy environment.

If you want something a bit cleaner, try visiting Nuketown, and expect to be there a while. Nuketown seeks to “publish and promote heroic speculative fiction—with a pro-individual, pro-reason emphasis and on a professional basis—on the World Wide Web.” This is a semiprozine—the fiction is paid at a flat rate, rather than the per-word rates required by most professional organizations (such as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) to be considered pro. The zine has monthly issues, with smaller weekly updates, all managed by the folks at Green Tentacles, a Web design and marketing company devoted exclusively to serving the speculative fiction community. (Their site is worth a look, if only for the chuckle you'll get from their slogan.) They have included a number of unusual features, such as a hoax-debunking section to inform readers whether the latest scare-story circulating the Internet has any merit, and an entire department devoted to role-playing games. The zine has come a long way since it first came online in 1996, when visitors averaged around 100 per month. Now, Nuketown sees hits in the area of 10,000 per month—which is easy to understand after you've taken a look at their archives. As with amateur zines, Nuketown's fiction varies somewhat. The August 2001 issue includes “Pigalle,” an interesting, if overly tidy, exploration of telepathy and anti-scientific postmodern philosophy; and “The Ring,” a somewhat over-dramatic ghost story about racism. Nonetheless, their nonfiction sections are reliably interesting, and often entertaining.

For even more nonfiction pieces, you can turn to Science Fiction Weekly, which is hosted on SciFi.com, which is associated, in turn, with the popular Sci Fi Channel. SFW publishes an impressive collection of reviews, interviews, and news items, all anchored firmly in the SF genre. In one recent issue, you'll find an interview with writer Steven Brust; news blurbs on subjects ranging from the death of Poul Anderson to next season's TV lineup; and reviews of books and TV shows ranging from the popular to the obscure. For anyone wanting to keep up with science fiction events, a visit to Science Fiction Weekly is definitely a must. Of course, if you actually want to read science fiction, rather than reading about it, you can click over to SFW's neighbor, Sci Fiction. This is probably the best-funded online fiction venue around, and it shows. The presentation is slick, the quality is consistent, and the site boasts quite a few veteran authors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Bruce Sterling, and more than one appearance of Howard Waldrop. Also, they periodically reprint classic short stories or novellas—they're currently showcasing “Consider Her Ways,” by John Wyndham, a brilliant story about social behavior among ... well, read it and find out. Of course, being operated by the Sci Fi Channel, Sci Fiction tends to focus solely on science fiction, and usually relatively “mainstream” varieties of it at that.

Conversely, the not-so-well-known Planet Magazine covers both sci-fi and fantasy, with a few variations on both genres thrown in for variety's sake. Though Planet is another amateur zine, offering no pay to contributors, it has had impressive longevity—it was first published in 1994. Planet bills itself as “the free, award-winning, and groundbreaking electronic quarterly of short science fiction and fantasy by emerging writers and illustrators.” They are on a mission “to encourage authors and artists and to just have fun,” or so states the opening paragraph on their extensive Web site. The most recent issue (as of this writing—a new one will be published around the same time as this review) includes quite a variety of short stories and poetry. “Arcade,” by Peter Bergman, Jr., should provide some entertainment to gamers everywhere. Jeana Jorgensen's “Challenges Three” gives us a thorough rethinking of the traditional challenges of myths and fairy tales. “Martian Underground,” by David Edward Gault, mixes SF with both political intrigue and political commentary. The issue is rounded out with three more stories, and several poems, including “Volus Nocturnus,” by James Livingston, which takes the vitally important, but rather dry, concept of biodiversity and, through clever imagery, turns it into a touching and beautiful piece of wordsmithery. Each issue of Planet Magazine also features some astonishingly good cover art; in this issue it happens to be “Accelerator,” by Carl Goodman, which threatens to burst forth from your monitor, scattering charged particles hither and yon.

Though more popularly known as a print magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction hosts a Web site offering an agreeable selection of reading material, including several novellas and novelettes—much longer pieces than the short stories available at most sites. If you're interested in a nice long read, check out their site and surf through Lucius Shepard's “Radiant Green Star,” a story about the importance of history, or Greg Egan's “Oracle,” a fascinating theological meditation based on the lives of several historical figures. Also free to browse are the links for their monthly columns, featured stories, online chats, and various excerpts and informational links. If you want Asimov's in its entirety, though, you'll have to buy the print magazine.

Although a few zines have not been able to survive the financial beating the last year has doled out to them, and we've said goodbye to some good publications—Jackhammer E-zine being a notable example—there is still hope for quality works of speculative fiction on the Web. Sometimes you just have to look for it. Even if you can't find something you like, you can always write it yourself. As always, there are still many Strange Horizons to explore!

Janean Nusz is a freelance writer residing in the Midwest. Her nonfiction work has been seen in numerous publications, both online and in print. Look for her new fiction books online, coming soon to DiskUs Publishing, Pixel Press, and Writer's Exchange E-publishing. Or just stop by her Author's Art site to read an excerpt or two.

R Michael Harman is a reviews editor for Strange Horizons.

"When I was a child ... I remember once I found an old book, full of old pictures. Of couples. In the pictures, the women were all shorter than the men. It looked very funny, to have all the women in all the pictures midgets. I said something about it to the tutor for my study-group aide. He told me that hundreds of years ago, on Earth, everybody used to think that women were shorter than men, because all the men would only go around with women who were shorter than they were and all the women would only go around with men who were taller than they were."

—Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton

I've always been fascinated by this particular passage in Triton, a passage which often passes unremarked amongst the novel's more obviously spectacular efflorescences of speculation about human gender and sexuality. Most readers notice that Triton recognizes 40 or 50 different genders and nine sexualities, but how many of us fully and consistently imagine a world in which the women are as big as the men? It's an interesting question, not least for the further conjecture that Bron, the dysfunctional protagonist of the novel, suggests to his counsellor, Brian, following the sex change intended to make him into his own ideal woman. Bron muses, “I've always wondered if perhaps, back then, women really weren't smaller; perhaps there's been some sort of evolutionary change in humanity that's increased women's size."

Why the digression into Triton at the beginning of a review of Gwyneth Jones's Deconstructing the Starships, a first collection of critical writings by a highly acclaimed British SF writer? One of the essays in Jones’ splendid collection, the rather eccentrically, if aptly, titled “Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins,” just happens to provide a brilliantly off-handed suggestion for why gender is associated with size differentiation in primates and thus why Bron's speculation about evolution is so beautifully ironic.

Contemplating the scientific study of sex, a topic remarkably rarely addressed by science fiction writers, Jones turns to a collection of scientific essays from the Eleventh International Conference on Comparative Physiology. In this somewhat dry sounding volume, The Differences Between the Sexes, Jones finds a great deal of information, including an article on primates which reveals that skeletal analysis indicates that at one time “female proto-gorillas, humans, chimps may have been as hunky as the males” and that size differentiation by sex may thus not be ‘natural,’ but the evolutionary effect of sexual selection. This information brings what may have seemed to some readers of Triton a tendentiously ideological speculation about gender politics firmly back into the realm of hard science. While Jones doesnt make the connection to Triton herself, she does demonstrate how an SF writer might extrapolate from the scientific analysis of sex; in fact, she finishes this chapter by noting that “we dont have two complementary sexes any more, each safe in its own niche. All there is left is gender: an us and them situation.” It is the “us and them” of gender roles disconnected from biological sex that provides the basis for the aliens in Jones's White Queen and its sequels.

This leads me, of course, to the comment that the essays collected in Deconstructing the Starships prove Jones to be not only a pre-eminent feminist SF writer, a novelist of considerable grace, style and intellect, but also a quite remarkable feminist critic of her chosen genre. Jones is the author of eight SF novels, including the just released Bold as Love. Two of her novels, Divine Endurance and Flower Dust, form a series set in a far future Malaysia and Indonesia. The Aleutian trilogy, which consists of White Queen, North Wind, and Phoenix Café, are First Contact novels situated on a near future Earth whose misadventures with the alien invaders highlight the fact that issues of language, communications and gender can be just as seriously science fictional as problems of physics or feats of engineering.

Jones also writes horror novels for juveniles under the pseudonym Ann Halam. Her SF work has netted her the British Science Fiction Award, the Tiptree Award, and two World Fantasy Awards, as well as numerous nominations for the Hugo, the Nebula and the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The Tiptree nominations and the actual award (for White Queen, in 1991) are hardly surprising for a writer of intelligent, sophisticated, complex tales which find remarkably novel ways to address precisely those questions of gender that are the Tiptree's particular purview. Yet the other award nominations indicate that Jones’ work has a broader appeal to sf readers who would not necessarily identify their own reading interests as feminist.

Gender naturally plays a significant role in these essays, but it does so in the context of a coherent feminist analysis of science fiction as a genre, an analysis which inevitably also touches on such issues as the definition of the SF genre, the rise of cyberpunk, the relationship of SF and postmodernism, the problems of feminist writing that reifies and essentializes the female, and the nature of science itself. Even when a chapter focuses on a specific issue, such as the discussion of cyberpunk in “Trouble (Living in the Machine),” Jones's context remains the prevailing themes of genre, gender and science. Jones thus provides the reader throughout the book with a remarkably clear and succinct discussion of the generic characteristics of SF, a discussion which, particularly in the introduction, shows a lucid familiarity with the major literary and critical theorists of the twentieth century and yet does so almost entirely without recourse to academic prose and vocabulary. The “deconstruction” of the title is virtually the only exception ... and one that is neatly explained by Jones's comment that SF writers and readers habitually practice deconstruction, whether they know it or not:

The fictional text, radically reinterpreted, becomes a collection of signs, the study—or deconstruction—of which will produce an anatomy of the process of its production; the limits imposed by the ideological matrix which defines this process, and the transgressions by which these secret rules are revealed. The text thus becomes what science fiction always was—a means, not an end: an experiment that can be examined, taken apart, even cannibalised by ruthless commentators, rather than a seamless work of art.

This is a rather neat trick, explaining the apparently frightening terminology of postmodernism by pointing out that “every writer and reader [of SF] has to practice this modern art habitually, technically, intuitively” in the process of unravelling and comprehending the thought experiment that underlies the creation of any truly science fictional world. In the second essay, “Gettting Rid of Brand Names,"Jones ties her own insight into the deconstructive nature of the thought experiments that are the real science of science fiction (that is, scientific method, rather than the exploration of any specific scientific discipline) to two other fundamental observations about SF. The first is Delany's dictum that the language of SF must never admit to knowledge of any world other than the one constructed for the story. This practice, if writers do not abandon it in favor of chunks of exposition, explicitly requires the reader to “deconstruct” the unstated premises of difference from our own world. The second is the observation, made by such disparate writers as William Gibson and Ursula Le Guin, that SF is not about the future, but the present. “Science fiction is a confusing phenomenon. As even an acute mainstream critic may observe, it pretends to describe the future, yet more than any other literary genre it reflects the exact preoccupations of the present.” Again, it is the reader's habitual deconstruction of the thought-experiment that reveals the present-disguised-as-future.

“Deconstructing the Starships,” then, is a process of examining the genre, represented in the title of the book by one of its most lasting and iconic clichés, the starship. We pull it apart, cannibalize it, in order to understand how both its generic conventions and its ability to transgress generic limits and expectations most clearly reveal the unspoken ideologies of SF. In so doing, it becomes apparent that certain conventions of SF—e.g. that it is about specific sciences, that it is about the future—bear little relation to the reality of the genre today. Jones carries this process through in several of the novel's essays and some of the book reviews to a consideration of specific areas of SF writing, most notably cyberpunk and feminist SF. Applying the same critical intelligence with which she addresses the genre as a whole, Jones points to some of the more egregious problems of both types of SF writing.

To see how this works, let's look at Jones's discussion of feminist SF. One of the dilemmas Jones, a self-proclaimed feminist, sees in certain schools of feminist SF is the recourse to essentialism (women are women and what is most quintessential in all women is their femaleness) as a strategy for validating the lives of women in the face of a hostile patriarchal world. With devastating accuracy and wit, Jones refers to this style of biologically determinate fiction as “the rise of the dark-female-womb-good vs. light-male-phallus-bad story.” Jones makes the apt but somewhat dismal point that “this is the only version of feminism that has broken through to permeate the genre-as-we-know-it.” Jones concludes that she sees two types of SF writers: the Dinosaurs, which includes most writers regardless of gender, race, and popularity, and the Birds. The Dinosaurs know that you “can break the laws of physics any time, but human nature can never change.” The Birds “claim that they do not know what ‘bird nature’ is, or ever was...” It's a neat allegorical distinction for a very real problem that has plagued SF, including feminist SF, for several decades now: even the most radical end-of-patriarchy novels end up reproducing the same old gender divides that have bedevilled us since Western society invented the idea of binarism and applied it to every aspect of human life.

If Deconstructing the Starships comes back again and again to issues of feminist SF and the problems of gender—and by extension sexuality—in science fiction, it merely reaffirms Jones's point that the genre reflects contemporary preoccupations. In a world divided by the twin preoccupations of obsessively examining issues of sex and gender or of obsessively denying that sex and gender are or could be issues at all, it is scarcely surprising to find these particular fixations of the late 20th century played out in contemporary SF writing. It is a question that Jones returns to consistently throughout the course of the book, in both essays and book reviews.

Perhaps the most fascinating of all of the essays in the collection, “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension” describes the process by which Jones went about constructing her aliens in the Aleutian trilogy in order to conduct a thought experiment about the nature of the ‘other’ and the problem of communication. In White Queen, the first novel of the trilogy, a mildly disreputable band of aliens, whose notion of sexual dimorphism is purely arbitrary, arrive on earth only to discover that they have accidentally fulfilled our own fears and myths of alien invasion. Sexless, but not gender-less, the Aleutians are some of SF's more notably alien aliens, which makes it that much more of a shock to the reader of “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension” who discovers for the first time that the aliens are modelled not only on the colonized others of Europe's imperial past, but also on women. As Jones says, there are “obvious parallels between my culture's colonial adventure and the battle of the sexes.” Additionally, as Jones herself, points out, it is an SF cliché that all aliens speak English. The Aleutians do not. They are telepaths—or they may be telepaths. It's not clear to humans. And while some of them learn English and other Earth languages, many refuse to use speech at all.

What does the speechlessness of the Aleutians have to do with gender or with the relations between coloniser and colonised? One of the basic insights of both post-colonial and feminist criticism is that those who are neither white nor male tend to be silenced by the dominant culture, while at the same time being seen by their masters as essentially speechless. Moreover, colonised races are treated by the colonisers as if they were—or were equivalent to—female. In bringing these insights into her SF, Jones is proposing not an exact correspondence between the Aleutians and the subjugated colonial races nor between the Aleutians and women, but rather an “an alternative” representation. Jones says that:

I planned to give my alien conquerors the characteristics, all the supposed deficiencies, that Europeans came to see in their subject races in darkest Africa and the mystic East—'animal’ nature, irrationality, intuition; mechanical incompetence, indifference to time, helpless aversion to theory and measurement: and I planned to have them win the territorial battle this time.

There is a nice irony in the turnabout of colonial stereotype that the Aleutians come to represent in the novel, a point that disappears seamlessly into the science fictional scenario of the books. The lovely, yet rather gently satirical quality of the Aleutians as aliens is only underscored for the reader when Jones quotes one US critic as hailing the Aleutians “as ‘the most convincingly alien beings to grace science fiction in years.'” Jones's humanoid sexless telepathic aliens make for a particularly satisfying science fictional thought experiment, one with as much importance to the consideration of gender in feminist SF as Le Guin's Gethenians, yet without the many critical problems of language and representation that have been engendered by The Left Hand of Darkness. “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension” is just as satisfying, not only for its consideration of the problems of colonialism and gender politics, but also for its insight into the writer's process of creation.

All in all this is an invaluable collection of essays, some of which are masquerading as book reviews—"masquerading” because, in every case, Jones's approach goes beyond the mere basics of a review to a contemplation of the nature and purpose of SF. Deconstructing the Starships does, however, appear to be rather arbitrarily divided into three parts: a set of essays combined under the heading “All Science is Description,” followed by a second set entitled “Science, Fiction and Reality,” and finished up with a collection of Jones's book reviews that runs the gamut from Sarah Lefanu's In the Chinks of the World Machine to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to an extended meditation on Le Guin's utopian fictions. According to the acknowledgments, all of the essays were written between 1987 and 1997. Although they are thematically linked, they are not arranged in chronological order, which might perhaps have given more coherence to what is already a very strong piece of work.

Of course, Deconstructing the Starships is roughly modelled on collections of essays by other SF writers, most notably Ursula Le Guin's Language of the Night and Dancing at the Edge of the World and Samuel Delany's earlier critical works. In some ways, however, the casualness with which the essays and reviews have been arranged does the work a disservice, since it is clear that there is a consistent and remarkable vision informing a work that is, in its own right, every bit as important to the genre as Lefanu's groundbreaking study of feminist SF. In fact, Liverpool University Press seem to have had no idea of the value of Jones’ book, which is rather shabbily treated both in the matter of proofreading and in the cover art, which is a thoroughly uninspired and entirely too obvious beige diagram of an exploded starship model, à la Revell, over a starfield.

Anyone who is interested in SF, in what it is and how it works and in how sf writers think and write about their own field, will find Deconstructing the Starships an invaluable addition to their collection. It is a book which combines the best traditions of informed critical thought and engagement with the ideas of academic criticism, especially post-modernism, with a readable, trenchant and witty style. Indeed, Jones writes with a kind of British understatement that depends on her ability to say what she means with precision, while at the same time exhibiting a nice sense of humour, a penchant for irony and, occasionally, a touch of outrage. This is the work of a writer who is passionate about her genre, and that passion informs and enhances all of the essays in the collection. There is much to think about here—no reader is going to come away from this collection without finding some new insight into the genre or some particular provocation to thought. In the end, whether one agrees or disagrees with what Jones has to say about SF and about gender in SF, in particular, is irrelevant in comparison to the work's ability to stimulate the reader to deconstruct the ideas and ideologies of the genre. And ideas are what it's all about.

Wendy Pearson is a Ph.D. student with a particular interest in SF. Her article “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer” won the SFRA's Pioneer Award for the best critical article in 2000. She has published a number of articles on sexuality and gender issues in science fiction. Her most recent article deals with the figure of the hermaphrodite in SF novels by Melissa Scott, Stephen Leigh, and Ursula Le Guin.

How many of us read Greek myths as children: stories of the Trojan War, the gods, and their mischievous adventures? I know those were some of my favorites, and, to this day, I love retellings of ancient Greek tales. Roberta Gellis's Thrice Bound is an excellent retelling of this kind. She borrows her characters from the myths, incorporating the gods, like Artemis or Apollo, as highly Gifted mortals who are called gods by the un-Gifted. Thrice Bound, sequel to Bull God, is a retelling of the story of Hekate (sometimes spelled Hecate), who, in the Greek pantheon, is the goddess of magic and was worshipped at crossroads , which she traveled in the companionship of a pack of black dogs, a motif adapted by Gellis in a highly original way. Thrice Bound is a sequel to Bull God in that their stories take place about the same time in the same world and feature some of the same characters, but the plot of Thrice Bound is independent from the previous novel, which told the story of Ariadne and her brother the Minotaur.

The title of Thrice Bound relates to the triple vow Hekate must labor to fulfill. At the beginning of the novel, Perses, Hekate's father and the greatest mage in all of Ka'aanan, has ordered her to murder the Queen of Byblos and take her place at the King's side, so he can rule the country through her. Hekate, who agrees that the cruel Queen deserves to die, complies, and prepares to infiltrate the Palace. Later that day, she receives a message from her mother, Asterie, telling her that Perses is preparing a compulsion spell—when Hekate returns, she will be forced to carry out his plans.

Hekate flees, stopping to visit Dionysos, whom she rescued when he was an infant and subsequently bound herself to protect. Dionysos, one of the main characters in Bull God, tells her of a Vision he had, of Perses using blood magic to raise an otherplaner creature called a guhrt to follow and recapture Hekate. Warned, Hekate flees for the Caves of the Dead, where her father's magic cannot function. The guhrt follows her, and Hekate makes a stand, driving it back ... but not without great loss of strength. In her fury, Hekate vows that she will punish her father, and is bound twice. In the caves, she meets a young man named Kabeiros, who is bespelled so that he turns into a blind dog whenever he leaves the cave. Hekate, who can work magic by drawing power from the earth's blood, swears that she will find a way to dissolve the curse ... and is thrice bound.

Thrice Bound is filled to the brim with magic, suspense, humor, and romance—especially in the scenes describing Hekate's travels through the Mediterranean. She journeys to search for Kabeiros’ cure in the guise of a widowed herb-wife who wishes to become a healer. Many scenes describing Hekate's mishaps while practicing magic are quite humorous, but, although she does not know it, she is under magical compulsion from her father to learn—and remember—as many spells as possible, in order to bring them back to him. The blend of humor and suspense is excellent!

Like much of Gellis's work, Thrice Bound manages to be thought-provoking as well as entertaining. I loved her explorations of Hekate's bindings, her freedoms and obligations. At the heart of this foray is Gellis’ re-creation of the world of Greek mythology, which give Hekate's bindings the power to trap her. Hekate has sworn to destroy her father's power, but she can't kill him because the Furies—referred to in the novel as the ‘Kindly Ones'—do not permit blood to be spilled between kin. Yet somehow she must keep her oath, or it too could destroy her:

Kabeiros frowned. “But what if you don't fulfill the oath? You can stay here and never see or hear from your father again."

Now it was Hekate's turn to sigh. “You can't ignore a binding. It grows tighter and heavier until your body fails and your spirit is broken.” She took his hand in hers. “That's why I know I must break your binding ... I would stay if I could. You are the only friend I've ever had, Kabeiros ... and I'm afraid to go alone, Mother knows where ... I'm afraid.” Hekate's voice died to a whisper.

Hekate is bound by her feelings as much as she is by the oaths themselves.

Although the novel as a whole is wonderful, Thrice Bound has some drawbacks. The writing, in places, is unnecessarily convoluted—especially in the first chapter. The first few pages contain a tedious description of Hekate journeying to her father's workshop, along with some hefty infodump in order to get the reader “up to speed” and informed of what has happened—all of which would have flowed better had the story begun a day earlier. It is important not to be put off by the slow opening, since the rest of the story flows quickly. For those who like to sample a novel before buying, Baen has a 7-chapter excerpt available at their Web site. Also, Hekate's bindings are integral to the story, but I find that, later in the book, she takes them a bit too lightly, even forgetting them at times. Perhaps this is explainable because she travels, healing people and teaching magic. Maybe it's because the novel follows her for nearly ten years.

My chief complaint about Thrice Bound concerns the character of Perses. Too many speculative fiction novels rely on cardboard cutout villains, with no redeeming values whatsoever, who do horrible things to innocents for their own ends. They are evil just for the sake of being evil. Unfortunately, Perses happens to be a villain of this kind. It is annoying, but does not detract from the novel too much since Hekate is traveling the world in search for a spell to cure Kabeiros for much of the story.

Despite these flaws, Thrice Bound is definitely worth reading. It has everything I look for in speculative fiction: the dialogue is witty, the settings are lush, the characters, with the exception of Perses, are well-drawn and believable, and the descriptions are crisp. I would recommend Thrice Bound to anyone looking for a good speculative fiction novel to read, from teens to adults. It has the elements that give it universal appeal—romance, action, suspense. Hekate is a heroine who is larger than life and yet realistically believable. She travels in search of a cure for her friend, yet is sworn to defeat her father and protect a young boy, a task that is nearly impossible ... and she succeeds against insurmountable odds.

Roberta Gellis has a self-maintained Web site with an extensive bibliography, publication list with links to Amazon.com, guestbook, news archive, and contact information. She has published books in other genres besides speculative fiction, including mystery, romance, and nonfiction; she is a well-published author who deserves more recognition than she has received.

Heidi Elizabeth Smith is an avid reader of speculative fiction. In writing this review, she was happy to apply her three favorite hobbies—reading, writing, and running the computer.

Archangel Protocol, by Lyda Morehouse, is a new cross genre novel with a broad based appeal. The narration is approachable without being simplified and the plot takes off quickly, taking the reader on a fascinating ride through an appalling, yet familiar, world.

Ms. Morehouse has created a cast of wonderfully believable and fascinating characters, complete with goals and dreams, but also flaws—the most important feature assigned to realistic characters. They don't always have the answers and they don't always make the best decisions. Their feelings often get in the way of altruism and orders, and in the end it is the things that make them most human that have the greatest impact. There are a number of key characters in this novel, good and evil, all of whom have been carefully composed such that none feel like cardboard stand-ins for an archetype. The protagonist, Deidre McMannus, is well developed and likable, so the book does not need to rely on those in supporting roles to inspire interest and sympathy, as often happens in novels with many characters. Furthermore, good and evil aren't laid out in clearly demarcated black and white, again more representative of the real world, avoiding the absurdity of caricature that comes with absolute extremes. Deciding who is on what side, and who has no allegiance to either, is part of the mystery Deidre must solve. Often there is a mix of good and evil, muddying the waters of perception. Some evil, it seems, may even act for the side of good.

The setting for the novel is a post-apocalyptic U.S., which has discarded science as villainous in an attempt to assign blame after a war of global proportions. All good law-abiding citizens have adopted an approved religion along with a wetware implant allowing constant access to the LINK, a faster, vaster Internet. LINK users can cruise their favorite bulletin boards whilst simultaneously absorbing information and entertainment (often marketed as the same thing) simply by thinking about it. On the upside, Presidential debates get great ratings, but on the downside, excessive use of the LINK and some of its features can result in addiction and brain damage. The LINK has been the venue for recent miracles: the appearance of entities dubbed “LINK-Angels", accepted by all major religions as the genuine article. Angel mania rampages through society, inspiring people to extreme acts on behalf of their religious beliefs. One such zealot has initiated the Last Day movement, which is determined to provide space for the burials of good Christians by changing the protected status of certain national forests. The land is to be divided into cemetery plots so that the deceased may properly rise bodily to heaven when the end of the world, always close at hand, arrives. Leaping on the latest craze, other citizens have legally changed their names to include one or more of the many named angels of their particular brand of faith.

Enter Deidre McMannus, former detective on the New York police force. Fired, excommunicated, and cut off from the LINK, she has taken up private investigation as a means of survival. She has a lot of baggage: guilt over how things have ended up as they have, and unanswered questions. Into her office strolls Michael, a client who insists that the LINK-Angels are fake. Her life, it seems, has become entangled with this controversy, and she finds she must take Michael's case in order to answer her own questions and resolve her unfinished business. Armed with contemporary sensibilities, the reader is often just a bit ahead of Deidre in unraveling some of the mysteries of the novel, but also just a bit behind on others, illustrating Morehouse's skill at maintaining the character's point of view. In attempting to prove Michael's claim, she finds there is far more at stake than she imagined possible. Some things have truly eternal consequences.

At the outset of the story Deidre is distinctly a product of her culture. An outcast, she has been exposed to the gross underbelly of her world, and though she sees the obvious hypocrisy and social problems, she is torn. While railing against the politics, she still longs to reconnect to the LINK and return to respectable society. Although lacking in genuine religious faith, she is unable to turn her back on her church, even if it has turned its back on her. As the book progresses, Deidre makes observations that indicate a change within her, and a modification of her beliefs about the world culture. At one point she notices the dichotomy of the anti-science/pro-LINK attitudes. This observation is made in passing, as it is not significant to the plot, but it shows that her perceptions are changing as a result of the factors newly introduced in her life. But true changes of heart and mind, particularly of things so ingrained, take time, and Ms. Morehouse handles this in a realistic fashion. It is not until later that Deidre herself comprehends the full impact.

This future world has a complex history and political system, which have been built without the excess of techno garbage and slang usually associated with cyberpunk. The new and unfamiliar are explained smoothly and succinctly, keeping the story from getting bogged down in definitions. There are moments of wonderful imagery, occasionally allegorical, giving the reader a vision of this world and the people who live within it.

I turned around just in time to see Michael and Morningstar draw their weapons. Michael grabbed for the battered .45 with his right hand as Morningstar reached for his weapon with his left. Their arms unfurled in perfect unison. They looked like deadly mirror images.

Goldilocks herself would find the description just right, showing the reader the characters and their world without slowing things down. Thus, the pace of the story complements the rapidly unfolding plot, making it an extremely tough book to put down.

S.N. Arly's short fiction has appeared in Fearsmag.com and in the Dragon*Con 2000 chapbook Do Virgins Taste Better, published by 7-Realms Publishing Corp.

When I was ten, I was going to visit the stars. Not that year, of course, but in my lifetime, certainly. After all, in the period of my life to that point, we'd started from nothing and we'd just succeeded in landing astronauts on the moon. The planet Mars would be next, and in short order, we'd be breaking the bounds of the solar system, and you could bet I was going to be there. The realization, sometime in my teenage years, that no such thing would happen for anyone in my lifetime, let alone for me, is one of the sadder and more adult moments that I can remember from that time. “Space, the final frontier,” was real for me, but not for the American president who promised a moon landing before the end of the decade. For him, and perhaps for most, it was a “space race,” an exercise in one-upping the Soviets so that the world would be a safer place for folks named Kennedy to play touch football on the weekends.

You've probably noticed, or you very quickly will if you page through our archives, that even a speculative fiction venue like Strange Horizons rarely speaks of travel to the stars. You might conclude, based on that, I'm a bit out of place here—and you'd be right. Perhaps you also feel a bit out of place, and in a way I hope so; that's part of what we promised you when Strange Horizons began a year ago. We didn't want Strange Horizons to be a comfortable couch to reminisce about the “golden years” of speculative fiction, but a forum where the best of the new and established voices of the genre continue to challenge you, and where you encounter diverse viewpoints that may not have been a part of your experience. Mary Anne Mohanraj said in our first editorial:

...And in addition to those female characters who started creeping in a few decades ago and now are everywhere, I'm starting to notice some who are (startlingly) not white. That's rather nice, I have to say. The genre is starting to actually reflect the world I live in. The field is growing and expanding and shifting and changing, and it's an exciting time to be part of it.

We started this magazine because we wanted to help with that change. We wanted to create a place to showcase some of those new writers, to bring them to the attention of a new international audience—and also to share with you our deep enjoyment of some wonderful established authors.

After a year of weekly publication, I think we've made at least a considerable down payment on that promise.

Strange Horizons has grown and changed a great deal in our first year, particularly when you consider that we, quite literally, started from nothing. We have a lot more exciting plans as we grow into our second year, and we'll be asking for your help in filling out a reader survey in October so we can understand better who you are, and what entices you to read Strange Horizons.

Some of the changes as we enter our second year are obvious, some more subtle. We've added thumbnail images to the table of contents in each department, and we've added an entirely new music department to the magazine. We'll now have a new poem each week, and there's a brand new method for linking directly to individual pieces and still including them within the magazine frame, and the instructions for that are here. We've also redone a number of things in the archives, with more enhancements to follow. We've had the good fortune to keep most of the first-year pieces in the archives, so they're definitely a treasure worth seeking out. A surprising number of pieces first published here have won awards and high praise, and we've added a new Awards page to showcase the ones we've heard about. And all that is just a good start on the excitement of our second year.

Strange Horizons has an extraordinary, all-volunteer staff that labor exceptionally hard to make my position as managing editor almost unnecessary. While they are, quite literally, a standout team, and certainly not an uneven collection of a few leaders and a great many followers, I do want to take this opportunity to single out two positions for special thanks, because I doubt that we ever acknowledge them enough. We have enjoyed the services of two amazing Webmasters over this first year—Sean Miller and Will Quale. Sean saw us through the startup of the magazine and did an exceptional job laying all the important groundwork for the basic functions of the magazine. Will has expanded on that base with consistency and with systems that I wouldn't have dreamed could be so smoothly implemented. And in both cases they put up with the real life demands of the position—deadlines, last minute changes, explanations that someone else's busy life would once again preclude them from their busy life—with humor and grace. We quite literally would not be here without them.

We have also enjoyed the services of three gifted copy editors—Paul Schumacher, Mithran Somasundrum, and Chip Sudderth. The fact is, when errors slip through to the final copy, it is most often because they've been unwisely overruled, and not because they've failed to spot the problem. They not only do an amazing job, but write wonderfully entertaining behind-the-scenes email that makes my job a joy—and no, you aren't ever going to see any of that.

Of course, no anniversary would be complete without a thank you to all of our readers. No question about it, you make all the hard work worth it. We're pretty sure that you're a surprisingly diverse bunch, and we know with certainty that you're persons of taste and intelligence. We enjoy your comments and occasional emails, and even just your quiet reading, and we hope to get to know you just a little better through the survey. We also hope that we have challenged you, and brought you thoughts and ideas that rocked your world, at least a bit.

Last, but certainly not least, let us lay a fundraising pitch on you. Strange Horizons is reader supported, and we unquestionably need your support. Consider what a print magazine this good would run you in a year—say, $30.00—and how much more convenient it is to have us, updated weekly, available 24/7 wherever the Internet can be found! Then visit our support page and send us a birthday present. You know you want to.

Thanks for a great first year—we hope to be here for many more to come.

Brian Peters is the Managing Editor for Strange Horizons.