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Copyright ©2001 by Strange Horizons, Inc. See copyright notices following each article.

Article: Interview: James Morrow, by Faith L. Justice

Article: Bose-Einstein Condensates, by Marissa K. Lingen

Article: Sleeping with the Bug-Eyed Monster, by Jim C. Hines

Article: An Evening with Freeman Dyson, by Greg Beatty

Fiction: Fiddler, by H. Courreges LeBlanc, illustration by Shelton Bryant

Fiction: Carol for Mixed Voices (part 1 of 2), by Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond

Fiction: Carol for Mixed Voices (part 2 of 2), by Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond

Fiction: Other Cities #4 of 12: Amea Amaau, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Fiction: Other Moments, by Daniel Goss

Poetry: purified on the only visible moon, by T. Emmett Mueller

Poetry: Threnody at Sea, by Mark Rudolph

Poetry: Oracle, by Kendall Evans

Poetry: An Open Letter To Our Astronauts, by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

Review: I Love Anthologies: A Review of the Year's Best Science Fiction 2001, reviewed by Danyel Fisher

Review: Ken Wharton's Divine Intervention, reviewed by Lori Ann White

Review: Marie Jakober's The Black Chalice, reviewed by Christopher Cobb

Reviews: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, reviewed by Walter Chaw

Editorial: Where Does Genre Come From?, by Jed Hartman

12/3/01

Award-winning author James Morrow takes on the foibles and inconsistencies of Western religion with wit and vigor, holding up a mirror and asking, “How far will we go?” Booklist dubs him a “genius” and compares him to Twain, Heller, and Vonnegut, for bringing much needed humor to this too-serious subject. The science fiction and fantasy community has honored him with two Nebulas (for his 1989 short story “Bible Stories for Adults #17: The Deluge” and 1990 novella “City of Truth") and a World Fantasy Award (for his 1990 novel Only Begotten Daughter).

In his most recent work, known collectively as the Godhead Trilogy, Morrow takes us on a tour of a post-theistic world. In Towing Jehovah, a disgraced tanker captain seeks redemption by fulfilling a dying angel's request to tow God's immense dead body from the middle of the Atlantic to its final resting place in an Arctic ice cave. In Blameless in Abaddon, God's body is discovered and He is posthumously put on trial in the World Court for all the evil He allowed in the world. Morrow's newest novel, The Eternal Footman, brings this cycle to a close as people struggle with “death awareness” and the psychic consequences of God's abandonment of humankind.

In this interview from his home in State College, Pennsylvania, Morrow discusses his debt to the SF/F community, scientific humanism, organized religion, the literary roots of his stories, the difficulties of addressing the “big questions” in satire, and his writing process.

Faith L. Justice: You've been called one of the “great modern satirists” and claim Twain, Vonnegut, and Heller among your literary influences. How did you wind up writing in the SF/fantasy genres rather than in mainstream fiction?

James Morrow: As early as my first novel, The Wine of Violence, I was producing fiction that obviously partook as much of satire and allegory as of “SF/Fantasy.” But the events in Wine occurred on another planet, and the people got there in spaceships. We all looked at each other—my agent, my editor, and me—and said, “It probably makes sense to market this as science fiction, but let's hope we can somehow reach a crossover audience."

I'm not a fatalist. I don't like Original Sin scenarios. But it's possible that, in defining myself as an SF author right at the beginning, I have irretrievably exiled myself from the Garden of Mainstream Acceptance. If I had it to do over, however, I suspect I'd choose to lapse from grace once again. I'd love to have the large audience enjoyed by Twain and Heller. But it's important to remember this: there's no obscurity like publishing a mainstream novel that goes nowhere. Heller was the first to admit that, for every Catch-22, fifty equally worthy mainstream novels fall by the wayside.

I shall always feel enormously indebted to the SF world. It's given me an audience, critical acclaim, half a living wage, and more than my share of awards. And here's the most powerful argument of all: by working in relative obscurity, addressing myself to the freewheeling, low-pressure science fiction community, I think I've probably done better work—more biting, more audacious, more honest—than if I'd quickly become a high-profile writer. And in my haltingly idealistic fashion, I shall always insist that the work, not the royalty check, is what counts most.

Now, if the mainstream wants to discover me at this point in my career, that would be perfectly all right with me. I could use the money.

FJ: You call yourself a “scientific humanist.” What does that mean?

JM: I like that term—I first heard it in connection with Jacob Bronowski—because there's something slightly paradoxical and ambiguous about it. And I think that worthy fiction always partakes of paradox and ambiguity.

C.P. Snow's famous dichotomy between “the two cultures,” scientists versus humanists, goes back to 1962, and I think it's still very much with us. If anything, the schism has gotten worse in recent years. Snow was concerned about the failure of academic humanists to comprehend the insights of science. Today we have hundreds of postmodern academics who are actually proud of their failure to comprehend the insights of science—a pride in which they are so noisy and articulate and persuasive that they make someone like me feel slightly ashamed to be caught using a phrase like “the insights of science."

Bronowski liked to point out that science is “a very human activity.” I think he meant that it's a mistake to regard science as a sterile, passionless, bureaucratic pursuit, destined to turn us into numbers. But the postmodernists have distorted Bronowski's idea—as they have distorted similar ideas drawn from Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper—beyond recognition, turning science into a mere “metaphor” or “narrative.” Bronowski was inviting humanists to join in the great post-Enlightenment conversation about the limitations and misuses of scientific knowledge. And the humanists, to their eternal shame, responded by declaring that the Enlightenment was dead.

We need a serious critique of science in this culture. The apologists for the technocratic machine must be countered and contradicted. But this will never happen by filtering science through the bizarre epistemologies of French intellectuals. Jacques Derrida didn't discover the threat to the ozone layer. Scientists did. (Their names, for the record, are F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California.)

FJ: You've said that satire is the child of anger and comedy. In your writings on western religion, where does your anger come from? Your comedic touch?

JM: As I mentioned in a Paradoxa interview with Samuel R. Delany, people are sometimes surprised to learn that my childhood contacts with religion were undramatic. My readers assume that, given the vehemence with which I question Christianity's legitimacy, I must be working through some terrible, quasi-repressed trauma. They think I was hit with a ruler by a nun, or I had to empty a Lutheran minister's bedpan—something like that.

My religious upbringing was actually quite tepid and generic—a white Presbyterian Church in the Philadelphia suburbs. My skepticism comes primarily from reading the world's great disbelievers—Voltaire, Twain, Ibsen, Camus, and so on—and realizing that their anguish and their disaffection felt honest to me in a way that the theistic worldview never did. To use my earlier terminology, Voltaire and Camus seemed to be among the real grown-ups on the planet.

Let me hasten to add that, while my skepticism is essentially intellectual, that doesn't mean it's passionless. Quite the contrary. For me, thinking and feeling are inextricably intermixed.

To quote from the aforementioned interview: “I guess I'm writing for readers who, whether they're believers or not, are viscerally disturbed, on a almost daily basis, by Christianity's claim to occupy some moral and epistemological high ground. My imagined audience includes people who've noticed that you can't depend on religion to get us thinking intelligently about war, peace, ethics, eros, gender, nature, intolerance, or human origins—au contraire, religion often gets us thinking about these problems in vacuous and ugly ways—and this state of affairs shakes them to the core. It drives them crazy. It makes them want to scream."

The comedy in my fiction functions as a kind of Trojan horse. It lets me smuggle all sorts of grand opinions into each story without seeming too pretentious. Woody Allen does it better than I do. He has a gift for condensing a devastating—yet at the same time rather subtle—critique of the theistic worldview into a single line. In Love and Death, Allen raises the possibility that God is “evil,” then quickly adds that he's probably just an “underachiever” instead.

FJ: Your writing has been called everything from “irreverent” to “blasphemous.” How would you characterize your writing and, given Salman Rushdie's fate, does this vehemence affect your writing or personal behavior?

JM: Obviously a whole book could be written about the Rushdie affair and the differences between Western and Islamic perceptions of fiction and its power over reality. On the whole, I don't imagine myself becoming the next Rushdie—I don't fear reprisals from Christian militants. At this point in history, theological satire in the West flies well below the radar of the religious right. There's no need for me to put a barbed-wire fence around my house.

Occasionally, a born-again Christian with a powerful search engine will blunder into my website. The poor fellow has typed in “Jesus,” and suddenly he's confronted with reviews of Only Begotten Daughter. Usually he'll leave me a message—disapproving, but hardly menacing. It goes something like this: “Well, Jim, I can see by this website that you're very concerned with religious matters. Did you know that Jesus Christ is very concerned about your concern with religious matters? I suggest you let him into your heart, preferably before sundown, lest you roast in Hell. Have a nice day."

Believe it or not, I sometimes wonder if my relentless railing against Christianity doesn't go too far. At a certain point, obviously, any sort of blasphemy can become hurtful, irrelevant, or puerile. But I keep coming back to this question: who struck first, the satirist or the sacristan? And the answer is clearly, the latter.

We must be angry about Christianity's historical complicity in war, slavery, anti-Semitism, and the subjugation of women. God knows, that's not all we should be angry about. Secular belief systems also have much to answer for—maybe they even have more to answer for. I don't know. But it's my particular job to keep shouting, “Look where the theistic-salvationist worldview leads us if we're not careful!"

FJ: You've described Towing Jehovah as a fantastical Lord Jim, and Blameless in Abaddon as a retelling of the “Book of Job.” What are the literary roots of The Eternal Footman?

JM: Its primary touchstone is The Epic of Gilgamesh. I'm not very subtle about this ancestry. My heroine spends part of the novel traveling with a theatre company that's producing a more-or-less faithful adaptation of Gilgamesh in a succession of southern towns.

We hear a lot these days, especially from academic precincts, about the deterministic nature of human language and culture. There is no such thing as a universal human spirit, the postmodern intellectuals argue. All realities—moral, epistemological, psychological—are ultimately “local,” conditioned by immediate social and linguistic norms. Even science, the postmodernists say, can be profitably scrutinized through this radically relativistic lens.

And yet here's Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving epic, speaking to us with poignancy and immediacy about the bedrock tragedy of the human condition. The theme is the inescapability of death, and the poem tells us how utterly human it is to wish that things were otherwise. If Gilgamesh is essentially “local,” then I say the hell with it.

It's possible to map the whole Godhead Trilogy onto the Divine Comedy. Towing Jehovah corresponds to the “Purgatorio"—the characters are trapped in a gray domain defined by their moral limitations. Blameless in Abaddon is the “Inferno” in a different key. ("Abaddon” is a Hebrew word that can be translated as “hell.") And Footman, with its glimpses of a post-theistic utopia, might be regarded as a kind of “Paradiso.” But this is all rather cerebral. Let's drop it and go on to the next question.

FJ: You've lamented that, unlike nineteenth-century writers, modern novelists deal primarily with “quotidian life and its discontents.” What are the grand questions you wrestle with in this trilogy, and did you come up with any answers?

JM: No, let's not go on to the next question. Aaarggh! I'm overwhelmed! This is a great question, Faith, but I could spend the rest of the week trying to answer it! Let me attempt an end run around the problem. Let me talk briefly about the gap between the cosmic riddles I thought I'd be confronting in the Godhead Trilogy and the riddles I really did confront.

Before I actually wrote Towing Jehovah, I'd assumed it would be a satire on the common notion that, when a society loses faith in God, it ceases to be moral. But eventually I took the theme much more seriously, and I ended up giving theism its due. Once the crew of the Carpco Valparaiso discovers that nobody is peering down from Heaven, they lose their moral compass: murders and orgies start becoming the norm.

But only temporarily. By the end of act two, the Kantian categorical imperative has taken hold, and the crew starts behaving decently again. So a novel that began life as a kind of science-fictional joke—what if God died?—ended up addressing other sorts of questions. How do we account for ethical behavior? What might a non-theistic morality look like? Do we behave decently merely because we fear divine retribution, or are we a better species than that?

I went into Blameless in Abaddon knowing that the plot would revolve around God's long overdue trial for crimes against humanity. But until I began investigating theodicy in depth, I had no idea that the case for the defense could be so rich and complex. Christian theologians have been explaining God's ostensible complicity in human suffering for nearly 2,000 years, and they've accomplished a lot—so much, in fact, that I decided to have the World Court judges return a “not guilty” verdict. And here I thought a single case of childhood cancer would make the prosecution's case!

But there's a problem, of course. Because after you've hammered together your beautiful little theodicy—whether you're Saint Augustine or C. S. Lewis—you're still stuck with that suffering child. So while the World Court was ultimately willing to let God off the hook, you can be sure that James Morrow was not.

On the drawing board, The Eternal Footman was supposed to address the following theme: “No matter what the clerics tell us, death means nothing but oblivion, and it's also the primary source from which the world's religions draw their energy.” But during the composition process, I realized that death is a more ambiguous phenomenon than my original notes allowed. I still have no use for it in my personal life, but I can see how—from the broadest evolutionary and historical perspective—the case for death's necessity is probably even better than the case for God's goodness.

As for the notion that death-denial lies at the heart of most religions, I have one of the characters in Footman say this very explicitly. But I'm no longer prepared to reduce religion to that formula. Like Towing Jehovah, The Eternal Footman got me speculating about the genesis of ethical behavior, and I concluded that religiously-rooted narratives like the Good Samaritan certainly have their part to play.

FJ: Your stories are always fantastical yet grounded in the real world. What kinds of research do you do to keep the “science” in science fiction?

JM: Ever since This Is the Way the World Ends I've attempted to work simultaneously in two very different—perhaps even incompatible—idioms: the utterly fanciful and the utterly mundane. I'm intrigued by the artistic possibilities that unfold in that kind of literary no-man's-land. One finds a similar landscape in Kafka's stories, though without the strain of scientific rationality that runs through my work.

World Ends turns on a wholly supernatural premise—a temporary reprieve for the “unadmitted” victims of human extinction—but the disaster itself is treated realistically. I read dozens of books on the effects of nuclear blasts (short-term and long-term), the perverse logic of so-called “strategic doctrine,” and the Nuremberg precedent whereby the “unadmitted” put their murderers on trial. The situation is impossible, but the suffering is real.

The argument I make to myself goes something like this: if I do enough research, augmenting the premise of the moment with lots of gritty particulars, then at a certain point I will start to believe that premise, no matter how ridiculous. And if I believe it, then maybe the reader will believe it as well.

FJ: I've always admired your quirky complicated characters—people just on the edge of mainstream, neighbors with a twist.

JM: This issue of characterization dovetails neatly into the research question you asked earlier. It's the other side of the coin: how might a writer invest his characters with enough humanity that we care about them even if they're living through impossible events?

A common criticism of SF is that it settles for far too simplistic an understanding of the human psyche. In the words of Thomas Disch, the genre lacks “a decent sense of despair.” It's a fair complaint, I feel. There's certainly no evidence that, as our species becomes increasingly dependent on technology and our world becomes increasingly science-fictional, we're losing our psychological complexity. Indeed, most people would argue that inner turmoil and ineffable existential dread have increased in the post-industrial age.

Nobody in a feudal fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or Dune experiences anxiety attacks of unknown origin. Nobody has to cope with migraines or hemorrhoids or suicidal depression. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe that kind of realism would destroy the very conventions that permit such novels to delight us. But I do worry when an author places a caste system at the center of a novel and then fails to ask searching questions about it.

Having said all this, let me hasten to confess I've always found characterization to be the hardest aspect of novel-writing. I conceive of my stories in terms of themes and situations first, human psychology second. If I were completely honest, I'd have to admit that the main reason I give my characters vivid occupations—Murray Katz processing snapshots, George Paxton carving tombstones, Nora Burkhart delivering flowers, Gerard Korty sculpting the Divine Comedy—is that it simplifies the characterization problem. This strategy affords me lots of “objective correlatives” for my character's mental states, including their self-doubts and neuroses. That's better than the stupid conceit of a worry-free Sardaukar, but it's certainly not the highest variety of psychological fiction. I'm not Dostoyevsky.

FJ: What does your typical creative day look like?

JM: The alarm clock rings. Kathy and Jim send Pooka the Border collie to wake up Christopher, the eleven-year-old (my son, Kathy's stepson). Kathy makes Chris's breakfast. Jim takes Amtrak the Doberman for a walk, a process that usually yields at least two good ideas—a line of dialogue, a juicy metaphor, a structural tactic—for that day's scene.

Chris eats breakfast while reading the funnies. Jim, Kathy, Chris, and Pooka walk a quarter-mile to the bus stop. (For reasons not worth explaining, the best way for my son to get to school is on a public bus.) While Kathy and Chris ride downtown together, Jim heads for home with Pooka. He typically gets two or three more good ideas along the way.

The rest of the day is a dance among competing obligations. Jim tries to get a load of dishes washed ... to have at least one nourishing conversation with Kathy ... and to jog twice around the block. But mostly he writes and writes and writes. It's an addiction.

FJ: Did you ever write a line that you're especially proud of—that is, a line in which you managed to capture your worldview in epigrammatic fashion?

JM: In Towing Jehovah, my heroine says to a friend, “That maxim, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’ it's not an argument against atheism—it's an argument against foxholes."

Faith L. Justice is a self-styled science geek and history junkie. Before becoming a freelance writer, she worked as a lifeguard, paralegal, college professor, and business consultant. She has published numerous science fiction and fantasy short stories and poems since co-founding a writer's group twelve years ago. Faith lives with her husband, daughter, and cat in New York.

12/10/01

In our daily experience, most of us deal with three phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. A fourth, high-energy phase of matter, plasma, occurs in high energy processes as near as a fire or as far away as the core of a star. For decades, the existence of a fifth, low-energy form of matter, known as Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs), was only a theoretical possibility. In 2001, the Nobel Prize for Physics went to Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl Wieman, who used lasers, magnets, and evaporative cooling to bring about this fascinating new phase of matter.

BECs have strange properties with many possible applications in future technologies. They can slow light down to the residential speed limit, flow without friction, and demonstrate the weirdest elements of quantum mechanics on a scale anyone can see. They are effectively superatoms, groups of atoms that behave as one.

The theory of BECs was developed by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in the early 1920s. Bose combined his work in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics with the quantum mechanical theories that were being developed, and Einstein carried the work to its natural conclusions and brought it to the public eye. At the time, none of the necessary technology was available to make BECs in the lab: cryonics were extremely limited, and the first laser wasn't even built until 1960. The fine control allowed by modern computers was also a prerequisite. Because of all of these technological hurdles, it wasn't until 1995 that experimenters were able to force rubidium atoms to form this type of condensate.

We can distinguish among the phases of matter in several ways. On the most elementary level, solids have both fixed volume and fixed shape; liquids have fixed volume, but not fixed shape; and gases have neither. Solids have stronger intermolecular bond structure than their corresponding liquids, which in turn have stronger intermolecular bond structure than gases. We can also differentiate between phases of matter by considering energy levels. Solids have the lowest energy levels (corresponding with the lowest temperatures), while liquids and gases have increasingly higher levels. At the top end of this scale, we can add plasmas, which are energetic enough to emit all kinds of energy in the form of heat and photons.

Bose-Einstein Condensates represent a fifth phase of matter beyond solids. They are less energetic than solids. We can also think of this as more organized than solids, or as colder—BECs occur in the fractional micro-Kelvin range, less than millionths of a degree above absolute zero; in contrast, the vacuum of interstellar space averages a positively tropical 3 K. BECs are more ordered than solids in that their restrictions occur not on the molecular level but on the atomic level. Atoms in a solid are locked into roughly the same location in regard to the other atoms in the area. Atoms in a BEC are locked into all of the same attributes as each other; they are literally indistinguishable, in the same location and with the same attributes. When a BEC is visible, each part that one can see is the sum of portions of each atom, all behaving in the same way, rather than being the sum of atoms as in the other phases of matter.

At the very beginning of the study of quantum mechanics, it was discovered that light could behave either as a wave or as a particle, when before it had only been treated as a wave. This discovery led Pierre de Broglie to theorize that perhaps matter could be treated as a wave, and not just as a particle. This theory was tested and found to be true: matter behaves as both a wave and a particle, depending on how it is observed.

Each atom has a wavefunction that describes its behavior as a wave. This wavefunction can be used to determine the probabilities that the atom will be in a given place or have a certain momentum or other useful properties. Each particle can also be determined to have a spin. While many physics terms mean something other than their everyday usage, “spin” seems to be a behavior that acts just as if the particle is spinning around an axis.

The amount of spin a particle can have depends on the type of particle. Fermions (like electrons) can have spin values that are +/- 1/2, +/- 3/2, +/- 5/2, etc.; bosons (like some isotopes of hydrogen and helium) have spin values that are whole numbers. Fermions obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, whereas bosons do not. Bosons and fermions can both be composite particles; they don't have to be “indivisible” particles. The same physics will hold for bosons such as photons and K mesons as will hold for hydrogen and helium atoms, as long as the atoms are close to their ground state.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle (which was determined experimentally) states that no two fermion particles can occupy the same state at the same time. They must have some way of being distinguished, whether by location, spin state, or some other property. That means that if one fermion is in a local ground or minimum energy state, the next fermion in the area must be in a higher energy state. For bosons, however, the Pauli Exclusion Principle is irrelevant by definition—so all of the bosons can be in the same state at the same time. They don't have to be distinguishable from each other. When this happens, a Bose-Einstein Condensate is created.

Because of the specialized conditions under which they can exist, Bose-Einstein Condensates have only been created in laboratories. First, an experimenter takes bosons that have been purified of other elements and puts them in a vacuum. Popular choices for these bosons include specific isotopes of atoms of helium, sodium, rubidium, and hydrogen. Not all isotopes are bosons, and only bosons can form a BEC. The initial method of making a rubidium condensate is the most straightforward, and further methods have been refinements of the same general principles of cooling.

The atoms are first cooled to fractions of a degree Kelvin. They need to be virtually motionless in order to stay in the BEC ground state. Then they are put into a magnetic trap, keeping them in a limited area. The magnetic trap is arranged with eight magnets in what is known as a quadrupole configuration. The magnets we are most familiar with in daily life are dipole magnets: a two-ended field of magnetization with one polarity at one end and the opposite polarity at the other end. A quadrupole configuration looks more like a plus sign, with the opposing points having the same polarity.

When the atoms are in a quadrupole magnetic trap, the way they interact is primarily through their spin; higher order considerations such as magnetostatic interactions are limited by the trap. A laser with a precisely calculated wavelength shines on the atoms, and as the light scatters off the atoms, it takes with it more energy than it brought into the process. The Doppler shift from the higher energy atoms is calculated so that they “see” the laser of the right color, and the atoms that are already lower energy stay unexcited. The energy state of the atoms is, of course, directly related to how quickly they are moving, so the first wavelength used is selected for the fastest atoms present.

The laser's wavelength must be very precisely tuned to the atom. One of the hardest problems physicists face in making BECs is keeping the laser tuned to the right frequency despite outside interference; even a car passing by on the road outside a lab may cause enough vibration to knock the laser out of its desired frequency. To make things worse, as the average speed of the atoms decreases and their energy level goes down, the desired Doppler shift changes, so the laser must be retuned to match the new “high” energy atoms. In order to account for motion from all directions, the lasers shine in on the atoms from opposite points on all three axes. Further, the magnetic trap is combined with an optical trap that pushes atoms back towards the center if they stray too far. This laser set-up is known as “optical molasses."

The atoms are then cooled further through what is known as evaporative cooling. Essentially, evaporative cooling allows the faster, more energetic atoms to escape from the trap, leaving only the slowest, coolest, least energetic atoms behind. Of all the materials used, rubidium was the easiest to make into a BEC because its atoms are the largest—they achieve low velocities at the highest temperature (energy) because mass relates to energy (hydrogen was the hardest BEC to form, but researchers think it may have superior applications because of its small size). When the atoms get to the point where only ground state atoms are left, they coalesce into a Bose-Einstein Condensate, which behaves like a superatom. The first condensate consisted of 2000 atoms; some condensates have been created that are the size of a dime (several million atoms), but still behave as one giant atom.

Most research into Bose-Einstein Condensates serves as “basic” research—that is to say, it is more concerned with knowing more about the world in general than with implementing a specific technology. However, there are several potential uses for BECs. The most promising application is in etching. When BECs are fashioned into a beam, they are like a laser in their coherence. That is to say, both a laser and a BEC beam run “in lock step,” guaranteeing that an experimenter can know how a part of the beam will behave at every single location. This property of lasers has been used in the past for etching purposes. A BEC beam would have greater precision and energy than a laser because even at their low kinetic energy state, the massive particles would be more energetic than the massless photons. The major technological concerns with a BEC beam would be getting a clean enough environment for it to function repeatedly and reducing the cost of BEC creation enough to use BECs regularly in beams. However, BEC beams or “atom lasers” could produce precisely trimmed objects down to a very small scale—possibly a nanotech scale. Their practical limits will be found with experimentation.

In some ways, the atom laser works as the opposite of a laser. A laser can produce more photons from the atoms at hand, but an atom laser can only deal with the number of atoms it starts with. Rather than being knocked into an excited state, as atoms that emit laser photons are, BEC atoms are cooled down to the ground state. Unlike a laser beam, an atom laser beam could not travel far through air and would fall due to gravity. However, these differences can be calculated and accounted for in the future uses of the atom laser.

One of the most commonly known properties of BECs is their superfluidity. That is to say, BECs flow without interior friction. Since they're effectively superatoms, BECs are all moving in the same way at the same time when they flow, and don't have energy losses due to friction. Even the best lubricants currently available have some frictional losses as their molecules interact with each other, but BECs, while terribly expensive, would pose no such problem.

One of the problems physicists run into when teaching quantum mechanics is that the principles are just counter-intuitive. They're hard to visualize. But videos of BEC blobs several millimeters across show wave-particle duality at a level we can comprehend easily. We can watch something that acts like an atom, at a size we could hold in our hands. MIT researchers have produced visible interference fringe patterns from sodium BECs, demonstrating quantum mechanics effects on the macroscale. That alone is worth notice.

Perhaps most interestingly, BECs have been used to slow the speed of light to a crawl—from 186,282 miles per second (3x10⁸ m/s) in a vacuum to 38 miles per hour (17 m/s) in a sodium BEC. No other substance so far has been able to slow the speed of light within orders of magnitude of that speed. Although so far this discovery has not been applied to any technological problems, researchers at Harvard suggest that it might make possible revolutions in communications, including possibly a single-photon switch.

The Bose-Einstein Condensate is to matter as the laser is to light—the analogy is precisely that simple. It took twenty years from the invention of the laser until its technological applications began to take off. At first, lasers were considered too difficult to make to ever find use in everyday applications; now, they're everywhere. The characteristics of BECs, specifically their response to sound and other disturbances, are still under investigation, but they hold the promise of many curious developments to come.

Marissa K. Lingen is a freelance writer living in Hayward, CA. Her background is in physics, but she's currently also interested in Finland, early (pre-transistor) computing, and moose.

The BEC Homepage.

An Introduction to BECs.

An article on atom lasers.

12/17/01

"The dominant ... view since the eighteenth century has been that there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and that the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these ‘facts.’”—Thomas Laqueur, “Of Language and the Flesh”

"The king was pregnant."—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”

Traditionally, one of the goals of science fiction is to ask the question, “What if?” In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction is a thought-experiment. It is a chance to bend the rules, and those rules can range from astrophysical laws to technological limitations to sociological norms. Given society's fascination with all things sexual, the mores and traditions surrounding sexuality have been a common area of exploration in science fiction.

Le Guin's essay, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” deals with the portrayal of gender and sexuality. Sexuality is often the focus of the science fiction author's question, “What if?” Yet the extent to which the author can explore this question is limited in a variety of ways. By deconstructing the assumptions that go into science fictional portrayals of “alternate” sexual systems, one discovers that many such systems are in fact rather traditional, and that the speculative exploration is quite limited.

In her essay, Le Guin admits this point with admirable honesty. She discusses her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she attempted to portray a world without male-female identity. An admirable experiment in theory, the result falls short of its goal. After all of Le Guin's work to create an asexual society, the characters tend to slip right back into traditional gender roles. “This is a real flaw in the book,” Le Guin admits.

But Le Guin is still a step ahead of most authors in that she recognizes and admits the difficulties in attempting to question and explore sexuality. Other authors, in the attempt to produce new and alien systems of sex and gender, instead tend to reproduce rather simplistic sexualities whose connection to traditional sex roles is quite transparent. Such is the case in Piers Anthony's Cluster.

Finally, there are authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, who tend to leave biological sex alone and instead concentrate on sexual relationships. But once again, for every new or alternative idea Heinlein explores, there is a strong compensation in the opposite direction. A group marriage, for instance, will be counterbalanced by an exaggeration of traditional gender roles.

So in most cases, science fiction's thought-experiments with sex have fallen short of their goals. One way or another, societal norms have a way of counteracting truly original ideas and pressing them gently but firmly back into the context of a larger, socially accepted system. In essence, science fiction's sweeping vision of the future all too often finds itself bogged down by the past and the present.

On the surface, Piers Anthony's Cluster seems an excellent example of a novel that challenges traditional views of sexuality and explores alternatives. The novel tells the story of Flint, a human from one of Earth's outmost colony worlds. Flint's “aura” is stronger than most humans,’ which allows him to transfer into alien hosts. Throughout the book, Flint jumps from one host to another, giving the reader a chance to explore Anthony's esoteric collection of alien species. In most cases, this exploration revolves around sex, as Flint proceeds to copulate in one way or another in nearly every alien host he inhabits. The book almost serves as a xenophilic Kama Sutra, describing sex acts practiced throughout the galaxy.

But the term “sex” is a slippery one, and it encompasses many separate ideas. For the purpose of this article, I use “sex” to refer to biological sex, the actual genetic and/or physical differences between male, female, and the potential alien “other.” “Gender” refers to one's internal sense of sexual identity, regardless of biology. Finally, “sexual orientation” is used to describe any preference regarding the sex and gender of one's partner(s).

Anthony's experiments begin about a third of the way through the novel, when Flint actually begins to transfer into alien hosts. From the beginning, Anthony seems to throw traditional conceptions of sexuality to the wind by rejecting a two-sex model and the binary opposition that goes with it. This is a powerful move, since the two-sex model has been a basic foundation of belief for several hundred years. Thomas Laqueur describes the evolution from a one-sex model, in which male and female were considered to be biologically similar, to a two-sex model, in which “there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and ... the lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these ‘facts’”. Anthony breaks away from these models and creates a three-sex system that includes, rather than men and women, Impacts, Sibilants, and Undulants.

As an Impact member of this oceanic race, Flint swims along, proceeding on his mission, and accidentally crosses a boundary zone designed to keep the three sexes from intermingling. The reason for this soon becomes clear. For this species, sex is not a voluntary act. The presence of all three sexes causes an overpowering biological urge that culminates in sex. “It was sex—with three sexes ... [t]he three entities were penetrating each other—but not as a man penetrated a woman. Not even as a two-man/one-woman trio. They were interpenetrating."

Even more alien is Flint's discovery that for this species, the sexual act automatically results in reproduction. The actual gender roles played by each sex vary depending on the circumstances. Whoever initiates the sexual act (in this case, Flint) becomes the catalyst. The other two become the sire and the parent, the latter of which actually creates the offspring. (Anthony never makes it clear how the remaining two participants become parent or sire.) As a result, someone who was a parent could easily become a catalyst in another union. As befitting the watery environment, gender identity is truly fluid. Sex only serves to create three possible roles, not to assign an individual irrevocably to any one of those roles.

Even as Anthony begins to explore this sexual system, he has already begun to undermine it as well. One of his primary assumptions about the technology that allows Flint's aura to transfer into other beings is that “the potential host [has] to be sapient and of the same sex.” If this is the case, then how can Flint, a traditionally virile male, transfer into a member of this three-sex species? The underlying implication is that the Impacts are, despite the three-sex system, fundamentally male.

The complications become even more apparent when an enemy agent transfers in to follow Flint. This agent is female, and she takes over the body of Llyana, an Undulant. Once again, little mention is made of the apparent sexual disparity that should, according to Anthony's rules, prevent a two-sex species from transferring into the bodies of these aliens. Llyana must, according to the rules, be the alien equivalent of a female. Because nobody ever transfers into a Sibilant host, this third sex is relegated to the background and tends to be ignored.

Later, Anthony's system continues to disintegrate. Flint, having already experienced the involuntary alien triple-sex, uses his knowledge as a weapon to trap Llyana. He lures her into a forbidden area where he knows they will encounter a member of the third sex, which will again initiate the mating process—and reproduction. This time, because Flint and Llyana arrive together, the third entity—the outsider—becomes the catalyst.

They drew together until the three were a tight, rock-hard ball, with only small portions remaining discrete, and there was appalling pressure. The urgency of completion was so great it seemed that their very substance would sunder.

And it did.... There was an instant of exquisite pain as a gross chunk of flesh was ripped out of his body; then Flint was rushing through the water, incomplete yet completed....

[H]e swam around to follow Llyana. It was a risk, but a necessary one. He had to be sure he had nullified her.

He found her, undulating along with an infant of her kind.

The one factor that Anthony never explains is why Llyana was the one to assume the parental role. Why did she, rather than Flint, end up with the child? Both Flint and Llyana contributed part of their flesh to the creation of the child, but it is Llyana who ends up in the role of the mother.

The implication is that Llyana became the mother because she is female. While gender is fluid for the aliens, the host is still a female, just as Flint remains a male. With no other explanation, the audience is left with the impression that Flint must be the father, the one to contribute to the creation of the child without the burden of commitment, whereas Llyana, being female, would naturally be the one to actually give birth and, in the process, be saddled with the responsibility of raising the child.

The aura-transfer technology thus provides a workable metaphor to describe why Anthony's experiment is a failure. In transferring the aura, one's spirit remains the same even as it animates radically different forms. Likewise, while the outer appearance of this alien sexuality seems startlingly different and novel, at heart, it is still a traditional two-sex system.

Anthony's failure becomes even more pronounced when the reader realizes that it was most likely accidental. Nowhere does Anthony address the basic assumptions that underlie Llyana's relegation to the role of mother. Llyana is simply assumed to be feminine, and throughout the book, she is described in feminine terms. At one point, Flint compares her to his fiancé, Honeybloom—a beautiful and idealistic woman from back home. “Llyana was to Undulants as Honeybloom was to woman."

In Cluster, Anthony has experimented with the surface appearance of sexuality, but he has fallen prey to the same traditional assumptions that Laqueur describes as being centuries old. Ours is a two-sex system, and even when Anthony breaks away from that system, he swiftly returns to it. In the process, he reinforces the idea that sex is binary, for while the description of the alien interaction involves three sexes, the underlying dynamics depend on a two-sex system.

Perhaps the problem was that Anthony tried too hard. In creating an alien system, it is easy to go to extremes, and in the process to overlook more subtle elements. Anthony created a three-sex system, but ignored the basic binary assumptions that formed the basis of that system. In that case, we might find more success in a novel that works, not with aliens, but with humans.

Friday, named after the protagonist of the book, is one of many examples in which Robert Heinlein explores, not an alien system of sexuality, but instead an exaggerated human one. His thought-experiments tend to take the form of prediction and projection. He is famous for his well-planned, carefully described near-future predictions. In discussing sex, he tends to break traditional rules, particularly when it comes to sexual orientation, and creates idyllic, free sexual spaces.

Friday's character serves as a way for Heinlein to explore (and violate) the “rules” of sex in greater detail. In the tradition of science fiction, Friday is a character on the outside looking in; she is an artificial person, a genetically designed human being who was grown and raised in a laboratory. As a result, her views on sex tend to be more practical, objective, and in the end, more mechanical than those of normal human beings.

Heinlein carefully avoids labeling Friday's sexual orientation. While she sleeps with both men and women, she is never identified as bisexual. Indeed, the word does not appear once in the entire novel. At one point, when Friday realizes that she has fallen in love with a woman, she turns to her boss and mentor for guidance. Her boss, with typical Heinlein-ian subtlety, replies, “Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers."

Those monkey customs seem remarkably similar to Gayle Rubin's “charmed circle” of traditionally accepted sexuality which restricts “good” sex to that which is monogamous, relationship-oriented, married, procreative, and heterosexual. Friday, on the other hand, begins the book as a member of an S-group, an extended family with multiple husbands and wives. In fact, she has three of each, and only a few pages after she returns home, she has already had sex with two of those three husbands.

While this approach still seems to incorporate the marriage relationship, that is the only connection to Rubin's circle (and it should be noted that this marriage is far from traditional). Friday also has sex with her wives, and as an artificial person, she is incapable of having children. Furthermore, when her identity as a genetically enhanced human is discovered, she is kicked out of the S-group.

In order to cope with her loss, she heads for the bar, where she encounters Ian Tormey, a pilot she had flirted with in an earlier chapter. She takes him to bed after getting thoroughly drunk. “I got smashed. Just how thorough a job I did on it I did not realize until next morning when I woke up in bed with a man who was not Ian Tormey."

This man turns out to be Ian's brother-in-law, Freddie. Throughout the following chapters, Friday proceeds to establish an informal polyamorous group that includes Ian, Freddie, both of their wives, and several others. In addition to being polyamorous, non-procreative, and bisexual, Friday has also thrown any trace of marriage to the wind, roaming ever farther from Rubin's circle of traditional sexuality.

Throughout the novel, Friday continues to throw traditional sexuality to the winds in favor of making her own rules and loving however, and whomever, she sees fit. Whereas Anthony attempted to create new sexual systems by creating new sexes, Heinlein's approach is more subtle, and more successful. He makes Friday a human female. In fact, Friday is an enhanced female, and could be considered a prototypical woman. Her genetic makeup was “carefully selected to maximize the best traits of H. sapiens."

So Heinlein seems to be demonstrating the fact that females can break out of the traditional rules of sexual orientation, the “monkey customs” of society. Likewise, Friday avoids traditional gender roles as well. She is an athletic woman—a soldier. In many instances, she physically defends the men around her. She is strong, resourceful, completely independent.

All of this makes it much more disappointing when, at the end of the novel, Heinlein undermines everything he has built and relegates Friday to the role of a “traditional” woman. For her final mission, she is asked to smuggle “a modified human ovum.” While she is supposed to smuggle the ovum in a specially concealed pouch, her employer double-crosses her. Her sterility is reversed, and the ovum is implanted in her own womb, the logic being that the child will be safer in the womb than it could possibly be in a mechanical substitute.

Through no fault of her own, Friday has become a mother. The consequences of this betrayal are numerous. Her employer has become the enemy, and Friday must find a way to escape before her ship arrives at the distant planet which is their destination. Friday breaks free of the ship and flees to a colony planet, where, by amazing coincidence and the heavy hand of the author, she is reunited with Ian, Freddie, and her other polyamorous partners.

At this point, she had numerous options. She could have aborted the child, or had it transplanted into another host. She could have waited and given birth to the child, then resumed her previous lifestyle. But instead, she chooses to become “a country housewife.” She marries another escapee from the ship. While Heinlein hints that polyamorous liaisons continue to occur, they are now quietly swept under the rug. Instead, what is emphasized is the idyllic family life and Friday's happiness with her situation.

Geniuses make their own rules on sex? Perhaps ... but in this case, those rules seem to include a period of experimentation that ultimately results in a rather traditional, relatively conservative approach. While Friday experimented with polyamory and Rubin's outer limits of sexuality, Heinlein avoided any authorial condemnation. Indeed, the general overtone was one of approval. But throughout the novel, Friday was never truly happy. She was always insecure and lonely, up until the end. At that point, everything else is swiftly forgotten in the face of Friday's sheer joy at her role as a housewife. Her final words, as she describes her role as a housewife, are, “It's a warm and happy feeling."

Apparently even a genius must conform to society's rules of sexuality, at least if they want to be truly happy. The results of Heinlein's thought-experiment, like Anthony's, are disappointingly restricted. Once again, the science-fictional world of tomorrow is fenced in by the world of today. The reader gets the sense that Heinlein began to explore alternative possibilities, but in the end, he gave in to societal pressure and contributed to the idea that the only truly good sexuality is that which is approved by the dominant majority.

But this was not a novel about sex. Sexuality was merely one piece of the futuristic world Heinlein created for his readers. As such, the more complex and subtle details might have been overlooked. It might be better to examine a novel such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, in which sexual issues are the very basis for the story.

The Left Hand of Darkness differs from the books previously discussed in several ways. First of all, gender and sex are more central to the story than in Anthony's or Heinlein's works. Le Guin wrote this novel because she “want[ed] to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender; in [her] life and in our society.” Whereas Friday and Cluster portray sexuality as the backdrop for a story, in The Left Hand of Darkness, sexuality is the story.

The novel takes place on Winter, a rediscovered colony world on which the human settlers had been genetically altered, resulting in a world of hermaphrodites. However, the colonists are not true hermaphrodites. They spend five-sixths of their lives in an androgynous state in which they display muted characteristics of both sexes. Approximately once a month, individuals enter kemmer. At this point, the sexual drive becomes overwhelming, and the individual must seek out another person who is also entering kemmer.

“When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated ... until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role."

If someone becomes pregnant, they remain in the female role until the child is born. But beyond that one instance, sex is completely random. Someone who is female in one kemmer could easily be male in the next. As in Cluster, sex becomes a fluid term, one that can not be used with any permanence or stability.

The focus of the novel seems to be Le Guin's exploration of fluid sexuality. As a result, the sexual act has a more prominent place in the world of Winter than it does in our own. Everyone receives one week off from work each month for when they are in kemmer. There are public kemmer-houses where sex is freely available. Drugs can be used either to artificially induce kemmer or to postpone it indefinitely.

At its root, what Le Guin's novel accomplishes is the creation of a world in which sexuality exists without the baggage of binary opposition. No one is either male or female. Everyone is both and neither.

One of the results of this unified sexuality is the breakdown of gender identity. No longer is there a unified group of traits that is assumed to correlate with biological sex. Instead, most of the characters described display both “male” and “female” traits. The exception is Genly Ai, a male visitor from another planet. By using Ai as a narrator, Le Guin is able to continuously and effectively question societal assumptions about gender identity. She takes the bordered worlds of male and female and swirls them together into an inextricably intertwined knot.

In describing his landlady, Ai says, “He was so feminine in looks and manner that I once asked him how many children he had.... He had never borne any. He had, however, sired four. It was one of the little jolts I was already getting.” This is a complex portrayal because it contains several contradictory dynamics. On the one hand, we read the novel through the eyes of a gendered character. As a result, he describes Winter and its inhabitants using gendered terminology. A truly androgynous society would be less likely to have described the landlady as feminine. This seems to undermine Le Guin's efforts to avoid oppositional sexuality.

At the same time, it enables her to emphasize the lack of oppositional sexuality. Ai's perspective lets him point out what is different. He examines and ponders the differences rather than accepting and ignoring them, as a native would. In this way, the reader also gets to experience Ai's jolts of culture shock.

In the end, unfortunately, those jolts are not enough to offset Ai's gendered filtration of Winter. Because characters are described in sexed terms, the reader begins to identify them as being of one sex or the other. The exceptions tend to come across as abnormalities rather than as a viable, “normal” pattern of life. Despite the somewhat shocking revelation that Ai's landlady has fathered several children, Ai, and therefore the reader, still tend to regard the landlady as female.

Perhaps this is inevitable. No matter how well-portrayed the world of Winter may be, the readers of The Left Hand of Darkness still come from a dominantly two-sex society. Anything they read will be interpreted in terms of their own experience. As reader response theorists point out, “the audience plays a vitally important role in shaping the literary experience.” Any effort to present a radically different culture will be restricted by the cultural background of the audience.

Still, there is evidence that Le Guin herself fell short of her ideal, and may have helped encourage a two-sexed interpretation of her novel. The most obvious example is the fact that she chose to use male pronouns throughout when referring to the inhabitants of Winter. While the male pronoun is generally accepted to be the more generic pronoun in English, it still conveys a sense of sexual identity, and the reader begins to visualize Winter as a world of men rather than a world of androgynous hermaphrodites.

In her own analysis of the book, Le Guin points out that this was a deliberate choice on her part. Using “he” and “him” was preferable to the attempt to invent a new pronoun.

Still, the novel itself reinforces this all-male interpretation of Winter. This is most apparent through Ai's counterpart, Estraven—one of the androgynous natives of Winter. Despite Le Guin's attempt to incorporate aspects of both sexes into the natives, Estraven tends to take on masculine roles to the exclusion of feminine ones. He engages in strenuous physical activities, hiking across miles of frozen glacier. He is a powerful political figure. He helps break Ai out of prison.

Le Guin admits that she did this because “I was privately delighted at watching, not a man, but a manwoman, do all these things.... But, for the reader, I left out too much. One does not see Estraven ... in any role that we automatically perceive as ‘female': and therefore, we tend to see him as a man.” But even had Le Guin been able to perfectly balance Estraven's male and female activities, one must wonder if her efforts would have been successful.

Even as she analyzes the flaws that handicapped her “thought-experiment,” Le Guin still refers to “male” and “female” activities. She still writes from a two-sex, two-gender perspective. She also conflates sex and gender—the way to portray someone as being of both sexes is to portray them in activities of both genders. The result is a people who are not truly androgynous, but instead seem more like an artificial conglomeration of male and female, man and woman.

This is not to say that Le Guin's efforts are futile. Indeed, she does a remarkable job of exploring sexual issues. For the most part, she is the most successful of the three authors examined. Whereas Heinlein eventually undermines himself and reinforces traditional sexual norms, Le Guin remains consistent throughout the book. Within the limited success of the overall experiment, she often challenges more specific assumptions of sexuality. For instance, because sex in kemmer is inconsistent, monogamy is not a viable option. Likewise, by creating the institution of the kemmer-house, Le Guin brings sex out of the home and into a more publicly acceptable forum. She explores Rubin's outer limits of sexuality in a more effective manner than Heinlein, and she does it almost as an afterthought.

Similarly, whereas Anthony's portrayal of alien sexuality was a relatively transparent projection of human sex, Le Guin's world was much more complex, and the shortcomings more subtle. By ignoring the temptation to create “true aliens,” and instead limiting herself to modified humans, Le Guin was able to focus more specifically on human sexuality. It is only by deconstructing the underlying assumptions of the book that one is able to see where the cultural context of the author/reader erode the effectiveness of Le Guin's experiment.

A theme that unifies these three novels is their attempt to experiment with sexuality. On a slightly deeper level, they are connected through the fact that all three fall short in their own ways: one simply places a mask of “alienness” over traditional human sexuality, another undercuts itself, and the third is limited by the context of both the readers and the author.

So what have these novels accomplished? What is the result of these thought-experiments? It is a common assumption that science fiction tries to predict the future. While this may be the case in some works, it is by no means universal. In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin argues that she is not attempting to predict the future, but instead to describe the present. She is “merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are [androgynous]."

Connect this quote to the fact that the least successful of these three experiments was the one which tried the hardest to escape the bounds of “humanness.” Anthony attempted to create genuine aliens, and the result was strongly human. Le Guin and Heinlein worked with humans. Their results, paradoxically enough, were more effective in breaking the conventions of traditional sexual thinking.

For even though all three novels ultimately fell short of their goals, they still produced interesting results, particularly in the case of Heinlein and Le Guin. The former explored several alternate systems of sexuality. Though these systems were ultimately shunned, their very existence forces the reader to question the assumptions of sexuality. Heinlein may believe in society's rules, but in Friday, he makes it quite clear that they are simply rules, arbitrary and breakable.

Likewise, Le Guin uses The Left Hand of Darkness to question the idea of binary, oppositional sexes. Even though her portrayal falls short of her goal, the question itself leads the reader to question as well. Throughout this article, I have claimed that the context of the author and reader was one of the problems this book faced, that the sexual nature of our society filters and distorts our reading of Le Guin's society. But isn't it possible that this is simultaneously working in the reverse? Because we can read Le Guin's fictional society through the lens of our own, it makes sense that after we put the book aside, that fictional society will in some way affect the lens through which we see our own society.

It seems that science fiction is trapped. Any attempt to explore sexuality is ultimately bound by our own context. Yet within those bounds, it is possible to raise fascinating questions, to challenge assumptions, and ultimately, perhaps to loosen up those very boundaries, making more room for the next writer to explore. The goal is not to answer the question, but instead to simply ask the question. And as those questions are asked and the boundaries continue to loosen, it will be interesting to see the directions that science fiction will follow.

Jim C. Hines lives in Lansing, Michigan. He writes both fiction and non-fiction as the mood strikes. His favorite genre to write is light fantasy, and his least favorite would have to be author bios. His work is featured in Writers of the Future XV and Book Of All Flesh. For more about him, visit his Web site.

Anthony, Piers. Cluster. New York: Avon, 1977.

Heinlein, Robert A. Friday. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Walker and Company, 1969.

—. “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.” Dancing at the Edge of the World. Ed. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Grove Press, 1989. 7-16.

Richter, David H., ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford, 1998.

Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David H. Halperin eds. New York: Routledge, 1993. 3-44.

12/31/01

Freeman Dyson was born in England in 1923 and came to the United States after World War II. He has since spent close to fifty years researching physics, and studied with J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. Dyson was involved with the Orion Project, which attempted to send manned spacecraft to Mars. He has written a variety of works interpreting science for the general public, including Origins of Life, Imagined Worlds, Weapons and Hope, Disturbing the Universe, and From Eros to Gaia. As the titles of his books suggest, Dyson's writing is poetic, his interests far-ranging, his fundamental attitude one of profound optimism. Through the course of his career Dyson has received a long list of honors, including a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship to study physics (1947), a Wolf Prize for accomplishments in physics (1981), and the 1996 Lewis Thomas Prize, an award honoring scientists for their artistic achievements. Wired magazine has called Dyson “our deepest and most trustworthy futurist."

I was excited when I heard Freeman Dyson was coming to town, but frankly, I expected to be alone in that. I was wrong. There was a quiet but perceptible buzz in the weeks before Dyson came to town, and a bit of tension between Western Washington University, which was sponsoring his appearance as part of their Distinguished Lecture Series, and Bellingham, Washington, the surrounding town. Series organizers made sure students had access to tickets first, and released only a limited number of these (free) tickets to the general public; apparently, in the past, townspeople had snapped up all the tickets, leaving no room for the university students to attend.

And again, I was excited, because I knew who Freeman Dyson was. I knew him as the author of a number of other intelligent, accessible works on science, as well as countless scientific papers. I cherished Dyson for his commitment to projects near and dear to my heart, such as space exploration, but even more I appreciated the bravura daring of his mind. It was Freeman Dyson who observed that an advanced civilization requires two things to keep growing: space and power, and envisioned, in response, the Dyson sphere, a hypothetical artifact in which an advanced civilization builds a sphere that entirely encloses their sun, multiplying the surface area available to them for building many thousandfold and addressing their power needs by harnessing the entire energy output of their sun. Amazing in itself, the Dyson sphere quickly moved through science fiction, spawning many projects in response, including Larry Niven's Ringworld, which addressed many of the same needs but simplified construction immensely. (For example, you can spin a ringworld to get artificial gravity, whereas you must generate gravity in a Dyson sphere.) In short, I was excited because I knew who Dyson was, but didn't believe that the general population could.

Apparently, I was wrong. All tickets for the Freeman Dyson lecture were gone within 30 minutes of the time they became available; I wasted some time trying to negotiate standing room for an interested third party later.

The talk was scheduled for 6:30 PM. When I arrived at 6:10, the auditorium, which held thousands of people, was completely full on the ground floor, and the only seats available were midway back in the balcony. There was a buzz in the crowd, which looked to be mostly undergraduates; they sounded like they were waiting for a good concert to start. I later learned that the university had done a fine job of prepping the students, with months of publicity, on campus meeting with Dyson, and a strong push for instructors to link class activities to the visit.

The Pacific Northwest is known as a hotbed of political liberalism, and it became obvious throughout the evening that it was the lecture's specific topic, “Technology & Social Justice,” that had drawn most of the audience. Any time that Dyson articulate a view that could be claimed as liberal, he was greeted with intense applause. However, several times he spoke with even greater insight and compassion, but without voicing a recognizably liberal position, and was greeted with confused silence.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself. The evening started on time. A university representative delivered a brief biography that accented Dyson's background and summarized his career—and answered the question of how Western got him to come to campus. It turns out that his son, Lyn Dyson, teaches for Western Washington (in the college of education), and Dyson was lured more by his son and grandson's presence in the town than by anything special about the school.

For indeed neither the general topic, which has long been a concern of Dyson's, or the specific talk, seemed adapted for this particular audience. When Dyson took the stage, springing up the steps two at a time in a fashion that belied his recent retirement, he took it as a platform, as another chance to talk about issues that have consumed him his entire career. Early in the talk he stated that he was there to talk about two questions. First, is it possible to have a high technology civilization without aggravating the gap between rich and poor? And second, is there a practical way to combine increased technology with social justice?

To address these questions, he delivered eight case studies, incidents in which conscious attempts had been made to bring about social change for the better by means of technological enhancement. The first of these, an intricate tale of the “African groundnut scheme,” in which the plant Americans know as the peanut was introduced to Tanzania in an attempt to address regional hunger and economic need, established a couple of expectations which Dyson spent the remainder of the evening fulfilling. First and decidedly not least, he is a fine speaker. He spent his early years in London, and the traces of an accent combine with precise wording, a careful cadence, and considerable dry wit to produce complete control of his audience. Not the least of these qualities as a speaker was his willingness and ability to educate without condescending; each generalization was illustrated, each principle followed by examples and analogies—and again, often jokes.

But second, it established that Dyson meant “technology” in its deepest sense, not its common usage. Dyson used the term in the sense of its original Greek original, in which any techne,—a body of knowledge, or established craft or practice—is a technology. In this sense, he spoke late in the speech of the respective reigns of “green technology” and “gray technology.” Green technology is his term, not specifically for technology which is ecologically friendly, but rather for techne that is based in biology; Dyson spoke of green technology as producing the first five thousand years of human civilization, during which time human civilization centered on the village. Gray technology, on the other hand, is based on chemistry and physics, and produced the most recent five thousand years of human civilization. Beginning with the smelting of metals, gray technology brought humanity into cities.

Throughout the talk Dyson implicitly accented the need to redress the balance of power between these two loci of civilization. At the end of the speech he explicitly called for such a redistribution of power, so that once again the village would be the center of human life. And here is one of many places where my reaction parted from the bulk of the audience's. Dyson made this point near the close of his formal speech, calling for a rebirth of green technology, and seeing its foreshadowing in things such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep. When Dyson spoke approvingly of this, the audience applauded. I waited, but Dyson didn't provide anywhere near as complex or consistent a set of reasons when dealing with ethical questions as when dealing with technological ones

But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. Dyson's discussion of the African ground nut scheme, which was historically informed and culturally astute, showed his ability to synthesize lessons from history, economics, sociology, and anthropology, as well as farming, and to treat them all as techne fit for solving problems. His flexibility was impressive, as was his willingness to think in truly independent ways.

Part of this flexibility comes from his own acknowledged membership in two communities that are too often distinct: that in which science and technology are seen as goods in themselves, and that in which social justice is pursued, with little or no concern for science. As someone in both communities, Dyson repeatedly reflected on the compatibility of ethics and intellectual freedom. He brought home the complexity of this question through sharing a number of further case studies, each of which were selected to highlight some lesson or principle.

Each of his summaries was cogent and relevant to his guiding questions; each offered Dyson's audience another chance to follow him through a complex interdisciplinary path in search of ethical truths. As he spoke, one thing that became desperately clear was how fundamental his use of technology in its original meaning was. Rather than equate “technology” with current high technology, such as computers, Dyson used it to mean any condensed form of human understanding, from hammers and screwdrivers to principles of social organization. What's more, at no time in his stories did a single science or specific technology provide an answer to anything, and, most often, when someone did attempt to address a complex question with a single science, they failed. Often these failures were horrendous, as in his second case study, Mao's Great Leap Forward and the millions it left dead in its wake. Without ever saying so directly, Dyson undercut the arrogance of the fanatic, the vested interest, and the overly rigid. Such tools, he indicated, were at best wasteful, and at worst deadly.

Such judgments offer clues to the slippery complexity of Dyson's own politics. He is clearly opposed to the massive centralized planning that has characterized many socialist nations. However, he made it clear that for members of developing countries, both free market projects of industrialization and altruistically-minded human aid programs have been experienced in the same fashion. Both have imposed solutions from the outside on local situations without full knowledge of local customs, or, even of local geology, climate, or biological constraints. If pressed, I would characterize Dyson's politics as a sort of enlightened cybernetic web. He acknowledges the presence of and need for both a world economy and a global information network, but accents the sovereignty of local communities and the need to respect regional beliefs and practices. In theory that sounds pretty good. In practice, despite Dyson's detailed examples, I'm not sure how this works as a policy.

While all of Dyson's case studies were exciting to hear about, and as rich with possibilities for truly wonderful science fiction, several of them deserve especially close attention. The first of these was a story about Dyson's own involvement in an attempt by President Carter to provide affordable housing for the poor. Specifically, Dyson was part of a group assembled by HUD and charged with finding out how high-tech materials and processes could be used to produce cheaper housing. He went into fair detail about how he and the other scientists called on expert after expert to inform themselves on the state of the field, and how they spent a great deal of time developing alternatives to common practice. Upon examination, using new materials didn't look promising for economic reasons, so they focused on discovering more efficient methods to assemble existing materials. And they found them. They blocked out a number of ways to fabricate housing materials differently, and especially more efficiently. They established that they could in fact cut the cost of housing substantially, and then, when they were done and quite proud of themselves, they found, in Freeman Dyson's own words, “that they had reinvented the mobile home."

After the waves of laughter subsided—half of it surprise, half of it appreciation for Dyson's humility in including his own work among his examples of failed projects—Dyson went on to spell out the implications of his story. They, and he, had failed in part due to the scientific arrogance about which he had already warned us. That he himself fell prey to it was a lesson on just how pervasive this arrogance is. They were the scientists; surely they could do a better job than the market! He was careful to indicate that this assumption was wrong, and that the mobile home industry had already done a better and cheaper job in all of the areas that the group produced proposals. By implication, Dyson was indicating that it is always possible to ignore “native” knowledge, and to abstract erroneously from a recalcitrant specific problem, even in one's own land. He closed this account by summarizing the socio-cultural reasons mobile homes would not solve the problem of housing the poor, and accented that scientific solutions must always fit existing cultural contexts to fully solve problems of social justice.

Dyson followed this failure in addressing the problems of the poor with a summary of Habitat for Humanity, which succeeds without any particular technological advancement, then with other case studies about solar panels powering lights in Asian villages and computer networks in South African schools, the micro-credit banking of the Grameen Bank, and closed with an account of his recent trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Several themes ran through it all: Dyson's deep desire to alleviate pain and suffering, his respect for other individuals doing so on any level, from the level of loaning money to buy a hammer (literally) to making global decisions about the proper future for bio-engineered plants, and his desperate desire to bring knowledge and ethical action together.

Dyson closed his talk in a surprising fashion, but one entirely appropriate for a scientist; he decided that there was not sufficient information to answer either of his opening questions. He did, however, state several lessons that could be drawn from all of his case studies. The first of these was that if one compares top-down projects and bottom-up projects, bottom-up projects have a much higher rate of success. He drew several dry observations about the American tendency to favor top-down solutions, but stopped before actually pointing fingers. I, on the other hand, could not help but see that he was pointing out how often economic success and military might had led us into policies that were anti-democratic, anti-freedom, and anti-community; it was as if Dyson was critiquing the pull towards an imperial perspective that accompanies any great power, be it political or scientific.

His second lesson was also appropriate for a scientist; he observed that step-by-step experimentation with trial and error built in tended to work, while single schemes intended to resolve every aspect of a problem always failed. This too fits a sort of cybernetic model of politics, and sets Dyson quietly in opposition to many social trends. Americans are impatient people, and most countries have terrible difficulty establishing temporary laws, just as most politicians find themselves unable to propose partial solutions. By default, many of Dyson's successful examples must be local, and/or private; only those organizations can act in accord with his lessons in the realm of realpolitick.

His third and final lesson was that collaboration is always necessary. To apply a high quality of technology well, he argues, one needs local economic initiatives. And from this lesson Dyson slid quickly into conceptually swampy ground. He abandoned his more measured stance and began to make generalizations. Two of these were that the free market ideology was as dangerous as socialism, and that ethics must rule our decisions, and ethics dictates that a gap between rich and poor was wrong.

The audience again roared with applause at these two points; I was and remain puzzled. What do these statements mean? To take the first, if it is true, how would one organize an economy? What system of distribution is an alternative to both capitalism and collectivism? Most of Dyson's solutions assumed a right to property. Some used government funds; usually these were applied locally. I found and find myself paralyzed as I attempt to apply this lesson. Vote for or against a bill? Refuse to vote? I know what a Dyson sphere would look like; I don't know what a Dyson society would look like, except that there would not be a gap between rich and poor, and it would tend to be organized on a local level. Did we have a hard scientist who was an anarchist? That seemed unlikely.

His second pronouncement, that ethics must guide our decisions, seems inarguable. except when you apply it back to his case studies. Mao was seeking to destroy the gap between rich and poor; he was seeking to equalize wealth. Were these not ethical goals, by Dyson's standards? In other words, Dyson's bravura performance as a visionary scientist seemed a bit myopic here. Surely he was not suggesting that it was easy to establish a shared ethical code? Or that science offered a single ethical answer?

But by the time I could formulate these questions, dozens of others were already in the queue to be read to Dyson. These ranged from in-jokes about his family there in town, to his interest in baseball, to how to resolve the recent terrorist challenge to America. Here Dyson showed another reason that he deserves my respect: his bravery. Some of the questions were very pointed; the audience clearly preferred one answer to another. In all cases, Dyson spoke directly and clearly. You may like his answers; I laughed with pleasure at the way he turned the assumptions of the ecological activists against them. You may not like his answers; I found myself wincing at his proposed solution to the question of peace between Israel and Palestine, which seemed both naîve and arrogant. But in all cases, he offered answers that managed to be honest, that communicated complex ideas with clarity and grace, and that energized his listeners. Regardless of the immediate emotional response he may have triggered, he always made his listeners think, and, more importantly, helped them to think well.

As I left the auditorium, I reflected on the possibility that Freeman Dyson may be all that I saw, and be even subtler than I thought. Maybe he knew that I and other listeners would surge to classify his ideas within existing systems, and that we would be all too willing to surrender our intellectual autonomy and let the scientist tell us what to do. That way, as each of Dyson's case studies demonstrated, led to disaster. Instead, what he offers is hope, or better, a myriad of hopes, all of which were freely available to us so long as we were in there working along with him, negotiating solutions and voicing our needs. Freeman Dyson made it seem possible to collaborate in the creation of wonder, and that is a great gift indeed.

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.

12/3/01

November always dragged around the station, but today was one dead Sunday. Not one car pulled off the interstate all morning. Nothing hit the drive but a thin steady rain, puddling slow rainbows in the oil. Me and Harnie just tilted back our chairs against the cigarette rack, watched the monster movie, and waited for the game to start. The big flying turtle was about set to barbeque downtown Tokyo when the drive bell rang, and up sluiced a car so damn gorgeous it hurt to look at it. A ‘37 Buick Roadmaster it was, painted a red so rich it was nearly black, that straight eight engine whispering like a lover while teardrops of rain rolled down the chrome grill.

Out climbed this tall fellow, dressed like God's grandpa done up for a wedding or a funeral. His skin was brown as a buckwheat cake, with creases deep as drainage ditches. Took a mighty long stretch of sweat and toil, love and birth and dying, to carve a face like that. He flexed his shoulders, then rolled his neck till it cracked. He pulled a pack of Camel straights from inside his vest and flipped one out.

“Got a light?” His voice was deep and warm, half gravel, half honey.

I tossed him a pack of matches through the open door; he caught it left-handed, then flipped it open, folded over a match, and struck it with his thumb.

“This the town with the dead fiddler?” he said after a long drag on the smoke.

“You might say so,” I said, ignoring the look Harnie gave me. Nobody talked about her; I wondered how this fellow had even heard about her. “Ain't a fiddle, though. It's a cello, like in the symphony."

The stranger shrugged. “Close enough."

“She ain't d-dead, neither,” Harnie said. “M-more sleeping, like."

He puffed out a wreath of smoke. Then another. “Let's go wake her up,” he said.

“You best not try, mister,” I said. “She been sleeping for thirty some year."

The man grinned. “I'm feeling lucky today. C'mon, boys, let's go."

“Mister, I sure hope you ain't as lucky as you feel. Woman like that, best not woke at all."

“You scared?” the stranger said.

“Damn right I am,” I said. “You'd be too, if you knew."

“I just want to see her, is all."

“She ain't no damn tourist attraction. You wanna play tourist, get back in that car of yours and drive on up to Graceland. North on 55, three, four hours."

“I'm no tourist,” the stranger said. “You can't spook me.” He stepped over the sill through wreaths of smoke, and leaned against the rack of pork rinds.

“Look here, mister,” I said. “You see how Harnie ain't got no right hand?"

“M-muh-” Harnie said. “M-my f-f—"

“Take it easy, Harnie,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder. “I'll tell it."

Harnie scowled and grabbed the remote to turn down the sound of Tokyo roasting. Then he tilted back and scowled at me again.

“Me and Harnie was just kids,” I said, turning back to the stranger. “Thirteen, fourteen, know what I mean? Harnie fell in love with the lady the day she come to town."

“Y-you too."

“Sure,” I said.

“When was that?"

“Back in the late sixties,” I said. “Don't remember the date."

“The d-day they sh-shot Dr. K-King,” Harnie said. “She was b-beautif-ful."

“Sure she was,” I said. “Skin like the moon, hair black with red highlights."

“Like y-yer car,” Harnie said.

I hadn't noticed that. “Guess so,” I said. “Anyway, she was wearing this long white dress kinda thing, and at first we figured she was just another of them hippie gals hitchhiking to the Mardi Gras, come to sleep in the park."

“L-lots of hippies,” Harnie said.

“Sure,” I said. “They was everywhere back then. But this ‘un was different. She took that cello out of her case, opened up her legs, and snugged it up against her."

“She was s-so-so b—"

“Yeah,” I said. “Harnie and I was on our bikes, just watching her wrap her fingers across the strings. She sighed just then, and looked up at Harnie and me with them green eyes of hers."

“B-blue,” Harnie said.

“They was green, Harnie,” I said.

“B-bl—"

“Dammit, Harnie..."

“What happened next?” the fellow said.

I looked down at the counter. All that smoke of his was stinging my eyes. “She smiled at us."

“Ah,” the fellow said. The rain whispered steady on the concrete, the smell of its mist cutting through Camel straights and wasted fuel. “Ah."

“Then she sighed again, her smile melted away, and she shut her eyes. She just sat there, cello snuggled between her knees, and didn't move at all. Not then, nor ever again neither."

“What about his hand?"

“I-I-I—"

“Dammit, Harnie,” I said. “Don't get all riled. I'm telling it."

Harnie blushed and nodded.

“Well, me and Harnie just sat there watching her—heck, we wasn't moving no more than she was. We sat there all afternoon, watching folks not see her."

“They st-still don't, m-mostly,” Harnie said.

“Come nightfall, Harnie and I was just about fit to bust. We walked up to her, as close as close can be."

“H-h-heard her b-breathe."

“Yeah,” I said. “I reached out and nudged her shoulder, but she didn't move. Then Harnie laid his hand on hers, the one she had wrapped round the neck of the cello."

“But she still didn't move,” the stranger said.

“Right,” I said. “She didn't move no matter what we did. Finally, though, Harnie reached down and plucked one of the strings. Just a little pluck like. Just to see.” Boy, my mouth was dry, rain or no rain. “Reach me a soda, would ya mister?"

He went over to the cooler and grabbed three Big Shot pineapple sodas. He handed one to me and slid another over to Harnie. Then he reached inside his vest again and laid a fiver on the counter. “My treat,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

He popped the top and took a pull at the soda. “Ahh,” he sighed in satisfaction. “I've missed this. Can't get ’em where I been."

“Where you from?” I asked.

“Round here,” he said. “But I been away."

“Whereabouts?"

He smiled then, a sad smile. “What happened when Harnie plucked that string?"

I took a pull at the soda. “Not sure I can explain it. It was just a little plunk, like. One quiet little note. You couldn't hardly hear it. But that sound cut me to the heart.” I took another pull at my soda. “I can still hear it. I lay in bed, nights, staring at the ceiling, listening to it."

“And Harnie's hand?"

“Harnie's hand ... well, it just lit up. At first it was like he was holding a flashlight to his palm. Then it was shining, painful bright, till finally it was showering sparks like a Roman candle. Didn't smell like it was burning or nothing, though. It smelled like, I don't know..."

“Flowers,” Harnie whispered.

“And all the time that fountain of light was eating away his hand, Harnie was laughing. Just laughing."

“Didn't it hurt?” the stranger asked.

“Flowers,” Harnie whispered again.

“And nobody even noticed!” I said. “They'd just walk right past us—Harnie's hand spitting a rooster-tail of sparks ten foot over our heads—and they'd say ‘howdy, boys’ without a second glance. We both stood there staring at Harnie's arm till the stump sizzled out, and quite a spell longer too. Finally we headed home."

“What did your folks say about Harnie's arm?"

“Our daddy been gone since we was babies. And Mama acted like Harnie ain't never had but the one arm."

“Ev-ev'rybody,” Harnie said.

“Sure,” I said. “We asked Doc Harrison, he said Harnie was born that way. Pretty soon we stop asking. And they see the lady sit there, day in, day out, but don't think nothing of it."

Stranger drained his soda. “That's quite a tale."

“Ain't no tale,” I said angrily. “It's the God's honest truth."

He locked eyes with me. “I believe you,” he said. And I could see he did.

“Okay, then,” I said.

“I'll ask one last time,” the stranger said. “Take me to her."

I looked at Harnie, and his face had that look.

“All right,” I said.

It was raining hard by now, but I didn't mind. I locked up the station and we piled into his Buick. There was plenty room for all of us up front. It was only three blocks to the little park downtown. I wished it was longer; I coulda rode all day in that gorgeous antique Roadmaster. It rode like a dream.

He pulled up to the curb right next to her bench. Then he climbed out and, without even glancing over at her, walked around to the trunk. While he was rummaging around back there, Harnie and I walked over to the lady. She was so beautiful. So quiet.

Then, with three quick snick-snacks of clasps flipping open on a case, the man pulled a National Steel guitar from the trunk. He walked over, sat down beside the woman, and settled the guitar in his lap. He reached out and ran one calloused fingertip along her cheek.

She sighed, and opened her eyes. They were green, just like I remembered.

“Sorry I'm late,” the stranger said, and from his vest pocket pulled out a pick.

Copyright © 2001 H. Courreges LeBlanc

H. Courreges LeBlanc expatriated from New Orleans in 1980, and underwent Clarion in 1996. He has sold stories (several of which explore his cajun heritage) to Terra Incognita, Tales of the Unanticipated, and Darkling Plain. He is a founding member of both the Wyrdsmiths and Eight Minutes to Wapner. He lives in south Minneapolis. For more about him, see his Web site.

Shelton Bryant is an artist living in North Carolina. He does work for alternative progressive magazines which includes the Independent Political News and The Cultural Survival Quarterly. His art was previously featured in a Strange Horizons gallery. To see more of his work, visit his Web site.

12/10/01

In memory of my Clarion suitemate Tina M. Spell, 1967-2001.

Part 1 of 2

Marley was dead on her feet to begin with, but she still ran all the way from the underground parking lot up the stairs of the Wyndham-Mark hotel. Why had Curtis picked today, of all days, to end up in the principal's office? He'd already proven he could manage it any time.

The sight of the Lamar Ballroom doors gave her the energy for one last sprint, but a security guard grabbed her arm and yanked her to a stop. She cried out in frustration.

She tried to reach for her First Contact Team identification, but another guard helped the first hold her immobile. In the party room, a salsa band swung into a well-meaning attempt at “Hail to the Chief.” A childish fury blazed through Marley. Her delinquent son's antics had cost her not only hours off work and her dinner, but her chance to see the President in RL.

The ballroom doors slammed open. More security scurried out, reminding Marley of the time Curtis poked a fire-ant hill with a stick. In the middle strode President David Fordham, hero of the Middle East war and protector of North America. Marley shrank against the wall and held her breath, as much to avoid his angry glare as to allow passage.

In seconds, Fordham and his swarm disappeared. Her arms freed, Marley displayed her credentials, but the guards had lost interest and waved her into the holiday party. Her heart pounding with the merengue beat of “White Christmas,” Marley, suddenly weak, leaned against the door. She shouldn't have run. She hadn't regularly exercised in a year. For that matter, how long had it been since she'd eaten? She remembered only half a donut around dawn. Now that the anger, shame, and fear she'd been feeding on had seeped away, she became aware of her stomach, painfully constricted around a vast vacuum. She felt too wobbly to walk, but she had to eat immediately.

She set out towards the most likely location for solid refreshments: behind the biggest cluster of people at the far wall. The party looked like the inside of Curtis's anthill. Half the guests were streaming past Marley towards the door; the other half jiggled about in fierce Brownian motion, careening off each other and into the 12-foot Christmas tree.

The ballroom had shed its workday character as the FCT's conference room and blossomed into diversity-crazed holiday splendor. Marley tried not to laugh as she passed under Chinese wedding symbols hanging from Christmas lights looped around garlands of Hanukkah dreidels and Kwanzaa corn. Token Solstice moons and stars littered the ceiling.

As she struggled upstream through the crowd, she heard scraps of conversation like chittering insects on a Houston summer evening.

“Can you believe it?"

“Is it safe to stay?"

“You can't tell what they'll do."

Startled, Marley looked around for the Eridanians. The aliens stood, as serene as ever, exchanging greetings with the European Anschluss Ambassador at the opposite end of the room from the band. People seemed to be giving them a wide berth that had nothing to do with the military guard surrounding the festivities like a menacing Nutcracker army.

“Don't they look evil?"

“Just like bugs, aren't they? Great big carnivorous bugs."

Marley flinched. The Eridanians had been called “Bugs” since their first transmissions had arrived, nearly two years ago. Beings with six limbs, huge eyes, and flat, noseless faces could expect nothing else from humans. The individuals who arrived in May had been dubbed Red, Green, and Blue, based on slight tinges to the gray skin. Marley was embarrassed when the Eridanians adopted the names too, but she refused to call them Bugs. Naturally, Curtis did so when he was annoyed, which was whenever she saw him these days.

She couldn't see any of her First Contact Team co-workers among the politicos, glitterati, and others who'd cadged an invitation to the event. For some reason, the crowd's excitement over the Eridanians’ first public reception had turned to fear, but since it didn't look like the Eridanians had suddenly started eating the guests, Marley continued her quest. She couldn't see the food tables, but as she approached the main cluster of people, the holiday smells strengthened into something nasty. The chatter around her crescendoed.

“What's the President going to do?"

“He ought to blow them back into space."

“Let's leave before they get violent."

Marley had just snagged a plate when the head of her department, the eminent and publication-encrusted Dr. Winthrop Scofield, appeared in front of her. “Where were you? We needed you."

Though she knew exactly how Dr. Scofield manipulated language to control the hired help, Marley became tongue-tied whenever he spoke to her. She always felt hardly more than a translator. “I had to ... my son ... I thought you were going to translate."

He scowled at her. Wondering what had gone wrong, she bit her lip. Party amenities should have been within the scope of Dr. Scofield's skills, even with the Southern drawl that lay over all his speech.

“First thing tomorrow, I'm putting you on High Eridanian.” He didn't wait for an answer.

“Merde, not High Eridanian.” They'd only begun to crack Blue and Green's native language. The grammatical structures seemed totally different and the words layered with extra meanings. Marley felt sick as the odors threatened to overwhelm her. She lunged towards the food.

“Hey, Marley, you missed the fireworks.” Kevin Bates, Army xenobiologist, blocked her way to the meatballs. He carried his omnipresent camcorder under one arm to leave his hands free for macaroons.

Marley didn't even like coconut, but she eyed the cookies longingly. She shifted in her long-unused party shoes, now pinching like a vise. “What happened?"

He tossed one handful of sweets into his mouth and pulled out the camcorder. “Not real sure,” he mumbled around the macaroons. “I mean, it's all here—” He handed her an earphone and pointed to the viewer, where a tiny President Fordham, still recognizable by his granite chin, stumbled through a greeting in Eridanian. The Eridanians chittered together.

Marley covered her eyes.

Kevin asked, “What are they saying, word wizard?"

“They're trying to understand why our leader would address them in half obscenity, half nonsense,” she snapped.

Red used the Eridanian language that Marley knew best. “I will speak to him. I have heard such speech at our lodgings by those who attend our comfort.” The alien switched to AmStandard and said, “And the same thing with your mother!"

Kevin shook his head. “That went over big. So how come you understood so quickly? Took the others fifteen minutes to come up with anything."

Marley flushed. “The language the Eridanians chose to teach us is tonal. It helps to have a tonal native language, like Chinese."

Kevin glanced at her face. “Regular melting pot, aren't you? Funny, you don't look..."

“More of a gumbo, actually, since my father's family comes from all over the Caribbean. My mother's from Ohio, but her mother was the daughter of a missionary and one of his Chinese converts. Grandmother always spoke Chinese with me."

“We need you on the front line. Should have finished that doctorate, baby girl."

“I was a single mother with a young child to raise,” retorted Marley. Finishing a terminal degree in communication science had seemed a pointless mockery when Josh left her for a woman who really understood him. “What else happened? We have translation snafus all the time."

“Usually not with the whole world watching. Look at Fordham, ready to burst. Then old Blue steps out..."

The largest alien stretched out his arms and declared in fluted AmStandard, “I am Blue, child of they who smote their enemies with such force that they never lived again, but lie buried, children and adults, in the sands of Eridan."

Marley gasped. Even through the party din, she could hear the swell of voices on the recording.

The President drew himself straighter. He put on his Commander-in-Chief look and glared at the aliens for a long moment. Then he said, “I am David, he who drove back the terrorists that now lie buried in the Eastern sands.” As usual, he worked in having seen the World Trade Center collapse with his brother inside, his subsequent change of college plans to include West Point, his Middle Eastern war record, and his vow to defend America against all threats.

“All threats,” he repeated as he glared at each alien. “No matter where they originate."

“It kept going downhill from there.” Kevin sighed. “He never did want the Eridanians here."

“But he did! He insisted! He's tried to keep other countries off the FCT!"

“Only because he's Colonel Fordham, defender of North America, and he wouldn't trust anybody else to save us. Remember those first transmissions? Everybody's all excited about the first interstellar visitors on their way, and they start putting the First Contact Team together?"

“Yes.” Marley felt tingly, remembering her thrill at being chosen.

“Well, they formed the Planetary Defense Team at the same time. Why do you think they based FCT in Houston?"

“NASA. Right? They'd been preparing for interstellar contact for years.” Marley's voice wobbled under Kevin's derisive smile.

“Also, it would be easy to blast Houston into the Gulf if the visitors weren't friendly. It's a long way from the capital and all the important people. After all, they just got it rebuilt from the Aughties attacks."

Marley shuddered, remembering those fearful days. “But they've never made an aggressive move. They seem to like us."

“That's what Captain Cook's men thought when they met the New Zealanders. Had to send another group to clean up leftover body parts after the barbecue."

“That was a misunderstanding.” Marley pushed forward close enough to see the tables, loaded with holiday bounty. Her mouth watered.

“I'll say. The natives asked for Crispy with Extra Spices.” Kevin snapped the viewer closed and finished the last of his macaroons. “Anyway, if you can do something to help us get to the new year, better do it quick."

“Me?"

“Oh, and that liaison guy from Washington wants to see you. He's running around trying to put Band-Aids on the situation."

“Stephen Grimsky? He wants to see me?"

“Yeah, he was over by the Bugs. You know what he said? The President wants to see the results of my ‘mind-reading’ experiments. Mind-reading! I told him we're mapping brain functions and exploring emotional perception, so then he wanted to know if the Bugs ever get angry. I told him, ‘Initial preliminary emotional data looks promising for correlation but must be confirmed by empirical analysis.’ And this is how these people make decisions? About our lives, I might add."

Finally they had a clear shot at the food. Marley could almost taste the meatballs. She fumbled with silver tongs as she said, “At least your bosses don't want you to kill the aliens to get a closer look, like Martin Frobisher did with the Inuits."

“Yes, they do, but the President said to talk to them first.” Kevin scooped up the meatball Marley was aiming for and waved to her as he slid back into the crowd.

A server swooped through and collected the meatball tray.

Marley slammed the tongs on the table and looked around. The other food lines snaked most of the way across the room. Her lip quivered. She moved away in the only direction without competition: towards the Eridanians. She understood the comments around her better now.

“They're probably bringing their army."

“You think we'll attack them on their planet?"

“The President must have been planning for this."

She smiled at Red, Green, and Blue, and they solemnly nodded back. They'd been drilled on nodding. An eddy in the crowd brought Marley a sight to gladden her heart: Stephen Grimsky, Special Attaché to the President. A worried frown cut into his delectable brow, but he still managed to smile. Looking into his Caribbean-blue eyes, Marley forgot to breathe. It was amazing, too, how much better her legs felt, like warm honey soothing the veins. She wiggled her toes, happy to feel them again.

Stephen touched her arm to bring her aside. “The President is extremely disturbed. He's been cautious all along, but that hostile display earlier...” He ran his hair through his sculpted black curls. “He's never been completely convinced that those deaths during the landing were an accident, you know. And that speech ... they've never talked like that before."

“I'm sure...” Marley stopped. She wasn't at all sure.

“The media's full of dire predictions and the usual conspiracy stories. They're wondering what the government's doing to protect us. Yesterday I saw a tabloid shot of Blue with the Pope, with the headline ‘Can the Pope Save Us?’ The President feels his responsibility keenly; he's the one who let them land. After Christmas, if they remain peaceful until then, he's going to insist that they leave unless he has some clear evidence of their good will. We're depending on all of you on the FCT for that. In the meantime, we're going to show them our strength and our good intentions. I understand they're interested in our ‘winter festival.’”

Marley glanced at the trio. “Ever since they saw the decorations in August."

“I'm arranging trips to some traditional activities, starting tomorrow night. The Bugs have asked for you as interpreter."

“Why me?"

“They say you most nearly reproduce their language. Quite an honor, wouldn't you say?"

Marley's voice squeaked. “But my son's in a Living Nativity tomorrow night."

Stephen nodded. “That's a good holiday function. We'll put it first on the schedule.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder and flashed a smile before he escaped into the masses.

A server passed by with several trays, and Marley grabbed an egg roll. She munched to “Deck the Halls Cha Cha Cha,” as grease dripped down her fingers and onto her only silk blouse. “Happy Humbug,” she muttered toward Stephen's broad back. The end of the world was coming, and she had to work overtime.

Marley drove home as fast as she dared, anxious to hold Curtis close. She turned on the radio in hopes of soothing music, but all channels were covering the President's first meeting with the Eridanians and his abrupt departure. The commentators had even less material than the party guests, but they had plenty to offer in past coverage of Colonel, later President, Fordham. His war record. His ending the war—on American terms. The background of violence on home ground, shifting borders and allies, and a loss of faith in the West's supreme technology. The clamor for a forbidden third term.

Not electing President Fordham would be like firing your father. As a small boy, Curtis had come home from an encounter with a school bully and sobbed, “I'm telling President Fordham!"

Fordham's mighty declarations—"I renew the pledge I made to you when I took office: you will be safe in your home, safe in your work, safe in your play from any who dare to oppose us. Wherever Americans walk, they'll walk in safety"—had the opposite effect on Marley, and she urged the old car faster. If the world were going up in smoke, she wanted to go out holding the only family she had.

Curtis wasn't home. Marley substituted the cat instead, clutching the old tabby in a vociferously unappreciated hug. In the ensuing struggle, she noticed her wrist phone glowing softly with a recorded message that she'd missed at the fear-soaked party. Her most dependable terror—a call from the police—flared. She held her breath until she heard, “Mom, where are you? If you're not here by the time the last parent's gone, Bob Chang will bring me in the church van."

She slapped her forehead. How could she have forgotten to pick up Curtis after the Living Nativity rehearsal?

When he'd announced last summer that he wanted to attend the Church of Light and Harmony with his friends, she'd rejoiced because (1) he had friends; (2) they went to church; and (3) though it was a far cry from St. Agnes Catholic Church, where she'd been terrorized into morality, at least it wasn't Church of the Satanic Vampires.

Deep in her conditioning lay the notion that families went to church together, so she went too, when she didn't have to work. The first week she'd heard a sermon on miracles being a shift in perception. When she'd asked Curtis the topic of his Sunday School lesson, he'd said, “The Force.” In her mind, Saints Teresa, Francis, and Pio, their sweet stigmata dripping as they pointed accusing fingers, declared her a bad mother when she didn't ask again.

She made herself a cup of tea and forced her mind to things that had seemed important a few hours ago.

Christmas: Forget decorations. She hadn't been able to find them since the move, which seemed incredible, considering the tiny apartment's closets.

Presents: not a happy thought either. With credit cards still maxed out from the move and Curtis's various emergencies, she'd have to postpone shopping until the Christmas bonus showed up.

She hadn't written her court-required progress letter to Josh either. Maybe the Living Nativity would be something positive to mention. She didn't have much good to say. “Grades in tank. Attitude same. Prospects worse” about summed it up. She resented the effort she put into the probably-unread reports—after all, Josh found writing a check too taxing—but she kept hoping that something she wrote might make him want to know his son.

She collapsed in the once-velour-striped rocking recliner that Josh had given her on Mother's Day when Curtis was a week old. She pressed the hot mug against her forehead. She had been so sure that their lives would turn for the better with the move to Houston and her new job. Curtis had shared her excitement about meeting the first interstellar visitors, despite leaving the friends she was glad to get him away from. But what did it matter now, when her own country planned to scrub them off like a cosmetic blemish?

A shot rang out and she vaulted out of the chair. Tea poured into her lap. She tried to dance away from her dripping pants and peer through the vertical blinds at the same time. In the parking lot, Curtis climbed out of an ancient VW-e hybrid van with tie-dye colors splotched over rust stains.

Marley ran outside and threw her arms around him.

“Hey! Mom!” He shucked her off in embarrassment, looking back at the van.

A harassed man climbed out of the driver's seat and started to explain, but a bare spring from the car seat hooked into his jacket. The seat back fell into the parking lot. He scrambled to replace it.

Marley stared from the van to Curtis. “You're riding in that?"

The man pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Hello, Ms. Richardson. I'm Bob Chang, one of the youth counselors. The van's not too bad as long as you take left turns gently because of the axle. The internal alert signal never stops while you're driving, but it's just a short."

Three other fifteen-year-olds stuck their heads out the windows and sang, “Siii—"

“Beep!” chirped Curtis as the warning signal.

“—elent Niii—

“Beep!"

“—iight."

Bob frowned. “Keep it down, guys. People are trying to—” The scream of an ambulance cut him off. He tried to ignore the adolescent laughter. “And the brakes haven't hit metal yet. The backfire's annoying, but it doesn't—"

“But ... so late...” Guilt of the forgetful mother froze her tongue. She muttered an obscenity in her private language.

“But, Mom, we had to stop by Quik Mart for Tina to get some diapers for her baby. Then the van wouldn't start and we had to push it until—I gotta call Tina and tell her we made it.” Curtis loped through the apartment door.

“Ooooooo, Teeeeeeenaaaaaa,” shouted his friends.

Bob looked at his feet. “Do you want to pick up Curtis from now on?"

“Yes. Well ... I'll try.” Marley looked away. “I don't always know when I'll get off work. I'm sorry."

“Don't apologize. I'd feel the same way if it were my boys.” He whirled around to make a quick exit, but the door handle stuck.

Equally humiliated, Marley watched him drive away, his passengers caroling and beeping, this time to “We Three Kings.” She looked up at the night sky as she went back inside. Where was a guiding star when you needed one?

Buried under street lights, business neon, airport signals, and the glow from the SuperAstroDome. She shook her head as she shoved the front door open.

Curtis emerged from the kitchen with his hands full. “Can we go to Bubba's All-You-Can-Eat Barn tomorrow night? You said I could pick."

Marley ran a hand through her hair. “Oh—we can't. They changed my schedule."

“You promised! You said you'd come to opening night."

“Yes, I know ... and I will. It's just that they'll come pick us up and take us, so we can't go out to eat, unless I can get off early...” She shook her head, not wanting to break another promise. Curtis snorted in agreement. “And I can't stay all evening. I'll have to go with the aliens to some holiday shows. I should be back in time to pick you up.” Again her voice rose uncertainly.

“It's sure not like Christmas used to be,” Curtis muttered through a chicken leg. “I'll get my own ride home."

“Not in that...” Her voice trailed off helplessly. She blinked away visions of toddler Curtis cooing, clapping at the Christmas tree while she and Josh ... She reached for something, anything, to say.

Curtis was gazing at her pants. “Have an accident, Mom?"

The mature discussion Marley intended to have with Curtis the next morning dissolved into a scattershot of grievances, ending with Curtis's theme song about things not being like they used to be (with door slam accompaniment). Wondering what right she had to call herself a communicator, Marley slouched through the work day, watching the team try to explain holiday customs to politely uncomprehending Eridanians. Asked about their own celebrations, the aliens recounted the days set aside to mark the devastation of the southern continent by their northern enemies and the remembrance of those who died in religious wars. It was a long list. Human faces grew pinched. Marley began to panic, more from the human reaction than the Eridanian stories. She tried to point out that Earth had plenty of bloody occasions that most people took lightly, but no one heard her. She vowed to talk to the Eridanians when she had them to herself that evening.

As it turned out, she had them to herself and three vans worth of military personnel. Curtis, his earrings swinging, affected an indifferent slouch as he climbed into Marley's van. She tried not to be embarrassed. He looked like any other teen. Introduced to the van's occupants—two security guards, Kevin as driver, and three Eridanians—he rasped and yipped what he thought was the traditional greeting. He came closer than the President had.

The Eridanians graciously replied. Curtis hunched down in standard sullen boredom, but his eyes kept darting towards the extraterrestrials. Saving up bragging details, Marley was sure.

On the drive to the strip mall, Marley explained the Living Nativity, skimming over religious elements while Kevin chuckled under his breath. She glared at the back of his head as she said, “The church youth have volunteered to present this pageant to raise money for a church building."

Curtis added, “Yeah, and the angels are gonna wear their nightgowns, and Tina Salera is back from having her baby, so they're going to be Mary and Jesus. She already looked pretty fine before, and now she's got boobs. And Keanu Jardine moved to the Lower Territories to get out of child support."

Kevin laughed. “Translate that, Mom."

As the government van slipped, sleek and silent, into a parking place, Curtis jumped out. Even unmarked, the vehicle radiated power. Next to it the tie-dyed van pulled up. It backfired with a lurch.

“Van fart!” shouted its adolescent passengers, streaming out into anarchy.

Besides the church, the strip held a Mexican restaurant, a thrift shop, a used media store, and a gym. The Nativity had been consigned to the far end of the lot to grant peace and parking to the other enterprises, but it was spilling over.

Nightgown-clad angels ran shrieking, throwing handfuls of hay at their pursuers, shepherds reaching with papier-mâché crooks. Their neglected flock, goats with white bath mats tied around their middles, milled about moodily, terrorizing customers. An aerobics bunny from the gym screamed as the goats surrounded her. An adult who'd been nailing the beams of the stable together ran to help. His carpentry collapsed, to the cheers of the youthful congregation.

A Virgin Mary, looking more like Circe, stood apart, baby in arms. She nudged the manger with her foot and looked askance at the goats nibbling the hay. Despite her shapeless robe, every move emphasized the curves Curtis had admired. Marley shut her eyes in pain.

A family van pulled to the lot. Teen girls bounced out, carrying pizza boxes and waving pop bottles. A pro mom in uniform—denim skirt and perky red Christmas sweater—barreled out, bawling, “All right, settle down, round up these goats, get back on our side of the lot."

“This is winter festival?” asked Red.

“I'm afraid so.” Marley sighed.

Dressed in traditional magi costumes handed down through the ages—velour bathrobes with gold piping and paper crowns from a fast-food restaurant—Curtis and his fellow wise men erupted from the church. Marley noted cynically that the most exotic boys had been selected, to give the magi a foreign appearance. They King-Tutted to their “camel,” a pony with a brown bolster pillow.

With a royal flourish, Curtis offered the pony a slice of pizza. “Whoa!” shouted his companions, laughing as the pony lipped off the toppings. “Let's try anchovy and onion on him!"

Blue asked, “Significance?"

“It's the pageant we spoke of."

“Pageant?"

“Um, play."

“Toy?"

“No. Um, they're acting out a religious story of a baby, a star—"

“And many animals,” said Green, examining the piebald goat sniffing his robe.

Blue pointed. “Sitting on animals?"

Marley sighed. The Sri Lankan magus was trying to mount the bolstered pony. Curtis and his African counterpart helped. The pony ducked his head in apology but backed up in a definite negative. “Those are the wise men."

“We seek these.” Red waddled toward them. Blue and Green followed after a few hoots that Marley didn't understand.

“Wait. They're not really—"

“Ms. Richardson, I still don't have permission slips from you.” Bob appeared at her side.

“What? Oh.” Marley squinted after the Eridanians. Bundled in coats, scarves, and hats, they could pass for humans. But could Curtis be trusted? What were the boys telling them? She looked for the security men; they were circling the area. Kevin was entering the Mexican restaurant.

The shepherds thundered by again.

“Are they all like this?” Marley covered her ears.

“I just started as a youth counselor, so I can't say. But my eldest was just getting to that stage when my ex-wife moved.” Embarrassed, Bob ducked his head. “That's why I volunteered. Rev. Boehm thought it would help me stop feeling sorry for myself."

“Did it?” asked Marley, feeling the same need.

“Now I feel sorry for myself because I'm a youth counselor.” Bob shoved some papers and a pen into her hands. She signed as best she could as the pen sputtered. “This is a permission slip for me to drive him home, if you still want me to, and one for him to take part in the activity. An information form with his medical and insurance information, a hold-harmless agreement between you and the church and any church volunteer, a personal commitment form agreeing to have him here at the designated times, an agreement to support any disciplinary action that might be necessary (not to include corporal punishment), and—"

“Just for a Christmas pageant?” Rising on her toes, Marley tried to see the Eridanians.

“We have a lawyer on the executive board,” Bob apologized. “And a goat rancher.” He grabbed a runaway goat.

Marley almost escaped, but the professional mom accosted her.

“Marley Richardson? I'm Samantha Jacoby, your Prayer Angel."

“Prayer Angel?” Marley craned her head to look around Samantha. Curtis was making wide gestures for the Eridanians, and a couple of security men had discreetly closed in.

“I drew your name, and I'll be praying for you. At the New Year's Luncheon we'll talk about our blessings.” Her face lost some of its brightness. “If we're still here on New Year's. With aliens roaming the earth, I mean. Did you hear the President's speech?"

“Roaming?” asked Marley in a feeble gasp. The aliens had hardly set foot out of the Wyndham-Mark until this week, and never without heavy security.

“Is there anything you'd like me to pray for? Any way you'd like your life to change?” Samantha hooked her bright smile on with an effort.

Wild desires tumbled through Marley's heart, including model sons and men with Caribbean-blue eyes, but as she made a break, she said only, “Just a miracle or two."

“You know what Rev. Boehm says about miracles,” Samantha called.

The Eridanians waddled back. “Useful,” chirped Red.

Bob came back with the bucking goat, and his eyes widened in recognition. Panicked, Marley herded the Eridanians aside. “It's about to begin. Let's go where we can see better."

The pageant's static nature gave Marley plenty of time to struggle with translating abstract and religious concepts into a language where she'd barely mastered concrete nouns and action verbs. Finally Kevin ambled back from El Periquito with a bag, adding fried grease to the animal stench. “Special holiday praline taco, anyone?” he asked between munches.

“Can we just get out of here while we're all alive?” Marley snapped. “Remember what happened to Captain Cook in Hawaii?"

“That was an accident. They weren't aiming at him."

“Ha!"

The rest of the evening's schedule called for a performance of “A Christmas Carol,” a family version cut beyond the bone in deference to early bedtimes. Then they drove through the Candlelight Festival, since it was convenient to the new Hermann Park Theatre. During the drive, Kevin tuned in to a replay of the President's speech, a rework of one of his first campaign addresses.

President Fordham's deep voice flowed like black molasses. “I personally am monitoring all activity and negotiations with our interstellar visitors. We will not let the quest for knowledge override our first duty. You may continue with your daily tasks, your preparations for the holidays, secure in the knowledge that your defense from any menace, from this world or the stars, is my only priority. I pledge to you that this administration will never sleep, never relax its vigilance, never flinch from a hard decision when the safety of our nation is at stake. Wherever Americans walk—"

“—They walk in safety,” chorused the men. Kevin mumbled a codetta: “Except possibly in Houston if we have to blow it up."

Marley's stomach twisted in knots.

At the Galleria they heard special music from local high schools and saw the Santa Claus village. Marley hustled them by a media store, where the wall screens displayed clips of the President's speech and party footage of the Eridanians. Hearing murmurs like “Blow them back where they came from,” she worried about people recognizing the aliens as Bob had, but the shoppers plowed through everyone in a self-centered whirlwind. After the third body slam, Green asked, “What religion does this activity represent?” Marley thought it a fair question. Fortunately they were walking by Digital Dream, and the fleet of computers playing “Silver Bells” slightly out of phase made answering impossible.

Back in the van, free of the cacophony and rancid odors of Christmas bliss, she said with some anxiety, “Much of what we saw tonight is pretending. Not real. You understand that?"

“We perceive,” said Blue. “People pretend happiness."

Marley's head had been pounding cruelly since Bellaire High School's rendition of “Little Drummer Boy,” which they'd misread as “Little Drum and Bugle Corps with a Few Riffs from the Jazz Band.” The headache dissolved on the soporific return journey, but the scent of roses and new car leather lulled her close to sleep. Maybe she could try again tomorrow. If they had a tomorrow.

Copyright © 2001 Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond

A former Texan, Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond is now freezing in New England. A veteran of Clarion ‘98, Viable Paradise ‘99, and several Turkey City workshops, she has sold several stories, including last year's holiday story in Strange Horizons. For more about her, see her Web site.

12/17/01

In memory of my Clarion suitemate Tina M. Spell, 1967-2001.

Part 2 of 2

The next few days combined the worst of holiday anticipation and stark terror. The anthropologists asked the Eridanians for more history, and all three described long-term wars and cruelties that made even the most hawkish humans blench. No one could help imagining what such beings might do when the President told them to leave.

Private unvoiced hells drove all departments to redouble efforts on their reports for the President. Everyone needed translation constantly. The linguists never had more than ten uninterrupted minutes to work on their own report. When Dr. Scofield pulled Marley off of High Eridanian qualifiers, she was sorry to be dropped back into the turf wars and shouting matches. Kevin ran about, clamping electrodes onto the combatants’ heads to get good human readouts of strong emotion.

Even packed with multiple excursions for the Eridanians, the evenings brought Marley some relief. At least nobody shouted. They attended a Messiah singalong, hastily scheduled parades at military bases, a klezmer band playing the Nutcracker, a public Hanukkah candle lighting, and Carols on the Square.

They even visited the holiday display at the Space Center, where some impulse made her purchase a souvenir shuttle paperweight. It would probably elicit an “Oh, Mom” and rolling eyes, but Curtis as a small boy had loved rockets and spaceships. It might be his only present, with the bonus money still a theory. The cynical view held that the government hoped to delay paying it until they bombed Houston.

One night Curtis brought home a twisted pine spray. He said the nearby tree lot had given it to him. Looking at the brown-tipped needles drifting to the carpet, Marley believed him. She told him he was responsible for setting it up. “But not there!” she shouted when he filled the kitchen sink with water and stuffed his tree in the drain plug. When she came home the next night, she found it nailed, wildly askew, to the coffee table. Teenage accessories—earrings and keychains—dragged the drooping branches down further.

By Christmas Eve, Marley felt split, fried, and barbecued. Only last night the President had assured them:

“As I watched the World Trade Center towers collapse on themselves, I swore to end all terrorism on American soil. The attacks on our major cities over the next decade only strengthened my resolve. And I stand before you today as your President, the only President in fifty years to have served in the military, and I pledge to you that during my administration you will always walk in safety, no matter what the cost."

The media stories had tripled in hysteria afterwards, but their reaction seemed mild compared with FCT team's thrashings with their final reports. No one said out loud how final they might be.

After 3:00 p.m., Marley's eyes glazed over in after-school anxiety, relieved only when Curtis beeped her wrist phone in his afternoon check-in. She had hoped to leave early for some minor Christmas shopping, but Dr. Scofield planned for the linguists to outstay everyone else and work on their report then.

Someone brought in cold pitas for supper around 8:30. Marley tried to snag some minitubs of hummus, but two FCT staffers were standing in front of the tray and arguing over a letter from a Buddhist monastery thanking the Eridanians for their visit.

“They didn't go, did they?"

Marley tried to reach behind the smaller man, but he backed into her.

“How could they? They were here every day. Buncha cranks."

“Buddhist nuns?"

She snaked an arm between them to grab a handful of tubs. Then she searched for Kevin. She tracked him down in the hotel bar, where he was gulping Shiner Bocks faster than the bartender could clear them away.

“I've brought some food.” She tripped over the door sill and muttered a private curse as she stumbled against the bar.

Kevin banged his mug on the counter. “What did you say?"

“You speak Arabic?” she asked, surprised.

“Shh! I can curse fluently in any number of languages, but that's not one I recommend admitting to. Particularly as authentic as you sound.” He searched her face as though reading her DNA. “Where did you learn it?"

“From Sitti. It's been a long time.” Marley set the containers down on the brassy bar.

“I thought your grandmother was Chinese."

Marley shoved the containers around and refused to meet his eyes. “Sitti was my friend Fariha's grandmother. She hardly spoke any English."

“She taught you to curse?"

“That was Fariha's big brother Ahmed. I used to stay with their family while my mother worked. Until 9-1-1-0-1. We watched the towers collapse. And the news. Fariha had to translate. She was only six and didn't understand most of it, but it made her cry. Us cry. And Sitti explained that no devout Muslim would take innocent life. My mother came home early to pick me up, and I tried to make her understand, but she wouldn't listen. I never saw Sitti again."

“I told you, you shoulda finished that doctorate."

“I was five!"

“Always an excuse. But switch languages, okay? The war hasn't been over long enough.” Kevin tugged his already-wild hair. “And now we're gonna have another one. I wish these gov'mint folks would give us time to study. They think science is like a Vegas show.” He raised his glass for another deep draught.

“What's wrong, Kevin?"

“I've got information that could get somebody killed. Maybe us. Or them.” He took another swig with one hand and handed her his PDA with the other. “Tap through this slide show."

“It looks like brains. What am I supposed to see?"

“I've got yours and Red's on split screen. See? Yours is an excellent example of mad as hell."

“Thank you. I was thinking about my son and his efforts to pitch his life down the tubes. And his father."

“Now look at Red's as of this week. Eridanian parts aren't quite the same—some things in different places, some different sizes, some I haven't identified—but you can see the similarities. They've got an enormous limbic system—"

“Emotional center?"

“Right. Look under this basal ganglion. If she were a human, she'd be flaming furious, and I'd be ducking.” He punched through the scans. “Makes you look like Mary Sunshine."

A thump behind them made Kevin and Marley jump. Stephen stood at the door, clutching several liters of pop, his face as green as the bottles. Another bottle rolled on the floor against the bar. “The President has to hear about this,” Stephen whispered.

Kevin held up a hand and almost fell off the bar stool. “Whoa. Wait a minute. You can't condemn a whole race because one of them is in a snit. Maybe they had a fight over who gets the media control."

“I'm not condemning them, but I have to give the President any available data and warn him of possible ramifications."

“Then you have to give him everything we've got. The linguists don't think they're violent, do they, Marley?"

She hesitated. “Dr. Scofield hasn't finalized the wording of the report, but he doesn't feel that their language structure shows...” A glance at Stephen's face told her that language structures weren't going to cut it.

Kevin grabbed his arm. “Jeez, Steve. What do you want? We're trying to give definite answers on stuff that'll take years to sort through. Our best evidence that they're friendly is that they are. They cooperate with whatever we ask. Don't throw away this chance—and possibly our lives—over paranoia."

“We can't make ourselves vulnerable to anybody, no matter where they're from,” Stephen said. “The President is responsible not just for the safety of Houston and North America, but the whole world. If the Eridanians are as friendly as you say, they'll leave quietly."

“Will you evacuate Houston before you ask them? Do you have defenses in place?"

Marley dropped her gaze to hide a film of sudden tears. So this was how it ended, with the door slammed on visitors from the stars, like so many other doors slammed. She was surprised at how much even the best-case scenario hurt, with the Eridanians leaving quietly, never to return. The other possibilities tore her heart like a serrated knife. No rosy future with better jobs and more chances for Curtis, maybe not even the chance to grow up.

Stephen didn't flinch. “I'm willing to listen to any case you can muster. I don't want to make a mistake any more than you do. The future of the human race could depend on what we do."

In the silence Marley wiped a tear off her cheek.

Stephen's voice softened. “Maybe you could get some data together and meet me for lunch tomorrow. We could do Chinese."

Marley tucked her head even more to hide her flushed cheeks. In the midst of disaster, a small present. She raised her head to say that tomorrow was Christmas and why didn't he come over. The words choked off when she saw that no one was looking at her. Kevin still gripped Stephen's arm, but tenderly; Stephen had covered Kevin's hand with his own. The gaze between them would have melted an ice cap. Marley stepped back and turned away.

A commotion at the elevator just outside the bar grabbed her attention. At first she saw just a surging crowd of security, but she gasped in recognition when the shouts penetrated to the bar. She lurched forward.

Kevin grabbed at her sleeve. “Marley, that's not something you run towards."

As the guards parted, she faced her last nightmare: Curtis held between them as he raged, thrashing from side to side in handcuffs.

Something inside Marley shattered and strengthened her in the breaking. She'd listened too long to verbal attacks and suspicion. It would not happen to her son. She would not permit it. Her stumbling steps turned into a march; her shoes slapped the tile.

She saw the dangerous young man, out of control, tall and powerful as his captors. But other images overlaid the present like a kaleidoscope: Curtis at all ages, wide eyes embracing the world, ready to give, ready to join, until biology and the move to Houston twisted him into something more complex.

She halted in front of the struggling procession, stopping it cold as she glared up into the ranking officer's eyes. Capturing his attention against his will, she demanded in a voice that silenced the lobby, “What is the meaning of this? What are you doing to my son?"

“Mom, they—"

“Quiet, Curtis.” To the guard, she said, “Explain yourself."

The guard blinked. The others stiffened in place. “Your son was apprehended in a restricted area, heading for the aliens’ quarters."

“And why wouldn't he be if he were looking for me? I work with the Eridanians, sometimes in their rooms.” She shoved her badge in the man's face, so close he had to cross his eyes to see the dancing authorization symbols.

“No one is allowed in that area, and we have orders to treat any trespassing as an act of aggression."

“Aggression! A fifteen-year-old boy looking for his mother on Christmas Eve?” Finally she looked at Curtis.

“Mom, they stole Tina's baby!” His eyes pleaded with her to make it all right.

“We have to take him—"

“You'll take him nowhere. I don't know the time in Europe; his father may still be in International Court, but we'll have him pulled out if necessary.” Court had adjourned for the holidays and Josh had been on the beach for a week with the latest Little Ms. Understanding. He'd probably say, “Curtis who?", but there was no point calling yourself a communications specialist if you couldn't lie when necessary.

A hand pressed Marley's shoulder. She flinched.

“I'm Stephen Grimsky, Special Attaché to the President. Does this concern the First Contact Project?"

The guards attempted to repeat their orders and their story. Marley interrupted. “Stephen, this is ridiculous. What harm do they imagine a child could do?” Before the guards could respond, she snapped at them, “Was he armed? Did he have anything on him that could possibly harm anyone?” She looked at Curtis again, willing him innocent.

“He didn't have—"

“You searched him without my permission? Without his attorney and his doctor?"

“Not a cavity search, ma'am."

“Stephen, if we are not allowed to leave immediately—"

“I think this incident has been blown out of proportion,” Stephen said. “We're all a bit nervous these days. I'll take responsibility for the boy's release, and we know how to contact Marley if the need arises.” He looked at each guard. “There seem to be quite a few of you here. I trust you haven't neglected to lock down the area. That was also part of your orders, I believe."

Marley threw an arm around Curtis's shoulder and marched him to the parking lot stairs. By the time they reached level ground again, she was leaning heavily on him; her legs trembled.

“Mom, could you come talk to my English teacher like that? She is so wicked unfair."

Marley unlocked the car with shaking hands. She slid in and leaned against the steering wheel while Curtis pulled on the door that always stuck. Rubbing her forehead, she tried to organize the rest of the night. She'd have to drive him home and get back to help with the report.

“Mom, are you okay? We have to go see Tina, to see if they found her baby yet. Please, Mom, it's not far."

“Tina's baby? You said somebody stole her."

“When Tina went inside to the bathroom. Amy Burzak was supposed to watch Carissa. But Amy started talking to Jabar and when Tina got back, the baby was gone. Bob called the police, but they acted like Tina did something to the baby. The Bugs were there, Mom. It had to be them. I was going to pretend to be from the cleaning staff and see if they had her."

“Oh, Curtis, you can't get in at this time of night as cleaning staff. You'd need a badge and a uniform—"

“Wow, Mom! You know how to break into a hotel?"

Marley coughed—with dignity, she hoped. “I've certainly heard. But you must be wrong about the Eridanians, Curtis."

“It couldn't be anybody else!"

“Curtis, the guards are there to keep them in as much as to keep people out. They weren't scheduled to go anywhere tonight. You're accusing them just as unfairly as the guards accused you."

“Mom, we've got to do something.” His voice cracked.

Marley put her arms around him and stroked his hair, like she did when he was six. She hated this part of parenting, when you couldn't make things better. That's when they turned to you, of course. They never said, “Mom, if you don't translate this passage of Virgil into Eridanian, my whole life will be ruined.” Always the unfixable. “Make my kitten live again.” “Make Daddy come home.” And now, “Find my girlfriend's baby."

You did what you could. Marley started the car. To hell with the report. If the world were to end next week, she knew how she wanted to spend the time left. “Where does Tina live?"

Curtis jumped out of the car as soon as it pulled into the driveway. Tina stood in the doorway, a man behind her. Marley recognized Bob as she picked her way along the crumbled path.

Relief flooded Bob's face. “Ms. Richardson, I'm so glad to see you."

Tina huddled on the couch with Curtis, whispering. Her puffy eyes leaked tears; her swollen breasts, milk, splotching the faded “Happy Holidays” on her T-shirt.

Bob jerked his head toward the kitchen.

Taking the hint, Marley followed him, saying loudly, “I'll fix some tea."

“Not for me,” said Tina. “The caffeine's not good for the baby.” She began to cry again. Curtis put his arm around her.

Bob said in a low voice, “She wasn't gone five minutes. There were lots of people around; I looked over at the wise men for a minute, thinking I'd seen the, the people who were with you the other night."

“They were really there? That's impossible!"

“I thought I saw someone bundled up like they were, but it was so crowded. And then Tina was screaming that Carissa was gone. I called the police, but they didn't find a trace. I brought her back here, but her father's in rehab, and her older sister left this morning on a Christmas cruise with her boyfriend."

Marley went back into the front room.

Tina was sobbing, “I prayed and prayed before she was born. My whole family said get an abortion, but I thought God told me to have her, and I promised to be a good mother, so why—” She gulped. “My sister said I was so stupid."

Marley sat down on the other side of Tina and for the second time that night held an almost-grown child close. Maybe the first comfort was the only one life could offer. Wondering how she'd ever seen the girl as anything but desperate, Marley pushed back Tina's tear-soaked black hair.

Curtis tugged Marley's sleeve. “Mom, I told Tina she could come home with us."

Marley drew in a breath. “Of course she can.” She turned to Bob. “We won't be having much of a Christmas, but why don't you join us tomorrow, if you don't have other plans?"

Bob flushed and looked at his feet. “Thanks. I don't, no. My boys aren't coming to visit. Janet ... my ex-wife ... I hope she lets me see them again someday."

Marley reached out a hand, but didn't quite dare touch his arm.

Curtis tugged again. “Mom, can we have Christmas like we used to?"

Marley tried to smile. “I don't have the presents you asked for."

He shrugged. “Sure, I want the stuff, but that's not really Christmas."

Curtis led Tina down the hall to gather her things. “Me and my mom used to have the best Christmases when I was little. We'd clean the cages at the animal shelter and walk the dogs. Then we'd have our presents and fix dinner just for us and go see my granddad at the nursing home, sing with the old people and all. You shoulda heard Gran do his reggae Jingle Bells."

Marley stared after him. “I always thought he meant the wonderful Christmases when his father lived with us.” She smiled at Bob. “Maybe they're right about miracles."

Marley gently shepherded the teens home and to bed, though Tina proclaimed she was going to pray all night.

Some hours later, Marley started awake. The thin window shade glowed bright, but when she pushed the shade aside, she saw lights from the kind of businesses that never sleep: Memorial Hospital, Dell-Digital, Amalgamated Microchip. Exhausted, anxious, disgusted, she flopped back on her pillow. A rare morning to sleep in, and she was up before dawn.

At least she had time to think, or at least run thoughts in a mental squirrel cage. Should she evacuate? When? Where? Back to Colorado? Marley rubbed her forehead as though to scrub out the worries. Now, she thought, was the right time to sneak in with the hotel staff. For centuries, the wee small hours had belonged to those who stood and waited on others.

She stiffened, as though struck. After all, she already had a badge.

Silently, she crept out of bed. Tina, despite her brave intentions, didn't stir from her place in Marley's bed. In sleep, with her hair spilling over her candy-striped nightshirt, she looked even younger.

Marley wrote a note in case Curtis and Tina awakened and tiptoed out the front door.

She was so busy rehearsing stories to tell the guards that she almost didn't see the lone figure in the outdoor parking lot. She slammed the brakes and zoomed backwards to take a good look.

“Blue?” It couldn't be.

He faced her. “Greetings, Marley. I wondered how to call for your assistance."

“And I wanted to ask you a question. But what are you doing out here?"

“Your stories mention following stars. How do you accomplish that?"

“The custom has fallen into disuse lately. But I meant the guards; how did you get around them?"

“It is one step only. Tell, Marley, what do human babies eat? How?"

Trembling with confirmed fear, Marley gestured to her chest. “Females provide nourishment."

Blue nodded. “Will you come nourish an infant?"

“I can't, not any longer.” She licked her lips and swallowed, trying to force moisture into her dry mouth. “May we return the infant to its parent, who is capable?"

“We would do so, if we were sure of its safety. Your sages informed us that the infant now celebrated will be sacrificed next season. Green and I reflected what this might mean, but Red, who is too young for reflection, became angry at your crime. She returned by subterfuge and removed the infant. She sought only to save it from its fate, and we to protect her and our mission here, but we are forced to conclude that, despite research, we do not understand the infant's needs."

“Is—is she well?"

“Judging from the volume of her language, which we do not understand, I believe so, though I do not know how to interpret her odor. Will you come?"

“Yes, but—” She thought of trying to get past the guards, of the political ramifications.

She punched Kevin's number into her wrist phone. “Kevin, do you know how to find Stephen?"

“Mmm. Minute."

A different voice came on, mumbling through a yawn. “Grimsky here."

“Get down to the hotel. Now. I need your authorization to get into their quarters. We have to resolve an incident."

“Marley? Marley?"

“I'll meet you in the FCT rooms."

They had just arrived in the FCT conference rooms when Green raced in, so fast that he seemed to fly. The two aliens consulted in high Eridanian. Marley gave up trying to understand and let her gaze wander. When she looked down, she saw Green's feet dangling several inches above the floor. She blinked in surprise.

The door opened, admitting Stephen and Kevin, the latter fumbling his camera into action.

Marley blinked again. Nothing made sense tonight. “That was quick."

“I'm staying at the hotel,” said Stephen. “We went to the penthouse first, to make sure the Bu—Eridanians were all right.” He stared at Green. “We were just talking to you there. You said—"

Kevin whisked in to settle his electrodes on Blue's skull. “We don't have any scans of you, just Red."

“That doesn't matter now,” Marley objected.

“Science always matters.” He tapped at the controls. After a moment, he whistled. “This can't be right."

Blue sat down in the chair Red normally took. “I will do science while you return to our rooms with Green."

“What's wrong?” Stephen asked Marley.

Kevin responded before she could frame a statement. “It's so different from the other one. If this were your brain, you'd be seeing God and talking to angels."

“Angels!” gasped Marley. “Roses. Levitation. Healing. Bilocation—they did visit the Pope and the monastery—that's how they get around so fast. They're not warriors; they're saints!"

“Saints.” Stephen gulped. “The Pope sent a Christmas message, calling for peace. He sounded like he'd talked to them. I thought it was a bad translation."

“Maybe we ought to take them to the Dalai Lama,” said Kevin.

“Maybe they've already been,” retorted Marley. “And we've got more problems than that. Acting on ... a misunderstanding, they ... rescued a baby."

Stephen sat down and clutched his forehead. “Stealing babies. This kind of publicity could—"

“Save us, if it's publicity our way,” said Marley. “Right, Kevin?"

Red was desperate enough to climb into the van with only a little reassurance from Marley, who changed Carissa's diaper and poured a few sips of formula into her mouth. Everyone sighed when the van gently rocked the child to sleep. Kevin drove slowly to counter the lack of an infant seat.

“In the pageant, the young people were acting out a story from long ago,” said Marley. “This baby isn't the same one in the story."

Blue looked at Red, then back at Marley. “Teaching story. You tell it to remind that such things must not happen again. As we do with stories of our ancestors. Even after our peace of ten thousand years, we must not forget what we are capable of."

“Ten—ten thousand?” said Stephen. “You never mentioned it."

“You requested our stories of shame,” Green said.

Marley shook her head. “You told us your worst; we misunderstood why and showed you a lot of faked merriment. But the sages were not real sages. They were young boys, pretending."

“Wisdom must first be pretended,” said Blue. “We ask indulgence for our young."

Green said, “Naturally children do not perceive as adults. They have not the same abilities. Releasing dimensions is long and painful, though necessary for maturity. We hope to see Red move lightly through the universe, with every place step away."

“She can't ... move like you do? How did she get to the church?” Kevin called back. “And past the guards?"

“Watch the road,” snapped Marley. “Not you,” she told the obedient Blue and Green. Red stayed slouched down, and Marley noted that some body language crossed cultural boundaries.

Blue answered, “She used subterfuge to escape and ‘call a cab,’ I think you say. Many youth now say they will not mature. They wish to avoid pain. In seeking you, so like our young, we sought to better understand them. We need to know if cultures of those not matured can succeed."

As they crowded through her door, Marley worried about so many people in the tiny rooms. But when the Christmas cooking aromas—apple cider, baking cookies, and stuffed turkey—brought smiles to the human faces, she knew everything would be fine.

Bob was leaning over the oven. “Hi, I hope you're ready for an early lunch. It'll be done in an hour."

“Already?” asked Marley.

“It's tofu,” he said. “I'm vegetarian."

Curtis and Tina sat by the gnarled excuse for a tree, listing farther off-center than ever with new burdens of hair ornaments and beads. Curtis was setting a foil star on top. He'd tried to twist it so that “Big Tex Burger” didn't show.

Tina looked up and burst into tears. She sprang to her feet, tripping over the offended cat. “Carissa!” she sobbed, cradling the baby against her cheek.

Curtis's eyes widened as he took in the Eridanians, Kevin, Stephen, and security guards. “Better get out the SPAM too."

They weren't reduced to that, though probably everybody would have an early supper. Kevin recorded the happy meal and presents under the tree as the Eridanians gathered close. Marley nearly cried over the bubble bath Curtis gave her. “You need to relax, Mom."

He exclaimed over the space shuttle. “Mom! You remembered!” He was still reciting space statistics when Kevin herded them into one last group shot.

“Just wait till they see this one,” Kevin muttered as he posed Tina kneeling by her baby's makeshift catfood-box crib. Curtis stood proudly over them. “Trust me, it's traditional,” he assured the visitors. The humans stood close, with the adult Eridanians hovering slightly above. Red knelt in front of the crib to place the diapers and formula she'd bought. The cat moved in to sniff the formula.

Stephen smiled, relieved. “This should just about fix everything."

Kevin murmured as he packed his camera, “You know, Drake and the natives of Nova Albion got on famously when they met."

Marley smiled. “Paul Gauguin lived over ten years in Tahiti, his longest stint anywhere. And you know what an idiot he was."

“Now that is a miracle."

The next day, Marley sat at the kitchen table, remembering. They'd taken the Eridanians to the animal shelter and then to a nursing home to sing carols, with Kevin duly recording.

Later, Bob had offered the teens his car and babysitting if they wanted to go to a movie. Curtis and Tina protested, “Not on Christmas!” and made all of them sit down on the couch to watch a suitable family movie, about miracles and angels. The President interrupted the broadcast with soothing holiday greetings. He forecast the dawn of a new era of “peace on earth and beyond.” Some of Kevin's clips and stills followed.

Now Marley smiled, remembering Bob's leg pressing against hers. He was coming over soon, Curtis and Tina having accepted today's offer of a car. Tina had insisted on taking Carissa; Bob was bringing his son's old car seat.

Tina and Curtis had their heads together by the window, carrying on a low-voiced discussion about the best film for a six-month-old infant.

Marley smiled and turned to her PDA. “Dear Josh,” she entered, “I'm so proud of Curtis..."

Copyright © 2001 Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond

A former Texan, Madeleine Rose Reardon Dimond is now freezing in New England. A veteran of Clarion ‘98, Viable Paradise ‘99, and several Turkey City workshops, she has sold several stories, including last year's holiday story in Strange Horizons. For more about her, see her Web site.

12/17/01

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

Amea Amaau—or Double-A, or Dub, or Dub-Bub, or DB, or Popstop, as it is also sometimes called—is a new and gleaming city in a matrix of six hundred and forty-three thousand cities exactly like it, somewhere in the terribly exciting part of the world. The citizens of Popstop—but there are no citizens, for everyone who slept in Amea Amaau tonight will be moving on in the morning. They will roll out of silver water beds, vacuum the night's spit and eye goo and wrinkles from their faces with the handheld vacuums considerately installed in every wall, leave the dwelling they arbitrarily chose for last night, embracing and saluting the companions they arbitrarily chose for last night; and they will go to the chute drop and each hop into a chute, any chute at all, to be swept off to do one of the very exciting things there are to do in the world, perhaps (just perhaps) in Double-A itself, but more likely in Fairlanes, or Kingdom X, or Paunax, or Olam Chadash, or Gopferdelli, or Sang Froid, or Triple-B or Marley or Snackpack.

And before she hops down the chute, perhaps one of them will pause, looking at the rotating silver statue of Amea Amaau's namesake waving a mechanical good-bye at the top of the chute drop station. Perhaps she will stop and wonder about Amea Amaau for a moment—before she plunges on into the chute, ready for adventure, ready for anything.

Previous city (Ahavah)

All published cities

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 Writers’ Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writer Online. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.

12/31/01

Anna bumped the portly man reaching for the bag of low-fat chips with her cart. “Sorry,” she said. Again. This was her third vehicular assault in twenty minutes. The man scowled at his chips—not bothering to look her way—and slouched off down the aisle. Anna resisted the urge to bump him a second time.

Shearson's Market was suffering through an epidemic of irritable, last-minute Christmas shoppers—and Anna realized she was becoming as caustic as everyone else. She glanced down at her dog-eared list. Only the cranberries were left. What aisle were they in? What aisle was she in? Jesus. She put the cart in reverse, trying to glimpse the sign hanging above her head, and backed into someone. Again. “Sorry!"

This was impossible. Why had she listened when Philip blithely suggested switching grocery stores? A few dollars saved each month was not worth this. But would she really tell him that? Not likely. She'd rather brave the throng.

SOFT DRINKS/SNACKS/WATER. What the hell was she doing in this aisle? Anna rotated the cart out of the lane, offered the right-of-way to the two oblivious old ladies at the intersection, and wheeled around the bend. Not because she needed SHAMPOO/DEODORANT/FEMININE HYGIENE products at the moment, but because no one else seemed to, either. Also, she thought she'd spied CANNED something over the next rise of shelves. She'd zip down this vacant aisle, turn the corner—hopefully without major incident—and be right where she needed to be.

The strategy worked perfectly until she made the turn. “Sorry!” she said to the startled blonde girl she'd whacked. “Where's your mommy, sweetheart?” And why are you running, you little shit?

The girl stuck out her tongue and ran off.

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Anna said, putting the cart in gear. And in about seven months I get one of my very own. Terrific. She continued down the aisle, shaking her head.

And, finally, there were the damn cranberries.

She navigated past the sullen shoppers clogging this aisle and snatched a can off the shelf, feeling let down at the dullness of the prize after the gauntlet she'd run. She turned to dump the cranberries into the cart ... and froze.

There was already a can there, nestled between the bottles of turkey gravy and applesauce. She must have already been down this aisle. But I don't remember doing that at all, she thought. I don't remember any of that.

She shrugged and wheeled the cart off to the checkout, deciding it was just one of those things.

It happened again on New Year's Eve.

Anna was staring out the passenger's window of Philip's Explorer, counting the houses decorated with holiday lights as they rushed past, wishing for the hundredth time that it snowed more often in Southern California. She also wished Philip would choose a different movie to watch tonight. “I really don't like action movies, you know,” she said, hoping it would sink in this time, but realizing there was a better chance of blizzards in LA. “They're all just exercises in male wishful thinking. And my eyes are always covered through most of them. Why do you still want to watch them with me? I don't get it."

Philip put a hand on her knee, etched a figure-eight with his finger. “How about this?” he said. “You give me a son. We wait a few years. Then I'll take him to the action movies. How about that? Sounds fair to me.” He laughed, eyes on the traffic ahead.

Anna watched his angular features flicker in and out of existence with the flash of brake lights. His five o'clock shadow was already darkening his chin, despite the fact that he'd shaved before they left the house. “Who says we're not having a girl?” she replied. “Besides—even if I am carrying a boy—are you saying I have to wait around for him to grow up before you'll let me off the hook? What's fair about that?"

He smirked. “Hey, time flies,” he said, squeezing her knee. “At least you liked this one a little. You said you enjoyed the story, anyway."

“When did I say that? I haven't heard a single thing about this one. I don't even know if it got a ‘thumbs up’ or whatever."

His thick brows furrowed and he darted a look at her. “On the way out of the theater. You said: ‘Story eight. Acting three.’ Remember?"

She pushed his hand off her leg. “Very funny. Talk about wishful thinking. We haven't even seen the damn thing yet."

He chanced a full look at her this time, his expression taut. She knew that look. He was considering getting pissed off. “What are you talking about, Anna? We just watched it. We're on our way home. Stop playing games."

She glanced out the window and realized they had turned onto Rosewood Avenue. The house was just ahead. “What?” she whispered. “What?” A nameless fear slithered behind her eyes and she began to shake.

“Anna?"

“Philip? Philip? What's happening?"

“Blood sugar a little elevated,” Dr. Varza said, tapping a pen against his front teeth. He flipped a page on the clipboard. “But acceptable. Fetus appears healthy.” More teeth tapping. The difficulty of translating what he was saying was compounded by his thick Indian accent.

Take that damn thing out of your mouth and look at me! Anna wanted to shout. She felt miserable. More frightened than she'd ever been in her life. And no one, especially not this HMO mumbler, would take her situation seriously. She crossed her arms against her blouse, still feeling as exposed as she had in the sadistic paper-doll gown she'd worn during the examination.

“And no family history of neurological disease?” Dr. Varza shook his head, glancing up at her for the first time since striding back into the room. “I really don't know what to tell you, Anna.” The sudden familiarity rang false, especially after his disinterested prodding during the exam. “Except not to worry too much. Pregnancy, you know, is a very difficult time for women.” He gave his teeth another tap. “And you say this memory lapse occurred a few weeks ago? And only once? Twice?”

Anna tensed, concentrated on keeping a level tone. The bastard had the bedside manner of an end table. “They're not ‘memory lapses,'” she said. “You can't forget something that never happened. I know the difference. I didn't watch that movie. Do you understand what I'm telling you, Dr. Varza? That wasn't me. It's as if something wants in. I can feel her! I can feel—” Her voice was crescendoing out of control. She jerked a hand to her mouth.

Dr. Varza moved the pen aside long enough to manufacture a smile. “Bahram,” he said. “Call me Bahram.” He laid the clipboard down and patted her shoulder. Then he tapped those teeth again.

Anna bit into her palm, deciding that it was either her or him.

“What about your husband?” he asked, glancing at the clock.

Anna winced, recalling Philip's frustration with her, his mounting disdain—his hands slamming her against the kitchen counter the last time she broached the subject. She shivered, drew her arms across her shoulders.

Dr. Varza pretended not to notice the reaction. “I'm sure he's there for you,” he announced, hand still resting on her shoulder. “Have the two of you discussed counseling? This seems a problem more conducive to therapy of some sort."

Anna could take no more. She pushed his clammy hand away. “I'm not crazy! Something is happening to me."

Dr. Varza picked up the clipboard and moved toward the door. “If your symptoms recur, be sure to call the staff to schedule another appointment,” he said, pulling the door wide. “After you've gotten dressed,” he added, “there may be some additional forms to fill out."

Anna resisted the pointless tears that wanted to fall. She was tired of fighting, tired of battling this ephemeral thing that pried at the very periphery of consciousness. Most of all she was weary of trying to make people understand what even she didn't understand. She leaned back against the wall, in no hurry to climb down from the table and struggle into her clothes. Just a moment to pull myself together, she told herself, closing her eyes. Just a moment of peace.

She woke in darkness, sweating under the blankets. The digital clock beside the bed read 2:26. She put out a hand and felt Philip's warm back beside her. How did she get here? She'd been at the clinic only a moment ago. Not again, she thought. Please. Not again. She threw back the covers and slid out of bed. Why is it so hot in here? Philip kept the house as cold as ice, which was why she always bundled up at night.

She crept into the hall and read the illuminated dial on the thermostat. Eighty degrees? That had to be a mistake. She twisted the dial down to sixty-five. She realized she had to pee, which was also odd. She never had to go in the middle of the night. Another fun perk of pregnancy, she supposed. A nice addition to the relentless weight gain and the persistent ache in her lower back. She finger-tapped down the darkened hall to the bathroom, closed the door quietly behind her, and switched on the light. The brilliance stung her eyes; when they adjusted, her reflection squinted back from the mirror above the sink. Jesus. Have I gotten that fat? I look like a damn chipmunk. She wanted to believe what she'd promised Philip, that it was just the baby. But the scale, now hidden away behind the hamper, knew better. The pounds had been creeping on for months.

Something else, she realized suddenly, was wrong with her face. Her dark blonde hair seemed shorter than it should be. And the style was different: lifted back from her face, where before her bangs had hung naturally. She leaned closer, until she was nose to nose with her reflection. There were crow's feet around her eyes. Not many, but enough. The wrinkles made her appear even more exhausted than she felt. What's happening to me?

She used the toilet, switched off the light, and left the bathroom. The hall was now an abyssal black. Before her eyes adjusted again, she heard a noise. Footsteps, moving slowly toward her down the hallway. They were too light to be Philip's, barely a whisper on the carpet. She backed against the wall, heart racing.

Something grabbed the hem of her nightgown and she screamed.

“Mommy?"

Anna reached out, felt a small head and chest. “Who are you?” she asked, pulse shifting out of high gear. “What are you doing here?"

“It's me,” the child whispered. “Becky. I heard something. You scared me."

“Go ... go back to bed,” Anna replied. “Everything's fine.” Who is this child? “Just go back to bed, ... Becky. Everything's okay."

The hands grasping her gown let go and footsteps trailed off down the hall. Toward the room Philip had prepared for the baby.

Anna's hands went to her belly. Have I lost more time than I thought? she asked, unwilling to accept the implications behind that simple question. Am I losing my life? Is it all being ... snatched away? Faster and faster? Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her hands had gone numb. Had this happened to other people? If it had, who would know? Who would listen? She shuddered, despite the ungodly heat, and felt her way back to the master bedroom.

She stumbled over to the bed and shook her husband. “Wake up!” she whispered. “Philip! Wake up! Something's happening to me, goddamn it! Wake up! Philip!"

He groaned. “You're having a nightmare, Anna. Go back to sleep."

The hell I will. So what if he got angry again? Someone had to understand this. Someone had to help her! She reached over and switched on the bedside lamp—an act she never would have dared under normal circumstances—intending to wake him whether he wanted it or not. Light stabbed her eyes, but she refused to close them to the glare. Her hands trembled. She couldn't breathe.

The bare-chested man in the bed groaned again and covered his bearded face with the blanket. “Anna!” he growled. “For Chrissake. What are you doing?"

She couldn't speak. There were no words. None. She just stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes.

“Anna? Are you okay?"

“Philip?” she whispered, hysteria rising in her throat, wrenching her chest. “Where is Philip? Where is my husband!"

The man sighed. His red hair stuck up from his head. He reached out for her, but she flinched. “He's gone, Anna,” the man said. “He can't hurt you anymore. Philip is gone."

Anna shook her head. “Who are you?"

He rose up from the pillow, watching her carefully. “You told me this happened to you before. Where you forget things for a bit? You said it happened back when you were still with him. I thought it was because of him.” He shook his head. “And the doctors never found anything wrong, Anna. We never thought it would happen again.” He tried to touch her but she slapped his hands away.

“Who are you?” she repeated, thinking: Who am I?

“I'm Brian,” he said gently. “Your husband. We've been married for five years.” He pointed to the bedside table, waited for her to follow his gesture. “That's a picture of us. You and me. And Becky. Your daughter. My stepdaughter."

Anna looked at the family in the photograph. She saw herself there, grinning into the camera. A rosy-cheeked blonde girl squirmed in her lap. This strange man loomed behind her, hands resting on her shoulders in a relaxed, familiar way. Anna hardly recognized herself. The woman in the picture was so ... content. That expression seemed horribly out of place on her face. Had she ever been so serene? Had she ever looked so pleased with herself? This is the woman who's living my life, she thought distantly. This is the woman who takes the missing time. The woman who left Philip, when I wouldn't dare. Anna hated that self-satisfied smirk on her face. She hated her.

This time when the man—her husband!—wrapped his strong arms around her, she didn't resist. She buried her face against his neck and sobbed. “Gone,” she choked out. “The next moment it will all be gone again. I can feel it. It's like this house, this life, this body, isn't mine anymore. It's like I'm ... trespassing. Someone stop this!"

“Shhh,” the man soothed. “You'll be back to normal in no time. That's how you said it happened before. I'll have my sweet wife back in no time at all. Shhh."

She almost told him what she was thinking. That's what I'm afraid of, you bastard. That's what terrifies me.

The flicker of the television caught her eye. She was in the darkened living room, sitting on the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table. A paperback was butterflied open on her lap. The hyperactive man on the television was demonstrating a strange appliance above a flashing 1-800-12B-UYIT and the words ACT NOW! WHILE SUPPLIES LAST! TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE!

The front door opened. A young woman with dark blonde hair stepped into the house. “Mom?” she asked. “Dad's not up, is he?"

Anna looked around. “Who? No.” Her mind felt muddled, numb with exhaustion. As if she'd labored mightily to return here over some great distance and now could not recall exactly why she'd come. “But I'm here."

“Thank God,” the girl said. “He'd throw one of his fits if he knew I was out with Bernard again. You won't tell, will you?"

“No. I won't tell. You're Becky?"

The girl closed the door with a nervous grin. “Are you awake, Mom? You sound a little looped."

Anna found the strength to lift a hand that no longer felt like her own. “Come here,” she whispered. “Let me look at you."

Becky moved out of the shadows, concern shining in her eyes. She wavered like an apparition in the light of the television. “Are you crying?” she asked. “Mom? What's wrong?"

Anna wiped away the tears. “I'm fine. Look how beautiful you turned out. Like an angel. Maybe it's for the best, Becky. Maybe you've had a better life this way.” She smiled. “Or is this all just a dream?"

Becky's cheeks flamed. “Mom! What's up with you? Are you drunk?"

“Promise me something!” Anna shouted, a sense of urgency rearing up. She reached out toward the lovely stranger who was her daughter. “Promise me you'll be happy. Promise me you'll live every moment as if there might not be another. As if someone more deserving could win the prize of your life. Can you promise me that? Please?"

“Sure, Mom,” she answered, amused, backing way. “Whatever.” She moved toward the stairs. “Go back to your dream. Good night."

Anna waved. “Have a full life, Becky,” she managed, her voice choked with pain. “Have it for both of us."

The television flickered once more and went dark.

The infant cooed in her wrinkled arms, round face puckered and red. She rocked him. Someone somewhere was playing music. A familiar Christmas song. What was it? Anna couldn't remember. Her mind felt sluggish, her memories blurred.

“Are you a grandchild?” she asked, in a stranger's wheezing voice. “Are you Becky's?” The baby squirmed in her lap, bright eyes staring up solemnly. “You are, aren't you? And what a pretty one. Pick of the litter.” She rubbed the child's belly with gnarled fingers and was rewarded with a giggle. This is a moment worth having, she thought. This is a moment to treasure. And this one is mine. Anna leaned down, ignoring the ache in her back, and planted a kiss on the child's blonde head. An old woman's tears wet those ruddy cheeks. Her last moments, before the other returned, were of exquisite joy.

Copyright © 2001 Daniel Goss

Daniel Goss has written dozens of short stories and is now laboring melodramatically on a novel.

12/3/01

no wind with answers blowing,
no raiment, bread, nor breath of air...

our footprints,
pristine, eternal,
mark paths of to and from.

we lie here motionless,
our backs pressed into chalky dust,
reposed on slope of true tranquility.
no one owns this desert sea,
the only waves are shadows
stretching darkly.
interlaced fingers behind
two reflective heads....

in a silence
of vacuumed, black-space sky
one planet of pearl floats,
blue with stormy swirls of white
and worried gray—we'll stay
in this, our place of calm,
no gusty violence,
the only hint of breeze,
the exhale of our solitary sighs.

Copyright © 2000 T. Emmett Mueller

T. Emmett Mueller, an educator for 26 years in Michigan, retired to Florida seven years ago. He currently holds the position of Submissions Editor for This Hard Wind poetry magazine and is Associate Editor for PoetWorks Press. Recently, T. Emmett was a featured poet at the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival and the Austin International Poetry Festival in Austin, Texas, where his work appears in the festival anthologies Di-Verse-City 2000, and 2001. For more about him, visit his Web site.

12/10/01

Once a month
when her doctor visits,
my aunt asks when will she be healed,
believing a broken hip
must be the reason why she's here.

Suspicious of the staff,
she hides her purse, refuses
to remove her watch,
and stows the brittle checks,
account closed years ago, in a hatbox.

She no longer bathes
herself, fearful of water
as if water were a sailor
with roving hands and a crooked smile.

Last night I dreamed
her young again, elegant and cultured—
twin pearls she envied
in others yet never had herself.

On an ocean liner
in the dark, she strolled the deck.
Fog from the cold Atlantic
feathered her shoulders and
swirled like tulle around her waist.

Some days a swell of reason
buoys her up, and she seems
to recognize us;
our arms and hands wave to her.

Most days in a filthy robe she roams
the halls, gray braid swaying
from side to side, and tells anyone
who'll listen she's been kidnapped,
forced to travel miles from home.

Today the cleanup of her home
began: old dresses to charity,
magazines and books to the library,
and on the sloping lawn,
her furniture scattered like debris.

While loading the van,
I tried not to think of how
the ocean steals anything it wants:
bridges, ships, even entire cities;
then throws it all back—warped
and bleached, battered beyond recognition.

Above the traffic, I heard
a keening, Circe-like, wavering
like the first note of a storm
calling us all out into the waves
where we will be stripped
of everything, even our names.

Copyright © 2001 Mark Rudolph

Mark Rudolph lives in southern Indiana and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Chiaroscuro, Electric Wine, Star*Line, Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and other venues. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.

12/17/01

Listen to the rustling
of mutant oak leaves....

"Go,” said the Oracle
at Tau Eridani III,
"Where wormholes close and open
like anemone."

Copyright © 2001 Kendall Evans

Kendall Evans has had over sixty poems published in various SF/fantasy/horror magazines, including his story-length narrative poem “I Feel So Schizophrenic, the Starship's Aft-Brain Said,” which appeared in a recent issue of Black Petals. His “The Keeper of the Lighthouse at Land's End” received an honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

12/31/01

I wonder about them, those brave explorers,
Cocooned in their antiseptic habitats,
Sexually and temperamentally paired to a nicety,
With all the amenities the late 21st C has to offer.
When they return, eyes blazing with alien worlds
(The cities, the domed necropoli, wheeled plants and
Mile-long insects, weird new minerals and
Precisely measured constants),
When they return from their far adventuring,
What will they think, poking through the pestilential ash
Of our last and truly final war,
In which even the bones of the slain were devoured
In jig time by the worst the late 21st had to deploy?
And I write them notes, preserved in a wide variety of media,
And hide them in obscure places on several continents.
I try to tell them: don't grieve, don't feel guilt,
Turn away from this stupid dead thing and go back to the stars,
So that our suicide will not quite have been in vain.

Copyright © 2001 David C. Kopaska-Merkel

David C. Kopaska-Merkel spent his formative years north of the Arctic Circle, where he spent his time counting polar bears. Chapped skin forced a return to warmer climes, and he now resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he studies rocks for the state and writes poetry for himself. David's previous poem in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. Visit his Web site for more about him.

12/03/01

I. Amor Anthologatis

I love anthologies.

In high school, my summer jobs couldn't quite pay for the shiny new science fiction books that were coming out. So I'd forego the latest in the Dragonlance saga, and slip into the local used-book store. It was called “Tales Retold,” and it became my refuge after a long day at school. The room smelled marvelously musty, and I'd spend hours poring over the shelves.

I'd often come home with a short story collection. I'd start some choice story in the used-book store, and finish it on the bus ride home. A really good story would mean that I would miss my stop, and I managed that on a regular basis. Another story would be my break in the middle of my homework that evening, and I'd probably read some more on the bus ride in the morning.

All these books were bought used, and many had worn covers before I was born. It was wonderful for my economic sense, but terrible for my notion of contemporary fiction. In the science fiction I grew up on, man might someday reach the moon, Korea was a recent American overseas entanglement, and the next war would be fought with animatronic robots against with Soviet enemies.

Science fiction has changed since then, as has the rest of the world. Old SF (even from a few decades ago) always looks simultaneously retro and super-futuristic. The computers talk to humans, but not to each other. The cars fly and are piloted by computers, but the humans can't talk until they're on the ground. In the real 21st century, we've got computer networks with processors on every desk and in every phone. On the other hand, we've become less willing to predict radical changes in how people do things. The science-fiction writer of the 1950s would be perfectly comfortable making his way through the contemporary world—cars, stoplights, money, and telephones all act just like he'd expect—although he might be bitterly disappointed at the lack of commercial moon shuttles and talking refrigerators. When modern SF wants to predict massive change, we place our new worlds and new civilizations millennia in the future.

There was something important in common about those stories. As I've traveled through the history of the genre, Gardner Dozois seems to have been my reliable guide. He has stamped his name on every issue of Asimov's since 1985, and the Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies for the same period. This year, I've been lucky enough to read a current anthology, one based on the works of 2000.

II. Quantitative Studies

Gardner Dozois kicks of this hefty volume with an extensive view of how the world looks in 2000 from his perspective, and from the perspective of published science fiction. His feelings are mixed: a few magazines are struggling, but the selection of web publications is growing. He loves the vibrancy in science fiction today—apparently, more has been published in the last few years than ever before, and readers are reading with growing appetites. He's enthused about the wide variety of speculative fiction publishing venues now available. He lists off a number of web ‘zines—Strange Horizons makes the list. The introduction is worth leafing through for his painstaking work. He knows circulation figures for magazines that the rest of us can't even find the subscription desk for.

But just as he looks at the world from the editor's desk, where a defunct Australian science fiction ‘zine gets more lines than the X-Men movie, so he gives us a look at the world of the future. He speaks for all of us—after all, this is The Year's Best Science Fiction.

A science fiction anthology, writ large, is a collection of the communal hopes and fears of the world today. (Read small, it's what popped into an editor's head.) What interests us today?

I worried, at first, that the collection would seem dated. The stories of 2000 were written in 1999, and now we're two years later. The Internet boom has busted; the worldwide growth of the last decade is receding, and the geopolitical situation is a mess. But the stories are vivid, and good fiction transcends its era.

To write this review, I carefully read the stories in the collection. Then, being a quantitative researcher, I coded and counted them. I looked for genre and for important themes: does the story focus on space travel? Computers? Artificial intelligence? Biotechnology? It all went into a spreadsheet, sorted by genre, and then by whether the world ends.

The end of the world was, apparently, big in 2000. Nine of the 23 stories have a world end, at least once. Nancy Kress’ “Savior” has the world end—in any conventional sense of the apocalypse—at least a half dozen times, as future history is laid out from the perspective of a shielded alien craft in North Dakota.

Biotech is big. At least two-thirds of the book deals with advanced biotechnology of some form or another. Some stories are set a few years from now, others in the remote future; and both offer revolutions in technology. We'll search the Amazon for useful chemicals—but we'll also dig through office buildings, as M. Shayne Bell's bizarre “The Thing About Benny” explains. In that story, biotech companies send teams of horticulturalists off to search through office plants and home cuttings for unusual variants, hoping to find something new. Hope will even be found on alien moons⁵. Over the course of our fictional future, biotech will replace humans (as in Robert Charles Wilson's “the Great Goodbye"), cure diseases, and merge us with computers and each other. The merges will lead to inevitable strife¹⁹, of course, and both biological machines¹² and biological systems¹⁴ will be used as weapons. We might be spared that war, though, if antibiotic-resistant bacteria wipe out civilizations, as in Tamarind Due's “Patient Zero". Meanwhile, we can hope that the cure for cancer is somewhere in a petunia, a displaced South American tribesman, or a live-sampled trilobite brought back from the Paleozoic.²⁰

And we will be in the Paleozoic, because time travel is big. The paradox-stories of a few decades ago (Heinlein's “All You Zombies,” for example, in which the narrator is his own father, mother, and lover) have faded away: everyone who travels in time does so backward, and to a subtly different parallel world², or in such a way as to prevent contradiction. In Greg Egan's “Oracle,” for example, an alternate Alan Turing is guided by a time-traveller from a parallel timeline. She feeds him insights and guides his research to help ensure that his timeline is more successful than her own. There are no more time cops, wandering up and down the millennia.

Aliens are another area where the field seems to have come to consensus. Aliens no longer learn to cook (for?) humans, as the Twilight Zone's “To Serve Man” had it. Nor are they tall, slim, and gray-headed. Rather, they come as mysterious floating spheres¹⁵, and as balls of impenetrable matter⁴. Twice, they seem to be diseases^5,23.

Computers, however, are safely open for debate. No writer particularly questions the future of this technology. True artificial intelligence—the kind that talks to people—takes the stage four times, but everywhere are high-speed connections to a world of information. A tale of painful adolescence in a near-future Nevada (Susan Palwick's “Going After Bobo"), has GPS on everything. In the farther future, the computers get implanted and join up with brains¹². Fascinatingly, in that story, the technology is used mainly as a way to join people together with each other—it draws a slow continuum between direct brain transfer and the more ancient email message. That same email is the way that secret agents from an alternate universe communicate while disguised as mild-mannered geeks, reading about computer innovations on comp.risks in Charles Stross’ “Antibodies."

Not that everything is unconventional. The book has several classic Space Opera Adventures. Like any good science fiction anthology, the book is bursting with passages about laser guns burning through space and humans with exotic names:

“The Interdiction's sensor web can't spot us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spy-sats over the nest."—Alister Reynods, “The Great Wall of Mars”

"Turn back right now,” Sho said. “We can take you out with the spectrographic laser if we have to."—Paul J. McAuley, “Reef”

Pael said, “Not perfectly. They are based on the Planck-zero effect: about one part in a billion of incident energy is absorbed."—Stephen Baxter, “On the Orion Line”

III. Case Summaries

The low-tech end of the spectrum is just as spellbinding. Eliot Fintushel, for example, has a charming story of shady life in the big city, and some rather unusual people who live there. In “Milo and Sylvie,” a young man comes out of years of fevered dreams and intensive therapy to learn that the world is a more complex place—with a far simpler explanation—than he had ever imagined. For Fintushel's always-manic writing, it's gentle.

Compare the sample chapter on his Web site:

Listen to me! The Space Vikings are looking at us, at our time, at our galaxy. I have astrographic evidence of their penetrating the Milky Way in this century, perhaps this very year! And we must stop them, Leona Taddington, because I love you! I love you, Leona Taddington, and I don't care if they hear me. Why don't you tell me your own true feeling about me, Leona Taddington? Leona ... ? Leona ... ?

with his writing in this story:

The little machine! The box sheathed in perforated black leather hiding inside Dr. Devore's rolltop with all of Milo's secrets! Like the totemic soul of a primitive: a pouch, a feather, or a whittled doll secreted in a hollow log, proof against the soul-snatching demons and enemies.

The love of exclamation points is the same. But the relentless beat has been calmed, and the writing is smooth, caring. I found myself sliding into his unnamed city, wandering with this young boy and his mysterious friends—the psychiatrist who keeps disappearing into back rooms; the puppeteer whose fingers truly seem to be magical; and the strange secrets that connect them all.

There's another, even taller tale in the collection. Michael Swanwick's “Raggle, Taggle Gypsy-O” is a marvelous adventure through time and space. A wanderer slides between dimensions and through time in a way much like Zelazny's Amber princes. He sells dinosaurs to the Roman Colliseum out of the back of an eighteen-wheeler, ducking evil lords of the universe and kidnapping a busty, beautiful—and altogether willing—partner. It's a love story, the love of a trickster for his lass, and his search for her once she's gone. This story is written as canon: he's not just any trickster but the trickster; he doesn't fight a lustful evil overlord, but the lustful, evil overlord. His search for his love asks challenging questions: how do new legends get created? What purpose might they serve?^*

John Kessel's “The Juniper Tree” is a mystery, locked in a culture clash. The moon colony, founded by feminists trying to rethink society, is socially liberal, ruled by women, and polyamorous; the earth below them continues to be strongly conservative. In what may be a response to libertarian sex roles in science fiction, the characters—a father and daughter immigrant couple—neither fornicate their way off into the horizon, nor are attacked by rabid hordes of fundamentalists. In this world of Heinlein characters, they don't sink in and discover the truer beauty of everyone. Rather, they struggle to get by through culture clashes, and their perspective is a dark one in a world swung too far in the other direction. The authors don't, in the end, condemn that world—but neither to they hold it up as a paradise.

“Patient Zero,” by Tamarind Due, is set in a near-enough future to be truly disturbing, and, in the wake of anthrax scares, is the one story that kept me awake at night. It's a story of a disease slowly progressing as seen from the perspective of a boy in a bubble. He's the one carrier who hasn't died from the otherwise completely-fatal condition. The story is compelling, touching—in its few pages, we get to know a number of characters for just long enough to miss them when they go, and through those characters we see the rest of the world.

IV. In Conclusion

In total, then, the collection is exactly what it should be: a triumph of great stories. None of them is disappointing, and many are excellent. After reading this collection, I subscribed to Analog and started looking for stories by some of my favorites. I've been introduced to three or four new authors, and I've been convinced to pick up a few novels by writers in the book.

And so Dozois succeeds again. I like the image that Dozois is, even now, flipping through magazines, surfing the web, flagging favorite pages. We'll find out, of course, next June with Best of 2001.

* Jane Yolen does something rather similar, in her meta-folktale “The Traveller and the Tale,” from 1995.

Danyel Fisher, a graduate student in Southern California, continues to be stunned at how much easier it is to write reviews than his thesis.

12/10/01

Divine Intervention could have been a profound meditation on the eternal tension between science and religion.

Thank heaven first-time author Ken Wharton decided to have a little fun instead.

Divine Intervention does contain science aplenty, as well as religion. It combines them, in fact, in one of the niftiest explanations for God I've yet seen. Wharton has created a plausible science-based religion called Symmology, predicated on a new interpretation of quantum mechanics—that the universe is truly time-symmetric. Another arrow of time has originated (or, from our perspective, will originate) at the Big Crunch and is shooting past us on its trek from our future toward our past, with the Big Bang as its final destination. God is the collective consciousness of beings traveling along that other arrow.

This vast intelligence is much closer to the Big Bang than we are to the Big Crunch, and thus far in advance of our abilities. We cannot interact with God directly, but only through the quantum interstices of our minds—in prayer, or through religious visions. Such an epiphany is experienced by the Captain of the Walt Disney, Earth's first colony ship, as it travels from star to star, searching for a home, and over time the crew of the Walt Disney, chosen for their scientific abilities, logical minds, and agnostic ways, embrace the scientific religion of Symmology as revealed by their Captain.

The Walt Disney finds Mandala, and 115 Mandalan years later Symmology is the leading religion of a small but thriving colony centered in Mandala City. The Captain is revered as a Moses figure, having led his people to the promised planet. The ship's log books and the Captain's journal comprise Symmology's religious writings. What the Mandalans teach to their children as “theology” more closely resembles mathematics and physics.

At first Mandala appears to be a peaceful colony, but it doesn't take long to find trouble in paradise. Not everyone subscribes to Symmology or wants to live in the rigidly-ordered City. Thus far the dissidents—contemptuously called Burnouts by the City-dwellers—have been content to leave Mandala City and found their own commune-like “kingdoms.” But more trouble is coming. Suitable land for colonization on Mandala is limited, and environmental pressures loom. Rising tensions between the Burnouts and the City dwellers have spurred development of weapons, formation of a militia, and pressure for a pre-emptive strike against the Burnouts from the more hawkish factions of the Mandala City government.

To make matters worse, another ship from Earth has already arrived in-system, a ship that carries enough colonists in cold sleep to crowd all the descendants of the original settlers—City dweller and Burnout alike—off the best land and reduce them to a powerless minority. Alexander Channing, Prime Minister of Mandala City, is spurred to drastic measures to maintain both the independence of the City and his own position as the biggest fish in the pond. It's a small pond, true, but it's the only pond in town, and he's not going to give it up without a fight.

Toss in a boy who can talk to God, and the stage is set for fireworks.

The boy is Drew Randall, a typical seven-year-old (nine in Earth years) with a healthy imagination and a modicum of mischievousness. Drew is bright, but in a realistic way—he's not possessed of the self-aware precocity of a sitcom kid. Theology is his favorite class. No surprise, as his father, Paul, is a preacher of Symmology, respected by the City dwellers and tolerated by the Burnouts, with whom he does missionary work. Drew is also a deaf-mute, a legacy of the cosmic radiation that bombarded his ancestors on the Walt Disney. But Drew can hear and speak, courtesy of a clever microwave transceiver that feeds directly into his brain. It's his transceiver that enables him to talk to God, and, as all the various plots unfold—City versus Earthies, City versus Burnouts, Burnouts versus Earthies—God sees all, and God talks back.

As Drew, his father, and his mother Katrina, a biologist, are drawn further into the machinations of the different players, the action escalates, war looms, and thousands of lives are at stake. Drew—and God—hold the key to restoring peace to Mandala.

Divine Intervention has its share of philosophical musings on the natures of time and God, but for the most part it's a darned fun read set firmly in the action-adventure camp. It also has some loving descriptions of interesting science (Wharton is a physicist), a few puzzles to chew on along the way (what are the Burnouts up to? Is God really God?), and some engaging characters, roughly in that order of importance. For the most part, the action, the science, the puzzles, and the characters deliver.

In praising Divine Intervention, I don't want to oversell the novel. It does have some problems. I sometimes found myself wishing for a little more depth, a little more persistence in pushing ideas to the next level, on asking the next question. (On the other hand, Wharton isn't Samuel Delany—nor does he claim to be—and in an unashamed action-adventure story, such a failing can scarcely be called a fatal flaw. ) Several areas would have benefited from such persistence: Mandala City itself, which, except for a few interesting tidbits, always seemed like a small midwestern city; a conflict between Drew's parents that could have—and should have—almost torn them apart but was instead glossed over; the Burnouts, who turned out to be much more engaging characters than the stuffy old City dwellers. And Wharton's religion, Symmology, the centerpiece of the novel.

The science of Symmology is splendidly drawn. In fact, Wharton gets a wee bit repetitious about it. But the religion of Symmology is given short shrift. Wharton does ponder the question of free will, given that God has seen our future, and even comes up with a compelling reason why such a God would find it in His best interests to help us out.

Yet when told that Drew's father Paul turned to Symmology for comfort after the tragic deaths of twin daughters before Drew was born, I found myself wondering what comfort a religion like Symmology could provide. There's no promise of a “better place” for grieving parents to cling to, no talk of a purpose for senseless deaths. No guarantee that death is not the end, no assurances that our individual prayers will be answered. Unfortunately, the God of Symmology is no more prepared than we are to answer the question, “Why?” Wharton has postulated two intelligences whizzing past each other at the speed of time, but it seems to me there's still room at the top.

Does this invalidate the novel? No—far from it. If you think it does, you're reading the wrong book. Wharton was obviously having a lot of fun with Divine Intervention and he's been kind enough to invite us along for the ride. I see no reason to turn him down. But I look forward to his second novel with the hope that he's gained enough confidence to really explore some of his nifty ideas.

Lori Ann White is a writer and martial artist currently living in the San Francisco Bay area. She has appeared in Writers of the Future, Vol. 3, Full Spectrum, Vol. II, and has work forthcoming in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. She is also personally acquainted with author Ken Wharton, and hopes her first novel turns out as well.

12/17/01

It is early winter in the year 1104 in the Reinmark, a duchy in the north of the Holy Roman Empire. Karelian, Count of Lys, newly returned from the victorious Crusade, rides north with his knights through the bleak forest of Helmardin. Their destination is Ravensbruck Castle, stronghold of Count Arnulf, who holds the northern border of the Reinmark against the pagan Vikings. Karelian is journeying there to marry Arnulf's daughter Adelaide. The marriage has been arranged by Gottfried the Golden, Duke of the Reinmark, who had been Karelian's captain in the Crusade, to unite his two greatest vassals. Gottfried will need their united strength behind him, for he has great plans for a next Crusade.... Riding through Helmardin, Karelian and his men are caught in a sudden snowstorm. As night is falling, they happen suddenly upon a castle in the waste, where there should be no shelter at all. Karelian's men fear sorcery, but the Count, always bold in the face of danger, leads them into the castle. There they find warmth and music and beauty and sorcery enough, for the castle is Car-Iduna, Keep of the Sorceress of Helmardin, Guardian of the Black Chalice. The Sorceress is beautiful, and generous, and powerful, and utterly outside Christian salvation. She has brought Karelian here to offer him a future very different than the one he is riding to find in Ravensbruck, a future that can be his if he will renounce his allegiance to Gottfried and serve her instead. Not only his own future is at stake in his choice, but that of the Duchy, the Empire, and the realm of Christendom as well.

So begins the story told in Marie Jakober's The Black Chalice, a novel that will engross readers who love medieval historical fiction, neo-pagan fiction, or feminist fantasy. The Black Chalice's representation of this struggle between militant Christian piety and sensual pagan magic deserves comparison to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon and Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne, as well as to less ambitious popular classics of medieval historical fantasy like Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books or Judith Tarr's The Hound and the Falcon series. Like all of these works, its plot is built on a conflict between an ascetic, rigid Christian orthodoxy and a broader view of a sacred world that celebrates compassion, sensual pleasure, and magic as well as the worship of God or the gods. Its development of this conflict is not especially original, though it spins a tale that was gripping enough to keep me reading far into the night.

The work's originality and its more profound attractions lie in the way the tale is told. Central to its telling is the voice of its narrator, Paul of Arduin. Once Karelian's trusted squire, he has spent seventeen years as a monk, trying to forget the history that the book relates, hoping that his part in it will likewise be forgotten. The novel opens thirty years after the beginning of its story, when Paul, ordered by the Pope to write the history of Karelian's deeds, is caught once again in the middle of the conflict between the Church and its pagan opponents. Just as Paul begins writing his tale of Karelian's seduction by the powers of darkness, Raven, the Sorceress of Helmardin, arrives and enchants Paul's quill so that it will write only the truth, as he remembers it! That truth turns out to be much more complicated and painful than Paul would like to admit, even to himself, and he struggles to suppress the feelings that Raven's spell and the Pope's command force him to relive. Thus, although the hero of the story is Karelian, the character the readers get to know best is Paul. The story that he gives us reads as might the Gospel according to Judas or The Lord of the Rings according to Gollum. It's a narrative voice utterly unlike those of the standard late-adolescent-point-of-view characters who drive so much commercial fantasy. In Paul, Jakober has created a subtle portrait of self-deception, self-justification, and frustrated passion, a portrait both horrible and fascinating in its study of how a man comes to reject life and love in his fear for his soul, exemplified in this chilling response to the coming of spring:

Rain slithered softly over the monastery walls, and ran down the cobbled paths, whispering of bursting grapes and flowers, whispering of life: boundless life, spilling out forever from the black loins of the earth.

Always more life ... and still more ... and yet still more. Paul shook his head. He acknowledged God's generosity, the marvelous abundance of creation, yet he was sickened by this endless glut of life, this growing over of everything by the weeds of indiscriminate existence.

To the black fecund earth, the bones of a king and the leavings of a rat were no different. They were both just offal, just matter to chew up and spit out again in still another form—another weed, another drop of rain, another rat. Why did God permit it? Why did all this life exist, when all but a few tiny fragments of it were meaningless and befouled?

It's in Paul's own torment that the spiritual struggle of the novel is most compellingly realized.

The counterweight to Paul's life-hating voice is the world itself as Jakober has rendered it. If her medieval German pagans are occasionally unbelievably modern in their philosophies, their world as a whole is not, and it teems with life: human, natural, and supernatural. Karelian's heroism comes from his full embrace of the life of the world, which Paul can never accept, when he binds himself to Raven: “And he would take her gift of sorcery, take it with both hands, triumphantly, and love her better for it. It was magic and wildness and shimmering power; it was strength in his body and cunning in his mind; it was the hunger to live and the hope to win and it was sweet, sweet ... sweet as her harpsongs, sweet as the taste of her flesh against his mouth."

Jakober's representation of her medieval world avoids anachronism not only by rigorous historical research (though she's much freer with her history than is Judith Tarr, for instance) but also by her grounding in medieval romance. In addition to Paul's voice, what sets her work apart from similar historical fantasies is her debt to Wolfram von Eschenbach, the greatest of Medieval German poets. Wolfram is best known for his Parzival, a version of the quest for the Holy Grail. It's a work that exuberantly bursts the bounds of medieval orthodoxy in its celebration of human vitality and diversity. Jakober follows Wolfram by also telling a Grail story. Her Black Chalice is the Grail, and she makes explicit what Wolfram only implies: her Grail is a pagan relic, not a Christian one, and it is the Christian goal to master the life-forces that the Chalice both represents and defends that must be opposed in this book. Its story is the inverse of the traditional Grail quest.

Because The Black Chalice is much more than a pleasantly escapist fantasy, I've held it to a high standard in this review, pointing out to the prospective reader a certain familiarity to the basic story, the occasional too-modern feel of its heroes. Such faults as the novel has arise from its passionate embrace of life, an embrace so fierce that it has little compassion to spare for those who reject it. I was, as I think most readers will be, little troubled by the work's commitments, though some Christian readers may find the lack of a single Christian character who is both clearly devout and clearly humane something of a loss. On the other hand, the corners and eddies of the story that are apart from central plot of the book are so exquisitely stunning that the reader must wonder what the book could have been like if it had been just a little less impassioned about its conflict of values. Readers caught up in the main plot may be tempted to speed through some of these passages: they shouldn't. The story of Karelian and Adelaide, though clearly subordinate to the story of Karelian and Raven, is magnificently told. The squalor and subtle menace of Ravensbruck Castle, the festering hatreds and desperate dreams of its denizens, comprise as harrowing a piece of unromanticized historical fantasy as I have ever read. In parts of the story where the sides of the conflict aren't clear, Jakober endows her characters with an extraordinarily poignant psychological complexity as they try to find their ways in the harsh world that has damaged them all, the reader fears, irreparably. It is their suffering, even when turned into a hatred of everything that lives, that justifies the defense of the Chalice, much more than the ambitions of the central villains, about whom little need be said.

The Black Chalice is not a perfect book, but its flaws are small in comparison to its daring narration and vivid prose. It's been good enough to make the jump from small press to major publishing house. First published in hardcover in September, 2000, by Edge Press, it will be appearing in a paperback edition from Ace books early in 2002. The paperback edition will help it reach the wide readership it deserves. The hardback from Edge is beautifully produced, however, so if you have a taste for handsome, durable books or want to support independent publishing, I'd strongly recommend picking this book up in hardcover.

Christopher Cobb is Senior Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons.

12/19/01

At the heart of Peter Jackson's brilliant The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring—the first of three cinematic adaptations of Tolkien's beloved fantasy, shot simultaneously for release in consecutive years—is a favourable melancholy, a despair born of two things: the crucial feeling of desperation that infests a small band of heroes striving against an invincible evil; and the knowledge that this film will soon end, its sequel twelve months away. Jackson has translated nearly every element of Tolkien's universe, from a vast, sprawling history implied in the language and the actions of its multi-specied characters, to a completely immersive fantasy realm with nary a seam to spoil the illusion, to a quest that's worthy of epic attention. He's captured the sadness and moral weight of Tolkien with the kind of deep reality that seems effortless but is born of a meticulous preparation and all-consuming vision. It takes a certain skill to make things look good; it takes genius to keep the pretty pictures from overwhelming the narrative of what is, in this case, a universally familiar story. Ridley Scott never quite got the hang of it.

In many other ways, Jackson's film surpasses Tolkien. Though adept at the creation of a rich history and a multi-layered reality, Tolkien lacked a gift for crafting climactic scenarios and compelling action sequences. You'll find no such problems in The Fellowship of the Ring, particularly when it comes to the fighting: every sword thrust, axe chop, and slung arrow lands with a savage purpose. One forgets that many of the antagonists are computer-generated. Peter Jackson is among the few directors truly capable of integrating CGI and live-action (as evidenced by the underestimated The Frighteners), a knack attributable to his understanding that images should augment a scene and not upstage it. But even better than Jackson's visionary re-imagining of Tolkien's battles is his expulsion of the British philologian's subterranean religiosity and subtext of virulent racism. The Fellowship of the Ring manages to be neither proselytizing nor xenophobic while retaining some political elements that make it surprisingly poignant for a modern audience. It is, in other words, a personal story about hardship that refrains both from easy relationship crutches such as schmaltz and, at the other end of the spectrum, from a patronizing belligerence.

Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) is a hobbit, a creature approximately four feet in height (the actors were digitally, flawlessly shrunk) who lives in the ever-flowering Shire's bucolic Hobbiton. On the occasion of his uncle Bilbo's (Ian Holm) 111th birthday, Frodo is given a mysterious ring as his birthright. The wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) suspects something infernal of the ring when the otherwise honest Bilbo lies to hold onto it. A quick study reveals that it belongs to a dark lord now seeking, through a steady rebuilding of his armies, to regain the ring and with it his corporeal form. The malevolent warlord (named “Sauron") dispatches nine wraiths: hooded avatars riding midnight steeds whose voices sound like screaming children. Frodo is forced to leave his beloved Shire on a journey in which he enlists allies (the titular Fellowship) to destroy the ring in the fires of a volcano at the heart of the enemy's realm.

Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, read variously as a Christian text, a fable of industrialization, and a parable of WWII with its mechanized grand fiend and a confederacy of free peoples allied against him (Tolkien denies the connection to the Second World War), functions most effectively—and Jackson understands this—as the most important modern example of the archetypal hero's journey. Frodo is the classic reluctant champion, the son of unlikely parentage called upon to complete an impossible task against forbidding odds. Joining Frodo are Gandalf; his hobbit friends Sam (Sean Astin), Merry (Dominic Monaghan), and Pippin (Billy Boyd); a pair of humans in Boromir (Sean Bean) and the mysterious Strider (a fierce Viggo Mortensen); an Elvish archer, Legolas (Orlando Bloom); and a gruff dwarf named Gimli (an unrecognizable John Rhys-Davies).

Basically a long flight across several realms of Tolkien's Middle Earth, Jackson has crafted distinct looks for each demesne. The black-plumed conflagration of Sauron's infernal homeland Mordor, the soaring spires of the Elf-home Rivendell, the Giger-cum-Robert Mills tower Isengard (stronghold of the treacherous wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee))—all astonish. The highlight of the film is a trip through the dark Mines of Moria. A massive Dwarven city carved through a mountain (it is a four-day walk from one end of it to the other), Moria is the backdrop for three of the film's finest set pieces: a struggle with a terrifying thing in a pond; a battle against a horde of goblins and their pet cave-troll; and a confrontation with a demon of smoke and fire: the winged, whip-wielding Balrog.

At its best, there are moments in The Fellowship of the Ring that I have only seen in my most winsome and wildest fantasies. At its worst—and there are stumbles—the film becomes too enraptured with its own gravity and bogged down as a consequence. If you're a newcomer to the world of Middle Earth, rest assured that the flurry of implied back-stories are faithful to Tolkien's myth-making, the encyclopaedic knowledge of which is not vital to your enjoyment of the film—it's more a matter of knowing that the places and things in this world have names than knowing the names proper. In a slightly misguided effort to present a more unified story, however, Jackson has incorporated a grand skirmish only related in a supplementary work (The Silmarillion), as well as one too many scenes that express the importance of an event in vain. Suffering the most, the incandescent (literally, it so happens in this case) Cate Blanchett has her performance as the Elven queen, Galadriel, almost entirely obscured by sound effects, lighting, and visual pyrotechnics that seem only to underscore a point ("the ring is evil") that has been made a dozen times previously.

Even given its occasional miscue, The Fellowship of the Ring is an unqualified triumph, its status as the best Western fantasy film ever made all but indisputable. (The Japanese have been making fantasies on this level through the anime medium for years.) I have no doubt the series will get better now that the groundwork is laid. The cast carries off the tricky balance between high drama and nuance, the characters are driven by recognizable motivations of greed, love, loyalty, and courage, and Jackson's direction is very plainly above reproach. The breadth of imagination on display here is awe-inspiring, and the reserve with which the fantasy scenario is handled no less so. As an adaptation, it cuts the fat yet preserves the soul of the work, reminding of Kenneth Branagh's mud and glory Henry V in its visceral force and illumination of the source material. (Jackson's film explains things to me that didn't make sense in the original text, and repairs things that didn't work.)

New Line Cinema's unprecedented investment of time and money has been justified, and the film plays too short at a full three hours. The wait already seems interminable for not only the release of the second film (The Two Towers) but also the next showing of this one that I can attend. The uncompromising The Fellowship of the Ring reminds most of us why we go to the movies in the first place: to be frightened, to be excited, to be transported, to be treated with respect. To be enchanted. I can't wait to be reminded again.

Copyright © 2001 by Walter Chaw;
reprinted courtesy of FilmFreakCentral.net

Walter Chaw trained in British Romanticism and Critical Theory, and is now the chief film critic for FilmFreakCentral.net. Syndicated weekly in 32 small print journals, he is a nationally accredited member of the Online Film Critics Society.

12/3/01

Genre labels have at least as much to do with reader perception as with content.

I've been having a lot of discussions lately about the differences between literary fiction and other genre fiction (especially speculative fiction). All such discussions are doomed, of course; even agreeing on a useful definition for a given genre is nigh-impossible. Still, I'm interested in exploring genre definitions and boundaries, and in looking at fiction that crosses genres, or that falls into the interstices between genres. Such fiction is sometimes known as slipstream or interstitial fiction. (The two terms are not precisely synonymous, but there's a large overlap.)

One of the most important reasons for such explorations is that speculative fiction readers are often blind to what's going on outside of the worlds of science fiction and fantasy publishing (and similarly, literary-fiction readers are often contemptuously dismissive of speculative fiction without knowing anything about it). I think cross-pollination can help expose everyone to new ideas. For example, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Bruce Sterling wrote some stories (I'm thinking in particular of “Dori Bangs” and “The Sword of Damocles") that did things nobody else in speculative fiction was doing at the time. The stories garnered high praise from speculative fiction readers for being innovative and daring, for going far beyond anything those pitiable mainstream writers could do. But those stories could have been published as literary fiction; they employed metafictional devices that literary fiction had been using for decades.

So I think it's worth exploring how a work ends up with one genre label instead of another. But before getting into that, let's talk a little about what the word genre means.

I went through a big paradigm shift when it was first pointed out to me that for many purposes, science fiction is simply a marketing category. A couple years after that, I heard Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith talk at a convention about fiction that spans genre boundaries; if I remember right, they said that a science fiction romance novel would sell something like ten times as many copies if marketed as a romance than it would if marketed as SF.

Bruce Sterling, in his seminal essay on slipstream, borrowing terminology from Carter Scholz, distinguishes between marketing category (how books are categorized on bookstore shelves) (Sterling and Scholz use the term category) and genre (an “inner identity” or set of characteristics shared by a set of works). I often use the term genre to mean both of those things, but I think it's often worth making the distinction.

Not all of what I would call SF is marketed as such. My understanding is that Kurt Vonnegut (for example) intentionally distanced himself from what was then considered the SF ghetto, in a (successful) bid for mainstream appeal; Slaughterhouse-Five is obviously an SF novel in the sense that it contains SF elements (coming unstuck in time, aliens), but was published and received as literature. Other fiction with major speculative elements that's been published as mainstream literature includes Donald Barthelme's stories (a king with a donkey's head, putting buildings in envelopes to mail them, and so on), Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale (a flying horse, extrapolation into the future), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (in which a ghost features prominently). This isn't a new phenomenon, of course; many older works containing prominent speculative elements (ranging from Gulliver's Travels through Frankenstein and Dracula to Brave New World and 1984) weren't labeled as science fiction or fantasy, and are still widely considered literature rather than science fiction.

And that's one definition of slipstream: fiction with fantastical elements that's published in a marketing category other than speculative fiction. (As I understand Sterling's essay, this is fairly close to one of his original definitions of the term.) By that definition, of course, no speculative fiction magazine or publisher has ever published any slipstream.

But at another end of the multidimensional and slippery concept of slipstream, there are works with few or no traditional speculative elements that are published as speculative fiction. Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, for example, is widely considered a fantasy novel, and it reads and feels like a fantasy novel, but it lacks the major element that marks most fantasy as fantasy: it contains no overt magic. It takes place in a world other than our own, populated by humans, in a culture that in many ways resembles a historical human culture; and it was published by Tor Fantasy, with a Thomas Canty cover. All of which are hallmarks of a certain kind of fantasy. But unlike other fantasy novels, this one violates no laws of physics, contains no humanoid races or talking animals or fantastic monsters; it owes more to Georgette Heyer than to Tolkien, and Gene Wolfe described it as “Noel Coward [writing] a vehicle for Errol Flynn.” It seems reasonable, then, to label the book (as the author does) interstitial: a work that falls into the interstices between traditional marketing categories. (I should note that my cavalier uses of terms like speculative fiction and fantasy should not be seen as an indication that those terms have simple definitions. I've encountered a few people lately to whom fantasy means specifically what I would call high fantasy (which has a lot of overlap with what Interzone calls Big Commercial Fantasy): Tolkienesque elves and dragons. Whereas by my definition, anything containing magic is fantasy, whether it's urban fantasy, magic realism, high fantasy, science fantasy, dark fantasy, or none of the above.)

And then there are hard-to-classify items like the comic book Love & Rockets (in which one of the two major sets of stories starts out with spaceships and dinosaurs and superheroes and various other sci-fi trappings but rapidly evolves into being largely non-fantastical and heavily character-driven; while the other major set of stories drifts back and forth across the line between Latin American-style magic realism and literary fiction). Not to mention children's picture books, which largely aren't market-categorized by whether they contain speculative elements. (Someone suggested some years back that Dr. Seuss should be awarded a posthumous lifetime-achievement Hugo; I think the suggestion was intended mostly as a joke, but I thought it was a brilliant idea and I wish it had happened.)

Sterling noted in his essay that slipstream was a new genre but not yet a new marketing category. That was true at the time, but I think slipstream may be on its way to slowly becoming a marketing category, even if nobody yet is quite sure what it means. At WorldCon 2000, we talked with someone from one of the SF book publishing companies about Strange Horizons; she tried to help us find a short catchy label or category that we could use to describe the magazine, to give readers some idea what to expect and therefore draw them in. We used the word slipstream in passing, and she said something like, “Oh! So you're publishing stories with a slipstream mentality. That's the kind of description readers will understand.” (That's not an exact quote; she phrased it more clearly.) She was looking for a marketing category to put us into, to improve our advertising, and “slipstream” was one that made sense to her.

These days when most people use the word slipstream, they're generally talking about a particular feel that some fiction has. (As Mary Anne wrote in her editorial a few months ago: “In the end, [genre seems] to come down to a matter of language and tone.") Jonathan Carroll is the usual canonical slipstream example: a fluid mix of reality and fantasy, published as literary fiction. And much of what genre authors publish as literary fiction is slipstream—that's certainly how I'd categorize some of Le Guin's more literary work, such as “Half Past Four,” a story published in The New Yorker in 1987, which presents several disconnected permutations of a set of characters and character names, as if showing several alternate-universe versions of the ways these characters might interrelate.

Another way of putting it is that slipstream is fantasy (generally set in a world much like our modern world) that doesn't read like fantasy; it usually Feels Like Literature, but has fantastical (often extravagantly fantastical) elements that are fundamental to the story. It's often a little harder-edged than magic realism—more often William S. Burroughs than Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but then again, it can be construed as being a subset or a superset of magic realism.

I think it's reasonable to say that (as noted in Sterling's booklist) Barthelme and William S. Burroughs and Pynchon are all slipstream writers. They get weirder and more hard-edged than most of what I'd call magic realism (though fully exploring the overlaps and differences between the two terms would take another essay), and the magic and weirdness is often less fluidly integrated with reality—it's often a bit jarring and somewhat over-the-top, whereas a lot of magic realism (at least the Latin American kind) is so dreamlike that you can almost forget that that sort of thing doesn't happen in the real world. Slipstream is also sometimes a catch-all “weird stuff that doesn't fit any other category” category; Sterling says that on being given a vague definition of the term, any SF reader can immediately add books to the slipstream reading list, but I think that's partly because there are several overlapping definitions, some of which are very vague. Anything that doesn't have any overtly and unequivocally fantastical elements but does contain things that might be fantastical could probably be labeled slipstream. By a loose definition of slipstream, probably the majority of the fiction that we at Strange Horizons publish could be labeled that way, but calling us a slipstream magazine would probably give the wrong idea.

In the end, defining slipstream is at least as difficult as defining speculative fiction; I'm sure others’ definitions will vary. Work that has no clear fantastical elements sometimes hangs out in the general neighborhood of slipstream; whether you call it slipstream or not depends on your definitions.

Sterling provides other definitions of slipstream as well. For example, he notes that the kind of writing he's talking about could also be called “Novels of Postmodern Sensibility.” He adds: “It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is an attitude of peculiar aggression against ‘reality.’ ... [T]hese works ... often somehow imply that nothing we know makes ‘a lot of sense’ and perhaps even that nothing ever could.” But here I think Sterling is conflating a couple of different aspects of what he's labeled as slipstream: on the one hand, slipstream as a fuzzy label for items that don't quite fit into traditional genres, and on the other hand, slipstream as defined by a particular attitude shared by certain of the writers.

So I think it's worth looking at a couple of different aspects of what constitutes genre. Even if the following areas don't quite manage to define slipstream, I think they're useful to think about when attempting to categorize various kinds of fiction.

Content—whether a work contains “speculative elements” or not—is what I'm usually talking about when I attempt to put genre labels on fiction. Science fiction, for example, most often is set in the future and involves some sort of technology that's beyond our current understanding but doesn't contradict currently known/believed physical laws. Slipstream, too, often contains fantastical elements of some sort, or elements that verge on the fantastical or in some way appear to be fantastical. But you can probably come up with a dozen counterexamples to each of those descriptions without trying hard.

We in the Strange Horizons fiction department are definitely interested in slipstream, but we do generally require that stories we publish have a fairly clear speculative element. There are exceptions—stories like “Medusa at Morning,” for example, in which the snakes waver across a blurry line between metaphorical and literal. (Which is part of what I like so much about that story.) And we've published a couple of stories in which the speculative element is definite but very slight (though as we see it, other factors put those stories firmly in the speculative fiction tradition). But in most cases, if we can't see something that looks undeniably fantastical to us in a story, we probably won't publish it.

Not all magazines take that approach. Century, for example, publishes some stories that have no speculative elements; a review at Tangent suggests that it makes more sense to think of Century as a literary magazine with an interest in SF than as an SF magazine per se.

It sometimes feels a bit arbitrary to me to make a distinction between stories with speculative elements and those without, but we (the Strange Horizons fiction editors) want to publish speculative fiction rather than other kinds of fiction, and content is an element in perception of genre, so we continue to generally make that distinction.

But as noted earlier, a reader's perception of genre often has little to do with content; it's often the language or prose style that makes the difference. Slipstream often is written in unusual prose styles; it's often edgy and direct, sometimes choppy, sometimes lyrical. The language of classic science fiction is often transparent, using prose that doesn't call attention to itself; the language of hard-boiled detective novels feels succinct and direct but is surprisingly full of metaphor; the language of high fantasy tends toward the archaic. One way to mix genres is simply to apply the language of one genre to the content of another.

Narrative structure is another area that, while not directly related to genre, is often indicative of genre. Slipstream and literary fiction use experimental and non-traditional narrative forms more often than science fiction does: nonlinearity (in a variety of forms), lack of traditional plot structure, breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience, inclusion of non-prose forms in the work (see Always Coming Home), and so on. Also, genre writers tend, in my experience, to be very concerned about keeping viewpoint strictly consistent and constrained, while literary fiction writers seem mostly to care less about following Standard Rules Of Story Construction and more about achieving specific effects.

Of course, unusual and experimental forms of fiction can be found in speculative fiction as well. There was plenty of experimentation back in the New Wave, and it's still going on; Benjamin Rosenbaum's “Other Cities” is a good example of a work that doesn't have most of the elements of a traditional narrative. Hyperfiction is another promising area of development for experimental narrative; I haven't seen much that I've liked, but the field is still maturing.

Alan DeNiro introduced me to a useful analogy: if traditional narrative structure is like a window, more experimental writing is like a stained glass window. Alan notes that the former tries to be transparent, not letting style or structure interfere with clear gazing outside, while unusual styles and structures force you to look at the window, notice the colors, textures, and so on. These are two different approaches to writing (and reading), with different goals: as Alan puts it, “Sometimes you want to look outside, and sometimes you want to look at the window."

Finally, one of the biggest elements in determining how a reader perceives a work's genre is the attitude the work takes toward fantastical/speculative elements. If such elements are treated as satire, metaphor, or surrealism, for example, chances are the work will feel more like literary fiction; in science fiction and fantasy, they're more often treated as literal fact in the world of the story. If it's not entirely clear whether those elements are intended to be taken literally or not, the work may end up in the gray zones of slipstream or interstitial fiction.

By “speculative elements” I mean, more or less, things that couldn't happen in the real world today as the world is generally construed by Western scientific/rationalist culture. By convention, nonexistent people and geography that are similar enough to real equivalents to seem realistic don't count as speculative; also by convention, alternate history (contradicting known historical fact) does count. By convention and historical association, modernized versions of fairy tales and folksongs—retelling an old story in a modern and naturalistic context (even without speculative elements)—tend to loiter on the borderlands of speculative fiction.

In the introduction to her anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, Nalo Hopkinson writes: “Northern science fiction and fantasy come out of a rational and skeptical approach to the world.... But the Caribbean, much like the rest of the world, tends to have a different worldview: The irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by each with the daily events of life.” This thread exists in North American and Western European literature as well, but more in the literary-fiction tradition than in speculative fiction. Stories are often told through the subjective filter of a character's perceptions; most often in North American speculative fiction, when strange things happen to a character living in a realistic world, the simplest explanation is that the character is insane. (In the ‘40s, characters in SF stories spent pages trying to figure out whether they were insane or not; I don't generally have much patience for that these days. I want a nod to the issue, but I also want a recognition that today's readers are sophisticated enough not to need that kind of thing played out in great detail.)

In the end, then, what genre we assign to a work depends on a variety of different factors, from content, style, and structure to how the work is marketed. There are real and valid differences between genres, but works that fall on or between the borders of genres are hard to categorize clearly; and it's those works that often provide fertile ground for expanding and enriching the cores of the genres.

I'll leave you with a quotation from critic Larry McCaffery:

"...[T]alented artists nearly always find ways to loosen the corset of genre expectations to give themselves enough room ... [to] produce [fresh and original] genre works.... [But T]ruly great writers like Theodore Sturgeon are rarely content with merely loosening these restrictive norms; what they are often after are much more thoroughgoing reconfigurations that will permit them to break on through to an entirely new textual space ... where they can ... begin exploring what they really want to write about."

—Larry McCaffery, Foreword to The Perfect Host, volume 5 of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

So even if we can't reconfigure the genre completely, let's get to work loosening those corsets.

Parts of this editorial were originally posted to the Rumor Mill.

Jed Hartman is a Senior Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

Bryan Cholfin's editorial for the Crank! Web page talks about what he'd like to see in the intersection between speculative fiction and literary fiction.

Samuel R. Delany, “About 5,750 Words,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. All of my conversations about metaphor and style in science fiction end up coming back to this essay, particularly its discussion of “subjunctivity level” in phrases like “winged dog” and “the door dilated."

An almost entirely unrelated use of the term interstitial fiction appears in “Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks,” by Stuart Moulthropan, an essay on hyperfiction, “interactive fiction,” and the future of fiction.

If you want more about slipstream, you could attend the Slipstream Conference at LaGrange College in Georgia.