Strange Horizons, Inc.
www.strangehorizons.com
Copyright ©2002 by Strange Horizons, Inc. See end of each article/story for author copyright.
Interview: Mark Ferrari, by Terry Hickman
Article: The Dimension of Our Galaxy, by Brian Tung
Article: Both/And: Science Fiction and the Question of Changing Gender, by Sherryl Vint
Article: Making Believable Planets, by Peter Jekel
Fiction: Little Gods, by Tim Pratt, illustration by Mark Precious
Fiction: Travel Agency, by Ellen Klages
Fiction: The Final Solution (part 1 of 2), by K. Mark Hoover
Fiction: Other Cities #6 of 12: Zvlotsk, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Fiction: The Final Solution (part 2 of 2), by K. Mark Hoover
Poetry: Gargoyle Poems, by Michael Marsh
Poetry: Muse Trap, by Tim Pratt
Poetry: Why Norm Jones Never Feels Like He Gets Anything Done In A Day, by Russ Bickerstaff
Poetry: The Eclipse, by Liz Henry
Review: Firebird: A New Line of Young Adult Speculative Fiction, reviewed by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Review: Neil Gaiman and John Bolton's Harlequin Valentine, reviewed by Erin Donahoe
Review: Keith Hartman's Gumshoe Gorilla, reviewed by Wendy Pearson
Editorial: All That Glitters Is Not Pyrite, by R Michael Harman
2/4/02
Mark Ferrari is a fantasy illustrator whose work conjures as much (or more) magic as the stories it illustrates. His book cover illustration work has graced projects at Tor, Ace-Berkeley, Doubleday, Eclipse Comics, Chaosium, to name a few. He's also done gaming software illustration for Lucasfilm, Lucasarts Software, and MacGraw Hill Interactive, among many others. You can see his work on the cover of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine #49, enhancing Susan Dexter's story, “Rowan, Oak and Iron."
I met Mr. Ferrari at Wayne State College's second annual WillyCon, in Wayne, Nebraska, in March 2000. I bought a print of “Trying to Fit In,” having fallen in love with it at first sight. At WillyCon, he impressed me with his focus on the students. An example: upon discovering that there was nothing to give students whose art had placed in the WillyCon Art Show, he took several students downtown and bought materials, then made hand-calligraphied certificates for the award winners.
His medium of choice is colored pencil, which is unusual in his field.
Terry Hickman: Why pencil?
Mark Ferrari: I use Prismacolor pencils. Originally when I started I picked that medium because I considered it visually more attractive; it was more affordable than most other media; and it was very portable. And non-messy—that was important because I had roommates!
TH: How did you get into fantasy illustration?
MF: Fantasy literature was a huge interest of mine since about the 4th grade. I “did art” throughout grade school, junior high and high school, up to about halfway through college. Then I lost interest and quit, gave away all my equipment and supplies. For seven years I did no drawing or painting at all. By then I was working in a field totally unrelated to art, and finding that I needed to do something else. I was miserable. I started looking for another profession by sitting down and listing things I thought I could do, enjoy, and be good at. I ended up with a list of four professions: writing, psychotherapy, film, and art. I included art only because I knew I could do it.
I decided to give each of them a chance, starting with art because I figured I'd hate it, as I did when I'd dropped it years before, so I could eliminate it quickly. I started with Peter Max-like landscapes in a small, 8"x10” format. As I got better at it, I kept working in larger and larger formats, and started selling them—people wanted to buy them!
And I was getting absorbed in art again. I forgot about the other three careers on my list. I decided to go to art school, the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. I ran out of money, so I could only attend for two semesters, but I got exposed to many ideas and concepts I wouldn't have otherwise thought about, Art History especially. While in school, I settled on the colored pencils as my medium of choice, but I still hadn't decided what area of subject matter to focus on. It hadn't occurred to me that there might be a living in the fantasy genre that I'd loved ever since I was very young.
To get into the school you had to write a statement of purpose. Part of what mine said was “I don't want to be an illustrator.” I had this prejudiced view of what “illustrators” were. I thought they drew assembly diagrams for blenders and bicycles. So naturally, due to scheduling constraints, I ended up having to take survey of illustration! And that's where I learned what illustration was. The artists were doing all the things I wanted to do!
“Hobbitesque” was the first piece I created for my portfolio. “The Dream” was the first post-art school drawing I did for it, and in some ways I feel like it's still one of my best works. I did it just for myself.
TH: That might suggest something....
MF: Definitely! With those seven years’ hindsight, I realized why I'd dropped art in the first place. It had become entirely about meeting the expectations of others. It was one of the few things which consistently earned applause. There are a couple of ways to destroy a young artist: one, put down their talent and efforts. Two—and this is really almost worse—praise them profusely, build up the pressure to keep topping the last masterpiece. This takes all the joy and play out of doing art. I ended up drawing only those things I was sure would come out well—therefore I kept drawing the same things over and over again. Boring! Also, those trite images then get burned into your retina so that when you do try something new, all that comes out is the same old-same old.
TH: So you came out of art school with a portfolio started and a refreshed love of art and a new focus: fantasy.
MF: There were some really wonderful people who helped me out. Some of them provided housing while I sort of hid out and honed my craft. I was prepared to go the route: struggle and anonymity. Then I had showed my work to a staff member of the Dark Carnival Bookstore in Berkeley, and someone there suggested I take it to BayCon. That was about 1987. I'd never heard of science fiction-fantasy conventions. I had no idea what to expect.
So I went, got a booth for my work way back in a corner out of everyone's way ... and discovered that ten or twelve of the biggest names in fantasy art were there. I thought, “Oh my God am I out of my league!” I was working on the contract for the H. P. Lovecraft Creatures book at the time, so I had to enter the Art show as a Pro instead of an Amateur, meaning I was competing with Those Big Names, so I really was feeling overwhelmed.
And people were stopping by my booth and examining my work and asking all these questions: “What medium is that?” “That can't be pencil!” “But how do you get that effect with pencils!?” and all kinds of technical stuff, so there was quite a bit of activity I hadn't expected.
Then Tom Kidd stopped by, and sort of took me under his wing. He introduced me to all Those Big Names I'd admired from afar for so long. There I was eating lunch with all these Big Names! And then “The Dream” won “Best of Show” and won “Best Fantasy” in the Professional category.
TH: Wow! Overnight success!
MF: (laughing) Yeah. So much for my years of struggle.
At BayCon I was contacted by a representative from Lucasfilms. They were looking for artists to work on their computer games. So the next weekend I found myself at Skywalker Ranch in Marin, CA, talking with the Art Division art director and some of their other artists. They liked my work and they didn't care that I didn't know much about computers; they said it was easier to train an artist to use a computer than to train a computer technician to be an artist. So I started working for them doing game illustration using 2D software. I turned out to be very good at the software illustrations, largely because I didn't know anything about computers. I didn't have the foreknowledge of what couldn't and shouldn't be done with the software. I even came up with some innovations that changed aspects of the industry.
I kept doing cover art while working on gaming software. Looking back, I can see where I was drifting towards the very situation that had made me leave art the first time: I had gone from being nobody to being very, very busy and in demand but I was really not prepared. I felt very un-equipped and very insecure. Meeting the deadlines and expectations of these important employers caused me to do what was safest and fastest, and my work became stale. And then, four or five years ago, the 3D CAD systems came out (Doom, etc.), and the hardware and software for those was very expensive, and the 3D work just wasn't as interesting ... and it didn't matter who did the art work, because the software did most of the rendering.
TH: Is there a parachute leap coming up?
MF: I took a year off, went to the mountains, and wrote a book. It was an invaluable learning experience but a very poor book.
When I got back, what I had been doing was no longer in demand. The business had changed. So there I was, starting over yet again! But I'm doing all right, actually. I'm still making a living with my art work. I'm finding more time to do art for myself, and those pieces are doing well in the market.
TH: How do you choose your subject matter?
MF: When it's a commissioned work, like a magazine, or a private collector, the client tells me what it is they want a picture of. In other cases, it's something I've heard, a piece of music. I've also had mental images generated by a single, visually interesting object; a landscape; or a person's face, expression, or costume. On rare occasions the inspiration has been a dream. I would say two or three times over the years, I've awoken with a vivid image from a dream. I've never drawn those, but they're still up there; I may do them yet someday.
TH: How do you turn an idea into a finished piece of artwork, both conceptually and mechanically?
MF: Conceptually, I always begin with a pretty vivid image in my head of what this is supposed to be. If I don't have one, I can't draw it.
The thing to remember is that the initial mental image is the place to start, not a place to end. The finished product rarely looks much like the image in my head, although it will bear a resemblance. It's much like writing a book: the outline is just the skeletal framework that changes as I work on it, and fill in as I pursue directions that come up.
As far as the mechanics, it depends whether I'm drawing it manually or it's a digital product.
For a colored pencil drawing, first I'll make references. I'll take photos, or find photos, of all the focal objects in the picture. I can draw the general composition, you know, a face, a tree. But I make references to get the tiny details: dimples, folds, shadows, planes. It's the tiny details that you may not even notice that make a drawing come alive.
Then I do a whole bunch of drawings. Using tracing paper, I trace over my sketches, drawing onto the paper, using the photos and what-have-you as references. This is just the line drawing, the basic sketching. There will be things in the first sketch that are wrong, or misplaced—and others that are just right. So I lay another sheet of tracing paper over the first, and then I can see the earlier sketch, and keep the right parts and change, delete, or re-locate the others. This layering allows me to move the earlier sheets around underneath to get elements (like props, limbs) positioned correctly. I repeat the process, sometimes up to 7 or 8 layers or more, until the composition is just right. Then I start sketching details, like the environment, props, etc.
Then I can project the final line drawing onto a piece of 2-ply vellum-finish Bristol board. I do a light tracing there, and then use the colored pencil to complete the shading and color work, the details.
That's for a colored pencil product. I've been doing more digital work recently. Creating a digital product is a very different process. For one thing, no tissue layers; all of that is much easier using the computer. I use a mouse for drawing. I use very few if any scanned art or objects in my digital work. Most of my 2D work is done in Photoshop 6.0. I don't do any 3D work, no 3D CAD modeling systems; no automatic rendering tools.
TH: A struggling artist would probably be very interested in your statement “I'm still making a living in art.” Isn't that really, really rare?
MF: It's easier to do in art than it is in writing, especially in the genre fields. You don't even have to be a great artist—just proficient, and reliable. People don't realize that everything they see in the world was probably drawn by an artist before it was made. Cars, product labels, furniture, magazine and TV ads, clothing, kitchen supplies, office accessories—you name it! Everybody uses art work.
TH: So your advice for aspiring artists would be....
MF: Don't figure out what people want, or what will sell. Figure out what you love to do. Learn to do it very, very well before you try to catch anyone's attention. When you've learned to do what you really love to do as well as you possibly can, find out who's paying for what you love to do.
There's a real thirst for beautiful, imaginative, and original things in the world. That thirst is not always honored by the usual commercial venues. But if you're doing beautiful, imaginative, and original work, it's possible to get it to the public. We in the fantasy art world are fortunate to have the Cons as alternative venues.
TH: Is there anything you'd like to say to artists trying to get a foothold in the business?
MF: Yes! Hang on to what's trying to get out from inside you, don't lose it to what's trying to direct you from outside.
TH: That sounds like a lifelong process.
MF: Indeed. I expected struggle and difficulties; they just came in different forms than I'd ever imagined. And I still don't know what's going to happen next. How life is going to turn out.
So I would add: embrace the ups and downs of what's liable to be a long journey.
TH: What's been happening in your career since we met up at WillyCon in March, 2000?
MF: That December I started getting gobs and gobs of work again. I got calls to do concept art for computer game companies. Some clients wanted me to do the concept art for the whole look of the game, which they'd then turn over to their in-house artists to base the games on. I got calls from product designers, for example doing coffee mugs for a major coffee company; calls from Target; drawing products for catalogues, for example upscale picture frames; and I designed sculptural fantasy beer bottles for a major national beer company. So I got really busy with a lot of projects, some were creatively satisfying and some paid the rent.
TH: Any idea why this sudden burst of business?
MF: Part of it was, I think, because the economy was collapsing. Everyone was downsizing, so they had fewer in-house people to do these projects. Also, when the economy is sinking, people can't afford junk like they can during a boom. When everyone's got money, they buy—not necessarily the best products. So maybe in a downturn, the companies are going toward better art, product, and writing, so people will still buy it. For the rest of it: serendipity, I think.
TH: You've hinted that you've got something major up your sleeve. Can you tell us about it?
MF: Only hints. It's a digital product that everyone will want and be able to afford. It's not a game, but it is an entertainment product. Personally I can say that without a doubt, it's the single most creative job I've been offered in decades as an illustrator. If everything goes right, it will be unveiled at WorldCon at San Jose in August.
TH: It's not a game...?
MF: No, but it's oriented toward fantasy-interested people.
TH: You know the fantasy that's on everyone's mind right now...
MF: This is original, it has nothing to do with that or any other work or franchise. It's my own, original concept.
TH: I guess we'll just have to wait, then. Thanks, Mark, for the interview!
Terry Hickman, cleverly disguised as a middle-aged woman of Danish-American heritage, writes science fiction and occasionally haunts local indie-rock shows. Her aberrations extend to startling unsuspecting moshers in the front rows of Nine Inch Nails concerts with her presence. Other oddments: one husband, two cats.
Visit Mark Ferrari's Web site.
WillyCon IV is at Wayne State College, April 2002. Guests of Honor will be James P. Hogan and Terese Nielsen.
2/11/02
"Therefore, all things considered, it will be better for me to believe that I am not insane, and go with this gentleman to collect my Prize. If I am wrong, I shall wake up in an institution. There I will apologize to the doctors, state that I recognize the nature of my delusion, and perhaps win my freedom."
—Tom Carmody, in Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles
In Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles, Tom Carmody finds out that he is the winner of a galactic lottery, run by a civilization that until that moment was unknown to humans. He is transported to the center of the Milky Way to accept his “prize,” which turns out to be nothing so much as a talking Dear Abby device, whose advice is occasionally bizarre or useless (or both).
Oh, and he also finds out that the trip to the galactic center, to collect his winnings, was a one-way trip. He's on his own for the way back—well, he and his talking advisor.
To summarize the situation, Carmody is oodles of light-years from the Earth, he's been abandoned by the strange people who brought him here, and he has a gadget that, when confronted by a carnivorous dinosaur, advises him to turn himself into a plant.
And somehow, he has to find his way home.
What if this were your problem? To make it somewhat tractable, suppose you're at the center of the Milky Way, and you have a spaceship capable of travelling at, say, 100,000 c—that is, 100,000 times the speed of light, which itself is about 300,000 km/s. The Sun, and the Earth around it, are just about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center. That means that a ship travelling at the speed of light would take 25,000 years to get home, so one travelling 100,000 times faster would take only about 3 months. (We'll ignore the relativistic effects for the time being.)
But you can only get home that fast if you know precisely where to go. The Milky Way contains some 400 billion stars (give or take a hundred billion or so). The nearest star to our own is Proxima Centauri, a little more than 4 light-years away. If you visited each star in the galaxy, in exhaustive fashion, and each step between stars was 4 light-years long, you would have to travel 1.6 trillion light-years. Even at 100,000 times the speed of light, that would take 16 million years, and let's face it, neither you nor Carmody has that long to dawdle around. Worse yet, over those 16 million years the stars are bound to move around a bit, and it'll be hard to keep track of where you've been, and where you haven't.
Perhaps, however, the local stars are only spaced 4 light-years apart because the Sun is in, relatively speaking, the boondocks of the galaxy. Stars near the center of the galaxy, where things are busier, are bunched together much closer—perhaps about 1 light-year apart on average. But even if every step was 1 light-year in length, that would still only decrease the total travel time to 4 million years.
Very obviously, then, if we're going to get home from the center of the galaxy within a single ordinary lifetime, we'll have to make use of some knowledge of the galaxy itself—and only information that we have access to at the current time. No fair assuming that we'll someday have a complete map of the galaxy, down to the last star, and using that instead. The first thing to try, possibly, is that since we know the Sun is not at the center of the galaxy, there's no point in trying the stars there. And since the galactic center is so tightly packed, that allows us to eliminate quite a few stars.
In fact, knowing that we're approximately 25,000 light-years away from the galactic center means that we don't have to examine any stars out to a distance of almost 25,000 light-years—but not quite. After all, we don't know that figure too precisely. It might be 23,000 light-years, or 27,000; the margin of error is, let's say, about 2,000 light-years in either direction. We wouldn't want to skip the Earth just because we happen to be a little off on its exact distance from the galactic center.
If the Milky Way galaxy were a spherically symmetric ball of stars, and we had to systematically check each star in a shell 25,000 light-years in radius and 2,000 light-years thick, we would have to cover a volume of about 20 trillion cubic light-years. At that distance—including our local neighborhood of stars—the density of stars is about 1 star every 50 cubic light-years. That would mean we'd have to cover 400 billion stars, at 4 light-years a pop. As we noted above, that would take 16 million years.
Fortunately, the Milky Way is not a ball of stars, but rather a beautiful spiral, a little like a pinwheel. In other words, it's flattened out—and rather dramatically so. Estimates vary, but a typical figure is that the disc of the Milky Way is about 50 times wider than it is thick. It's considerably thicker at the center, where there's a bulge, but we've already eliminated those stars from consideration. Since the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, from edge to edge, its thickness is about 2,000 light-years.
That means that we only have to consider a ring of stars, located at a distance of about 25,000 light-years from the center, 4,000 light-years wide and 2,000 light-years thick. That gives us a volume of “only” about a trillion cubic light-years. Again, at a local density of 1 star every 50 cubic light-years, that means 20 billion stars. At 4 light-years a step, that's about 80 billion light-years, which—at our top speed of 100,000 c—would take us 800,000 years. A lot better than 16 million years, or even 4 million years, but quite obviously not good enough.
The problem is that we don't know which direction to go from the center of the galaxy. If we knew, even approximately, which way to go, we could eliminate a huge part of the ring of stars we have to examine, and shorten the search time commensurately.
A century ago, there would have been little we could have done. As far as anybody knew, the Milky Way was the entire universe. And we didn't even know its structure that well, because even though we get to examine it close up—being a part of it ourselves—that very closeness makes it difficult to get a feel for its large-scale structure. What's more, much of our view of distant parts of the galaxy is blocked by clouds of dark gas. This gas is actually pretty thin, thinner than a good laboratory vacuum, but because the clouds are so large, and we look through such a great thickness of them, they are very effective at obscuring anything behind them. If you don't know the structure of the Milky Way, it makes it hard to figure out how to get back home from the center—even assuming you know there to be a well-defined center.
To be sure, there are suspicious looking clouds, called nebulae (from the Latin word for “cloud,” naturally enough), some of which had been discovered, by the middle of the 19th century, to display some spiral structure. One of the largest lies in the constellation of Andromeda, and was consequently called the Andromeda Nebula. At the time, these spiral nebulae were thought by most astronomers to be other solar systems in the making; our own Sun was believed to have condensed out of just such a spiraling cloud of gas and dust.
Some believed, however, that they might be other galaxies—"island universes,” they were often called—each containing about as many stars as the Milky Way itself contained—and that the only reason they looked nebular (that is, cloudlike) was that they were so far away that no individual stars in them could be made out. At the end of the 19th century, there was no way to tell for sure which idea, if either, was right. No telescope could resolve the nebulae into component stars, and in smaller telescopes they often resembled comets. The comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) put the Andromeda Nebula in his catalogue of comet-like objects (to be avoided when hunting for comets) as M31. The inability to resolve it and other nebulae seemed to imply that they really were clouds of gas and dust within the Milky Way.
As the 20th century dawned, however, a breed of larger and better telescopes was being put into use. The 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, under the command of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), was the first to be able to resolve the Andromeda Nebula. The overall dimness of those stars demonstrated that M31 had to be very far away indeed—probably hundreds of thousands of light-years, although it was impossible to tell more precisely just from that. At that great distance, it had to be very large and external to the Milky Way. Naturally, there went any idea of it being a solar system condensing out of gas and dust, and from then on, the Andromeda Nebula was increasingly often referred to as the Andromeda Galaxy.
But just how far away was M31? In 1912, Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921), then working at Harvard University under Edward Pickering, was studying a class of variable stars called Cepheids, named after their prototype, delta Cephei, in the constellation of Cepheus the King. She discovered, after analyzing the brightness curves of Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way in the southern hemisphere, that there was a direct correlation between the period of a Cepheid—that is, the time between its brightness “peaks"—and its average intrinsic brightness.
This made Cepheids useful as standard yardsticks. If all stars were the same brightness, then it would be easy to tell how far they all were; the dimmer ones must be further away, in direct accordance with the inverse square law—but they aren't. It's easy to determine a star's apparent brightness, and if you can find its real, or intrinsic, brightness, you can determine its distance, or vice versa. By timing a Cepheid's peaks, you could determine its intrinsic brightness, and therefore its distance.
Then, in 1923, Hubble followed up his observations of the Andromeda Galaxy by discovering a Cepheid variable in it. After tracking its brightness for some time, he determined that the Cepheid, and M31, were some 700,000 light-years away. That was considerably larger than the size of the Milky Way, and confirmed that M31 was a galaxy, separate from the Milky Way. Later, it was discovered that Cepheids come in different varieties, each with its own distinct relationship between period and luminosity. The Cepheid in M31 was intrinsically brighter than previously thought, and in order to appear as dim as it did, it had to be even further away.
The distance to M31, even now, isn't precisely known, but based on the best available figures, it's about 2.5 million light-years away. Since our estimated distance from the center of the Milky Way galaxy is only about 25,000 light-years, or just about 1 percent as great a distance, M31 is pretty much in the same direction in the sky, no matter where we are in the Milky Way. It therefore serves as a convenient and usable beacon for plotting the first main leg of our trip.
From the center of the Milky Way, M31 is probably not visible—it's lost in the glare of the dense galactic nucleus. We have to go “up,” out of the plane of the Milky Way, in order to find it. M31, as it happens, is a bit south of the galactic plane, by about 20 degrees. From the center, we won't necessarily know which way is south, so we'll have to guess. If we guess correctly, then after travelling about 1,000 light-years or so, we'll have cleared the nucleus by enough to see M31.
If, after travelling that 1,000 light-years, we don't see M31, we have to conclude we went up on the north or “wrong” side, and sink back down to the south. By the time we get to the right point, we'll have travelled 3,000 light-years total distance. Since there's a 50-50 chance of going either way, the average distance it takes us, just to find our first beacon, is 2,000 light-years.
Step 1 Distance: 2,000 light-years
Step 1 Time: About a week
What do we do once we see M31? Here, we take advantage of M31's great distance. If we head out of the galactic disc from Earth toward the south galactic pole, M31 is in the direction of Cassiopeia and Andromeda, and the center of the Milky Way is out to our left—"at 9 o'clock,” so to speak.
But if M31 is so far away, then it will be in the same direction as seen from just above the Milky Way nucleus, too. It will no longer be in the direction of Cassiopeia and Andromeda—those constellations only exist when we observe from the Earth—but they will be in that same direction relative to the Milky Way. If we continue to call the direction of M31 12 o'clock, then from the center of the Milky Way, we should travel toward 3 o'clock to get toward home. (See Figure 1.) It isn't exactly at 3 o'clock, but such a precision is sufficient to get reasonably close. And since home is about 25,000 light-years from the center, that's how far we'll travel in our second step.
Step 2 Distance: 25,000 light-years
Step 2 Time: About 3 months
Assuming that our current understanding of the galaxy is correct, we should now be within about 2,000 light-years of home. But that is still far too great a distance to pick out the Sun. The Sun has an absolute magnitude of about 4.8, which means that as seen from a distance of 10 parsecs, or 32.6 light-years, the Sun would appear as a star of magnitude 4.8. Stars of that magnitude are fairly dim and cannot even be seen from many city skies.
But that's as seen from 32.6 light-years away. Two thousand light-years is about 61.3 times further away, and leaves the Sun looking 61.3 squared, or 3,760, times dimmer. A dimming of 3,760 times is equivalent to an increase in magnitude of about 9.0 (recall that magnitude increases as brightness decreases), so from that great distance, the Sun looks like a star of magnitude 4.8 plus 9.0, or 13.8.
Looking for one star like that in a multitude is truly like looking for a needle in a haystack. For one thing, if the skies are anything like our own, there are something like a few dozen million stars of about the 14th magnitude. For another, the Sun is unlabelled. There's no tag on the Sun that indicates that the Sun is our particular star. It's an ordinary yellow-white star on the main sequence. Even if we restricted ourselves to those 30 million or so stars that are of about the right brightness and temperature, at least a few thousand could pass for the Sun. We can't spend the time it would take to try each and every one. It's not yet time to resort to trial and error; there's far too much room for error.
However, if stars themselves are unremarkable, there are other things in the galaxy that aren't. Some objects can't be mistaken for anything other than what they are, even at quite a distance—for much greater a distance, certainly, than any star like the Sun. Many of the nebulae, for example, are quite distinctive. A great many of the nebulae turned out to be external galaxies, which don't help us here, but then, many of them didn't, but really were clouds of gas and dust within our own galaxy. If we could recognize one of them, it might serve as a second stop on our way home.
One of the most noticeable nebulae is the eta Carinae Nebula, in the constellation of Carina the Keel. (Carina is one of three constellations that were “created” by astronomers out of Argo the Ship when it was decided that Argo was too large and unwieldy to deal with, and is by far the most astronomically interesting of the three.) One of the stars in Carina, known as eta Carinae, was known in the early 19th century as an active but otherwise unremarkable variable star. It was ordinarily of the sixth magnitude (that is, barely visible to the unaided eye), but had been known to flare up occasionally to as bright as the third magnitude.
Then, in 1841, it brightened suddenly and dramatically. For a few months, it reached magnitude -1, brighter even than Canopus, which is usually the brightest star in Carina and the second brightest star in the entire night sky, after Sirius. From photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope it appears that, in 1849, eta Carinae underwent an explosion that nearly tore it apart. A lesser star would surely have perished; something like 10 or 20 solar masses were lost in an instant, astronomically speaking. In its wake, the nebula around eta Carinae was greatly embellished, and it is easily seen from decent skies on Earth (provided you are well-situated, in the southern hemisphere), even though it is around 10,000 light-years away. From 2,000 light-years, it would be large and obvious.
Unfortunately, being 10,000 light-years from the Earth is not much help, since we're already within about 2,000 light-years. What we need is something much closer to home—ideally, closer than 1,000 light-years, but we'll accept something a little further away, in exchange for a better fix on our location.
As it so happens, there is a bright nebula that's much closer to the Earth than the eta Carinae Nebula. That is M42, otherwise known as the Great Orion Nebula. This patch of gas and dust, easily identifiable from dark skies as the middle star in Orion's sword, hanging down from the bright belt, is a giant star factory.
The distance to M42 isn't easy to determine. The distance to the stars can be determined using parallax, but that doesn't work as well for diffuse objects like the Orion Nebula. There is, however, another method that takes advantage of M42's known role as stellar birthplace.
The stars in the sky move with respect to one another. They move very slowly, so that it took a long time to discover this movement, called proper motion (and we'll go into how long in just a moment), but they do move. Three of the stars around Orion are called “runaway stars” or “flying stars,” for their unusually high proper motions. These motions, if traced back about two million years, point right back to the Orion Nebula. Based on these and other observations, we can determine that the distance to M42 is just about 1,600 light-years. A bit further than we wanted, but certainly an improvement over the eta Carinae Nebula.
Depending on where we end up after Step 2, we'll have to travel an average of about 2,000 light-years to get to M42:
Step 3 Distance: 2,000 light-years
Step 3 Time: About a week
The Orion Nebula, naturally enough, lies in the constellation of Orion the Hunter. The galactic center, where we started, appears in Sagittarius the Archer when viewed from Earth. These two constellations are on opposite sides of our night sky; in other words, the Earth and the rest of the solar system lie right between the Orion Nebula and the galactic center. As a result, by going to Orion, we've overshot our mark. Now we have to trace our way back home, in the direction of the center again, but this time taking a step of only 1,600 light-years—the distance to M42.
You might well wonder why we didn't just go 1,600 light-years less in Step 2, so that we could avoid this next leg. The problem is that we didn't know exactly where we were with respect to home—we might have missed to the right, to the left, up, down, whatever. Only by heading first to M42 can we figure out which way we're off.
Step 4 Distance: 1,600 light-years
Step 4 Time: About a week
We're almost home now—the distance to M42 is known within an error bar of about 100 light-years. From this vantage point, we should be able to recognize quite a few of the familiar constellations of the Earth. Some constellations, on the other hand, will be noticeably altered. The constellation of Canis Major the Great Dog, for example, contains Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, at magnitude -1.4.
Now, Sirius appears that bright primarily because it's relatively close in interstellar terms: the current estimate is about 8.6 light-years. Its absolute magnitude—again, the brightness it would have at the standard distance of 32.6 light-years—is thus about 0.0. It's therefore considerably brighter than the Sun, to be sure, but nothing compared with the other bright stars in Canis Major, which are first and second magnitude stars at a distance of 400 light-years and up. Aludra (eta Canis Majoris), at magnitude 2.8, is about 3,000 light-years away. If Sirius were that far away, it would only be a small dot of light at around magnitude 10.0.
Since these stars are all so far away, most of the shape of the Great Dog will still be recognizable, aside from missing its brightest star. That does not mean that the constellation's appearance will be totally unchanged, and therein lies the key to the last phase of our voyage home.
It's an interesting game to take a photograph of your house, or some other place you're familiar with, and try to figure out the exact vantage point it was taken from. You make an initial guess, say, and stand where you think it might have been taken from. But the picture doesn't exactly match your actual view. Maybe two trees appear too close together; in that case, you'll have to move to one side or the other, so that their separation matches that in the photo. Or maybe a couple of fenceposts have noticeably different heights in the photo, but to you, they appear to be nearly level with one another. Then you have to vary your altitude, again, until the fencepost heights match what you see in the photo.
If you're at the center of the galaxy, there's no way you can play that game with the constellations. The vantage point is too far away. The constellations depend on a lack of depth perception—they contain stars of all different distances from the Earth—and even if you could recognize them in principle, there would be too many stars in the way to pick them out. Similarly, if you had a photograph of your house taken from up in the airplane, it might be difficult to pick out which house was yours, let alone the exact angle and distance of the point where the picture was taken.
But from 100 light-years, things are different. The constellations are close enough to their usual forms to recognize, but not so close that they appear identical. There are enough cues to fine-tune your location. Finally, when you get to within a few light-years of the Earth, the constellation forms might no longer provide a usable basis for navigation, but now Sirius, at a distance of only 8.6 light-years, will do the trick admirably. At that distance, if you're off by a single light-year, Sirius's position in the sky will be in error by as much as 7 degrees, quite easy to notice and adjust for.
Now, it's true that if your position could be off in such a way that Sirius is still in the right position in the sky, but we can address that simply by having a second nearby star to sight. If you know that your house is directly due south of city hall, that alone wouldn't be enough to pinpoint your house's location. Even if you could see city hall to the north, you might be too far or too close to it. But if you also knew that your house was due east of the theater, that would be enough. What we need is a nearby star, one that's unmistakable so that we would recognize it and know where it ought to be, even when it's out of place. What star would be that bright and close to us?
One of the clues that Sirius is so close is that it has a relatively large proper motion. Well, relative is relative; as I mentioned earlier, the stars are mostly so far away that they don't appear to change their relative positioning when you observe them for a year, or for 10 years, or even for 100 years. The proper motion of even the fastest-moving star is only about the width of the full Moon in one century.
Fortunately, humans have been cataloguing the positions of the stars for millennia. The Greeks did it no later than the third century B.C., with Timocharis, and then more famously in the second century B.C., with Hipparchus (c. 190-120 B.C.). Hipparchus had, according to Pliny the Elder, observed a new star—a nova, that is—and in order to accurately record further observations, decided to commit to papyrus all the stars visible to the unaided eye, with their locations and their brightnesses, using the magnitude system that he invented.
Much later, in 1717, the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) compared the then-current locations of the stars with those recorded by Hipparchus, and found that the positions of three of them differed by up to half a degree. Such a small discrepancy might easily have been chalked up to the lack of proper instrumentation in ancient Greece, but Halley thought that unlikely, given Hipparchus's other achievements. By taking the old coordinates at face value, he interpreted the discrepancy as an actual change in location, taking place very slowly over nearly 2,000 years. Future observations have vindicated Halley's judgment in this matter.
Because there's no reason to think that these stars were intrinsically different from other stars, astronomers expected that the relatively large proper motion of these stars was due to their closeness, rather than their own native speed through the heavens. What strengthened their case was that the three stars were also quite bright, something else you expect when a star is nearby. One of the stars was Sirius, and the other two were Aldebaran, in Taurus the Bull, and Arcturus, in Bootes the Herdsman.
By using these three stars to calibrate our final positioning, then, we should be able to position ourselves to within a light-year of the Sun and Earth. From that distance, the Sun should be a brilliant star of magnitude -2.7—easily outshining anything else in the sky. That should allow us to head directly home. It's hard to say exactly how far this last step should be, but it's probably no further than the 100 light-years we talked about before:
Step 5 Distance: 100 light-years
Step 5 Time: About 8 hours
All told, adding up all five steps, we cover only a little over 30,000 light-years in just under four months, easily in time for dinner. Not bad!
The imaginary trip we just completed is only convoluted because of our incomplete knowledge of the Milky Way. Galaxies are fluid objects, all of the stars flowing amongst its neighbors, but only on time scales of millions or billions of years. In the short period of time that's needed to get from the galactic center to the Sun in a ship that travels at 100,000 c, we can treat the galaxy as essentially static. For these purposes, it makes sense to think of a “map” of the galaxy.
Such a map may be coming, and relatively soon. The Hipparcos satellite has uncovered the distances to many of the nearby stars to about a several hundred light-years distance. Its proposed successor, the GAIA project, may be able to extend this horizon all the way out to the opposite edge of the Milky Way galaxy. If we had a complete map of the galaxy, we could make it home in a straightforward, one-step trip of about 25,000 light-years.
But oh, what wonders we would miss!
Adapted from Astronomical Games, November 2001.
Brian Tung is a computer scientist by day and avid amateur astronomer by night. He is an active member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society and runs his own astronomy Web site. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
2/18/02
The figure of the transsexual or transvestite circulates as an extremely charged image in contemporary debates about sex and gender. From Judith Butler's celebration of drag as that which reveals that all gender is a performance, to Janice Raymond's characterization of transsexuals as an empire of men bent on subverting feminism from within, theorists of gender have found in transgendered people an extraordinary range of meanings and ideological agendas.
Readings such as Butler's argue that the production of gender identity as a cultural system extends even to the materiality of the body itself, unduly limiting the range of bodily morphologies that could materialize, in Butler's double-meaning of that term. Other critics, such as Raymond, insist that the material body remains essentially male or female, and that the target of critique should be the system of gendered social behaviours that we attach to these gendered bodies. Transgender people themselves are torn between occupying a subject position that inherently challenges the sex/gender system and a requirement (now receding) to articulate their ‘problem’ in terms of essentialized gender identity so that they meet the psychological standard for gender reassignment surgery. Both their own self-representations and the use of their image by cultural theorists struggle with the nature/nurture, biology/culture debate, and the question of how best to challenge the current sex/gender system.
In this article, I would like to consider what speculative fiction (SF) can contribute to this discussion. In the world of SF, gender reassignment surgery can occur with an ease that is not possible in our own world. Through the trope of perfected technology, SF is able to raise questions about the malleability of gender identity given a perfectly malleable body. Not limited by what Anne Balsamo has called “the irreducible distinctiveness of the material body,” SF bodies can inhabit any gender—male, female, something in between, or nothing at all—and can switch with ease from one to the other. This ability makes SF bodies a potentially useful site for challenging the cultural construction of gender.
I'm going to explore the representation of the gender-fluid SF body in two SF texts, Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia and John Varley's Steel Beach, to interrogate their representation of gender and the effectiveness of this representation as a critique of the sex/gender system. The larger question I want to ask concerns the malleable body and its usefulness to cultural theorists of gender: is the SF body a more useful image than the transgender body for this kind of cultural work? In order to answer this question, I will first provide a description of the malleable body in each of these novels, before turning to an analysis of the ideological effects of each representation.
Delany's novel begins with an epigraph from Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. The Douglas quotation reminds us that “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived,” signaling Delany's understanding of the body as a product of culture rather than an artifact of nature. The subtitle of the novel, “an ambiguous heterotopia,” comes from a quotation from Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, a work which addresses one of Delany's recurring concerns about how language can model reality: what is the relationship between words and things. In both cases, these references signal Delany's consciousness of the social power of language and naming and his explicit engagement with the way ideology constructs social common sense.
The social/sexual world in Delany's novel includes the ability to switch from one gender to the other and to change one's sexual orientation through a neural process called refixing. There is no explicit prejudice against either homosexuality or heterosexuality, and prostitution is legal, although most prostitutes are male on the moons while most are female on Earth. The narrative does note the peculiarity that male prostitution is illegal on Earth while female prostitution is illegal on some moons. Most people live in co-ops—which are specific to gender and sexual orientation, although mixed co-ops also exist. Some people live in family units composed of multiple parents whose gender, sexual orientation, and parental title may shift. A social space exists for almost any combination of sexual desire and bodily morphology that can be imagined.
The plot in Trouble On Triton recounts the experiences of Bron, a resident of the moon Triton, during a war between some of the outer colonies and Earth. At the beginning of the novel, Bron is male and lives in an all-male, non-specific sexual orientation co-op. Significantly, the residents of Triton describe the war as being over the inviolable right to subjective reality. The standard on Triton is that the state can't interfere with the choices of its citizens up to the point of “destructive distress—and the destruction must be complained about by another citizen; and you must complain about the distress.” The driving force of the novel is the fact that Bron cannot be happy within this heterotopia because he does not know what he wants. His crisis of identity begins with the rejection he experiences when the Spike, a woman he is attracted to—obsessed with might be a more accurate characterization—refuses his advances.
The turning point for Bron occurs during an incident in which he constructs himself as a heroic male who has rescued the familiar helpless-woman-of-patriarchal-construction and said woman fails to appreciate his heroism. In this act of heroism, Bron happens to be near the home of Audri (a female coworker) during an incident in which the city is experiencing random losses of power, which cause certain areas either to lose their artificial gravity or to experience an extreme increase in gravitational force. The women in Audri's co-op are being harassed by an ex-husband of one resident and have locked themselves inside. The man leaves (and is killed by a gravity fluctuation) as Bron approaches. Bron breaks a window of the co-op, but discovers that this action is unnecessary as the crisis is now over and because the women were not even aware that the gravity problem existed. Shortly after Bron's arrival, the authorities announce that it is now safe for everyone to go home.
Bron finds that he doesn't want to go home, but instead wants to remain and “have the women give him coffee and a meal and talk and smile and laugh with him"—his earned reward of deference for this act of heroism. Bron's disappointment over the women's failure to respond in a manner he considers appropriate to his heroism, and his anger at the Spike for rejecting him, lead him to the decision to switch both gender and sexual orientation, becoming a woman who desires males. He explains his decision to Lawrence by arguing that women don't understand “normal, heterosexual men,” and that he must become this kind of woman “to preserve the species.” Bron argues that “what gives the species the only value it has are men, and particularly those men who can do what I did ... the bravery demanded there.” These men, he continues, “deserve more than second-class membership in the species,” but are currently not getting their due because “that kind of man can't be happy with an ordinary woman, the kind that's around today.” Bron's decision to become a woman, then, is based on his desire to be the woman he thinks he deserved as a man, in order to ensure the existence of such a woman. He is the epitome of everything Raymond fears transsexuals represent: a man who uses the material of a female body to insist upon, to embody, a definition of femininity that suits patriarchy.
Delany's narrative distances itself from Bron, however, by continually undermining Bron's perspective through the response of other characters to it. Bron complains to his counselor, “I just don't feel like a woman. I mean all the time, every minute, a complete and whole woman.” The counselor responds, “When you were a man, were you aware of being a man, every second of the day? What makes you think that most women feel like women,” demonstrating to the reader that Bron's perspective on being female is precisely that, a male perspective on femininity. Bron's plaintive reply, “But I don't want to be like most women” again suggests a narrative distance from Bron revealed in the irony of his contradictory demands: he wants to be a real woman but insists that real women must be women as he wants them to be. Delany uses Bron's experience as a woman to diagnose how damaging the category of ‘ideal’ woman can be. Bron attempts to live up to his conception of the perfect woman, a conception that is markedly similar to the patriarchal construction of woman.
As a woman, Bron feels it necessary to forego her own desires in order to accommodate the desires of the men around her. Acquiescing to Lawrence's demand that they go out to dinner when she would rather remain at home, she observes, “after all, Lawrence was a man. And a real woman had to relinquish certain rights. Wasn't that, she told herself silently, the one thing that, from her life before, she now, honestly knew?” The female Bron is less competent and efficient at her work and unable to act upon her desires for men she finds attractive for fear that such aggressiveness would turn off the kind of man she wants to approach her. Bron become a woman in order to ‘do’ woman better than the females around him were; as a woman, she discovers that “the doing, as she had once suspected and now knew, was preeminently a matter of being and being had turned out to be, more and more, specifically a matter of not doing."
Through Bron's disappointments and challenges, Delany diagnoses the damage that the sex/gender system of patriarchy does to women as individuals. Bron's counselor tells him that his inferior work performance is a consequence of the fact that he is “somebody who believes that women are less efficient. So you're just living up to your own image.” He argues that Bron can never really be a “complete” woman because “being a woman ... means having that body of yours from birth, and growing up in the world learning to do whatever you do ... with and within that body.” Bron hasn't experienced the socialization required to make him the ‘real’ woman he desires to be, both because he has not occupied the female body throughout his life experience, and because the kind of ideology that used to produce the ‘inferior-to-man’ woman Bron desires is no longer a part of social experience in Delany's heterotopia.
In Delany's representation, being a woman is the result of a long process of socialization, the specific contours of which will be determined by the ideological elements influencing this design. Bron longs for an ‘earlier’ ideological formation, one in which woman would be produced according to his blueprint. He laments,
It's so strange, the way we picture the past as a place full of injustice, inequity, disease, and confusion, yet still, somehow, things were ... simpler. Sometimes I wish we did live in the past. Sometimes I wish men were all strong and women all weak, even if you did it by not picking them up and cuddling them enough when they were babies, or not giving them strong female figures to identify with psychologically and socially; because somehow it would be simpler that way to justify ... [sic]
Bron finds himself unable to finish his sentence, to explain what the model of strong men and weak women would justify, but the reader can clearly see that such social shaping is used to justify sexist discrimination. Bron is told that he is “a woman created by a man” rather than the ‘real’ woman he longs to be; the similarities between Bron's woman and patriarchy's woman thus provide an effective critique of the sex/gender system and its systematic production of sexual difference.
Varley's novel also openly suggests that sexual difference is a thing of the past. The novel begins with the announcement that the penis is obsolete, about to be replaced by a new sexual stimulation technology that offers pleasure far superior to that which can be provided by simple friction. As our narrator Hildy explains, “the basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much to do with each other, why should we have sex with our reproductive organs.” On its surface, Varley's novel suggests an enthusiastic deconstruction of gender essentialism. The near-immortal characters move from one gender to another throughout their lives, except for a few aberrant individuals called Naturals who resist cosmetic body modifications. People generally live alone because long-term relationships are simply too extremely long term given the modified human life span. Sexual relationships can be monogamous or simply casual, and many individuals shift between hetero- and homo-sexual relationships with ease. Most children have a relationship with their mother alone, the concept of a father being illogical in a society in which gender is not fixed. One's mother may be male or female at various points in one's life, and most births are accomplished using artificial wombs. Sexual pleasure, reproduction, and social role have all been neatly severed from one another, a move that reveals the constructed and artificial character of a patriarchal social organization that would demand necessary relationships among these three terms.
The main character in the novel, Hildy, decides to switch gender from male to female after a virtual reality experience during which he had been female. After this interlude, Hildy decides that he is “wearing [his] body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind you in the crotch ... it was time for a Change.” The novel reveals contradictory feelings about the process of Changing, which is always capitalized in the text. On the one hand, Changing is established as a commonplace activity in the novel, reduced to mere fashion through tropes such as the Body Change Parlour and this season's fashions in body styling. In Hildy's words, Changing is “no big deal.” On the other hand, some sections of the novel demonstrate a strong attachment to gender identity as an essential part of character. After emerging out of his virtual reality experience and being informed by the Central Computer that he had failed to notice the gender switch to female in the virtual world, Hildy responds with extreme emotion:
Words fail me again. How many degrees of surprise can there be? Imagine the worst possible one, then square it, and you'll have some notion of how surprised I was ... I had been a girl before, and I was a girl now, and I never gave it a thought. Which was completely ridiculous, of course. I mean, you would notice such a thing. Long before you had to urinate, the difference would manifest itself to you, there would be this still, small voice telling you something was missing. Perhaps it would not have been the first thing you'd notice as you lifted your head from the sand, but it'd be high on the list. It was not just out of character for me. It was out of character for any human not to notice it. Therefore, my memories of not noticing it were false memories, bowdlerized tales invented in the supercooled image processor of the CC.
This passage demonstrates the tension surrounding gender identity that permeates the novel: it is no big deal, but still, one notices one's bodily gender.
Gender is so important to Varley's characters that the failure to notice the gender switch constitutes proof to Hildy that the virtual reality experience had been a computer simulation, not a ‘real’ experience. Another intriguing aspect of this passage is the way Hildy describes becoming aware of the gender change—you notice that something is missing. This characterization of the penis as essential signifier of identity works against the earlier suggestion that it had become obsolete. Varley's narrative is interesting to me precisely because it signals both the deconstruction and the reclamation of stereotypes required by the sex/gender system. Despite the openness of the world that Varley creates—one in which anyone can act in any way regardless of gender, can switch gender at will, and can engage in any sexual partnerings without reference to the gender of one's partner—the novel works to validate heterosexual desire and traditional masculine and feminine behaviour.
Hildy's direct address to the reader about the fine points of Changing is revealing on both counts. Hildy insists that he or she just ‘happens’ to be heterosexual in any gender. As well, Hildy's attitude toward clothing ‘naturally’ shifts when Hildy shifts gender:
Can you call something a quirk when you share it with a large minority of your fellow citizens? I'm not sure, but perhaps it is. I've never understood the roots of this peculiarity, any more than I understand why I don't care to go to bed with men when I am a man. But the fact is, as a man I am fairly indifferent to how I look and dress. Clean and neat, sure, and ugly is something I can certainly do without. But fashions don't concern me. My wardrobe consists of the sort of thing Bobbie threw away when I arrived, or worse ... I don't pay much attention to colors or cut. I ignore makeup completely and use only the blandest of scents. When I'm feeling festive I might put on a colorful skirt, more of a sarong, really, and never fret about the hemline. But most of what I wear wouldn't have raised eyebrows if I had gone back in time and walked the streets in the years before sex changing. The fact is, I feel that while a woman can wear just about anything, there are whole categories of clothing a man looks silly in.
The diction of the passage—"quirk, peculiarity, silly"—works along the axis of the same tension between triviality and importance that characterizes the novel's treatment of gender identity in total. The passage suggests that while Hildy is embodying a female stereotype of the narcissistic woman, this characterization is ‘no big deal’ because it is just a silly quirk; our narrator remains the same Hildy we ‘knew and loved’ in the earlier portion of the narrative. The novel tries to recuperate these stereotypes under the rubric of personal choice and preference, suggesting that they are merely one valid choice among many. At the same time, however, it privileges the ‘choices’ of the status quo, both through the failure to interrogate a contemporary ideology which would see them as the necessary and inevitable, and by making them the personal choices of our sympathetic narrator.
The novel uses the gender switch to ‘allow’ Hildy to engage in behaviour that she had not been able to do as a man. The plot of the novel concerns finding out the reason behind Hildy's suicide attempts, all of which are made while Hildy is a man, reinforcing the stereotype of masculinity as a condition of acting. After the switch to being a woman, Hildy begins to reach out to her friends and talk about these experiences, drawing on a stereotype of women as emotional. The narrative also treats Hildy differently after the sex change: there are many more passages describing her appearance, apparel, and sexual activity than in the ‘male’ sections of the novel. Finally, while the novel does try to signal a deconstruction of the sex/gender system by arguing that any individual can occupy any position within this system, it also suggests that the entire world changes when one changes gender:
It turns the world on its head, Changing. Naturally, it's not the world that has altered, it's your point of view, but subjective reality is in some ways more important than the way things really are, or might be; who really knows? Not a thing had been moved in the busy newsroom when I strode into it. All the furniture was just where it had been, and there were no unfamiliar faces at the desk. But all the faces now meant something different. Where a buddy had sat there was now a good-looking guy who seemed to be taking an interest in me. In place of that gorgeous girl in the fashion department, the one I'd intended to proposition someday, when I had the time, now there was only another woman, probably not even as pretty as me.
It is difficult to imagine a stronger statement of how important the sex/gender system is to identity and social organization. Unlike Delany's novel, which explicitly points out the social origin of these constructs, Varley's continues to insist that these are just natural and inevitable ‘quirks.'
At this point, I want to return to my original question: how useful the malleable body enabled by the discourse of SF is to cultural theorists of gender. In my reading of these two novels, it is clear that Delany's work performs its own cultural critique, using the imagined future to diagnose Bron's attachments to our contemporary gender constructions as pathology in a more enlightened future. Delany uses the tropes of SF to best effect, creating a world whose changed ideology demands that it produce different social subjects from the ones that inhabit our world. Varley's novel also works to construct a future in which no one is tied to a gender identity, suggesting that the category of gender has become irrelevant to social organization in his more enlightened age.
However, despite these protestations, gender identity remains an essential category of identity to Varley's characters. The contrast between these two novels suggests that the malleable body of SF is as problematic a category as the transgendered body for cultural theorists attempting to work through the sex/gender system and its social effects. Just as the acts and self-representations of particular transsexuals are open to readings at both ends of the political spectrum—Butler's sense that they reveal the absence of the authentic original and Raymond's sense that their raison d'etre is precisely to shore it up—so, too, is the malleable SF body open to multiple and contradictory readings. Simply creating a world in which the gender or sexual orientation of a body can easily be changed is not sufficient to dismantle the authority of gender as a category of social discrimination.
But I would also argue that the problem is deeper yet. There is a danger in works such as Varley's which explicitly support the elimination of gender as a category while implicitly relying on many of its axioms. Such works can mitigate against the development of a critical consciousness, encouraging the reader to engage with the surface narrative of gender equality while ignoring the persistence of gender stereotypes in a world in which, seemingly, anything goes. This kind of SF reveals the degree to which an unacknowledged and unconscious allegiance to the notion of gendered behaviour as natural continues to structure our social perceptions and choices, even our perceptions of alternate worlds.
Let me quickly add, in case this sounds as if I am advocating that we stop reading ‘inferior’ works such as Varley's, that I don't think that metaphorically seeing no evil is an effective solution. Instead, it is important to critically read and discuss works like Varley's, works that both circulate popularly and that embody the contradictions of the sex/gender system, so that our discussion can make these tensions more evident. Although gender, like race, may no longer have any standing as a biological category, it continues to have concrete effects as a ideological one.
I'd like to end by arguing my case for both/and, extending the use of the term beyond an understanding of gender as a spectrum rather than a set of poles. I am not arguing that the malleable body of SF is a better tool for cultural critics than the material transgendered body, but I am also not arguing that it is a simple or unproblematic tool. We should use both tools, and we should be aware of their limitations. The malleable body of SF is both a useful tool for interrogating the category of gender and a tool that can be used to reinforce the sex/gender system; its limitations and ambiguity do not preclude it from serving as a useful point of departure for critical analysis.
However, as the comparison between Delany and Varley reveals, simply showing that protagonists can shift gender is not enough, just as treating gender as a performance through drag is not enough for the performance to be critical. The appeal of drag can lie in the fact that it is an acknowledged performance, relying on the gap between the performance and the ‘true’ gender beneath to produce its effect. Similarly, the gender-malleable body of SF can work to reinforce constructions of gendered behaviour as natural or inevitable by suggesting that they would persist in a context where gender was fluid, as is the case with Varley's novel.
I want to end by stressing that my purpose is not to argue the obvious point that Delany is a more sophisticated novelist than is Varley and hence is self-conscious and critical when using the category of gender to construct his SF worlds. Rather, it is to argue that the transgressive potential of SF's representation of gender is not achieved by the fact that the fictional world can allow things like gender changes to happen, but in how thoughtfully the reader engages with the implications of these changes. The malleable SF body, like the transgender body, does not mean one thing or the other; form is not enough alone, but the form's potential to be politically enabling is a useful starting point.
Sherryl Vint holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta. She is currently working on a project about the intersections of sciences studies and science fiction. She completed a dissertation on representations of the body in science fiction in 2000. Send her email.
Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex'. New York, Routlege, 1993.
Delany, Samuel. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York, Pantheon Books, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994.
Varley, John. Steel Beach. New York: Ace Books, 1992.
2/25/02
“It was raining on Mongo that morning.” This is SF writer Jerry Pournelle's way of encapsulating the syndrome of oversimplication we sometimes see in the creation of planets for science fiction stories. Too many novice writers have a simplistic vision of an ice world, a jungle world, or even an ocean world. In the capable hands of some writers, such concepts can work. For example, Stanislaw Lem described an ocean world in his hypnotic novel Solaris, as did Jack Vance in The Blue World. Frank Herbert's enduring classic, the Dune series, is set on a desert world, and Bruce Sterling also successfully created a desert world in Involution Ocean, in which men travel the nearly waterless world hunting down dustwhales. Ursula K. Le Guin's classic The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet with Antarctic-like conditions, appropriately named Winter. By way of contrast to these one-environment worlds, take look at our planet. It's hardly a one-ecosystem world, with deserts, oceans, jungles, mountains, plains, and ice caps. There are many concepts to consider when creating a planet, and we'll look at several of them in detail below. This is not to say that you must address each of these items when creating a world, but it is at the very least essential to keep these considerations in mind.
First and foremost, consider the gravity of your planet. Do you want a heavy-gravity planet, a low-gravity world, or an Earth-normal planet? A planet's gravity will determine a number of other important parameters. The gravity of an object is described by the equation G=M/r^2—that is, gravity is equal to an object's mass divided by its radius squared. Stephen Dole, who wrote the book Habitable Planets for Man, suggests that a habitable planet's mass should fall between 0.4 and 2.35 Earth masses. It's a balancing act; too much gravity will crush any possible life, and too little gravity will make it difficult for the planet to retain a protecting atmosphere. You don't have to adhere to Dole's theories entirely, but be careful when playing with the radius, as the mass of your planet is related to its density.
Density, in turn, is affected by the relative proportions of elements that make up your world. Heavier elements such as uranium and gold are denser than lighter elements such as carbon and silicon. Jack Vance used this density concept to create the story “Big Planet,” set on a world fixed in the stone age because heavier metals are extremely rare on the planet. In a similar vein is Charles Harness’ novel, Redworld, which is about a planet which has only 23 of the known elements. Another example of a story set on a heavy-gravity planet is Hal Clement's Close to Critical, which is about humans attempting to contact the inhabitants of the heavy gravity world Tenebra. Another idea that can be used for heavy-gravity worlds (and has even been hypothesized for the atmosphere of Jupiter) is that of airborne life-forms which glide the atmospheric currents, without experiencing the crushing forces below.
The rotation of your planet will determine the length of its day. Though not carved in any mathematical stone, rotation of a planet seems to be somewhat related to mass of the planet. Massive planets such as Jupiter and Saturn have relatively short days when compared to Earth, Venus, and Mars. However, you do have a lot of leeway when determining the rotational period of your planet. Think about the rotation time of your planet and its effects on your planetary ecosystem; it may be kind of neat to have a planet which has a day many hundreds of times longer than Earth's, but the temperature extremes between the day and night sides of such a planet would be so great that life as we know it would be an unlikely concept. A shorter rotational period would result in a more even temperature distribution.
Dole suggests that for Earth-type life to evolve, the maximum rotational period should be 96 hours. However, not all planets need to be stocked with Earth-type life forms. In fact, science fiction thrives on this idea. Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is set on a planet with a rotational period of 18 minutes. This quick rotation creates another consideration: as a planet rotates on its axis, it tends to flatten out. With a rotation time of 24 hours, the flattening out of the Earth is barely noticeable, though there is a slight flattening at the poles and a bulging out at the equator. Mesklin, the planet in Mission of Gravity, is extremely flattened out, so that there is a significant variation in gravity at the poles and the equator; the equator, because it is further from the center of the planet, has less gravity, whereas the poles, which are closer to the planet center, have very high gravity.
The 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth on its axis gives us the seasons. If there were no tilt, there would be little or no seasonal variation (the Earth's elliptical orbit means it's not always the same distance from the sun, but the difference is relatively minor), and if there were a greater tilt, for example at 90 degrees, one hemisphere would be completely in shadow in the winter and the equator would only receive a feeble light year-round. The only way to create seasons without such oddities of axial tilt is to alter the orbit of your planet, making it extremely eccentric rather than almost circular as Earth's is.
The closest alien world to Earth is the Moon. Early science fiction is often set on and under the surface of the Moon. With this intimate connection to our nearest neighbor, many science fiction writers give their planets moons as well. If one moon inspires our species, maybe many moons will inspire another race. Don't do it! Many moons will create such complex tidal forces that the planet that you are creating will be impossible to describe plausibly. At least one author has tried to describe the effects of a multiple moon system; Michael Coney's story “Syzygy” centers around a planet with six moons. When the moons reach a certain alignment, tidal forces and general madness are the result.
Moons must also be set outside what is known as the Roche Limit, which for Earth-type worlds is equal to 2.5 Earth radii from the centre of the planet. If a moon were to wander inside that limit, it would be crushed by the tidal forces of the planet, creating a ring of dust and particles (you could conceivably have a ring around your planet, much like Saturn or Uranus). Your moon or moons will also have phases, as our Moon does. A moon waxes when it circles the side of the planet furthest from its sun and wanes when it circles the side of the planet closest to its sun. The Moon also has its effects on Earth, most significantly on tidal forces. The most dramatic of these tidal effects is seen off of New Brunswick's eastern coast in the Bay of Fundy.
Does your world have a magnetic field? Does it need one? How strong is it? Our planet has a magnetic field, which has allowed life to develop. It protects the Earth from the devastating effects of solar winds and cosmic rays. The source of our magnetic field is unknown, but the most widely accepted theory is the Dynamo Theory postulated by two British physicists, W. Elasser and Sir Edward Bullard. They theorized that the magnetic field is created by the currents flowing in the fluid outer core of the Earth; in other words, mechanical energy is being converted into electromagnetic energy. The magnetic field is not a constant across the planet; it's greatest at the magnetic poles, and weakest at the magnetic equator. These points are constantly moving over time. In fact, there is evidence that there have been complete reversals in the distribution of the magnetic field on Earth. How can you alter the planet's magnetic field? Change its rotation rate and its density. A low density, slowly rotating planet will have a weak or no magnetic field—another reason to avoid those tempting slow-rotation worlds as the setting for your story.
Take a cross-section of the Earth and you'll find that it's layered like a cake. There is an inner solid core surrounded by an outer liquid core (as noted, it is the motion of the liquid outer core that is believed to generate the magnetic field of Earth). Around the core is the mantle, a layer about 2900 kilometers thick, which is the dominant layer of our planet. Over the mantle is the lithosphere, which is the outermost shell of the Earth. The lithosphere is not one solid piece of material; rather, it is divided into a number of plates. These plates are hardly static—they're in constant motion, the energy for which is provided by the radioactive decay of material in the Earth's interior. It is best to think of the motion of the plates as a conveyor belt. The action of convection (the transfer of heat from an area of greater concentration to an area of lesser concentration) causes an upwelling of hot molten material at the mid-oceanic ridges and rift valleys. Following the direction of convection flow, the material then moves along a horizontal pattern. As it approaches the continents, it cools, thereby becoming denser and then sinking back into subduction zones in the mantle.
Plate tectonic activity is also responsible for mountain building (as two plates collide with one another), the creation of oceanic trenches, and earthquakes. Earthquakes are a result of the motion of plates relative to one another; they either collide or slide past one another. It is at plate boundaries, therefore that earthquakes are most common. Here is where, again, it's important to determine the gravity of your world. A low-gravity world would experience greater amounts of tectonic activity than a high-gravity world, so the process of mountain building and decay would be a lot faster. Therefore, a low-gravity world would appear rougher, with higher mountains, and the high-gravity world would appear smoother, with lower mountains.
Our planet is made up of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and small percentages of several other gases. If you are creating Earth-like life forms, do not alter this formula greatly. Increasing the oxygen may sound like a good idea (with the thought that if a little is good a lot would be so much better), but unless you want to set your planet ablaze, this is not advisable. If life is to evolve in a high oxygen environment, it can perhaps evolve fire-retardant chemicals, so do not be entirely turned away from a high oxygen environment. Even if altering the oxygen content is not your idea for an interesting planet, there are a number of other atmospheric effects that you can use.
Wind is merely air in motion, ranging in intensity from a light breeze to a full-blown hurricane. Winds are important in the temperature stabilization of the planet. They are created by three driving forces: the effects of temperature and pressure differentials in the atmosphere, the friction of the air, and the Coriolis Effect caused by the rotation of the Earth. Planetary winds, like the plate tectonics, can be thought of as a conveyor belt. The air at the tropics is warmer than at the poles. Convection forces warm tropical air to move towards the cooler poles. In turn, the cooler denser air at the poles undercuts the northward-flowing warmer tropical air and moves towards the equator. Because the Earth is a rotating sphere, a given point on the equator must rotate faster than a point nearer the pole; this creates the Coriolis Effect. The Coriolis Effect deflects the air movement in the north south flow, the result being planetary winds such as the northeast trades of the Northern Hemisphere and the southeast trades of the Southern Hemisphere.
There are secondary wind systems, also important in the maintenance of stable planetary temperatures. An example from Earth are the monsoons that regularly strike the east coast of Asia. Regional winds are winds that are altered by a geographic feature such as a mountain range. Moist air approaches the range and is forced to rise. As it rises, the moist air cools, forcing it to give up some of its moisture in the form of rain. Just ask any resident of Vancouver about rain on the windward side of a mountain range. As the air descends on the other side of the range, it heats up. Such winds can be very turbulent and destructive. Wind shears are the result of a sudden intense downdraft of air that spreads across the ground, and are often associated with severe thunderstorms. Having a high-rotation planet can whip winds to hurricane speeds. However, having a slowly rotating planet will also result in high wind speed, because warmed air from the hot side will move to the cooler side. Another way to alter wind speed is to alter the composition of the atmosphere. Different dominant compounds in the planetary atmosphere will have different densities than the Earth's atmosphere, which would alter the wind dynamics of your world.
Ocean currents of a permanent nature are created by the dual action of winds and by the action of thermohaline convection. The latter is associated with the cooling and sinking of sea water in high latitudes. Like winds, ocean currents are extremely important in stabilizing world temperature so that life can evolve and thrive. The wind-driven and thermohaline circulations depend on the circulation of the atmosphere; in turn, the heat energy to drive the circulation of the atmosphere is supplied by the ocean.
Ice ages occur when the winter snowfall exceeds the summer melt, resulting in a gradual accumulation of snow. One of the recent theories as to why there have been ice ages on Earth is orbital variation, which results in the accumulation of ice over time. There is a change in the Earth's orbital eccentricity on a 97,000-year cycle, a change in precession (tilt of planet on its axis) every 22,000 years, and a change in the axial tilt every 41,000 years. High particulate numbers (i.e. lots of dust and other small particles) were present in the stratosphere during past glacial eras. Some of the dust probably occurred as a result of volcanic activity, as well as the exposure of receding sea beds. As sea levels dropped due the accumulation of ice, the amount of exposed sea bed rose, creating a perfect self-perpetuating cycle.
There is also the specter of a nuclear winter resulting after a nuclear war, where the high number of particulates in the atmosphere results in a deflection of the Sun's energy back into space. Dunes and loess blankets show evidence of wind changes during past glaciations. Changes in wind direction would directly impact on temperature distribution which in turn, could have resulted in ice accumulation. Variance in the amount of carbon dioxide may have contributed to the Ice Ages; even though carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, potentially preventing the release of heat back into space, an opposite event occurred during glacial periods. The cooler seawater present during a glaciation would have been able to absorb more of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby cooling the air further. Any or all of these factors combined could result in an ice age.
Mongo is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. When creating your world, don't be lazy. Notice how complex a planet can be, and notice how interrelated all of the concepts are. To enlighten yourself on planet creation, read Poul Anderson and Hal Clement; they are masters of this skill. Another fine example of world building is Harlan Ellison's Medea: Harlan's World. To create this book, Ellison commissioned Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Frederick Pohl to create a planetary system. He then sought out the writers such as Frank Herbert, Thomas Disch, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Williamson, and Kate Wilhelm to write stories using this planetary system. The effect is fascinating, to say the least. If you make yourself aware of the complexity of planet creation, the pieces will fall together, making an altogether unique planetary setting for your story.
Reprinted from The Outer Rim, May 2000.
Peter Jekel is the Director of Infectious Disease Prevention in one of the largest Health Department Districts in Ontario. He has lived in Bracebridge, Ontario with his family for the past 16 years.
2/4/02
“I wish I could be a little goddess of cinnamon,” my wife Emily says, closing her eyes and leaning in close to the spices. I'm used to Emily saying things like that, so I don't take any notice, just nod and pick up a bottle of peach nectar off the shelf, slosh it around, wrinkle my nose. I know all the gunk in there is supposed to be fresh natural goodness, but to me it just looks like gunk. Emily says that I deny the truth of natural origins. Emily likes peach nectar, so I put the bottle in the basket.
“A little goddess of cinnamon,” Emily repeats. “Or brown sugar.” She crosses her arms, her silver-and-brass bracelets tinkling together.
“As opposed to a big goddess of cinnamon?” I move on down the aisle with my basket over my arm.
“Little things get little gods,” Emily says. “It's only natural.” She trails after me, running her finger along the shelves, pausing to sniff at the black teas, to open the lid on a jar of sugar-free gumdrops. Emily is always prodding, smelling, caressing—she says that she is experiencing the world.
“So big gods are for big things, then? Like, say, whales?"
Emily sighs behind me. “Big things like ... I don't know ... love."
“How about hate? Jealousy?"
“Sure. But I wouldn't want to be one of those, nothing so big.” She squeals in delight. “Ooh! Chocolate-covered espresso beans!"
“I didn't realize those were in season,” I say dryly, but she isn't paying attention to me, has darted off to get a plastic bag to fill with candied caffeine. She'll be up all night, and she'll keep me up with her. That might be nice. Sometimes she likes to make love all night when she's had a lot of caffeine; other times she gets jittery and talks wistfully of the days when she smoked cigarettes.
Emily dances down the aisle, long skirt swaying, silver bells around the hem jingling. She shakes her bag of espresso beans like a maraca.
“Goddess of chocolate?” I say. “Would you go for that?"
“Sure. But I'd be even more particular. Goddess of dark chocolate. Goddess of Mexican hot chocolate. Goddess of hot fudge on a wooden spoon."
“Those are awfully small gods. It'd take a lot of them to keep the world running."
“Well, sure.” She looks around the otherwise uninhabited aisle in an amusingly furtive way, then opens the plastic bag, removes a bean, and pops it into her mouth. “The big gods—the gods of abstractions and ideals—they're like CEOs, figureheads, upper management. I mean, the goddess of joy may get paid well, but where would her operation be without the god of hot showers, the goddess of hot sex, the avatar of angel food cake? I'd be just as happy to have one of those lower-level positions, one with nice, clearly defined responsibilities, a comprehensible mission."
“I love you,” I say, feeling warm toward her all of a sudden, my Emily with her corkscrew black hair, her squinched-in-thought features, her clothes she's made mostly with her own hands, sewn all over with suns and moons. My flaky angel who reads the stars and knows how to make bread rise, bring flowers to life, tune a mandolin, make my heart beat beautifully along with her own. My Emily, who believes in little gods of tuna casserole and stained glass.
She takes my hand and squeezes it. We go toward the checkout. There is some commotion up front, I can't see what—a crowd milling around, someone talking hurriedly and sharply. I don't pay attention, just push through toward the front, Emily's hand in mine, tugging her along—she can be distracted ten times in ten seconds, and I want very much to get her home, to get into the hot tub with her, to talk about the little gods of kissing-her-belly, rinsing-her-hair, touching-her-face.
When I get to the checkout I see him, just a boy really, not even seventeen. He wears a mask like the Lone Ranger's, but his is just cheap black plastic with a rubber band to hold it on, something picked up from the 99-cent bin at an after-Halloween sale. He has a gun, though, and it jerks all over as he aims it here and there, warning people away from the exits, threatening the cashier, who just stands perfectly still, as if her brains have been scooped out or drained off. Emily doesn't see the boy, the robber-boy; she is looking off to the side at a display of kiwi and passion fruit, oblivious, she can sometimes be so oblivious. “Ooh,” she says, and pulls her hand away from me and starts toward the fruit, moving on a course tangential to the boy-thief, the gun-boy.
“Emily, no,” I say, and she turns toward me with her eyebrows raised, and in turning she bumps into a dump-bin full of suckers and packs of gum, her hip thumping the display hard and making a little candy avalanche. The boy with the gun jerks his arm up, startled by my voice or the movement or the sound of falling candy or perhaps just strung too tightly with the frustration of the motionless cashier who won't goddammit put the money in the bag like he told her. I don't know if the boy means to do it or if it happens by accident but the gun goes off with a crack and a stink (small god of lead, small god of expanding gases) and Emily goes down, goes over, tumbles into the candy display and it falls down with her. She hits the ground in a rain of neatly-wrapped sugar, the little bag of espresso beans falling from her hand, and she doesn't move, and the front of her is all red.
The boy-thief, killer-boy, runs away. Someone screams. Someone says something very calmly about calling an ambulance.
I drop my basket. The bottle of peach nectar tumbles out. It hits near my feet and explodes. Small god of the sound of breaking glass. Small god of small wet fragments.
Two days after Emily's funeral, with her parents finally gone and everything settled except for the pain in my head, I put a chair out on the back deck and sit looking at the birdhouse Emily made last year. A family of jays lived there for a while, but they're gone now, nothing left inside but bits of straw and sticks and string. My chest seems sometimes as empty as that birdhouse, and other times I think I've been filled with something hot and foul and gooey, cough syrup heated on the stove, thickened with molasses or blood.
I have trouble with time and living. Clocks don't make sense. I cry. I'm too hot, or too cold. The covers stultify me, and I can't sleep on my bed (our bed), so I stay in the living room on the couch, with my eyes closed so that I can't see anything, not the watercolors Emily hung on the redwood walls, not the flowers she cut the morning we went to the grocery store, now dying in the vase. Nothing but the inside of my eyes.
It's better outside, with just the natural world pressing around me, rather than the substance of the life Emily and I made together. Emily used to call this house our haven, our safe place, and I thought it would be so always. I never expected it to become a bleak museum of grief.
I watch the sky for a while, the sun moving, and gradually realize that my throat is dry; I haven't had anything to eat or drink since Emily's parents left. I get up and go to the door, part of my mind wondering why I bother, why I waste time keeping body together when soul is sundered. But it's easier just to go along, to move without thinking. I go into the house, into the kitchen, and the first thing I notice is the smell of divinity fudge cooking, that sweetness that is almost too cloying, a sweetness that Emily loved far more than I did. Then I see the woman standing at the stove and think for a bright leaping moment that it is my wife, my Emily, somehow returned to me—but this woman is too tall, and her dress is too black—raven's-wing black, slice-of-night black—with no designs or silver threads. Emily would never wear anything so dark, and anyway, she is dead.
I move closer, wondering who this black-dressed, black-haired woman is, why she is in my kitchen, but I don't really care—I am not ultimately very interested. Perhaps she is a friend of Emily's. Perhaps she is a thief.
She turns toward me, and her face is pale, white as sugar. She holds a wooden spoon. A large pot stands on the stove, empty and gleaming, and yet she moves the spoon inside as if stirring something, and the smell of divinity fudge rises up. I am suddenly furious (and even that feels strange, because I have felt nothing at all for days now, except sometimes a dull ache with sharp edges). Who is this woman, to come into my home, to touch Emily's things?
I snarl at her and she drops the spoon with a clatter, her mouth opening in surprise as if I'm the one who should not be here. I step forward, not knowing what will happen, whether I'll grab her or hit her or just firmly take her arm. Before I can touch her I am blasted in the face with a wave of hot air, and that air carries smells—divinity fudge, vanilla cookies, incense, rainwater, cinnamon, Emily's skin. Emily's skin. A hundred other smells, too, all of them keying instantly to memories of my wife, all of them bringing up fragments of images and moments. Memories that a week ago would have been sweet now twist like corkscrews, jabbing like knives, reminding me of all I've lost. I go down on my knees, my eyes closed against that scented wind, my chest twisting and contracting as if there's some horrible crab behind my ribcage, writhing. I put my forehead on the cold linoleum and sob.
The smell, the storm of smells, fades. I lift my head, blinking, looking for the pale woman in black.
She is gone. There is no pot on the stove, no spoon. The kitchen smells like dust and nothing else at all.
I check the doors and windows, somewhat surprised to find that they are locked. I don't remember locking them, but perhaps Emily's father did so before he left. He is a large and capable man, slow-moving and sad, like a great and ponderous planet in erratic orbit. He would have locked the doors and windows for me. But that means no woman could have gotten in, and that means my mind is coming loose, not just hiding under a stone but actually coming loose, imagining things, imagining even the scents of grief.
I sit on the couch again and lean my head back, my eyes closed. I feel smothered, as if a wet curtain has been draped over me, stifling my breath. It's not enough that my wife dies in a grocery store on a springtime afternoon; I have to lose my mind, too. But why do I need my mind, with my mind's closest best companion gone?
I hear something like the movement of a bird and open my eyes. There is something on my ceiling, above the rafters, something like a black cloth pinned up at the corners and center—a drape, a canopy. I look at it blankly, trying to understand it with my eyes. After a moment I realize it is not just cloth but a woman in a long black dress. The woman is suspended somehow in the center of the ceiling, looking down, and her impossibly long skirts are spread out all around her, covering the ceiling. I did not see the woman at first because her skin is nearly as black as her dress, and her eyes are dark too, and she is not smiling, so I cannot even see her teeth. This is of course not the same woman I saw in the kitchen, but for some reason my first thought is: They're sisters. Which makes no sense, as the other was white, and this one is black.
The woman's skirts begin to sag, billowing, falling down toward me, and I feel my sense of suffocation double, now it is like lying facedown in the mud while wet, mildewed mattresses are piled on top of me. I gasp and struggle to my feet, staring up at the woman on my ceiling. I grope blindly and my hand finds a paperweight on the end table, a lump of volcanic glass that Emily picked up on our honeymoon in Hawaii. It seems terribly heavy, but I am angry now, angry beneath the wet burlap suffocation, and I manage to lift the weight.
I hurl the chunk of rock at the woman on the ceiling. It hits her in the stomach and bounces off, landing on the coffee table with a crack. She squawks like a blackbird. Her skirts draw in quickly like windowshades snapping shut, and then she's gone, nothing on my ceiling but abandoned spiderwebs.
I sit back down, the oppressive weight suddenly gone, making me feel impossibly light by comparison—as if I could float away, as if no one I loved had ever died, as if the sun were filling my veins. But that thrill leaches slowly away, returning to me to the grayness, the neutrality, that I've felt since Emily died.
I fall asleep, which is really only another flavor of oblivion.
I wake to find a man dressed in a threadbare black suit sitting on the edge of the hearth, cleaning his fingernails with a folding pocketknife. I immediately think of him as a preacher, as he resembles somewhat the country preacher of the small church my family attended when I was young, though he is clearly not the same man. He has black hair, a bit mussed, and a single heavy eyebrow that looks almost too hairy to be real. His face is middle-aged, hale and hearty, and when he looks up at me his eyes are blue and twinkling.
“Boo,” he says, softly.
“Who are you?” I demand, irritable from being just-awake, irritable at all these incomprehensible intrusions, all these distractions from the grayness of my first week without Emily, the first of who knows how many weeks I'll be able to bear.
“I'm here to help,” he says, sounding sure and self-satisfied. “A couple of the girls told me there was something funny about you, that you could see them, so I came to investigate things personally. And here I am, and here you are, seeing me.” He stands up, folds his knife, taps it against his palm. He makes a peculiarly medieval sort of bow. “I'm the King of Grief, Gatekeeper of the Dead Places, and a Gambler of Bad Fortunes."
I don't know what to make of him. “Those women ... ,” I say.
He waves his hand dismissively. “Just little goddesses, handmaids, field workers, don't mind them. The one in the kitchen was the goddess of scents with sad associations, the one with the big black skirt was the goddess of heavy hearts. You don't need to think about them. I've taken a personal interest in you, because of your ... peculiar vision. You can see us, and that means you're a special man, a man who deserves more than bad luck."
I look at him blankly; it is as if I am observing all this through a pane of dirty glass, as if it is taking place inside an aquarium. Little gods of grief? Like Emily's little gods of joy, of love? Is this the route my madness has taken, to make me inhabit a darker version of the world my wife imagined? How can this man be the King of Grief, with his threadbare suit, his greasy hair? Just looking at him, I know he has bad breath, and his teeth are crooked when he smiles. His eyes shine, but it seems to me that the shine is like that of oil on a rain puddle—full of rainbows, but ultimately foul. Still, who am I to question my own delusions, to question the face of a god?
He sits back down on the hearth and leans forward, elbows on knees, rubbing his hands together briskly. “Now then. What will you give me to get Emily back?"
I sit up straighter, as if I've been given an electric shock, and the grayness recedes, replaced by a furtive and desperate kind of hope. “What?” I say. “What do you mean?"
He looks annoyed, his single eyebrow bristling and drawing down. “A bargain,” he says, enunciating plainly. “You've heard the stories, haven't you? A man goes into the underworld to fetch out his dead wife, a woman gathers the dismembered pieces of her lover and begs the gods to put him back together, it's a classic tale, and here you are, in the middle of it. But it's a bargain, and I need something in return, if you want Emily back."
“Anything,” I say, not caring if this is a delusion, not caring if I've gone insane—better an insane world with Emily alive than a sane world without her. But of course that's a contradiction in terms; no world in which my beautiful wife is dead can be called sane.
“Your left eye?” he asks, flicking open his pocketknife, showing me the shiny blade. He grins, and there are bits of gristle and meat stuck in his teeth. “That's more or less what Odin gave up for wisdom—is your dead wife worth as much to you?"
I think of the knife, the blade, the pain that would come, my vision forever dimmed—but I'd have Emily. Would I give up an eye to look upon her again?
I don't even question. If I'm insane, insane enough to see and hear this, then my mind is lost beyond redemption. But if it's real, if this offer is real, how can I refuse it, how can I even risk a hesitation?
“Give me the knife,” I say, holding out my hand. “I'll do it."
He laughs heartily. “Good man! But you're too eager, that's no way to bargain. Your left eye is hardly anything, after all. Perhaps if you also sacrificed an ear. Van Gogh cut off his ear for a whore—is your wife worth as much flesh as a whore, hmm?"
I clench my fists, furious, and say, “Don't toy with me. I'll give anything for my wife. If you are who you say, you know that."
“Oh, yes,” he says, voice suddenly like velvet, but even that image is rotten, and I imagine tattered red velvet eaten by moths. “I know. But would you give your life? Would you plunge this blade"—and suddenly the blade is longer, ten inches long, a foot, length sliding from the hilt like a cat's claw from a paw—"into your eye, into your brain, knowing your death would bring your wife back to life?"
I hesitate. Death? By my own hand?
“I see,” he says, sounding satisfied, flipping the knife closed. “I thought you wouldn't. I mean, just because you caused her death, that's no reason for you to give up your own life."
I tremble, but not from anger, from something different, more brittle, more sharp. “I didn't,” I whisper. “The boy, the boy with the gun—"
“He just wanted money,” the man said. “But you had to shout at Emily, call the boy's attention to her, startle her, startle him. If you'd just kept your mouth shut, she wouldn't be dead. And yet you"—his contempt is total, I am as useless as the gristle caught in his teeth—"you won't give up your life for hers."
He is right. He is absolutely right. “Give me the knife,” I say. “And give Emily back to the world."
“That's my boy,” he says, and flips the knife over, and holds it out to me—
The sound of wings, battering at glass. Both of us look at the windows, and there are butterflies there. No, not butterflies, white moths. The man, the King of Grief, whimpers. “Shit,” he says.
I smell dust.
A woman glides into the room from the kitchen. She has olive skin and otherworldly, golden eyes. Her long dark hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she wears white pants and a white shirt; they could be silk pajamas. Her feet are bare. She looks at the man on the hearth. “You,” she says, and the disappointment in her voice is heavy and inescapable. The man cringes. “Get out of here,” she says.
“I was only doing my job,” he mutters, folding his knife.
“Away,” she says, and the command in her voice is the command of the mind moving a muscle—it cannot possibly be disobeyed.
The man looks at me, scowls, and then climbs headfirst up the chimney. A moment later his feet disappear from view.
I wonder who this woman can be, to reprimand the King of Grief, and I hate her for driving him away on the cusp of my absolution, my sacrifice for Emily's salvation.
“He is no King,” she says, looking at me, and in her eyes I see long years of looking at gray slabs of stone, of peering through air thick with dust. “He is a petty thing with pretensions, and I regret to admit that he is one of mine.” She sits down beside me on the couch, and it is this unassuming, perfectly normal gesture as much as anything that makes me believe her. “I am the goddess of grief,” she says matter-of-factly, and I don't hear the grandiosity, the capitalization-of-words, that I heard when the man said something similar. “He is the little god of guilt and bargains. A natural part of grief, for many, and therefore necessary to my employment ... but his spirit is meaner than those of most of my helpers. When he realized you could see us, that he could interact with you directly...” She shrugs. “He chose to violate all protocols and do so. I apologize for his behavior."
I nod. Tentative, hopeful, I say, “What he said, about bringing Emily back, about bargains, can you...” But I trail off, because her eyes are sad now, full of twilight. I slump. I put my face in my hands but don't cry.
“I'm sorry,” she says, and I believe her, but it doesn't help.
“If there are gods, then is there something more, a place we go when we die, will I ever see her again?"
“I am concerned with the living,” she says simply. “Grief is my work, from beginning to end. The causes of grief, the resolutions ... I cannot speak to those things."
I am not angry, only empty. I wonder if I am not angry because she does not wish me to be angry, if she controls me that much.
“It is ... unusual, your situation,” she says. “Not unheard-of, but rare. A loss such as yours can sometimes trigger deeper understanding, deeper vision. Needless to say, this changes everything. The process is made more complicated. By seeing us, knowing we're here, you interfere with our work."
“I think I can be devastated without your help,” I say, but without as much bite as I would wish.
“Oh, yes.” She nods, her hands folded neatly in her white lap. “Without a doubt. You can be destroyed by your loss, emptied out and drained. But without our help ... it is unlikely that you will come out whole on the other side."
“It's supposed to get easier with time,” I say.
She smiles, perhaps, but the light touches her slantwise, so I can't be sure. “Yes. I make it so."
“I don't care. Without Emily, nothing matters.” And then, bitterly: “And it is my fault that she died."
“I can help,” she says, and I hear the pattering of moths again, white moths against the windows. “The process is broken, but ... I can make you forget. Carry away your memories, carry away your pain. This house and everything in it"—she makes a sweeping gesture—"is an engine of grief. But that engine cannot run smoothly, now; your perception ruins that. Let me soothe you. Let me make it easy. Let me take it all away."
The moths are inside now, flying around her head, and I remember reading once about a sort of moth that drinks tears to survive, clustering around weeping eyes to drink. I wonder if these are that sort of moth, and think: of course they are. They can drink my pain away, and leave cool white flutterings where the hurt used to be. That's her offer, her gift.
Anger penetrates my grayness. “No,” I say. “No, no, no. No forgetfulness. I loved her. I won't give that up."
She brings her hands together, as if in prayer, and kisses her fingertips. The moths swarm together for a moment, then disappear like candle flames going out. “Then another way,” she says, and puts her gentle hand on my knee. “We'll find another way."
I do cry, then.
She stays with me. She holds me while I shiver on my too-empty bed. She makes me drink water, but she won't let me take pills; instead, she sings to me when sleep won't come, and though I suspect the songs are funeral dirges from some lost civilization, they serve as lullabies. She says that everything will be all right, and from her, how can I doubt it? And yet, of course, I do. I doubt it.
She washes my sheets, clearing away the dust, taking away the scent of Emily that clings to the fabric. She opens the drapes to let light in. I talk about loss, my loss, and she listens somberly. She watches while I rage, when I punch my fist against the wall until my knuckles are bloody, and in the presence of her patient eyes I calm down, I sit. I am not angry at the house. She says little, but somehow her presence helps me. The grayness of the days just after Emily's death is gone; I am plunged headlong into the furnace, into the boiling pool, into the whirlwind of my life without her.
After the first two weeks, the goddess doesn't stay every day. She leaves me to sort through pictures, clothes, musical instruments, books—these are Emily's earthly remains, as much as the body I saw buried, and I divide them, some to go to her family, some to be given away, some to be kept deep in a closet. I feel as if I'm burying her all over again.
The goddess comes every few days, and though I tell her that I feel so broken and torn-apart at times that I fear I'll never be whole, she never offers me the solace of her tear-drinking moths again. I hate her for that, but I am also grateful. She is the queen of grief, and she wants me to pass through the dark and the tunnels and the shadows of her kingdom, and emerge into the light on the other side.
I ask her if she was ever human, if her helpmeets ever were, if Emily might, perhaps, have her wish fulfilled—become a goddess of ice water on hot days, goddess of warm oil on sore muscles, goddess of breath in a sad lover's lungs. The queen wraps her arms around me, and the smell of dust that surrounds her is almost sweet. “What I am, I have always been,” the queen says. “And as for others, who knows? If it pleases you to imagine your wife in such a way, do."
Like all her comfort, it is somewhat cold and all too truthful, but I accept her words as best I can.
She leaves that night, after brewing me a cup of black tea and kissing my forehead. My grieving is not done, she says, but the time for her direct intervention is past. From now on, the process will proceed on its own. From now on, it's up to me.
My first moment of happiness comes three months after Emily's death. I sit on a bench in a little park near the sea cliffs, watching the sailboats in the bay. Sailboats have no particular association for me—I never went sailing with Emily, she never particularly exclaimed over the grace of wind-driven boats. Watching the colorful sails in the water, I find myself smiling, a true smile that won't turn to poison in a moment, that isn't a smile over something Emily said or did. This is a smile of the rest of my life.
I see a woman on the sea cliffs, and at first I think it is the queen of grief because she has the same sort of presence, the same sort of bigness, but this woman is dressed in yellow, not white. Her dress seems to be composed entirely of gauzy scarves. She dances lightly along the precipice, and when her face turns toward me for an instant it is a morning star, a sunrise after a long night, a sudden downpour of water in the desert. I recognize her in the deepest chambers of my heart—this is the goddess of joy. And behind her come other women and men, dancing in colorful costumes, feathers and shawls and hats and capes—the retinue of joy, her small gods. The goddess of joy leaps into the air over the water and shatters into light, becomes motes of brightness drifting, becomes the reflection of sunlight on the waves. The small gods follow, jumping after her, whooping and singing and laughing, and I find myself still smiling as they, too, turn to light.
The last of the small gods hesitates on the cliff. She wears a purple dress sewn all over with stars and moons. She turns her head toward me, her hair a cloud of soft black corkscrews, hiding her face. My breath stops. I look at her, wondering—do I know that shape, that hair, that stance?
I smell, faintly, a trace of cinnamon on the wind, and nothing has ever been sweeter.
The small goddess (of cinnamon, of one man's love) leaps from the cliff, and turns to light.
I sit, watching, until her brightness merges with the sparkles on the surface of the water, and then I walk away, mouthing a prayer of thanks to the small gods of waking up in the morning, the small gods of drawing breath, the small gods of holding on.
Copyright © 2002 Tim Pratt
Tim Pratt is a graduate of Clarion ‘99, poetry editor for Star*Line, and all-around writer type. He spends most of his days working for a science fiction magazine and too many of his nights playing computer games. It's a wonder he gets anything written at all. For more about him and his work, see his Web site. Tim's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Mark Precious was born in Los Angeles in 1967 and graduated with a fine arts degree from Pomona College in Claremont, CA, in 1989. He currently works at Random Lengths News, an independent local newspaper in San Pedro, CA, as an advertising production assistant. This illustration is his first online publication.
2/11/02
My older sister and her daughter, my favorite niece, have come to stay with me in my house outside Boston for a few nights. Marjorie is a frequent flyer; she works for the airlines, in management. She wears stretch jeans and a white sweatshirt with glittery appliquéd gingham teddy bears. This is Emily's first visit. She's almost ten. She gives me an awkward hug, and a shy smile when her mother is not looking.
My guest room is a room that is usually the den. I have cleaned up the day-to-day clutter of papers and books, and put clean sheets on the sofabed. Marjorie frowns when she sees it. It is a little small for two to sleep comfortably.
I tell Emily that she'll be sleeping in the attic, if that's okay. The child's eyes light up as if she'd just been offered a bunk on a pirate ship. They live in a suburb, in a split-level ranch house with white carpeting. But I know from her letters that many of her favorite books seem to involve old houses with great, sometimes magic, attics. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's house has an attic, and the Four-Story Mistake. I think there's one in Half Magic, too.
Magic rarely happens in a living room, or in a basement, unless it's scary magic, which isn't the kind you want to have surround you at night.
For most of my guests, my attic is a utilitarian place. It's just a room at the top of the house, the place where the luggage lives when it's not traveling, and where the boxes of Christmas ornaments and books without bookshelf space are stored. Winter clothes in the cedar closet in July; bathing suits in plastic boxes in December.
But the child is beside herself, hopping excitedly from one foot to the other, waiting to see my attic. I am a librarian. I am neither blasé about the importance of my offer, nor alarmed at the hopping. I am actually rather delighted. Marjorie puts a hand on Emily's shoulder and tells her to behave. The child stops hopping and pulls her ears a fraction closer to her shoulders.
The attic door opens off the upstairs hallway, between the guest room and the bathroom. It isn't one of those attics that is reached by pull-down stairs set in the ceiling. It is a proper attic, with a proper doorway and small, twisting, steep stairs. Emily turns to me and smiles when I open the door, her eyes so bright I'm amazed that the narrow stairwell isn't illuminated by them.
At the top of the stairs, we step out into one big slope-ceilinged room. It's finished in the sense that there are paneled walls and not just exposed beams and studs and lath. But it is not wallpapered or carpeted or decorated. Two-thirds of it is full of the usual attic-y jumble of boxes and trunks, lamps that don't match my new couch, and occasional tables whose occasion has come and gone. It is a place for things that no longer belong.
The far end is an open, rectangular space with a small iron cot of the same shape and vintage as the ones in the cabins of my childhood summer camp. A thin mattress lies atop springs that I know will squeak when the child sits down, or when she turns over. I have made it up with some faded green sheets and an equally faded summer-weight quilt.
The cot sits in the middle of an old, threadbare Oriental rug that holds the encroaching boxes at bay. An upturned footlocker stands at the side of the bed, topped with a green glass-shaded lamp. Next to the lamp is an offering of nine-year-old-type books that I have pulled from the dozens of bookcases that line the rest of my house: The Lilac Fairy Book, The Wind in the Willows, an Enid Blyton schoolgirl book about the fourth form at St. Clare's, and The Phantom Tollbooth.
A few feet above the bed, there's a small, round window, filled with the leaves of the neighbor's tall maple. The wall faces west, and the late afternoon light streams golden onto the tiny bed.
Emily stops in her tracks when she sees all of this, stops moving altogether. I'm not even sure if she's breathing.
She looks from her mother to me and then asks, “Do I really get to sleep here?” The wonder in her voice makes one of us smile.
“For two whole nights? Just me? By myself?"
I nod. The child has her own room at home. It's not like she lies shackled to her straw pallet next to the kitchen hearth, deprived of both comfort and privacy. But this is a place that she'll remember. Years from now, she'll be able to close her eyes and recall every detail. She may no longer be able to remember where she'd been, or why, exactly, but she'll remember there was a bed in an attic, and a doting aunt who gave her the chance for a bit of a storybook childhood.
“We're going to go down and start dinner,” I say, giving her a wink. “Do you want to stay up here, or come down and have a root beer while we cook?"
It is not a hard choice.
“Here, I think. Maybe I'll kind of unpack.” She is already eyeing the books on the bedside table.
So Marjorie and I go downstairs and open a bottle of Chardonnay, and I begin chopping vegetables while she goes on about United, and Donald, and how they plan to landscape the yard next spring. An hour later, I excuse myself and tiptoe back up the narrow stairs.
Dust motes swirl in the last rays of twilight. As I had hoped, the cot is empty, only a small girl-shaped indentation left in the quilt. Enid Blyton is lying face down, pages open. I smile as I close it and tuck it under my arm.
I thought it was what she'd choose. It's a lovely place for a holiday, and the girls in the fourth form are such a lively bunch this year.
Copyright © 2002 Ellen Klages
Ellen Klages is an eclectic writer. She has co-written four books of hands-on science activities for children for the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. Her short fiction has been on the final ballot for the Nebula, Hugo, and John W. Campbell Awards. She is on the board of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and is somewhat notorious as the auctioneer/entertainment for the Tiptree auctions. For more about her, see her web site.
2/18/02
Part 1 of 2
When it becomes necessary to abandon reason, decisions become more visceral. Changing from fight-or-flight back into reason is a slower process—but necessary for the continuation of any species.
—Paul Brome, The Last Jew
Coarse bracken whipped the boy's legs as he ran through the forest. A full moon kept pace with his terror, gliding between jet branches.
Breath rasping, he gripped an empty 7.65mm pistol, its barrel warm from the last shot. In the distance behind him, German submachine guns barked their symphony of murder, suddenly stopped. Fifty meters into the thickening woods he still smelled the harsh stink of cordite intermingling with his own dank fear-sweat.
Moonlight dappling through the trees briefly illuminated him. The machine guns opened up again. Bark splintered; bits of pine needles and broken stems showered like green rain. A ricochet struck the side of his face, ripping open his cheek to expose gleaming bone, teeth.
He sprawled headlong and scrabbled across the frozen ground, biting back a scream. Frantic, he burrowed into the patch of shadow where the bracken was thickest, a wounded animal.
He lay on pine needles, heart knocking wildly against his breastbone while German soldiers shouted to each other.
The beam of a flashlight probed a clump of scrub, bounced away like a will-o'-the-wisp. They were quartering the area, methodically searching the rugged terrain.
The boy pressed a hand to his torn cheek to staunch the flow of blood, knowing he had to get sulfa drugs into the wound before it became infected.
Uncle Karl. Mischa. Mr. Lempke. Anya.
He pressed his forehead to the cold earth. All his friends dead—ambushed by a German hunter-killer squadron lying in wait along the rail line. To catch and liquidate the resistance cell plaguing the supply trains shuttling troops and matériel to the Eastern Front.
The boy shoved the pistol into his waistband and drew a hunting knife from his fur-lined boot.
Uncle Karl. Mischa. Mr. Lempke. Anya.
Think, if you want to live. The Carpathian Mountains are behind me. I can hide from the patrols, using ravines and deep gorges.
Gripping the knife, ignoring the fierce pain in his face, the boy swore he would return from the mountains one day and drench the steel blade with Nazi blood. To avenge his family, his people.
“I vow,” he whispered. The knife reflected a shard of moonlight into his brown eyes. “I vow."
He backed out of his hiding place, thanking God the Germans didn't have dogs with them.
Crouching low, he kept the bouncing light behind him. He struggled up a steep grade, slipping on the loose spall. Just before dawn he evaded the last of the search team on a wooded mountain slope. Finally, completely exhausted, his face swollen and crusted over, he crumpled at the base of a tree and wept for the memory of his dead family and friends.
I've seen every way a man can die. When I was finally captured in late 1943 I saw a group of kapos hacksaw an old Jew and his son to death in a quarry. There is nothing I haven't seen.
—Paul Brome, The Last Jew
“I'm telling you, it can be done,” Joseph Gibli insisted. “The Americans have already opened swing-gates into alternate timelines. It's not a hoax."
Colonel Paul Brome sipped his ouzo. “What's a swing-gate?"
“That's what they're calling the interdimensional doorway."
“What did you say this lunatic's name was?"
“Dr. Hannah Zachal. And she's not a lunatic. The Americans have pumped billions of dollars into their project. The Russians and Euros are only a step behind. But now we've got the jump on them—Dr. Zachal is the only person to solve the space-time equations we need to accomplish our task."
Only half-listening, Brome let the hot sun beat pleasantly on his face. Loose paper and dust blew through the narrow street and into the sidewalk cafe where he and Gibli sat. Tourists ambled through the Propylaea, snapping holographic images of one of the few ancient structures to survive the chaotic Mad Times that had dominated The Twen. On the horizon, the white columns of the Parthenon stood like mute sentinels.
Gibli shielded his face from the wind-blown grit. “What will it take to convince you, Paul?"
Brome solemnly regarded Gibli's cataract-clouded eyes set in a face scaled and pitted with age. He had known and trusted Gibli ever since their days together in the Mossad, and before that, in Dachau. He liked the man, respected his intuition. But this time....
“Joseph, what you're saying is too fantastic to be believed.” He shook his head with bemusement. “You can't violate causality. Hell, even I know that and I'm only a soldier."
“This isn't a go-back-in-time-to-kill-your-grandfather sort of thing,” Gibli said. “That's impossible because we can't reach the past of our own timeline. This is a separate timeline that includes an historical event-chain echoing ours. It doesn't affect our time stream at all."
“You make it sound awfully easy."
“The main problem is energy expenditure. The year, the night we need is just far enough away. Wait any longer, and it'll slide out of reach. Forever."
Brome rolled the now empty ouzo glass between his hands. “Joseph, when you called out of the blue I didn't even know you were still alive. I haven't seen any of the old gang since I left Mossad. Now, suddenly, you show up in Athens while I'm on vacation. Why?"
“This project is important to me, Paul."
“So I gather. But why do you need me, when anyone else would do?"
Gibli dodged the question. “Look,” he spread his gnarled hands apart, trying to relate some measure of the scale involved. “You can't go back more than about 130 years. Beyond that, the amount of energy required becomes too prohibitive. In fact, you'll only have twenty minutes to complete your mission."
Brome's eyebrows arched. “Only twenty minutes?"
“Maximum. Your presence will cause the timelines to radically diverge. If they separate too far we'll never be able to retrieve you."
A waiter brought a second round of drinks. Brome absently fingered the thin white scar along his jaw. In the distance, burnt-orange tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, and dark green olive groves blanketed a shimmering horizon. The Acropolis shone like a crown jewel in the midst of it all.
Gibli's outrageous proposition whirled through Brome's mind like a maelstrom. Gibli was obviously unable to live with the bitter winds and ghosts haunting his past. Brome, on the other hand, had long ago buried his dead—and fully intended them to remain that way.
Going into the past, or opening an event-chain or whatever, was pure fantasy. Let the dead rest their rest. Besides, nobody gave a damn anymore and Brome was tired of trying to make them care; he had burnt out his anger long ago. People didn't want to be reminded of those days. They lived for today, no longer wanting to be defined by their cruel history. Frankly, who could blame them? Dredge that nightmare out of its grave? To what end?
He reached across the table for Gibli's hand, a withered bag of dried walnuts and brittle rods. Brome's own, by contrast, was supple and strong. The elasticity of his skin belied his eighty-odd years. Although Gibli had had the best medical care Mossad could provide, he had never accepted the idea of rejuv nodules at the base of his spine. Now, he was too old for the cutting-edge biotechnology to do him any good.
Years ago, Brome asked why he had made that decision. “Because someday I want to die,” came the unexpected reply. “I'm not afraid of dying, Paul, that's the difference between us. You keep trying to understand what we experienced in the death camps. That's why you fail: no one can philosophically describe an illogical event."
Uncle Karl. Mischa. Mr. Lempke. Anya. Millions of others, nameless and faceless, but important. Always important. Why shouldn't I be able to understand the Why? Brome thought.
He shook himself and looked again into Gibli's leather-tanned face.
“Joseph, listen to me. Those bad years, and what they meant, are over now. Dr. Zachal's idea is moonshine. Even if it were true, what's the point? Because if we don't it'll fall beyond our reach and be lost forever?"
“That should be reason enough."
Brome shook his head. “And what about shattering the world we know? How will people react when word gets out? An operation of this magnitude can't be kept secret forever."
“Our security is first-rate."
Brome leaned forward. “Joseph, I beg you: don't let the past destroy us. Anyway, it's not our world; you're worried about people who probably don't even exist."
Gibli was unswayed. “You're the only man who can do it, Paul. The only one who can set right what, surely, was never meant to happen. You won't be shattering the world. You'll be healing an open wound in the history of our species. For the first and only time, Humanity has a chance to do something right. If we deny this responsibility to ourselves then we're ignoring what it may ultimately mean to be human."
“Ask anything else of me, but not this. My life as a soldier is behind me. I've moved on because I'm sick of killing. I'm sorry."
Rising abruptly, Gibli groped for his eyecane. His words lashed out. “Paul, you have a chance to return to the beginning and set things right for everyone. Your act will have a ripple effect—"
“Joseph, for God's sake, think what you're asking me to do!"
“For me, Paul. Please? We only have two weeks before the timeline moves beyond our reach."
Brome stared at a napkin fluttering in the breeze.
A vein in Gibli's temple throbbed like a black worm. “I thought I could count on you.” Stubborn silence. “Then there's nothing more to say, except goodbye.” He waved his eyecane in an arc, letting the digital bulb on its ferrule locate and warn him of landmarks. He hobbled down the crowded sidewalk, his thin frame and loose-fitting clothes soon lost in the crowds of tourists browsing the open-air stalls.
Brome angrily paid the bill then wandered the sun-washed streets, the plaintive request ringing in his ears: For me, Paul. Please?
Insanity. How dare Gibli think I would risk my life on a pipe-dream of murdering that inhuman monster?
Looking back, he couldn't pinpoint the exact moment he made up his mind, but he thought it was when he had seen Gibli, clothes loose upon his scarecrow frame, stoop-shouldered, shuffling through the buzzing crowds.
Brome had seen haunted men who looked like that before, in the death camps.
He found a public telecomp, pressed his ident chop into the data-capture slot. While he waited for the phone to initialize the call, an inner voice screamed: Don't do this! Gibli will drown you with his mad scheme. Think what you're doing!
Brome summoned his courage. No, he realized, if there's a chance, any chance it won't happen all over again ... then I owe that much to the faceless millions who died in this event-chain I call my life. And if Gibli's right ... God, if he is!
“Hotel Nationale."
“Room 434, please."
The clerk routed the call.
“Joseph, I'll meet Dr. Zachal,” Brome said without preamble. “I'm not promising anything, you understand, but I'll meet her."
Gibli never missed a beat. “Fine. My jet leaves for Tel Aviv in the morning. May I ask what made you change your mind?"
“Don't ever walk away from me like that again, Joseph. I don't ever want to see that again in my life.” Brome's voice shuddered as he remembered the camps and the lurching, tattooed skeletons. And he, one of them.
A long pause. “I'm glad you're my friend,” Gibli said softly.
Brome removed his ident card, breaking the connection, and waited until the buffer dumped the call data before turning to leave.
Man's destiny? History is replete with examples: the Romans, the Mongols, the Conquistadors. Victims and criminals in different guises, different eras. Man against himself—that is the true eternal struggle.
—Paul Brome, The Last Jew
“When I open the swing-gate into the Gasthof zum Pommer inn you'll have twenty minutes to kill him before the Van Den Broeck bubble collapses.” Dr. Hannah Zachal sat behind a cluttered walnut desk, sipping coffee from an ivory mug. “By the way, I read your book last night, Colonel, in preparation for this meeting. Can't say I liked it—too bleak for my tastes."
Brome hadn't known what to expect when Gibli finally conveyed him to Israel's newest High-Energy Physics Institute on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, but he certainly wasn't ready to debate his literary skills.
“The Middle East wasn't a garden after the war, Doctor. We didn't have cheap microfusion energy or dependable life-extension techniques. Israel was surrounded by implacable enemies. We had our past hanging over our heads, coupled with an uncertain future. That's what I wrote about: man's failure to build a shining future from the harsh reality of his past."
“Hopefully, we can correct that now.” Her eyes found Gibli, who sat, a bundle of bones and dried skin, in a deep armchair near a bright window. “Right, Joseph?"
He gazed with half-blind eyes at the diamond-sparkle of the Mediterranean Sea. “I pray so, Hannah. Yes."
She swung her attention back to Brome. “You're in good shape, Colonel. That's fortunate—this project will be strenuous."
“I still teach a Krav Maga course for the military.” He decided to regain the upper hand. “You're in pretty nice shape yourself, Doc, from what I can see under that lab coat."
Actually, he reflected, Hannah Zachal was a handsome woman, despite her prickly personality. Blue-black hair brushed back from her forehead contrasted with ivory skin and deep violet eyes—haunted eyes, he realized, that had witnessed grim secrets of hidden worlds.
Hannah opened a file on her desk and read in a clear voice: “After Dachau, the Aliyah Beth smuggled you into Palestine during the British Mandate. You joined the Haganah, eventually becoming a Lieutenant with the Israeli Defense Force before Joseph recruited you into the Mossad. After several high-profile missions you retired. The reason is a little vague ...."
“Security,” Joseph Gibli supplied cryptically, his long face in silhouette. “Paul's cover was blown in Damascus during a sensitive operation."
Hannah shrugged. “Very well. Afterwards, you wrote your collection of philosophical memoirs, The Last Jew. Two more books followed, neither garnering the critical acclaim of the first. Your last rejuv implant was over five years ago. You're not married and you have no children or surviving family. You are, and always have been, a professional soldier for the State of Israel.” She lifted her eyes from the page.
Brome saw no reason to either deny or confirm these facts. They were common knowledge, to be gleaned from any book jacket.
Hannah closed the file, placed her palms flat on top. “I know you've expressed doubt about the significance of this project, Colonel Brome—"
“I never said it wasn't significant,” he interjected. “I simply questioned whether it was feasible."
“Point. I assure you, however, I have accurately mapped the topological surface density and transitional energy gradients of the timeline in question. And I'm the only one who knows how to send a man in and bring him back again. Alive."
“Before I sign on, Doctor, I want to know more about the logistics involved. First of all, why pick me?"
She gave Gibli a sharp glance. “Didn't you tell him?"
“On the flight over,” he affirmed. “But he still doesn't believe me."
Hannah rocked back in her chair and steepled her fingertips. “I don't want to bog down in a nomological discussion about the nature of the universal laws governing the timelines. Suffice it to say, we have two weeks to get you inside Pommer Inn and complete the assassination. Everything hinges on that one aspect of the mission. Nothing else is remotely important."
Hannah warmed to her subject. “There are an infinite number of domains, but you need the right metric—the mathematical solution—to map and access them. I will inject you into the late evening of April 20, 1889, the night the target was born. You will complete your mission and my system will retrieve you after twenty minutes. That's as long as I dare hold the swing-gate open before our respective timelines diverge.” She ventured a thin smile. “I only have a small tokamak reactor as my power source."
“You still haven't answered my first question. Why me?"
“Remember what we're trying to do here, Colonel. Heal a wound. My sense of morality demands I send a man of your history through that domain wall."
But that's not the only reason Joseph came to me in Athens, Brome thought. She's hiding something else.
Hannah said candidly, “I can't give guarantees. It's a risk for everyone involved, including myself. If our government got wind of what we're trying to do they'd shut us down. Or worse."
“I've yet to hear a good reason why I should risk my life for this."
Gibli spoke. “Paul, it's simply a question of doing what's right for Humanity.” His aged fingers played nervously with the shaft of his eyecane. “For me, for you, our past is an awesome mountain. We must escape its shadow. I'm not saying forget what happened. We are our past! But something in here,” he clenched a bony fist and thumped his breast, “tells me for the first time in our long and terrible history, our people can ameliorate it.” He slumped, emotionally spent. “I can't explain it any better. Except to say, I firmly believe what we do will have a profound impact on how we view ourselves and the future of our species. I don't know if we're chosen. We are, however, the only people in this event-chain who have a chance to level that mountain of history."
“If we're successful,” Hannah said, “then perhaps we were chosen by some higher power to do this thing—call it God or whatever you want."
Brome ground his teeth. He felt he was being maneuvered against his will. But, he reasoned, if there was the slightest possibility of bringing it off then shouldn't he try? For the nameless millions, if for no other reason?
“How many people know about this?"
Hannah: “Only a select few. We can't risk sabotage by an individual or a fanatical religious group blinded by political motivations."
Brome digested this. “Will we stay in Tel Aviv?"
She shook her head briskly. “There's a black lab buried a hundred meters beneath the Negev Desert, east of Mount Ramon. It's normally used as a hot lab to research dangerous, cutting-edge technology.” She looked at him. “We'll start your training by running VR simulations. A lot of simulations."
“If I fail the first time...."
“You can never go back. Translation of physical objects causes contamination of the domains. We'll never know what causal chain we've set into motion when the project has ended. All we can say is they won't suffer the same fate our world did."
Brome thought furiously, astonished he was considering doing this crazy thing. Murdering the boy. He met her gaze.
“How do I kill him?"
The first sims are easy: variations on weather, or random obstacles like locked doors or chambermaids with insomnia. Brome breezes through them.
He's given a blueprint. He memorizes every room, every closet, staircase, table, bed, and chair inside Pommer Inn, along with the dimensions of the private apartment where Klara, Alois, their children, and the target reside. Will reside. Did reside.
The boy is always referred to as “the target."
Hannah tells him: “Braunau am Inn is a border village on the River Inn, between Bavaria and Austria. You will be injected at 0300 local time. Everyone should be asleep."
The first sims are easy, yes. Then they get harder.
Hannah sets him down in a pasture. Clouds scudding across a starry sky are reflected in a weed-choked river. A weathered farmhouse stands in the distance. Brome forces himself to remember he is only inside a sensorium tank. He activates the protein-sheathed wetchip implanted in his brain's sulci and accesses a map. He's thirty kilometers from Braunau. He taps the pin mike curving from his ear, tells Hannah sitting like God in her polyglas observation booth over the sim tank: “I can't make the village in time; it's too far. I'm going to hit the recall switch.” A switch on his visor will transmit a signal, reach across the domain wall, and yank him back to his own reality.
Hannah barks abruptly: “Are you telling me you're giving up?"
Brome begins to run. At the end of twenty minutes the sim shuts down and he's in the black lab, in the sensorium, face steaming with sweat, chest heaving, cursing anyone foolish enough to approach him.
He rips off the headset and stalks from the sim tank, angry for getting caught short that way. The sim was a test of character and he has failed. Hannah glowers from behind the polyglas windows, surrounded by her geeky programmers. Brome's performance is logged as “unacceptable” and she loads a new sim.
Pommer Inn on fire. Brome rushes inside. A woman, one of the housemaids, screams when she sees him; his shycloth armor has failed due to the intense heat. He takes the stairs two at a time, completes the mission, hits the recall and Hannah compliments him on getting the job done because he didn't waste time saving the other screaming children trapped in the raging fire. Hannah's like that, the bitch; the job comes first with her. Failure is never an option beneath the Negev.
Other scenarios. He meets a second traveler, from a third domain-echo, intent on saving the target. Brome kills him first, then the boy. Blood on his hands. Hannah logs the run a glowing success. Brome is sickened.
So many simulations in the intervening weeks he can't remember them all. Klara wakes. “Paul, why are you hurting my baby?” The sorrow in her voice cuts through him but he injects the target with toxin and Hannah logs the run. Or, he finds the right address, Vorstadt No. 219, but the inn has inexplicably been transformed into a blacksmith's shop. He searches frantically for the boy, fails, is recalled unceremoniously.
In another sim he approaches the inn from the countryside. Braunau in 1889 has medieval fortifications and broken Gothic arches limned with moonlight. Trees whisper; wind gusts off black water. A dog barks and he hears the somber clank of a cow bell from a nearby meadow. The Inn River meanders through the countryside like an unbroken silver thread. Idyllic, but he has come, a demon encased in shycloth armor, to murder a mother's child in her arms.
Hannah dismisses his qualms with a flip of her hand. “Children often died of measles or diphtheria in the late 1800s. Klara Pölzl is young and healthy. She can always have another little Schicklgruber."
New scenario: Brome is hopelessly lost inside the Planck foam forming the boundary between domains. He spins in white nothingness, in what he later learns is called “spatial decoherence” by the theoretical physicists assigned to the Project. He's incorporeal, tumbling helplessly, forever trapped. He screams but hears nothing, feels nothing, is nothing. He spends twenty long minutes in this hell before the sim mercifully ends.
Back in the sensorium, the attendant technicians peel adhesive sensors from his chest, temples, groin. He grabs one man, voice ringing like steel. “Goddammit, I'll walk out of here if you run that one again."
The tech, whey-faced, stares at his captured arm. One more pound of torque will snap the radius. His partner nervously radios Hannah's booth for instructions.
Brome's teeth are clenched. “Don't run it again. Do you hear me?"
“We won't, we promise.” Gibli hobbles fast into the sensorium, gripping his eyecane. Brome releases the technician.
“Hannah's decided that's the last one,” Gibli says. “You go tomorrow."
Brome looks up at the observation booth, in hope, in fear. Hannah, surrounded by her stone-faced programmers, nods.
Copyright © 2002 K. Mark Hoover
K. Mark Hoover is a writer living in Mississippi. He has published over a half dozen fiction and non-fiction articles and is the contest administrator for the Moonlight & Magnolia Fiction Writing Contest. The contest is open to new writers of genre fiction. He is married and has three children.
2/18/02
Sixth in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.
Around the turn of the last century, as its factories pulled workers from the countryside and its population boomed, Zvlotsk was afflicted with many of the urban ills of its time: slums, houses of prostitution, and unsolved murders of a rough and ready sort. If not for the work of the forensic genius Herr Dr. Oswald Lügenmetzger, Zvlotsk might have continued to endure these plagues in gritty mediocrity.
Though he also broke racketeering rings by reasoning out their webs of suppliers and customers, specified the precise alloy to be used in police badges, and liberated poor girls from the slavery of prostitution through the exercise of Kantian metaphysics, Lügenmetzger's true metier was the murder case. He could often solve murders before they occurred: it then became merely a matter of stationing an officer where he could observe the foul deed and apprehend the evildoer.
Lügenmetzger's savaging of the criminal underworld could not long escape notice. Soon an entire industry of tabloid journals, pulp editions of victims’ memoirs, and theatrical reenactments grew up around his accomplishments. Thousands of would-be detectives were sold Starter Kits containing magnifying glasses, fingerprinting equipment, and copies of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. By 1912, the popularization of detective work accounted for a third of the Zvlotskian economy.
Dr. Lügenmetzger's answer to this tawdry circus, the Zvlotsk School of the Forensic Sciences, was an immediate sensation. But after the First World War, his cerebral style became increasingly unfashionable. In contrast, the Modern Academy of Detective Work offered a two-fisted, emotionally involved approach that eschewed antiseptic ratiocination.
By the late twenties, the schools had by any measure wildly succeeded. Detection rates were stratospheric, and criminals fled Zvlotsk en masse for less demanding cities. The falling murder rate squeezed the city's detective industry, imperiling the economy. Editorials lambasted the cowardice of the fleeing criminals, and the Gridnovsky publishing empire threw its weight behind a variety of remedies: Murderer Starter Kits, sponsorship deals for elegant archvillains, and women's magazine articles with titles like “Ten Ways To Find Out If He's Cheating On You (And Deserves To Die)."
In the thirties, economic privation and anger restored the murder rate to its proper levels, and Zvlotsk boomed. As murderous and detection-happy immigrants crowded into the city, a snob hierarchy developed. The disaffected mugger and the enraged cuckold were despised as lowbrows; the true craftsmen of murder inaugurated ever more elaborate schemes. Both murderers and detectives sported flamboyant costumes and exotic monikers, attempting to distinguish themselves from the common herd.
The Second World War dealt a major blow to amateur detectivism, and under the Communist regime it was outlawed as a form of bourgeois sentimentality. Both murder and police work became as drab as the endless rows of concrete block housing which grew up around Zvlotsk's smokestacks. Dissidents lit candles to the spirit of Lügenmetzger and privately circulated illicit copies of true crime stories in the Gridnovskian mode.
After the Revolution of 1989, there were great hopes that Zvlotsk's unique prewar culture of crime and detection would again flourish. But while the youth of Zvlotsk have embraced American-style serial killing along with MTV and McDonald's, they find crime-solving prohibitively boring. The intellectuals of the University of Zvlotsk have declared detection an obsolete attempt to impose a totalizing narrative on the pure sign of murder. At present, Zvlotsk is a city with many murderers, but very few detectives.
Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum
Previous city (Ylla's Choice)
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.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
Ijon Tichy, ed., Antologia Belytrystyki o Prawdziwich Zbrodniarstwach, Gridnovsky Press, 1929 (published in the U.S.A. as “An Anthology of True Crime Tales,” trans. V. Nabokov, Scribner & Sons, 1954)
Emil Riesenschlaf, “The Weekly Murderer” (gossip column), Zvlotsky Abendzeitung, 1921-1938 (Thursdays)
Dr. J. Moriarty, “Lügenmetzger: A Biography", Reichenbach Press, 1933
2/18/02
Part 2 of 2
My father was an electrician. My mother taught piano. I don't remember much about my sister, except that she was very beautiful. There are no photographs; all I have are memories.
—Paul Brome, The Last Jew
Hannah assigned Brome a full-time bodyguard as the minutes ticked down to the Red Hour. Everyone was on edge. Brome slept very little, tormented by dreams of an empty desert and wailing souls tossed helplessly by the winds of time.
Hannah came to his quarters early the next morning, sent the bodyguard out into the corridor. In the past week she and Brome had become emotionally close out of necessity. Working together, the late night skull sessions, the immense stakes involved—all had conspired to bring about a new dimension to their relationship.
“There's something I must tell you, Paul,” she said. “No one else knows this—not even Joseph—but you have to know."
Brome sat at the foot of his rumpled cot, dressed in nothing but briefs. All the hair of his body was shaved (even his eyebrows) for full sensorial contact with the shycloth armor he would wear into the other timeline.
Hannah had fueled her body on nicotine, coffee, and Benzedrine in the past week; the abuse had taken its toll. Dark smudges rimmed her eyes. Her lab coat billowed around her thin frame, smelling sour as she paced back and forth. She had also developed an ugly hacking cough that made Brome wince.
“I need to tell you exactly why we're doing this.” She was hoarse from too many cigarettes but had another going anyway.
Brome had expected a last-minute briefing, and mentally prepared himself for whatever was to come.
Hannah searched vainly for an ashtray, finally just flicked the ash onto the carpet. “I've solved another n-dimensional equation, Paul. I've been looking in on them for some time now. I think it's the future of the one I'm sending you into.” A stray current from the air-conditioning duct blew soft wisps of hair away from her temples. Her voice lowered.
“Inside this other domain the Final Solution was successful, but global in nature. An Empire stretches from the Atlantic halfway across Russia. China is a vassal state of Japan. Africa has been annexed to the European continent. America, isolated from the world, has fractured into squabbling nation-states. Modern Israel doesn't exist; the Middle East is totally unrecognizable.” Her lips trembled. “Everyone lives under the same umbrella: they have universal health coverage, universal education. Textbooks are full of revisionist history. Orbital platforms with Maltese crosses circle the Earth. Everyone within the Empire has enough to eat and a place to live and they're happy. They've killed over five hundred million people in a decades-long Global Solution program and they're happy and content with the racial purity of their world."
Brome went numb.
Hannah's eyes welled with tears. “Can you imagine what it's like, knowing a place like that exists?” Tears tracked her sallow face. “That world is as real as the polycrete floor I'm standing on. I've seen it, Paul."
Before he could say anything, Hannah rushed to the bathroom. The door snicked shut. The sound of running water masked her sobs.
Brome rapped on the door. “Hannah?"
After a long while it opened. She had scrubbed her face, made a feeble attempt to comb her hair, discarded the soiled lab coat and cigarette. She looked at him, eyes large in her drawn face.
“Well, now you know,” she said.
Brome clumsily put his arms around her. She rested her head on his naked shoulder. “It's all right,” he murmured. “I won't let it happen again. I'm going to do this thing, Hannah. I swear I will."
“I hope so,” she said weakly. “God, I really hope you can."
On the deepest level of the black lab, the Van Den Broeck injection system surrounded a pilot's chair nestled in the bottom half of an ovoid shell. Snaking electrical cables crisscrossed the floor. Power conduits radiated outward, urchin-like, towards huge mass spectrometers and organic scintillators stacked into massive detector arrays. Bunched optical fibers and acrylic light ducts draped like lianas from the ceiling, pulsing with digital information. Honeycombed latticework filled in the gaps between rows of gleaming equipment.
Encased in shycloth armor, Brome walked out under the glaring lights. People crowded the observation booth.
Gibli met Brome on the steps leading to the chair, embraced him. “Good luck, Paul. Come back safe and sound."
Brome was grim. “I will."
He climbed into the pilot's chair, letting it adjust to the contours of his body. He pulled down his visor and activated the shycloth armor's imaging systems before switching to suit oxygen. The gas was cold, with a somewhat plastic taste.
The earpiece in his helmet crackled. Hannah, in the control booth surrounded by monitors scrolling green and amber numbers, started the checklist.
“One minute to injection."
The top half of the ovoid chamber fell smoothly from the ceiling. Hydraulics hissed. The two halves met, sealed. Enclosed, Brome checked his HUD telltales. His visor was up and running, giving him a full spectrum from UV through IR.
“Thirty seconds,” Hannah warned. In the background he heard someone call out radiation readings.
A distant hum. Power feeding from the mini-tokamak buried beneath the black lab, Brome knew. Slight vibration in the chair frame. Feeling of disorientation beginning to take hold.
Mouth dry. Knuckles white. Pulse elevated.
What was it Gibli had said in Athens? Ah, yes.
You can set right what, surely, was never meant to happen. You won't be shattering the world. You'll be healing an open wound in the history of our species.
“Injection!"
He hurtled through the domain boundary.
—throwing out a hand to grab the wooden bannister because his foot had slipped on one of the steps. Brome pulled himself straight, heart thundering. Bearings: he was halfway up the staircase, the balcony several meters above. Check the integrity of the suit: 3V recorders were on-line, documenting the mission for posterity. Power and environmental connections looked good. He looked around, recognizing the familiar landmarks and geography of Pommer Inn.
Pinpoint accuracy.
He remained motionless so the shycloth's outer integument of digital chromospheres could camouflage him. Below, an open doorway yawned onto heavy tables. Chairs, a glimpse of a rustic kitchen. Curtains drawn on the windows downstairs finished the Spartan decor. The rafters and aged timbers of the inn's vaulted ceiling creaked in protest as the wind rattled under the eaves.
He was born on Easter Saturday, half past six on the evening of April 20, 1889, in the Gasthof zum Pommer inn. The weather is overcast and chilly at 3:00 a.m. The inn will be cold. People will be in their warm beds, sleeping.
Brome switched on his visor's light-intensifiers. Objects jumped out in sharp relief: furniture, stairs, the grain of the wood on the cleanly swept floor, the coarse texture of rugs. He climbed the stairs silently, a technological ghost.
On the landing he found the recessed door leading to the private residences. Locked. He used a key attached to his wrist, squeezed the end bulb to make it inflate properly. The splines slid smoothly into the oiled hub of the lock. He opened the door and was through in seconds, the skeleton key safely back in his wrist pouch. Elapsed time from a clock in the lower left of his HUD: three minutes since he had been injected into Pommer Inn. Seventeen to go.
Parlor: heavily polished furniture, rugs placed neatly on a hardwood floor. Cramped dining room offset. Muddy boots by the door, jacket hanging on a peg. A doll (probably Angela's) was propped forlornly in a sturdy chair, staring at him with accusing black button eyes.
An ornate cuckoo clock ticked loudly. 0311. Tree branches scratched the side of the house. The wind moaned off the Inn River.
Brome weaved past dark furniture towards the back rooms, their doorways slightly open. The first was furnished with two beds. Alois, Jr., was in his, but Angela's was empty. Had she heard something and gone to warn her parents? Where was the housekeeper? Did she only work during the day, helping Klara with the children? Hannah had not been able to provide Brome with all the information he would have liked. She could make general determinations but could not give specific movements. Brome had to rely on his instinct, and his luck.
Five minutes. You're wasting time. Move.
He entered the largest bedroom, small by modern standards. A window cast a rectangle on the bed. The first person he saw was Angela, the target's half-sister. Her back was to her father, snuggled in his arms, sleeping soundly.
Brome stood over the family in the dark.
Alois's round face was drowned in sleep, mustached mouth slightly parted and snoring with a soft buzz. Klara lay on the other side of the bed, breathing evenly. A rocking crib sat flush against the wall, under a gilded mirror. A discarded blanket lay tangled on the wooden floor.
The boy was not in the crib.
Brome walked quietly around the foot of the bed and saw Klara had one possessive arm over a tiny hump under the covers. Only vaguely aware of the time ticking down in his visor's HUD, and the blinking recall switch, Brome stood and stared at the mother and her newborn child.
—And knew without a doubt he wouldn't have been able to do this if he hadn't already been desensitized to it a hundred times.
That's why Hannah ran so many sims. She wanted me inured to killing a child in its mother's arms. Even him.
Klara's already lost three: one within a few days of birth, two to diphtheria.
Now she'll lose a son because of me: a specter from a parallel history, supported by science and technology even I don't fully understand. For reasons she would never believe, never accept. (Do I?) Have her wake up with a dead baby in her arms? I won't do that to any mother, for any reason. Hannah be damned.
Take him to the crib and do it there.
I vow. I vow.
He placed his palm against the side of Klara's neck. A needle slid from his gloved thumb and pierced her skin. She opened her eyes, startled, blinked several times, closed them again. She was deeply asleep again within seconds.
Brome carefully removed the embroidered quilt, revealing the target. He slipped his hands under the tiny body and lifted the infant into a gleaming chink of moonlight. Adolfus whimpered, his tiny red fists clenched to his chest, mouth a red bow. The dark hair on his head was fine and thick. Long eyelashes brushed ruddy cheeks.
Brome stared raptly at the boy nestled in the crook of his arm, trying to equate this baby to the incalculable horrors of his own past and the future looming vast for the world of this domain. Oblivious to the passing time, he stood riveted by the meaning of the life he held in his arms for both worlds. Both histories. Himself.
He placed a second thumb-needle against the baby's neck, preparing to release a toxin that would shut down the child's respiration.
Joseph, you did this for me. You knew. That's why you found me in Athens.
I am the only man who can set right what was never meant to happen: the dissolution of my own humanity, my own soul.
I don't have to shatter the world if I can make it better, make it mean something again to be human. Only I hold the key to do that. One universe healed, another grappling with a more difficult lesson. I, locked in the middle.
To heal a wound in a history that never should have happened—on any world. Brome believed that now. Looking at the boy, he knew it was frighteningly true: he was the only person in history who could set things right.
I'm not neglecting the past, he told himself. I'm affirming it. Forgiveness can't be an esoteric concept. If so, our grip on humanity is lost and we can never find the true depth of the human heart.
The suit's software alerted him. Sixteen minutes had passed. Only four left.
Four! Heart racing, he backed out of the master bedroom and hurried through the parlor. Oh God, oh God. Descending to the ground floor, he held the child close. The boy was beginning to wake, fussily. Brome opened the com channel in his HUD. Voice shaky with muffled disbelief in his helmet: “I've done it, I've done it. I have him...."
There was no interim during which he was aware of transfer to his side of the domain wall. One fraction of a second he was in the gloom of Pommer Inn—then reclining in the pilot's chair, clutching the screaming baby while the top half of the ovoid chamber cracked open and lifted, flooding light into his face. Attendants fell on him, downloading the visual record, stripping off helmet, gloves, battery pack, plastic oxygen tank.
Brome stepped off the dais, barely aware of the screams of disbelief reverberating in the lab. People clustered around him, keeping a careful distance from the squalling infant. Hannah gaped unbelievingly at what he carried. Gibli elbowed his way through the crowd, felt the tiny body with his hands and gasped.
Tears spilled shamelessly down Brome's face. “I couldn't do it, Joseph. God help me, I couldn't do it.” His voice broke. “I'm only human."
The child wailed, tiny fists waving.
Brome, his sense of wonder vast at the infant in his arms, looked up, dazed. And all Humanity, and the histories of worlds gone mad and other worlds healed, and the faces of millions always important, towered like mountains over the event-chain he called life, thundering, thundering.
Copyright © 2002 K. Mark Hoover
K. Mark Hoover is a writer living in Mississippi. He has published over a half dozen fiction and non-fiction articles and is the contest administrator for the Moonlight & Magnolia Fiction Writing Contest. The contest is open to new writers of genre fiction. He is married and has three children.
2/25/02
Comparing the soundtracks to the movies, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has become something of an Olympic event among reviewers. The reason may be in part because the films were released within a couple of months of each other surrounded by a lot of hype and eager anticipation. But a more important reason is that the books the films are based on have strong, loyal readerships that have put added pressure on the filmmakers to be as true to the written word as possible.
In attempts to capture the essence of the written word on film, filmmakers focus on elements such as dialogue, plot, and setting. They are also aware of how each reader converts the descriptions of characters and worlds into images and sounds within their minds while reading the books. Secondary to this is the cinematic device used to enhance the other elements in the film—the background music. Background music is not something our minds conjure up when reading—unless the music is a part of the text itself. Yet, more often than not, the presence of background music in film adaptations of books is an important contributor to the success of those adaptations.
The composition of the score is the only aspect of film adaptation of books for which the adapter can't go back to the source material to find specific examples. The only exception is when music is mentioned or performed in the books and even these most often don't go into the depth of detail needed to give a composer a clear aural impression.
When a setting or an object or a character is described in a book, we may quibble on the minute details, but if the author does a good job with the descriptions, there is usually very little dispute over the broader visual images. A hundred different artists can come up with a hundred different interpretations of what a hobbit looks like, but the images will have enough in common with the descriptions in the works of Tolkien to make each image recognizable as a hobbit. But what happens if a hundred different composers tackle the following passage from The Fellowship of the Ring?
Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him.
The resulting music from these hundred composers will have nothing about it that shouts to the listener that it depicts anything from The Lord of the Rings, much less a specific passage. Even the use of Tolkien's Elven lyrics would not invoke the same “that's what it was like in the book” reaction that visual images could invoke.
The musical references in the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone are mostly of school or holiday songs imbued with the flavor of England. One delightful moment in the book is when Albus Dumbledore invites the students to pick their favorite tune and sing the words of the school song to it. When the song is complete he responds with, “Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!” This is a musical moment that would bring tears of delight to Charles Ives’ eyes and also one of the few musical moments depicted in a book that can be interpreted by a hundred different composers and still be recognized as being from Harry Potter.
The film composer's job is to support and enhance the other elements of the film, because the music on its own is too abstract to conjure anything verbally or visually of what the film is about. Someone listening to the scores for Harry Potter or The Fellowship of the Ring—without knowing whether they're for film or television or ballet or a suite from an opera or simply a stand-alone musical work—cannot match it to a nonmusical medium. Instrumental and wordless choral music only conveys sounds without specific verbal or visual meaning to the listener. The astute listener may pick up on the Elven words and the reference to Evenstar in the lyrics on The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack but that alone is not enough to invoke anything other than the idea that the music has something to do with the works of Tolkien.
Two composers with very different styles received assignments to capture in music the essence of a pair of fantasy books that have attained both critical acclaim and commercial success. While most readers are unable to articulate what kind of music matches how they visualize a book, they know when the music doesn't work, especially when it supports a visualization that does a good job of capturing a book's essence. So in many respects, the composer's task is even more daunting than the filmmaker's because the music can deaden a film as much as it can support and enhance it.
The selection of Howard Shore (whose musical style has been described as subtle, introverted, even non-melodic and dissonant) for The Fellowship of the Ring was greeted with puzzlement by those familiar with his work. The fantasy genre is a far step from the modern rather cult-like films that boast scores by Shore. Despite the unfamiliar literary territory for the composer, the resulting score for The Fellowship of the Ring showcases his ability to adapt his style to diverse cinematic subjects. He succeeds in capturing the overall heroic and somber nature of the Trilogy, yet disarms us with a charming innocence in depicting the hobbits and the Shire. The voice of Enya—the single commercial element in the soundtrack—blends well with the rest of the music. Part of the reason for this is that voices are incorporated throughout the score, and Shore's own orchestrations and arrangements accompany Enya's distinctive voice and compositions.
Shore's score succeeds in capturing the essence of The Fellowship of the Ring and complements the vision of the film's director, Peter Jackson. The score keeps the viewer focused on the action with strong thematic material, the use of a large orchestra and choral ensembles, and by giving the music the dark complexity that rumbles all the way through the Trilogy. In the end, Howard Shore has proven to be a perfect composer for The Lord of the Rings.
The moment the first notes sound during Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone the name, John Williams, pops into the mind, creating a momentary distraction away from the action on the screen. This strong composer recognition is not necessarily a bad thing. John Williams’ music for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films are wonderful musical supports, and his delightful score for Hook is a welcomed diversion in an otherwise mediocre film.
So why isn't the music for Harry Potter as strong and as memorable as other scores by John Williams? A hint comes from the attention the music brings to itself when first heard in the film's opening. The music does not quite connect with the other elements on screen causing it to sound a bit detached instead of being fully focused on supporting the film. Unlike the magical score for The Fellowship of the Ring, the music for Harry Potter lacks that spark of inspiration found in other scores by Williams. What is missing is that intangible musical turn of phrase or chord structure that absolutely captures and completes the viewers’ experience with the film. Some reviewers have even suggested that the music sounds like Williams on auto-pilot. Although Williams has always been a bit of a self-plagiarist and a borrower from many different composers and compositional styles, he has perfected the ability to blend all this musical diversity into background music that successfully supports a film's overall impact.
All this being said, an uninspired score by John Williams is still better than a good score by many other composers, and the music in Harry Potter is certainly nice to listen to. But one can't help but feel that Harry Potter deserves something a little more creative and imaginative. It is interesting that so much attention has gone into capturing the quality and essence of the Harry Potter books and yet the score fails to capture the quality and essence of what is expected of its composer. In this respect, Howard Shore has had a better time of it than John Williams in the comparing the scores competition because Shore had only to prove that he could pull it off. Williams had to prove he could create musical magic—yet again. This is simply too daunting a task to succeed at on every attempt.
To the delight of the judges and spectators alike this competition has several more rounds to go. Howard Shore is the composer for the complete Lord of the Rings trilogy and John Williams is listed for the next two Harry Potter movies.
C. A. Casey is a Music Editor for Strange Horizons.
Lord of the Rings movies site
Harry Potter movies site
The Official John Williams Page
Filmtracks’ Tribute to John Williams
The John Williams MIDI Page
Howard Shore
The Journey Into Middle-Earth—Howard Shore talks about his score for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Score Of The Rings—Howard Shore finds the music in Middle Earth
2/4/02
Hens grow teeth
in graveyards,
picking black daffodils
in the shades
of broken stones.
Shadows smile
and hair grows
thick on toads,
frogs laugh,
old blood dripping
from their lips.
Spiders waltz
hanging shrouds on
the dried skeletons
of grinning worms.
There is
even the Ghost
of a Gargoyle
riding
his night colored mare.
(Untitled)
It creeps
through like night
in a country
of worn fields,
Taking
the last daylight
out in a
lightened dusk.
It sits
in a resting
breath as
peace, and seems
As sleep,
giving those
a gentle dream
of death
Copyright © 1968-71 Michael Marsh
Michael Marsh is the author of “Translations from the Gibberish,” “Sand,” “Next to Water,” and numerous poems and book reviews appearing in Star*Line, The Transformation Times, and others. He edited poetry at Portland State University in the 1970s. Marsh died in the early 1990s; these poems are printed with custodial permission.
2/11/02
My muse escaped last week,
slipped out the window between
the bars with my overnight
bag in her hand. I called the police
but they didn't care about a petty
thief, and they said she was too old
to put on a milk carton, so I've
had to resort to other means.
Tonight I made a muse trap
and baited it with all her favorite
things. I left a trail of palm fronds
and cinnamon sticks and jelly beans
and peacock feathers and moon rocks
and lizard's feet and uncooked meat
and colored glass and weathervanes
and window frost and broken kites
and a book of Yeats and a dish of cream
and a pile of dates and a sprig
of mistletoe sharpened at both ends
and an aloe plant and a glass of the wind
and a star in a blue bottle and a newborn
kitten and an elephant's tusk and chocolate-
covered cherries and pears and ripe berries
and three feet of knotted black thread
and a blue silk pillow to rest her head
all leading from my big backyard
through the patio doors to this cardboard
box open wide on the floor. I'm hiding
behind the bathroom door with a knobby
club of fresh-cut oak and a burlap sack
and a music box that plays “Hush Little
Baby” when you open it up. I'll be writing
again by morning if the gods give me luck.
Copyright © 2001 Tim Pratt
Tim Pratt is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Oakland. His poetry has appeared in Asimov's, Weird Tales, Star*Line, and other nice places. He works for Locus magazine. Visit his Web site to read more about him. Tim's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
2/18/02
Even when Norm is sleeping on the couch without motion
his soul recognizes vast motions elsewhere
as the couch and the house it rests on and the ground it's dug into move around
the earth's central axis, which itself moves around the sun, which itself moves
around in a galaxy
that's dancing around with so many others in the vast ballroom of the universe
the way the electrons run around the center of every atom of every molecule that
are somehow dancing around the center of Norm's soul.
There's no exact scale for distance.
"Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear”
they could also be further away
but maybe it's something in the journey that evaporates
or maybe it's the first night of decent sleep
or maybe it's stray thoughts from the gentle
ticking of action potentials in the wet clockwork of the brain.
Copyright © 2001 Russ Bickerstaff
Russ Bickerstaff is a performance poet/spoken word artist currently living in Milwauke, Wisconsin. He has a BA in psychology with a focus on cognitive neuroscience. There are exactly 30 teeth in his head. His longest sustained conversation lasted for eight hours. He has been mildly confused for 6 years.
2/25/02
As we are dying we reveal
ourselves. This is why
when I kiss you I close
my eyes sometimes.
Such decadence shining
through, as the sun
walks behind the shadow
of the shining moon.
Studying in dreams
How nostalgia, self-reflection, limns
The word of the world.
Wailing and shrieking, making
A great noise to wake the dead god.
I have swallowed the sun.
I have sent it to sleep.
Yes, your gaping mouth
has been chasing the chariots,
but the wolf
who swallows such a coal
would burst into flames:
the sign on the horizon.
Copyright © 1989 Lizzard Henry
Lizzard Henry writes poetry, short stories, and unfinished novels, and translates poetry from Spanish. She lives in Redwood City. At times she turns into a Moomintroll. For more about her, visit her Web site.
2/4/02
I was delighted to hear that Penguin Putnam was coming out with a new line of young adult science fiction and fantasy, entitled Firebird. Firebird is an ambitious project, with fourteen titles scheduled for the first year. It's aimed at a crossover market—young adults who read adult speculative fiction, adults who read young adult spec fic. Firebird will be mixing classic reprints with new titles. Since this is one of my favorite sub-genres, I'm thrilled to see the older stories that I grew up with becoming available once more, and I'm very hopeful about the new titles. In Spring 2002, Firebird is launching with four titles: Westmark, I Am Mordred, Fire Bringer, and The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm. I'll briefly review each of these.
This is one of those books that I read as a child, and have re-read every few years since. The story of Theo, a printer's devil (apprentice) who sees his master unjustly killed and is then forced to flee for his own life, holds up remarkably well to repeated re-reading. The king is lost to grief for his dead daughter, the land is in the grip of an murdering minister, and Theo becomes involved with various people who are all resisting oppression, each in their own way (which sometimes work at cross-purposes). The book is a rousing adventure tale, with mystery and even a little romance at the heart of it. But it's more than that—Theo has to wrestle with difficult moral questions, and while the end of the book provides a satisfying resolution, it's not really a final ending. Westmark is the first book in the Westmark trilogy, and is followed by the marvelous sequels, The Kestrel and The Beggar Queen (forthcoming from Firebird in Summer 2002). Those books continue the difficult moral questioning begun in Westmark, as Theo must try to decide what exactly he believes in, while his friends take different political sides.
My only slight confusion is with the question of why exactly this book is in the Firebird line, given that there's no actual speculative element in the entire book. But perhaps that's quibbling—Lloyd Alexander is justly well-known for his marvelous fantasy series, The Chronicles of Prydain, and I think any reader who enjoys those books will enjoy the Westmark trilogy as well. (It has a flavor very similar to Joan Aiken's Black Hearts in Battersea series, which is also very popular with fantasy readers, despite the lack of any actual magic). Highly recommended.
Springer takes on a difficult task with this novel, giving us Mordred from the inside, and attempting to create a sympathetic character out of someone who has traditionally been portrayed as a black villain in a tragic tale. She manages to keep Mordred human (with the help of a little magic towards the end), but perhaps more impressively, she doesn't pull any punches with the actual story. Typically, Arthurian retellings for children and young adults have been rather watered-down; even when the tragedy is presented, it's presented with some of the roughest edges smoothed down. Springer doesn't pull any punches, in this story that starts with the young King Arthur murdering the babies (because the wizard Merlin had foretold that one of them would eventually be the destruction of Camelot and all the bright kingdom that Arthur hoped to create).
Mordred, child of Arthur and Arthur's half-sister, Morgause, is one of those babies, and he survives to grow up both loving and hating Arthur. Loving him because he is, indeed, perhaps the greatest and noblest king the land has seen. Hating him because Arthur will not, cannot, acknowledge that Mordred is his son—and so Mordred is forced to grow up with the sneering comments of those who know the truth of his bastard and incestuous parentage—which soon becomes everyone. He also grows up with the fear and distrust of those who know the prophecy, that he will eventually destroy them. Mordred tries to find a way to escape that terrible fate. Springer comments in her bio that she wrote this story in part for all those teenagers who grow up in a world that expects them to turn out badly. I can applaud that sentiment ... though I have to wonder what message this book sends, ultimately, since Mordred doesn't actually end up escaping his fate. He is doomed to destroy Camelot, and in the end, does so. Still, a fascinating read, quite compelling and thought-provoking. Well worth a look, and I plan to look for her next title in the series, I Am Morgan LeFay, coming out in Fall 2002. Recommended.
I was a little disappointed by this title, in part because of the comments on the cover that compare it to Watership Down, Richard Adams’ truly brilliant saga set among rabbits. Fire Bringer takes us to the world of red deer, set in the early days of Scotland, when Edinburgh was just being established. It's an epic tale, complete with heroes, scoundrels, friendship and love, and generally a pleasant and fast-moving read. But it was also fairly predictable—in part because there's a Prophecy early on that just comes true, step by step, with few interesting turns. It also lacked the depth of Watership Down—the protagonist, Rannoch, does struggle slightly with some moral issues, but at the crisis point, his struggle ends fairly quickly and easily.
I have to admit to also being a bit uncomfortable with the gender politics. Given the nature of the animals, I certainly don't object to a fairly patriarchal set-up—the stags generally running things, most of the hinds (females) content to be told what to do. Clement-Davies had to work within the constraints of the species, after all. But two of the groups that Rannoch encounters in his travels are groups that have gone very wrong—and in gendered ways. One group is entirely composed of mindlessly violent males; the other of dominant females who treat their males very badly. These two groups work to reinforce the idea that the original set-up was the natural and healthy one ... and I'm not sure why the text needs to spend time reinforcing gender roles? I'd be happier if this hadn't been a major issue in the story. Aside from that issue, though, and from perhaps unfair comparisons with Watership Down, Fire Bringer is a pleasant and readable book. It did do a rather nice job of simply conveying a great deal of information about the habits of deer and other forest creatures. And there are some delightful moments in the story, such as the meeting of Rannoch and Rurl, a wise and helpful seal. Worth a read, especially if you like the Redwall books by Brian Jacques.
I've been saving the best for last. This title is apparently a reprint from 1994, but I must have missed it the first time around—so I'm particularly delighted that Firebird has brought it to my attention. This is a marvelous book, from start to finish. Set in 2194, it's the story of the three children of the General who rules Zimbabwe. They've been neglected by their busy parents and overprotected by their stern father, who never lets them leave their heavily guarded compound, where robots serve their every need. The children, led by the oldest, Tendai, badly need an adventure—and they want to get their Scout Explorer badge. So by slightly devious means, they manage to set out into the nearby city—and are promptly kidnapped, just as their father feared. The story from that point on is a delightful mix of chase and adventure, as the children manage to rescue themselves, only to promptly fall into a worse trap, over and over again. Their parents are right behind, aided by three detectives, known as The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, who are thoroughly charming in their own right.
Perhaps the best part of this particular story, in my opinion, is that while the children do manage to have their adventure, learning strength and cunning and self-reliance along the way, we also get to see their parents and other adults working desperately to save them. This was a refreshing change from all the classic fantasy novels where the children save themselves (and sometimes the world) while the inattentive adults barely notice. This structural difference seems in keeping with the story's thematic focus on community—many of the difficulties in the book arise from various separate communities and their disparate needs and desires; an apt theme for a story with strong political elements.
As with Westmark, the children quickly get caught up in larger political issues beyond their own personal needs and interests. Unlike Westmark, this book is certainly speculative fiction, as it's set two hundred years in the future. The world has changed significantly in that time, as might be expected, and as is indicated to the reader in brief comments from the children. There are also some interesting supernatural elements, but they have more of a miraculous flavor than a magical one. They are intimately connected to the living religion of the country, with ancestor-possessions (generally quite helpful), the presence of various gods, and an overall sense of Zimbabwe's collective soul. They remind me a little of magical realistic writing in that regard. Overall, the language, terrific details, and warm humor of the story help to carry the reader along, making the book almost impossible to put down. Highly recommended.
Overall, there are some strong stories in the Firebird line, and we can expect more terrific tales to come. In Summer 2002, they'll be publishing Robin McKinley's charming Spindle's End (a Sleeping Beauty retelling), along with The Outlaws of Sherwood. They'll also be publishing the rest of the Westmark trilogy, and Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel. In Fall 2002, we get the aforementioned I Am Morgan LeFay from Nancy Springer, along with The Hex Witch of Seldom. We also get two of the wonderful Charles de Lint's novels—The Dreaming Place, and The Riddle of the Wren, along with Laurel Winter's Growing Wings, which will be new in paperback, and which has been receiving heaps of praise in hardcover. Hopefully this will be part of a renaissance in young adult speculative fiction. Fingers crossed.
Mary Anne Mohanraj is Editor-in-Chief of Strange Horizons.
2/11/02
Neil Gaiman and John Bolton have come together to create a graphic novel that deserves to be given as a Valentine's Day gift. Harlequin Valentine is a beautifully illustrated book, telling a modernized version of the commedia dell'arte relationship between Harlequin and Columbine. Gaiman's words depict a strange and wonderful kind of love story, which is enriched by Bolton's photo-realistic paintings.
The tale begins on February 14th, when Harlequin nails his heart to the door of Missy, a woman he has decided is his Columbine. While Missy sees the heart, and removes it from her door to place it in a plastic sandwich baggy, she cannot see the capering Harlequin, who stalks her footsteps as she tries to discover the source of this rather unusual Valentine's Day present. The subsequent events revolve around what Missy does with Harlequin's heart now that she has it, while Harlequin follows her around and falls ever more deeply in love. Harlequin is portrayed as capricious, whimsical, and romantic, while Missy, his Columbine, is practical, realistic, and no-nonsense. As we are led through the measures of their adventures, the characters dance through a world of muted greys and browns, where Harlequin is by far the brightest spot of color.
Gaiman originally published this narrative as a short story in the program book of the 1999 World Horror Convention, and it was later published in both The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: Volume Eleven. Gaiman's grasp of descriptive language is that of an iron fist, but his finesse and subtlety are the velvet glove, as he deftly combines fancies from the long tradition of the commedia with the mundane sparkle of everyday reality. It is a tale ripe for illustration, and John Bolton plucks the fruit by skillfully matching Gaiman's words with his lavish and colorful paintings. His realistic approach to the work helps to tie the paintings to the words, and though Missy's coat is more black than the blue I had imagined it, and she cannot put the hat pin from Harlequin into her “lapel” since she is wearing a tank-top, these are very minor details in a large set of stunningly rich images. The book is dedicated to Lisa Snellings, a sculptor with an eye to the elegantly macabre and a penchant for harlequin figures, and it is easy to see a touch of her influence in Bolton's vision of Harlequin.
This story is a bizarre and tragic romance, in which Harlequin sees the characters of the Pantomime in many of the people he spies. The British Pantomime consisted of several stock characters whose relationships were defined by convention, varying only slightly from tale to tale, or more precisely, from play to play. First, of course, there is Missy, whom Harlequin sees as his Columbine. Later he finds characters who he believes are the Doctor and Pantaloon, and he comforts himself with that knowledge and treats each accordingly. There are several mentions of Pierott, another of the Pantomime archetypes, who was often hopelessly in love with Columbine, and unsuccessful in his pursuit of her. At one point Harlequin comments to himself that he is feeling “almost pierrotish, which is a poor thing for a harlequin to be."
Those who are unfamiliar with the sixteenth century commedia dell'arte and the later British Pantomime (or Harlequinade) will not feel left out, despite the importance of these dramatic forms to the story, because Gaiman gives each reference enough context to make its significance clear. For those who want to reread and delve deeper into the meaning of the text, the author has provided a three page guide to the Harlequinade, which includes a history of the Pantomime, descriptions of the role of several archetypes, and more of Bolton's splendid artwork. The book concludes with a beautifully written story about Bolton and a short biography of Gaiman, which I shall choose to believe are true.
Neil Gaiman has a gift when it comes to telling the short story which I have not seen come through in his novels. His shorter works, like the passing of a dream, forgotten as we awaken on a cold winter morning, leave us with a lingering sense of the mystical possibilities tucked away in dark corners of the world. Those possibilities hide between the pages of Harlequin Valentine, waiting to leap, laughing and capering, into the mind of an unwary reader. For those who enjoyed the Sandman series, it is also a pleasure to see Gaiman's work once more realized in graphic form. Some might argue that his greatest gift is the ability to communicate his visions so clearly that an artist can successfully complement with a brush or pencil what Gaiman draws with words.
Between Gaiman's storytelling and Bolton's lush, even lavish paintings, this book is nearly too magnificent for words. It should make it out in time for Valentine's Day gift giving, and is being published in a lovely forty-page hardcover. If you like tales of the fanciful and the horrific then this is definitely a book for you. You may devour it in under an hour, but you'll be digesting it for years to come.
Erin Donahoe currently resides in the hills of Appalachia with a black bundle of cat dander named Sierra. She has had several poems accepted for publication, and plans to Dominate the World by 2003. Erin's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. Visit her web site for more about her.
2/18/02
“Did you ever see that old tv show, the one with the gorilla in a trench coat?” Of course you didn't and neither did I, since the gorilla gumshoe, Monk Malone, is only a character in a tv show invented by the fertile imagination of novelist Keith Hartman. Gumshoe Gorilla is the second novel by Hartman dealing with this particular vision of a near future USA in which various interest groups, from fundamentalist Christians to gays and lesbians to the Cherokee Nation, are at each other's throats. The Cherokee want their land back, the fundamentalists want the world to conform to their wishes, the tv moguls want ratings, the stage mothers want publicity, and the capitalists, of course, are in it for the money. What the gorilla wants is an interesting question.
Of course, the gorilla's not so much a feature in the book as a spectre, turning up in gay Private Investigator Drew Parker's dreams to make Humphrey Bogart style comments about the state of Drew's various investigations. There's also a dead transgendered Cherokee shaman with an interesting dress sense and a surviving husband who is convinced that Drew is his late wife's heir, even though the dresses are several sizes too small. And that's all before we get to the witch: Drew's Wiccan partner, Jen. One of the wicked ironies of Hartman's very funny novel is that it's really Drew who has the better connection to the world of the supernatural, despite Jen's Tarot cards, herbs, and Wiccan books.
The gumshoe gorilla may be Drew's spirit guide in the PI business and his icon for what it's like to be all alone in an alien world—something Drew's all too familiar with, having grown up as a gay kid in a homophobic Baptist family—but the cases Drew and Jen get called on to deal with are very much concerned with the flesh and the world. Like its predecessor, The Gumshoe, the Witch and the Virtual Corpse (1999), this novel presents a variety of first person narrations—mostly the gumshoe and the witch, but also the rival PI, the deaf client, her clone boyfriend, the mother of the clones, the spy in the fundamentalist camp, a Cherokee extremist, and once even Monk Malone himself. It takes a deft hand to manipulate eight different points of view, but Hartman has a nice ear for voice, so the reader doesn't constantly have to be checking the chapter headings to know who's speaking.
These different voices tell a series of interlinking stories, including the two main cases Drew and Jen are trying to solve. The first of these involves a woman who's disturbed at her daughter's whirlwind romance and marriage: is the new husband really who he says he is? The second, which forms the major part of the novel's plot, involves the deaf plot coordinator for the popular TV thriller, Czechmates, who wants to know what sort of trouble her boyfriend, Charles Rockland, has gotten himself into. Rockland won't tell her himself, so—prompted by a dream about the gumshoe gorilla—she turns to Drew and Jen for help. The only problem is that there are five Rocklands—all identical clones created by their publicity-mad mother using DNA from the frozen corpse of a Big Name movie star. Five indistinguishable Rockland boys may be cute, but, as Drew and Jen discover, they're hell on an investigation, especially as three of them are playing a single character on Czechmates.
At the same time, there's still spillover from the plot of the last novel, as the Baptist News Network tries to pussyfoot its way around the indictment of its charismatic leader, the Reverend-Senator Stonewall, for the on-camera murder of a popular Christian rock star. And the Cherokee Nation is still busy trying to win the land claim that had Stonewall frothing at the mouth; between the BNN and the extremists on the Cherokee side, a propaganda war of manipulated images has morphed into active sabotage. At the same time, Stonewall's fundamentalist rivals, the Christian Alliance, are conspiring to reinforce BNN's ratings plummet so as to take over the network at rock-bottom prices. And an unknown poet is programming traffic signs to display his satirical verses about the entire situation.
Meanwhile, Drew is distracted from his actual cases by his seemingly paranoid suspicions about his young friend Daniel's new boyfriend. These suspicions take him all sorts of strange places, including a vampire sex club with designer Gothic decor and real blood. Along the way, Drew even manages to rescue a very young kitten. Drew's near obsession with Daniel and Daniel's complete oblivion to Drew's feelings are very realistically portrayed, but they also serve to showcase the PI's genuine strength of character. He may have his sentimental kitten-rescuing side, but like all good PIs he's tough as nails when the going gets hard. The same can also be said of Jen, who's a lot more than a cute sidekick with a good line in psychic schtick.
Like Hartman's last novel, Gumshoe Gorilla is a genre bending mix of science fiction, hard-boiled detective novel, fantasy, and satire. The satire's occasionally overdone; while much of the novel is genuinely funny, there are a few jokes that get a little tiresome. Jen's trick with the mashed potatoes at the start of the novel was genuinely hilarious; when it was repeated, with minor variations, later on, it was strictly “been there, done that.” Of course, these are the particular dangers of writing satire: the writer has to perform on the high wire of literary gymnastics, never setting a foot wrong. Hartman comes damn close to perfection, close enough to forgive him the occasional bobble.
Beyond the odd inclination to let the satire go over the top, Gumshoe Gorilla is a pretty cool extrapolation of a near future US that's close enough to our own time for the satirical knives to cut pretty deep on occasion. Hartman's main targets are fundamentalist Christians, the ones who have little difficulty overcoming their scruples about abortion if it means getting rid of fetuses that would turn into gay children. However, even gays come under scrutiny, as Drew's first case in this novel sees him investigating a gay man's financial records to make sure that he comes clean about his assets during divorce proceedings. Gay marriage has its downside, it would seem.
While most of the gay and lesbian issues in the book are background, the question of parents abandoning gay children is front and centre. Both Drew and Daniel have that particular history in common; although Daniel was a very small child at the time, Drew's personal history includes being thrown out of the family home as a fifteen year-old with no employment options aside from prostitution. Although it's central to one of the story lines, the question of familial desertion is never dealt with heavy-handedly. And Hartman's version of the near future is nicely sophisticated: he resists the temptation to depict a world that has jumped all one way or all the other. It's true that Baptists and other fundamentalists are aborting their gay children and that the government has been forced to raise a great wave of gay kids in camps, following the widespread availability of the gay blood test. But at the same time, for the majority of US society, homosexuality is just not much of an issue, gay and lesbian marriage is old history, and tv shows routinely create boutique versions of the same plotline for different interest groups.
I did have a couple of quibbles with some of the background details of the novel. Although it seems unlikely that anyone would bother genetically modifying goats to produce cat milk—especially when a perfectly reliable cat milk replacer has been on the market for years—that's the kind of detail any writer might invent to make their near future world a bit more solidly real. So I can accept that the technology may have changed in twenty-five years; what won't have changed are the digestive systems of infant mammals, which is why it jarred me out of the story every time Drew fed the kitten cold milk.
On a less trivial level, however, the one thing about the novel that really puzzles me revolves around the issue of the gay gene. If Drew's future USA really believes, as it seems to, that there is a genetic cause for gayness, obviously if one person is gay, then anyone with identical DNA is also going to be gay. Which raises a problem when it comes to the whole plot to make it appear that Eddie Rockland has been having an affair with a male Baptist. Because if Eddie has the gay gene, his clone brothers must have it also, which throws an interesting crimp into the solution to this particular crime.
And since Eddie is also obviously bisexual, there's a clear gap between the gay men who are identified by blood tests and men like Eddie who have sex with both men and women. The idea of finding a gene for exclusive gayness rather boggles the mind. If you presuppose, as some contemporary researchers do, that there's a single gene controlling sexuality, with heterosexuality as the dominant trait and homosexuality as the recessive, then it's hardly likely that bisexuality would escape the notice of the testers. It also seems unlikely that a behaviour as complex as human sexuality could be controlled by a set of genetic material as simple as those that made Mendel's pea flowers pink. This is a problem that's larger than Hartman's novel, but it does make one wonder whether Hartman really believes in the post-test era he's exploring or whether the entire situation is being subtly subverted by the much more complicated sexualities of the characters who inhabit the novel.
These are issues that I found myself thinking about, especially on reading Gumshoe Gorilla a second time. They certainly don't distract from the enjoyment of this fine novel, nor from the anticipation of whatever Hartman has to offer us next. Indeed, any novel that can make us think about the implications of things we take for granted, whether positively or negatively, is something to treasure. At the same time, the ongoing plotlines involving the Cherokee land claim and the court case against Stonewall mean that Hartman has quite clearly set the stage for another story featuring Drew, Jen and Daniel—and, of course, Monk Malone, the gumshoe gorilla. And that can only be a good thing.
Wendy Pearson is a Ph.D. student with a particular interest in SF. Her article “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer” won the SFRA's Pioneer Award for the best critical article in 2000. She has published a number of articles on sexuality and gender issues in science fiction. Her most recent article deals with the figure of the hermaphrodite in SF novels by Melissa Scott, Stephen Leigh, and Ursula Le Guin. Her previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
2/25/02
Editor's note. Some time after the reviews department decided to solicit a review of Trysts, Steve Berman joined the staff of Strange Horizons. The reviewer, Greg Wharton, is not a staff writer.
Steve Berman's short fiction collection Trysts: A Triskaidecollection of Queer and Weird Stories is a rare gem. These thirteen tales of desire and passion—with a nod to the supernatural and the fantastic—are skillfully wrought with surprising, wonderful results. The prose is strong, the characters interesting, the stories highly original and generically diverse. With stories ranging from gothic horror to fantasy to erotica, Trysts will satisfy readers of varied interests.
Most of the collected stories (five reprints and eight new) are short, some very short. Many read like excerpts: slices from longer stories, glimpses of much bigger worlds. Berman often leaves some details to the imagination or leaves endings short of clean resolution. This style, which might work poorly for many authors, succeeds here because Berman's imagination is wildly creative, his voices strong and distinct, his evocation of atmosphere vivid. Where some “unfinished” stories frustrate, these stories haunt. I loved not having everything spelled out or neatly finished.
Some of these tales contain just a hint of the supernatural. The opening story, “Beach 2,” concerns a Ouija board and a man dealing with his sexuality. It is a nice calm way to start the wild ride:
Nearly back to the beach house, Daniel stopped one last time. He trembled, but not because of the cool breeze. All he had to do to keep life sane was go back, slip into bed, put his arm around her, and forget.... He should force himself to follow his tracks back. He found them, off to his right, his footprints deep in the sand. At least they looked like his. They would lead him back to Hilary and perhaps that day when they'd dance at their own wedding.
But he ached when he thought about the future. He had so many urges, none of them easy to define, not even his turbulent thoughts of Seth. It seemed crazy to let any of them take hold, but these days he constantly imagined things. None of them led to a self he could clearly picture.
From there, the stories take us to many a dark locale with memorable characters. One features a Prague sex club and a clever new slant on the gargoyle; another, paper voodoo dolls and the search for Mr. Right at the Copy Center; a third, “The Resurrectionist,” a young man guarding the grave of his not-yet-quite-dead uncle from grave robbers:
Wallace took a few steps closer and aimed the revolver at the tart. She had tripped on her long dress again and crawled over the dirt trying to get away. “P-please,” she begged, her face wet with tears.
"Did you hear him?” Wallace's eyes glanced in the direction of the mound, looking right through the wounded man.
She shook her head as if she didn't understand him. He did not even feel the second pull of the trigger, did not hear the shot. Only realized the woman was dead when the blood on her face dripped down her cheeks in the same path as her tears had run. He then finished off the man.
Wallace went back to the blanket. The end of the revolver burned his knee when he rested it there, but it mattered little. When his father came in the morning to relieve his watch, he would head home and have salve applied. There was no sense leaving, not when he had several more hours left before the cries of his uncle died off to a satisfying silence.
Although some stories are frankly macabre, at the core of this book are trysts. Each story involves the meeting or coming together of two lovers. While generally homoerotic in nature, these scenes succeed in being extremely erotic without graphic sexual detail. And while that may disappoint some readers who wish for a bit more, I found this refreshing. In these stories, Berman is able to exhibit love, lust, and desire—both found and lost—with more flair than most. In “Left Alone,” a man mourns the death of his lover while being visited nightly by its ghost:
Dave ran out to him like he did every time, worried that he might not reach him before Jerrod disappeared—as had happened the first time. Too much cheap red wine at dinner. Dave nearly collapsed on the beach, while his boyfriend teased him with a midnight swim. By the time Dave realized he could not see Jerrod in the water, it was too late. He was left alone.
They embraced immediately. Alone on the beach, he pressed close, eager to share his warmth. A small rivulet of water slipped from Jerrod's mouth and down his chin. Dave licked it before the drop could fall. His mouth filled with the savory nature of his boyfriend. Salty. He tasted like the sea.
Berman's thirteen stories all involve trysts, but they are not romantic in format. His characters experience both passion and loss. They are often confronted with dismal situations and surroundings that mirror the turmoil they feel inside.
This mirroring is most fully explored in the collection's final four stories. Their plots are loosely interconnected, and they share a common setting: a wonderful world known as the Fallen Area. This alternate-reality is a walled-off city within a city where dreams and nightmares come true, and magic is the norm. Berman has created a complex urban landscape in a not-too-distant future where currency is no longer valued, and bartering—sometimes with highly unusual items and talents—has become the basis of a subsistence economy. Once you enter the Fallen Area, your citizenship is revoked and you cannot easily return to the world and life you knew before, though many who have entered realize they wish to. [For a taste of the Fallen Area stories, you can read “The Anthvoke” here at Strange Horizons.—ed.]
The Fallen Area is at once familiar and fantastic. It is an amazing and exciting world where anything can and does happen. But the characters still feel the same emotions we do: the excitement (and lust) of new love found, and the pain and heartache of love lost. The final four tales are a wonderful close to an accomplished collection of short fiction. Author Berman is a distinctive storyteller, effortlessly blending complex human emotion with the supernatural. And while all the stories in Trysts are satisfying, I must admit to hoping the Fallen Area might come to life in a full-length novel.
There are thirteen stories here, all told—which makes this, to adapt another archaic word, a triskaidecollection. Not every culture thinks thirteen is an unlucky number. I share that view; thirteen seems more thrilling than awful. Each tale revolves around a tryst. It may be a chance meeting which incites a new passion, or a pair re-igniting lost love. But remember that these tales are weird as well as queer; as you read them, you may find that sometimes two people can come together in strange (and even unnatural) ways.—Steve Berman, from the Foreword
Greg Wharton is the founder and publisher of Suspect Thoughts Press, editor of the webzine suspect thoughts: a journal of subversive writing, and the erotica editor for Velvet Mafia. He is the editor of the anthologies Of the Flesh: Dangerous New Fiction, and Meat: Tales of Lust, Appetite, and 100% Grade A Beef—The Best of the Best Meat Erotica. He is hard at work on a forthcoming collection of his own short fiction for Alyson Books.
2/4/02
I am Strange Horizons’ New Media Reviews Editor. “What makes a medium new?” I hear you ask. From one point of view, everything Strange Horizons publishes could be seen as using a pretty new medium: the Internet. But the way I see it, our fiction would be pretty much the same printed on a page as it is pixelated on your screen. (As a matter of fact, in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to get quite a good bit of it in print.... But that's another story, to be told another time.)
Written text has been around as a medium for storytelling for a few thousand years. Our “new media” category includes all those nifty devices that have shown up in the last century and a half or so. This includes motion pictures, including animation; high-quality mass-produced graphics, from coffee-table art books to comics; and recorded sound. (On that last, one might argue that a basic audio-book—as contrasted with audio dramas using a large cast and extensive special effects—is actually closer than a book to the very oldest medium, the oral traditions of ancient storytellers. However, the relationship between performer and audience is clearly different.) It also includes innovations such as the interactive story, which is the driving force behind many modern forms of game—computer games, role-playing games, and so on.
Now, remember that Strange Horizons was created partly to encourage the ongoing integration of speculative fiction into the mainstream consciousness. Most writers, and many readers, of speculative fiction are acutely aware of the fact that there are still people out there who think that SF is kid's stuff, that it's not “literature.” We're here, in part, to prove them wrong.
Of course, if you want to do that, you usually point to the classic books that have pushed powerful ideas into the mainstream—Brave New World, The Left Hand of Darkness, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. You point to books like The Lord of the Rings, which joined the timeless power of myth with the spirit of an age. You do not, usually, point to the cheesy special-effects laden movies that are churned out at an ever-increasing rate, hoping to make a buck right now by going “bing!” louder than the competition, and expecting to be forgotten in a few years. You certainly don't point to the gamer geeks with their “Monsters & Mayhem” guidebooks.
But maybe you should. I actually agree with the snobs that there's a lot of junk out there, and I think that a lot of people are forming their impression of SF based on that junk. Furthermore, a lot of people seem to be satisfied with unintelligent, but flashy, entertainment. However, I don't think that ignorance is irredeemable. If you have a friend who hasn't read any SF, or perhaps doesn't even read books often, instead of pushing a thousand-page trilogy on her, try handing her a video, so she can get a taste of the genre in one evening. Then tell her the book is better. How many people do you think have started reading SF as a direct result of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies? I obviously don't know, but I'll wager that there are some. Some of them will even move on from those books to discover the many wonders of the genre.
But that's only part of why I'm here. Another part is that what matters to me is not how you tell a story, but whether your story is any good. And the fact is, there are some very good stories being told in all sorts of media, if you take the time to look. Just as the critics who claim The Lord of the Rings isn't “real literature” are missing out on a treasure that's right under the same noses they're looking down, so too are those who dismiss anything that is not made of wood-pulp. Extraordinary talent can be found in the oddest places.
Consider the bizarre rumination on immortality and art that was Shadow of the Vampire. Among other virtues, this film showcased an intriguing trend in SF film-making towards using the medium to explore itself. While one could write a book about an author, the solitary nature of that craft doesn't offer the kind of material available in film, where the interactions of cast and crew provide fertile ground for tale-spinning.
On the small screen, take a look at the goofily named Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has more than its fair share of immature teen angst, and a lot of its appeal has to do with its comic side. But it also deals with controversial themes, from homosexuality to drug abuse; asks difficult questions about power, responsibility, love, family, and death; presents characters who have real complexity and depth; and most importantly, it tells stories worth hearing.
Turning to games, one could cite Zork Nemesis, a descendant of the classic 80s text adventures with a darker bent than its predecessors. Its plot revolved around the practice of alchemy, and this subject was carefully researched. Pages from historical texts were scanned and incorporated into the game, as were a variety of artworks. This attention to detail was also applied to the diverse puzzles, perplexing whodunnit plot, and well-performed cinematic sequences, to produce a game that was well-worth the time it took to play. One standout feature was the use of stereo sound, fairly novel at the time. Early in the game, as I walked through a courtyard, past a fountain, I realized that as I looked around, I could always hear where the fountain was in the space around me. Even the language I use to describe this conveys how totally real the experience was. This kind of manipulation of the senses can be used to create anything from awe, to fear, to slapstick humor.
Finally, taking the games off the screen and onto the tabletop, one could consider that most geeky of past-times, the pen-and-paper role-playing game. It's very hard to assess the merits of an RPG, because much of the storytelling is done “on the fly” by those playing it. The details of combat, movement, and economy shape the story in unpredictable ways, but a clever gamemaster knows when to bend the rules to maintain the atmosphere he desires. The most important part of creating an RPG is providing a consistent, rich backdrop for the story. That takes talent, and some published RPGs do a very good job of it. For example, White Wolf's World of Darkness weaves disparate elements, drawn from the legends of cultures across the globe, into a whole that is as compelling as many of the classic worlds of SF.
I love books. I have more books than I can fit on my shelves, and I'm on a first-name basis with the staff of my favorite bookstore. I know that a written story can build a world in such depth that I feel like I know its neighborhoods, and give its characters such detail that they seem like old friends. Books will always have the upper hand when it comes to telling long, complex tales. On the other hand, I also like the new methods of storytelling. I think those shiny, flashy new media presentations, when done well, can have more emotional immediacy than books.
Maybe you've tried to tell a story to a friend, and couldn't convey to them why it mattered to you, and finally you threw up your hands in exasperation and said, “You just had to be there!” The reason people like new media is that they give authors new ways to take you there. Sure, there are cultural and financial issues that tend to make a lot of new media presentations into exercises in repetition of trite themes. But the only way to encourage an improvement in quality is to pay attention to those that rise above the level of the lowest common denominator. There's a basic human drive to define one's self as superior to others, to have an “us” and a “them,” and say that We're Better Than Them! Humans like social hierarchy. But one of the greatest lessons SF can teach us is that ignoring the hierarchy, violating the social boundaries, and exploring the unknown, can enrich us beyond measure.
R Michael Harman is the New Media Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons.