ISSUE #267

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2016

Publisher

TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK

w: ttapress.com

e: interzone@ttapress.com

f: TTAPress

t: @TTApress

Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address

Editor

Andy Cox

andy@ttapress.com

Story Proofreader

Peter Tennant

Events

Roy Gray

roy@ttapress.com

© 2016 Interzone & contributors

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system – tta.submittable.com/submit – but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.

CONTENTS

COVER ART: THE ORION CRUSADES: INFECTION by VINCENT SAMMY

karbonk.deviantart.com

TADE THOMPSON

interviewed in the Book Zone by Maureen Kincaid Speller

INTERFACE

EDITORIAL: THE JAMES WHITE AWARD

MARTIN McGRATH

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

ALTS

HARMONY NEAL

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

DOGFIGHTS IN OLYMPUS AND OTHER ABSENCES

RYAN ROW

story illustrated by Jim Burns

www.alisoneldred.com/artistJimBurns.html

THE HUNGER OF AUNTIE TIGER

SARAH BROOKS

story illustrated by Jim Burns

YOU MAKE PATTAYA

RICH LARSON

story illustrated by Dave Senecal

senecal.deviantart.com

ROCK, PAPER, INCISORS

DAVID CLEDEN

James White Award winning story illustrated by Martin Hanford

martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

MY GENERATIONS SHALL PRAISE

SAMANTHA HENDERSON

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

REVIEWS

BOOK ZONE

books, including interviews with Tade Thompson and Chris Beckett

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

films

LASER FODDER

TONY LEE

DVDs & Blu-rays

EDITORIAL: THE JAMES WHITE AWARD

MARTIN McGRATH

Often, when faced with a challenge that seems overwhelming, the hardest thing to do is to find a place to start. A traveller, even one who knows the exact location of their destination, is lost if they can’t work out where they are right now. The most detailed map is useless if you can’t find your place on it.

Sometimes we all need a great big arrow and a friendly YOU ARE HERE sign to help us on our way.

That’s how I’d like to think of the James White Award – especially for those writers, like David Cleden, who are lucky enough to win the competition (David’s ‘Rock, Paper, Incisors’ appears in this issue). Winning the Award is not meant to be the end of a journey, the competition is for new writers, we’re the starting post not the finishing line. I hope we’re a friendly hand on the shoulder that guides an author to the foot of the path. There’s no guarantee of success, the route is perilous, but here, at least, is the point from which you can plan a route forward.

The James White Award is fifteen years old this year. When I took over as administrator of the competition in 2010 it was partly because I was an admirer of James White, whose pacifist science fiction – written in Northern Ireland, much of it during the worst of The Troubles – had a big effect on me when I discovered it growing up in the six counties in the 1980s. I wanted to keep the competition going in his honour. But it was also because, at the time, I was trying to write my own short stories and I felt I understood the frustration (not to say heartbreak) that new writers experience as the rejections pile up. I liked the idea that I could make a little contribution towards helping others take a first step towards getting noticed.

My own faltering attempts at “being a writer” haven’t amounted to much, but I look on the seven stories that the James White Award has had published in Interzone in my time as administrator (six winners and one runner-up) and feel a tiny bit of pride. I know from having run the Interzone Readers’ Poll for a time that these stories can affect some readers and I hope the Award brings something a little different to the mix of my favourite science fiction magazine.

The James White Award is as strong as it has ever been. For that I’m grateful to the support of Interzone and also the British Science Fiction Association. With luck we’ll continue to provide new writers with directions to the starting line for years to come.

The James White Award is currently open to submission. If you are a new writer and would like to find out more, visit www.jameswhiteaward.com.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

More than Fools. More than Fodder.

Recently, this column has devoted itself to first novels in an effort to force me from my comfort zone and into a place where I can help to challenge the field’s tendency to focus its attention on the work of people who are already widely known and beloved. However, while I do intend to return to first novels soon enough, it occurs to me that any attempt to shift the focus of genre culture must involve both a celebration of the unseen and an honest evaluation of the familiar. This desire to confront the successful, the commercial and the overly-familiar led me straight to Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series, the latest instalment of which was published earlier this year.

The Shadow Police novels are best described as being part of the increasingly crowded sub-genre of novels about magical policemen solving crimes in old London town. Aside from Shadow Police, the last six years have also seen the emergence of such series as Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, Mark Morris’ Obsidian Heart, and Sarah Pinborough’s Dog-Faced Gods. While the fact that all of these novels have been published since 2010 suggests that the market may be reaching saturation point, it is also worth noting that all of these series have emerged in the aftermath of both the financial crisis and the Conservative government’s ill-conceived and failed attempts to return the country to solvency. For both good and ill, Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series are undoubtedly novels of the now.

2013’s London Falling begins by introducing us to an undercover unit trying to build a case against a gang leader whose rise through the London underworld had been nothing short of meteoric. Drawing on such intelligent TV procedurals as The Wire and Prime Suspect, Cornell introduces us to a cast of conflicted characters who are all trying to find happiness in a job that is hampered on all sides by corruption, incompetence, and institutional decay. Once the mundane elements of the setting are safely in place, Cornell pulls back the curtain and reveals that his gang leader owes his success to a deal he struck with a witch who happens to support West Ham football club. When the cast discover the deal and move to arrest the witch, they wind up accidentally gaining the ability to see the true face of magical London.

The first thing to strike you about the Shadow Police novels is how they appear to have been written with television in mind. This is perhaps not surprising given that Cornell has written for series like Doctor Who and Robin Hood but everything from the uncluttered, efficient characterisation through to the reliance on sensational but cheap-to-produce set pieces speaks to a desire to see these books turned into TV. While this stylistic choice deprives the books of the kind of ambiguity that might encourage you to pick up a book rather than watch TV there is no denying the skill and grace with which Cornell handles his plot and characters. Everything keeps moving, nothing outstays it welcome, and the whole thing builds and builds to a superbly tense conclusion. I’ve often complained in the past that genre audiences are poorly served when it comes to thrillers but all of the Shadow Police novels work like quantum clockwork. In truth, the problems only start to creep in once you move beyond the plot and start thinking about what it is that Cornell is trying to say about the current moment.

Much like Mike Carey’s excellent comic series The Unwritten, Cornell presents magic as a form of literal postmodernism in so far as the world is physically shaped and re-shaped by the beliefs of the people that inhabit it. This means that stories have real power in the world of the Shadow Police and that people with influence tend to have magical power as they can control the way that other people see the world. The backdrop of the novels is that the recent destruction of certain institutions in British public life has allowed traditional ways of seeing the world to be replaced by a worldview that is harsher, colder, and of benefit to considerably fewer people. The political dimensions of this backdrop are made quite explicit in 2015’s The Severed Streets.

The second novel in the series finds London consumed by riots as young people take to the streets in order to protest their government’s austerity programme. With the police threatening to strike for the first time in centuries and far-right nationalists causing trouble in the background, Cornell adopts the viewpoint of the political establishment and depicts all forms of political activism as disruptive, toxic, and ultimately pointless. The pointlessness of political activism is evident partly from the fact that the demonstrations turn out to be the result of magical rabble-rousing rather than genuine political disagreement but also from the way that Cornell skilfully juxtaposes the incoherent rage of the faceless masses with the nuanced emotional lives of magical elites who can not only see what is actually happening on the streets of London but also act meaningfully to solve the problems. In a move that can only be described as pandering to his audience, Cornell not only imbues Neil Gaiman with magical powers and has him deliver huge infodumps; he also contrives to make the magical underworld look an awful lot like organised fandom. Turns out that even on the grim and rain-slicked streets of magical London, Fans are still Slan.

The third novel in the series is dominated by the figure of Sherlock Holmes and so winds up reading a lot like an attempt to land Cornell a job writing for either Sherlock or Elementary. However, despite being the weakest novel in the series so far, Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? winds up doing a pretty good job of demonstrating the flaws in Cornell’s literary methods.

The novel’s primary subplot involves a character who has been traumatised by the time they spent in Hell. At first, the trauma is handled quite sensitively as the character’s growing distress and uncharacteristically desperate attempts to avoid trauma-related cues map quite well onto what we know of post-traumatic stress. The problem is that rather than dealing with the character’s condition in a realistic fashion, Cornell stages a magical intervention and cures them by having them choose to act more like themselves. The reason Cornell’s treatment of PTSD seems both offensive and simple-minded is that PTSD is a genuine mental disorder with an increasingly well-understood pathology. Presenting it as a magical illness that can be cured by sufferers pulling themselves together is not only insulting to people who struggle with the disorder every day of their lives, it also serves to distance and distract us from the psychophysiological processes that make us who we are. In other words, Cornell could have told us something about the workings of the human mind but instead he chose to wave a magic wand and make everything okay.

While the Shadow Police series does touch on real political issues, it uses its genre elements to distance and distract us from what we already know about the world. Rather than using genre techniques to help us engage with complex issues like the effects of privatisation, the misguided politics of austerity, the cynical exploitation of racial tensions by successive governments, and the way that neoliberalism has colonised our thought processes and turned us all into fungible commodities, Cornell draws a veil over the real world of cause and effect and invites us to engage in the fantasy that all of our problems are rooted in the actions of a grinning cocaine demon in a well-tailored suit. This is not so much engaging with the real world as exploiting our emotional ties to the real in order to dress up a load of reactionary fables about wizards, goblins, dark lords and magical weapons.

Even by the logic of the novels, Cornell is on the side of the baddies; he hints at liberation but his message is that people are nothing but blind, faceless, and incoherent rage. People need elites to make decisions as their problems are both magically intractable and beyond the limits of their perceptual capacity. If stories did shape the world then the Shadow Police series would be part of the problem. Contrary to what Paul Cornell would have us believe, we are more than fools and can be more than fodder.

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

High Road to the Future?

Last month, I had the pleasure of reading the draft manuscript of a new novel by the Glaswegian speculative fiction writer, Douglas Thompson. Entitled Barking Circus, the novel uses a variety of narrative techniques to offer a compelling and original portrait of Glasgow through time. Part memoir, part satire, part personal crusade, Barking Circus is a high point of Thompson’s work to date, building upon and strengthening the metafictional approach he uses in earlier novels such as Ultrameta and Sylvow to create a tapestry effect – or, in Thompson’s words, a quantum narrative – that is simultaneously intimate and vast.

One of the key sections of Barking Circus is entitled ‘Newayr’, a future dystopia in which the citizenry of a devastated Glasgow has been deported to the far north of Scotland and placed under observation in various isolated communities, the purpose of this outlandish experiment being to discover, over a period of generations, whether the primal impulse of humanity is to build or to destroy. A shorter version of ‘Newayr’ was originally published in the 2013 Eibonvale Press anthology Caledonia Dreamin’, a collection of new Scottish speculative fiction edited by Hal Duncan and Chris Kelso, with each of the tales directly inspired by a word or words in the Scots language. One of the leitmotifs of the volume as a whole is the personal and public instability generated by social inequality, in its various forms. After returning from a week in Scotland and still thinking about Thompson’s book, I found myself wondering if Scottish science fiction in general has shown a greater willingness to engage with political themes than its English counterpart, a greater radicalism even.

Certainly the most inspiring literary event I have ever attended was a panel at the Montpellier literary festival a couple of years ago, where I had the thrill and privilege of hearing James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Alan Warner and Louise Welsh dispute and discuss the evolution and relevance of Scottish writing in the landscape of contemporary literature. The fearlessness and passion of these writers in speaking their minds seemed a far cry from most of what is on offer at the blandly commercialised Hay Festival these days. Above all, these writers left their audience in no doubt of their firm belief that writing matters, not simply as an entertainment or pastime but as a political act. In the current political climate, where the differences between English and Scottish political culture appear stark, to say the least, they would surely agree that it matters more than ever.

This most recent trip to Scotland prompted me finally to get to grips with the mighty Lanark, Alasdair Gray’s first novel and a key work of speculative fiction that has been on my ‘to read’ list for years. At the time of writing I am roughly halfway through the book and in love with its directness, a literary radicalism that is able to mix heartfelt sincerity with intellectual rigour and reach perfect accord (or, given Lanark’s fearless expressionism, should I say discord?). It is this perfect synthesis of heart and mind that Douglas Thompson is clearly aiming for – and, I would say, attaining – in Barking Circus, and I cannot imagine that he was not at least partly influenced in his endeavour by his fellow countryman.

At its heart, Lanark is a critique of the insoluble conflict between art and commerce. In a conversation with the eponymous Lanark, the priest Noakes begs the young man to pledge himself to the cause of destroying the sinister ‘institute’ that employs them both:

“Because it is mad with greed and spreading like cancer, because it is fouling the continents and destroying the handiwork of God! It is horrible for a priest to confess this, but sometimes I care less for those the institute eats than for the plants, beasts, pure air and water it destroys. I have nightmares of a world where nothing exists outside our corridors and everyone is a member of the staff. We eat worms grown in bottles. Between meals we perform Beethoven’s Choral Symphony with Ozenfant conducting, while the viewing screens show ancient colour films of naked adolescents dancing through flowers and sunlight that no longer exists.”

Reading Gray’s words on the day Theresa May’s Conservative government forcibly overturned the democratic decision of local councillors in Lancashire not to allow fracking in their county made them seem particularly prescient, especially given that they were written almost forty years ago.

If Gray was one of the first of the modern generation of Scottish writers to use speculative materials to critique capitalism and highlight the role of repressive governments in cementing structural inequality within society, he has certainly not been the last. Andrew Crumey’s distinctly Lanark-like Sputnik Caledonia (2008) similarly juxtaposes the Bildungsroman with future dystopia to reveal a world caught between 1950s Stalinism and the disparate and dangerous uncertainties of a future that has become regulated to a paranoiac degree. In Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon, a fifteen-year-old girl brought up in the care system is kept under guard in the circularly structured prison of the title, reliving trauma and forming intense connections to her fellow inmates in a narrative that hints at the future but that is already being played out in our streets and cities. Fagan’s new novel The Sunlight Pilgrims heightens her use of science fictional elements, centring affecting personal narratives against the stark background of climate change.

And it is climate change that forms the key strand of Neil Williamson’s 2014 novel The Moon King – another future Glasgow, another society in semi-collapse. One of the main characters in Williamson’s story, a washed-up cop on the trail of a serial murderer, could have walked straight from the pages of Carole Johnstone’s astounding novella Wetwork, published in Interzone’s sister magazine Black Static earlier this year. Before reading Johnstone’s story, I would have bet serious odds against ever finding a work that would stand even a small chance of reversing my terminal zombie-fatigue, yet Wetwork is not just another zombie story. With its scintillating use of Glaswegian and Doric dialects, it is as tough and realistic a portrait of a city in crisis as anyone could dare to imagine. That the inner lives and personal dilemmas of its policemen-protagonists are rendered with such agonising empathy adds another layer of excellence to what might just be the finest piece of shorter fiction I’ve read all year.

At this year’s FantasyCon in Scarborough, I took part in a panel discussion on whether it was time to ‘rescue’ science fiction from the formulaic escapism of space opera and bring it back to Earth, where the greater task of speculative fiction lies waiting to be completed. I argued pretty consistently for the ‘yes’ camp in this debate, and it occurs to me now that Scottish SF has been making pretty much that same argument for the past few decades. The more I think about this topic, the more fascinating it seems, and certainly deserving of a longer and more comprehensive article than time and space allow for in this instance. The fact that I seem to have written an entire column on Scottish SF and not even mentioned Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod can only underline this, although I can’t resist slipping in a quick mention of Ken MacLeod’s 2014 novel Descent. This quietly ruminative and unjustly neglected text uses the theme of alien abduction to background a story of coercive government and the conflict between truth and profit, set amidst a landscape of mistrust. Exactly those themes we’ve been discussing here, in other words.

With Scotland and England taking up such clearly opposed positions in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, questions around the very concept of nationhood seem particularly urgent. Could it be argued that Scotland’s more outward-facing, inclusive approach to both national and international politics has fostered a greater willingness among its writers and more specifically its science fiction writers to grapple with themes that directly address our current predicament? As artists and citizens who are both the beneficiaries and the victims of political systems that largely refuse to accept any value beyond the profit motive, should such questions matter to us? The answer to both these questions can only be yes. If a significant proportion of English science fiction finds itself looking increasingly parochial and irrelevant, one further question remains to be asked: is this lack of political engagement the result of indifference, or despair?

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

Trumps of Doom. Apparently Donald Trump ‘is like the blond alien in the 1995 movie Species, who mutates from ova to adult in months, regenerating and reconfiguring at warp speed to escape the establishment, kill everyone in sight and eliminate the human race.’ (New York Times) • Stephen King tweeted, ‘My newest horror story: Once upon a time there was a man named Donald Trump, and he ran for president. Some people wanted him to win.’ Not for nothing is the University of Maine creating the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature in his honour. But who will dare sit on it?

Awards. British Fantasy Awards (novel categories). Fantasy: Naomi Novik, Uprooted. Horror: Catriona Ward, Rawblood. • Gaylactic Spectrum (novel exploring LGBT themes): Ian MacDonald, Luna: New Moon. • Eugie Foster Memorial Award (short): Catherynne M. Valente, ‘The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild’ (Clarkesworld). • Forrest J Ackerman Award for Service to SF: Gregory Benford. • Gemmell (heroic fantasy). Novel: Mark Lawrence, The Liar’s Key. Debut: Peter Newman, The Vagrant. Cover Art: Jason Chan for The Liar’s Key. • Honorary Graduand at Anglia Ruskin University (for services to letters): Nalo Hopkinson. • PEN (Harold) Pinter Prize (for authors who cast an ‘unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world’): Margaret Atwood.

As Others Avoid Us. H.W. Brands: ‘For enjoyment I read almost everything but history […], fantasy and sci-fi. The real world is bizarre enough for me.’ Daniel Silva: ‘I have never been drawn to science fiction or fantasy. In fact, I can say with some certainty that I have never read a fantasy novel.’ (both New York Times Book Review)

Court Circular. The creators of the US TV series Timeless, whose innovative premise is the tracking of crime via time machine while avoiding damage to history, are being sued by Onza Entertainment of Spain for allegedly stealing this unprecedented concept from Onza’s proposed El Ministerio del Tiempo, whose startlingly original gimmick is…

We Are Everywhere. A newspaper correction of sf relevance: ‘The house was the setting of the “Mork and Mindy” TV show, not the residence of the poet Allen Ginsberg.’ (New York Times) The concepts are so easily confused.

Adrian Greenwood, UK antiques dealer, was murdered on 6 April for the sake of his first edition of The Wind in the Willows (worth £50,000) – or so the court was told by prosecuting counsel in the trial of Michael Danaher, who allegedly planned this crime months in advance and kept damningly detailed notes on his laptop. (Guardian, October)

As Others Rank Us. ‘A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place.’ (David Graeber, Evonomics.com)

Gollanczfest! During its London festival in September, Gollancz held a boozy party on the acoustically-challenged top floor of Foyles in Charing Cross Road, celebrating five glorious years of SF Gateway and of the online SF Encyclopedia – which had just reached the landmark of having added Two Million Words since the launch party in 2011.

The Weakest Link. Q: ‘Which part of the Medusa’s body was made up of snakes?’ A: ‘Her lower abdomen’. (ITV, The Chase)

As Others Write Us Off. Recent non-fantastic YA novels (‘realist…grittier’) mark the end of genre as we knew it. ‘Now, though, the appetite for paranormal lunacy has abated, and issue-driven fiction set very much in a universe of urbanism’s chief concerns is having a renaissance.’ (New York Times)

Hugos There? The 2017 Worldcon in Helsinki plans a trial run of the proposed Best Series Hugo category, with a series defined as three or more linked volumes (at least one published in 2016) totalling at least 240,000 words. How long is a novel? The qualifying length for the Hugo category is 40,000 words, and 60,000 or 70,000 used to be considered decent novel lengths; but a whole trilogy of such puny little things doesn’t now add up to a series. Asimov’s original Foundation trio, given a one-off Hugo as All-Time Best Series in 1966, would be reckoned too short.

Alice B. Wilson, author of the only post-1972 story in The Folio SF Anthology (2015) ed. Brian Aldiss, is apparently a pseudonym of Brian (Wilson) Aldiss.

Thog’s Masterclass. Dept of Anticipation. ‘Rapid sonorous beats of turmoil and uncertainty pulsed in his head to near unimaginable proportions as the potential ramifications perpending if what he expected to discover was to come true overtook him.’ (Peter Senese and Robert Geis, Cloning Christ, 2002) • Self-Taut Dept. ‘I felt myself clench. Tight as a mollusk.’ (S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep, 2011) • Dept of Losing Face. ‘Ruth Ann’s face drifted off…’ (Christina George, The Publicist, 2012) • Hypernasality Dept. ‘“There are ways, there are ways!” declared Drecke, winking and laying his finger along the cucumber-sized lump of his nose.’ (Jack Vance, ‘The Man From Zodiac’, August 1967 Amazing) • Dept of Describing a Woman’s Bottom. ‘…two wrestlers full of muscles in a crush, each one in turn gaining an inch on their opponent who immediately takes it back, deadlocked so that they merely seem to heave from side by side.’ (Alan Moore, Jerusalem, 2016) • If Badger Books Had Sex Scenes. ‘Color it purple and fill out your vision with pulsing, pistoning, driving, churning, sliding, surging, suctioning, gripping, kneading, undulating, writhing, twisting, rocking, swaying, bucking, heaving, jerking, convulsing, ecstatic movements of your own devising…’ (Clyde Ames [William H. Knoles], Gorgonzola, Won’t You Please Come Home?, 1967)

R.I.P.

Bernard Bergonzi (1929–2016) UK literary academic whose many publications include The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of The Scientific Romances (1961) and H.G. Wells – A Collection of Critical Essays (1976, as editor), died on 20 September aged 87.

Paul Brazier, editor of the Brighton-based semiprozine Nexus (1991–1993), who for ten years was typesetter and graphic designer for Interzone (which absorbed Nexus in 1994), died on 10 October; he was 66.

Michel Butor (1926–2016), French nouveau roman novelist and pioneering sf critic who wrote on Jules Verne and published a once mildly notorious 1953 essay translated as ‘Science Fiction: The Crisis of its Growth’, died on 24 August aged 89.

Arthur Jean Cox (1929–2016), US writer who published sf from 1951 onward – his first novel being Nude in Orbit (1968) as by Gene Cross – recently died; he was 87.

Dennis M. Cummins (1951–2016), US musician, author of short horror stories and Horror Writers Association member, died on 18 October aged 64.

Jorge De Abreu (1963–2016), Venezuelan author of much short genre fiction who was president of the Venezuelan Association of Fantasy and SF and edited two of its online magazines, died on 28 September; he was 52.

Steve Dillon (1962–2016), UK comics artist who featured in Doctor Who Magazine and Warrior, drew Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper episodes for 2000 AD, co-created Preacher with Garth Ennis and worked with Ennis on Hellblazer and The Punisher, died on 22 October; he was 53.

Doug Fratz (1952–2016), US editor and reviewer best known for the critical magazine Thrust (1973–1993, renamed Quantum in 1990), which received five Hugo nominations, died on 27 September; he was 63.

Ed Gorman (1941–2016), popular US crime, western and horror author who as Richard Driscoll co-wrote the 1992 Star Precinct sf trilogy with Kevin D Randle, died on 14 October; he was 74. Gorman co-edited several sf/fantasy anthologies.

Duane E. ‘Doc’ Graveline (1931–2016, US doctor – briefly a NASA astronaut in 1965 – and self-published sf author whose novels include The Ark (1997) and Brothers of the Perseids (1998), died on 5 September aged 85.

W.P. Kinsella (1935–2016), Canadian author best known for baseball stories including the fantasies Shoeless Joe (1982, filmed 1989 as Field of Dreams), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986) and If Wishes Were Horses (1996), died on 16 September; he was 81.

Dave Kyle (1919–2016), long-time (since 1933) fan, writer, illustrator and publisher who was a member of the Futurian group, co-founded Gnome Press in 1948 and entered the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1988, died on 18 September 2016; he was 97. His works include three novels set in E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman universe and two lavishly illustrated coffee-table books about sf, the first being A Pictorial History of Science Fiction (1976).

Barry R. Levin (1946–2016), noted US antiquarian sf/fantasy book dealer (as Barry R. Levin Books of California) since 1973, committed suicide on 14 September; he was 70.

D. Keith Mano (1942–2016), US author whose novels of religious dilemmas include fantasies and the future-apocalyptic sf The Bridge (1973), died on 14 September aged 74.

Richard T. ‘Sparky’ Moore (1925–2016), highly prolific though generally uncredited comics artist who drew for Western Publishing (often Disney characters), Dell Comics and such 1960s animations as Marvel Super Heroes and Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest, Mightor and Space Ghost, died on 7 September aged 91.

Robert C. ‘Bob’ Peterson (1921–2016), publisher of 1940s sf bibliographies including The Fantasy Index, editor of the anthology The Science-Fictional Sherlock Holmes (1960) and member of the First Fandom Hall of Fame, died on 15 August.

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016), US author of much notable sf with strong ecological and feminist themes, including The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) and Grass (1989), died on 22 October; she was 87. Her genre novels began with the popular True Game science-fantasies (1983–1986); her straight sf debut was The Revenants (1984); frequently shortlisted for major awards, she received the 2015 World Fantasy Award for life achievement.

Bill Warren (1943–2016), US fan and genre film historian who worked with Walt Lee on Reference Guide to Fantastic Films (1972–1974) and wrote the 1950s-focused reference Keep Watching the Skies! (1982, 1986; combined 2009), died on 7 October; he was 73.

Robert E ‘Bob’ Weinberg (1946–2016), US author, bibliographer, book dealer, prolific anthologist, small-press publisher, sf/fantasy art connoisseur and expert on the pulp magazines, died on 25 September; he was 70. His first novel was The Devil’s Auction (1988).

M.K. Wren (Martha Kay Renfroe, 1938–2016), US author of the 1981 Phoenix Legacy space-opera trilogy and the critically praised post-holocaust novel A Gift Upon the Shore (1990), died on 20 August; she was 78.

BLACK STATIC #55 OUT NOW

fiction

LISA TUTTLE

STEPHEN HARGADON

SIMON AVERY

BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM

JEFF BOWLES

DAVID HARTLEY

interviewed

V.H. LESLIE

comment

LYNDA E. RUCKER

STEPHEN VOLK

book & film reviews

PETER TENNANT

GARY COUZENS

art

MARTIN HANFORD

BEN BALDWIN

GEORGE C. COTRONIS

RICHARD WAGNER

“Long-lived short fiction magazines are a rarity today. And ones that have had a real impact on the wider landscape of storytelling are even rarer” The Guardian

“The best magazine of dark fiction that is produced on a regular basis. Readers are treated to stories that are not of the norm in the genre and often evoke a cross between the Borderlands anthologies and Dangerous Visions. Yes, it’s that solid and consistent” Cemetery Dance

“The best international magazine of dark fiction. No other magazine in existence matches it in quality of fiction, columns, and visual appeal” Horror World

“The most essential publication for fans of literary horror” Dread Central

“The premier source for a regular and opinionated overview of the horror, dark and weird genres” Bookgeeks

Buy the print version from the website: ttapress.com/shop/

ALTS

HARMONY NEAL

illustrated by Richard Wagner

The letter said Cat had to join the support group or lose her monthly stipend. The paper tasted of bureaucracy, skin flakes, and Jovan Sex Appeal. She tossed it in the trash. She’d received the email version earlier in the week and had already confirmed she’d attend, but StateCorp made her sign for a physical copy mere hours before the meeting anyway. She took a deep breath, making the sides of her neck ache with longing. If only she had gills, she’d disappear and never need money again.

But she didn’t have gills, so her life was stupid and common and tragic. The various branches of the military contacted her daily to see if she’d changed her mind and wanted to enlist. Over 10 gigs of videos from Andre insisted the Marines were fun and damn if he hadn’t learned so much since joining and the danger was almost nil. She wasn’t about to kill people for a living, directly or indirectly through “service”, but she hadn’t been able to find suitable employment. Alterations were not covered as disabilities requiring reasonable accommodations under the law. StateCorp had seen to that. They agreed to provide employment or stipends to their test subjects, and the government allowed them to keep creating embryos that might turn into happy, functioning adults whose alterations could be made available for public purchase, or miserable outcasts kept out of the public’s view.

She flipped her tablet face down on her desk, just in case they were watching, which they probably were. Some things she kept for herself.

The plastic tent that covered her latest project mimicked an old-timey circus tent with colorful stripes and seams. She unzipped the top and lifted away the pointed crown, proud of the mix of scents that wafted up. She touched each figure in turn. The three unaltered humans balancing on pink rubber balls tasted of sweat and fear, but their collars and chains needed a sweeter metal tinge. The giant bear alt tasted of musty fur and satisfaction, with a hint of freshwater fish from his cane and a slight aftertaste of wild blackberries, compliments of his top hat. She considered adding ram horns to the popcorn vendor, not caring that other people wouldn’t notice most of the layers. Her earlier projects hadn’t been at all concerned with visual appearance, conglomerations of tastes and smells and tactile sensations that would appear to be little more than wet mounds of chunky clay to people accustomed to relying on their eyes. Her new project was her first attempt to marry scent and taste with a visual component.

Her tablet shouted “Semper Fi!” It would be another video of Andre trundling along the bottom of a lake, barbels quivering with the joy of navigating a native habitat. The sound of metal scraping down a chalkboard interrupted the repeated cries of loyalty. She reattached the top of the tent over the project. It was time to put on the suit.

The suit was like a wetsuit, only made of fabric that breathed. She slicked ointment over her skin to keep the suit from drying out her viscous layers and damaging her chemoreceptors. The trickiest part was her barbels, which tickled and tried to wriggle away from her fingers. Starting with her toes, she tugged on the summer suit she’d had done in an angry red with white polka dot hearts. The ludicrous thing included a hood and covered everything but her face, for which she had a special mask that fit over her sunglasses and barbels, but she decided to leave the mask off.

She would have preferred to never use the eyes in her head – everything came in too bright and too colorful and she could only see what was right in front of her face. Without the suit, she could close her eyes and tell you exactly where everything was in her apartment, even if you tried to move a lamp or pen behind her. She could brew a cup of tea or whip up a gumbo that would clear your sinuses, but she couldn’t read or watch videos. The world was designed for people who mostly relied on sight, not people like her.

Andre swore the military would help her maximize each of her senses, but she didn’t give a damn. Suit on, she packed her purse with her tablet and access cards and facemask, just in case. A StateCorp car waited outside. She shuddered to imagine what the ride would be like on a train or bus. Outside her building, she wasn’t sure which was worse, her blocked chemoreceptors or the barrage coming through her barbels: asphalt, dozens of people with their hundreds of individual chemical scents, thirteen distinct kinds of exhaust, sewer grates, food vendors, and slow-eroding paints from buildings, benches, and vehicles.

She swayed on the sidewalk, trying to stay upright. The driver got out and opened the door for her. She put a hand on the car frame, which tasted of paint and plastic and oil. She wasn’t entirely sure how far away to put her foot or ass, so she pushed off from the sidewalk and let herself more or less fall into the backseat. Once inside, she scrambled to put the mask on, then closed her eyes. She dimly sensed the driver, his few small gene changes for better health and longevity. Pity for him, a long life of servitude.

The driver escorted her into the hotel with a hand on her arm. She appreciated and loathed the gesture. At least he had a subtle, unperfumed taste, and at least the suit made it seem like the flavors came from across the lobby.

Her mandatory support group was meeting in Ballroom A. A conference room would have been much more comfortable, but StateCorp wouldn’t be StateCorp if they weren’t in a constant state of showing off. She wondered what kind of appeals they would make, how they intended to trick her, and the others, into bending to their will. Cat smiled to herself behind the mask. They were fishing a dry wash. Cat no more felt like a member of the alt-race than she did the human race. She didn’t owe StateCorp or the other alts anything.

The room was cool, but not too cool, dim, but not dim enough. A circle of folding chairs set up in the middle emphasized the size of the place, the insignificance of the circle and nearby folding table of coffee and pastries. A few people milled about while others had already chosen seats and were angrily sitting with their arms crossed or nervously glancing around with big eyes.

Cat scented Gene by the donuts and went over to say hi. “Cat!” He looked her up and down. “It’s been a while! I’d hug you, but you know.” He shrugged inside his land suit, which was like an astronaut suit equipped with ever-circulating moist air. She wasn’t sure the exact details of his alteration. It wasn’t like she’d offered the details of hers to him. The only surviving person who really understood was Andre, and Andre was a tool. All Cat knew about Gene’s alteration was that it involved tiny suction cups over most of his epidermis, but the suction cups weren’t something he could will to activate or deactivate, and the alteration had not produced instincts for a primate body plan to cope with squid anatomy. Gene always joked that at least his alteration hadn’t been the Gecko version, and Cat always laughed, even though she didn’t have a clue what that meant.

“Can you believe it? Shrimp and sardine donuts! What a delight!” Cat had smelled the offerings on her way over, even though all sensations felt far away and weirdly filtered, as if every taste and smell in the world was buried under a pile of bleached cotton. She shrugged, refusing to give StateCorp the satisfaction of seeing her gobble up the pastries.

She didn’t have much to say to Gene, not when everything was certainly being recorded, so they took their seats in the circle, which had room for a lucky thirteen. Within minutes, all the seats but one were taken and a man with outdated pitbull ears – uncut, luckily for him – cleared his throat while looking at his tablet. “Thank you all for coming. On behalf of StateCorp, I’d like to welcome you to this group, which we hope will be helpful in assisting each of you to better reintegrate into society and lead more fulfilling lives.” He smiled pitbullish teeth and was met with a series of sighs, snickers, and grunts. His ears briefly lay back on his head before he caught himself and perked them up into friendly attentiveness.

“My name is Albert Prince, but you can call me Rover if you want.” He waited for a chuckle, but got nothing. “First, I need to do a roll call to make sure everyone is present. Please just say ‘here’ or raise a limb when I call your name. Gary Finklestien?”

Cat chortled. StateCorp came up with the dumbest names for their experiments. She glanced down to see if Mr Prince had a tail to go with the ears and teeth. He did. That was their generation for you. Too much. Every damn time. Either the scientists weren’t thinking or StateCorp wasn’t thinking or they just hadn’t had the technology yet to really pick and choose. It was surprising, when she thought about it, that Mr Prince wasn’t covered in fur. Of course, he might have had it all removed. She wondered if he had sweat glands. Gene nudged her in the side, probably at some cost to himself. She hadn’t noticed her name being called. “Amika Jackson?” Mr Prince said in a shrill voice that suggested he’d already said her name a few times.

Cat nodded. “Yeah, that’s me. I go by ‘Cat’ these days. You know, short for ‘Catfish’.” She leveled a meaningful look his way, but he was already looking at his tablet again. He wagged his tail briefly and marked her off the list. He had regular hands with regular nails. Cat nodded at this with an unexpected satisfaction. Mr Prince was obviously a hideous sell-out, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have empathy for him.

“Yolanda Perez?” A brown and yellow woman hunched unhappily under a heat lamp let out a hiss. She was completely unmoving and looked absolutely miserable in a silver suit that stopped at her scaled neck.

StateCorp obviously had some weird hang-ups. They gave white alts the weirdest white names imaginable, but seemed to give alts of color “ethnic” sounding names. Cat rolled her eyes behind her mask and sunglasses, amused to imagine playing the stereotypical black woman. She could get loud and angry and wave her arms in the air and demand respect. What a joke.

On the other side of Yolanda, a thick-furred pink-handed woman unwrapped pieces of hard candy, rotated the candy in her hands in front of her mouth, sniffing with her oversized nose, then put the candy under her seat in the middle of a pile of ripped up napkins and plastic candy wrappers. Cat watched, mesmerized, wondering what else might be hidden under the woman’s seat. She tried to smell what was there, thought there might be a few pastries, but couldn’t be sure through the suit. The woman glanced around as she unwrapped, sampled, and hid each piece of candy. Her eyes met Cat’s sunglasses and mask, which made Cat look away, barbels rigid.

Mr Prince wagged his tail, thumping the metal tubes of his chair’s backrest. “Now that we have that out of the way, I want to welcome you again and get started. StateCorp cares about each of you and wants you all to lead happy, fulfilling lives.”

Yolanda Perez let out a hiss that might have been a laugh. Cat felt like laughing, but she also felt like tossing a stick into another room. She had a ball in her purse, one of those stupid light-up toys with army in multicolored letters. She wondered how many young idiot dog alts the military got to join based on their toys alone.

“StateCorp wants you to know that it cares about each and every one of you, and it hopes these sessions will help. Which of you would like to go first?” The room stayed silent. “You know, just talk about your life and what you do and what obstacles you face.” No response. “Your hopes and dreams? What you’d make different if you could?” Mr Prince looked around desperately then retreated, head down and shoulders hunched up, like a dog who knows he’s not wanted. After a few sad-eyed seconds, he perked up his ears and peeked at his tablet. “Mr Papadopoulos? Why don’t we start with you?”

Gene frowned at Cat, then frowned at Mr Prince, then frowned around the circle. “I’m not one much for talking about myself, sir.”

Mr Prince nodded eagerly. “That’s quite all right, Eugene, quite all right. Just tell us what you do, how you get by, what could make your life better.” He kept nodding, like it would force the words out of Gene’s mouth.

Gene slowly surveyed the circle again. “Well, I’m working on my PhD in marine biology and chemistry, with a focus on allosology and what this means for intraspecies and cross-species relations.”

Most of the group had tuned out when Gene said “PhD”, but he had stopped looking at them and was now staring up at the ceiling or inside his own mind. “It’s fascinating really, how marine creatures respond to alters. Some attack, some ignore, but some are quite curious and will even attempt to mate with their altered counterparts, and which ones try that seems to have very little to do with body size or sexual dimorphism. Why just the other day, I met this delightful female squid, and she—”

“OK!” barked Mr Prince. “Thank you, Eugene. I think we’ll hear from someone else. Anyone game now that the ice has been broken?”

Eleven sets of eyes, plus or minus, blinked. Mr Prince went back to his tablet, empowered by his newfound authority to twist people into speaking. Cat raised a suited hand. “Excuse me, Mr Prince?”

“Yes? Miss…Jackson? Would you like to share?”

“Actually, I want to know why Gene’s here. He’s obviously living a full and productive life. He’s in school, after all, and he goes out in the field. And me too, I live my life the way I want, so why are we here?”

Mr Prince seemed to consider her question. Apparently finding no answer, he started poking his tablet. “StateCorp cares about your well-being,” he muttered, looking for the correct answers on his screen. “They want to ensure each of you is living as happy and fulfilling a life as possible.”

“But who are they to decide we’re not? Gene seems happy enough.”

Gene nodded.

Mr Prince studied his tablet, glanced at Cat and Gene, then went back to his tablet. He poked around desperately, then seemed to give up. “Look, all I know is that we’re supposed to have these meetings, and I’m supposed to let each of you talk, and when we’re done, you’re supposed to feel better. So if you don’t mind, we might as well get on with it.”

“Well, I’ve got a few things to say.”

Startled, Cat craned her neck. Hanging from a bar on the ceiling was a person she hadn’t noticed before. She tried to pull her eyes away, but couldn’t. Her brain buzzed with ideas for a new aviary project.

Some members of the group twisted their necks to regard the person on the ceiling, others stared intently at the floor, and a few fidgeted in their seats, trying not to look anywhere, smelling of the same quiet desperation they’d had the entire time. The figure on the roof sighed. “Hold on.”

In a strange feat, the person unfurled giant wings, did a single loop in the air and alighted on the back of the empty chair. “There, now no one has to strain just to be polite. I can’t stay down here too long, and I guess that would be my first complaint. My circulation is built in some way where I’m most comfortable upside down, unless I’m in motion. Do you know how difficult it is to stand in line if you can’t stand in line? I have to hover, which is exhausting, or find somewhere to perch, which is almost nowhere. Yeah, the birds can perch all day long, but they don’t have to worry about blood pumping up into their brains— Hold on.” Cat had no idea what gender to assign this person or if the notion of gender even applied. The figure flapped his/her big leathery wings, made a few circles around the room, then came back to the chair. Cat wondered how he/she didn’t hit one of the nearby people while alighting. “See? I was already starting to feel light-headed.” The person looked at the members of the group meaningfully.

“I’m trapped on a farm way outside of town with a bunch of birds who wake me up with their damn singing every morning. I’m nocturnal, not that StateCorp gives a shit. I can’t move somewhere else because I’m under strict orders never to be seen in public. They crammed me into the back of a moving truck to bring me here, in the middle of my nighttime. So there, Rover, you said we’re supposed to reintegrate into society. What is StateCorp going to do for me?”

“Well…Mr…uh…Ms…uh…Little Windsoarer. I will take it up with StateCorp during our debriefing this afternoon and report back next week.”

Little Windsoarer made a motion with his/her left wing that Cat imagined might be something filthy, then flew up to the ceiling, disrupting a peppermint wrapper from the rodent-alt’s pile that flew into the air and disappeared in a quick pink blur into Yolanda Perez’s mouth. Ms Perez choked with a hacking wheeze, head back, eyelids fluttering up and down, revealing painfully large slitted pupils. Her long tongue protruded from her mouth with the forked tines stuck together at the end. Gene leapt from his seat, grabbed Ms Perez from behind, and methodically jerked her into the air. After a dozen rough thrusts of the Heimlich, the wrapper dislodged from Ms Perez’s throat and flew in a wet crinkled glob to the middle of the circle. Gene gently sat Yolanda under her lamp and patted her shoulder as she blinked her slitted eyes. A smattering of applause went up around the room.

Gene tried to give one of his signature modest shrugs, but half his upper torso seemed to be stuck to itself. Face contorted in pain, he half whispered. “No big deal. Now if you’ll all excuse me for a moment. I need to visit the Gents.”

Mr Rover whimpered, tail pulled under his body and sticking out between his legs. “I’m sorry, Mr Papadopoulos. You’ve been very heroic just now, but I’m afraid no one is allowed to leave the room until the session is finished.”

Gene winced. Cat stood up. “Are you out of your goddamn mind? The man is in pain. He needs to go right himself.”

Mr Rover whimpered again and turned his face away from Gene and Cat. “It’s not my call.” He whined. “I wish there was something I could do.”

Cat nodded her head, crooning in a soothing voice. “I understand, Rover. You’re doing the right thing. It’s not your fault.” She reached into her purse. “No one said it’s your fault. You’re a very, very good boy.” She pressed the button with her thumb to turn on the lights. “Here you go!” She flung the army ball through the open doorway behind Mr Rover, who took off after it in a flurry of instinct. She hissed, “Now, Gene, go!” Gene was a rule-follower, but the discomfort of his engaged cups overrode his inclination to obey authority, so he ran in his weird, slinking way to the opposite exit.

A few moments later, Rover returned, ball in mouth, tail wagging, before he remembered himself. He pulled the ball from his mouth, wiped the slobber off on his pant leg, and abashedly contemplated the room. Ms Perez might have been asleep or dead with her face tilted an inch away from her lamp. Most of the people present had turned away, out of boredom or respect or both. Cat stared very nonchalantly at the glistening wrapper lying on the floor, smelling the growing tension in the room, satisfied that she wasn’t the only alt who wasn’t about to play StateCorp’s game.

Rover seemed to decide his superiors would want recent events struck from the record. “Thank you for sharing, Muh…Windsoarer. That was very enlightening. Would someone else like to share?” He wagged his tail a little, hopefully. A man who hadn’t said anything, who looked something like a boulder with a spigot, slowly stood up on stout legs.

“Yeah, I’ll say something. This is bullshit. All of it. I don’t give a fuck if StateCorp swoops in and locks me into one of their secret cells or kills me where I stand.”

Cat suspected elephant-alt, but judging by his unruly moustache, it was possible he was a rhino gone wrong. Either way, a miniature version of him was going in her circus project. She strained to smell him through her suit and mask.

“All of this? Bread and circus. And you know what? StateCorp would like to put us all in a circus. That’s why we’re here. We’re not doing what they want, and they’re trying to figure out how to make us. We all know the military is little more than a StateCorp subsidy.” A series of gasps rose around the room, including from Cat. Everyone did know that, but no one ever said it.

“Yeah, I said it. We should all say it. Fuck StateCorp, fuck the military, fuck the AltBoard, fuck this group, and especially fuck you, Mr Rover-Whatever-Prince, you fucking sellout.”

With that the man trudged purposefully out of the circle. “Ahmed!” Rover shouted. “Er. Mr Jamal! Wait! You don’t want to leave this room!” Mr Jamal didn’t pause his slow, stodgy stride. Rover stood up, but so did the rodent-alt, who snatched a short, but sharp-looking knife from under her chair. “Stay where you are, Mr Prince,” she squeaked.

Cat leaned forward, intrigued. Jamal stopped his trudge, just outside the circle, past the rodent-alt, curious. All eyes were on the shaking rodent-alt and the knife she held a few inches from her body. Rover’s tail curled up between his legs. He reeked of fear. Cat didn’t think anyone was really scared of the rodent-alt so much as scared for her.

“We were created to do God’s work. All of us.”

Cat snorted. All eyes turned to her. Her barbels stiffened, but she decided to ignore them. “There ain’t no god, friend. There’s just nature and humans and the mess they make, like us.”

The rodent-alt let out a long, high-pitched whine. “There is too! I’ve seen her and spoken to her, and she wants us to do her work.” She turned to Rover, thrusting her knife in the air toward him, “All of us, Mr Prince. Even you.”

Rover showed the whites of his eyes, tail still thrust between his legs, covering his groin. He whispered, “What does she want us to do?”

Cat leaned forward even more, barbels extended as far as they’d go. The scent of the rodent-alt was fur and candy and something like joy. Cat couldn’t sense any anger in her.

The rodent-alt lifted both arms into the air. “She wants us to store nuts and other edibles for the coming winter!” Her face beamed beatifically.

Cat wasn’t the only person in the circle who laughed, but she was the only one who did more than chuckle, letting out huge heaving belly laughs she hadn’t realized were in her. Her eyes kept closing with the laughter, even as she strained to keep them open, keep them on the poor, deranged rodent-alt and her knife, who didn’t move, didn’t respond to the scornful response of her peers. The rodent-alt still had her arms raised when Little Windsoarer dropped from the ceiling and knocked the rodent-alt onto her back. Jamal leaned over slowly and gently pried the knife from her delicate pink fingers. He took the knife with him as he headed toward the exit.

Little Windsoarer rolled off the rodent-alt, then scrambled to lift her into his/her lap, stroking the rodent-alt’s cheeks around her long whiskers. The rodent-alt kept her eyes closed, the smile still on her face.

“Uhhhhh…” Rover’s tail was no longer between his legs, and he’d gone back to hiding the white of his eyes.

Little Windsoarer looked up at the group. “I think she’s OK. She just needs a rest.” Little Windsoarer sighed. “We all need a rest.”

Rest. Cat realized Gene should have come back already. She closed her eyes, but the suit was doing its job. Without thinking through the consequences or embarrassment, she shed her mask and suit and tested the air with her eyes closed. Yes. They were out there. StateCorp agents manned each door with tranquilizer guns. She could smell Gene struggling two rooms away with three other figures. Likely, he was on his way to prison or rehabilitation. All he’d wanted to do was fix his damn suction cups.

Mr Rover’s primary smell went from general relief to worried excitement. He wasn’t really paying attention to Cat or Little Windsoarer or the rodent-alt. He was staring hard after Mr Jamal. His voice came as a soft growl. “Seriously, Mr Jamal. I implore you. Do not leave this room or you will regret it.”

The man didn’t even pause before he pushed out the door. Cat could smell that once he was fully out of the room he was darted multiple times. They all heard the crash, but no one said anything. Instead, the eyes in the room wandered to Cat in her state of undress, or to Mr Prince and his sagging ears, or to Little Windsoarer who had started swaying dizzily over the rodent-alt, or to the intermediate spaces that had occupied some of the participants’ attention since they’d arrived.

Bombarded by the emotions in the others’ chemical scents, Cat tugged her suit back on. She was surprised by the complexity of Mr Prince’s odors, by the strong tang of defiance she’d overlooked before, when she only had partial senses. She realized that, like her, he got most of his information through smell and wasn’t as easily fooled as he pretended to be. She sat down. Mr Prince gripped his tablet in shaking fingers and gulped. “Okay. Back to business.” He tried to sit up straighter, but failed. “How about you, Mr Torrez?” No one turned to see who he was questioning, and no one responded. Mr Prince didn’t look up. “Ms Yang?”

Cat smelled him moments before everyone else heard the sucking and popping of suction cups attaching and detaching. She jumped up and cried “Gene!” Gene sidled back into the room. All eyes turned to him, everyone holding their breath. Cat kept herself from locking him in a bear hug. Mr Prince’s tail wagged uncontrollably, slapping his chair loudly. “Welcome back, Mr Papadopoulos. Welcome back! I trust you’re all straightened out?”

Gene blushed and shrugged, confused. “Well, yes, just fine. Thank you for asking. Some StateCorp personnel were very helpful in the matter. One of them was also named Gene, if you can believe that. I had a delightful chat with one of their scientists about my research into the possibility of interspecies breeding. She was quite interested. I do believe I might receive a most helpful grant for my research.” He smiled brightly as he took his seat, but the others, including Cat, frowned and looked away. Mr Rover’s tail stopped mid-wag. He looked back down at his tablet and halfheartedly muttered, “Good for you, Eugene. Good for you.”

Cat surveyed the gathered misfits, starting to understand. She wondered what plans they had for Little Windsoarer, for Yolanda Perez, for her, what they might use as bait or net. They’d darted Ahmed Jamal and rewarded Gene, illustrating for the rest of the group their two options: you could go along willingly or unwillingly, but you were going along, one way or the other.

Cat’s back began to itch. The sensation spread out to her limbs. You didn’t take the suit off and put it back on without a new layer of ointment. The itch grew unbearable. If she scratched, she’d hurt herself. She put the mask on and closed her eyes, using visualization techniques taught to her when she was younger, a ward of StateCorp. She imagined herself in another world, a calm, mundane place without industry, without alts, without politics or military, a giant pond, mud thick and delicious, sinking down into the depths. She imagined fins for herself, parts she’d always felt were lacking. She imagined away her ridiculous jointed limbs, streamlined her body, locked her razor sharp spines for protection, let her barbels unfurl, and sunk down to where it was quiet and warm and no one ever spoke a word.

***

Harmony Neal appeared recently in Black Static (issue #53, still available from our website) with the extremely well received ‘Dare’. You can find other weird fiction and nonfiction of hers all over the internet. She’s trying to compile it all into a website: harmonyisawitch.com.

DOGFIGHTS IN OLYMPUS AND OTHER ABSENCES

RYAN ROW

illustrated by Jim Burns

Diego’s chasing some punk through wisps of cloud so white they almost don’t exist. His console shows that flat heart of an EM storm. Sensor fry. This planet is all cloud and electricity. There’s something special at the center of it all, some flower of superdense element or highly radioactive, sub-alive titan bioform. It doesn’t concern him. Why should it? The white nothing billows by him. His eyes feel sharp and animal. He twists the Nimbus fighter through the slipstream left by the punk. It rapidly closes in front of him until there is no evidence of this crime left except for the empty places of the spent shells in his forward Les guns.

He bursts the surface of the cloudform and into a valley, an open space surrounded by curls and rings of super white cloud like God smoking up the universe. There’s the kid’s Nimbus, halfway through the valley, sputtering. One fusion engine spits a trail of black smoke where Diego tagged him earlier. The kid’s retro rifles open and thin beams of crystal blue light shatter harmlessly on Diego’s forward shield. He doesn’t even bother evading. Diego opens up. The Nimbus shakes with it like a jittery dance. One two three. One two three. He’s spinning with it. There’s a release to it, like sex. It’s all totally silent and brilliant. There’s no shame up here.

The kid tries to zip, or maybe make a 90° or some other evasive move, but he can’t handle his ship, and one engine is popping with flames and holes of light and smoke. Diego’s velocity suit hugs him all over, like a lover. He can hear his own breath, and it feels complicated and almost musical. The kid goes into a spiral. He’s as good as gone, gone baby gone, but Diego doesn’t let up. The kid’s ship is coming apart, and it feels like it’s coming apart right in Diego’s hands. Like a handful of pebbles slipping through his fingers. The ship’s in pieces now. It rains into the cloud below him, a violent, celestial hail. Diego is ringing like a glass bell. Diego feels so alive that he might just shatter all over this planet. The muscle of his heart aches, like he’s been using it to lift weights and it’s running super hot in his chest. This planet feels like it’s made up entirely of clouds and light, which seems to have no source at all but comes at him from everywhere. Do the other pilots feel like this? he wonders. He’s just a rookie himself.

The kid’s nowhere to be seen, and the holes his wreckage left in the cloud are already closing up like old wounds, which have healed over, and scarred.

***

Diego brushes his young wife’s black hair away from her damp brow. Her skin is a soft brown, which he has always thought of as the smoothest color. She’s naked beside him, and the lights are on in their small home. He’s on leave. She’s not as fit as she was when he left. He notices the carpet needs vacuuming. The room smells of garlic and warm tortilla and sex. He wants to get up and turn out the lights. He doesn’t want to see this room where she lives alone, but where there is also space for him. Empty drawers and hangers in the closet shaped like his life. Space waiting to be filled by the shape of him. Her eyes are black and huge like empty galaxies. Her lips are thin and warm. He loves her so much. He can’t stand the sight of her.

“I want to get pregnant,” she says. “I’m lonely.”

His fingers are tangled in her hair, which has always been a little coarse and prone to knots.

“You want to get pregnant,” he says. “With who?”

She giggles and playfully hits him in the chest. Her little fists, he thinks, are like a child’s.

Her breasts shake, and he’s very aroused suddenly. Really, he is just a man. Just a man, after all, and not so complicated.

***

Humans have been fighting over Olympus for years, the name of this cloudy planet. Countries’ air and space forces as well as dozens of private military outfits for hire. Angel Element. Air Corp. Freedom Control Limited. Aero Tec. SoSoft. And on and on. Free for all.

These outfits trade pilots like stocks, like baseball cards. When Diego’s tour with the U.S. Air Force ended, he entered the shuffle of the private companies. First Aero Tec, then Black Spades, Mad Dogs, which he’d hated, Tru Sky. A few months or a year with each. He had some value. He was an ace now for the sheer fact of his stubborn refusal to die.

***

Three Nimbus on his slipstream. God damn. The air around him fractures wonderland. Curealian and silver beams slide off his hull and turn to chips of solid light that fly off and disappear into the metal purple of the clouds. The terrestrial lights are going wild again, and they light up his whole world neon quantum pink and purple. His shield’s getting thin. He can hear it crackling like burning paper. The heavier artillery, the Les shells, fly by him like thin, oblong eggs. He feels like an egg himself. Just about ready to crack open. Just about ready to be born.

He jerks left, right, right, slams the retros and halts in mid-air. He loses one in a cloudbank thick with weird, Olympian light, crooked bolts of pink heavy with lens flare and purple fog. Two still on him. He crisscrosses and zips. Pulls a 90° and a short dive, then spins back. They’re on him like gravity. He’s being pulled down. A Les shell glances off him and rips a hole in his shield the size of his whole life. The shell of his head is cracking. He’s breaking out of it like a baby bird.

He dives. Dives hard. He feels like he’s being compressed, like he’s getting smaller. Dark clouds rush by. They remind him of leaves, of a river that was near his house as a child and which he almost drowned in. The water had been high and dark like this, and fascinating. He’d let it drag against his dipped fingers. He’d been alone, and he leaned in closer and closer until he just fell in and almost died. It had carried him hard, held him all over, like a darker parent.

His console is screaming. Consciousness is a soft, strobing light. In and out. In and out. He thinks he can hear the clouds whispering in a bizarre and angelic language. All ice crystals and intricate patterns of light. It is so beautiful, it makes him never want to speak again.

He falls into a narrow valley of cloud. A corridor in which he feels tiny and swallowed. The walls are gentle and filled with lightning. He hits the retros and spins, facing the little hole he came out of. The move throws him hard, even through the velocity suit. He passes out very briefly. He’s still falling slowly, and he lets himself fall. Be carried.

When his two tails finally break the cloud like divers with their breath held, gasping, he’s already pulling the trigger. And the Les shells, pretty and white like astonishing doves, have been flying up toward them, where he knew they would appear, for what feels, to Diego, like forever.

Later, after he has tracked down his third tail and taken him too, his base leader squawks over the intercom, “Diego, are you alive?”

“Never more,” Diego says. He feels brand new.

***

There is some relativity involved here, just a little. The cloudy Olympus is 0.2 lightyears away from the Terra Six artificial moon where his family makes their home. His two year tours take about three years. His three year tours take about four, more if he takes any leave in the middle and goes home and adds time through the ferryman of relativity.

Sometimes, this makes him feel uncomfortably immortal. The way people age, just a little, around him, like water running around a rock. He walks with his wife through a public garden. The stars are cased in glass above, as if they have been gathered together like ancient artifacts just to be put on display. Amazon Lilies hang heavy and white over blue grass. Smooth trees with fat red leaves that smell like pepper cast great, warm shadows. Her hand is in his. She’s very pregnant now, and happy.

“I love you so much,” he says. At that moment, it’s true. Life is so slow here.

“I know you do,” she says. She is smiling, and about to cry again. Those black eyes, wet like puddles of rain.

He isn’t himself anymore.

Other times, it is like he was never gone at all.

***

He misses the birth, of course. His wife splurges and buys a message. It costs so much to communicate over this distance. She attaches a little file with a few compressed images. His little daughter. Her name is Ariel. Ariel is shaped like a seed, he thinks. There’s something precious about that, he thinks.

He’s in the clouds again. This time they’re a cobalt blue so deep he almost can’t breathe.

He and his squad are waiting to ambush a pack of Mad Dogs. Crossfire. They don’t stand a chance. Not so long ago he’d been one of them. He might know a few of the guys. So what? His little daughter is shaped like a seed, a sunflower seed, and for some reason, that’s all he can think about.

***

There are moments where he feels frozen in time. Where he almost doesn’t feel alive at all. He comes home and his wife has dyed her hair a metallic red and wears a multicolored lipstick which has come into style in his absence. He doesn’t like it. What kind of mother is she?

His daughter is two now and babbling like music. Like a strange language he’s sure he’s heard before, but he can’t remember exactly where or when. He is sure there are secrets in it. Keys in it with which she could unlock any of the tiny compartments inside his bloody heart.

He lifts her up. Her little ribs shake as she laughs and squirms. He’s never felt anything so alive or innocent.

***

Not a Nimbus anymore. That model’s on its way out. Good riddance. It’s all about the Seraphim now, the high angel. It takes him to a whole other realm. The Nimbus had been all angles, all edges. The Seraphim is all curves, like the idealized thought of a woman. Diego runs his hand along the hull. The slope of his wife’s hip. Her thigh. Her navel. He wants to kiss the thing. To caress it with his tongue. To fuck it. To live inside it forever.

It handles like a fantasy. Like it’s not even real, it makes him feel unreal too.

***

He doesn’t see Ariel again until she’s six years old. She’s obsessed with cloud fighters, like him, and Olympus and hyper potential energy dense matter, which makes up, scientists theorize, the dirty core of Olympus over which he has been fighting for years.

“How long are you staying this time?” she says. She is excited. There’s a whistle in her teeth. A few are missing. He loves the sound of it. And her little head under his hand.

“A long, long time,” he says.

“A few months,” his wife says.

His wife has become more gray at her temples, so she has bleached her hair ultra silver, and her teeth are so white it hurts his eyes. She has had her eyes colored a stranger blue. She’s fit again. Fitter than she’s ever been, actually. Maybe artificially so.

“You look beautiful,” Diego says.

“You look young,” she says. “I think we need to talk.”

They have a little house now on a quiet, safe street under a thick glass portion of Terra Six’s outer shell. He can see a close, orange star through it and mess of other, tiny lights. He has paid for this house, which he has never slept in. It has two bedrooms, a small living and dining room. A kitchen. A bathroom. But comparing it, in his head, to the one room apartment where they used to live together, this place feels incredibly small and almost fake.

Only Ariel feels real to him, and only when he is holding her, and he can feel her lungs expanding and contracting. This is the only proof of life he has. That life exists outside the hard drive of his skull.

***

His cockpit feels like a bed, or maybe a coffin. He’s floating above the mysterious equator of Olympus, but the white hot sun is on the other side of the planet, and it will be for hours. The clouds beneath him are a mess of neon purple laced with delicate lines of silver and little fists of lightning that are as surprising as laughter. Above him, the naked stars lay out in the dark like the inviting form of a young woman.

That’s not for you anymore, he tells himself, and tries to will sleep to invade his body.

He’s on a long deployment. He shits and pisses right in his seat, into a chute that opens up under him like a trap door. He eats A-ration packs and lets the scraps of foil packaging collect at his feet like drifts of snow or tinsel, even though he could drop those in the chute as well. He likes these deployments. They’re only for aces. Rooks can’t handle the soft emptiness of the hours and days and weeks stacked on top of each other like weird towers.

He feels like a wild spirit, free from any decaying, human form. He feels like somebody could conjure him up with a spell and a sacrifice. His BrightGlass window screen displays an unbroken 360° angle of his whole world. His Seraphim hovers, like he is an actual cloud or angel, in standby mode. In a tiny corner of his window screen, he has scratched ariel. ariel. ariel, with a diamond edged flick knife he won in a card game. He hopes this doesn’t fuck up whatever smart circuits are embedded in the glass, but he finds that he doesn’t really care. He cheated at that card game. This is a bad habit of his. This tiny blind spot may be what gets him killed one day.

***

Twenty-eight days later, he has scratched ariel into his window 292 more times. He pictures her, leaving him behind in time. Not so far behind, but further every day, it seems. He imagines her on her eighth birthday, gap-toothed and strong and so smart. Her twelfth birthday, a little woman already. Uncomfortable hugging, but hugging him anyway. The little beat of her little heart through her back. Her tiny shoulder blades like tiny wings. She looks more like him than she does her mother. He imagines her first kiss. What must it have been like? Was she disappointed? When she got her first period, had she been afraid? When she started high school, had she been confident? Had she ever been in a fight? Did she have bad dreams? Were they about him? How had her mother managed all this in his absence?

It’s making it hard for him to see clearly. The faint white scratches of her name like the fingernail markings made by someone buried alive in a glass coffin. Beyond them, the clouds shift and turn in irregular shapes. They are both formed and unformed. They’re a soft, velvet color today. When he returns to the SoSoft satellite base in thirteen more days, he decides he will request some of that leave he has racked up. Maybe he’ll break contract even, and quit outright. Probably not. These pangs are just an itch, he tells himself. Scratch it, and it’ll go away.

His console pings. A bogie. The Seraphim is great. EM shields for miles, radars and sight for miles, even in these alien clouds.

***

“How many?” Bastian, Diego’s mechanic in this company, asks. They’re in the harbor of the SoSoft outer orbit satellite. Gray steel. A crisscross of pipe and catwalk. The smell of gas and hot particles. Hard, white light.

“Twenty-three,” Diego says.

Bastian whistles. “Gonna need to make room on your wing. What companies?”

“Loyals, Advent, Air Corp, Unity Group, MZS, KX6, U.S Air Force, Royal Air Force, People’s Liberation Army Air Force, JSD, Indian Cloudfront, Mad Dogs, Upside-Down. Maybe others. A few were unmarked. Maybe deserters. I don’t know.”

So many ships. So many notches on his wing like the faint markings of a horde of ghosts passing him by. So many lives, just like his own, obscured by clouds now forever. So what, in the end? He’s seen people eject, helplessly from their disintegrating fighters, screaming and laughing like all of life was just some cheap ride in an even cheaper amusement park. He’s seen fighters blow themselves up just to take the satisfaction of another notch away from him. More than once he’s seen two or more friendlies crash into each other in the middle of an EM blind cloudbank because of bad communication. Had almost done that himself. He’s seen a boy, a friend of his, accidently eject from a perfectly functioning Nimbus. He’d been way high on some chem and Diego had talked to him and tried to find him until he fell out of range or else the EM storms fried him.

“Where are you?” Diego had hissed. “Where the hell are you?”

“Baby,” the boy said, still tripping the universe, “I’m everywhere.”

So nothing.

Bastian nods appreciatively at Diego’s list.

“The Americans and the Chinese are well outfitted, so’s Advent and KX6. Well done. It’s in your brain?” Bastian says, rapping his knuckles against the flat chrome hull of the Seraphim, roughly where the black box combat record is stored. The tin rapping sounds oddly hollow, and hurts Diego in his chest.

“It’s in there,” Diego says, tapping his temple. His smile feels a little crazy and jagged in his mouth. Bastian doesn’t seem to notice. He takes a magnetic screwdriver to the hull, takes off a panel, then plugs in a diagnostic tool, which glows softly with a metal light. All the while he’s humming some popcorn radio song popular back in the colonies and shuffling in his sandals.

Diego’s body feels atrophied and unfamiliar. His legs are shaking under him. He feels like blackout all over. Scraped out inside.

“Where’s the captain?” Diego says.

Bastian throws his head back toward the officers’ lounge, and the motion makes his long neck look boneless and weird, like a ragdoll or a newborn.

***

“Captain,” Diego says.

“Ace,” the Captain says. “Twenty-three’s a great number. Good work.”

“Not really,” Diego says, but he remembers the thrill of each one. Each one like a lightning storm in his mind. Thunder clapping with each rook he sent down to the open grave of Olympus. I am, the thunder booms and crashes. I am. I am. I am.

Is he lying to himself? Can he really leave all this behind? Maybe. Maybe he can. The thought of Ariel, so unprotected without him, living her life exposed, fatherless, naked skin out in the ice storm of life, makes him sick. This desire to protect her is very obviously selfish. He knows it. But who’s he kidding? It’s only him inside his head.

“I think we need to talk,” Diego says.

***

It’s always boring, but the return trip feels even longer than usual. The stars slide by. Time speeds up. He feels like he’s chasing it, or maybe running from it.

***

He is meeting his wife, his ex wife, for lunch. He’s sitting at a table outside. The air is tropical and smells, just slightly, of sand. The climate of the Terra Six artificial moon is trophic all the time.

He can’t seem to find Ariel. She isn’t answering his messages, but he’s trying not to panic. She’s a teenager now, after all, fifteen or thereabout. Perhaps she is building some structure of independence around her life. That’s alright. The SunLights above warm his skin on all sides. It’s nice, to be able to track the light. To see its source. He feels unbelievably clear. He’s got time now for miles.

Her mother appears. He’s shocked again by how old she looks, but good, very good. She’s stopped dying her hair, and little streaks of silver run through it like veins of ore. She’s in good shape, probably better than him. Her blue eyes have faded a little, and there’s a blackness behind that almost makes them look multicolored. She’s dressed simply, long skirt, blouse with gold buttons done up to the neck. She’s elegant now in a way he can’t remember her ever being before. He feels dumpy beside her, a little ridiculous even. He’s in a T-shirt, and his head is shaved, and there are big pockets on his pants. He needs some adult clothes.

“What did you want?” she says, even before she has sat down. She orders vodka and water, and when it comes it throws rainbows everywhere like confetti.

“Ariel is not answering her phone,” Diego says.

He shows her the messages he sent, though he’s deleted several after saving them to a private file. Most of his messages say he’s in town now, and they ask if they can meet.

“That’s not her number anymore. Hasn’t been in…probably three years.” She drinks from her glass and makes it look beautiful. Her lips are pink, and they look supple and moist pressed against the glass. “Anyway, she’s not here anymore.”

“Where is she?” Diego says. There’s the beginnings of a falling sensation inside him, but he holds it steady.

“She joined a cloud outfit, as a pilot. You didn’t know? She said she sent you a message. I gave her the money for it.”

“But,” Diego says. It’s his heart that’s falling. Right out of his chest and onto the floor with a soft plop like a sigh. He doesn’t understand. It’s so hot, suddenly, and the air tastes recycled. “She’s only fifteen, or…or sixteen?”

Her mother frowns. “She’s eighteen, Diego. She was able to join a private company right out of high school because her simulator scores were so high. Highest in the quadrant, actually. She won a trophy for it. The companies had a little bidding war for her and everything. She used to practice for hours. She was so focused. It was almost like she was away, like you.”

She seems distant. She dips a finger into her glass, then presses it against her lower lip.

“What company?” Diego says. He’s shaking. His lungs have fallen out of him, following the slipstream his heart left behind. Then goes his liver. His kidneys. Miles of intestine. He’s getting tunnel vision again. He might pass out. He knows the signs.

“I’m not sure. Angel’s…something something something? Mad something? Protect something? I don’t know. Maybe one of the new ones. 3rd Realm or Virtuoso, or Upside-Down something?”

“For the love of god, Gloria,” Diego says, very softly. “You’re killing me. You’re tearing me apart. Have a little mercy on me.”

“Diego,” she says, softly, not unsympathetically. Her brows are knit together. There’s pity in there, in her face. She puts a hand lightly on his. Her index finger is wet. When she had told him, years ago, that she could not stay married to his ghost, she had said she would always care for him, and that he would always be Ariel’s father. But she doesn’t know what he’s thinking now. Hasn’t put it together. Had Ariel? Had Ariel considered this possibility, perhaps even sought it out? How much she must have hated him. Her hate for him, her resentment. He can picture it. In his picture, it’s shaped like a whole planet. Thick with light and unformed shapes like memory. Her mother takes her phone out of her bag. “You can just read the acceptance mail for yourself.”

Finally, his brain falls out of him. He’s a neuron mess. He’s a splash of stars. His bones turn to liquid and flush down the drain of him. Surely, no one in this vast universe is any lower than him.

***

Unity Group. She’d joined Unity Group. They still flew 2nd gen Nimbus with 80% output nuclear fusion reactors that melted holes right through their own hulls if you hit it just right, and Diego often hit it just right. Oh, how he could hit it just right. With his eyes closed. Inside his vast sleep. The dove of a Les shell, flying into the infinity of a dark cloudbank. The glowing orb of the reactor coming loose. The cyclone of hydrogen and helium and beryllium spilling wild like a super hot flower and falling right out the bottom of the ship like a rejected organ. Tearing the ship to pieces as it fell and broke magnetic containment.

He’d taken down dozens of those jokers in just that way. Not so long ago. Not so long ago at all.

It had made him feel like God. Destroying stars.

***

“When did she deploy?” Diego says. Everything else in the world has vanished. He has vanished. They are surrounded by the whiteness of a blank page. All the universe, a blank page.

“I don’t know. You read the mail. You know what I know now.”

“More than a year ago? More than six months? It’s not dated. I was flying six months ago. It takes six months to get here.”

“Sometimes longer,” she says, taking her hand off his. Age has carved her into a great beauty. Diego feels primal, stripped down, very young. There’s a bead of rainbow vodka on the back of his hand. Where is his daughter now? Where is she?

Gone to Olympus.

***

He dreams about Olympus almost always. What else? He’s in the clouds, but there’s no ship. He has a full spherical view of all the whiteness and yellow lightning of cloud infinity. Not even his body is in his way. He’s got the living lightness of a child. He feels like lightning. He is so alive. It is always after he has awoken, deep in a cool, tropical sweat, that he realizes it is a dream about ejection, expulsion. Failed escape.

***

He lives in a small, one bedroom apartment on the Terra Six satellite now, because where else would Ariel return to? He, like her mother, waits for her messages, which never come. They wait because they do not know where to send their messages. By the time they arrive, she will surely be gone. The companies were notoriously bad with private mail, and there are few opportunities for pilots to access radio equipment powerful enough to respond. Secretly, he sends her messages anyway. The cost is huge, but he’s got the money. He expects her mother does the same, but they don’t talk about it.

Is she alive? He believes that she is with his whole mind. The waiting is hard, maybe the hardest thing he’s ever done. He feels like he’s killed her. He will keep waiting until the end of time, he tells himself. And this time, he means it.

***

It comes to him that in all those years, he’d never seen the secret heart of Olympus. That bizarre core they were all fighting over. But that was alright. He’d never shown it his, either.

***

He takes walks in a small, nearby park. It’s lush and tropical like everything is in Terra Six. Trees with huge, heavy leaves. Vines covered in little yellow flowers. Purple African Moon flowers, orange sunburst Blanket flowers, pincushion Blood Lilies. It’s very pleasant and reminds him of his youth. The colors remind him of Olympus, but not enough to hurt so bad.

He has started to date his ex-wife, and it’s very exciting. She’s an independent woman now. She runs the administration department of a sleep clinic at which she used to receive treatment, and she is no longer lonely for him. He has so much to learn from her. From the way she lives. She helps him sleep. They make love constantly in the blue grass, soft as moss, in that park that smells of pepper and flowers, in that park that was theirs for a moment. So long ago. He craves the safety of her body all the time. Almost like they are kids again. Almost like they have traveled backwards in time. Almost like it might nearly be possible to regain all those things they’d thought they’d lost for good.

***

Ryan Row’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Quarterly West, Shimmer, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future Award, and holds a B.A in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He lives in Oakland, California with a beautiful and mysterious woman. You can find him online at ryanrow.com.

THE HUNGER OF AUNTIE TIGER

SARAH BROOKS

illustrated by Jim Burns

And underneath her skin, a tiger was waiting

— Chinese folktale

Auntie Tiger has gobbled up my brother again. Auntie Tiger is always hungry. She waits in the forest for lost children and she hides her bright fur under human skin. She is careful not to show her yellow eyes and sharp teeth. She is careful not to show how her hunger has claws.

***

“Why do I always have to get eaten?” says Xiao Wei, folding his arms across his chest the way Baba used to.

“Because you’re the youngest,” I say, in my calmest voice, which always makes him mad.

“But there’s more meat on you, you’re taller.”

“Well, she goes for the easy victim first.”

His forehead wrinkles in the little frown that means he’s thinking, which is never good, so I jump in quickly: “And anyway, you get to be Auntie Tiger, too, so it balances out.”

Of course, one of us is always Auntie Tiger, now that we have her forest all to ourselves, except for Nainai, and she doesn’t count. See, we tell each other, the bones of the waystation look like trees, the metal skeletons reach towards the sky like they could sprout green leaves at any moment, if you screw up your eyes really tight… In Auntie Tiger’s forest we can pretend we are anywhere. We can practise the words the Company left us: aquifer, mo-screen, fuselage. We can fill our bellies with food, all the tastiest, tenderest food we imagine.

“I’m hungry,” says Xiao Wei.

“You can’t be hungry yet, you’ve just eaten a whole boy.”

“No, I’m hungry, real me. Can we eat the dumplings now? Please?”

We’ve waited all day, knowing that they are there, safe in the burnt-out ship which is Auntie Tiger’s house, and knowing this is almost as good as knowing they are in our bellies. Almost. The sun is falling and the forest is full of shadows. My stomach has been rumbling for hours. Xiao Wei runs his tongue over his dry lips. He wraps his skinny arms over his belly and shuffles from foot to foot.

“Okay then,” I say, pretending to take some time to think about it. “Let’s eat.”

We sit on the floor and I tell Xiao Wei to take small bites, even smaller. Sand crunches between our teeth.

“Do you think it will make us fat?” Xiao Wei asks, his mouth full.

“The dumplings?” I want to laugh at him, though I don’t. In the dumplings are thin slices of peppers, coaxed into life in our little plot of ground, treasured. The dumplings will never make us fat.

“No, not the dumplings, the sand.” He starts drumming on his stomach. “To see if I can feel it bouncing around,” he explains.

“Don’t be stupid,” I tell him, but I try it anyway, and I am a little bit afraid because I think I can feel it inside me, like the way water sloshes around, only all dry and whispery.

We finish our dumplings far too quickly. I take out a flask and let Xiao Wei sip first.

“Count!” I shout at him.

“I’m counting,” he mutters. “There, that’s three.”

I take my own sips whilst Xiao Wei clambers onto the pile of blankets which is Auntie Tiger’s bed, and sighs contentedly. In the story, this is where Little Brother sleeps, and Auntie Tiger cuddles him, singing him lullabies so he will dream sweet dreams to make his flesh more tender. Older Sister sleeps on the floor, and I am about to curl up and ask Auntie Tiger if my brother is sleeping well when there’s a familiar tap-tap of a walking stick outside, and a knock on the wall. I groan. Xiao Wei bounces off the bed and shouts, “Nainai!”

A wrinkled face peeks in. “I hope Auntie Tiger isn’t here to eat me up,” she says.

“She’s sleeping,” says Xiao Wei, grinning. “Don’t worry.”

We call her Nainai – Grandma – even though she isn’t our grandma. She doesn’t have her own family but lives out here on the edge of the city by herself. Mama used to tell us we had to be kind to her, so now we’ve got into the habit.

She shoves her walking stick into the ship, then climbs in after it, elbowing me in the stomach, and squats on the floor next to Xiao Wei. The ship starts to smell of feet, and something else, musty and sweet at the same time.

I mutter to Xiao Wei, “We’ll be here all day now.” He glares at me.

When the Company came to the city most people had already left. Nainai said it was the last straw. She went off into the mountains by herself and only came back after they’d gone, after everyone thought she must have died out there, all alone in the wilds; everyone except Baba, who said he always knew she was far too stubborn for that.

She calls the Company people a bad name. So bad I can’t even say it here. But sometimes, in the dark, Xiao Wei and I whisper it to each other to see who can be the first to make the other giggle.

“Well then,” says Nainai, “what’s doing today?”

“Tell us about the snakes,” Xiao Wei begs her, as always. “Tell us about the time you got poisoned and your feet turned purple.”

He listens to her with his mouth open. He believes everything she says.

“Did you see tigers?” he asks.

“Once one chased me up a tree,” she says. “I only got down three days later when it had got so hungry it had to go and chase something else.”

But I know she is lying because there aren’t any tigers any more, there haven’t been any for years and years, not since the city ate up all their homes. And even when the city got quiet, the tigers didn’t come back.

Once after a sandstorm we found bones in the shape of an animal. They were all curled up, like it had walked all the way into the city, beneath the eyes of all the apartment blocks, then just lain down and died, right in the middle of Freedom Square.

“It’s a tiger,” said Xiao Wei, after we had looked at the bones for a long time.

“How do you know?” I said, but I knew they were tiger bones, too. We wrapped them in a cloth and carried them out to Auntie Tiger’s forest and they became our secret thing, buried between the burnt-out ship and the comms mast. We used to burn paper money for the tiger, so it would be happy in the underworld and wouldn’t come back and eat us. We still try to keep the sand swept away, and though Nainai always says she’ll help us she just leans on her broom and tells us what to do.

***

Nainai likes to try and teach us things, even though we know them already. She thinks now that Mama and Baba aren’t here anymore we don’t learn anything. “Look here,” she always says, “Look here.” Today she fishes around in her clothes where she keeps scraps of paper wrapped up in cloth like they’re treasure. It takes her a while to find one with writing on only one side. The scraps are getting smaller and smaller. Then she gets out her pen and ink. Her pen is clear plastic. The end is all chewed into a scrunched up point. She won’t tell us how she makes the ink. It’s black, and smells of something from a long way underground.

“Look here,” she says, finally, spreading the scrap of paper out on the floor. “This is Tiger.” When she writes it, all the lines are wobbly because her hand is all shaky. “Here is how you write tiger. Look here – first you draw this, this is the tiger’s skin. Then you draw this, this is the tiger’s feet.”

We look at the wobbly shape. “There’s only two feet,” says Xiao Wei.

“Ha!” says Nainai, hauling herself out of the ship. “Tigers are clever at hiding things. You should remember that.”

***

In the books the Company left us there are pictures of things we have never seen, like “reservoir” and “bio-dome”. The Company people smiled at us and patted our heads and we had to pretend to like it because we wanted those books, we wanted them almost as much as we wanted the little packets of food they passed out, and the sweet drinks that made our teeth feel fuzzy and strange. They hung up huge red banners on our houses with big white characters that Mama said meant “Working Together for a Prosperous Future”. When Baba saw them he said that Nainai had the right idea.

The Company also gave all the children books about animals. These books were the ones we liked best, the ones that made us want to look and made us scared of looking at the same time. This is how we know what Auntie Tiger looks like. She has orange and black stripes and yellow eyes. She is coming out of a forest of tall trees and looking straight at us. Her yellow eyes are saying, “I’m hungry” and even when we were very little we knew that she wanted to gobble us up.

***

In the middle of the night Older Sister hears the sound of crunching and says to Auntie Tiger, “What are you eating? I am also hungry.” So Auntie Tiger gives her a date, and Older Sister is so hungry she is about to pop it straight into her mouth, but she stops, and she feels it, and she finds that it isn’t a date at all but a human finger. And although Older Sister is very hungry, she isn’t hungry enough for this. So instead she says, “I have to go outside, Auntie Tiger,” (in those days, there weren’t any bathrooms) and Auntie Tiger says, “Let me tie this rope around your waist, then you won’t get lost my dear,” but when Older Sister gets out into the moonlight she sees the rope isn’t a rope at all, but human entrails, all pink and slippery and bright under the moon.

***

We’ve made our entrails out of plastic bags tied together, with a bit of sand in each to make it heavier. We’ve seen real entrails, when there used to be animals to eat, and we’re quite pleased with how our fake entrails look. When I am far enough away from Auntie Tiger’s house, I untie the entrails and climb up a tree as quick as I can.

The tree isn’t a tree but a comms mast – or what’s left of it – with a ladder up the side. From up here, if you look one way you can see the city is getting thinner, some buildings falling apart and some never finished. You can see more and more light through its ribs. If you look the other way you can see all the way into the flat distance, and we don’t know what’s there. Whichever way I look I can’t see any people and I imagine that there is just us here, just me and Xiao Wei in Auntie Tiger’s forest, and the world all empty around us. It makes me feel shivery, even though it is hot.

On the horizon, where the sun is going down, there’s a dark line like someone’s smudged their finger just above the ground. Somewhere over there is a storm.

***

The sand swallows things up. Fields and animals and buildings and people. It swallows pretty much anything. The Company promised that their machines could keep the sand away. They talked to Baba and Mama and all the other grown-ups who lived at the edge of the city about businesses and opportunities. They talked to us about the new little friends we’d have. Then they leant down with their hands on their knees and said, “Won’t that be wonderful!” and smiled at us through glasses that reflected us back.

“Why can’t we just go to where you come from?” said Xiao Wei. “Wouldn’t that be easier?” But the Company people just laughed and ruffled his hair.

Sometimes we play Company people. Xiao Wei puts on his special accent which he has to wrinkle his nose and raise his eyebrows to do. “A hopeful future for all!” he proclaims, wagging his finger in the air. “Progress is within reach!” I have to admit that he’s quite good. He takes an exaggerated swig from an imagined bottle of water and smacks his lips together. “The taste of change!” he declares, and I give him a round of applause, I can’t help it, even though it turned out that the Company people weren’t as clever as they thought. All their machines and numbers didn’t do much of anything in the end, and we never got to see the things they showed us in the pictures, the great bowls of water in the earth and the shining silver buildings that would grow up beside them, and we never got to find out what change tasted like.

Nainai says she always knew they’d have to give up in the end. “No staying power,” she says of people she disapproves of, and she always spits after she’s said it.

***

When Auntie Tiger has waited a long time, she pulls on the entrails to bring Older Sister back. But when the entrails return Older Sister does not, and Auntie Tiger gets very angry. She crashes out of the house and she shouts up to Older Sister in the tree, “I see you!”

***

This is Xiao Wei’s favourite part. He scampers around on all fours beneath the mast and shouts, “Come down, come down, and I’ll cook you some food!”

I should be taunting him, gloating to Auntie Tiger that she won’t have me for her dinner. But I can’t keep my eyes from the horizon and its dark, smudged line.

“Come down, come down, your little brother is scared!” He makes his voice high-pitched and sing-song.

I hold out my thumb. The line is about half the size of my thumbnail. As I watch, it starts to grow.

“Come down, come down or I’ll come and get you!”

My legs are heavy and all of a sudden I am very tired.

“I’ll chew on your brains and pull out your eyeballs! I’ll pull out your guts through your nose!”

I watch the line. I feel like all the sand and dumplings in my stomach are being pressed together. I tell my legs to move. When that doesn’t work I shout at them. It seems like a long way down, much further than on the way up.

“What are you doing?” shouts Xiao Wei. “I’m not finished!”

I can feel grains of sand begin to whip onto my face.

“I’ll gobble you up,” he says, uncertain now.

I start to scramble faster. I know I should shout to him, tell him to run, but the wind has stolen my voice. Something is roaring. The wind tugs at my hair and my T-shirt. When I’m about two metres off the ground I jump.

“Are you blind?” I yell, straightening up and grabbing his hand. We start running.

The sand is too fast. I only look behind for a second but it’s enough to see what’s behind us. In our picture book there’s a wave, and below the wave is a little boat. The mountain of sand looks just like the wave, and we are just like the boat, all the way far underneath it. I try to look around us, one arm over my face but all the places that might give us shelter seem too flimsy, too full of holes – they are just the skeletons of things that used to be useful and finally we crash into what’s left of a wrought iron barrier. We throw ourselves behind it and as Xiao Wei burrows his head in my stomach I try to put my arms around him and over my head at the same time and the sand sweeps over us, on and on and on.

And there is only the dark, and sand all around, filling my ears and mouth, pressing down like it wants to keep me forever. There is only silence, and I have lost which way is up, lost where the ground was before it swallowed me, and all I can think is that I want Baba and Mama back, I want them to reach down their strong hands to haul me up, to lift me out.

It seems like a long, long time before I realise I am still clutching my brother’s hand, that I am not buried all alone. That we have to move, to dig, and the more we dig, the more sand falls in and even when we wriggle out it is hard to breathe. The air is a dirty, browny yellow. It is as dark as evening and it feels like we are a long way from home because there is nothing around us that I recognise. Our hair is matted with sand and our skin is all stubbly. Xiao Wei looks at me, his eyes big and glittery. I start to giggle. The relief makes me feel light and floaty.

***

We are brushing ourselves down, still shaking, when we smell something wrong, something musty and strange and old. And after the smell, a growl, long and low, and we know what it is even before yellow eyes come out of the dust like the cleverest looking lamps you’ve ever seen.

I take hold of Xiao Wei’s hand. His fingers curl round mine. “Auntie Tiger,” he whispers. We stand very still. The yellow eyes are followed by orange and black fur rippling with each step, coming towards us, coming closer, and I know that we were right, she is hungry, and the sand has brought her all the way here to the city to gobble us up.

I think she can smell us; her nostrils flare, we must smell like good food. Her claws rake the sand. I’ve always thought that Auntie Tiger’s not very clever if she doesn’t realise that Older Sister will untie the rope. But this tiger isn’t like that. This tiger is like the tiger that Nainai writes. She looks like she is thinking. She looks like she has secrets to hide.

“It’s only a game,” I whisper, and I don’t know whether I’m talking to myself or my brother. “Auntie Tiger doesn’t exist, she’s only a story.” She’s only a story, just like the ones the Company told us. Just like the giant bowls of water in the ground and the silver buildings touching the sky. Stories aren’t true, we’ve learnt that by now. But my voice has gone thin and high and it’s not convincing anyone.

Auntie Tiger has gobbled up my brother again. This is my bad dream. I dream it night after night and it’s always the same. I am not the brave Older Sister our parents told me I had to be. I am too scared to run away, even though I know how the story goes, that there is a tree out there for me to climb, and that Auntie Tiger will not be able to trick me down and gobble me up.

This is my bad dream and this is when I should wake up. But I don’t wake up. There are no trees to climb or tricks to try.

Xiao Wei holds my hand tighter. The tiger bares her teeth. I want to say to him I’m sorry, but the tiger has stolen my voice. I want to run but my legs are too heavy and I think maybe he’s right, maybe the sand is weighing us down. It has swallowed up all the sound. It has swallowed up the sky. I put my arms around my brother and I hold him close because I don’t know what else to do. Because this wasn’t in the stories.

Then Xiao Wei shouts, “Look. Look!”

I don’t understand at first, but then I see it. Another wave, coming towards us with a roar, faster even than last time and there is nothing we can do but crouch together and hold on, our arms wrapped around each other as everything around us turns black and angry and somewhere out in the darkness are long claws and sharp, sharp teeth.

***

The sand swallows things up but it uncovers things, too. That’s what Mama used to say. Once after a storm she found a silver necklace, just peeking out of the sand. “This necklace,” she would say, touching the thin chain around her neck, where she’d hung a pendant shaped like a bird. “See, baobei, you can find the hidden things, if you look.”

The storm passes. It feels like it has sucked everything out of the air. The quietness makes me afraid. We keep our heads down and listen for the tiger’s breath.

But what we hear is the tap of a stick, and someone scuttling towards us crying, “Aiya! Look at the state of you!”

Nainai is moving fast, her dress flapping around her. She is saying “Aiya!” over again and shaking her head but we are too busy digging ourselves out of the sand and looking about us at the empty space where the tiger was waiting.

“Where did it go?” says Xiao Wei.

“What?” says Nainai.

“The tiger. The tiger was going to eat us.”

“Ah!” says Nainai, “And I would have liked to see it! What a shame!’

We watch her carefully for signs of mockery.

“It wanted to eat us,” says Xiao Wei, just to make sure she’d heard the first time.

“Of course it did, it’s a tiger,” says Nainai.

Xiao Wei and I look at each other. I try to make my look say Crazy old lady. Xiao Wei makes his look say Shut up.

***

This is the end of the story: Auntie Tiger runs to find her tiger friends to help her tear Older Sister from the tree. But Older Sister climbs down quickly, ripping her clothes on a branch. When Auntie Tiger comes back she says, “Look – there is a human in the tree,” but all her two tiger friends see is torn clothing so they think she has cheated them and they are angry like only tigers can be. Older Sister watches from a distance as they pounce on Auntie Tiger and gobble her up, and then Older Sister runs out of the forest and never comes back, because she is clever and knows when to learn a lesson.

***

Nainai says, “It must have been in a rush, your tiger. It left something behind.” She takes her stick and prods at a lump of something in the sand, and Xiao Wei hurries over to pick it up.

“Fur!” he shouts. “Tiger fur!” Orange and black and white and far bigger than Xiao Wei, holding it up and staggering under the weight.

I gaze at Nainai, open-mouthed.

“Can we keep it?” My brother has wrapped the fur around himself, and it’s trailing behind him on the floor.

Nainai surveys him, her head cocked to one side. “Oh, I think it’s yours now,” she says. “Look after it. And each other.”

She gives me a look I don’t understand and shuffles away before I have chance to speak. I watch her bent figure until it disappears behind a dune. Then my tiger brother and I set off home through a landscape that is strange to us. The buildings have changed their shapes and the city is lost in a yellowy haze. Xiao Wei keeps tripping over the tiger fur but refuses to take it off, even though he’s hot and getting so tired he can hardly put one foot in front of the other.

“We’re nearly there,” I say. “Nearly there now,” but to be honest, I’m not sure where we are. We’ve come too far into the city to find our way out. We turn down street after street but nothing looks familiar and the sun is cutting through the clouds. My throat is dry and itchy.

I see a flash of metal, something rising up like a giant silver beetle.

“Auntie Tiger’s house,” mumbles Xiao Wei. But there’s something different about it. Auntie Tiger’s house is old and falling apart; this is bright and shining and new, as if it’s been perfectly preserved in the sand. A door in the side is open and beckons us in to the shade, cool and inviting.

“Let’s sleep here,” says Xiao Wei, trying and failing to hold back a yawn. “She won’t mind.”

I look around, half expecting to see a stranger approaching, a Company pilot coming back to claim his ship. But there is only the sound of a lone bird, just beginning to sing somewhere up in the ruins of a building above us.

I guide my brother through the open door and into the cool ship, where he curls up on the floor and closes his eyes, and I collapse onto one of the chairs by the control screen. We’ve earned a rest, after sandstorms and tigers. I’ll let him sleep for a while, though he will wake up hungry, as always, and we will find our way home to our empty house on the edge of the empty city, sweep the sand from the floors and tend the pale vegetables. We will play in Auntie Tiger’s forest and pretend that everything is fine. We will go on telling the same story.

I rub my hand over my eyes. The ache in my belly reminds me how long ago it was that we ate our dumplings. Xiao Wei mutters in his sleep, squirming into a more comfortable position.

Cautiously, I run my hand over the screen. Lights appear at my touch. I hesitate, then reach out again. From somewhere in the bowels of the ship, an engine hums into life. I look around at my brother and realise I can’t tell where tiger ends and boy begins.

The ship door closes with a sigh like an exhaled breath.

***

Sarah Brooks has lived in China, Japan and Italy, and now teaches East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. She is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and has had work published in a previous issue of Interzone, plus Strange Horizons and Shimmer.

CRIMEWAVE 13: BAD LIGHT

Mat Coward

Ralph Robert Moore

Linda Mannheim

Stephen Hargadon

Paula Priamos

Simon Bestwick

Andrew Hook

Steve Rasnic Tem

Georgina Bruce

Gerri Brightwell

Ray Cluley

Mike O’Driscoll

Wraparound Cover Art

Ben Baldwin

American Royal, 240 pages

MAILING OUT SOON • ORDER IT NOW!

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“A fascinating mix of top-notch practitioners (including writers famous for their stellar work in the horror and science fiction genre)… a unifyingly dark feel, rich with atmosphere and a certain surreal consciousness at the heart” — Barry Forshaw

YOU MAKE PATTAYA

RICH LARSON

illustrated by Dave Senecal

Dorian sprawled back on sweaty sheets, watching Nan, or Nahm, or whatever her name was, grind up against the mirror, beaming at the pop star projected there like she’d never seen smartglass before.He knew she was from some rural eastern province; she’d babbled as much to him while he crushed and wrapped parachutes for their first round of party pills. But after a year in Pattaya, you’d think she’d have lost the big eyes and the bubbliness. Both of which were starting to massively grate on him.

Dorian had been in the city for a month now, following the tourist influx, tapping the Banks and Venmos of sun-scalded Russians too stupid to put their phones in a faraday pouch as they staggered down Walking Street. In the right crowd, he could slice a dozen people for ten or twenty Euros each and make off with a small fortune before a polidrone could zero in on him.

And in Baht, that small fortune still went a long way. More than enough to reward himself with a ’phetamine-fuelled 48-hour club spree through a lurid smear of discos and dopamine bars, from green-lit Insomnia to Tyger Tyger’s tectonic dance floor and finally to some anonymous club on the wharf where he yanked a gorgeous face with bee-stung lips from a queue of bidders on Skinspin and wasted no time renting the two of them a privacy suite.

Dorian put a finger to his lips to mute the pop star in the mirror, partly to ward off the comedown migraine and partly just to see the hooker’s vapid smile slip to a vapid pout that looked better on her anyways. She pulled the time display out from the corner of the mirror and made a small noise of surprise in her throat.

“I must shower.” She checked the cheap nanoscreen embedded in her thumbnail, rueful. “Other client soon. Business lady. Gets angry when I late even one fucking second.” She spun toward the bed. “I like you better,” she cooed. “You’re handsome. Her, I don’t know. She wear a blur.” She raked her glittery nails through the air in front of her face to illustrate.

“That’s unfortunate,” Dorian said, pulling his modded tablet out from under the sheets.

“Like I fuck a ghost,” she said with a grimace. “Gives me shivers.” She turned back to her reflection, piling up her dark hair with one hand and encircling her prick with the other. She flashed him an impish Crest-capped grin from the mirror. “You want a shower with me?”

Dorian’s own chafed cock gave a half-hearted twitch. He counted the popped tabs of Taurus already littered around the room and decided not to risk an overdose. “I’ll watch,” he said. “How’s that?”

Her shoulders heaved an exaggerated sigh, then she flitted off to the bathroom. Dorian flicked the shower’s smartglass from frosted to one-way transparent, watching her unhook the tube and wave it expectantly in his general direction. Dorian used his tablet to buy her the suite’s maximum option, sixty litres of hot water.

Once she was busy under the stream, rapping along to Malaysian blip-hop, he took advantage of the privacy to have a look at his Bank. The scrolling black figure in his savings account gave him a swell of pride. 30,000 Euros, just over a million in Baht. He was ripping down record cash and the weekend’s binge had barely dented him. Maybe it was finally time to go to a boatyard and put in some inquiries.

Dorian alternated between watching curves through the wet glass and watching clips of long-keeled yachts on his tablet. Then, in the corner of his eye, the mirror left tuned to a Thai entertainment feed flashed a face he actually recognized: Alexis Carrow, UK start-up queen, founder of Delphi Apps and freshly-minted billionaire. Dorian sat up a bit straighter and the mirror noticed, generating English subtitles.

CARROW VACATION INCOGNITO

Alexis Carrow young CEO from Delphi Apps on vacay in our very own beautiful country, celebspotters made clip yesterday on Pattaya Bay Area. She appears having a wonderful time perusing Soi 17 with only bodyguard. No lover for her? Where is singer/songwriter Mohammed X? Alexis Carrow is secretive always.

Dorian dumped the feed from the mirror onto his tablet, zooming in on the digital stills from some celebspotter’s personal drone that showed Ms Carrow slipping inside an AI-driven tuk-tuk, wearing Gucci shades and a sweat-wicking headscarf. Thailand still pulled in a lion’s share of middle-class Russian and Australian holidayers, plus droves of young Chinese backpackers, but Dorian knew the West’s rich and/or famous had long since moved on to sexier climes. Alexis Carrow was news. And she was here in Pattaya.

Cogs churned in his head; grifter’s intuition tingled the nape of his neck. He eased up off the bed and walked to the smartglass wall of the bathroom. Inside, Nan – Nahm? – was removing her penis, trailing strands of denatured protein. He doubted it was her original organ – surgeons needed something to work with when they crafted the vagina, after all – but customers liked the fantasy.

Dorian put his forehead against the smartglass, watching as she slipped the disembodied cock into the nutrient gel of a chic black refrigerated carrycase. The night’s activities were a slick fog. He tried to remember what she’d told him between bouts of hallucination-laced sex, the endless murmuring in his ear while they lay tangled together. Things about her family in Buriram, things about her friends, things about her clients.

Someone even richer than you, she’d said, fooled by his rented spidersilk suit and open bar tab. Wants me all the week. You’re lucky I think you are handsome.

Dorian couldn’t contain his grin as he looked down at his tablet, flicking through the photos. She was right about one thing: he had always been lucky.

***

By the time the hooker was dressed, Dorian had checked on Skinspin and verified her name was Nahm. She exited the bathroom with a slink of steam, wrapped in a strappy white dress, her black hair immaculate again. Dorian appraised her unending legs, soot-rimmed eyes and pillowy lips. She was definitely enough to catch even a celebrity’s biwandering eye.

“What?” she asked. She crouched to retrieve one Louboutin knock-off kicked under the bed; Dorian produced its partner.

“Nothing, Nahm,” he said, handing her the sandal. “I was just thinking how much I’d like to take you back to London with me.”

“Don’t make a joke,” she said, but she looked pleased. She gripped his arm for balance while she slipped into her shoes and then gave him a lingering goodbye kiss. As soon as the door of the privacy suite snicked shut behind her, Dorian scrambled back into his clothes.

Someone had dumped half a Singha across his shoes and his sport coat stank like laced hash, but he didn’t have time for a clothing delivery. He raked fingers through his gel-crisped hair, prodded the dark circles under his eyes, and left. The narrow hall was a bright, antiseptic white unsullied by ads, and the soundproof guarantee of each privacy suite made it eerily quiet, too. AI-run fauxtels did always tend toward a minimalist aesthetic.

Walking Street, by contrast, bombarded every last one of Dorian’s senses the moment he stepped outside. The air stank like spice and petrol, and a thousand strains of synthesized music mingled with drunk shrieks, laughter, trilingual chatter. The street itself was a neon hubbub of revelers.

Dorian used his tablet to track the sticky he’d slapped to the bottom of Nahm’s shoe. He couldn’t see her through the crush, but according to the screen she was heading upstreet toward the Beach Road entrance. He plunged off the step, ducking an adbot trailing a digital Soi 6 banner, and made for the closest tech vendor. A gaggle of tourists was arrayed around the full body Immersion tank, giggling at their electrode-tethered friend drifting inside with a tell-tale erection sticking off him.

Dorian cut past them and swapped 2,000 Baht for a pair of lime green knock-off iGlasses, prying them out of the packaging with his fingernails. He blinked his way through set-up, bypassed user identification, and tuned them to the sticky’s signal. A digital marker dropped down through the night sky, drizzling a stream of white code over a particular head like a localized rainshower.

Stowing his tablet, Dorian hurried after the drifting marker, past a row of food stands hawking chemical-orange chicken kebabs and fried scorpions. A few girls whose animated tattoos he vaguely recognized grabbed at him as he went by, trailing fake nails down his arm. He deked away, but tagged one of them to Skinspin later – it looked like she’d gotten her implants redone.

Once he had Nahm in eyeball sight, he slowed up a bit. She was mouthing lyrics to whatever she had in her audiobuds as she bounced along, necksnapping a group of tank-and-togs Australian blokes with the sine curve sway of her hips. She detoured once outside Medusa, where bored girls were perusing their phones and dancing on autopilot, to exchange rapid-fire sawatdees and airkisses. She detoured again to avoid a love-struck Russian on shard.

Ducking into a stall selling 3D printed facemasks of dead celebrities, Dorian looked past Nahm to the approaching roundabout. A shiny black ute caught his eye through the customary swarm of scooters and tuk-tuks. As he watched, Nahm checked her thumbnail, then glanced up at the ute and quickened her pace. Dorian felt a jangle of excitement down his spine as he scanned the vehicle for identifying tags and found not a single one.

Someone had knocked over a trash tip, spilling the innards across Nahm’s path, but she picked her way through the slimed food cartons and empty condom sprays with pinpoint precision that left Dorian dimly impressed. He squinted to trigger the iGlasses’ zoom, wondering if he should chance trying to get a snap of the inside of the ute.

Then the lasershow started up again, throwing its neon green web into the dark clouds over Pattaya’s harbor, and as Nahm craned her beautiful head to watch for what was probably the millionth time, her heel punctured a sealed bag of butcher giblets.

“Shit,” Dorian said, at the same time Nahm appeared to be saying something similar. Casting a glance at the approaching ute, she lowered herself gingerly to the curb to hunt through her bag. She produced a wipe and cleaned the red gunge off her ankle and the strap of her sandal. Dorian bit at the inside of his cheek.

She continued to the underside of the shoe, wiping the needle-like heel clean, then paused. Dorian winced, thinking of all the many places he could have put the sticky. Slipped into her bag, or onto the small of her back, or even somewhere in her hair.

Nahm pincered the tiny plastic bead between two nails and peered at it. Dorian crossed his tattooed fingers, hoping she wasn’t one of the many girls addicted to Bollywood spy flicks. She frowned, then balled the sticky up in the used wipe and tossed it away. The stream of code floated a half-meter over, now useless, as the ute pulled in.

Dorian slid closer, watching Nahm get to her feet, smooth out her dress. For the first time, she looked slightly nervous. The ute’s shiny black door opened with a hiss. Dorian didn’t have an angle to see the interior as Nahm slithered inside, but the voice within was unmistakable, Cockney accent undisguised.

“Christ, what is that stink? Please do not track that shit in with you, love.”

Dorian didn’t get to hear Nahm’s retort. The door swooshed shut and the ute bullied its way back into the traffic. Dorian trotted over and picked up the bloody wipe, retrieving the sticky from inside. The smell barely bothered him, because Alexis Carrow was slumming it in Pattaya and he was going to blackmail the ever-loving shit out of her.

***

When Dorian tried to search Nahm’s profile again, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see she’d yanked it off Mixt and Skinspin and the rest. Either finding the sticky had spooked her, or her current customer was upping the pay enough to make exclusivity worthwhile. Dorian had to do things the old-fashioned way, with a sheaf of rumpled 200 Baht notes doled out to helpful individuals.

He didn’t find her on the beach until late afternoon, and almost didn’t recognize her when he did. She sat cross-legged on the palm-shaded sand, chatting to the old woman selling coconut milk and bags of crushed ice from a sputtering minifridge. Her face was more or less scrubbed of makeup, eyes smaller without the caked-on kohl, and her black hair hung gathered in a ponytail. Loose harem pants, flip-flops, a canary yellow Jack Daniels tank he assumed was being worn ironically.

“Sawatdee krap,” Dorian said, butchering the pronunciation on purpose. He flashed her an incredulous grin. “This is a surprise.”

Nahm looked up, surprised. “Hello,” she beamed, running her fingers through her ponytail. Then her smile dimmed by a few watts. A crease of suspicion appeared on her forehead. “What is it you want? I am no working.”

“I guessed from the flip-flops,” Dorian said. “Long night for you?”

Nahm narrowed her eyes. “You,” she said. “You put a…thing. To my shoe. First I think it was Ivan, but it was you.” She said something to the old woman in machine-gun Thai, too fast for Dorian to even try at, and slunk to her feet. “I am going. I don’t care you are handsome, you are crazy like Ivan.” She brushed sand off her legs and made for the street.

“Have you figured out who you’re fucking yet?” Dorian asked, dropping pretenses. “That business lady? The angry one?”

Nahm stopped, turned back.

Dorian clawed the air in front of his face as an extra reminder. “Whatever she’s paying you is shit,” he said.

“More than you pay me.”

“She’s a lot richer than me,” Dorian said. “She’s Alexis Carrow.”

Nahm’s eyes winched wide and she put a furious finger to her lips, scanning the beach as if paparazzi might burst up out of the grey sand.

Dorian grinned. “So you do know.”

“What is it you want?” Nahm repeated, raking fingers through her ponytail.

“I want to talk business,” Dorian said. “Walk with me a minute?”

He chased a few coins out of his pocket to buy a coconut milk and a bag of ice chips, then gestured down the beach. Nahm swayed, indecisive, but when Dorian started to walk she fired off another salvo of indecipherable Thai to the old woman and fell into step with him.

It was low tide and the beach was a minefield of broken glass bottles and plastic trash floating in tepid puddles. Other than a prone tourist couple baking away their hangovers, Dorian and Nahm had the place to themselves.

“You familiar with the term blackmail?” Dorian asked, handing her the coconut milk.

Nahm spun the straw between her fingers. “I watch bad movies. Yes.”

“Your client is wearing a blur for a reason.” Dorian ripped open the ice bag. “She’s not keen on the tablos finding out she took a sex trip to Thailand.”

Nahm gave an irritated shake of her head. “If she found that thing on my shoe, big fucking trouble for me, you know that?”

“Does she actually sweep you for bugs? Christ.” Dorian popped a chunk of ice into his mouth. “Pawanoia.”

“She careful.”

Dorian crunched down on the cube, eliciting a squeal and crack. “Yes. Very careful. Meaning any fuck-footage from her trip is going to be extremely valuable. Do you want to get rich, Nahm?”

“Everybody wants to get rich,” Nahm said, plumbing with her straw, not looking at him.

“Well, this is your shot. Also, my shot.” Dorian spat a piece of ice into the filmy surf. “Alexis Carrow has enough money that paying two enterprising individuals such as you and me to suppress a sex scandal is easily worth 50,000 Euros. And if she refuses to negotiate, any of the bigger tablos would pay us the same for the footage.”

Nahm’s eyes went wide and Dorian realized he probably could have halved his actual demand a second time.

“Enough money to take care of your family out in Buriram,” Dorian continued. “Get them out of the village, if you want. Definitely enough to assuage any lingering embarrassment about how their first-born financed her vaginoplasty.”

“I make good money do what I do now,” Nahm said sourly. “Enough money. I send them.”

“Not 50,000 Euros money,” Dorian said. “D’you really want to hook in Pattaya your whole life?” He packed another ice cube into his cheek. “This city is the diseased bleached asshole of Thailand. It’s disgusting.”

Nahm gave him a dirty look. “You’re here.”

“I’m disgusting,” Dorian explained.

“And this is why Pattaya is Pattaya,” Nahm said, lobbing her half-empty coconut milk into the water. “You make Pattaya be Pattaya.”

“Don’t have to litter about it.” Dorian crunched his ice. “If you help me pull this off, you can live wherever you want.”

“In London with you?” Nahm asked dryly.

“50,000 Euros,” Dorian repeated. “Split even. Fifty percent yours, fifty percent mine. I’ve got a way to short-circuit the blur projector. I’ll rig a sticky, it’s the same thing I stuck to your shoe. Tiny. You just have to put it on the collar without her noticing.”

“I told you she scans me in the car.” Nahm folded her arms. “Very careful, remember?”

“That’s why we plant it in the room beforehand, along with a little slip-in eyecam,” Dorian said, groping inside the ice bag with reddened fingertips. “Where’s she taking you tonight? Does she do fauxtels or the real thing?”

Nahm bit her lip. Dorian could practically see the tug-of-war on her creased forehead, a chance at instant wealth battling the cardinal rule of confidentiality.

“I want sixty percent,” Nahm said. “I lose my best ever client. I maybe get big fucking trouble. You are safe with your phone somewhere, no risk.”

Dorian grinned. “You’re sharper than you let on. Why the dizzy bitch act? Do clients really like it that much?”

“Sixty percent,” Nahm repeated, but with a hint of her own grin.

“Fine.” Dorian spat out his ice and stuck out his hand. “Sixty.”

***

Alexis Carrow had rented a suite at the Emerald Palace, a name Dorian thought a bit generous for an eight-story quickcrete façade topped by a broken-down eternity pool collecting algae. But if she was after privacy, it wasn’t a bad choice. It was far enough from the main drag to be relatively quiet, and small enough to be inconspicuous.

Of course, gaining access was as easy as waltzing past reception wearing a drunken grin and clutching an expired keycard fished from the wastebasket outside. Dorian affected a slight stagger on his way to the lift. Once the shiny doors slid shut, he took out his tablet and called Nahm.

“How’s the timing?” he asked, as she appeared on the screen putting up her hair with a static clip.

“She’s on her way,” Nahm said, unsticking a floating tendril of dark hair from her eyelash. “Get me from Bali Hai in five minute, then take ten, twelve minute back to hotel. Over.”

“Alright.” Dorian punched the backlit eight with his knuckle. “So I’m going to put it in the back of the toilet.”

“So, how they did in The Godfather. Over.” Nahm was now applying a gloss to her lips that shimmered like broken glass and was not paying as close attention as Dorian would have liked.

“Sure,” he said. “As soon as you get in, go to the bathroom. Get some water going so she can’t hear you take the lid off. Then open the ziplock, take the eyecam out first. You ever wear contacts?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like that,” Dorian said. “Once you have the eyecam in, take the sticky out of the ziplock and hide it in your hand.”

“And put it to the blur without her knowing it,” Nahm continued, then, in a surprisingly credible imitation of Dorian’s accent: “Base of the projector if possible, over.”

“Yeah, then business as usual,” Dorian said, as the lift jittered to a halt. “She won’t notice when the projection goes down, so long as you’re being your usual distracting self and you don’t start complimenting her eyes or anything batshit like that.” The lift made to open and he jammed it shut again. “Do what you normally do,” he went on. “Let the eyecam do the work. After she pays you, come find me across the street and we’ll get the POV uploaded to a private cloud. At which point, champagne and a blowjob.”

“Who give the champagne, who give the blowjob?” Nahm asked, checking her thumbnail offscreen. “Over.”

“Both on me if you do this right,” Dorian said, knuckling the Open Door button. “Message me when you get the hotel.” He paused, and then, because she was growing on him a bit: “Over.”

Nahm’s face lit up for the split second before he ended the call, then Dorian set off down the stucco-walled hallway. He made a quick check around the corner, then doubled back to door 811 and made short work of the electronic lock. The suite had obviously been prepped for her arrival. Freshly-laundered sheets on the bed, a sea of fluffy white towels at the foot of it. Condom sprays and lubricants arrayed brazenly on the nightstand. Minibar stocked with Tanqueray gin and Lunar vodka.

Dorian plucked a cube out of the full ice bucket and popped it in his mouth, making his way to the bathroom. He lifted the featherweight top off the back of the Western-style toilet, then reached inside his pocket where the tiny eyecam and the even smaller sticky had been lovingly double-bagged in ziplock. Neither had been cheap, and he had a feeling he wasn’t going to get the sticky back.

Setting the bag adrift in chemical-smelling water, Dorian replaced the top of the toilet and re-entered the room. He walked in a slow circle around the bed, picturing angles, trying not to get distracted imagining Nahm and a celebrity CEO fucking on it. In the end, he decided to plant his insurance cam in the far corner. It would be an uncreative wide angle shot, but with a near-zero chance of Alexis Carrow’s deblurred face failing to make an appearance.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nahm to manage the eyecam, but back-ups were his cardinal rule where information storage was concerned. A healthy fear of technical difficulties went hand-in-hand with hacking for a living.

Once satisfied with the cam’s placement in a shadowy whorl of stucco, Dorian put his ear to the door to listen for footsteps. Hearing nothing, he exited the room, heart pumping with the old break-and-enter exhilaration from his teenage years.

His hand was still on the doorknob when a black-shirted employee rounded the corner in his peripheral. Dorian didn’t look up. He pretended to struggle with the door, then looked down at his keycard and made a slurred sound of realization.

“This no your room, sir. Can I help you?”

Dorian tried not to jump. The man had slunk up and stopped directly behind him, quiet as a cat, a feat made more impressive by the sheer size of him. Tall for a Thai, broad-chested and broad-shouldered, with a shaved scalp glistening in the florescent lighting and a tattoo of a cheerful cartoon snake wriggling up and down one sinewy forearm. Dorian could have sworn he’d been kicked out of a couple bars by the very same. Bouncers and hotel security tended to overlap.

“Wrong floor,” Dorian said, waving his keycard. “Hit the wrong button in the lift. One too many Changs.” He shook an imaginary beer bottle.

“Okay, sir,” the guard said, not smiling.

“Nice tattoo,” Dorian added. “Friendly-looking little bugger.”

He gave the man a bleary grin, then made for the lift as quickly as he could without looking suspicious.

***

Now that the rest of it was in Nahm’s hands, Dorian had nothing to do but wait. He camped out in an automated tourist bar across the way, slumping into a plastic molded seat with his tablet. Once Nahm messaged him to say they were at the hotel, he bought a gargantuan Heineken bottle, the litre sort he never found outside Southeast Asia, and drank it slowly on ice.

Time ticked by on his tablet screen. He passed it imagining the whole thing going off flawlessly, and then by imagining himself on a small sleek yacht knifing through the blue-green waters off Ko Fangan. Maybe even with Nahm draped on his shoulder for a week or two, wearing a pair of aviators and a skanky swimsuit. Between that and the tingly insulation of a half-litre of Heineken, he barely rattled when a hand slammed down on the table in front of him.

Dorian blinked hard. Nahm was standing in front of him, shoulders trembling, clutching herself. The static clip was still in place, moving her hair in graceful black ripples around her face, but the effect wasn’t the same with her lip gloss smeared halfway across her cheek and a growing brown bruise under her bloodshot left eye. And hulking behind her, red-faced and furious, was the hotel security guard.

“Shit,” Dorian said. The buzz from the beer slipped away all at once.

“I fuck up,” Nahm said shakily. “I left the bathroom open. The blur go off, but when we switch around on the bed she see herself in the mirror.”

The security guard barked something fast and angry, from which Dorian could only extricate falang and police. He reached across the table and hauled Dorian up by the armpit, jerking his head toward the door.

“The eyecam?” Dorian demanded, trying to twist away. No go.

“She call this big motherfucker, he take it out my eye,” Nahm groaned, mascara finally starting to leak down her cheeks in inky trails. “She gets mad, she go. He says he will call the police so I tell him you have money.”

“I don’t have money,” Dorian said reflexively, looking at the guard.

“Bullshit.” Nahm’s eyes were wide and desperate. “I know you have money.”

Dorian looked around the bar, licking his lips. He’d picked it intentionally. A collection of steroid-bulky expats were cradling pints in the back, watching the situation with increasing interest. If he played ignorant right now, they looked both drunk and patriotic enough to intervene on behalf of a fellow Englishman. Nobody liked it when the locals stopped smiling.

“His cousin is police,” Nahm said, winnowing on the edge of the sob. “He says if I don’t pay he put me in the jail.”

Dorian picked up his glass and finished it; the sweat pooling in his palms nearly made it slip out of his grip. He tried to think. If Carrow had left in a hurry, that meant the insurance cam he’d hidden was still there in the hotel room. The fact she’d left furious only confirmed how valuable the footage was.

If he wanted to get back into that room before some overzealous autocleaner wiped the cam off the wall, he needed to defuse things.

“Okay, fuck,” Dorian said. “Okay. I’ll come.” He gave a glance toward the back table. “Nothing to worry about, lads. Just a bit of a… Lover’s spat.”

One of the men rubbed his bristly chin and raised his pint in Dorian’s general direction. The others ignored him. As he let himself be steered out the door, the bar chirped goodbye in Thai and then English. Nahm followed behind, pinching the torn fabric of her shirt together. Her bare feet slapped on the tile. She was biting her lip, rubbing absently at the smeared gloss.

“Sorry I fuck up,” she said miserably. Outside, the night air was warm and stank of a broken sewer line. Dorian fixed his eyes on the neon green sign of the hotel across the way. The sooner he had this dealt with, the sooner he could get the cam.

“Me too,” Dorian said, but he searched for her free hand in the dark and gave it what he figured was a comforting squeeze.

She looked down at their interlaced hands, then back up, brow furrowed. “You should have said, though. You should have said, ‘Nahm, don’t let her see a mirror’.”

Dorian took his hand back. The guard ushered them into the side alley, stopping underneath a graffitied Dokemon. Dorian crossed his arms.

“Alright,” he said. “How much does he want? And if it’s cash, we need a machine.”

“No cash,” the guard said, brandishing a phone still slick from the plastic wrap. “I do Bank.”

“Of course you do,” Dorian said. “So how much, shitface?”

“Five million Baht.”

Dorian’s exaggerated guffaw accidentally landed a speck of spit on the guard’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to notice and Dorian didn’t feel keen to point it out. “Who do you think I am, the fucking king?” he demanded instead.

In reply, the guard thumbed a number into his phone. “I call cousin,” he said, seizing Nahm’s wrist. “Your ladyboy will go to jail, maybe you too.”

Nahm gave a low groan again. Dorian made a few mental calculations. He had just over a million Banked, and the footage from the hotel had to be worth triple that, even if it wasn’t a full encounter. He would still come out of this in the black. The last thing Dorian needed was police showing up. And he didn’t like the idea of Nahm sobbing in some filthy lock-up, either.

“Half a million,” Dorian said. “All I got.”

The guard’s ringtone bleated into the night air. He shook his shaved head. Nahm started cursing at him in Thai.

Dorian clenched his jaw. “A million,” he snapped. “I can show it to you. It’s really all I’ve got.”

The guard stared at him, black eyes gleaming in the blurry orange streetlight. The ringtone sounded again. Then, just as the click and a guttural hallo answered, he thumbed his phone off.

“Show me.”

Dorian dug out his tablet and drained his account while the guard watched, dumping all of it to a specified address and waiting the thirty seconds for transaction confirmation. Nahm shifted nervously from foot to foot, mascara-streaked face bleached by the glowing screen, until it finally went through with an electronic chime. Dorian’s stomach churned at the sight of the zeroes blinking in his Bank. He reminded himself it was temporary. Very, very temporary.

Once the transaction was through, the guard bustled out of the alley without so much as a korpun krap, leaving Dorian alone with Nahm. He was formulating the best way to get back into the hotel room without running into the guard again when she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into a furious bruising kiss. Her fingers on his scalp and her tongue in his mouth made it difficult.

“Thank you,” she panted. “For not letting him call.” She hooked her thumb into the catch of Dorian’s trousers, giving him her smeared smile. “No champagne. But…”

With her right hand working his cock, he nearly didn’t feel her left slipping something into his pocket. He clamped over it on reflex. Nahm looked vaguely sheepish as the sound of a sputtering motor approached.

“I still am working on my hands,” she said, wriggling her fingers out of his grip, leaving a small cold cylinder in their place. “Bye.” She stepped away as a battered scooter whined its way into the alley, sliding to a halt in front of them. Dorian watched Nahm climb on to straddle a helmeted rider with a cartoon snake on one thick forearm. He lost his half-chub.

As the scooter darted back out into traffic, Dorian looked down at the insurance cam in his palm and grimaced.

***

It took another oversized bottle of beer before he could bring himself to watch the cam footage. Finally, slouched protectively over the table, he plugged it into his tablet and fast-forwarded through the empty hotel room until the door opened. Nahm glided inside on her pencil-thin heels, but instead of Alexis Carrow coming in behind her, it was the security guard, furtively checking the hallway before locking the door.

And instead of fucking, they sat on the edge of the bed and had a fairly business-like discussion in Thai. At one point Nahm departed for the bathroom and returned with the ziplock in hand. Dorian narrowed his eyes as she tossed it casually to her partner in crime, who stuffed it into a black duffel bag. The man paused, gesticulating at the bed and walls, then, with Nahm’s approval, dug a scanner bar out of the duffel.

Dorian fast-forwarded through an impressively thorough search until the cam was spotted, plucked off the wall, and carried back to Nahm. She flashed a very un-vapid smile into the lens. The screen went black for a moment, then cleared again in the bathroom, pointing towards the mirror where Nahm was now painting a bruise under her eye.

Dorian swilled beer in his mouth, letting the carbonation sting his tongue while he listened to Nahm explain, in her roundabout way, how her “little” brother had caught him running a scam in a bar where he bounced. How Dorian had drunkenly bragged about his takings. How Nahm had shopped photos from Alexis Carrow’s vacation in Malaysia six months ago and slipped the fake news report into the mirror for him to watch.

Her brother, working as a valet at the Emerald Palace, had gotten the imposing black ute out of the garage for a quick spin. She’d worked on her Cockney accent for a few weeks and done up a voice synthesizer. And from there, Dorian realized his overactive imagination had done the rest of the work.

“I hope the last part is so easy, too,” Nahm said sweetly, smearing her lip gloss across her face with the heel of her hand. “With the money, we think maybe to buy a boat. Mwah.” She blew a kiss to the cam, then reached in and switched it off.

Dorian leaned back at his table. Unprofessional of her, to add insult to injury like that and lay out her method besides. But he supposed it was understandable in the excitement of pulling off a semi-long con for the first time. And at least this way he’d recouped one of the cams. Dorian slid it back into his pocket, pensive.

For a little while he rewound the footage and sourly watched Nahm blowing kisses on loop, then finally he put the tablet away. He still had enough cash stowed to take a domestic down south and start over from there.

A fresh wave of tourists would soon be showing up on the islands, and Pattaya just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.

***

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Ottawa, Canada. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com.

ROCK, PAPER, INCISORS

DAVID CLEDEN

illustrated by Martin Hanford

The 2016 James White Award Winner

The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. Previous winners have gone on to either win other awards or get published regularly, which is exactly why the award was set up. The winning story receives a cash prize, a handsome trophy and publication in Interzone. Entries are received from all over the world, and a shortlist is drawn up for the judges. This year’s judges were Neil Williamson, Ruth E.J. Booth and Ian Sales. To learn more about the Award itself visit jameswhiteaward.com. The 2017 James White Award is now open. Entry is free.

The James White Award was instituted to honour the memory of one of Ireland’s most successful science fiction authors, James White. To learn more about James White and his writing visit www.sectorgeneral.com.

***

First, the quickening. Then comes the hardening. I forget now which is worse. Each bears its unique price, redeemable in pain.

I try my best to fight the changes. The darkness fills with soft, liquid sounds as I writhe within the underground chamber. Strange, alien sounds. I have a sense of new-formed membranes quivering and tightening, the budding of raw flesh and the grind of bones knitting together – sounds from a waking nightmare. For a moment I wonder what else lies in the darkness with me. But they placed me here alone.

I reach out a hand to where it hurts the most, forgetting. I have no hand left, only a bloody stump that flares with pain as surely as if thrust into a fire. How could I forget that? But forgetting is part of the quickening. They told me that but I didn’t believe them.

So use your pain. Shape it, then let it shape you.

I will not forget. My name is Silja, adopted daughter of the Tribe, and once I dreamt of a future. Those dreams – betrothal to Quaid, the status accorded a young hunter’s bride, perhaps even motherhood in a few years – are crushed. Now I pray for a quick death, as all chosen ones are said to do, though I don’t believe there is a god to take notice.

No, my little chiquada. Turn your anger inwards.

Not long ago I prayed that as my body changed and flowed, my sanity would remain untouched. Yet as I enter my fourth week of incarceration, that awareness of suffering only makes things worse. Perhaps losing my sanity would be kinder.

This dark chamber cut into the hillside grows uncomfortably hot. Before the quickening took my sense of smell, the stench of my own decomposing body was overpowering. I don’t envy the acolytes who come to feed me. Twice a day the stone is rolled back and they crawl in next to me: one to press a wet paste of food and poisons between my dry lips, the other to hold me down as I shake and retch. Yet now the quickening is done, I miss that companionship; the presence – no matter how brief – of other humans around me.

But again I forget. I’ve become something different, no longer human.

My flesh has slackened, muscles wasted away, my bones shrinking back to their marrow ready to knit together in new arrangements. I am like a puddle of flesh and organs, a blank canvas awaiting the artist’s brush to paint something new in place of the human I once was.

Already I can feel a spiky line of feathers growing along the ridge of my spine. They itch unbearably. Feathers! What use will they be in the fight? I try to focus my mind again, conjuring layers of muscle and sinew, imagining razor-sharp talons and powerful jaws that can crush a man’s leg.

Markov is here again. My mentor crawls in beside me, the light from the old world momentarily painting my vision white. My eyes haven’t been lost to the quickening yet. Then the stone is nudged back into place and in rolls the darkness, imprisoning us both.

Gently, questioningly, he touches me, inspecting the changes. Focus! he urges. Time is short. As if I don’t know that. Make tooth and claw your weapons! Nothing is more effective at close quarters. Nine out of ten killing moves are done with teeth.

I remember each of the years gone by, standing with the Tribe on the ridgeline, watching as the changelings fight in the arena below. I remember last season’s champion, their champion: a brutish creature twice the height of any hunter, splitting rocks with hammer-like fists. A fine array of sabre teeth had not saved our changeling that year, his skull crushed beneath a man-sized rock hefted by the Others’ champion.

I try to do as instructed. I think of teeth: long dagger-like protrusions, serrated edges, wickedly honed points, inset with a channel along which flows poison secreted from glands beneath – this my own addition – and try not to think of the gamble I am making.

Markov drip-feeds suggestions into my brain. Asleep or awake, his voice is a constant tone like the keening of the wind. His thoughts guide me through the hardening. I try to visualise all that he tells me, imagining my body taking shape anew, flowing as if from a crucible into the mold formed by his words and images.

But it’s no good.

If I had vocal chords left, I would tell him. I am no champion. What were the gods thinking by choosing me? The hunting grounds are lost to the Others as surely as if the fight had already taken place.

Be strong, Markov tells me. Grow powerful. Build from an inner core. He paints pictures in my head of armoured plates, a creature walking on all fours, squat and belligerent. A narrow whip-like head carries a complement of long needle-sharp teeth to rip and tear my opponent’s flesh. This is the creature I must become.

Should I tell him about the feathers growing soft and downy my back? Warn him that the strength of the vision is failing?

The Tribe hasn’t won the right to the best hunting grounds in three attempts. Three long years we’ve scratched around the edges of the plains, our bellies rumbling from near-starvation, tempers frayed by each fruitless day when the hunters return with little of substance for the cooking fires. It occurs to me that Markov has mentored every single one of those defeated changelings. That doesn’t bode well for me, does it? If I cannot rely on Markov, who else is left? Not Quaid, not my betrothed, that’s for sure.

Concentrate, Markov tells me.

I mumble a question. Why?

Because one death is better than many, Markov tells me. Your sacrifice – no, your victory, means neither tribe is weakened by the slaughter of battle. Our forebears learnt that lesson the hard way. This way is better. And this year, the hunting grounds will be ours.

But that isn’t what I meant.

I meant Why me?

***

The bowl of nuts passes along the line. Each adult member of the Tribe takes one. In the firelight, they all look the same. There’s no way to tell which contains the diseased kernel.

Quaid, my betrothed, leans across before the bowl reaches me. “Let me,” he says with a smile, cupping one in each hand as if weighing them. After a moment he presses the warm shell of a nut into my hand and the bowl passes along the line. I say nothing.

A half dozen times or more during the feast, he has left my side to exchange a word or two with friends or ingratiate himself with the hunters. Twice I glance round to see him sharing a joke with Helne, a hunter’s daughter whose dark, sultry looks draw hungry glances from the younger hunters. Quaid has no business with her, no favours to seek. I bite my lip, feeling the prick of jealousy and hating myself for it. Next season will be Quaid’s first and he’s only anxious for acceptance, to pay respects where they are due. Why should I be concerned? Is my face not every bit as pretty?

My foster family will be glad to see me gone. It’s the custom that when twins are born, one of them – the dibchik or ‘motherless one’ – must be given up for adoption by the other tribe. Raising twins can only bring bad luck on a tribe. Perhaps in some small way it helps us remember we are not so very different.

I wonder sometimes about my mother who has lived all her life amongst the Others. Is she happy there? Why wouldn’t she be?

But mostly I wonder why I was the one she chose to give away.

The mood of the Tribe is sombre and the grumbling runs deeper than usual this year. There is talk of injustice and the tricks the Others must be using to gain advantage in the battle of the changelings. I hear Markov’s name muttered in the darkness around me.

And then it’s time. The Elder speaks a few words and we split open our nuts. For the first time that evening, the chatter dies away and the Tribe grow quiet.

In my palm lies the broken shell and in the centre of that a shrivelled, disease-ridden lump of snot I do not recognise. I stare at it without comprehending, unaware of time passing. Then supporting hands gently lift it to my unresisting lips, force the kernel into my mouth, and thus begins the quickening process.

But it makes no sense. I cannot be chosen. I am too young, hardly yet a grown woman. And I am betrothed. I have a future ahead of me. How can the gods have chosen me? I even helped dig the shallow burrow of the quickening nest – a body’s length and a half into the soft soil of the hill above camp. We hollowed out a bell-like chamber, wide enough to contain whatever variant the quickening might bring forth. I helped line the nest with woven sheets of flax and woolskins, crawling inside to layer them until the nest was a soft, warm cocoon.

Everyone is staring at me. I search the ring of faces for Quaid, needing his reassurance now more than ever. He sits quietly next to Helne, and I see it in their postures, their hands close to each other though careful not to touch. He gives me no answering smile.

This, I realise later, is what betrayal feels like.

***

“They will send a dancer,” Markov whispers in the darkness. “All speed and agility. A flash of sunlight. Light dazzles but it does no lasting harm. Your foe will keep their distance. But when they tire of dancing, you will strike with all your might. You will rip chunks of flesh from his body and you will not stop even though they beg you.”

How does he know this? No one can know what form the other changeling has chosen, not until the moment they enter the arena. And three seasons in a row, Markov has been wrong.

I remember a childhood game played around the cooking fires. Rock, paper, knives. They will send a champion who is light and flexible – like paper. Paper wraps rock. Death comes through paper’s smothering embrace. So Markov wants me to be a knife; to become a creature with sharp-edged claws and fearsome teeth and jaws that can cut and grind. Slow and ponderous, but deadly up close. A knife cuts paper – and when it does, the hunting grounds will be ours again.

But rock blunts a knife. What if Markov is wrong and they send a rock instead?

I have no shortage of time to brood on this point.

***

Markov is back. He doesn’t stay with me throughout the hardening process. He is old and needs help even to crawl in alongside me. I doubt his body could withstand the heat I generate and the airlessness of that chamber for more than a few hours.

I feel his hands moving over me. He asks no permission, my body no longer my own. The Tribe have placed their faith in me and what I have become. But still I feel violated. At his touch, pain leaps like a flame where my body is still raw and unformed. Elsewhere I cannot feel his probing hands at all. I sense a hardened shell has formed, nerve endings burned away.

He is angry. “No, no. This is wrong,” he mutters in the darkness. “The form is all wrong. Have you listened to nothing I have said?”

It is too late to change now – and we both know it. The quickening takes weeks, but the hardening – the settling of shape and form – much less.

I try to protest. I try to offer my explanations. But the guttural rumble that rises from my chest is not my voice. It is a primitive thing, a growl.

I listened, I want to say to him. But I made a different choice.

My body has swollen with the changes and there’s no room in the burrow to turn round so they have to haul me out into the light. It’s rough, inhuman treatment – the way a hunter hauls some squealing sow from a hole in the ground. I hiss and spit with anger, cursing with something other than words. The sudden daylight is blinding and I try to wipe away grittiness from the corners of my eyes but my hands have swollen into callused, leathery stumps. Four icicle-like shards of bone protrude where fingers had once been, stubby and pointless in every sense of the word. Hardly the knife-like daggers Markov described.

I am naked yet feel no shame. Shame is reserved for humans and I’ve become something else. My torso carries some kind of carapace. Hard grey plates of some chitinous material slide and flex as I move my limbs. I stagger to my feet which have become wide pads of scabrous, leathery flesh. My movements are stiff and painfully slow.

I am not the knife Markov intended, that much is clear. I am nothing but a rock. He told me they will send paper – and paper wraps rock. But Markov has been wrong before. Three times.

Without warning, the anger is back. It burns deep within and now it explodes upwards. I bellow with rage and the honking sound of my cry sounds both pitiful and terrifying. The watching tribesmen fall back. I turn, letting my arms swing like clubs, feeling the heft of my new body, its slow ponderous power. The urge to destroy almost overwhelms me. I could crush the Tribe – once my friends and neighbours – who have condemned me to this. I take a step towards them.

Markov is there, whispering in my ear. “Control it. Direct it. Use it to do what you set out to. For the good of those you once cared for.” I want to tell him I did not set out to do anything. None of this was my choice, but I follow his gaze up the hillside. The ridge path leads to the natural amphitheatre beyond and slowly, as though with great effort, I do remember my purpose. Markov is right, better to die for a reason than in blind anger.

I catch sight of Quaid amongst the crowd of watchers. I stare at the man whose body I snuggled against on cold nights, but there’s no tenderness left in my heart any more. The changes have consumed it, broken it down and reformed it into something more raw. He takes a step back when he sees my gaze come to rest on him. Just for a moment, I am tempted.

At a signal from the Elder, they lead me the last few steps to the lip of the amphitheatre. Somewhere, approaching from the opposite side, must be my challenger. Just before I step over the ridge and into the arena, Markov turns to me. “You chose not to listen,” he says. “This failure is yours. Yours alone.”

His words sting. Markov is supposed to be my mentor, supposed to prepare me in every way possible as the Tribe’s champion. Instead he condemns me. And now I can hear the crowd muttering. “A dibchik always brings dishonour,” they are saying. I haven’t been called that name since I was nine or ten. The last girl to try had earned deep claw-marks on her face where my nails dug into her skin. “I do have a mother!” I had screamed at her. “I do!”

“Yes but she’s an Other,” the girl had spat back. “And you were the one she chose to give away.”

Remembering, with a bellow of rage I stamp down the slope into the amphitheatre.

***

The ground is uneven beneath my clumsy feet. Taking stock, I see rock outcrops piercing the carpet of wiry grass, and gorse thickets peppering one side of the curving bowl of land. The ground is boggy at its lowest point; a spring spilling from the ground and trickling down the valley. Are they here yet? He? She?

One of the nearer boulders unfolds; stands. He – it must be a he – is a head taller, but it’s his bulk that intimidates – the rounded torso all brawn, stubby arms and legs as thick as tree trunks, and powerfully muscular.

He snarls and takes a step towards me, and I can actually feel the ground shaking with those heavy footsteps. But I’m relieved too. He’s a rock like me; not a paper dancer darting and stabbing while I hopelessly flail. A rock. There is a chance…

Something snaps inside me. Maybe it is programmed to. Maybe in the darkness Markov whispered his instructions and then made me forget until the moment was right. A kind of desperate fearlessness seizes me. Better to end it now, swiftly and bloodily, than draw this out into a dance of death. So I rush at the creature, crashing my bulk into his chest before he realises what I’m doing. I catch him off-guard and he staggers back, but only a step or two. There is a sharp clack as hardened plates on our torsos crash together and splinters fly loose. I don’t bounce off exactly but my efforts have minimal effect. I feel no pain. My anger (or is it desperation?) burns too strongly for that.

I launch myself at him again, flailing my arms like clubs. But this time he’s ready for me and swats me away like a troublesome fly. I’m scrabbling to my feet, struggling to get my ponderous bulk upright when he lands a kick that sends me tumbling down the hillside. The ground here is waterlogged; soft and hard to get purchase on. He is on me again before I can stand. I manage to slip a leg around his, hoping to bring him down but I might as well try to trip up a tree. He stands over me, and I see his face has a muzzle like a dog’s. The lips pull back over sharp little canines and he snarls at me. I don’t see it coming until the last second: a hammer blow, straight-arm punch to the chest. I’m well armoured, half inch-thick carapace where my breast-bone once was. Even so, I hear the crack of the impact and feel pain blossom across my chest. Suddenly I’m short of breath.

My opponent wears a feral grin. I scrabble away from his upraised foot preparing to crush down, and the soft ground favours me. He’s sunk into the mud two or three inches and unbalances himself as he struggles to get free. I crawl away as he roars his frustration.

I search for some kind of weapon, anything that might give me an advantage over this colossus stalking me, but there are none. It occurs to me that Markov may have been right after all. I should have been a knife to my opponent’s rock; dancing away from his stumbling bulk, tiring him until my chance comes to lunge and sink those incisors into his flesh. Too late for regrets. And I would just as soon see Markov crushed in my jaws.

Breathing is becoming harder. I haul myself up the slope a little way, wanting the advantage of higher ground, anything to give me respite. But dark spots seem to dance and swell in front of me as my head lolls. I shake myself to banish them and when I do, I see him standing over me. The rock he holds above his head must weigh as much as me. Even he is straining from the effort of holding it aloft.

He says something, his words made indistinct by that dog-like muzzle. He repeats it. A single word; a question. At last I understand. “Yield?” he asks.

But to yield means the loss of the hunting grounds and dishonour. Better to die, Markov told me back in the darkness, just as his last three champions have done. I feel the bile rise within me and summon enough strength to spit into my opponent’s face above me. There. That is my answer. I will not yield.

He screams. The boulder slips from his grasp smashing into the soft ground inches from my head and he swipes at his face with stubby, paw-like hands. I see little wisps of something curling away from his skin, which sizzles like bacon fat frying on the griddle. Where my spittle has touched him, there is an oozing, bloody rawness. He screams again, blinded.

I did this. I created this. Lying there in the darkness all those weeks, my thoughts turned me into something I scarcely understand. It’s a shock, of course – but much more so for him, I think grimly.

A horn sounds; too distant to concern me. I try to crawl further up the slope but can move no more than a yard or two with the vice-like pain that is crushing my chest.

And then Markov is next to me, prodding and inspecting me for damage as though I am no more than his pet. He should not be here. Once the fight begins, no one is allowed in the amphitheatre.

He leans down. “Abatement. Both Elders have agreed.” I struggle to recall the unfamiliar word. “Another chance,” he says, and there is a coldness in his voice.

Then I remember. My opponent and I will fight again on a different day. Between then and now we must change and remake ourselves into new champions.

I look up at Markov. I want to tell him I would prefer death to another round of quickening and hardening, but I cannot seem to summon the words.

***

Pain. Darkness.

More pain; endless pain.

My thoughts are jagged. He commands me to think of sharp-edged daggers glittering in the sunlight; the tip of a bronze arrow, honed to a needle-like point. And teeth – ranks of wicked, serrated bone; incisors to pierce and rend, molars to crush and grind.

Markov’s voice is with me in the darkness, dropping thoughts into my head like pennies down a well. A part of me wants to lash out or crush him beneath my bulk, but the quickening has me paralysed. My body is undone: unhooked and disconnected, waiting to reform at my suggestion.

Markov’s suggestion.

Again, he wants me to be a knife. This time, little chiquada, do not fail me. The knife will triumph. Only the knife! The Others have no guile. Last time they sent a rock, the most brutish thing their limited imaginations could encompass. And it did not work! So this time they will choose the opposite. They will send a paper dancer; fleet of foot and swift as a dragonfly. He will dance around you and you will need your wits not to be overcome by his nimbleness, but paper is always vulnerable.

We all have our vulnerabilities, I think.

Be a knife. Knife cuts through paper as surely as night follows day.

What if Markov is wrong – as he has been before? What if the Others send a rock once more? Ten days is little enough time for a quickening and hardening. It must be hard to shed such bulk and become something utterly different. Wouldn’t it make more sense to repair and rebuild his current form? To become, in fact, more rock-like?

Rock blunts knife.

Teeth, chiquada, he mutters. Strong, powerful jaws to crush, terrible incisors to tear his flesh. We are counting on you.

***

I hear the hiss of dismay and disapproval ripple through the watchers. Markov has told them what to expect and they know I have disappointed. A few turn away in disgust, not wanting to witness the battle.

My body feels light and elastic. I stand taller than I remember. My arms and legs are ridiculously long – so much so I drop to all fours and immediately feel more at ease with myself. My limbs are stick-like, my body stretched and elongated. I tense and flex muscles experimentally and find I can spring dozens of feet across the ground without hardly trying, like a grasshopper would. Even I am startled by my abilities.

Markov watches me, face expressionless. He doesn’t speak to me.

What am I? Paper, I suppose; a dancer. But a strange kind. I don’t recall any previous changeling taking this form.

Just before I step over the lip, I sweep my gaze over the crowd of watchers on the far side, looking for her. The Others are silhouetted against the low sun but even so, I think I recognise her outline – a little more stooped than has been described to me, half-turned as though torn between staying and leaving. She could not recognise me even were I not changed. Why would she care? What am I to her other than the memory of a child given away.

And yet somehow I feel she does.

I am barely three steps down the slope when he comes for me. The swish of air is my only warning of danger. He runs on all fours, sleek and muscular, and moves like lightning across the ground. A cheetah-form; quick and deadly.

I crouch and spring and those instincts save me. For an instant I can feel his hot breath on the back of my neck and then I’m gone. Already he is preparing to pounce again. I jump away, again and again. He follows, like a cat chasing a butterfly.

Despite our different forms, we are evenly matched. I imagine Markov’s grim expression. He guessed they would send paper – a dancer – and he was right. A knife would have cut through paper. But I am a dancer too, in my own way. The match is an even one.

We run and chase and run, leaping across the rocky outcrops, circling around the gorse, splashing through the brook and wet grassland, but always staying within the confines of the arena. The sun rises and steams the glistening sweat from our bodies. Hours pass in this fashion. This is a battle of attrition. One of us will tire before the other and expose a weakness. That’s how this will end.

I shelter behind a jutting outcrop of rock. I have decided to name my opponent Beast because it seems important for things to have a name, especially a thing that intends to kill you. Beast crouches just beyond my hiding place. If he darts forward, I am ready to leap away and the chase will begin again. I realise we have been frozen like this for ages, neither of us wanting to make the first move. The watchers on the skyline seem to have dwindled.

“Have you grown tired yet, grasshopper?” Beast calls. His voice is gravelly in this form but I can make out his words without much difficulty. “Do you think you can run forever?”

“I intend to try.”

He snarls and lunges but the attack is borne of frustration and poorly executed. I leap away easily.

“I should have chosen better,” Beast says. “A fist to crush those fragile legs of yours.”

“Then I would have chosen differently, too,” I tell him.

I see those yellow slits of eyes narrow. “Are you listening to my thoughts when I am quickening, grasshopper? Is there trickery at work?”

I choose not to answer. Let him gnaw on that. But it is uncanny how well-matched our choices have been. I consider what might have happened if I had not ignored my mentor’s guidance. I would be dead twice over. Not for the first time I wonder about Markov and feel the flame of my anger burn a little brighter at the thought of all the ways I have been betrayed.

Beast leaps at me, but it’s a half-hearted attack, easily evaded.

“This has no end,” I say, no longer afraid to let the weariness show in my voice.

“It has an end. Your death, my victory.”

“Your victory? Or your tribe’s? Had you forgotten about them? The reason why we do this?”

“I… My brethren…feel so distant to me.”

“Because they are. They’ve changed you and cast you out just like they’ve cast me out. Why? Because it suits their purpose.”

“There is honour to be fought for. I can never forget that.”

“There are other ways to settle differences.”

He is exhausted. I am exhausted. I wonder what would happen if we both expired here and now. It doesn’t seem an unattractive prospect.

“I have an idea,” I say to him. “Will you listen to it?”

After a moment he pads closer and stretches out almost at my feet.

I take that as a sign of agreement.

As I begin to speak, we hear the horn blowing up on the ridge.

Abatement.

***

One more change and the gods will take me, I know it. I feel spent; nothing left but the shell of something that once lived.

Knowing the process, how my body softens and melts into itself, how my mind shapes and moulds it afresh – knowing this ought to help. But nothing helps. The pain is as raw and fresh as it was the first time. The difference is the fear gave me an edge then, some sliver of hope. Look at me now. My spirit has withered and there is strength enough for one last hardening, and perhaps not even that.

I am nearly done before I realise Markov has not come to me.

Am I surprised? A little. I have seen firsthand the pride and determination in him. He is not a quitter, yet now he has abandoned me.

Light floods into the nest chamber. They have come for me. It’s time.

I welcome it. No more time for regrets. I snarl and my muzzle snaps at them in irritation as they haul me out again, this time their handling spears ready to fend me off if I become too wild.

My shape and form are of my own choosing. But is that so very different to the previous times? My decision; my responsibility.

I stalk out into the daylight.

Whatever I am, I am.

***

The watchers have thinned even more. Amongst the Others, I recognise the woman who once suckled me as a babe – until she sent me away. Again, I wonder if somehow she knows me.

I slink into the arena, walking on all fours. A downy fur, black as night, covers my skin. Despite the pain and weakness of this last week of the quickening/hardening cycle, I feel strong and powerful. My frame has shrunk but body mass has become muscle and sinew and I can feel the power and sleekness behind my stride, like a jaguar or some other kind of wild cat.

Markov should be pleased. Finally he has got what he asked for. I run a thick tongue over the teeth in my lower jaw, probing their bite. I can feel how it will taste as those sharp incisors tear into flesh for the first time, bloody juices dripping from my lips. But rock blunts incisors, just as surely as my teeth will cut through a paper dancer. Nothing is certain. Every form is a gamble on the opponent’s choice.

He waits for me on the far slope.

I hear the gasps that come from both sets of watchers. He’s bigger than me and well-muscled. A male to my female. But in all respects, near identical even down to the jet-black coat, the sheathed claws hidden within massive paws. An even match, but for the advantage of his body mass.

He dips his head and I take it as recognition that our bargain has been honoured. There can be no more quickening, our bodies are drained. These are our final forms. And once again we are well-matched. By agreement this time, rather than chance.

I pad closer; wary, cautious, sparing one last glance for my birth mother who watches expressionless.

“I’ve seen you watching her,” he says. His voice is a bass rumble, vocal chords straining to shape the words. “What concern is my mother to you?”

I say nothing. Is this why we made the same choices the first two times? Even separated at birth, perhaps we share more than we realise.

“No concern at all, my brother. Didn’t we agree it’s they who have turned us into outcasts? Changed us for their own purposes. We owe neither tribe our allegiance now.”

“This is betrayal then?”

I call to mind the Tribe: those few I once called friends, the foster family who shared their food with me but never their love – and Markov of course. Last of all, Quaid, my betrothed. “No more than they deserve,” I reply.

He considers this, the soft yellow slits of his eyes staring at me, unreadable. A part of me still wonders if this might be some kind of trick. Has it become a game of mental agility rather than physical prowess? “True enough,” he says at last.

I stretch out a paw experimentally, and feel long claws dig into the soft ground. “You know that they will try to kill us. For daring to defy them.”

He snarls, baring his teeth. They are wicked things; deadly and powerful. I realise how fearsome we must now seem, their human bodies frail in comparison. “I think not,” he says.

Moving swiftly, we ascend to the ridge at the top of the hillside. The humans scatter from our path, keeping a respectful distance. Only Markov holds his ground. For an instant I’m seized with the urge – the need – to strike him down. I imagine the blood flowing as my teeth tear into the soft flesh of his throat. He wanted me to be a knife and now I’ve become one. Let him reap his reward. I think he sees it in my eyes, but he doesn’t give ground, proud to the last. Or perhaps he’s ready to embrace death.

Instead, my brother and I step over the outer boundary, out of the arena together. “They’ll find other ways to settle their differences and agree who gets the best hunting lands,” I tell him.

“With raiding parties. Fighting. Slaughter. The old ways,” he says. “Wasn’t all this designed to prevent that? One sacrifice for the greater good.”

“We’re leaving them free to make their choices. Why should we care? They were the ones who re-made us – and made our concerns something different.” I turn and look out at the wide plain spread out before us, and beyond to the lush valleys where foothills begin to reach up for the sky, rich with meat for hunting. That is what all this has been about. Now it can be ours. I feel my mouth salivating.

“What is there for us out there?” he asks, but I can see in his eyes he is beginning to understand.

I glance back at the ring of watchers below us, two groups scattered along the ridge. They shuffle uneasily when we turn to stare.

“Not them,” I reply.

***

David Cleden’s day job is writing business proposals. On the weekend he writes fiction. He can’t stress enough how important it is not to muddle them up. He’s placed a few stories in small press magazines but this is his first professional publication.

MY GENERATIONS SHALL PRAISE

SAMANTHA HENDERSON

illustrated by Richard Wagner

The woman on the other side of the glass must be very rich and very sick. I study her face, looking for any kind of resemblance. If I’m a Jarndyce candidate, we must be related. It’s the only way she could ride my brain.

She’s a predator. I recognize my own kind.

Mrs Helena McGraw is studying me too. The side of her mouth quirks up, twisting her face out of true. “Great-grandmother Toohey,” she says, a little too smug.

Never knew my great-grandmother, but I do a quick calculation. That makes us second cousins. Helena’s lucky, me ripe for picking on death row. Only this low-hanging peach has some say in what’s going to happen to her. Not much: a choice of deaths. But how I choose means everything to her.

I can see we’re alike in some ways. The shape of the brow ridge, how far the eyes are separated by the root of the nose, the slight protrusion of the chin. We’d look more alike if her face wasn’t marked by her disease, tiny lines birthed by pain and exhaustion. Makes her look older than she probably is. And my life sits on my face: coarse skin, smudges under my eyes like permanent bruises, cheeks hollowed where I’m still missing teeth. During the years the state’s waited to kill me, they’ve taken excellent care. Dental, exercise, better nutrition than a welfare brat living on peanut butter. Access to books, online classes. But you can never truly erase the witness of a life hard-lived. It’s like cigarette smoke in an old house – you have to grind off the wallpaper, scrape the plaster to get the smell out. One of the reasons I’ve always hated smokers.

“Lucy Toohey,” she continues. “Dropped out of college and married a musician with more sex appeal than brains. Two kids. One was a boy who, in the fullness of time, got a girl pregnant. Kid was adopted, the papers sealed. That was your mother. Do you care about the details?”

“Nope.” I consider how this new information changes the calculus of my life. Mom never told me she was adopted. She ran away from home pretty early and supported us with a series of shitty waitress jobs. My grandfather – not by blood, as it turns out – showed up at the third or fourth sleazy diner I remember. Mom screamed at him and threw coffee cups, which shattered the front window and got her fired. “Where do you come in?”

She leans back, mimicking me. “Lucy got smart, divorced the musician, and married my great-grandfather. He didn’t much like Lucy’s kids, sent them away to their father. I won’t bore you with the rest, but I’m an only child and I married a trust-fund. He’s dead. Was bad at business, but I’m good.”

Mom got a job at a crap roadhouse after the coffee cups. That’s where I learned I could make extra money giving the truckers blowjobs, even more if I roofied them and cleaned out their wallets. Maybe being good at business is genetic. Maybe not, considering Mom, always slipping behind no matter how much she tried, pathetically honest always.

I didn’t love my mother. But she didn’t know that. I did kill for her, though. She didn’t know that either.

“So now I’ve got more money than God,” continues Helena.

“And?”

“Pancreatic cancer.”

Gamechanger. “Ouch.”

She smiles with the other side of her mouth. “True.”

“And you want to map yourself on my brainmeat.”

“Also true.” Despite the smile I can feel the heat of her desire to live, and the anger that even with all the money in the world my own true, trashy, baby-killing self can deny her. The DOJ can’t force me either, much as they’d like their cut. They can fry me, everyone likes that, but God forbid they let someone hop my mind.

I understand the satisfaction of taking a life. But a legal killing is so expensive, the ceaseless cycle of appeal, the sheer mass of salary-men required to make the machinery of a justified death grind on, and no-one turning the gears wants to spend money in a voting year. They went reality-show for a while, but despite tearful interviews with victims’ families and artfully edited black-and-white footage of crime scenes, the climactic three minute shot of someone twitching under a grey hood isn’t really all that interesting, and the ratings tanked after the first season.

So they’re stuck again, with a public that howls for blood whenever a politician who needs a boost reminds them to, but saddled with a powerful need to pretend there’s justice in this process. I’ve seen plenty that wouldn’t be on death row if they could pay for a lawyer worth her salt. Even some who were innocent. But once you’re here you’ll stay here; the machine loves you too much to let you go, blacks your eye and kisses it better, heals you all twisted and grinds you small in the end, loving you to extinction.

No way to monetize its beloveds in their little cages. Not until Dr Henri Jarndyce, playing around with gene therapy, engineered a virus that could strip away the weeds of one personality, with all her memories and inclinations and thinky-thoughts, and leave the field tender and furrowed for the seeds of another.

See, personality’s all electric, anyway. If you really wanted immortality, you’d invest in software, downloading your blips and wavelengths to a computer. But everybody wants the fleshy life. Helps if the field and the seeds are related somehow. Helps more if your fallow field is a clone.

But human cloning’s still illegal, mostly. So is the Jarndyce procedure, mostly. You can’t find a suicidal cousin and promise them oblivion. You can’t bribe a desperate nephew with three mouths to feed, clothe, and educate to let you take a ride in the body of the fourth. There’s only two ways. First: find a brain-dead match who signed her organ donor card and get her next of kin to agree. If you’re her next of kin yourself, congratulations to you.

Second: find a match on death row and practice your rhetoric.

Helena needs to practice her rhetoric.

She’s here, so she already knows somehow we’re a likely match. She’s here, so she got permission from the Rimbaughs and the Alcotts. They must’ve liked the idea of the Jarndyce virus wiping my brain, every memory, every tiny electric jolt that makes me me disappearing one by one, and then a stranger’s electricity mapped out in that blank space. But why should I make them happier by leaving this world now, not later? For now I can live appeal to appeal. I have my routine. I like thinking my own thinky-thoughts.

“You got nothing I want,” I tell her. “I don’t know why anyone gets suckered into doing this.”

“Jarndyce candidates? They’ve got people they care about,” she says. She’s careful to make her grammar just a little better than mine with her careful “they’ve gots”. “Someone who’ll get the money. Last Jarndyce set up a trust fund for the children of the woman he killed. Made him feel better about himself, I suppose. You could do something like that. Fund some charity.”

There’s a pause before we both start laughing.

“Oh Mrs McGraw, cousin of mine, I almost like you. Can’t you fight on a little longer? Clone a new pancreas? Adrenal mods?”

She coughs and shakes her head. “Did and done. Anything else will kill me.”

“Well, bless your heart, but I think you’re gonna die,” I drawl, enjoying her wince. “Because I got no reason to leave this earth any sooner than I have to.”

She coughs harder. “There’s your daughter.”

I laugh again. “Nice try, but I’ve always been a crap mother. And Cece’s too stupid to know what to do with the money.”

“There’s the baby.”

I open my mouth and shut it.

She chuckles. “Oh, you didn’t know? She didn’t tell you? You are perhaps not as close as you once were?”

Cece’s not the brightest bulb, but for some reason she’s a good kid. Much better than I deserve. For a long time she thought I was a good person.

The trial was remote jury, with only the judge and officers present: family and witnesses on closed circuit feed. I was watching her screen the moment the sheer weight of the evidence coalesced. I saw her face melt from when everything came together for her – she was one person, then another. A small change, but nothing would be the same for her. All I could think was poor stupid little bitch. I wish I could be sorry I broke your heart.

There are a lot of people on death row who shouldn’t be here. I’m not one of them. I can’t blame Cece if she doesn’t want a monster for a mother.

But I’m kind of hurt she didn’t tell me.

My cousin leans forward, hands spread on her knees, like a football coach about to give a pep talk. I see the faint trace of a nicotine stain on the front and middle finger of her right hand.

“Here’s my proposition,” she says, moving quickly, while I’m still a little off-balance. Good technique. “I’m going to set up a trust for your daughter. You find someone, anyone you trust, as a third-party administrator, and I’ll pay for that too. Choose someone to vet the agreement. She’ll get her needs met, medical, anything, and a generous allowance. We both know better than to let her touch the principle.”

“You met her.”

She shrugs. “I do my research. That’s good business.”

I play for time. “Give me a minute to think.”

She’s relentless. “And the baby. He, she, it…”

“How did you find out about the baby?”

She grins. Her teeth aren’t as white as they might be. “Let’s say ‘she’ for now, shall we? It’s nice to think about having a granddaughter, something you can dress in pink. We’ll make sure she gets everything you and Cece didn’t. Private school, college fund.”

Deliberately, she eyes my face. “Braces. Dermatologist. Come on – a big middle finger to anyone who ever called you trash, and I know they did. Your kid, your grandkid will have it all while theirs are clipping coupons and making a block of American cheese stretch the week. Just for letting me have something you’re going to lose anyway. What’s it worth to you?”

I can’t help it; it comes out a snarl. “All your money. That’s what it’s worth. Everything.”

A mistake. I let her get to me when she hit all my soft spots. Now she knows I have a price.

“We know that’s not going to happen. I’m not unreasonable. A third.”

I call her bluff. “All of it. I’ll sign right now.”

She hesitates, then shakes her head. “Half. I’m not going to a new body and not have the cash to enjoy it. And remember Justice won’t let this happen without their cut.”

“You look like shit walking,” I observe. “What if I agree, and you die on me?”

A shrug. “We’ll put it in the paperwork – a deed of gift. Once you sign it, it’s hers, whatever happens to me.”

I tap the Formica for the guard. The door opens behind me, and I raise my hands shoulder-high, as far as the thin chain that attaches my wrists to my waist will let me.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Not too long.” She breathes deep and braces herself to get up.

I nod. The guard lays her hand on my shoulder, tightens her grip when I don’t move.

“Did you quit smoking yet?”

It catches her on the way to the door; she turns, disconcerted. She expected the last word. “What?”

“Did you quit? I don’t want you crapping up my lungs.”

Her thin face is powder-white; she tamps down the anger. “Yes, I quit.”

The guard’s fingers dig in: a last warning before a baton in my belly. They’re no meaner than they have to be, the women, anyway. I obey. The yawning doorway leans darkly into the bowels of the prison, like an old badger’s den going perpetually down between the roots of ancient oaks. I like that. It makes me feel safe, like I’m indwelling within my own mind, coiled up inside the body that Helena McGraw wants so badly.

I always sleep sounder than a monster should, but that night I can’t sleep, because my memory dredges sound. Thick diner china mugs breaking. Cece’s cry as she drew her first breath, and how it startled me. The hiss of air bubbles breaking the surface as a baby tries to breathe underwater.

***

Library time, next day, I search Jarndyce Procedure on YouTube and get a stack of hits that make it through prison filters, a handful of greyed-out links that don’t. I click on barnes chicago grimes, surprised it wasn’t screened since the footage was some unlicensed freelancer with a flipcam. Reg Barnes was the last Jarndyce client out of this region, got mapped on the cerebral cortex of a rapist-turned-murderer named Grimes. I’d seen Grimes a few times in solitary exercise as I was passed between buildings, his dead-man’s walk in an empty yard. Just a couple glances, but I remember the way he moved. I look for that now, in the few seconds of jumpy footage: Grimes’s broad face and narrow nose, medium-build body in a bespoke suit walking down the street, speaking intently to a young woman who leans in to hear him, glancing at the camera, brows contracting in anger as realization strikes, vanishing quickly behind the corner of a building. Grimes’s face, but does any of Grimes remain? He’s not supposed to. Jarndyce wipes the furrows clean, neutralizes every electric memory. But what is a brain after all? Three pounds, give or take, of flesh connected to neurons. A thing connected to a thing connected to a thing. How can you say what ends where? Maybe Grimes doesn’t exist in his brain any more, but in his fingers and toes, in his dick and the top layer of his skin, a thin layer of Grimes over the client. Maybe I could do that – predator-stalk from the outlying regions of my body, swoop down on my newly-seeded brain, make sure a piece of me grows back.

I play the footage over and over, looking for Grimes’s walk, the way he held his shoulders. It’s useless. If it’s there I can’t see it, and if I start seeing it it’s from a desire to see it – nothing I can trust. I close out YouTube, then on impulse open it again and repeat the search. This time the barnes chicago grimes link is greyed-out, forbidden, and I laugh.

***

Cece’s the closest I’ve ever come to loving anyone. And I sure don’t love her enough to sacrifice myself for her. Like I said, I’m a crap mother. But does anyone love their children as much as they say they do? Can you love something that’s simply a wandering offshoot of your own body? I think it’s all part of a great pretending, bolstered by the endless flow of Christmas specials and Lifepic streams howling about the preciousness of children. Because if it’s not a grand old lie, how terrible a thing. What an obscenity, to weave your joy so intimately to a mewling snotrag of a child. I would burn out such a thing to the root.

But now I know I’ll have a grandchild. Does this make me love Cece, my good, dumb kid, a little bit more?

No. But it makes her more interesting, knowing that through her my blood and flesh could rise. And what a glorious fuck-you to that bitch who ditched her kids for a shiny new husband, to my mom’s fake dad, who fucked her up so badly she broke a shift’s worth of china chucking it at his face, to every sanctimonious bitch who looked at my photo on the front page of their newsfeed and thought bad breeding.

A little Cece. And then a littler Cece after that. Smarter than me. Better educated than me. More money than me. Better tools. That’s interesting. That’s why we have kids, isn’t it? And why some people love their kids – just to see what they’ll do.

If I take Helena’s offer, I might not see it. But then I might. I didn’t see the shadow of Grimes on the face that Reg Barnes bought. But I didn’t not see it, either.

So I call Bernie, my court-appointed unfortunate, and he sets up a remote with Helena. Bernie uses his Pad and props it between the bars of my cell; the image quality’s good between his poor old shaky paws. Poor bastard’s worn himself out defending the unforgivable. I kind of like him; he reminds me of my mother.

Helena looks worse. Downright yellow. But eager. She can’t hide that.

“Not doing too well, are you? Put in that deed of gift and I’m game. But what if I sign and back out?”

“You can’t.” There’s a fraction of a second’s delay between her lip movement and the sound. “Once you sign you belong to me, and the Justice doesn’t get their share until you go under. They’re not going to let anything get in the way.”

I shrug. “What if I kill myself?” Behind the Pad Bernie frowns.

“You’re not going to starve yourself to death in three days. I suppose you could slam your head against a wall. But you haven’t done it so far, and you’re not going to now.”

“How do you know?”

She leans forward and someone on her side moves back to keep her centered. “Because part of you thinks you can win. You’ve been thinking that you’ll be able to keep a piece of your brain, that you’ll ride along with me like a tick on a dog’s ear, see the sights, enjoy some freedom and my money. That’s the only way you’d agree. You don’t think the rules apply to you.”

“Can’t blame me for trying.”

“Not at all.” She starts to cough again and makes a sharp gesture. The image winks out.

“I consider the Jarndyce option a form of coercion,” says Bernie, his voice full of fog. “I’m advising you to refuse.”

“Of course it is. Tell Cece to come after we sign. Will they let her in short notice?”

He’s the picture of resignation in a badly-tailored suit. “Of course, since there’s money on the table and you haven’t signed yet.”

“Tell her I’m stopping the appeals.”

“I don’t like…”

“Shut up, Bernie,” I tell him gently. He hates being called that. “Just tell her.”

***

For the signing they let me and Helena occupy the same room, no barriers. Two guards march me down Death Row’s shabby corridor, each cell shuttered against the sight of me. At first I think they’re going to take me out of the prison, into the city perhaps, but they just take me through a maze-like arrangement of hallways, up an elevator, and down another corridor. One wall is entirely glass, and outside, spread beneath like the sea, a green mass of trees.

I stop and stare at it for the four-odd seconds the guards will let me before they shove me onward. This floor must be four or five stories aboveground; at this distance the forest beneath looks soft, like I could leap and land safely in the trees. From the exercise yard there’s no hint that this exists. Something round and hard rises in my throat and my eyes prickle, surprising me.

My four seconds are up and I’m yanked away. At the end of the corridor a door, tall and sturdy, and behind that door a mass of dark-suited men, a woman in a pencil skirt, and my cousin in a green pantsuit, impeccably tailored. At my appearance the men and the woman surge around her like a confused tank of fish.

Bernie’s there too, a grey sadness. I convinced him to be the third-party executor, representing Cece’s financial interests in exchange for a nice little retainer. He still hates all of this but I convinced him he’s the only one I trust. Made him think he was doing this for more than the money.

For some reason I expect Helena to be short, but instead she’s got an inch or so on me. She looks so fragile I’m almost afraid to take a deep breath, in case I use up all the oxygen before she can sign.

I study this woman who’s decided she’s too rich to die. I don’t blame her – everyone thinks they’re the most important character in the book. Her skin is loose over her stick-bones, barely any meat beneath it. Her face is like an overripe plum that’s beginning to prune. Next to her I feel like an Amazon.

The attorneys sign. She signs. As she bends over the documents I can smell cigarette smoke on her. I knew that bitch had no self-control.

When it’s my turn I make a point of reading the whole document, beginning to end, like you’re supposed to with all legal documents and which nobody actually does. I stretch out the minutes until I smell the fear in her, the fear that I’m going to back out at the last minute. Lead her to her heart’s desire and destroy it.

But this is business, not pleasure. I sign with an exaggerated flourish. I don’t belong to myself anymore. I’m Helena’s mule. And wicked fast there’s a flicker of something in Helena’s harried face.

Relief? But it’s more than that. Victory. Like she’s looked into the abyss and defied it. Like she’ll live forever.

But she won’t. I’m forty-seven. This body is good for maybe thirty more years, if she’s careful. It doesn’t make sense, that look of sheer triumph for the chance at a quarter-century in an aging body.

It bothers me. It stays with me as Bernie pats my shoulder and the gaggle of suits converges on that frail green figure and the guards escort me away, down that corridor with its emerald view. I have one more week to live with my own self intact. I should be making my peace with that.

But instead I’m consumed by that look, that half-smile, sly and triumphant.

That woman, I think, riding down the elevator, is not stupid. That woman is like me. What would I do in her place?

I am she and she is me. I would strive to live forever.

So I lie in my bunk, staring at the seams in the cement ceiling and I become Helena. I, Helena, am a good businesswoman, very thorough. I have all the ruthlessness of my cousin the baby-killer and all the control she lacks. I find out everything there is to know about Cece. I find out she’s a good little soul, utterly unlike her mother. I know how she’ll respond to love, someone taking a genuine interest, especially from someone in her mother’s body. I know how she can be manipulated. Helena will own her, body and soul. She’ll go wherever Helena takes her. She’ll trust her, like a babe-in-arms, like a baby in the bathtub. Like the Rimbaughs and the Alcotts trusted me.

Once my body is finished, Helena will shed me like a carapace. Good at business, she’ll make her money breed and no law will apply to her, and how long can Bernie last, anyway? She’ll take Cece, and when Cece is worn out she’ll take the child. She’ll breed my family like cattle, like her money, and the virus will map her onto their brains ad infinitum.

Clever bitch. I have to admire her. But it’s risky. What happens when you move from brain to brain, pushing yourself into those wet little crevasses over and over? Would you even notice yourself changing, like a frog in a hot pot? After a century of it, would you even be human?

Maybe the solution isn’t to meat-hop from body to body. Maybe as her bodies – my generations – fail her she’ll harvest what she needs – heart, liver, lights – from my grandchildren. Eat them fast, eat them slow, kidney by kidney.

I’ll be damned if I let anyone ride my generations like mules.

But I’m the idiot who signed the papers, beguiled by the idea of Cece and little Cece frolicking in a wonderland of no want. Better for her to face the world as it is. Better for her to struggle. I’ve signed and taken that from her, and the lawyers have their cut and the DOJ has its very juicy cut and no one will give a damn if I want to get out of it.

I close my eyes and dream I’m in an empty city with jagged buildings and elongated streets stretching forever. I round a corner and a familiar figure stands there, laughing at me. I can’t tell if the face is Barnes or Grimes. Grimes or Barnes. The features shift like the tide.

***

Fuck me, I’ve had my hour of self-pity. Three nights to plan. Couple years ago, before I went full solitary, I traded three packs of gum and a twist of what I said was meth for a finger-length, sturdy piece of plastic someone cracked from beneath an old bunk. It’s been sitting in the bottom of my toilet tank for anyone to see – no one paid any attention. I fish it out and carve a slit down its length, and fit in a thin shard of metal that came from the weather sealing at the bottom of a door. Now I have a blunt, loose-handled knife. I trade a quickie with one of the guards who’s been trying to get a taste of me for years for the half-hour loan of a lighter and two cigarettes. I flush the cigarettes and heat the plastic until I can mold it around the metal nice and firm. I’ve got a tiny strip of emery board I managed to hold on to since they put me here and with that I put an edge on that blade that could slice a baby’s hair in two.

After my mom chucked all that crockery at my so-called grandpa, after he left, I followed him. Told him I wanted to hear his side of the story. I decided if he wanted to fuck a fifteen-year-old, my mom was right to hate him and he deserved what he got. Back seat of his Camry, his pants down around his ankles. I had a screwdriver in my sock. Always did, ever since I was thirteen. Useful as a knife and won’t get you in trouble. He didn’t even notice when I put the tip at the hollow of his throat. Punched it right through. I tossed the screwdriver in the bushes where the truckers peed behind the diner. Lazy cop never found it. We left the next day and my mom never knew. My only gift to her.

Cece’s coming this morning to say goodbye. My knife’s too pretty not to use.

I rehearse it in my head like a dance. Last time I’ll see her, they’ll let us together, we’ll hug. I know how to carry the knife so a search won’t find it. We’re the same height, just about. I’ll cradle her against my shoulder, arms crossed behind her head, nudging it into position. I’ll hold the knife, blade-out, against my wrist. And then I’ll pull back firm into the carotid artery beneath her jawline. Deep, and I’ll hold her up. I’ll do it right, she won’t even know what happened, and she’ll bleed out before the guards realize what’s happening. My only gift to her.

***

They pat down Cece more thoroughly than me, which makes sense; no-one expects anything to go out of death row, only in. Cece’s big blue eyes and freckles face me the whole time with a kind of intensity I haven’t seen since the trial. They leave us together with one guard at the door, bored with us already. Cece hugs me quick, then takes my hands, unsure of what to do. She looks good. Her hair is styled and her skin’s cleared up. Her nails are short and manicured, and her belly curves out a little under her short sleeved linen shirt. Pregnancy suits her.

“I don’t understand.” She almost calls me Mama like she did before the trial, but she can’t do it. I’m surprised that it hurts me that she can’t. Instead she swallows. “You signed something? And there’s a trust fund?”

“I stopped the appeal.”

“But…they said you had a chance…” Her grip tightens on my fingers. I’m a murderer, but no-one wants their Mama dead. Not usually.

“I’m tired of fighting, Cece.” God, I sound so movie-of-the-week. “It’s time to let this end.”

“But they said the jury…”

Blah, blah, blah, media saturation, jury was prejudiced, Bernie’s last ditch half-assed attempt. It was a remote jury so that dog won’t hunt. Cece blabs on; I don’t listen. I let go her right hand and brush my left palm across my crotch, retrieving my pretty knife.

“Cece,” I say, stopping her white noise. I try to make it portentous and meaningful, like a normal person would. “Cece.” I step forward into her embrace. She wraps her arms warm around my back. The guard tenses, watching for something passed between us. I feel a dull flash of anger. Back off. It’s my daughter, asshole.

I slide the knife forward, into place, into position behind her ear. I brace to push in and pull back and take her weight.

There’s a freckle on her shoulder, just where it meets the neck. She’s always had it, even as a newborn. I remember cradling her close, smelling that spicy newborn smell, curious if I’d feel anything for her. That freckle stood out on her waxy new skin, before she’d seen the sun. It’s been years and years since I’ve seen that freckle.

I have to do it now.

I can’t.

I want to. The blade wants to. It wriggles in my hand like a live thing.

I stare at that freckle and I can’t.

I feel the hot bulge of the baby against my belly and I pull away from her, palming the knife so Cece and the guard don’t see it. Hell, Cece can’t see anything, she’s crying too hard, her face all salty snot. My eyes are dry as sand. I feel sick down to my bones.

Cece’s still crying when the guards lead me away. I feel strange, fluey. My head’s fuzzy, my feet lead-bound. I wait until the barred door bangs behind me and the automatic catcalls of the other prisoners fade into silence, and then a great wave of nausea takes me. I barely make it to the toilet, spilling a bitter thin stream of vomit.

I sprawl on the floor at the base of the toilet. Eventually I heave to a sit, knees tucked beneath my chin. When I try to get up my belly roils, so I stay there a long time, thinking. Cece. Helena. Grimes. Barnes.

If this is caring, then what a terrible thing God made.

So Helena thinks she’s won. I know I can beat her. I know I can hide out in my nerves, in the electric impulses of my body, and take it back. I can imprison her as I’ve been jailed, give her a taste of helplessness that’ll make cancer seem like a walk in the park. And before I snuff her out, I’ll rape her mind, strip out everything she knows. I’ll learn her secrets, how to be her enough to fool everyone around us. I can make sure Cece and the baby have everything they want.

Or, if I choose to live forever, I can take them. Helena’s wrapped them like a Christmas present. Thirty years left in this body. Will it be enough?

Why not live forever?

The nausea takes me again and I barely make the toilet as my throat burns. Too late for appeals. Tomorrow Helena rides me until I can buck her off. Together we’ll be unstoppable.

I run a finger along my jugular, feeling the blood beat beneath the skin, pulsing red and lovely to the brain Helena’s bought and paid for. Like I said, my knife’s too pretty not to use.

My only gift to her.

***

Samantha Henderson lives in Southern California with humans and other animals. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, The Lovecraft eZine, Goblin Fruit, Bourbon Penn and Weird Tales, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction, Steampunk Revolutions and the Mammoth Book of Steampunk. She’s the author of the Forgotten Realms novels Heaven’s Bones and Dawnbringer.

BOOK ZONE

MAKING WOLF

ROSEWATER

Tade Thompson

plus author interview

WICKED WEEDS

Pedro Cabiya

ISRA ISLE

Nava Semel

THE KRAKEN SEA

E. Catherine Tobler

EUROPE IN WINTER

Dave Hutchinson

THE TOURIST

Robert Dickinson

INVASION

Luke Rhinehart

DAUGHTER OF EDEN

Chris Beckett

plus author interview

SLIPPING

Lauren Beukes

TADE THOMPSON: THERE IS NO “HOME”

Review & interview by Maureen Kincaid Speller

MAKING WOLF

Rosarium Publishing pb, 278pp, $15.95/ebook $4.99 (Sep 2015)

ROSEWATER

Apex Publications pb, 360pp, $16.95 (Nov 2016)

The private investigator, as Fredric Jameson reminds us in his recent book on Raymond Chandler, is positioned “inside the microcosm, in the darkness of a local world, without the benefit of the federal Constitution, as in a world without God”. Marlowe is a man alone, belonging nowhere, and that is part of his attraction. We are fascinated by his lack of encumbrance. The truth, though, is that most of us live remarkably encumbered lives, and private investigators are no exception. The problem, however, is that in fiction encumbrance is too often translated into novelty, leaving us with investigators who are little more than distinctive tics (jazz-loving, beer-drinking, divorced, cat-loving, depressed, quilting) bolted onto a puzzle that needs solving.

But the world loves crime and mysteries, so it’s no surprise that many sf writers have turned to writing futuristic detective stories. Blade Runner showed us what the mean streets of the future might look like: dirty, grubby, and full of cool, shiny stuff. What is not to like? And yet, too often, precisely what I do not like about investigators in space is that everything is all about the cool, shiny stuff. It’s a different form of novelty, perhaps, but still nothing more than that: all surface, often highly reflective surface, but no depth. Chandler knew about depth; it shows in the ways in which he constructed his worlds if not always his characters.

Tade Thompson also knows about depth, and in his writing it’s the characters who show it. In both Making Wolf and Rosewater it’s the people and their situations that immediately engage our attention rather than the worlds in which they’re set. And rather than being faced with one-dimensional characters, each with an easily identifiable marker, we’re dealing with morally complex people. There are no good guys or bad guys, insofar as everyone has their reasons for what they do, responding to situations that don’t always immediately make sense. You might even call it ‘real life’; writ large, perhaps, but it nonetheless feels plausible.

Take Weston Kogi, the protagonist in Making Wolf. He has returned home to Alcacia, a tiny African country, after living in London for many years, to attend the funeral of his aunt, the woman who raised him. Such a simple show of respect, one might suppose, and yet, as Thompson shows us, Kogi is performing an emotionally and politically dangerous act. To begin with, what is “home”? The past is a different country, of course, but Kogi departed amid harrowing scenes as a coup broke out; the country he is returning to is literally not the one he left. He’s aware that his time in London has changed him; he’s aware too that the people he’s likely to see will have expectations of him. The returning immigrant, it is hinted, will of course have made good, and everyone believes Kogi is a policeman in Britain rather than a security guard, because that is the story he told them before he returned.

Kogi’s position as an outsider enables him to take the longer view when two different militias ask him to look into the death of Papa Busi, the country’s much-loved leader, who has recently died in mysterious circumstances. Terrifying as it is to be juggling the demands of two different groups with a tendency to shoot first and shoot again to make sure, alongside the bewildering experience of returning to his “home”, Kogi goes about his work conscientiously, even though a resolution seems to be maddeningly out of reach. This is a brutal novel, and I don’t just mean the physical violence, of which there is a lot. Insofar as Kogi still possesses any illusions about his life, in London or in Alcacia, they are well and truly ground out of him during the course of the narrative, leaving him emotionally destitute and uncertain of his future.

If Kogi begins his story with a few shreds of optimism still intact, Kaaro, the narrator of Rosewater is already infinitely more world-weary; as we learn more about his early life, this becomes unsurprising. Isolated from his family by his abilities as a sensitive, but mainly because he has used those abilities to become a thief, Kaaro has deliberately become the ‘man alone’, careful to keep aloof from everyone around him, even those who attempt to reach out to him in friendship. Very few succeed in breaking through the carefully constructed shell, though one is his colleague, Bola. Through her, Kaaro meets Aminaat, with whom he tentatively begins a relationship.

We’re in a world in which aliens have long since landed, and have actually buried their way into the earth, manifesting themselves as a series of biodomes, emerging mushroom-like. Rosewater is the suburb that sprang up around the biodome – Utopicity – that appeared close to Lagos. Once a year Utopicity opens and those in the vicinity are cured of their illnesses. This doesn’t always go quite to plan – those buried too close to the biodome are likely to be accidentally resurrected, and then have to be disposed of – but many people have been genuinely cured as a result. The question is, what is going on inside the dome? No one knows but at least one government department hopes that Kaaro’s abilities as a sensitive will answer that question.

But while this is a part of the story, it is not all of the story. Thompson employs a complex double chronology to explore Kaaro’s early life, as he meets other sensitives and learns to use his abilities more appropriately, alongside the older Kaaro, suddenly aware that his fellow sensitives are starting to die, and unsure how to act. It is Kaaro’s interactions with people and his attempts to navigate his own emotional turmoil that prove the greatest interest in the story, although, like Kaaro, the reader always has one eye on what’s going on elsewhere. This sidelong engagement with the environment is extremely satisfying for those of us who aren’t that wedded to intricate world-building. There is always enough world to fill in the gaps as necessary but the focus is squarely on the people who live in and around Rosewater, and their relationship with the biodome, unknowable as it seems to be, unknowable as Kaaro himself seems to be. The similarities between the two entities are striking and certainly not coincidental.

I hesitate to use the word ‘gritty’ of Rosewater or Making Wolf; perhaps, instead, I should say that they are very ‘tactile’ or ‘physical’ novels, in that Thompson is very good at evoking intense sensations with just a few words. One emerges from these novels feeling dust in one’s mouth, sweat on one’s skin, one’s senses assaulted, and one’s intellect satisfied.

***

What led you towards reading/writing genre (assuming you think specifically in genre terms) – crime, sf, etc – and contributed to your literary aesthetic? For example, I was struck by the use of comic imagery in your collaboration with Nick Wood in AfroSF 2. And I suspect some people are going to get a (maybe misplaced) District 9 vibe from Rosewater.

I don’t think in genre terms. I consider “literary” a genre with its own conventions just like SFF, crime, romance etc. I see writing as a thought-delivery device. Each iteration of writing is a tool which should serve us (readers, writers) in the most effective way. I include aesthetics in my use of the word ‘effective’ in contradistinction to efficient. I will personally write anything, no matter what genre my ideas lead me into. I don’t want to be a slave to my choices or to the classifications of others.

Pretentious malarkey aside, I have read pretty much everything that has any kind of storytelling at its heart since I was very young. I am a big fan of comics, and ‘The Last Pantheon’ (the collaboration you mentioned) is a homage to the comics of my youth. It is meant to be a comic in prose form, hence the imagery.

I was fortunate to have a father who did not believe in age-rated fiction. We had a library and he let us loose in it. One of the best ways to get a child to have a broad literary appetite is to say “read whatever you want in here”. So I read pulp detective magazines, Amazing Stories, various encyclopaediae, books on witchcraft, Le Carre, Fleming, Milton, Shakespeare, Herbert (Frank and James), Stephen King, Greer, Cicero, chess, comics, religious texts, Anne Sexton, and so on. Everything, really.

I enjoy fantastical fiction because it affords a lot of freedom to the writer, which is why it is a shame that so many actors in SFF seem hidebound, deploying various literary and visual clichés. “You can be weird, but only in these ways.”

I have no control over how my writing is received: death of the author, and all that. I am not a big fan of District 9, although there are two different reasons for this. I simply detest the handling of Nigerians in that film, along with the disrespect towards the Head-of-State by naming cannibals after him. Not something I can accept, I’m afraid. The second thing is that the film fails artistically. The first half of the film is great, but it descends into silliness in the second part. If people see any similarities, that’s fine. They bought the book, and that entitles them to an opinion, just like paying to see District 9 gives me the right to my critique.

I notice in a recent interview, referencing Rosewater, you talk about being “more interested in the humans and their interaction with the science fictional elements of the story. […] My stories are about people, with incidental science”. Do you think it’s time that science fiction writing moved on from the over-attention to scientific detail?

No. I think that science fiction is a broad canvas. Different creators work to the tastes of different people. It’s a spectrum, and there is room for all wavelengths, although not all devices are sensitive to all bands. What I’m saying in my clunky way is that the hyper-scientific is as welcome as the barely-scientific. There are fans for all, and I don’t think science fiction should move on as much as expand. Editors in particular, as gatekeepers, need to have a broad vision that encompasses every possibility. Sure, you know what your readers want based on previous sales, but you don’t know what they don’t want. The two are not the same.

And pushing that a little more, I seem to remember at the Masterclass that you weren’t very enthusiastic about the notion of different cultures represented in stories as having “different science”, and wondered if that is connected?

In anthropology circles even the notion of “culture” is being challenged, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion. My opinion of “cultured science” in fiction is that it’s othering. It is not without historical origins (for example, the idea of zero was mind-blowing for Europeans. The Greeks literally freaked out at a time when Egyptians and Babylonians had been using it for centuries). I think that if done with subtlety and research, it’s okay. I just don’t like ham-fisted representations of other cultures. Sometimes “different science” is code for “magical”, which has its own sociocultural uses of making the other seem primitive.

Rosewater seems to have a little of everything – aliens, skills that some might choose to interpret as evidence of the paranormal, mysterious government organisations that might or might not be corrupt – but all set in a world that feels plausibly…I want to say quotidian; it’s full of people just trying to manage in the circumstances. Yet, for many of your readers the circumstances of daily life in Lagos might seem more difficult to comprehend than the fact of an alien city coming into being on its outskirts. Are you inclined to leave the reader to get on with figuring it out, hoping they won’t think that you’re speaking for all Lagos, all Nigerians, and so on, or do you feel concern that they’ll take your presentation as the definitive word?

I trust the reader. This is an entertainment, a fiction. I speak for nobody but myself, and the Nigeria I present here is a version, a dimension created from distorted memories. It is a truth, but if anyone wants to know a city or a country, they need to visit the country, or read the travel guides and other “non-fiction” accounts.

I will say, though, that lots of events and circumstances that are staples of post-apocalyptic fiction are commonplace in many non-Western countries. Nigeria is a difficult country to comprehend, but then so is the Republic of Ireland, USA, Russia, Iraq, the UK, and pretty much every single country that exists. Put it this way, nobody asks Zadie Smith if she speaks for all Londoners.

I trust the reader, and as I said, I can’t control how my work is received.

Making Wolf was a very harsh encounter with ideas of “home” for Weston Kogi, as well as being a meditation on the nature of “identity”, and a tough read generally. You seem to be, in part, suggesting that the immigrant never can truly go home, because they bring so much back with them…? But I’m struck too by the way that you lay a great deal of emphasis on the complexity of life as it twists around what we imagine are the certainties of genre fiction. So, are you deliberately trying to subvert the expectations of genre readers or just telling it like it is?

Both.

The moment you leave “home” for another country, you change. You are never going to be the person that left. Identity is negotiated daily and in different contexts both as an emigre and immigrant. The idea of returning in glory is a fantasy of all immigrants, regardless of the (usually romanticised) country of origin or destination. There is no “home”. There is only this hybrid creature who will never feel fully welcome in either country.

I am also telling it like it is. People love simplified versions of unfamiliar cultures, which is bullshit. People love statements that are right out of obsolete Eurocentric and elitist anthropology texts, making categorical pronouncements about a people you don’t fucking know except for what they show you. I spent one year in Western Samoa and let me tell you, I find Margaret Mead’s writings absolutely hilarious and marinated in mendacity. Humans are complex, and human groupings are infinitely complex. Genre needs to move away from simplistic depictions, and writers in particular need to do better.

***

WICKED WEEDS

Pedro Cabiya

Translated by Jessica Powell

Mandel Vilar Press pb, 256pp, $16.95

Stephen Theaker

This book begins with a warning: there are two ways of reading it, and both are a bad idea. The diligent reader who consumes each page in its usual order is on a road to chaos, which isn’t very appealing, so this reviewer took the second option: following the directions of the contents page. That takes us first to all the police interviews, then the personal journal of the unnamed, self-professed and supposed zombie at its centre, then the scientific explanations for his condition, and finally a series of field notes. This adds a degree of choose-your-own-adventure interactivity to the book, letting the reader shuffle through its pages like an investigator or a judge looking for evidence.

We learn that our zombie woke from his grave some years ago and availed himself of the washtub, clothes and money left at his grave in readiness. His parents were wealthy, and left him all of their assets, the only stipulation being that to enjoy them he must pretend to be alive. Other zombies can recognise him, which is not always welcome, but he finds it quite easy to fool humans, as long as they are kept at a certain distance, something he finds increasingly hard to do during the episodes described in the book.

He is the executive vice president of a company’s research and development division, in charge of twenty-eight chemists who work in five laboratories. Dissatisfied with working from an office on the executive floor, he chooses to work instead in Laboratory 5. He doesn’t know precisely why he chose that one – the glass windows? the free space? – but readers may come to their own conclusions as he writes about its other occupants and their physical attributes.

The hem of Mathilde Álvarez’s shirt rides up to reveal “steely abdominals and a pristine, flat belly button”. Patricia Julia Càceres wears a short skirt, revealing her leg, “a perfectly smooth, sculpted column”. Doctor Isadore Bellamy’s lab coat falls open, showing a floral-print dress that only just manages to contain “the flawless bulk of her jet-black breasts”, while “the muscles of her slender thighs stood out against her black skin each time she shifted her weight”.

The reader can tell from his descriptions that these three scientists must be attractive, and from subsequent events we understand that the three of them are attracted to the vice president. On some level his actions must be influenced by this; what’s missing is any understanding on his part of the connections between all this, the weight of anything. As a zombie he lacks what a fellow sufferer, the oldest zombie around, describes as qualia, “the living being’s capacity to establish a connection between his experience of the world and the self”.

This idea is both the book’s weakness and its strength. On one hand, it gives us a central character who behaves like an android, and the scenes where sexy scientists try to seduce him feel cheesy, a bit Tasha Yar and Data. On the other hand, the idea is explored in more interesting and political ways elsewhere: the poor, deliberately infected to become easily biddable, exploitable and shippable workers; or the rich, going on murderous rampages once their conscience is gone. It all asks the question: is our emotional connection to the world all that makes our lives meaningful?

Our central character is trying to fix what is broken in himself, to come up with a cure: that’s why he has taken degrees in pharmacology and chemistry, why he is in this career. The extent of his success is demonstrated by a lengthy appreciation of the sensations invoked by moving his hand up Patricia Julia’s leg in a nightclub, which takes a couple of pages. There is some humour in that level of detail, and also in that, after she puts her tongue in his ear, he crosses his fingers, hoping that a centipede won’t slide into her mouth.

The translator, Jessica Ernst Powell, has previously worked on Borges, among others, and seems to have done a fine job here with a text that mixes mysticism, science, zombies and social commentary in a way that must have been challenging to translate. It’s not a book for every reader, and some may find themselves admiring it more as it moves away, if read in contents page order, from the comical zombie scientist and his saucy pals to the darker histories of the field journal, to children going to the wrong side of the river at night, and to Papa Vincent in the jail of the Tontons Macoutes.

***

ISRA ISLE

Nava Semel

Translated by Jessica Cohen

Mandel Vilar Press pb, 256pp, $16.95

Lawrence Osborn

This is a novel in three parts: part detective story, part speculation about a peculiar footnote in American and Jewish history, part alternate history based on that speculation. As the story progresses it constructs a fictional alternate homeland for the Jews in upstate New York.

Part 1, ‘Grand Island’, is the story of a manhunt set in New York state in early September 2001. Simon Teibele Lenox (aka White Raven), an experienced New York cop, is assigned to a Secret Service unit based in the Twin Towers. His task is to find an Israeli, Liam Emanuel, who has come to the USA in search of an alternative promised land. The finality of his abandonment of Israel is symbolised by the fact that he left his shoes behind at Ben Gurion Airport (metaphorically shaking the dust of Israel off his feet). But the Israeli authorities want him found and quietly returned. Of course they do, ‘Emanuel’ means ‘God-with-us’, and the Zionist vision of Israel is meaningless if God has abandoned it.

In the course of his investigation, Lenox begins a relationship with a Jewish colleague, Jackie Winona Brendel, which forms an obsessive subtheme in his thoughts as his search for Emanuel takes him to Grand Island, NY. The author’s play with NY place names as Emanuel and Lenox head for Grand Island makes this a something of a second exodus. This is where the historical footnote comes in. Grand Island was bought in 1825 by Mordecai Manuel Noah who intended to found a Jewish refuge there, to be called Ararat. In Semel’s version, Emanuel is Noah’s descendant and he has the title deeds to prove his ownership.

Having tracked down Emanuel on Grand Island and failed to persuade him to return, Lenox returns to New York on the morning of 11th September and goes to his office to write his report and resign… And the story ends with Jackie pinning up missing person fliers.

Part 2 takes us back to 1825. Noah has come to Buffalo to claim the island he has purchased. This is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an Indian serving woman, Little Dove, in the household of Noah’s host, Lenox. She persuades Noah to visit the island, which in reality he never set foot on. While they are together on the island, they make love. Noah leaves; Little Dove remains, carrying his child – a fusion of Jew and Indian. And so the scene is set for the alternate history of Part 3.

Semel returns us to September 2001. Ararat rather than Israel has become the Jewish homeland. But the religion of Ararat is a strange fusion of Judaism and Native American traditions. A colour-blind gay black Indian photographer, Simon, is in a relationship with Jake Brendel (aka DJ Teibele), a Jew who has exiled himself from Ararat. Simon is commissioned by newspaper magnate Lenox to follow the story of Ararat’s governor, Emanuella Winona Noah, as she makes her bid for the White House. Initially on the lookout for a scandal, Simon eventually meets the governor and is won over by her. Again there is a subtheme of Simon obsessing about his relationship with Jake. Part 3, and the novel as a whole, concludes with Simon returning by plane to New York. He is looking at the Twin Towers and for the first time in his life he sees a flash of red when, it is implied, the plane crashes. Then we segue to Greater Damascus (Israel in our universe) where Jake has gone to scatter Simon’s ashes.

That summary seems to be full of spoilers, but the storylines seem less important than the symbolism and the careful weaving together of names and ideas across the three parts of the novel. There is the recurring fusion of Jewish elements with elements representing other victim groups (specifically native Americans, blacks, and gays). And this is achieved by presenting us with characters of mixed heritage, describing sexual relationships that bring together the different victim groups, and by mixing and matching Jewish and American Indian names.

A recurring theme throughout is the quest of oppressed people/exiles for a place they can call home. But they do not find what they are looking for. In the real world, the Zions they try to create fail to live up to their promise.

Did I enjoy the novel? No. Does that matter? Perhaps not. I am left with a sense that I have only scratched the surface of the novel’s meaning(s). If you are looking for a gripping yarn to while away a few hours, this is not the book for you. But if you want an intellectual challenge that will make you want to read and re-read until you have begun to make sense of its complexities, you could do far worse than tackle Isra Isle.

***

THE KRAKEN SEA

E. Catherine Tobler

Apex pb, 128pp, $11.95/ebook $3.99

Jonathan McCalmont

Before they are written, stories exist as pure artistic potential. The act of creation is also an act of destruction as the process of making a potential story into an actual story involves cutting away the excess potential until you are left with nothing but the actual. When moving from potential to actual, a writer must decide which elements of their potential story to make real: Do they emphasise the characters, the plot, or the themes? Do they service the plot by keeping things light and easy to parse or do they service the characters by delving into the thoughts and feelings of their characters? For every story that has ever been written there are hundreds of phantom potentials, forms that could have been actualised but were not. According to this view, the job of the creator is not just to come up with a series of good ideas but also to ensure that those ideas are actualised in the most pleasing manner imaginable. E. Catherine Tobler’s novella The Kraken Sea is an example of an actualised story that comes very close to embodying its full artistic potential.

Set in early 20th Century America, the story revolves around a teenaged orphan named Jackson. The novella’s opening act follows Jackson as he leaves his orphanage and tries to find a place for himself in the world. Tobler writes in short, unadorned sentences with minimal dialogue or emotional introspection meaning that Jackson’s early encounters with the outside world feel like an overwhelming rush from paucity to richness. At first, Jackson seems to struggle with his new world as he articulates everything he doesn’t understand (either about himself or the world) in terms of its resemblance to fantastical creatures. Finding himself stripped bare by an encounter with a young girl and a series of fairground stalls, Jackson demands to know why he is different to other boys.

The novella’s second act finds Jackson working in San Francisco as part of a criminal gang comprising people with gifts that are similar to his. As the story progresses, he comes to accept himself as more than human only to be approached by a rival gang who warn him about the mysterious Widow for whom he works. It is in this second act that the novella really hits its stride as Tobler guides us from monstrous street battles involving local kids to Jackson’s first visit to a burlesque club where men and women painted to look like carousel creatures promise numerous transgressive pleasures. These scenes really standout as Tobler’s parsimonious prose-style flexes and expands in an effort to describe first the adrenaline rush of combat and then hormonal bliss of teenaged desire. The moments when Jackson settles into his role as a criminal enforcer and starts to date a local girl really work as they are bookended by these moments of brilliant madness. By allowing her prose to expand, Tobler captures the ebb and flow of Jackson’s moods and so explains why he would feel so completely at home as a mob enforcer.

Unfortunately, the novella’s second act comes to a sudden halt when Jackson is forced into a magical confrontation first with the monster his boss keeps locked up in the basement and then with his boss herself. Though beautifully written and full of striking images, the third act really struggles due to its lack of foundation in the day-to-day life of the character. Indeed, the sequence at the fair works because we can sense its ‘unreality’ compared to the stripped back existence of an orphan. Similarly, the fight and burlesque-house sequences work really well because they inform and draw upon what we know about Jackson’s day-to-day existence. Given that it takes place almost entirely in a fantastical landscape involving characters whose motives are never explained, it is unsurprising that the novella’s conclusion feels like a somewhat over-inflated rush. You know an author is in trouble when their protagonist winds up asking another character what just happened and said character replies only with gnomic evasion.

I hope that Tobler plans to return to these characters and ideas as I suspect Jackson’s story would work a lot better at novel length. The problem is that the process of actualisation has stripped the story of so much potential that it feels somewhat thinner than it ideally needed to be. A bit more room and Tobler might have either fleshed out Jackson’s relationships or worked up the metaphorical aspects of his transformation into something more than human. A bit more room and The Kraken Sea could form the basis for a fantastic piece of urban fantasy as the writing and imagery on display are both top notch.

***

EUROPE IN WINTER

Dave Hutchinson

Solaris pb, 498pp, £7.99

Jack Deighton

This third in Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence of novels (previous knowledge of which is not necessary for reading this instalment) starts with a bang. Under the Urals a young couple blow up both themselves and a train in the tunnel belonging to the Trans-European Republic (aka the Line.) The significance of this does not become clear till much later.

Then, what at first seems merely a re-run of the Hungarians-trash-the-restaurant-in-Kraków scene from Europe in Autumn leads to an encounter wherein chef Rudi meets an older version of himself. He is told “You, and your entire world, are very, very sophisticated computer programs”. Not much later Rudi steps out from the restaurant and the wall behind him fades. The tone of this is of a piece with other scenes in Hutchinson’s trilogy. It is present here to introduce the idea that simulations of various futures are being run in the very secretive polity of Dresden-Neustadt in an attempt to realise a prediction engine. But that concept renders the scene problematic. Indications of unreliable narration are usually welcome, but this revelation verges on the dangerous for an author. How do we then have any faith in the depictions of all that follows?

Trust, and enjoy the roller-coaster. Rudi (what we must assume is the ‘real’ Rudi), an agent for the smuggling organisation known as Les Coureurs des Bois – a more or less essential organisation for those wishing to get things across Europe’s now innumerable borders – but here seemingly more freelance, has a large part to play in the remainder of the book. His observation that “Working in Intelligence is just a case of continually winging it” neatly describes his approach but is probably more widely applicable. We are also reacquainted, from Europe at Midnight, with The Community, the parallel world created by the English Whitton-Whyte family who “seem subsequently to have lost the knowledge of how to do it. Either it was lost, or stolen, or destroyed, no one knows, not here or in the Community. There are stories of a book of instructions, floating about somewhere, which tells how to map a new landscape over an old one”. Powerful and dangerous, the Community had precipitated Europe’s ultra-Balkanisation by unleashing the Xian Flu before official contact was made with it. “There was no way to defend against an enemy who could walk across invisible borders anywhere on your territory whenever they wanted, while you were quite unable to retaliate.”

Hutchinson’s unravelling of the interactions between the (by now essentially former) EU – “The Schengen era was just an historical blip, an affectation” – the Community and an entity known as The Realm (up to something in Luxembourg) is never straightforward but always intriguing. He also finds time to comment on the proceedings. “It had been an eventful day; if he had ever been unsure of what the word infodump meant, he wasn’t now.” Despite the appearance of SF grace notes – stealth suits reduce you to a transparent patch of barely-roiling air; there are time dilation effects between the Community and Europe with even longer ones in a certain cottage by the sea; someone steals part of the Community, it in turn steals Heathrow – the overall treatment is less redolent of the genre. “A solid reliable fellow” is not common SF phraseology. And not many SF novels mention a spectacularly catastrophic bowel movement, or AJP Taylor or, indeed, deliver an amusing aside on the interrogation methods of TV detective Columbo. Other allusive touches include the punning chapter title “The Justified Ancients Of Muhu” and a character named László Viktor. Another character opines “England is a constant pain in the arse; always whining, European only when it suits them”.

Rudi’s attempts to comprehend the convoluted relationships between the Realm, the Community, his father’s involvement in a billion-dollar trust fund, the murder of a Professor Mundt, the significance of a photograph of attendees at the Versailles Peace Conference, and the importance of a group of mathematicians, topologists and cartographers known as the Sarkisian Collective are never oppressive. His discovery of just what his role in Les Coureurs des Bois actually is adds an ironic twist.

Europe in Winter’s essence is really that of a Cold War spy thriller but in SF terms it does not add much to the two previous novels. That, though, is a strength. When a novel deals with an organisation which is capable of rewriting worlds, that looking-glass, nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems ambience may be the only suitable medium. Hutchinson executes it superbly.

***

THE TOURIST

Robert Dickinson

Orbit pb, 283pp, £12.99

Duncan Lunan

This novel comes with the promise that it’s “The most original conspiracy thriller of the year”, and is accompanied by your personal boarding pass to admit you to the Tri-Millennium Tour Company vehicle taking you back to the present day. I regret to say that, for me, that was where the originality came close to ending. The first chapter begins with an unnamed individual in a prison cell, and it’s written in second person, which normally I don’t mind, but this time I was far into the book before I realised who that person is. As the alternating chapters are written in first person, I had a lot of trouble keeping track of who was who, and perhaps more importantly who was when. As the whole novel takes place within a larger frame of ongoing time travel, events occur to the characters in different order both from how we experience them and how we are told about them. Those characters have recognisable names like Spens, Riemann, Cantor, Aldis and Mond, which seem as if they ought to be significant but apparently don’t relate to their present day or historical counterparts. Even the locations have anonymous and confusing designations like “City Two East”, and although it appears that some of them were major townships in Russia ‘you’ can’t remember the name of the most important one. It’s like reading the recent thrillers Bloodlines: Touch Not the Cat and Bloodlines: Traces, by Thomas McKerley and Ingrid Schippers, where the action alternates between the 1890s and present day, but without their family trees and careful specification in each chapter of where and when we are.

If I have it right the time travel operation is controlled from the 24th century, to which nobody from earlier times is allowed access. Tourists go back to the early 21st century, to carefully controlled venues in which the everyday action of our times is re-enacted, but seriously undermined by the official time travellers and by those who’ve “gone native”. Researchers travel further back, but at increasing risk of being killed or stranded, and great significance is attached to collectors who’ve gone back to early performances of classical music and found them to be different. Why that’s so significant I’m afraid I failed to grasp. The tour companies run their operations from domes and underground enclaves which are protected by heavy security, much to the resentment of the locals, and the tour guides are pushed around by the staff of future agencies with dystopian names like Awareness, Happiness, Safety and Facilitation, who know what’s going to happen in the immediate future but can’t come out with more than the odd frustrating remark like “You will be sent back, a month from now, because of a major breach of protocol”. There is apparently a central control in Geneva which knows more, but can’t or won’t say, and everyone is hampered by a huge lacuna in the “late 21st” records called the N.E.E. (Near Extinction Event) which apparently involved a nuclear exchange and a global computer crash as well as a catastrophic weather event called The Cloud, but whose causes are unknown.

Spens, with the shadow of his near-future “breach of protocol” hanging over him, has a routine assignment to take a tourist group by bus on a trip to a shopping mall, which will be enlivened by a minor road accident on the way back. When everyone’s rounded up afterwards, a woman tourist is missing. In the investigation which follows it emerges that she may be a drug smuggler, she may be an assassin, she may be the agent of other groups with secret agendas, or the innocent pawn of any of the above. She is present at, but may not be involved in, the death of a 21st century man who may or may not be a neo-Nazi, while being followed by 21st century criminals who may or may not know who she really is, and all this may or may not be related to a protest movement which is attacking the future by hiding radioactive materials in caches to be opened on the far side of the N.E.E., whom it may or may not be possible to stop, and whose actions may or may not have led through a loop in time to the N.E.E. itself. Finally Spens boards a transport back to the future, which crashes at an unoccupied underground enclave in featureless country where eventually he dies, hallucinating that he’s at one of those great classical concerts.

I realise that if ever commercial time travel becomes a reality it could end up as messed-up as this, with nobody sure what’s going on and bad decisions being taken in consequence. But I have to say that I was left as puzzled and frustrated as the characters.

***

INVASION

Luke Rhinehart

Titan pb, 441pp, £8.99

Duncan Lunan

After the frustrations of The Tourist, it would be hard to find a bigger contrast than Luke Rhinehart’s Invasion. Set in the present day, with plenty of contemporary references and asides, it follows the incursion into our world of creatures shaped like hairy beach balls, though they can change shape and do so with increasing frequency as they get the hang of it. They come from another reality (“another dimension”, as we would once inaccurately have said), and although they are subject to the physical laws of our continuum now they’re here, they are so flexible, so mobile and so damn clever that very little we can do impedes them. (Our authorities get better at that as time goes on, but with generally fatal results.) They reproduce by fission, but are capable of simulating our method with generally satisfying results. And their purpose in visiting us, and other civilisations elsewhere, is simply to play.

In short, they are nothing like any normal conception of extraterrestrial invaders, from The War of the Worlds onwards. If they confined themselves to playing beach games and frolicking with dolphins (with whom they get on very well), they might have met with a more general welcome. But once they start playing with people’s bank accounts, particularly those of governments and large corporations, and once they start intervening in wars, the powers that be take an increasingly dim view.

We see this happening through the narrative of Billy Morton, a semi-retired commercial fisherman who would not be out of place in either a Hemingway or a Heinlein novel, alternated with excerpts of minutes from increasingly desperate government meetings. Morton’s generally sceptical and tolerant attitudes sit well with Louie, the first of the visitors to arrive, and they quickly bond with his children. But as his wife is an environmental lawyer, drawn into defending the rights of the visitors in court, the family find themselves the centre of attention as the situation develops – amusingly at first, but something they like progressively less as they’re classified as terrorists, become chat show stars, fake their own deaths in an attempt to escape the publicity, adopt increasingly elaborate disguises and end up in Witness Protection, constantly dragged further away from their own lives by the close relationship they have to Louie, his friends and descendants.

Increasingly it seems that the visitors are doing more harm than good. It’s funny when they incite schoolchildren to defy their teachers en masse and spend the day on the beach, funnier when the police and finally the teachers join in. But if all the children do from now on is play, will that be sufficient preparation for adult life? If the parks are now huge adult playgrounds, never mind who’s minding the store, who’s manning the hospitals, fighting fires, restraining criminals or doing any of the things we actually need to keep our civilisation running? In short, it’s very kind of the visitors to come and teach us that all we need to do is have fun, but we didn’t ask them to do it.

For the military and most of the government, there is of course no question that all this is a bad thing, and there’s a darker undertow to the fun and games, in the attempts to find a hidden agenda, as they are actually injuring, capturing and killing visitors in increasing numbers, even if the big attempt with a nuclear weapon kills only a few of them. The willingness of the media to endorse the government line, attributing every accident and problem to the visitors, is perhaps all too realistic, but the keenness of the scientific community to add fuel to the flames with ever more bizarre and imaginary threats is perhaps uncomfortably close to the mark. The US President appears to be gifted with some common sense, but is given little chance to use it under pressure from his advisors to take ever more drastic measures. As the authorities try to stop the giant Fun-ins in Central Park, the National Rifle Association and other Libertarian groups turn up to protect the “rebellion”, and that quickly leads to a firefight. Initially casualties are light, but a more serious confrontation is pending. At the end, which is very sudden, matters are coming to a head when abruptly we are promised “Book Two, The Hairy Balls and the End of Civilisation”.

I’m not one to read the end of a book first, so I didn’t see that coming. I don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but I expect it will be entertaining. What I can’t predict is whether those more serious underlying questions are going to be resolved.

***

CHRIS BECKETT: EDEN

Review & Interview by Juliet E. McKenna

DAUGHTER OF EDEN

Chris Beckett

Corvus hb, 394pp, £16.99

After the gripping and thought-provoking dramas of previous books, I’m keen to see where Chris Beckett takes this story of communities descended from two hapless astronauts stranded on a remote, perpetually dark world. Initially I’m surprised to find this volume open with Angie Redlantern, a character from Mother of Eden. So there’s no generations-long interval as there was after Dark Eden. But why resume the narrative with a character from the isolated Knee Tree Grounds? These people deliberately steer clear of the conflicts between Johnfolk and Davidfolk. Their ancestor Jeff advised concentrating on the here and now. Indeed, it was his approach, tackling the most immediate challenges one step at a time, which proved central to humanity moving beyond the Circle Valley landing site.

But is Jeff’s philosophy as idealistic and as unrealistic as John’s dream of exploration and David’s lust for dominion over all Eden’s people? The Knee Tree Grounders cannot stop traders or shadowspeakers visiting their homes out in the shallow coastal waters of The Pool. Davidfolk guards demand tribute in goods or the sticks that now function as money if they wish to trade on the mainground. As the population along the coast has grown, Knee Tree folk suffer like everyone else as the bucks they all hunt become scarcer and other resources are exhausted. More than that, they’re increasingly left behind as technology advances elsewhere. Such change is being driven by those who refuse to settle for merely what they have here and now.

Angie couldn’t settle for never knowing what happened to her lost friend, Starlight Brooking, whose story we know from Mother of Eden. Maybe that’s one reason why Angie left Knee Tree Grounds years before with shadowspeaker Mary, even though the Kneefolk agree that anyone claiming to hear Mother Gela’s voice is a liar and only out to trick foolish people out of presents and sticks. Even though Mary tries to stamp out the Secret Story passed from mothers to daughters since Gela’s day. John’s descendants and David’s alike insist the only story that’s told is the one they approve. But Angie’s travels show her how many different stories are told across Eden, for good and for ill, by people longing for something more than the here and now, and by those who are ready to lie to get the possessions or power they seek. There’s no definitive, written record after all, in this illiterate world.

Now everything is changing as armed and armoured Johnfolk arrive from across the sea to enforce their chosen vision on everyone else. They bring softly-spoken and persuasive Teachers to explain their own version of Eden’s history. Neutrality is no longer an option for the Kneefolk or anyone else. Can they find sanctuary in Circle Valley? At least these different factions still venerate humanity’s first home on Eden. But how can that be the answer? The lack of resources in Circle Valley was what drove John Redlantern to leave.

At this point, further summary risks ruining this book. Suffice it to say, Beckett shapes his tale with consummate skill, drawing on readers’ expectations at the same time as challenging us to justify what we might wish for Angie and the others. How far do we want this story to follow that particular path? How could that stay true to this enthralling, utterly alien world which Beckett has created and to the people we’ve come to care so much about? But those are readers’ concerns. Within the story, Angie Redlantern must combine everything she’s learned on her travels with the enduring wisdom of Knee Tree Grounds. Because, as Jeff would say, she is reely there.

Beckett weaves different timelines and points of view together with all the skills so ably demonstrated in both previous books. Characterisation is subtle and vividly effective. Motivations and emotions are believably complex and contradictory. Deft transitions between the various strands of this story are guaranteed to keep the pages turning. Beckett similarly continues to make excellent use of Eden’s deceptively simplistic language to slide in details of this world’s history and the haphazard, often accidental, development of its culture that might almost go unnoticed – until something turns out to be crucial.

Any fan of the two earlier books hoping for more of the same will get another tremendously readable and compelling novel in the finest traditions of science fiction. More than that, this story builds on everything that has gone before to open up a rich hinterland of ideas and questions about life far closer to home. With this final volume Beckett lifts his Eden trilogy to a whole new level.

***

You’re saying this is the final Eden story. Did you envisage it as a trilogy from the outset?

I originally wrote Dark Eden as a standalone book. The somewhat open-ended conclusion was not me making space for a sequel, but just an aesthetic choice. (I don’t like to tie things up too neatly. I always feel that’s a bit of an anti-climax.) However, I decided that there was more I wanted to write about Eden and, having made that decision, I decided to write two more books with the general idea that one would be set mainly among the “Johnfolk” and one mainly among the “Davidfolk”: the two main groupings that emerged from the split in the human community that is described in Dark Eden.

Dark Eden still is in some ways a standalone book. All its characters are long since dead by the time of the other books, and two centuries have passed. Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, on the other hand, share some characters and are only ten years apart. I was clear in my mind that the story in Dark Eden was complete, and that I didn’t want a sequel with John, Tina etc in it. What did take hold of my imagination though was the idea of a future in which the events in Dark Eden had become mythologised, much in the same way that the people in Dark Eden had mythologised their ancestors who first came to Eden from Earth.

I did consider having a similar time interval between Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden as I did between the first two books. In the end though, I thought it would be more interesting to have two books which were set at roughly the same time, but among people who had radically different takes on the original events in Dark Eden. A bit like Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in the real world, whose ancient dispute is based on disagreements after the Prophet’s death about who was his true successor, so the people of Eden are divided about who is the legitimate successor to the original parents of all of them. I wanted to explore the two different world-views that emerged, and how they characterise one another. That works better if they are close in time.

Calling Eden “otherwordly” is a massive understatement. Where did your concept of a perpetually dark planet spawning bioluminescent organisms come from?

The original prototype of sunless Eden and its luminous life was a short story called ‘The Circle of Stones’ which appeared in Interzone (like every decent thing I wrote for a decade) way back in 1992. (It also included prototypes of John, Tina, Gerry and Jeff.) At that time I owned one of those old Amstrad computers whose screen displayed luminous green letters on a black screen. As I’ve said before, I’m fairly certain that staring at that screen was what gave the idea, firstly because letters on a page do sometimes strike me as looking a bit like a forest, and secondly because the Amstrad inverted the normal arrangement of dark letters on a white field, in much the same way that Eden, with its shining trees in a dark setting, inverts the arrangement we are used to, where trees have no light of their own and are dependent on light around them. So I may have Alan Sugar to thank for Eden!

Of course, it wasn’t just the Amstrad. The idea wouldn’t have caught my imagination if it didn’t resonate in some way with things inside me that I wanted to express. The story of Eden, the original Biblical story I mean, deals with the expulsion of humans from their original home, and speaks (to me at least) to a sense of a gap that’s part of the human condition: an absence, of something that should be there but isn’t. The dark planet with its absent, longed-for sunlight, seemed to me to connect with that, although of course here humans are exiled to Eden not from it.

And then, when I came to think about it, it seemed to me that sunless planets were surely a real possibility (I subsequently discovered science agreed with me) and life really could exist on a such a planet, powered solely by the heat of the planet itself. After all, such life forms exist on Earth. There is life around volcanic vents in the depths of the ocean, whose energy doesn’t come from the sun at all. There are liquid lakes under the Antarctic ice (where life is thought to be possible) melted not by the sun, but by the Earth’s heat from below.

So, three things came together. The shining letters, the Biblical story, and my awareness of geothermal life forms here on Earth. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it, this business of writing fiction? Scientists are analysers but we are synthesisers. We bring together material from diverse places and bind it into something new, like the players of the Glass Bead Game in that book by Hesse.

Do you have a fully developed ecology, geology and geography of Eden to draw on, which we readers merely glimpse?

My theory of worldbuilding is that the reader must be persuaded that the narrator can see the whole world, even if the reader can’t. (That’s why Tolkien is so good at it, for instance: he had it all worked out, and you can sense that when reading him.) I saw Philip Pullman saying somewhere that he didn’t bother with that: he just made up the bits necessary for the story, and didn’t worry about the rest. And I have to say, although I greatly enjoyed his Dark Materials books, that showed. I didn’t get a sense that he knew what was happening off-stage or what had happened before, or how this particular world had come about.

So yes, I have a pretty clear map of Eden in my mind, and a definite sense of how life evolved there, and how it works. Because no one in Dark Eden was remotely scientific they couldn’t know what I know, and that freed me from having to explain it all, but it provided a compass for me and I suspect that it is one of the reasons that many people find the world compelling.

How many times have you been challenged to explain or to justify aspects of the hard science underpinning Eden? How much do you think that sort of thing matters?

I was giving a talk at a school once, and a young boy asked me how Eden folk got Vitamin D with no sunlight. I was quite taken aback. It had just never occurred to me. But it was relatively easy to fix: starflowers are rich in it, okay?

No one else has ever actually challenged me in that way, but some people have very gently pointed out some problems. Firstly, human genetics: everyone on Eden is descended from two people. Could you really get a viable population that way? I’ve been told not, though I’ve also read of cases where entire islands have been populated by a few isolated animals arriving on mats of vegetation, so I’m not sure. Secondly, thermodynamics: could geothermal trees, acting like radiators, transfer enough heat from the planet’s core to its surface to warm up the atmosphere to a point where human beings could live? I’ve been told not, but I really don’t know. (A third problem is faster-than-light travel, but half of SF would disappear if we didn’t allow that!)

I don’t know that it matters all that much, if our invented worlds really are completely viable in the real world. I think they have to have a certain surface plausibility though. Eden seemed plausible to me, and I went with that!

How important do you think understanding the so-called softer or social sciences is to science fiction?

Some science fiction engages primarily in thought experiments to do with the hard sciences, but this is surely a relatively specialist niche. The great glory of SF as a form is that it allows us to engage in thought experiments of a sociological kind. And that surely is what most of the great SF novels are doing. I’d go as far as to say that SF is the most well-suited of all forms of fiction for sociological speculation. Just as the conventional literary novel allows authors to explore relationships and human psychology by making up characters and giving those characters challenges to face, so a sociological/anthropological SF novel like Dark Eden allows the author to explore the ways that societies evolve and change, by making up societies and giving them challenges. I have to give credit here to Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy, which (although I read it some thirty years ago) stayed with me as a masterclass on how to do this. In his case, it was the effect on society and human belief systems of a Great Year in which seasons lasted for hundreds of years.

Not that one has to be aware of academic literature on sociology to do this. We live in a world where we are exposed as never before to competing world views and beliefs, but also a world in which technological change is constantly making old belief systems redundant. (I think, for instance, of the effect of modern contraception on sexual mores. I grew up in a Britain where premarital sex was still a “social problem” and a source of public anxiety. Who worries about it now?) We all have to think about this dizzying absence of a fixed set of social structures and beliefs, and the kind of thought experiment that SF provides helps us make sense of it.

On one level, this is a history of an isolated, impoverished and illiterate community and all that these people achieve despite such handicaps in the midst of a hostile environment. On another level, these books explore the nature of stories and their influence on societies. Where does your interest in the role of narrative come from?

Ah, now that is an interesting question. I’ve always been fascinated by this: by narratives and by beliefs which are really narratives which we choose to “make function as true” (to pinch a phrase from Foucault). I’ve always been aware that beliefs never really are completely true, and that nevertheless we need them. (Philip Dick is brilliant on this sort of thing.) I guess there is a sociological explanation for my interest and a more personal, psychological one. The sociological one is that, as I said just now, we are aware as never before of competing belief systems, which challenge our own. The psychological, personal one, the reason why I am more obsessed with this than other people seem to be…well, I am speculating here, but perhaps it comes in part from growing up with two parents who subscribed to radically different narratives, my mother’s broadly progressive and liberal, my father’s much more conservative and traditional, and having to navigate between the two. And perhaps it comes too from an early awareness that my mother in particular, in many ways the dominant influence in my life, was a very unreliable narrator. I’ve always been aware that the stories on which I try to build meaning in my life are like wobbly stepping stones in a stream which you can’t stay on too long, or you’ll fall in. (Angie Redlantern, the narrator of Daughter of Eden, actually uses this analogy.)

How far is your writing offering commentary on what’s truth and what’s spin in our own world of mass and social media?

Well, I’m not attempting to comment on particular instances in the contemporary world, but in all of these books I try and draw attention to the way that narratives are shaped by power and serve the purposes of power, even while meeting other important needs. Narratives have to have some degree of plausibility and/or speak to some need of the listener, or they wouldn’t catch on, but power bends them like gravity, twists them around so that, even as they meet people’s needs for meaning and purpose, they also serve to explain and justify the status quo. Contemporary politicians and advertisers use ideas like Community, or Family, or Love, or Nation to win support or sell products. In Dark Eden, the shadowspeaker, Lucy Lu, cynically manipulated the messages she received from the dead to meet the requirements of powerful figures whose patronage and support she needed. In Mother of Eden, the Teachers have perfected a narrative that recruits the memory of the mother of everyone to justify their own male power. In Daughter of Eden, Angie worries about the effect of this gravity-like pull of power on the message that her mentor Mary gives to the low people as she travels around the Davidfolk Ground.

What writers and books drew you into reading SF originally? What interesting developments do you see in the genre these days?

My father had fairly eclectic tastes in genre fiction. He consumed large numbers of detective novels, and he also had a large collection of novels by Georgette Heyer. Neither of these tastes rubbed off on me: I never read detective novels, and I’ve never read the books of Georgette Heyer, though I’m assured they are very witty and good. However he also had a collection of SF novels and story anthologies, and as a teenager I consumed these voraciously. I can’t remember all the books now. Van Vogt was there, I remember – Voyage of the Space Beagle and a short story collection or two – and several Heinleins (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, my father and I both agreed, was another masterclass in worldbuilding, whatever you thought about its politics). There was a lot of Ballard. (I recently reread those old Ballard story collections and they were even better than I remembered: ‘The Watchtowers’ in my opinion is as close to perfect as a story can get.) There were a number of John Wyndham novels and stories, and quite a lot of Aldiss: Greybeard springs to mind.

These were the foundation of my interest in science fiction, and I began writing SF stories when I was still in my teens. Funnily enough, even though I’ve since discovered SF writers that weren’t on my father’s shelves, the ones who have most influenced me still tend to be from that same era. Philip Dick for instance. The Strugatsky brothers. Or even a much more recent discovery: the brilliant and harrowing stories of James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon.

I don’t read enough SF at the moment, or fiction of any kind, to be able to comment in detail on developments in the genre, particularly as I don’t consciously read to keep up with what’s going on, but simply follow my own path through books old and new, fiction and non-fiction, as the fancy takes me, or to fit in with current writing projects. (I’ve been reading a lot about US politics for instance, for my next novel.)

I am aware of, and welcome, the recent challenges to the dominance of male characters and male writers in the genre. Those old books on my father’s shelves were all written by men, and almost all of the major actors within them were men as well. Having women as the main protagonists of Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden was a conscious decision on my part to go against that pattern.

Might you be tempted to explore what happened between Dark Eden and Mother of Eden in any more detail? In a few short stories, perhaps?

Interesting you should say that because it is an idea that I have in the back of my mind as a possible future project. I’m as certain as I can be that I won’t be writing another Eden novel, but it has occurred to me that a short story collection might be fun, dipping into lives (as you say) lived in the period between Dark Eden and Mother of Eden, but also in the 160 years before the events in Dark Eden, between the original arrival of Tommy and Gela on Eden and John Redlantern’s act of rebellion. Whether I’ll ever get round to it is another question!

***

SLIPPING

Lauren Beukes

Tachyon pb, 288pp, $15.95

Barbara Melville

The author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters brings us Slipping, a cocktail of fantastical narratives spanning crime, cyberpunk, magic realism and journalism. Anthropology and social comment are central to these narratives, each giving us messages far beyond their events. Several offer ethnographies of South African culture, with a helpful glossary provided to unravel the terminology. Themes explored throughout the work include our relationship with technology, political unrest, celebrity culture and sexism, to name a few. And it all works for the most part. Not unlike Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, quirkiness, intelligence and what can only be called the heebie-jeebies bring life to every page.

For me, the most interesting stories explore the human form. ‘Princess’ is one such example: an erotic, metafictional fairy tale of a celebrity taking control of her body and her sexuality. It is perhaps a little forced in places but overall the light, archaic language works a treat, held taut by the mythical structure. In contrast, ‘My Insect Skin’ is centred around loss of control. A homage to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, we follow a woman who feels unloved in her own skin. A fascinating plot ensues, leading to a shocking, one-punch ending. Unfortunately the ending is a real letdown as it reeks of the author trying for aplomb. That said, Beukes still manages to weave strangeness with normalcy, resulting in an intensely creepy feel. I dare you to read it without periodically checking yourself for gills, tentacles or something equally disturbing.

The title story ‘Slipping’ is the strongest of the human-themed tales and possibly the whole collection. Pearl is a competing athlete who is physically half woman, half machine. When I first started reading, I worried it would descend into a one-dimensional discourse about which half wins, but I was pleasantly surprised. Right from the get go Pearl appears more human than those around her, challenging the dehumanising impact of technology enhancement. But to her custodians and the outside world she is an object for profit – nothing more than a running machine with occasional echoes of humanity. The prose is effortlessly unsettling: Tomislav […] unplugs her stomach and eases it out of her. He sets it in a sterile biobox and connects it to a blood flow. By the time he turns back, she is already spooling up the accordion twist of artificial intestine like a magician pulling ribbons from his palm. It smells of lab-mod bacteria, with the faintest whiff of feces.

The story explores capitalism, our interactions with technology and – as you can probably imagine – the disgust we have for our bodies. I was left with far more interesting questions than answers, which for me is often a mark of strong science fiction.

But it wasn’t all goosebumps. As is often the case with collections, few of the stories didn’t speak to me. One I liked less was ‘Smileys’, a tale of politics and survival with a simple plot and structure – so simple that even a partial explanation could spoil it. Although it is well crafted – Beukes could make instruction manuals edgy and imaginative – I felt deeply unsatisfied with how this story ended. At first I couldn’t figure out why, then I realised the driving elements are confused. I suspect this story was meant to be world or atmosphere driven, with a focus on unsettling backdrops rather than entertaining plots. But there were signals – twists and turns – indicating plot as important too. As such I paid too much attention to what was happening rather than messages within. ‘Adventures in Journalism’, one of the fantastic non-fiction pieces within the collection, helped elucidate this by exploring the same issues.

So, with my feelings so mixed, would I recommend this book or not? This humming and hawing is why I’ve never been the biggest fan of collections. In contrast with strong novels, even strong collections like this one tend to be a mix of hit and miss, especially if they include earlier writing. While there will usually be gems, there are almost always duds. Then there are the well-crafted works that you just don’t like, even though you can admire their engineering. But overall, the pieces in Slipping are so delightfully surprising and diverse that I find myself liking collections a little more. I therefore recommend this book to even the staunchest of collection-haters amongst you. Just be prepared for weirdness, edginess or that feeling of someone walking over your grave.

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

DOCTOR STRANGE

SWISS ARMY MAN

TROLLS

MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS

STORKS

SAUSAGE PARTY

MORGAN

THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR

UNDER THE SHADOW

SET THE THAMES ON FIRE

In a DOCTOR STRANGE dense with Mighty Marvel shoutouts, the most eloquent comes when Wong tools up for the final showdown with an ambidextrous bull’s-head staff that is unmistakably and gloriously the Wand of Watoomb: a prop first introduced in 1965’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2, which featured the first, and on Ditko’s watch the only, encounter between his two greatest creations, less than a year before the falling-out with Stan Lee that would blow the whistle on the end of the silver age and consign Ditko to a fifty-year anchoritic twilight of hired-hand gigs and fierce Objectivist Atlas-shrugging. Page 12 of the 1965 story is dominated by Ditko’s greatest panel – perhaps the greatest Marvel ever printed – showing a bemused Spidey newly thrown into the deep Ditkoverse, while under his left heel a gas giant lies half-submerged in an ocean of something inconceivable, its ring system and moons poking out at an angle under vertiginous flying sky-islands. It’s a glimpse of what the silver-age Marvel universe was becoming, particularly in Ditko’s Dr. Strange and Jack Kirby’s Thor, as urban costumed heroes rooted in present-day NYC found themselves suddenly reframed in vistas of cosmic immensity and grandeur that needed a new visual grammar even to represent on the comics page; and it’s what Doctor Strange now represents for the entrenched timidities of the mostly earthbound, actorly, city-trashing instincts of the Cinematic Universe to date.

Right across their own multiverse of studios, the Marvel films have long been scared of cosmic: domesticating Dark Phoenix, depersonalising Galactus, whisking Ant-Man out of the nanoverse as soon as he’s inside, and even keeping the Guardians at arm’s length from the rest of the Universe. So it’s refreshing to see a film whose expositional flytipping includes lines like “This universe is only one of an infinite number”, and warns of “dark places where powers older than time lie ravenous and waiting”. Part of the push must come from the longstanding competition with Fox’s X-Men universe, whose proliferation of time-turning alternates has been way ahead of the main MCU in the race to multiversality, and stands in danger of hijacking a central pillar of the Marvel mythos in the way that they did with the brand “mutant”. But in a global cinematic ecosystem that relies on promiscuous reboots and reinventions to sustain its franchise-based IP farms, Marvel needs its multiverse to ensure a flow of renewables; and Marvel are clearly positioning Strange, the last of Marvel’s silver-age A-listers to make it to the IMAX screen, as a prospective successor to Tony Stark as the hub of the MCU, which is only his due. Marvel metaphysicians know that the Sorcerer Supreme (which Strange isn’t yet by the end of this film, all but one of whose events predate his first comics appearance) is the anchor role in the structure of the Marvel Multiverse, that larger metasystem of megatextual continuities in which the citizens of Earth-616 are one strand in an infinite web of alternates to which the magic of Strange and his fellow sorcerers channel access and flows of power.

This is an important film for Marvel, and for the most part it does what it needs to do surprisingly well. It’s true that even untrained observers can hardly fail to note that the plot of Doctor Strange feels familiar, with its Iron Man origin arc of arrogant genius given a crash-course in humility through a taste of his own medicine, an education in his capacity for true goodness, and a stark choice between old life and new, culminating in a portal of very bad opening over a major world city and an act of sacrifice to redeem himself and the world. But the Iron Man origin had been only a few weeks on the stands when Ditko and Lee had to pull a backstory for Strange out of their back portals in time for his second appearance, so was fresh in mind and ready to hand as a template; while all the best stories in Ditko’s three-year run involved dimensional gates into Eternity-knows-what, long before they became instruments of resort across what he was unwittingly inventing as the transdimensional Mighty Marvel Multiverse. It does take a while to bed in, with a worryingly solemn prologue giving way to a training act which has had to throw everything it has at what is essentially a half-hour expositional flytip in which characters slam one another with weaponised infodumps delivered in headlocks and gag drops. (James Gunn’s script notes seem to have been of service here.) But Strange’s first facetime with Tilda Swinton’s blandly degeopoliticised Ancient One is a genuinely extraordinary moment of stargate wow, an explosive conceptual breakthrough into cognitive transcendence that puts a sceptical man of science through the most concentrated experience of science-fictional wonder yet detonated on screen.

There’s no Clea, Nightmare, or Eternity yet, but the uncredited final boss is who you were hoping, upstaging even the bravura final set piece in a time-reversed Hong Kong. (As usual, they never think of taking this stuff to Luton.) Benedict Cumberbatch acts his fingers off in the many hand scenes, which rather upstage the rest of his generally deft and engaging performance of one of Marvel’s trickiest characters, and the script does an ingenious job of integrating Strange’s surgical training and mind with his new role as trauma surgeon to the fabric of reality. It’s true that the support cast are rather underfed; Swinton eventually redeems herself with a strong final payoff of science-fictional emotion, but Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Mordo charged with fan foreknowledge that the ending(s) tell us will be paid off in a sequel, while leaving him for this film rather locked in sidekick mode. Rachel McAdams’ character, part of the Night Nurse roster from the comics but a stranger to this particular franchise, serves her purpose adequately as a link to Strange’s former lives, and earns her otherwise rather thankless screentime with her reaction to the mop gag; but we know she’s only keeping the seat warm for a hotter date on the other side of time.

Otherwise, there’s not much not to like. We could perhaps have done with a little less obsession with the visually whizzy but limply-conceived “mirror dimension” and its extended homages to Inception; while the climax recycles screenwriter Jon Spaihts’ unproduced Shadow 19 in yet another unacknowledged remake of Budrys’ Rogue Moon, which is surely up there with Ubik as the most filmed sf novel never to be actually credited. But this is a film that gets much more right about its heavily booby-trapped property than anyone would have reasonably expected, and is sincerely trying to figure out a live-action cinematic counterpart to the reinvention of the comics panel that Ditko’s Strange brought to the visual language of the sixties, while at the same time cleansing the doors of perception to reveal the MCU itself as just no. 199,999 in an infinite diverging series. No wonder Stan the Man is chortling in his cameo. Good luck collecting them all.

In this age of global superhero fatigue we’ve seen heroes from all walks of life, but Daniel Radcliffe’s Manny in SWISS ARMY MAN is the first superhero who’s a corpse. Washed up on a desert island just in time to awaken suicidal castaway Paul Dano’s curiosity, Manny reveals a series of powers that begin with the harnessing of his waste gases to turn his body into a fart-propelled jetski, and subsequently demonstrating a compass stiffy, airgun breath, and skin you can strike sparks off to make fire, alongside the power to speak while still remaining stone dead, and some persistent human erotic reflexes that will turn out to lead our castaway hero circuitously back to civilisation. By the opening credits we’re already off the desert island and heading for a more American kind of survival ordeal in what seems to be a coastal wilderness of the Pacific northwest, as the story behind Manny’s powers begins to take shape. “Maybe you fell into radioactive waste, or maybe you’re a cryogenically frozen supersoldier sent back in time to save all of us.” But is he real, or a projection of Dano’s hallucinated, perhaps dying or already dead, fantasy? How much of what we’re watching is actually happening, and what uncomfortable secrets are hiding in the gaps like the repressed wind of a life unlived in front of others? There isn’t much that can be said without spoilers, except that the reveal and finale involve a scene with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and a mostly out-of-focus Shane Carruth, which would probably be reason enough to watch anything. Radcliffe is genuinely the best he’s ever been, and Dano at least does impressively with the often pretty dreadful dialogue he’s forced to work with. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it definitely blows something out of the water.

The most Ditkoesque imagery of the year is actually to be found in DreamWorks’ jukebox animation TROLLS, the culmination of a sustained campaign to put together an integrated franchise package for Dam’s venerable character-doll property around a refreshed media brand tied to the international licensing rights (which DreamWorks have now acquired under the terms of the deal). To perform its duties, the film needs not only to work as a promotional platform for toys and related merchandise in the upcoming gifting season, but to support the kind of spin-off episodic series that have played well for the How to Train your Dragon and Puss in Boots franchises as a way to farm the brand for harvest in the spaces between feature releases. In the DreamWorks iteration the trolls are a refugee people, displaced from their homeland by the monstrous and ogrish Bergen, cousins of Shrek and Fungus who seek to feed on live trolls for their seasonal festival because of the buzz of happiness they deliver. This doesn’t deter “the happiest creatures the world has ever known” from spending their days in a dayglo rainbow video jukebox of permanent autotune under the insufferably perky Princess Poppy, with only the prepper dissident Branch issuing Cassandra warnings of the Bergen threat and fortifying his bunker in Cloverfield Lane. But when the most collectible characters are indeed abducted to be the main dish in a Bergen feast, Branch and Poppy are forced into a reluctant alliance to launch a rescue mission and redeem everyone with the healing power of really strange but catchy-as-flu musical numbers, including a genuinely extraordinary sequence in Poppy’s journey where she sings her way through a forest of Ditko imagery and (rather appropriately, in light of Ditko’s memorable work with spiders) gets Shelobbed up in a web for her pains. We’ve already seen this plot in Angry Birds, and the worthy off-the-shelf moral that “Happiness is inside of all of us; sometimes you just need someone to help you find it” is a bit of an undernourishing takeaway after an hour and a half of scorched-earth assault on your retinal cones. But there’s clearly a franchise in the works with or without our resistance.

Essentially the same plot drives MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN, which brings the felicitous pairing of Jane Goldman and Tim Burton to Ransom Riggs’ ingenious YA narrative riffing around his collection of historic novelty photographs, and centring on a children’s home for mutants in a timelooped 1943, whose inmates are sought by a rogue sect of Peculiars who sustain themselves by feeding on the eyes of kidnapped children. Into this fantasy encoding of the refugee experience stumbles seeming non-Peculiar Asa Butterfield, who finds his peculiarity and his place in their world as their darkest hour approaches. Burton has responded strongly to the material, which Goldman has delicately reshaped to tease out some classic Burtonian themes of persecuted gothic outsiders, suspended childhood, and creepy stop-mo, in a plot (most of which is in the trailer) that largely abandons the book for its final act in, of all places, Blackpool. The most inventive element, a genuinely novel time-twisting device involving hopping between loops frozen at different dates, is rendered all but incomprehensible in film form, in part because it doesn’t really make sense. But this is still Burton’s strongest live-action film in years, with some terrific visuals, a franchise-worthy cast, and a sustained edge of strangeness and darkness that captures some of the power of Riggs’ originating photos.

Children’s eyeballs are on the menu again in stop-motion wonder KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, Laika CEO Travis Knight’s visually stunning and narratively baffling fantasy about a shamisen-wielding kid storyteller with the power to animate origami figures with his music, who goes on a quest to defeat the moon king’s eye-thieving daughters in the company of a monkey and a beetle warrior who bear some kind of enigmatically Howlish relationship to his lost dad and his brain-damaged mum. A kind of stop-motion sequel to Princess Kaguya, it has the seductive strangeness of a fairy tale from an alien culture just outside the threshold of comprehension, before it all rather unravels in the final act and sense blows away like paper on the wind. But there are sequences here so extraordinary that you can’t imagine how they were even possible, and like all Laika’s films it self-deconstructs in the end credits with a making-of sequence at least as astonishing as anything in the body of the illusion.

As the animation houses roll out their seasonal hopes, by some distance the weirdest is Warners’ STORKS, a side-move into animation by Jason Segel’s regular writer-director teammate Nicholas Stoller. The premise, which feels like a studio boss’s really stupid idea passed through an entire digestive tract of development insanity, is that in the far distant past of 1998 storks stopped delivering babies and reinvented their historic business as an Amazon-like fulfilment operation; but when a series of whoopsies prompts an unsolicited order for a real-life baby, it’s up to heir apparent Junior and klutzy human orphan Tulip to make the delivery before the boss finds out. So far, so Monsters, Inc., in a predictably nostalgic reflection on the transition from manufacturing to post-industrial service economies and the loss of generational memory of a world in which the American employee was an individual with societal purpose. But the film is, intentionally, a lot stranger than that, with sharp plot zigzags into sudden weirdness every five to ten minutes, and jokes whose sheer disruptive oddness take the film several notches deeper into the bizarre than most four-quadrant family animations feel safe to play. Much of it is startlingly funny, particularly the scene-stealing wolfpack whose running gags include the power to form themselves into increasingly absurd vehicles of pursuit, though it never quite breaks free of the fundamental fakeness of its made-up background mythology under which prospective parents supposedly used to post handwritten letters to the storks to order babies for delivery. Perhaps the idea is that the target audience has no real notion of what it’s supposed to be nostalgic for, because they weren’t around to experience it when it was imaginary the first time.

A different branch of Storks’ creative family, which traces its lineage back to Judd Apatow’s Freaks & Geeks crew, is behind the more aggressively disruptive animation SAUSAGE PARTY, which licenses the power of cartoons to go to places live action dare not in a gleefully confrontational allegory about the tyranny of religion. There’s something of the Trolls dynamic in the romance between Seth Rogen’s sceptical sausage Frank and his virginal bap-bride Brenda, who find their dreams of erotic destiny threatened to its foundations as disturbing cracks begin to emerge in the foodstuffs’ myth of an eternal transcendent afterlife in the humans’ glorious world of light and joy, when scarred revenants who make it back to the store report a nightmare world of hellish torture and extinction. But this is a cartoon world, and savage violence, hardcore foodstuff-on-foodstuff action, and even militant faith-baiting and rationalism are permitted in its cheery toon-toned faux anthropomorphism. A long development has given Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and their co-writers space to tauten the script to a muscular hardness, and the carnage payoff when it comes has a horrible exhilaration. Throughout the film you’re haunted by the question of what possible happy ending could ever await these perishable characters so void of agency in their fragile and all too temporary shelf-life; but then the ending pulls a triumphant Doctor Strange resolution out of the bag that returns the point to the animated medium itself.

Ridley Scott’s boy Jake makes his feature debut with MORGAN, this year’s Turing-test fable about an android in a deepwoods facility being scrutinised for signs of humanity while the humans are being scrutinised right back as part of a darker purpose with a chain of twists ready to release. Anya Taylor-Joy is the engineered child-woman protected and feared by her makers, and Kate Mara the fixer sent in after an unfortunate incident has left Jennifer Jason Leigh confined to two scenes and a single afternoon’s filming. To nobody’s surprise but the cast’s, things go rapidly chips-up, especially when Paul Giamatti turns up for an extended cameo to do the obligatory two-handed table scene. The impressive international cast are all a bit too good for the script, whose twists are fairly foreseeable until the ambiguous final-shot sting, but Taylor-Joy makes a good fist of the android performance that is apparently now part of the cursus honorum for breakout female stars, while Mara makes the most of her character’s essential blankness by playing for a chilly unreadability that pays off when the big reveals, as they must, come out of the machine.

THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR sees the high-performing Blumhouse franchise go topical and 24, as Frank Grillo’s character from the second film re-emerges as personal security to a presidential candidate committed to rolling back the regime of the New Founding Fathers under which all crime is sanctioned for one night a year. (Policy summary: “The money generated by the purge lines the pocket of the insurance companies and the NRA. It is time to appeal to the better angels of our nature.”) This of course paints a giant target on her come Purge Night, and a by now familiar story shape assembles as groups of characters from different parts of the city get drawn together in a fight for survival that turns by degress into a fightback against the masters of the world. Like its predecessors, it uses the Purge premise as a way to talk angrily on film about class, inequality, and social control, with America’s elite meeting in panelled rooms with decanters of Scotch to exchange grim opinings like “They want the impossible: everyone to have.” (Of course they turn out to be in league with the Catholic church and practising human sacrifice.) There are interesting new ideas like the murder tourists that in the event go nowhere, but Grillo is quite fun now that he’s got over his demons from the second film (summarised here in two crisp sentences) and distilled his character down to its functional essence, and the result is the most enjoyable instalment of its dubious trilogy, though it’s hard to see a place left for a fourth film to go.

The urban apocalypse is all too real in Iranian ghost story UNDER THE SHADOW, in which a young mother finds herself trapped during the 1988 bombardment of Tehran in a rapidly depopulating and disintegrating apartment block with her daughter and a malevolent djinn which rides in on an Iraqi missile and moves by sinister degrees from making favourite toys go missing to more sinister and sensational forms of Babadookish torment, while the apartment, building, and city around them break down under the combined assault from outside and within. It’s a powerful genre allegory of repression (the heroine is a former medical student blocked by the 1979 revolution from completing her studies and fulfilling her destined career) and the familial and personal breakdown that life in a time of terror brings to the urban bourgeoisie, with spirits of evil ancient and modern converging in a nightmare that finds new implications in old wives’ tales: “They travel on the wind, moving from place to place until they find someone to possess … If you take a personal belonging, something that you treasure, there’s no escape from them. They’ll always know where to find you.” The end is pretty much the same shot as the similar-but-nothing-like A Girl Walks Home at Night, but here with a much darker and more despondent implication.

A more genteel urban dystopia unfolds itself in SET THE THAMES ON FIRE, a low-budget under-the-radar British indie from Sadie Frost’s production company that channels the spirits of Derek Jarman and Angela Carter for a slow but beguiling vision of how our cities will more likely die. In a flooded future London inexorably surrendering its remaining landmarks to the water, an introverted piano man and an up-for-it escapee from a psych ward are thrown together by, and increasingly entangled with, the drowning city’s tyrant, who comes across as a ghastly of Albert Spica and Harold Shand, with a supporting cast of randoms including Sally Phillips as a tarot-turning white witch and Noel Fielding as a motley pimp so exuberantly depraved that for one pivotal scene their most usable take still has one of the leads openly corpsing. More mood piece than narrative, its plot is little more than a washing-line on which scenes are loosely pegged out in a post-apocalyptic diorama of character performances and melancholic comic turns, with the real stars the lovingly crafted optical plates of a washed-out city reclaimed by its river as the tube tunnels flood and Tate Modern goes under. The film equivalent of an upstairs pub theatre production in Streatham, it makes a lot of its modest resources, shooting inventively around the fact that the budget doesn’t seem to have stretched to any actual water. But as the Ancient One says, “You cannot beat a river into submission; you have to surrender to its current and use its power as your own”; and one of the minor disappointments of Doctor Strange is that of the three global sanctums in “cities of power”, we never get to see the heralded London sanctum, which falls offscreen with none to hear. It’s nice to know that somewhere in this vast multiverse there are fantasy universes in which people still talk with wistful hopelessness of getting the Overground running again. For those on the Barking line from Gospel Oak, that’s a dream beyond the vision of the Vishanti.

LASER FODDER

TONY LEE

ARROW SEASON FOUR

THE FLASH SEASON TWO

DR. STRANGE

Green Arrow! You have not failed your genre! Although Oliver Queen ran away from home in Star City to play house in suburbia with A-team’s hacker Felicity, his archery gang soon ask them for help to fight evil Damien’s pursuit of ultra-hammy Halloween style havoc with his HIVE of homicidal hoods. ARROW SEASON FOUR (DVD, 5 September) reunites Green Arrow with sidekicks Black Canary, Spartan, and Speedy, in defence of a city forever on the edge of chaos. Ongoing problems for our unreliable heroes lurch between soap clichés (long-lost brother found, unknown son discovered, sitcom mother visits, old flames return, gay marriage), and middle-class melodramas of secrets, lies, and hypocrisy, where mapped-out destiny misdirects law-keepers and -breakers, and justice always costs a fortune in bloodlust.

Ridiculously frequent heart-to-heart talks, especially for self-pitying characters that doubt or simply don’t know who/what they are (at any age!), never mind how to cope or deal with traumatic life, are offset by the series’ ambitious production values. Arrow spotlights many well-staged action scenes, blending parkour-mania, anti-gun fu, biker stunts, gadget deployments, and TV-sized explosions on cinematic streets of gyre. As usual, Arrow suffers far too many shuffled flashbacks to five years ago, when bad-hair-day Ollie was sent on a mission back to that mysterious island of Purgatory. Said flashbacks devolve such narrative function from the built-in series-prequel, as in previous seasons, to a Highlander 2 solution for muddled storytelling. The location in the past makes telefantasy island a joint of anything-goes wish-fulfilment, so Arrow’s scriptwriters can freely smoke the DC comics-lore stash. Breaking the show’s timeline of causality for some ret-con revisionism of this milieu so that, of course, the stranded Ollie once met questing John Constantine, back then – and they bonded on BFF terms (with contractual obligations for some future Arrow episodes).

But showing the previously-unknown past does provide an intro for magic into the series, and the rewriting welcomes guest-hero Constantine, who’s later called into the city for a soul-restoration job in the present-day. The original Black Canary (Caity Lotz) is not the only resurrection, and themes of re-birth rule this season’s plots, right up to the climactic threat of a nuke-scorched planet with a subterranean ark for a new world survivalism scenario. MIA scientist Ray Palmer returns as hero Atom, while an Egyptian warrior-priestess is reincarnated as Hawkgirl in paired/cross-over episodes that mix Arrow’s usually pragmatic urban vigilantism with The Flash’s esoteric meta-human crises.

In a later Arrow story, we find a man made of networked-robot bees has only a short life-span, but such a super-menace seems fairly ordinary if compared to weirder attackers in THE FLASH SEASON TWO (DVD, 12 September). Where Arrow is salvaged from its dead-end story by a comics-industry standard of ret-con flashbacks, The Flash has not-right-here-and-now stuff that’s actually more like DC’s Elseworlds material, spillage from Earth-2 shenanigans, and time-travelitis. So, everybody keeps a secret or two, betrayal/forgiveness are passing twists, and a big-story development gets all tangled up with doppelgangers. Out on patrol in Central City “the fastest man alive” has plenty of enemies and some (un)healthy competition in run-around stakes. Jay Garrick, the Flash from from Earth-2 arrives, powerless against super-humans of offensive intent, sent on an episodic basis by unstoppable villain Zoom (unfortunately named since lame comedy Zoom, 2006) to kill the Flash. As top villain, growler Zoom would be a more effective terrorist if only he could actually talk as fast as he runs. His masked mouth moves in slow motion, but nobody actually bothers to use the peculiar weakness against him. They just stand there and listen to his every croaking word.

Initially, there are 52 wormhole breaches (same number as New 52 DC comics range), and so various pseudo-eerie “spontaneous energy malfunctions” are the least of uncanny problems for squad F. Like nukes in 1950s B-movies, here it’s dark energy and antimatter that enable miracles of transformation. The Flash’s rogues’ gallery has much sillier absurdities than Arrow’s average villains. Sand Demon spills all over the place, Dr Light shines bright yet briefly, anti-kinetic inertia-fiend Turtle slows good to a sluggish crawl, while ice-queen Killer Frost (Earth-2’s Dr Snow) and Black Siren (Earth-2’s Canary) prove that an evil double simply means a goth makeover. There’s quake-magnet Geomancer, female speedster Trajectory (Velocity was already in use for Jay’s ‘speed’ drug!), bulky shape-shifter Tar-Pit, phantasmic time-wraith (whatever next?), the Speed Force incarnated, and the most fun of all, fish-zilla King Shark (Jaws meets the Hulk!), and the return of telepathic gorilla Grodd (Kong for a Beauty & Beast with twists). Both talking monsters are treated with a po-faced aplomb to make The Flash a cult above its cartoonish competitors.

Flash learns how to throw lightning bolts, and gets a tachyon booster for extra power. The squad have to find a new host for Firestorm’s nuclear matrix. STAR Labs’ techie Cisco (Carlos Valdes – a typical hacktor, there’s no beginning to his talent) gets visions and becomes insipid psychic/seer Vibe – instantly making him thirteen times more of an annoyingly smug geek than he was before…a panto irritant level that rises to seventy-eight times worse as his Earth-2 doppelganger, the boringly contrived Reverb.

Just like Arrow, The Flash is cursed with the same old soap bubbles: long-lost sibling, dying parent, abused kids, temp disability, surrogate this, foster that, adopted other. Although it shares some of their faults, Supergirl relies upon lively sitcom with less moribund soap for its off-duty moments, so it turned out to be a better superhero adventure series than either of them. Spin-off Legends of Tomorrow expands the DC telly-verse with time-travelling by a curious hodgepodge of second-league characters.

Just ahead of Scott Derrickson’s supercharged movie for Marvel’s sorcerer supreme, Philip DeGuere’s curiosity from 1978 DR. STRANGE gets a very welcome release on DVD, 17 October. While other Marvel superhero icons like The Amazing Spider-Man (1977–9) and The Incredible Hulk (1978–82) enjoyed successful runs as favourites of telefantasy fans, the master of the mystic arts was not so lucky, and only a pilot movie was produced. An urban fantasy set in New York, it presents the intrusion of uncanny powers including teleportation, possession, and shape-shifting, accomplished with a batch of low-key techniques. There’s fifty minutes of hospital politics, psychic intrigue, and questions about a mysterious destiny, until the final half-hour of psychedelia on the astral plane and beyond.

“I’ll die if I go to a sleep again.” Traumatised student Clea (Anne-Marie Martin, who later co-starred in cult cop-com Sledge Hammer) forms a dreamscape bond with Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten), here a psychiatrist and not the surgeon of creator Steve Ditko’s Chandu-inspired comic book stories for Strange Tales in 1963. John Mills is a gentlemanly mentor as Master Lindmer (the Ancient One in comics), calmly evoking Jedi mind-tricks like he invented them. Seductive villainess Morgan Le Fay (Jessica Walter, Play Misty For Me) kidnaps novice wizard Dr Strange away to her weird lair in another dimensional realm for the climactic battle of spectacular and still amazing light-blasts. Strange, of course, is forced to abandon all professional objectivity when his rationality is challenged, first by subtlety and then by the brute power of a world-threatening evil. He overcomes modern scepticism, but never loses his compassionate humanity, and this origin set-up of a shrink becoming a sorcerer, in tandem with the emergent New Age culture, seemed a promising idea for genre TV back in the 1970s.

Despite its outrageously fantastic appeal and obvious quality as adventure it’s not hard to imagine why this fine intro failed to launch a series. Perhaps the network was understandably nervous about esoterical stuff being taken seriously? They might have remembered horror films Night of the Demon (1957) and The Devil Rides Out (1968) but magic on family telly had been almost exclusively the province of sitcoms such as Bewitched (1964–72) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70). Bill Bixby’s hit The Magician (1973–4) was about stagecraft, not fantasy, although it found a sympathetic hero in Bixby – shortly before he attained greater celebrity as Dr David Banner. Other major shows with just as much if not always more drama than comedy, like Charmed, British cult series Hex, and – of particularly underrated relevance – The Dresden Files, were a generation away, and mainstream acceptance of unashamedly magical themes in contemporary TV drama must have appeared to conservative executives like a very unsafe bet as humourless entertainment.

Apart from Jeffrey Combs vehicle Doctor Mordrid (see Interzone #251) – that was another Dr Strange movie in all but name – the most recent screen appearance of the superhero magician was 2007’s animated movie Doctor Strange (see Black Static #3). However this year’s epic remake turns out, at least it won’t have to contend with looking too bizarre for popular culture to accept its caped hero without a sitcom-type laugh track.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Editorial

Future Interrupted

Time Pieces

Ansible Link

Black Static

Alts

Dogfights in Olympus and Other Absences

The Hunger of Auntie Tiger

Crimewave

You Make Pattaya

Rock, Paper, Incisors

My Generations Shall Praise

Book Zone

Mutant Popcorn

Laser Fodder

Back Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Editorial

Future Interrupted

Time Pieces

Ansible Link

Black Static

Alts

Dogfights in Olympus and Other Absences

The Hunger of Auntie Tiger

Crimewave

You Make Pattaya

Rock, Paper, Incisors

My Generations Shall Praise

Book Zone

Mutant Popcorn

Laser Fodder

Back Cover