The game of love has a different set of rules today than it did even a few years ago — or so Hugo-winning author Will McIntosh recently learned. How will this affect how the game of love is played in the future? McIntosh speculates in his book Love Minus Eighty, and also, here in this Big Idea piece.

WILL McINTOSH:

In the future, single people will have access to databases containing millions of potential mates, complete with photo galleries and detailed information about their interests.  Elaborate matching software will be available to assist in their search for suitable mates…

Wait.  That’s the present.

When Orbit books expressed interest in seeing a proposal for a novel based on my short story, “Bridesicle”, they suggested I expand it by creating a larger vision of love and courtship in the future.   Doing a little research, I quickly discovered that my ideas about love and courtship in the present were a little out of date.  For one thing, I learned that people don’t go on dates any more–that the word date itself is dated.   Now, I met my wife a mere six years ago, so it’s not that I’ve been out of the dating pool for very long.  Evidently even when I was dating, I was an out-of-touch throwback.   I asked my wife for her input on this, and she confirmed that she felt like she’d been whisked back a few decades when we first met, what with me calling on the phone to ask her to go to dinner, and offering to pick her up and all that.

So I dug in and learned what I could about modern dating, with an eye toward how this might affect courtship in the future.

Evidently the modern approach to courtship is indirect.  Men don’t call women they’re interested in–they text them.  And in those texts, they don’t directly express interest in the woman, they just ask if she wants to hang out with him and his friends.  This allows men to avoid the sting of rejection.

There was also a recent article in The Atlantic about a guy who bounces from relationship to relationship, utterly incapable of settling on one woman, because there are just too many single women online to choose from.  The article concluded that online dating is destroying commitment and intimacy.  This is a fairly common SF idea, often depicted in the form of marriage contracts with time limits.

I’m not convinced we’re really headed in that direction, and this is reflected in my novel.  There have always been people who are uneasy with commitment, and people who thrive in a committed relationship.  I think online dating will make single people choosier, not necessarily more reluctant to commit.  Online dating offers people the opportunity to customize.  If you want a partner who loves Elvis Presley and exploring abandoned buildings, doesn’t want children, is a Methodist but not a churchgoer, and plays the trombone, you can locate her in under a minute.  The thing is, she likely doesn’t live anywhere near you, so those who are easily mobile have an advantage.

If you’re not sure who you’re looking for, don’t worry–dating professionals are always working on more precise algorithms to help you find the perfect match.  In the future, those algorithms may become scary accurate, because dating sites are doing a ton of research.  For example, want to improve your odds of getting a reply from that person you’re convinced is your soul mate?  Crunching millions of initial messages and response rates, dating sites have very specific advice for you.  First of all, use an unusual greeting, like Howdy, or How’s it going, instead of the stale and overused standard, Hi.  Don’t compliment your future soul-mate’s physical appearance.  Make a joke at your own expense.  Be an atheist (seriously, that was one of their findings).  And for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t misspell words.

If you’re not a good speller, there’s more good news: there are people out there who will write your profile for you, for a fee.  In Love Minus Eighty, I extrapolated this trend, creating dating coaches who feed you lines as you interact with your date (I just can’t figure out how to avoid using that word), so you can make a good impression by being funny in a self-deprecating way while resisting the temptation to mention what a great butt your future soul-mate has.

When it comes to the future of love and courtship, I’m betting the big changes won’t come from advances in information technology.  We’re reaching a saturation point in terms of connectivity.  Yes, one day soon we’ll be able to interact with 3-D projections of people from the other side of the planet, but really, how different is that from what’s available today?  I think the real action will come in biotechnology.  Imagine how different things will be for people seeking romantic partners when brain imaging advances to the point where you can tell whether someone is feeling love or lust, when extremely reliable lie detection is not only possible, but cheap, and when you are in possession of your entire genome, and are expected to share that information with potential romantic partners.

I incorporated some of these truly futuristic elements into Love Minus Eighty, but in the end, the heart of the novel became as much about love in the present as in the future.  Maybe that’s because I feel as if I’m already living in the future when it comes to love, and how we go about finding it.

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Love Minus Eighty: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site.

Author David J. Schwartz is offering his latest, Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib, as an Amazon Kindle Serial: Buy it, and every couple of weeks a new episode drops into your eReader. A neat concept (and I know from episodic content), but what’s the story? Well, as Schwartz explains, head to the 1940s… and swerve.

DAVID J. SCHWARTZ:

I don’t know about you, but I spend an embarrassing amount of time wishing some things had never happened, or had happened differently. Part of what’s embarrassing is that a lot of these events I think about changing happened in high school, and the changes I would make mostly have to do with helping me appear a lot more With It than I was then or indeed ever have been since. My own personal alternate history, in other words, with divergence points like that time in ninth grade when–to be honest, I’ve blocked most of those things out by now. Trauma, you know.

A divergence point, as you probably know, is the event upon which an alternate history hinges. Take the battle of Gettysburg. Back in 1931 Winston Churchill wrote an essay from the point of view of an historian in a world where the Confederacy won the American Civil War, titled “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” Alternate histories tend to focus on big events, because big events tend to have more consequences. Lee wins at Gettysburg, so the South wins the war, so–well, that changes everything. And that’s how science fiction is supposed to work: you change one thing and explore the implications.

My serial Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib isn’t science fiction; it’s contemporary fantasy with an alternate-history backstory. The primary divergence point, and in some ways the central idea for the entire world and story, is this: there was a top secret research project in the United States during World War II, but its object wasn’t the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, a team of magicians–including the late Aleister Crowley–found a way to weaponize demonic energy. As a result, magic has at least temporarily supplanted science as the preferred way of doing things. Instead of microwave ovens there are salamander-powered MagicWaves. Teleportation (known as “portalling”) is mainstream. Computers and the internet exist, but aren’t as reliable–or as relied upon–as in our world. Cellphones were never invented, but most people carry personally attuned crystals that allow them to place person-to-person calls–they never drop a call, but there is the occasional problem with ghosts picking up the line.

As you might imagine, magic has become a gateway for dozens of careers. File clerks and travel agents get certified in Spatial Distortion. Want a job with Dow or GE? An Alchemy degree might get your foot in the door. If you want to freelance for the rich and famous, putting up security wards around their lavish homes, Security Magic might be the path for you.

The school of the title is, in many ways, an unremarkable one for its world. It’s located in Gooseberry Bluff, Minnesota, just across the St. Croix River from Wisconsin. It’s more or less a technical school, not a fancy school for higher magic studies, like its crosstown rival, Arthur Stag College. It’s a good school as trade schools go, but not one that attracts much attention, until a couple of events attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs.

That’s another thing that Aleister Crowley did, in this world; the U.S. government was so pleased with his research in weaponizing demonic energy that they asked him to head up a new law-enforcement agency, charged with protecting the public from the threats and abuses of magic. And there are plenty of those. Among the most frightening and mysterious are the Heartstoppers, terroristic attacks in which dozens–sometimes hundreds–of people are left lifeless, though not technically dead. The attacks are fueled by demonic energy, and have taken place all over the globe.

That’s the world in which my protagonist, undercover FBMA agent Joy Wilkins, has to maneuver. It’s a world that’s been dealing with the implications and complications of magic for seventy years, and I try to reflect that. Some of the most fun I’ve had with the story has been in making up things like the Magical Currency Destabilization Act, figuring out how a conflict over magical/intellectual property rights might influence an interrogation, or all the utterly awesome ways in which libraries might exploit magic to, say, make Inter-Library Loans obsolete by enabling you to simply walk through the stacks to the library in the next town.

Joy has her own built-in challenges. She’s a rookie agent who comes into Gooseberry Bluff to investigate the disappearance of a professor and the illegal trafficking of demons. She sees auras, but she has trouble with faces; she has prosopagnosia, or face blindness. In a way, I think that has determined what this story is about, at least thematically: it’s about the deception of appearances. The deeper she gets into her investigation, the more difficulty she has deciding who to trust, and where to turn for help.

That’s the story, but the story doesn’t happen without the world, and the world of Gooseberry Bluff is built on that simple science fictional premise. Demons instead of atoms. That could change everything.

—-

Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib: Amazon

Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Twitter.

How “big” does science need to be to be important science? Jim Ottaviani ponders this as he explains the story of Primates, his latest science-related graphic novel.

JIM OTTAVIANI:

Big science. I’ve always been a big fan. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, the Very Large Array, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, NASA in its glory days, and what the heck, even today’s not-quite-as-glorious NASA…all inspire me. Their scale and audacity exemplify humanity at its best.

But — and you knew there was one of those coming — there’s also something discouraging about big science. When you think back to Marie Curie and her husband Pierre in their tiny lab (a shed, really) on rue Lhomond in Paris or Michelson and Morley in a Cleveland basement, respectively figuring out that there’s radiation that we can’t see and never imagined existing, and that there’s no luminiferous aether to carry any kind of real or imagined radiation, you might also wish for a time when you could make a world-changing discovery by yourself, or with just a partner or two, alone in a small room. Simpler times.

Or not so simple. Because doing science was as hard long ago as it is today, since by its nature science doesn’t get easier the less you know. And you still need enough money to feed yourself while you peer into the hidden corners of the natural world…or just look at what everyone else had looked at before, but with a clever enough hypothesis, sharp enough wits, and the patience to follow both to an unexpected place.

The unexpected place Jane Goodall followed her wits to was Gombe, in Tanzania. Dian Fossey? Karisoke in Rwanda. Biruté Galdikas? Tanjung Puting Reserve in Borneo. And the reason I wanted to learn more about these three — and in my experience the best way to learn about something is to write a book about it — was because their work is the antithesis of big science. One person, a notebook, and (sometimes) a pair of binoculars. That’s all it takes to make big discoveries if you’re as smart and as patient and as tough as Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas.

As usual for me, the story is told in comics. (Or as a graphic novel, if you like. I don’t have a strong preference myself, though I appreciate the sentiment when people bend over backward to use the more dignified phrase.) Why comics? Big science again, or rather, it’s opposite. To make something with the visual impact of a movie or television, as, you know, an actual movie or TV show, I’d need actors and sets and money. Lots of money.

With comics all I need to make something with both the visual impact of those other media and the staying power of a book is a six foot tall stack of reference material, imagination, and something to write with. Oh, and a skilled artistic collaborator, which I have in Maris Wicks. Her art sings, and does so via the simplest of tools: pen, ink, paper. Okay, she colored the book digitally, but you get my meaning: We didn’t need any more room or resources than what you could fit in a basement, or even a shed, to tell a big story.

And discovering what makes us human? That’s the biggest story and the biggest science I can imagine.

—-

Primates: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s 

Go to the book’s site (contains a pdf preview). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Author Bradley P. Beaulieu wraps up his “Lays of Anuskaya” fantasy trilogy with novel The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, and on the occasion of its release, he’s moved to look back on the entire trilogy and think on what it means to him, and how it relates to our own real world.

BRADLEY P. BEAULIEU:

The Flames of Shadam Khoreh concludes a trilogy that began, at least in my head, some eight years ago. In it, a prince and princess of a Russo-inspired Grand Duchy join forces with members of a violent extremist group whose stated goal for decades has been to destroy the Grand Duchy and its influence in the region. Unlikely allies indeed. Much of the story is about healing a world that is broken, but another part, a much more layered and nuanced part, is about seeing the world as your enemy sees it.

The Lays of Anuskaya is centered on a group of three elemental sorcerers who centuries ago attempted to bring the world to a place of enlightenment. They not only failed, they failed in spectacular fashion, and the world itself paid the price. As the trilogy opens, one of those very sorcerers has been reborn. Through his dreams, and through the brave efforts of others, we find the source of the world’s ills: the fabric between the material world and the world of the elemental spirits has been weakening. Rifts have begun to form.

The true nature of these rifts, and how they might be fixed, is a matter of some debate. The rifts are causing blight and disease and war throughout the Grand Duchy and the neighboring empire, and still the dukes bicker amongst themselves, causing delays at a time when the world can least afford it. The Flames of Shadam Khoreh begins as the pain and destruction from these rifts is becoming dire. Everything now depends on the ability of one boy, the sorcerer reborn, in finding the truth of how the rifts might be healed once and for all, for if he doesn’t, the entire world will suffer the consequences.

One thing I’ve rarely talked about is the fact that 9/11, the Iraq War, and the surrounding conflicts were one of the primary sources of inspiration for this story. Like so many people—not just Americans, but people all over the world—I was greatly affected by the events of 9/11. There was rage and confusion and a deep desire to “get to the bottom of it,” to understand why the perpetrators of that crime had done what they’d done. The more I searched for answers, however, the more I realized that it’s an endless story with endless causes and endless consequences.

Look, I’m a pragmatist. There are hard truths in our world. I’m fully aware that there are legitimate reasons to use violence to achieve an end, but it also seems that too often violence (or the threat of violence) is the first thing we reach for in our arsenal (a funny word to use when you’re trying to broker peace, but somehow it seems apropos; and by the way, when I say we, I mean the entire human race). So much of our politics is posturing and refusing to give in for fear of being seen as weak or “appeasing” the enemy.

This is true in many conflicts around the world and was true of the conflict in the Middle East, and as I watched the conflict unfold, it built within me a frustration that was hard to reconcile. It was in that frustration that the seeds of The Winds of Khalakovo, the first book in the trilogy, were laid down. Those seeds started to bear fruit as I fleshed out the conflict that’s told in the story, one that has roots in generations past but that’s coming to a head just as Winds opens.

The heart of the story—a tale of irreconcilable differences—didn’t change very much in the telling. It continued to be the primary driver of what happened. But I was able to show where some people, if they try hard, can meet in the middle, and I was able to bring that new perspective to several different characters. That was one of the more gratifying things for me, to show a tale in which the characters learn and come to understand another culture from a perspective that was beforehand very limited. Not everyone ended up agreeing with the other side—that wouldn’t be a truthful story—but they certainly understood more if nothing else, and all of that came from my inner desires for us, in this world, to do the same.

So what’s the Big Idea? The Lays of Anuskaya isn’t about our world. It isn’t about the conflict in the Middle East. But it was born there, certainly, and so it’s hard to escape some parallelism. I suppose if I had to formulate the roiling of inner desires that led to this book, I’d say it’s a plea for us to look further than today.

It’s a plea for peace, as told through a tale of war.

—-

The Flames of Shadam Khroeh: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Smashwords

Read an excerpt (scroll down for links). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Lauren Beukes’ latest novel, The Shining Girls, is hot. How hot? So hot that even before US publication, it was snapped up by Leo DiCaprio’s production company to be made into a television series. Why is it so hot? Because Beukes is one of the best writers of speculative fiction working today, and The Shining Girls a fine example of just how good she is. And to what does she credit for the genesis of this latest book? Why, the Internet, of course!

LAUREN BEUKES:

Writers write – that’s the most important thing, getting those pesky words onto the page. But writers also mess around a lot on the Internet.  And sometimes, just sometimes, that can pay off.

Take me, for example. I threw out the idea that I should write about a time-travelling serial killer during a bit of silly Twitter banter. And then quickly deleted the tweet because I realized I had to write that, right now, before someone else thought of it.

I had the image of a limping man giving a little girl an impossible toy that hadn’t been invented yet and a promise that he would be back to get it when she was grown up. I knew he had a house that opens onto other times that allows him to stalk young women through the decades. And I knew that when he did come back to find her to fulfill his promise, that she would survive and turn the hunt around.

It’s nice to have a strong premise to start with, but “serial killers” and “time travel” are two genres with a strong tradition, from Silence of The Lambs to Twelve Monkeys. I’m a big fan of the remix and the best mash-ups riff off the best things about the original and subvert them in a way that hopefully says something new or interesting.

Which meant, alas, I couldn’t write Bill & Ted’s Excellent Killing Spree from the dinosaurs to the Dark Ages with a stop-off in World War Two to kill Hitler.  Although that would probably have been a lot of fun.

And in fact there would be no killing Hitler. Not in my universe.

Between grandfather paradoxes, multiverse theory and the natural inclinations of subatomic mesons, I opted for classic Greek tragedy-style fatalism. By trying to resist your fate, you put into action all the events that will ensure that it comes about. Throw in some loops and snarls and paradoxes, and hey, voila!

You know what else has loops and snarls and ugly echoes that come up again and again? History.  Especially recent history.

Which is why I decided to contain the time travel over 60 years, from 1931 to 1993 (thereby specifically avoiding cell phones, the Internet, CCTV, Google Streetview and Reddit jumping on board to solve the mystery in two days flat)

There are obvious parallels in the book; the Great Depression of the 30s and our current recession, surveillance society and erosion of privacy in the name of the War on Terror, mirroring the tactics of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the fact that women’s right to control their own bodies is apparently still somehow up for question according to politicians.  But I was also interested in how cities have reshaped around highways, how the world has changed and how we’ve adapted, how all of that explains who we are right now. I could do that through the eyes of my serial killer, Harper Curtis, who is too cynical to see anything but ruin and rot, but we can pull focus to see the bigger picture.

I read a lot, watched documentaries and YouTube videos, listened to oral histories, re-visited Chicago, where the novel is set, to location scout and interview insightful people from Chicago architects to criminal defense laywers, cops, historians, sports reporters and music journalists.

On the other side of this remix, I had to contend with the stereotype of the serial killer.

I tracked the killings very carefully across the timelines with a murder wall above my desk full of notecards and red string and evocative photographs of the eras; Harper’s killing timeline, which gets uglier and more elaborate as he goes on, jumping all over the place so his MO is impossible to track, the actual historical timeline, the totem objects he leaves behind on the bodies and the novel’s timeline, playing out between his story, Kirby, the survivor’s, and the young women of the title.

I also did a lot of research. It was a sad horror reading up on true crime cases. The banal reality is that serial killers are generally not the Chianti-sipping diabolically sophisticated Hannibal Lecter predators of our popular imagination. Most of them are vile and violent losers with impotence issues and very little insight into why they do what they do.

But despite the lack of inner life, in the news and in fiction, serial killers usually get more attention than their victims. There are so many dead girls. Dead girls every day. At worst, the young women are a bit of violent titillation, the gorgeous tragic blonde with glazed blue eyes and her dress rucked up to expose her stockings, lying with limbs akimbo in a spreading pool of blood, or chained up naked in a basement having her eyeball gouged out.

At best, they’re just one more piece in the bloody puzzle the detective has to solve. A tragic loss, especially one so young and beautiful, but we usually don’t get to know a whole lot about who she was before she was a corpse.

All of which meant I was much more interested in “the shining girls” Harper goes after than writing about him.

Killers often have a general type – which could be vulnerable people at risk, like sex workers or runaway kids, or much more specific, like Ted Bundy’s predilection for co-eds with brown hair and a middle parting.

But what if it wasn’t a physical type?

What if my killer was attracted to young women with a spark, who stood out in their time, who weren’t afraid to fight convention, or were still afraid, but pushed through anyway, who had fire in their guts and a burning curiosity and the desire to set the world alight. That would drive my killer insane. He would have to cut it out of them.

Trigger warning. There is cutting. The violence in the book is terse, but it is shocking. It’s supposed to be. Because real violence is shocking. And we shouldn’t forget that, what violence is, what it does to us, personally, and the ripples it sends out through society.

There’s a moment in the book where Kirby says, “How am I supposed to let this shit go?” pulling down the scarf she uses to hide the scar across her throat. And she’s right. How can we?

I dealt with it by narrating the attacks not from the killer’s perspective, riding on his shoulder, complicit, getting off on it, but from the victims’, the horror hung on a few terrible details right at the end of a chapter that has been all about their lives. We’re with them at the end, in the shock and pain and fear and outrage.

I tried to make it about the emotional impact. To make it real. I worked to make the women breathe on the page, so you would feel the loss of them. Not just as mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, but as people in their own right, from a young activist to a bohemian architect accused of being a dirty Red, an African American Rosie the Riveter war widow or a burlesque dancer who literally glows because she dances in radium paint and Kirby, the one who got away, but who has allowed her life to become derailed by the attack.

Ultimately it’s a story about obsession, free will and determinism; Harper’s compulsion to kill and Kirby’s obsession with finding him, being trapped by fate or kicking back against it.

—-

The Shining Girls: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the trailer (US|UK). Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter.

It’s not unusual for authors to play with words in their stories. It’s slightly more unusual for authors to take chances with the meaning of their stories — and to see if the meaning of the stories will change if the words are changed, in a deliberate way. With The Gist, author Michael Marshall Smith is doing both. Here he explains how and why he’s doing it.

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH:

I don’t actually remember when or how or why I had the idea for The Gist—which is odd, as it’s ended up taking about ten years of my life. As a writer, I’m normally a pretty direct kind of guy. I don’t do fancy. I distrust artifice. I may wrestle with a Big Idea in a novel once in a while but it generally winds up being subservient to character and plot, and the books themselves are as straightforward as I can make them. The Gist had a complex circularity embedded within it from the start, however, and the idea sits front and centre.

The underlying notion is a simple one—Chinese whispers. It occurred to me that it might be intriguing to write a story and have it translated through a series of languages, before bringing it back around to English, to check what had happened in the meantime—to see if the ‘gist’ survived. To make it more interesting I decided to make the original story about the process of translation, too… or at least, I think that’s what happened. It may be that I started writing a story which featured a low-rent scuffler, a loser in every respect apart from having an exceptional facility with languages, who’s given the job of translating a book out of a language no-one’s never seen before… and that’s what gave me the idea of the translation project. I’m not sure. It must have happened one way or the other, but I can’t recall which was chicken and which was egg. The question loops back on itself, as the gist often does.

Either way, the translation aspect remained a pipe dream while I wrote the actual story, which took an unaccountably long time. Usually I like to get a first draft down as quickly as possible, preferably in a day, two or three at most. A handful have taken a few weeks to shoo into the cage, in between working on other things. The Gist took about five years, adding a little here, and a little there, with several months in between re-opening the file. I’m not sure why this was and I’ve never written anything else that way, but it meant that I was a significantly older person when I finished than I had been when I started, which is rather appropriate, given how the story turns.

When the story was finally done, and edited, I rubbed my hands together and prepared to embark upon the fun part. Nine months later, by then somewhat battle-scarred, I finally had a chain set up. I had agreeable individuals ready to translate the original into Italian, then from Italian into Polish, and from Polish into French. The final part of the journey, from French back to English, had always been earmarked for my old and dear friend Nicholas Royle, a writer whose work I admire very much and who was a source of great inspiration and support when I started to write. I’d originally hoped the chain might pass through a language using non-Roman characters, like Japanese or Hebrew, but it proved too hard to get the ins and outs to work: one of many things this project has shown me is how lucky I am to write in English, as other languages are far more patchily supported when it comes to translation. This struck me again when I gave a presentation on The Gist at the Sharjah Literary festival in the United Arab Emirates last year, as I was dependant upon simultaneous translation to communicate and unable to even guess at the title of the panel on which I was appearing.

Eventually I lit the blue touch paper and withdrew. At which point… nothing happened. The Italian translation never materialized, and so the whole thing ground to a halt. After two years I regretfully gave up, and prepared to use the story as the centerpiece of a new collection instead. But fortunately Bill Schafer at Subterranean, who’d been an enthusiastic, determined (and patient) supporter of the project from the start, prevailed upon me to give it one more try. I did, shortening the chain markedly and going to people upon whom I knew I could rely—Benoît Domis and Nick Royle. In a surprisingly short period of time these translations were done. I blocked out the design in the style of the Roycrafters (to whom reference is made in the story), and handed it over to Subterranean, who have made a fantastic job of turning this idea into a reality.

And it’s not done yet. Later this year The Gist will make the leap into the virtual, courtesy of one of my French publishers, Alain Nevant. His company Bragelonne will be publishing the story as an ebook, deploying an innovative app model that allows you to tap on any given paragraph of the story to alternate between the original English, the French, or the translated version. If you wish, you can even mix and match throughout, setting the gist free of any particular writer or language.

We all translate, all the time. Any given word, each collection of letters, is merely that: an arbitrary jumble of black squiggles upon which meaning has been conferred by history and convention. A word is not a thing, but merely an agreed method of referencing a thing, and these vary over time and space: what is comprehensible here and now would not be comprehensible there, or then. Every time we use a word in any language we are using something concrete to evoke the intangible, like using your hands to capture air. That’s not possible, of course, and never has been and never will be—and yet somehow we still manage to communicate, and run our lives, and buy cars, and order complicated coffees, and tell people we love them, and have them understand.

That’s the everyday miracle of language, the way in which through art we are translated. The big idea with The Gist was to celebrate how astonishing that is.

—-

The Gist: Subterranean Press|Amazon

Read an excerpt (scroll down). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

In today’s Big Idea, Campbell Award nominee Mur Lafferty takes on both the serious (Hurricane Katrina) and the less-than-serious (humor! Which is funny!) while writing about her novel The Shambling Guide to New York City. Hey, did I mention she’s a Campbell Award nominee? I did? Well, it’s true, you know.

MUR LAFFERTY:

I don’t know about you, but when disaster strikes, I often feel lost and impotent. The biggest fear for my area is hurricanes; we don’t get earthquakes or tornadoes and no one really cares enough about us for a terrorist attack. I’m not a trained EMT or part of the Red Cross or particularly good at a lot of manual labor. I’m also the kind of person who would show up, want to help, and completely mess everything up by getting in the way.* So I get the sense of, when shit happens, there is nothing I can do. Or should do.

When hurricane Katrina landed in 2005, I was writing for RPGs at the time. New Orleans went under water and I had my usual stress of unable to do ANYTHING. But a proactive RPG writer, Dave Wendt, came up with the idea of writing a sourcebook based on New Orleans and have the proceeds benefit the Red Cross. I was excited! This was using a skill I had that wouldn’t get in the way of anyone! Long story short, since this isn’t about THAT book, but about the book that birthed it, my mind came up with a little look at New Orleans from a tourist zombie’s eyes, and a visiting zombie is going to need what humans need: a tour guide. So I wrote a 4000 word piece called “The Shambling Guide to New Orleans,” which was just a look around the city from the eyes of a perky undead tour guide who loved her city so much she wanted to keep her job after her death. It told people where they could sleep, what bars and clubs were welcoming to monsters, etc. I had my friend Angi Shearstone do four paintings of the tour guide in her element, and that was our donation.

But the idea of what kind of travel guide monsters would need wouldn’t let me go. I started fiddling with a book about a human woman who discovers that a) monsters are real, b) they like to travel just like humans, and c) they need their own kind of travel guides. And there’s a publishing company forming with eager writers, but they have no editors with experience. She cajoles her way into the job and discovers some pretty weird stuff- even without the “monsters are in the city” truth.

She also learns about the office life of the undead and monster lifestyle, mainly that there are no sexual harassment laws when you work with succubi and incubi, the zombies keep their lunch in the fridge, and locked doors don’t stop nosey water sprites who can just seep under the door. There’s also the etiquette involved- they don’t like being called “monsters” – it’s “coterie.” And the people who build Frankestein’s monsters don’t call themselves Frankensteins, they prefer “zoetists” – those who work with the magic of life.

It shouldn’t surprise you that I was a rabid fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was in high school.** The very weird thing is that I didn’t realize how much those books influenced me until I had finished Shambling Guide. I suppose that’s a good thing, else I would have been stressed about perceived similarities, but I’ve been very lucky that one review said my book was like, “If Douglas Adams*** had written an episode of Buffy.” When I did my re-read, I kept hearing Peter Jones (“The Book” from the radio play) in my head reading the Shambling Guide excerpts at the end of each chapter, although his voice is wholly inappropriate for my “The Book.”

I’m thinking Vincent Price for “The Book.” Maybe Bea Arthur. Only, they’re dead.

The book (The Shambling Guide to New York City, not “The Book” within the book, also called TSGNYC. I can understand the confusion) is dedicated to my husband. Not only because I love him, but also because he made me submit it to Orbit instead of just podcasting it, as was my plan. So, thanks Jim. But it’s dedicated in part to Douglas Adams, because without his heavy influence and ability to spark a girl’s mind this book wouldn’t exist.

Humor is tough. You can read Adams and Willis and Pratchett and think, well hell, that’s easy. Put funny words together in a sentence! Something hangs in the sky the same way bricks don’t! Instant humor! But it’s not. That’s like saying that all professional baking needs is the ability to mix flour and salt and baking soda together. Yeah, you can throw stuff into a bowl but that doesn’t mean it can rise. I enjoy writing humor but I wish I understood it better. It just sort of happens when I write, I have trouble articulating how or why. I tend to think if I could articulate it, I’d be better at it, but maybe not. Maybe I’d just be able to tell others how to do it.

I got a “how to write humor” lecture off of Audible once, and it was racist/sexist/homobphobic as shit. Dude was very proud of a time he used “fruit” to describe a gay person in a joke. I’m not kidding.

Women! Amirite? </macfarlane>

So my Big Idea- hurricane, zombie tour guide, deep-seated Douglas Adams influence, and wandering into the great vast unknown called “humor.” It’s been a very interesting trek getting here, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Footnotes:

* I’m good at this. Seriously. My husband was in an accident just this morning, and after urgent care, I ran ahead of him to prop open the front door so he could get into the house easily, and two birds flew into the house. Two.

** I’m still a fan, but at the time “rabid” meant listening to the bootlegged radio tapes over and over and over again. The stores in the NC mountains didn’t carry a lot of BBC radio back in 1991. I’ve since purchased many versions of Adams’ work, including the radio play, hoping to kill my pirate karma.

*** Being too shy to meet Douglas Adams is my biggest regret, by the way. He was on tour promoting the Starship Titanic video game and we were at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and we walked by his booth. He was tall. We were too shy to say hello. He went back to England and died three years later. Seize the day, guys. Seriously.

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Readers often have default expectations when it comes to their reading — default expectations that we call “tropes.” But where do you go as a writer when the tropes don’t take you where your characters need to be? It’s a question that Rhiannon Held explores today as she writes about her new novel, Tarnished.

RHIANNON HELD:

Tarnished is the second book in my series, and if I had to articulate an over-arcing big idea for the whole series, it’s that I love to explore emotional truths tied to situations that don’t come up in typical urban fantasy tropes. In the first book, Silver, those non-trope situations were born from the religion and culture that I created for my werewolves. In Tarnished, I decided I wanted to find the emotional resonance in non-trope leadership strategies, and romantic relationships.

At the end of Silver my two main characters, Andrew and Silver, were poised to challenge for leadership of the largest werewolf pack in North America. In the typical urban fantasy trope as I’ve encountered it, usually the protagonist’s resistance to being Grand Supernatural Poobah begins as internal: she wouldn’t be any good at it! No one would accept her! Then, when she agrees, the resistance switches to being external: the rock golems won’t listen to a meat bag! The shapeshifters won’t listen to anyone banging a golem!

But once they’ve set aside their initial internal objections, would protagonists really automatically be totally committed to leading? Obviously they have to learn how to win everyone over, but would the protagonists really be completely awesome at leading once everyone’s behind them? Book 1 ended with Andrew and Silver’s decision to try to lead, and I decided that Book 2 needed to explore exactly what it would take to get there. Do they have the self-confidence to do it? Is that self-confidence strong enough to withstand everyone else’s doubt? Can they make hard decisions and keep their cool when people question those decisions? Can they admit they were wrong when they make mistakes? Can they delegate and trust others to get things done?

And can they lead, as opposed to just shouting louder than everyone else? Often werewolf alphas are portrayed as being all about physical strength, or if not physical strength, at least strength of emotional bullying. Andrew is somewhat slight in stature and slow from previous injuries; Silver can’t shift and can’t use her left arm. If they want to win the alphaship, they have do something other than shout loudest and punch hardest: they have to court allies, they have to coax people, they have to lead by example. I really wanted to showcase different leadership strategies, because while stories are often about the underdog beating the muscle-bound alpha, the underdog too often uses mystical punching powers that beat the alpha’s physical punching abilities. Why does punching have to be the measure of success?

Tarnished also introduces a new POV: Susan. She’s human and has a child with John, the Seattle alpha. She also has her moments of going toe-to-toe in fights with stronger, faster werewolves, but with her I also wanted to explore a different kind of romantic relationship. In Book 1, Andrew and Silver were somewhat typical of urban fantasies: they met, they were attracted to each other, obstacles kept them apart, but they got together in the end. In Book 2, I show them working as a functioning, loving team, so the romantic tension switches over to Susan and John.

Whether in books, movies, or television, I’ve always wanted more opportunities to cheer a couple on to working out their problems. That’s what gets you through life, after all—not giving up after the first big fight. Work through the fight and the relationship often ends up stronger on the other side. Of course, that’s not to say that life isn’t also filled with truly irreconcilable differences or people who are assholes. Staying to try desperately to change things in those situations can make everyone miserable. The way I think of it is that you want to preserve and care for a precious connection between two people, rather than upholding some ideal of not splitting up for moral reasons even if you have no connection left at all.

The trouble is that in fiction, the relationships being “worked on” are usually only based on irreconcilable differences or assholery. In that case, of course you’re cheering for the couple to break up! That way, one can get with the other hot, passionate love interest introduced in this book who is clearly so much better for him or her. Or else you’re rolling your eyes while waiting for the couple who’s off-again every book to provide cheap romantic tension to get their laughable miscommunication straightened out so they can be on-again.

Susan and John are already together. They have a child. They love each other, but their relationship is on the rocks because John lets himself be ashamed of her and misguidedly tries to protect her by keeping her out of the werewolf world. That’s something that can be worked out—I hope it’s something the readers want to see worked out!—because why should love be sacrificed to social expectations? But reconciliation is something they both have to work hard to achieve.

Hopefully playing with non-trope situations can help knock aside a few of the most annoying tropes as well. If my characters can remind readers that natural charisma doesn’t mean you’re born knowing exactly how to lead; people who aren’t hot, single twenty-somethings fall in love; and protecting your love by keeping them in ignorance of the supernatural world is forgetting they’re a consenting adult… so much the better!

—-

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Anyone who reads fairy tales knows that things happen in the tales for seemingly no reason at all. But just because there’s no reason in then doesn’t mean something interesting can’t happen when reason is added to them. Just ask Madeleine Robins, who mined a classic fairy tale when imagining Sold for Endless Rue.

MADELEINE ROBINS:

It started with a conversation. Or rather, an idea about a conversation.

When my kids were small we read a picture book of Rapunzel, gorgeously illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.  You know: pregnant wife craves rampion, sends husband out to get it; he steals it from the garden of a witch, who catches him and demands his unborn child in return.  The witch locks the child in a tower, where the girl grows her hair long enough for a passing prince to climb up.  Merriment ensues.

Zelinsky’s art sets the story in an early Renaissance could-be-Italy, and the central spread, chock full of drama, is of the witch taking the baby.  There’s a rumpled bed with the mother, post-partum, lying exhausted among the sheets. There’s the young husband, sitting with his head in his hands, horrified at what he’s given away.  And there’s the black clad sorceress, a classic old hag, stealing from the room with the newborn babe in her arms.

Well, that musta been a hell of a conversation. Imagine the husband coming home: Honey, I got you your vegetables, but there’s a catch: the witch gets the kid. What would his wife say to him? And why does the witch want the baby? In fairy tales motivations don’t matter: the witch wants the baby because she’s a witch.  But I am contrary and difficult and I want a real motive for taking that child.  Sold for Endless Rue is, among other things, my attempt to do that.

As happens with these sorts of bolt-from-the blue notions, it sat around gathering dust-bunnies and stray factoids while I wrote other things. I began cursorily reading up on daily life in the Renaissance, thinking of ways to rehabilitate the witch. Maybe she’s a midwife?  At least that would give her a reason to be in the room when the baby was born.  But why take the kid?

I had nuthin.

And then I stumbled across a factoid that rewrote my whole idea of the middle ages and, by the way, this story.  The first medical school in Europe, the Scuola Medicina Salernitana, not only had women as students, but women instructors.  One of the most famous, Trotula di Ruggiero (immortalized in the Jack and Jill rhyme as “old Dame Trot”), specialized in women’s medicine–what we’d call OB/GYN.  Her texts on the subject were in use for centuries.  Dame Trot was not a damsel or a peasant.  She was a professional woman. How cool is that?

One of my secret vices: I love medical history, medical mysteries, medical technology.  Now I had an excuse to research the Scuola and dig deeper into medical theory of the time. Boy, did they have theories. Most of them are scary-laughable, but some of them were solidly sensible (for instance, the Scuola recommended a moderate diet, clean living, and lots of sleep).  Pretty quickly it was clear to me my witch wasn’t a witch but a doctor, and that her reason for taking the baby was rooted somehow in her ambition.

I hate the sort of historical fiction where the heroine is a 21st century soul in a 13th century houppelande.  Unless you show me why that character is an outlier from her own culture, you lose me.  How would a peasant girl even think of becoming a physician, a profession overwhelmingly male, occupied by those wealthy enough to have the education required to enter the Scuola?  Where would she get, for lack of a better word, the balls?

Then, among the dust-bunnies and factoids I’d been collecting, I got this image of a child running up a hill, trying to escape someone very scary who is as determined to catch her and beat her to death as she is to escape.  She reaches the top of the hill and is stopped cold by her first sight of the sea, stretching out from the bay of Salerno. It overwhelms her with its vastness and strangeness, the sight of the city spilling down into the harbor, the newness of things she’d never imagined. And then she hears the sound of her pursuer and runs again.

That’s where Laura’s story begins.  Everything she is comes from one moment when even terror can’t stop her curiosity, and when determination is all that keeps her alive.  That’s how she can go against the grain of her time and place.

There are things Laura loses in gaining what she wants.  There are people she loses.  Just like now, devoting yourself to your profession can have very personal cost.  Taking that baby, in Laura’s mind, evens old scores.

But of course, taking the baby is only half the story.  Babies, even babies raised in the towers of academe, grow up, and make plans of their own…

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A bad thing happens, and we want justice for it. How far would we go for that justice? And what happens if in the pursuit of justice, we are tempted to act injudiciously? It’s the question that confronts author Chelsea Pitcher in her novel The S-Word.

CHELSEA PITCHER:

I’m a pretty pacifistic person. I don’t shoot guns or get turned on by knives. I’ve never even been in a physical fight (outside of sibling roughhousing). But once in a while, I dream of being a vigilante.

Vigilante-me sits atop a darkened high-rise and looks down at the city below. She scours the alleys for murderers and rapists, fingers twitching at the thought of revenge. She doesn’t wear skin-tight leather or a cape, but she does have a penchant for black, and there are probably boots involved. She makes the world a better place, picking up the justice system’s slack.

She’s a heroine.

It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Deep down, I think we all have vigilante versions of ourselves hovering just beneath the surface of our skin. We see injustice in the world, we feel horrified, and we don’t know what to do to make things right. But the hero-inside knows, and she is ever vigilant, waiting for the right moment to break free and save the day.

I started writing “The S-Word” with this real-world vigilante in mind. Seventeen-year-old Angie is strong, determined, and wicked smart, but she isn’t a masked avenger bringing villains to justice in the dark. She’s a high school student living in a world where bullying is commonplace and suicide is seen as a viable escape. When her best friend, Lizzie, is bullied by the entire school and takes her own life, Angie stops playing the bystander and starts taking action.

That inner vigilante comes out.

After that, everything should be simple, right? The villains are caught, and the hero lives, if not happily, at least contentedly ever after. But trying to pinpoint villains in a society where everyone contributed, through action and passivity, to a teenage girl’s undoing, was harder than I anticipated. Where, even, to begin?

What followed were a series of interrogations, where both Angie and I attempted to uncover the events leading up to Lizzie’s demise. Who participated in the bullying, and why? Who tried to intervene? Who did nothing? Slowly a tapestry revealed itself, made up of dozens of interwoven threads. Angie was able to see, through careful sleuthing, not only who contributed directly to Lizzie’s torment, but also whose silence allowed the bullying to flourish. Now, all she had to do was take that information to the school administrators, and justice could be served…

Except, she didn’t.

Angie, in fact, had very different plans. That’s the problem with vigilantism: you can only work around the law for so long before you feel like you’re above the law. And Angie had done such a good job interrogating her suspects…Why shouldn’t she be the one to punish them? Why shouldn’t she take an eye for an eye, and make them sorry for Lizzie’s suffering—

Wait. What was happening to Angie?

Suddenly, my big idea shifted to something much darker than I’d expected. I was no longer dealing with a heroine’s noble attempt to bring justice to a broken world. I was dealing with the very real possibility of Angie losing her humanity and becoming a villain. After all, how many times can we exact vengeance before our sense of right and wrong becomes blurred? How many times can we be cruel, even to cruel people, before we forget how it feels to be kind?

So my big idea morphed, and mutated, and had little idea babies of its own. “The S-Word” stopped being a story about vigilantes, and became a study in that oh-so-flimsy line between good and evil in us all. And, by the end of it, I couldn’t help envisioning a vigilante and a villain crouching inside of me, each holding the other’s hand, two sides to the same coin, whispering: Let us out, just for a moment… 

What could go wrong?

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In his Big Idea piece for Portal, a series-ending novel that he’s written with Eric Flint, Ryk E. Spoor delves into two things critical to today’s modern science fiction writers: The secret to writing hard SF, and the secret to bringing a hard SF series to a realistic but (hopefully) satisfying close. Curious? You should be.

RYK E. SPOOR:

Back in 2004, I’d just published my second book with Baen – the short novel Diamonds Are Forever, as the first third of the Mountain Magic collection. This had been written based on an idea sketched out by Eric Flint, and the two of us had both been pleased by the way that turned out. I now had no books under contract and, while Digital Knight hadn’t done terribly badly, Jim Baen wasn’t quite ready to give the go-ahead to another solo work by me.

So Eric mentioned that there was this idea he’d had, and tried to write twice, about a weird fossil being discovered on the K-T boundary that also turned out to have a connection to an alien structure found by space probes (his original plan, as I recall, had it be on Ceres). He’d never gotten very far, because he felt it needed something that would give it the “hard edge” of real SF in some manner that was also accessible… and he thought that the kind of stuff I liked to do with characters like Jason Wood and Clint Slade was exactly what he was looking for.

For me, this was kinda scary. HARD science fiction wasn’t an area I’d contemplated getting into. Oh, it wasn’t entirely out of my feasible zone (like Eric’s big moneymaker, alternate history, which I wouldn’t touch with a forty-foot adamantium pole) but my preference lies definitely in the Space Opera and Fantasy realms. And Eric wanted real hard SF – near-future, using extrapolations of real technology, with parts of it solid enough to ring like steel when someone hammered on them.

Despite my nervousness over this, I realized this was a big opportunity, so I took a deep breath and said “Sure, sounds great!”

The result was Boundary. Published in 2006, Boundary followed a varied cast of characters including paleontologist Helen Sutter, engineer Joe Buckley, sensor genius A.J. Baker, and superspy Madeline Fathom in a pure-science adventure that started in a dusty desert fossil dig and ended in an alien base on Mars. In some ways this was one of the hardest pieces of work I’d ever had to do, because I had to study up on a lot of technology and science that I’d only known peripherally – NERVA rockets, spaceship design considerations, Martian landscape and characteristics, and others – and then figure out two crucial things:

1)  How to present all the necessary, hard-science details to the reader without boring the living hell out of said reader, and

2)  When to STOP.

That second bit is a crucial, and very scary, part of writing hard SF. You cannot get it all exactly right, not without writing textbooks on each and every subject, and you don’t have hundreds of pages to make your technical points. If you’re lucky, you have two paragraphs to make the point before the reader’s attention begins to wander down the page, looking for the next thing that isn’t an infodump. And even if you think you can get away with a few paragraphs on everything, to learn everything you might need well enough to write authoritatively on it… well, it’ll take you a lot longer than your contractual deadline allows you.

At the same time, you have to get enough right that the reader’s willing to either trust you, or overlook your flaws later on. A feeling of versimilitude has to pervade a hard-SF work. One of the tricks to do this, of course, is make sure that something you as an author do know something about is brought to the foreground frequently, so anyone who reads it will say “hey, this guy knows his stuff”. For me, that was various sensor technologies, and A.J. Baker was my go-to guy to provide commentary – and realistic technology with gee-gosh-wow capabilities – that helped provide a foundation to build on.

But there were – and still are – areas in which I had to decide that I would ignore details of reality for the sake of dramatics; for instance, many space-travel times are based on idealized distances and circumstances in many cases. Even there, though, you’ve got to be careful; disregard the wrong aspect of reality, or do it too cavalierly, and you’ve lost all the solidity and trust you might have had.

Boundary sold quite well, so I guess Eric and I didn’t do too badly on that score. So Baen contracted for two sequels. With various delays, it wasn’t until 2010 that the second book, Threshold, was released. Threshold took our heroes from Mars to Ceres and eventually to the Jupiter system, in ships both new and very, very old indeed. Threshold also contained the only real interpersonal violence and combat in the entire trilogy, mostly caused by the actions of one particular individual.

The original plan for the series had been for the adventures of our crew to arrive at Saturn’s moon Enceladus for a final great discovery and wrap-up; but the ending of Threshold marooned them on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and we came to two realizations: first, getting them off that moon and home was going to take most, if not all, of the third book. And second – these guys are starting to get kinda old to be traipsing around the solar system. Over thirteen years elapses between the opening of Boundary and the ending of Threshold. The youngest member of the main cast, Jackie Secord (a teenager at the beginning of Boundary), is over 30, with former boy genius A. J. Baker just about reaching his forties and his wife Helen well over 50. While I assumed that their future had improved medical care and lifespan, that’s still pushing it for people heading into the most dangerous and remote areas of space.

So now – May 7^th – the third and final adventure of the Boundary trilogy, Portal, will be released, and I think it is the best of the three, because it draws on everything I’ve learned in the ten years since I was first published and gives our heroes what I think is their grandest, purest adventure of all – finding a way to not only survive disaster, but find a way to return home on their own, despite all odds… and with one last, wonderful discovery for all mankind.

The realization I had to finish their adventures was, itself, a bit daunting. Yet in a hard SF universe, your heroes can’t really be immortal, can’t be dashing hither and yon throughout the cosmos without a care for the fact that reflexes dull, bodies age, dangers suffered take their toll. Even cosmic chew-toy Joe Buckley has to get cut a break in the end; the latter is, of course, a running joke at Baen, in which characters named “Joe Buckley” suffer various amusing demises at the hands of multiple authors. Eric and I had decided that we would not, in fact, kill Joe – just make it look like we were going to kill him off.

As of this writing, off the top of my head, Joe has survived three spaceship crashes, a fall off the top of an arroyo, a spacesuit puncture, being marooned below Europa’s ice, and shot with a spaceship’s main cannon (which was intended for shooting large vessels or stationary bases). Of course, he hasn’t been alone on all of these, and the entire main cast has gone through various deadly situations.

Despite all the dangers, though, Eric and I painted a positive world, and one I liked visiting; here the excesses of the past couple of decades had been finally moderated, the world had not fallen into some kind of dystopia, the USA had been joined by multiple other countries as true superpowers, and the new space race was helping to fuel a new technological renaissance with the help of the clues left by the alien “Bemmies” in their deserted bases. Medical science was advancing, international cooperation was working, and people were basically living their lives as well as could be expected.

I feel extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to write these stories with Eric’s help. He did a lot of handholding – and writing, and rewriting – in the early days. As time’s gone on, he’s given me more and more leeway in writing them, to the point that Portal’s mostly my work from end to end… but based on an idea that Eric had, and infused to a great extent with his viewpoints and always, always guided by his advice on how to handle various aspects of the story.

I’m a bit sorry to say goodbye to most of these characters; I’ve spent a lot of time with them over the last eight years, and most of them are good people. Some I knew from the beginning, and saw where they were going – Helen Sutter and A.J. Baker’s relationship was clear to me pretty much as soon as I had them meet, for instance – while others decided they were going to surprise me. Dr. Nicholas Glendale was supposed to be a very minor character, appearing in a couple of scenes and then disappearing. Instead, he insisted on staying around, and became a strong secondary character in all three books. General Alberich Hohenheim was originally slated for death… but not only Eric and I, but a number of the beta-readers as well, felt that he deserved better than an unseen, unsung death on that floating tomb, so he gets a chance at survival and redemption. Larry Conley was supposed to just be a Tuckerization and handwave – and instead he ended up being a continuing character who plays significant parts in Threshold and Portal.

Madeline Fathom was originally meant to be an antagonist, colder and deadlier, but Eric wisely remodeled her and she instead became the rock on which most of the characters could lean… while she leaned on quiet, patient Joe Buckley when she had a rare moment of doubt. I hadn’t seen that one coming at first, but once it started the relationship became obvious in hindsight.

All things do come to an end eventually, though, and in this case I had to work hard to bring that end to a conclusion that I really felt good about. In a hard-science context, I had a huge challenge in arranging the events of the last major sequences – anyone who reads it will see the really tough part probably right away. The principles of everything that happens from the time that our heroes descend into Europa until the time they leave are correct, but how well the details of certain events would really hold up… I don’t know. Heck, I don’t have the scientific background or the computer resources to even set about trying to model a lot of it.

But dramatically they work, and for the sake of a story… probability has to just take a bow and get out of the way. In my works, the heroes triumph over their odds, and they get to come home, and come home they all do in the end, with the few bad guys having gotten their just deserts and the heroics recognized and rewarded.

You’ll note that I said I’m sorry to say goodbye to the characters, but not to the universe. That’s very deliberate. For while the adventures of one set of people may be over, as long as there are people, there will be others picking up that torch and carrying it, outwards to wherever humanity travels, to the edge of possibility… and perhaps beyond. As Helen says at the end of Portal: “To the end… of the beginning.”

The universe of Boundary is not over, and you will see it again… in a different light, through different eyes, but, perhaps, not all that different, after all, when the universe challenges ordinary people to do their best … and they become extraordinary.

And all of it started when Dr. Helen Sutter looked at a single little fossil…

—-

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Humans are very concerned about how we treat each other. We’re somewhat less concerned (in general) in how we treat animals of other species. What will this mean when we meet animals, not only of other species, but from other planets? At what remove will we put them to us then? It’s an interesting thought, one that Christian Schoon delves into with his new novel Zenn Scarlett.

CHRISTIAN SCHOON:

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: smart, thoughtful, logic-driven person, and one of my all-time favorite authors and “Creationism? Surely you jest…” go-to-guys. A few years ago, another smart person, animal rights activist and author Peter Singer, asked why Dawkins, logical-yet-carnivore, thought it was ethical to eat meat. Dawkins’ reply:

“What I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven’t yet produced to break out of that. It’s a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.”

We’ll come back to this.

So, my Big Bookish Idea was pretty much average-size on arrival. I had a fairly common author-moment: image swims up out of the depths, brief languid backstroke on surface, submerges again. The visual was of my heroine, a female but otherwise blurry, balanced on the snout of a very large, clearly unearthly creature.

So far, idea not so big. Plenty of stories about humans, somewhere in some future, interacting with large, alien animals.

The next time she showed up, more clues: The animal was injured, she was unafraid, she was there to help it. She was a teenage girl training to be an exoveterinarian. A bit later, her environment appeared: a science-based cloister and exovet clinic/school on a slightly down-at-the-heels Mars. Soon, the girl, named Zenn, begins to have disorienting interludes where she seems to be “sharing” thoughts, or at least sensations, with some of her alien patients. She was raised in a house of science, however, and knows there’s no evidence for anything like ESP. But something bizarre is going on. Or maybe she’s just losing her mind.

Then came the backstory of xenophobic, anti-alien sentiment running through the societies of both Earth and its Martian colonies. They have reasons for this, but they’re questionable. Now I began to glimpse the outlines of my Big, or at least, Large-Format-Paperback Idea. (Not claiming unique, here, of course.)

A quick but relevant aside: since moving from Los Angeles to a farmstead in Iowa several years ago, I became involved with several different local animal welfare groups. So, there are horses on our pastures rescued from abusive situations, and I’ve worked to rehab and re-home equines and other animals confiscated by the authorities, from full-grown black bears and cougars to Burmese pythons and alligators. I’m saying I have some experience with humans doing some pretty bad things to animals, generally because it never occurred to them that they needed to behave in any other way, basically because these animals weren’t human. So, speciesism.

Of course, speciesism as a trope is anything but new in SF&F. In fact, it’s rife, and you can likely think of more examples than I can. But, since it’s a subject that touches most of us in our daily lives, I was more than happy to park at least one of my theme-mobiles in its front yard, put it up on blocks and remove the wheels. And now we’re edging back around to Mr. Dawkins.

Those of us who eat meat or eggs or drink milk, wear leather, or benefit from experimentation on animals? Hard to say we’re not overt speciesists, and Dawkins basically admits this, at least where his grocery list is concerned. One can, and most people certainly do, argue the moral merit of human needs trumping all other species’ needs. But as more and more research results verify the continuum-ness of the human-animal continuum, the argument from simple superiority gets less tenable. So, on one side,  the usual arguments from marginal cases, discontinuous mind theory and the centrality of consciousness gambit; on other side, religion or pure philosophy. The speciesist position, in the end, still seems to be “Humans aren’t just smart animals. They’re different in a way that makes them better.” Dawkins doesn’t make this argument about food animals. He bluntly admits he lacks the “social courage” to bring his behavior into line with his intellect and go vegan. I applaud his honesty.

But especially concerning to me, especially in the West, and especially significant for our society’s young, is our often-noted, rapidly increasing distance from anything remotely non-human in our lives, beyond the special case of non-food companion animals. Out of sight, out of caring. This is one of the reasons most of us, perhaps Mr. Dawkins included, are entirely able to overlook, rationalize or repress that fact that most of the animals we eat are raised and killed hidden from us in factory farming or similar operations that are anything but humane (I grew up in the rural Midwest. I know this for a plain, no bullshit fact. Appetite-suppressing details on request).

So, do smart, thoughtful humans still continue to exploit animals in some significant, morally troubling ways? Yes, they do. Would our rampant speciesism change if, like my heroine Zenn, all humans could intimately sense the pain and fear of animals in distress? Maybe. Maybe not. Humans have a long, complicated and confounding history with the animals they eat and/or use in other ways to enhance or, in some cases, that allowed certain human cultures to assemble themselves in the first place.

So, my idea, big, pocket-sized, well-worn or otherwise, was simple (and, one hopes, somewhat camouflaged within the off-world adventure, skiffy intrigue and cross-species thought-sharing). That idea was to put some of my story’s attention on what human empathy and compassion mean, or what they might provoke, or how they could affect someone with an inhumanly intimate connection to the interior mentality of the Other. Plus… exovets wrangling big-ass alien animals. I know! Right?

—-

Zenn Scarlett: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Let’s talk about sex. Yes, sex! Why? Because Delilah S. Dawson wants to, and it’s her Big Idea slot, for her new novel Wicked As She Wants. And I am okay with that. So here we go!

DELILAH S. DAWSON:

Yes, that’s a dude in a blouse with an oiled chest, but I promise you’re in the right place. My books might end up on the romance shelves, and there may be a steamy hot scene on an airship brothel. But there’s a Big Idea at work—and one that goes far beyond frivolous bodice ripping and sparkly vampires. See, it’s a little known fact that at the heart of every romance book, there’s something very special.

An empowered woman who likes to have sex.

And that’s not a bad thing, a shameful thing, or an embarrassing thing. That’s a great thing!

There’s this strange discrepancy in the book world: at the base of everything we do, human beings crave love and sex, and yet to delve too deeply into romance alters how a book is critically viewed.  A little love in a good book makes it great and iconic; what would Tolkien’s books be without Aragorn and Arwen? And yet once you open the bedroom door and describe a woman’s passion, much less a man’s testicles, the entire tone of the book changes, and suddenly it’s on a different shelf and not “literature”.

In the words of Rodney Dangerfield, romance writers get no respect.

At least not until they hit the New York Times Bestseller list or make seven figures a year, which actually happens pretty often, and for good reason. Romance books can have characters just as complex and stories just as masterly as any other genre– the heaving bosoms are just a bonus. And you can pick up some good tips for the bedroom, too.

I didn’t actually set out to write romance, and I’m not going to lie: as a shy Southern girl, I had to get drunk to write that first sex scene. I’m a geek, and my Blud series started with a dream I had after watching too much Buffy: I woke up naked in a weird forest with a hot dude in a top hat staring at me. He sounded just like Spike, and I knew that he was a blood drinker but not a vampire. The world of Sang expanded from this tiny seed. Half the people are blood drinkers, but I didn’t want to follow the rule about wealthy vampires ruling the world. So I ghettoized them and filled the forests and back alleys with likewise blood-drinking animals. The adorably fuzzy rabbits want to suck your bone marrow with a straw, the horses are man-eaters, and the rats are the size of corgis and a hundred times more vicious. Transportation is therefore handled by armored train, dirigible, and submarine, and clockwork animals fulfill the roles of pets.

Voila! A new steampunk science fiction/fantasy world is born.

But you won’t find it in the Scifi/Fantasy section of your bookstore or on i09. Not only because Blouse Guy is on the cover or because I was asked to add hot sex scenes to my fantasy adventure, but also because the focus is on the heroine, Ahnastasia.

I’ve always felt like Princess Anastasia Nikolaevna got a raw deal in history: she was killed for political reasons before she was even a threat. That’s why I’ve given my Ahna fangs, talons, and the nature of a fierce and royal predator. When she first meets Blouse Guy, she tries to eat him. Luckily, she fails. Their romance is dogged by extraordinary hindrances, like vampiric political assassins and bloodthirsty unicorns, but they also face the same sort of problems you see in our own world: prejudice, destiny, pride, duty, addiction, bad choices, and trying to understand who you’ll become in a relationship without losing yourself completely. It takes a strong man to love a strong woman, so don’t let that blouse fool you; this romantic couple can fight back to back and leave a pile of drained bodies in their wake.

And you know what? There’s awesome sex, too. Because no matter how erudite we might like to appear, at the heart of all good stories is love, and at the animal root of all love is terrific sex. Finding her power as a sensual woman and taking control of her sexuality is part of Ahna’s journey to becoming a queen, and the story would be incomplete without opening that door for the reader. Although romance might not garner respect in literary circles, the romance genre takes a huge chunk of the market, with 48% of mass market paperback sales categorized as romance. From historical fiction to urban fantasy, the majority of these stories focus on a woman who undergoes a major life change related to owning her own pleasure and finding confidence, love and/or her destiny.

And women like that sort of thing.

Guys should, too, because a confident and passionate woman is far more likely to rock your world, in bed and out of it.

So that’s my big idea: it’s empowering to have great sex, to write about great sex, and to read about great sex, even if you do so covertly on your e-reader.

Your homework is to do at least one of those three things today and report back about how you feel afterward. If the answer isn’t ”awesome” or “empowered”, remember that practice makes perfect. And if you ever need recommendations for intelligently written romance, just ask. If I can get over my embarrassment and write a sex scene in a submarine, so can you.

—-

Wicked As She Wants: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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You like odd couples? In The Lives of Tao, author Wesley Chu has got an odd couple for you. A very odd couple.

WESLEY CHU:

I originally had a little trouble pinpointing the Big Idea for The Lives of Tao. Should I use the big idea I had when I first conceived the story, or should I go with the other big idea that manifested at the end? After all, big ideas could morph, couldn’t they?

I’m not great at elevator pitching, so for The Lives of Tao, I developed a little skit between the aliens in the book and humanity:

Alien: I’ve possessed you. Now, do as I command.

Human: Hmm… yeah, no. I don’t think so. I’m going to go watch TV instead.

Alien: But I’m all wise and advanced and…and stuff.

Human: How about this? Make it worth my while.

I’m one of those writers who love to build a mousetrap, plop the little fuzzballs in, and watch them suffer. In The Lives of Tao, I began by asking this: “What if many important historical events since the beginning of time were just part of a war between two alien factions using humanity as pawns in a massive game of chess?”

Now, aliens messing with mankind is a time-honored tradition in science fiction. We’re just so easy to mess with. For some reason, they’re always here to eat us, enslave us, take our resources, or steal our women, and they usually have a pretty easy time of it. After all, they’ve got the ships, technology, and in Joss Whedon’s case, space chariots. Humans only ever win, thanks to good ole’ fashioned ingenuity, in the last thirty minutes of the movie.

So that was my original mousetrap. I had assumed we humans were the mice and the aliens, known as the Quasing, were part of the trap. But then, I made two crucial decisions that changed the entire concept of my original big idea. I decided that, in order to complicate the plot and the relationship between the humans and the aliens, the inhabiting Quasings couldn’t control the humans; they could only talk to them. Then I made it so that once the alien inhabited the human, they couldn’t leave until the human host dies.

Suddenly, the aliens weren’t part of the mousetrap. They were right there alongside the humans trying to figure things out. This is when the big idea morphed. See, it is one thing to be someone in a position of power: when you’re the boss, captain, or leader, you give orders and others follow. Easy as pie. There’s little deviation from that chain of command.

However, what if you’re not the boss? What if you’re an all-wise ancient alien inhabiting a human and you want him to do something, but he refuses? Toss in thousands of years of alien manipulation, a civil war over control of humanity’s evolution, and now the bigger, better mousetrap is set. Time to put the little fuzzballs in and see what happens.

At the beginning of The Lives of Tao, Tao’s host had just died while on a mission for the Prophus, one of the factions fighting in the alien civil war. Unable to survive long in Earth’s atmosphere, Tao fled into the first available human, Roen Tan, an overweight lazy guy meandering through life.

I had created complete histories for Tao and Roen, and wanted to see how their personalities clashed. On one hand, we had Tao who was an all-wise alien who usually inhabited super spies and once had inhabited the likes of Genghis Khan, Lafayette, and the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. On the other hand, we had Roen, an overweight thirty-something loser who still ate frozen pizzas for dinner, got tongue-tied around women, and sucked wind every time he climbed a couple flights of stairs. As expected, the relationship started out testy, but what grew out of that trial by fire gradually turned into the highlight of the book, and it surpassed every other plot point in the novel.

So in the end, the big idea for The Lives of Tao is about the friendship that grew between Roen and Tao as they worked together to achieve both their objectives. Along the way, Roen helped Tao continue the fight against the humanity-manipulating Genjix while Tao helped turn Roen into a dynamic character who managed to lose weight, develop a stiff jab, find love, and ultimately discover a purpose in life.

All Tao needed to do was give Roen a reason to make it worth his while.

—-

The Lives of Tao: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

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Sidewise Award-winning author (and my college classmate) Martin Berman-Gorvine likes playing with time, space and narrative forms, all of which combine not only in his latest novel, Seven Against Mars, but also in this very Big Idea, in which the heroines of his novel, shall we say, have their opinions on the book, reading and several other topics.

MARTIN BERMAN-GORVINE:

I sighed and took my fingers off the keyboard. “Girls, how can I finish this essay for John Scalzi’s blog if you keep interrupting me?” I said.

“But part of the point you’re making is that characters gain a life of their own and take over your story,” 15-year-old Rachel Zilber said in her lilting Polish accent. “So we’re not interrupting, we’re helping you!”

“Yeah, you writers think you’re all that,” Katie Webb said, her Texas Panhandle twang thicker than… I’d better not complete that simile, she’s pretty sensitive to any perceived slights to her country, and in the 22nd century, whence she comes, the Republic of Texas is one powerful piece of the former USA. “But without readers, your stories just lie there on the page like cow flops on my Daddy’s back forty. Ain’t that right, Rachel?”

Rachel’s red curls jiggled as she nodded agreement. “That’s what I found out, Katie. I mean, I sure was surprised when the silly stories I wrote on my typewriter to keep my mind off things…”

“…like the fact the Nazis had you and your parents trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto along with thousands of other Jewish people who hadn’t never done them no harm…”

“…somehow came to life, and I woke up on the jungle planet Venus, where my very surprised hero Zap-Gun Jack Flash practically tripped over me, and then you practically tripped over both of us! But even more surprising was…”

“The fact that your heroine, the beautiful Martian Princess Anya Olympulska, looked just like you and spoke Polish, only she thought she was speaking Martian?”

“She does not look like me—” Rachel said, as Katie snorted— “and stop interrupting, Katie.”

I put my head in my hands and groaned. “I wish you’d both quit interrupting and let me get back to work!” Why did I have to make them teenagers, anyway? I have two teenage sons, you’d think I’d have had my fill of annoying adolescents. But I’ll get my revenge on Rachel and Katie in the sequel, where they’ll have to rescue an even younger, much brattier girl from the tyrant of Venus.

“As I was saying,” Rachel said, “it was even more surprising that once I was there, in my own ‘fictional’ world, I couldn’t make any further changes to it just by writing about them.”

“Less’n you showed them to me first,” Katie put in. I eyed her warily. She was the same age as Rachel, a little shorter even, but with muscles solid from farm work in a country that had gone back to a pre-industrial age. But was her accent always this strong, or was she laying it on a little thick now for some reason? Testing me, maybe, to see if I was apt to confuse a rural diction with low intelligence? I hoped not, partly because I was the one who’d created her but mostly because I didn’t want to wind up with a black eye.

“Oh, and by the way, you can have these back,” Rachel said, handing me books by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. “Neither of us could make head or tail of them.”

“But some people might say that Seven Against Mars is postmodernist science fiction, in the same vein as Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books or the Zoe Kazan movie ‘Ruby Sparks,’” I said, carefully reshelving the books in the special section of my room I reserve for books I swear I’m going to get around to reading but never do.

“It’s a lot of hogwash, you ask me,” Katie said. “And I’ve washed a lot of hogs in my time, and let me tell you, when I’m done that water don’t half stink. I ain’t surprised I ain’t never heard of Monsieur Bar-thees and Monsieur Derriere in the universe Rachel and I live in, ’cause their stuff must come from some parallel universe where people find French literary theory interesting!”

I wasn’t surprised she felt that way. Postmodern theory never held much appeal for me, even when I had to study it as an English major at the University of Chicago, and in recent decades many of the novels written in this mode seem to have devolved into a game for readers, albeit a game with all the fun drained out of it.

“It’s not a game for us,” Rachel put in, as if reading my mind. “We only wanted to use our ‘powers’ to rescue our parents from the real world—mine from the Nazis and Katie’s from a bunch of marauding Alabamans.”

“Don’t give away the whole story, Rachel,” Katie said. “We still want people to read the book. It’s got an evil villain it, and laser guns, and space battles, and that dangerous mix of virgins and live volcanoes. What’s the matter? What did I say?”

Rachel was turning redder than the planet Mars.

—-

Seven Against Mars: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Today’s metaphor for ideas comes to you from Josin L. McQuein, author of the new YA science fiction book Arclight. And what is that metaphor? Hint: They are small, they are many, and if you are not careful, they are coming for you — or at least at you, in their multitudes. Prepare yourself.

JOSIN L. McQUEIN:

I got my first big idea when I was an idiot.

I was a teenager, and had come to the conclusion that getting paid to make stuff up was the best invention of all time, so I was going to be a writer – YAY!

Honestly, that was entirety of my thought process. I wanted to write a novel. Any novel. The characters didn’t matter. The plot didn’t matter. Someone hand me a pencil and get out of my way. Unfortunately, those things that didn’t matter kind of did, and there was no story without them. Besides, novels were too long – I’d never be able to write that many words.

I was stuck.

Then the ants came.

They came by the thousands, descending on a rain forest hikers’ hostel in South America, skittering down walls in the pitch black of midnight. They terrified with their silence and their numbers. They spread out, filling every space, and covering every surface – human skin, included. And as they spread, they consumed. With one unimaginably tiny mouthful multiplied by a seeming infinity at a time, they devoured all of the vermin in the hotel – rats several thousand times their size, and scorpions who, by right, should have been the higher predator.

Even the hikers weren’t immune, because no matter how many they stomped, or sprayed, or torched, there were more ants waiting to replace the dead, and they had absolutely no aversion to trying a bite or twelve of human-on-the-run. By the time the sun came up, the hostel had become a battleground, barely held, where the humans chose to make their stand against the horde. In the silence that followed the struggle, they found themselves less victors, and more survivors left behind in a place that was fundamentally changed.

They were changed.

They had seen the superiority of human ingenuity fall to something that, in its individual form, was miniscule – insignificant. But together, all of those teeny tiny pieces became something fearsome and unstoppable.

And that became the big idea that mattered – the one that said “big” was the wrong way to go.

Rather than having a society fall to ruin beneath their own Tower of Babel, I wanted to go the other way, touting the brilliance of things that got smaller and smaller until those things could slip between particles, and alter the fundamental definition of reality.

Viruses were tiny enough to fit the bill, but those had been run into the ground lately. I wanted something different; I wanted my devourer. I wanted my ants with their singular focus and hive mind. And I had just enough knowledge of fact and fiction to create a use for them by pairing them off with nanotech run amok.

I started pulling scenes from different pieces I’d kept for years, and stitched them into a sort of Franken-novel that made absolutely no sense. (Zombies in space! Now, with extra vampires! Don’t ask about the unicorn. Seriously, you don’t want to know…) But it was a real start, and bit-by-tiny-bit, those ridiculous pieces transformed into something else.

A new setting came with hearing descriptions of the claustrophobia accompanying gradual blindness. Instead of starting the characters in a void, they were now on the edge of one, watching their world grow darker by the day. They’d fight it, of course, clinging to the daylight world they knew, but would also always be faced with the inevitability that the darkness was coming for them.

Local and world news fell into the mix, highlighting the dangers of viewing the world through the lens of a single opinion held by a single person. I wanted to explore how quickly paranoia can turn to mass madness, and how a charismatic individual with motives that seem logical, or at least well intentioned, can destroy a community. And with that, a queen stepped up to lead my little hive.

Each new idea bumped and jostled the others into line, creating the friction required for conflict, until, one day, I read through my notes and scribbles and realized they were all running together on a thousand tiny feet. Things clicked. They were no longer random pages or paragraphs or things I’d hastily written down while half-asleep. They’d become something both massive and cohesive, with a momentum I couldn’t stop.

I had characters! I had a plot! (I had an over attachment to ellipses, but I swear I’m getting help…) The important part was that the girl who couldn’t write a novel, now had one in her hands. And in the end, thanks to all of those little ideas, I finally had a big one.

—-
Arclight: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Nothing is constant but change — and changing times can be an interesting opportunity for a writer to document the upheaval of societies, standards and even power structures (fictional or otherwise). So Brian McClellan discovered with Promise of Blood, the first of his Powder Mage series. Here’s McClellan to explain.

BRIAN McCLELLAN:

A little over three years ago, my wife brought home the first episode of a British television program called Sharpe, based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels. It was a wonderful show that featured Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, a tough-as-nails officer rising up the ranks of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. Needless to say, I was intrigued. A show where Sean Bean doesn’t die? Sounds like a blast.

At this point I was working on ideas for my next novel. I was a little down in the dumps from rejections over my last book and was looking for an idea that would really hook the imagination. I wanted to write something that featured magic based on gunpowder, and had been toying with the idea of a short story set during the Prohibition.

This all changed when my wife brought home Sharpe. By half way through the show I had decided that I’d be writing an epic fantasy novel based on the technology level of the Napoleonic Wars. By the end of the episode I had a rough outline in my head. I started writing it the next day.

I quickly realized the wealth of inspiration for a novel that could come from that time period. Napoleon’s rise to power and the subsequent struggle for control throughout the various Coalition Wars is an epic tale all on its own that could be viewed from any of a hundred different perspectives.

Men like Napoleon were products of the changing times, somehow managing to navigate the turmoil brought about by countless factions vying for control of the political and social landscape. During the French Revolution, the decadence of monarchs like Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette was eclipsed by the brutal reign of Madame la Guillotine. The age of kings and their courts was coming to an end.

At the same time, the Industrial Revolution swept across Europe, changing the way people thought about everything from politics and manufacturing to agriculture and class roles. Technology advanced at a pace never before seen. These advances gave men the ability to feed and clothe the greater population, while also allowing armies to kill on a greater scale than previously imagined.

Kings were pulled down. Some empires expanded to include colonies in distant places; others were dissolved in favor of governments run by the people. Promise of Blood begins in this vein with a revolution; a bloody coup. Field Marshal Tamas sends his king and the high nobility of his beloved Adro to the guillotine, almost single-handedly beginning a new era of independence.

Tamas represents a rising class of sorcerers, ‘Powder Mages’, who gain speed, strength, and endurance from ingesting gunpowder. This new form of modern magic is at odds with the old elemental sorcery of the ‘Privileged’ which is practiced almost exclusively by the nobility. Caught in the middle are the common people, many of whom possess “knacks” or magical talents of their own.

I wanted the various magic systems to reflect the class struggles that follow a period of revolution and upheaval. I wanted to explore what would happen if magic evolved along with technology. How does magic change when gunpowder is introduced?  What if the very existence of this new technology of powder and steel changed the DNA of the magical world? How would it affect the outcome of a revolution?

Writing Promise of Blood allowed me to address themes of power, privilege, risk and revolution. Historical events like the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars helped inspire me to create compelling characters faced with the momentous task of rebuilding a world where not only society, but magic itself, is changing.

—-

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In the novel A Stranger in Olondria, reading is the thing. But author Sofia Samatar asks: Is it the only thing? Here are her further thoughts about a life of letters (and beyond).

SOFIA SAMATAR:

When I wrote A Stranger in Olondria, I wanted a whole world of my own, with all the details: hymns and hairstyles and dialects and desserts. Above all, I wanted books—and not just books, but literary history. I wanted to create both a world and its libraries.

The result is a novel about reading. Jevick, the main character, comes from a non-literate society, but his Olondrian tutor teaches him to read and write. After that, all Jevick wants is to travel to Olondria, the land of books. But when his dream comes true, his life starts falling apart: he becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young woman from his own country.

Jevick’s quest to get rid of his ghost brings up all sorts of issues he’s tried to suppress, such as his rejection of his homeland and his status as a wealthy merchant. It also throws him into a struggle he doesn’t understand, a violent conflict between rival Olondrian cults. His dilemma allowed me to explore not only the contradictions of self-imposed exile, but also the question of how well one can ever “know” a foreign culture. Jevick thinks he knows Olondria because he’s read about it, and because he possesses a single Olondrian friend, his tutor. He quickly realizes how much is missing from his view of this foreign country, including things his tutor has deliberately hidden from him.

He also begins to question the meaning of reading. Jevick lives to read, but he must come to terms with a world in which not everyone is literate, in which certain things are lost in the transition from an oral to a literate condition, and in which literacy is linked to oppressive power.

I wrote A Stranger in Olondria in Yambio, South Sudan, where I taught high school English: that is, I was working between languages, and between oral and written traditions. The experience brought home to me the links between reading and writing, my favorite activities, and the history of colonialism. This was an awareness I’d grown up with, as my father, a Somali academic, wrote a book about Somali oral poetry and the anti-colonial struggle, and dedicated it to my brother and me. It was in Sudan, though, that these issues crystallized for me, leading to a book that celebrates reading, while also expressing some anxiety about it.

Without giving too much away, I can say that Jevick’s choices reflect his growing awareness that reading, while wonderful, isn’t everything. It isn’t the story. Most stories, in both Jevick’s world and ours, can’t be read. These are the stories of those who do not or cannot write, or of those whose writings are destroyed, deprived of interpreters, illegible or lost.

Ultimately, A Stranger in Olondria is a book-lover’s book, one that takes reading seriously, in all its beauty and terror. I worked hard to reflect some of the tensions between oral and literate cultures without taking a stand in favor of either. And along the way, I got to make up religious texts, epic poetry, manuals for dream interpretation, painting styles and critiques of painting styles, pamphlets on etiquette, musical genres and children’s books.

Of course, not all of that material wound up in the novel! I’ve got enough left over to fill a library.

—-

A Stranger in Olondria: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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London! Cops! The supernatural! Author Paul Cornell! What do they all have in common? The answer: London Falling, Cornell’s latest adventure, which puts a pair of the city’s finest on a most unusual beat. And how do they approach it? As Cornell explains, by being what they are: Cops.

PAUL CORNELL:

London Falling is the story of a team of modern undercover police in London, who, in the pursuit of their duties, accidentally gain the ability to see the monsters and the magic of the conjoined cities.  (Because London is actually made up of two cities, Westminster and The City.  No, I mean in real life.)  After my heroes finish panicking, they decide the only way to save themselves and those they love is to use (real) police tactics against what is now clearly a truly terrifying ‘suspect’.

This is my first urban fantasy novel, the start of a series, and I like to think I’ve written it in the voice I used for my Doctor Who work.  That is to say, these are stories I have to tell, that come bursting out of me.  They’re emotional, and hopefully scary, and move along quite fast.

I’ve written on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog about how, while London Falling is very much an urban fantasy, it’s also a classic SF problem-solving novel in the tradition of editor John W. Campbell.  My heroes, being police, use their Ops Board to take apart concepts like ‘ghosts’.  They won’t settle for the mythic.  I have a rational basis for the psychogeography of my London, which will become clearer in each volume in the series.  And though this is a series, I’m determined that each book should be a complete story, that my heroes will close a case every time.

Writing these books has made it clear to me that I have a tendency to see the world in terms of underlying forces.  In my own life I track concepts like the gravity of capital, grace, the Marxist flow of history.  Sometimes I overdo it, and become like a Roman or a paranoiac, seeing auspices and patterns when there’s nothing there.  The London of my books is full of hidden influences, both real (like how the cities are shaped by planning permission and house prices) and invented, like the ‘extra boroughs’ that orbit the capital in some other sort of space.  (At least one of these can be accessed by catching a ghost bus.)  Add that to my heroes’ instincts to take apart everything they see, and you have a mechanism which makes me automatically examine both the world I created and the real one.  It’s startling, actually, where the police procedural can take one in that regard.

For instance, I have a scene set at a New Age Fair, where our heroes, new to the business of magic, go to work out what’s real and what isn’t.  They have to navigate a series of different maps, economic, political, social and magical, all inside one hall.  The bigger stalls at either end are where the magical power is, but that’s also because the richer stores can afford the bigger pitches.  Those with actual knowledge tend towards poor and wear old clothes.  And my two black undercover coppers discover there aren’t many non-Caucasians in this socio-economic group.  This conflict between hidden forces grows even more tense in the second novel, which I’ve just finished, underlying the plot of which is the insistence of a part of the occult community that money (rather than terrifying ‘favours’) should be allowed in their transactions.

These forces create the tectonic plates of hidden London.  I can feel them myself at two particular points.  If you’re in the capital, perhaps you could try them.  Get out of Tottenham Court Road tube, and go to the point where St. Giles High Street meets High Holborn, with St. Giles in the Fields (that name says a lot) on your right.  Before they built the new office blocks in front of you to the left, one could feel a weird dislocation at that point, as if planners and priests and magi had all failed to decide on something.  It was like a little No Man’s Land on the way to Forbidden Planet, a place where things got a bit seedy just for fifty yards.  Those new towers have balanced it somehow, but I can still just about feel it.  A dowser might say it’s about buried rivers or underground rail tunnels.  I don’t know what it’s about, unless the throne with the motto over it in that old church is relevant, but perhaps it’s all heading into psychoarchaeology now.

The other location is in Baker Street underground station.  Walk from the Bakerloo line down to the Eastbound Circle Line platform.  You’ll find yourself, before you get to the war memorial on your right, moving faster as you head down an actual physical hill, with the rumples and lumps of a meadow, hardly obscured by the flooring.  It’s like you’re suddenly, in the very heart of urbanity, being encouraged to rush down, like in childhood, or over the top, with the deaths of 1914-1918 waiting on the other side.  I feel something startling there, too.  The shafts of sunlight that can spring suddenly down into that station help with it.

I should mention, finally, that there’s one word that doesn’t appear in the book: ‘magic’.  My coppers and intelligence analyst just aren’t comfortable with it.  And I thought it’d be fun, like with the word ‘Mafia’ in The Godfather, to see how far I could get without using it.  Turns out that’s all the way.

I hope you’ll enjoy London Falling, and that it might give you a few more things to see and feel next time you’re in London.  Perhaps I should have talked more here about the characters, all of whom (particularly genius intelligence analyst Lisa Ross) are dear to me, all of whom we meet in depth.  But character, like everything else, is shaped by landscape, and, just for once, I wanted to write about what lies underneath.

Adieu, and thanks for listening.

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London Falling: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Author Shana Mlawski is on a quest to rethink the “quest” fantasy novel. Does she succeed in her novel Hammer of Witches? Here she is to make the argument.

SHANA MLAWSKI:

Here’s a joke I sometimes tell when people ask me about the inspiration behind Hammer of Witches: “I was getting tired of medieval European fantasies, so I wrote a book about wizards in 15th century Europe.”

It’s not really a joke, though. I mean it. Let me explain.

Nowadays many authors subvert the tropes of traditional fantasy quest stories, mainly by making them meaner and bloodier. (As if the problem with Lord of the Rings was that it wasn’t violent enough!) But these subversions tend to avoid grappling with one of the biggest problems with quest fantasies: They’re friggin’ colonialist.

Consider the basic outline of the Hero’s Journey. A young peasant boy (he’s almost definitely a boy—also white, able-bodied, and straight) of unclear parentage leaves his home to answer a call to adventure. He quickly learns he has special talents because of his noble, or even divine, blood. He quests through dungeons, sea voyages, cities, and towns, which our omniscient narrator describes with guidebook precision. These stops provide the hero with villains to slay, victims to save, women to love (or be tempted by), and mentors who supply hints, prophecies, and magical gifts. Be they villain, bystander, love interest, or sage, these secondary characters have one purpose: to help the hero come of age and complete his quest. When the trials are overcome, our boy-hero takes his rightful place as a man, a warrior, a leader, a husband, a messiah, and, often, a king.

It’s a great story—one of my faves, and I say this without irony. And if the Gospels are any indication, Christians love this story as much as I do. The whole thing has a real New Testament vibe to it.

Hammer of Witches asks the question, “What would happen if you took that standard quest story and set it in the real world in 1492?” The answer is, things get real interesting real fast, because Christopher Columbus was a big fan of this story, too. In his letters and diaries he characterizes himself as a poor but brilliant man of mysterious origins who sets out on a holy quest to a foreign land. There, he is helped by the angelic Taíno people, who feed him and give him gifts to help him on his travels. But gasp! Some of the Taíno have revealed themselves to be aggressive non-believers who want to hinder our hero in his quest! Columbus reluctantly but bravely strikes down these foes and takes his rightful place as king—or, at least, governor.

Suddenly our favorite quest story doesn’t look so innocuous, does it? When the map in the front of the book is of Earth Earth instead of Middle Earth, the quest story reveals itself to be a justification for conquest. That’s why these stories tend to have omniscient narrators. For the justification to work, readers must hear only one side of the story, and no one must ever question the teller of the tale. Columbus would agree. He would never let the Taíno share their perspective. To him, that would be like asking if we should get Arwen’s point of view, or the orcs’. It doesn’t make sense, because, in his view, the Taíno are mere side characters in his own legend.

Hammer of Witches approaches the quest story from a different angle. Here the narrator isn’t an omniscient god but a semi-unreliable teenager who spends most of the book unclear on who’s the hero and who’s the villain (or if these terms are even useful). He’s surrounded by stories of Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Taíno, and Classical origins, which continually undermine his perspective. In this fantasy, characters’ powers don’t come from their pure, noble blood but from their ability to uncover and control the meanings of stories. Every time our narrator thinks he has a handle on these stories, some other character butts in to explain why he’s got it all wrong.

Call it postmodern, postcolonial, multicultural. You could even use the term “Talmudic.” It views history as less of a straight line leading to apotheosis but a series of arguments that are constantly in flux. That’s why the joke I made wasn’t really a joke. When you take the familiar medieval European fantasy story and actually set it in medieval Europe, the story doesn’t look so familiar at all.

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Hammer of Witches: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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