Book Recommendations Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Unseen Academicals, Part II

May your sherry whisper wonderful things to you, too

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on April 12, 2024

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Who’s up for practice? Who wants Rincewind on their team? (Me, I do.)

Summary

Glenda and Juliet head back to the university to give themselves an alibi for not being at the match. Ottimony comes in to tell them all about it after leading the wizards there, and he swears that Juliet looks like the girl at the match. Glenda is summoned to the Stollops because Juliet’s dad got a letter from Vetinari, asking him to attend a dinner with the wizards to talk about the future of football. Trev finds Nutt asleep at the university, having eaten a large quotient of Glenda’s pies. He tells Glenda and Juliet what happened, and when Nutt comes to, he start up his work again. But he says a few things about how Trev really feels about his late father that sends Trev catatonic. Glenda asks Nutt how he knows all these things, how he managed not to die, and where he comes from. Nutt isn’t entirely sure; he only knows how he came to be in Ladyship’s castle and that there’s a door in his mind that he can’t access. Nutt thinks about writing love poetry for Trev to give Juliet, and Juliet bothers Glenda the next day about going to a fashion show, which has an ad in the paper next to an article about the origins of football going back a millennia. Glenda agrees to the show, but only after she gets a chance to listen in on the University Council meeting.

The wizards are putting together thoughts for what they need as a team, including the pies, the uniforms, and the fans. Glenda is bemused by the whole conversation and accidentally interjects herself, letting them know that they’ve got it largely wrong—they won’t be able to change much about how football functions, and they won’t be able to dictate how people enjoy it. She also tells them not to make their uniforms sport a UU across the front, or it’ll make the team look like they have bosoms. Ridcully asks what she does, and they all learn that she runs the Night Kitchen and makes the incredible pies they’re all so fond of. After she leaves, Ponder notes that Glenda’s talk of football invoked memories in the group, whether or not they had them; it was a kind of religious experience. Glenda goes with Juliet to a dwarf chainmail fashion show run by Madame Sharon, who has her assistant Pepe measure Juliet and asks them to help her because her model dropped a pickaxe on her foot. Glenda negotiates a hefty sum for Juliet to model the new cloth-like micromail. The wizards begin their first practice round of football, which they don’t rightly understand.

Glenda sees Juliet through her first fashion show. She’s very drunk and stumbles into the next room after it’s over, having a talking with Pepe, who turns out to have converted to being a dwarf with Madame Sharon’s help. They want Juliet to keep working for them, planning to pay her lots of money travel her around the Disc. They know Glenda is the key to her cooperation, so they ask her to consider it, and Glenda decides they’re going home for the night first. Despite the fact that Ridcully promised never to use it for these sorts of purposes, he demands that Ponder let them in to the Cabinet of Curiosity so that it can make them a proper football—because they don’t have one. They can only keep the ball outside the cabinet for about fourteen hours before causing trouble, so Ridcully stops Trev and Nutt in the hall and asks them if they know where to have the ball replicated. He gives them money for the job and they set off. Glenda tells Juliet that they’ll open up a bank account for her so that her father can’t get at her money. Trev and Nutt run into Andy again, and when he threatens Trev, Nutt threatens to break his hand. They make it to a dwarf shop, and ask him to replicate the ball in exchange for money and a university license to make more of them.

Juliet decides she agrees with Glenda about staying in her job at the university, which makes Glenda feel wretched; the next day her picture is in the paper. Trev goes to pee out back while Nutt and the dwarf artisan are working and sees two vampire women outside, which Butt later tells him are protection for Ladyship. Nutt delivers the love poem he wrote for Trev to Glenda, so she can give it to Juliet. Glenda reads the letter for Juliet and knows that Trev didn’t write it, but doesn’t tell her. Pepe wakes to Times reporters in their store and everyone asking about Juliet. King Rhys has the paper sent via clacks, and the grags are in a tizzy about Juliet’s appearance, deeming it undwarfish. Ponder returns the Cabinet’s ball to the Cabinet and they begin creating teams again. (Rincewind tries to get out of this to no avail.) The (former) Dean has arrived at the university, but the game is interrupted by Nutt, who means to tell Ridcully that they’re playing the game all wrong, and more strategy is needed and, indeed, more theater. Trev comes to Nutt’s defense to make sure no one gets upset with him for speaking out of turn, but Ridcully is amenable to the idea. Glenda sells a lot more for Stronginthearm and gives him ideas for whole new troll fashion lines.

Commentary

There are several overlays going on with the Juliet and Trev story, one of them obviously being the Romeo and Juliet angle that you get from her name and the “two houses” being their two football teams. This is mostly funny to me because I saw some Tumblr post just a few days ago that was pointing out that the Montagues and Capulets being “both alike in dignity” as houses did not preclude any level of poshness—they just needed to be the same. Hence, footballer families.

But the more intriguing slice here is the Cyrano parody, at least to me. Nutt is effectively playing the Cyrano part, writing letters on Trev’s behalf, who’s in the Christian role. But the intention isn’t to make a direct parallel, of course, because Nutt clearly isn’t interested in Juliet—he likes Glenda. And I appreciate the lack of conflict, but moreso, I find myself appreciating the fact that someone who’s as bright as Nutt isn’t really interested in someone who’s pretty if they’re not particularly thoughtful? Juliet’s not his type, so no issue there.

And conversely, Juliet’s route to becoming a fashion model for micromail is endearing too, namely due to Glenda learning some things for herself about snuffing out the desire to dream a little bigger. Do I like that it’s helped along by too much sherry? Yes, I do. I wish sherry talked to me like that. Tequila does, though, so I can’t complain too much.

We’re getting more clues on Nutt’s true identity as we go, but I do appreciate that the mystery is drawn out and viewed from multiple character perspectives, making it that much harder to guess point blank.

The bits where the wizards are practicing football are favorites for me because it reads like it’s written by someone who feels exactly the same way about sports that I do. There’s no sense, no real interest in the game itself, nor any inclination toward athleticism (aside from Ridcully’s own personal interest and physical prowess). The only time things make sense is when everyone is thinking about how exciting the game should be, how to generate narrative around it, how to make it a spectacle. I get that part. The rest is just window dressing.

Asides and little thoughts

• Of Vetinari being the wrong sort for Juliet despite being the only available “prince” around, Glenda thinks: Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all. Meaning: We’re honestly not sure if the man is gay, straight, or ace.
• “By his own admission, he would rather run ten miles, leap a five-bar gate and climb a big hill than engage in any athletic activity.” Me too, Ponder.
• Ridcully’s entire response to the concept of possible gayness—that could really just be some wizard having an affair with a married woman and he’s not getting it—being that there’s not enough love in the world and also “Well done, that man!” (which is, itself, actually in response to people playing football and grabbing his attention) is pretty perfect, all things considered.

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read up to:

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Book Recommendations Nordic Visions

Nordic Visions Provides a Unique Overview of Contemporary Nordic SF, Fantasy, and Horror

A recent anthology celebrates a broad range of short stories, from ghost stories to fairy tales to alien planets…

By Rowdy Geirsson

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Published on April 11, 2024

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Nordic Visions is an anthology of speculative fiction stories written by Nordic authors and edited by Margrét Helgadóttir. Released by Solaris Books in the fall of 2023, the book’s sixteen short stories are drawn from all of the Nordic nations and the Faroe Islands, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Taken as a whole, the anthology presents a compelling cross-section of original sci-fi, fantasy, and horror originating in a part of the world best known internationally for crime fiction and children’s books.

Helgadóttir’s introduction provides an informative overview of Nordic speculative fiction as a whole and positions the genre within the broader context of the Nordic literary tradition, while also delineating some of the cultural and historical differences found in each of the countries comprising the region. The short stories themselves are organized by country and they cover a wide range of themes—readers will encounter ghosts, far-flung planets, dystopian societies, mythological characters, fairy tale enchantments, and more. While covering a broad range, the selection of stories leans a bit heavier towards science fiction than fantasy, and some entries are, naturally, stronger than others (as is generally the case with any collection or anthology).

Buy the Book

Nordic Visions

edited by Margrét Helgadóttir

The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

Buy Book

Nordic Visions

edited by Margrét Helgadóttir

The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Nonetheless, Nordic Visions provides an excellent introduction to writers of speculative fiction from a region that tends to be overlooked in the genre. Most of the authors featured have also written full-length novels, many of which have been translated into English. A short bio of each author is provided at the end of the book, which serves as a useful guide for anyone who might wish to check out more of the selected authors’ other works. And if you’re interested in seeking out longer works of Nordic speculative fiction, be sure to also check out my earlier piece on “Exploring Nordic Speculative Fiction in Five Novels.”

Without further ado, here’s an overview of some of the many highlights found in Nordic Visions…

“She” by John Ajvide Lindqvist

A very clever little story that opens the anthology after Helgadóttir’s introduction. Written by the only author in the collection to have made a bit of a splash in English language literature (Lindqvist is the author of Let the Right One In), “She” is essentially a ghost story centered around the haunting of a new house built by a married couple in Sweden. As tends to be Lindqvist’s habit, he subverts the usual tropes of his chosen genre, in this instance by connecting the narrative to the horrors of World War II and shining some light on the darker side of modern Swedish history in the process.

“Sing” by Karin Tidbeck

“Sing” is a futuristic story set on the former mining planet of Kiruna (anyone familiar with Sweden should appreciate the name) that’s dominated by a parasitic ecosystem. The story follows the companionship of Aino, an outcast tailor, and Petr, a temporary visitor to Aino’s tiny village. Petr can’t communicate in the planet’s native “singing” language and as he digs deeper into how he might learn it, the disturbing nature of the planet’s ecosystem is revealed. “Sing” originally appeared on Reactor (then Tor.com) in 2013 and can be read here.

“The Cormorant” by Tone Almhjell

“The Cormorant” is Nordic Visions’ ode to the fairy tale, and is in fact based on one from the early 20th century by Regine Normann, who was something of a Norwegian Hans Christian Andersen (thus the tale is a modern age original story rather than a Grimm Brothers- or Asbjørnsen/Moe-style record of a much older one). “The Cormorant” follows a mother and daughter who live apart in isolation from the rest of their coastal village until an innocent but pivotal act triggers a chain reaction that upends their lives. A thickening sense of mystery propels the story forward towards a very effective, magical, and somewhat unsettling conclusion.

“A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer” by Johanna Sinisalo

Johanna Sinisalo, the author of Troll: A Love Story and the original story behind the film Iron Sky, is a highly original sci-fi writer and “A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer” is no exception. This story is set in a future with very few wilderness areas remaining and focuses on a single character who is responsible for using advanced electronics to study the behavior of birds… but of course, things don’t go quite as they should. This one is very compelling and ends on a wonderfully twisted note of cynicism.

“The Wings That Slice the Sky” by Emmi Itäranta

“The Wings That Slice the Sky” is a splendid little retelling of The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic and primary source of Finnish mythology. It starts with a description of the painting The Defense of the Sampo by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, which visually depicts Louhi, the story’s first-person narrator, as she is typically portrayed: a wicked, winged monster. The following pages then proceed to tell Louhi’s side of the story. “The Wings That Slice the Sky” is basically Finland’s answer to Genevieve Gornichec’s retelling of Norse mythology in The Witch’s Heart, only provided in short story form rather than a full-length novel.

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Book Recommendations Short Fiction Spotlight

Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: March 2024

Death, betrayal, and the unexpectedly weird in this month’s short fiction spotlight.

By Alex Brown

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Published on April 12, 2024

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We’re doing death, betrayal, and the unexpectedly weird in this short speculative fiction spotlight. I read these ten stories last month and they were so good I had to go back and read them all again.

“Everything in the Garden is Lovely” by Hannah Yang

Every now and again, a short fiction author hits me with an opening line so striking I can’t stop thinking about it. Hannah Yang gave me one of those with “Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden.” Her story is exactly what the sentence describes. A woman fails to meet the rigid, patriarchal rules of her society—in other words, she cannot have children—and is condemned to be turned into a garden. She’ll give life one way or the other. (Apex Magazine, March 2024; issue 143)

“Flight Pattern” by Azure Arther

Gotta say, I had no idea Azure Arther’s story would end the way it did, given that it opens with a guy casually munching on the last dragonfly on earth while hiding out in a bunker with his android wife. Strong Ex Machina vibes with this one, but with a feminist twist that was thoroughly enjoyable. (Uncharted Magazine)

“Lanterns” by Manu Zolezzi

Winnet, a widow in her sixties, is forced to confront a malevolent abuser in this empowering entry. In Winnet’s town, she sits on the council helping to keep order. When the town council vote to let in the Caravan of Light, Winnet isn’t happy about it. The traveling show breaks the borders between the living and the dead and allows spirits to walk the earth for one night. A creative way to explore abuse, trauma, and community support. (IZ Digital)

“Leprechaun Gold Accepted” by Vivian Chou

I loved this little quirky piece. It’s written in the style of a GoFundMe appeal for covering healthcare costs for a fairy attacked by three children, and the comments various donors have left in support. Vivian Chou’s insightful satire pokes at the ways allies often fall into performance territory, either with performative outrage or offering meaningless sympathy. She touches on the way the system oppresses and how when individuals collectivize under resistance, the system finds another way to get at you. (Flashpoint SF, March 8, 2024)

“Let the Star Explode” by Shingai Njeri Kagunda

In a not too distant future, beings in human shape but decidedly “not human” arrive on Earth. They bring with them technology for star jumping, but now only the wealthy can afford to use it frequently. Karu has the chance to star jump, and the things she experiences during her trip change her in ways she has only begun to understand. It should be no surprise that Shingai Njeri Kagunda has written a beautiful, thought-provoking Afrofuturist tale, but if this is your first introduction to her, get ready for a journey as surreal as Karu’s. (Lightspeed, March 2024; issue 166)

“Marshman” by Sara Omer

A cryptozoologist heads out to a strange swamp near a pit on the outskirts of farmland. The pit is a strange place, made stranger by the mysterious creatures lurking around the rim. The cryptozoologist descends into the pit to explore and gets more than they bargained for. Another win for The Dark in creeping me the hell out! A great story full of looming dread. (The Dark, March 2024; issue 106)

“Naglfar” by Elin Olausson

Elin Olausson’s piece feels the way a storm does, one of those rains where you’re cooped up and miserable inside but it’s too dark and cold to go outside. Hella lives alone in her apartment after her daughter abandoned her to travel the world. She took with her a magic coat and all Hella’s hopes and dreams. The title references a ship from Norse mythology that is made of the finger and toenails of the dead, and it gets even more unsettling from there. (Gamut, March 2024; issue 4)

“Saguaro Wedding” by Jordan Kurella

This was the first story I read in the first issue of Small Wonders I’ve ever read and it was just too perfect to pass up. Jordan Kurella’s flash fiction is about the person officiating a wedding between a crow and saguaro cactus. It’s weird, queer, a little bit Western, and a whole lot random in the best way. (Small Wonders, March 2024; issue 9)

“Summitting the Moon” by Pragathi Bala

A moon landing where the moon does the landing? Pragathi Bala puts a spin on the moon landing by pushing its orbit down until it scrapes the surface of the Earth. Ghis longs to “be in space gazing down at the Earth. She imagined her problems shrinking away—her life turned into a blip when compared to the vastness of space beings.” And in a few days, she’ll get her wish, even if her wife is less than enthused. The premise is just so interesting I couldn’t help but dig this piece. (Escape Pod, March 21, 2024; #933)

“The Witch Who Lives Next Door” by Zoe Kaplan

“Father says the Witch who lives next door is frightening, and a little bit beautiful. Mother says the Witch who lives next door is beautiful, and a little bit frightening.” A child lives next door to a witch in a town where witches are both feared and relied on. As the child and the witch grow their friendship into an apprenticeship, the child learns that being feared and needed aren’t necessarily bad things. A charming story about being your true self. (Kaleidotrope, Spring 2024)

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Book Recommendations Science Fiction

Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

Plenty of exciting hypotheses eventually fall out of scientific favor — but not before they’ve found their way into science fiction!

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: NASA

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Credit: NASA

The history of science is filled with beautiful hypotheses slain by ugly facts. The tendency of the universe to disregard the professional needs of hard-working scientists is something about which little can be done¹. In fact, disproof is a vital and necessary element for scientific progress, no matter how vexing it must have been to Thomas Gold². However, in that interval between hypothesis and disproof, a sufficiently enticing model can inspire intriguing science fiction stories.

Don’t believe me? Here are five science fiction works based on since-discredited science.

Polywater

Russian scientists suggested that under certain conditions, water could be polymerized. Subsequent experimentation revealed that under certain conditions, water could be contaminated, and the results wildly misinterpreted by Russian scientists.

In the context of the Cold War, the possibility that Russia had access to a novel form of water was sufficient to spark fears about a “polywater gap.” This may have helped inspire Wilson Tucker’s decision to incorporate polywater as a key component to the time machine that plays a central role in Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun(1970), in which a politically, militarily, and racially torn America attempts to secure its destiny by dispatching time travelers to map out the near future. Can America be saved with foreknowledge of its unalterable timeline? The answer not only won a Campbell Memorial Award, but the book also won the award in a year other than that in which The Year of the Quiet Sun was published. Time travel!

Memory RNA

James V. McConnell and others believed they had evidence suggesting that memories could be transferred via RNA from one planarian to another. Attempts to reproduce McConnell’s results failed and the model fell out of favor, as models without support do.

Chemically-transferred memory is a wonderful plot enabler. Thus, it was no surprise to see memory RNA appear over and over. Take for example, Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time (1976), in which the memories of a dead 20^th-century American, Jerome Branch Corbell, are transferred into the body of a condemned man. The state that rules the Earth of tomorrow requires a specific mindset for its interstellar starships, which the late Corbell appeared to possess. The state’s assessment is incorrect, as the state realizes once Corbell hijacks his spacecraft for a tour of the distant future.

In fact, A World Out of Time features a number of intriguing but wrong ideas, one of which is…

Bussard Ramjets

Physicist Robert W. Bussard’s 1960 proposal transformed major challenge to relativistic star flight into an asset. He theorized that the thin interstellar medium of hydrogen through which starships would plow could be used as fuel. One could use magnetic fields to divert the hydrogen into a fusion rocket and thus obtain endless fuel and reaction mass. Star farers would not have to worry about being bombarded with relativistic particles and at one gravity forever, the whole galaxy was within reach³!

Too bad that the math does not work and Bussard ramjets, if built, could work far better as brakes than as propulsion systems.

Bussard ramjets were wonderful plot enablers for relativity-curious SF authors, so it was no surprise that ramjets showed up in numerous SF works. Take for example, Lee Killough’s SF procedural The Doppelgänger Gambit (1979), whose plot is kicked off when conniving Jorge Hazlett bilks would-be space colonists by selling them a subpar Bussard Ramjet, with lethal results. Rather than face justice for negligent homicide, Hazlett decides to kill his way to safety with premeditated murder. Of course, it is so hard to stop with just one murder, even in a panopticon state.

Quicksand Moon Dust

Prior to space probes landing on the Moon, the precise nature of the lunar surface was unknown. Among the contending models was Thomas Gold’s⁴ proposal that the lunar surface could be covered in a layer of fine dust. Depending on the properties and the depth, the layer might act like quicksand⁵. As it happens, the lunar surface is dusty, but visitors do not have to worry about sinking into it. That is the only good news. Lunar dust is actually much nastier than Gold envisioned. Abrasive lunar dust is a hazard to machines and humans alike.

Arthur C. Clark’s A Fall of Moondust (1961) embraced the most extreme case of Gold’s model. Deep dry dust seas are traversed by lunar boats conveying tourists. A mishap strands a boat deep beneath the lunar surface. Will rescuers locate and retrieve the tourists in time, or will they smother or be boiled in their own body heat⁶?

The Destruction of Planet V

The region between Mars and Jupiter is filled with a myriad of small bodies. That is not controversial. The Belt’s origin, however, has been the subject of various competing theories over the years. In 1972, M. W. Ovenden proposed that the Belt is the remnant of a large planet that exploded about sixteen million years ago. Subsequent evidence… did not support this model* (imagine an emoticon of extreme disappointment inserted here).

[*Note to the editors at Reactor: please use a “this is an extreme understatement” font for “did not support this model.”]

This is not a huge surprise, given that it would take a phenomenal amount of energy to disrupt a 90-Earth-mass planet⁷, not to mention the total lack of evidence found on Earth for such massive disruption of a nearby world⁸.

Despite what was even at the time overwhelming reason to be skeptical about Ovenden’s model, there was at least one Disco-era SF novel that incorporated the model in a plot-significant way. In fact, Ovenden’s hypothesis may be the least bonkers thing about Charles Sheffield’s Sight of Proteus (1978), in which advanced biofeedback enables form change, which amounts to shape-shifting. Exposure to fragments of the exploded world prove to have unexpected effects on form change. What these effects are will surprise and delight readers.

Just because a hypothesis may be eventually disproven does not mean it cannot be inspirational before that comes to pass. Indeed, some ideas linger in SF long after they have been discarded by the scientific community. The above is only a small sample of a large field. I may have missed some of your favorite examples. In fact, I hope I have. Please entertain us all with other suggestions in comments below.

1. Trust me, you don’t want to go down the “what Lysenko says is science and true” path. ︎
2. Trust me, this is very funny, for reasons that will become apparent… ︎
3. In the reference frame of the traveler. ︎
4. Yes, the same Thomas Gold as in footnote 2. Gold had a talent for being brilliantly wrong in a wide variety of fields. Sometimes he was brilliantly right. Gold correctly identified the source of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s mysterious repeating signal as a pulsar. His success rate was high enough that even his outré suggestions could not be dismissed out of hand. The fact that there’s never been a Thomas Gold Inspirationally Incorrect Hard Science Fiction anthology is one of SF’s great injustices. ︎
5. It is impossible to fully sink in quicksand. I do not recommend quicksand for your body disposal needs. ︎
6. The struggle to save the tourists is reminiscent of the efforts to save the Apollo 13 crew, although, since the novel preceded the Apollo mishap, it cannot have been inspired by it. ︎
7. Even with perfect efficiency, it would take a full week’s worth of the sun’s output to disrupt the Earth. ︎
8. One tends to think of planets as effectively isolated from each other, aside from gravitational perturbation. This is not always the case. The formation of Mercury’s Caloris Planitia about four billion years ago may have deposited up to sixteen million billion tons of debris on Earth. ︎

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Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

Poetry Month 2024: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

Is it a fable?—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love—or what is it?

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” first published in 1862 in Rossetti’s own Goblin Market and Other Poems. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Lizzie and Laura are sisters on the brink of womanhood, who often frequent the rushy brookside near their home. Often, too, they see goblin men tramping down the glen with baskets and dishes overloaded with every succulent fruit that field and forest can provide. Both sisters know better than to deal with or even look at such folk. One evening, when prudent Lizzie has run home, curious Laura stays behind. The goblins offer her their fruit, and accept one of her golden curls as payment. Laura sucks down the irresistible juices of the “globes fair or red” until her lips are sore, then wanders dazedly home.

Lizzie upbraids Laura for staying behind in the twilight, a dangerous hour for maidens. She recounts the story of Jeanie, who had commerce with the goblins only to waste away and die when she could no longer find them and their wares. Laura rejects her sister’s warnings. She’ll seek the goblins again and bring Lizzie back some of their fruit. The two go to their shared bed and sleep peacefully, “cheek to cheek and breast to breast.”

The next day the sisters go about their usual chores and innocent amusements, but Laura drifts “in an absent dream…sick in part.” By the brook in the evening, Lizzie hears the goblins’ customary cry of “Come buy” while Laura hears nothing. That night she lies awake “in a passionate longing”, filled with “baulked desire.” Nor do her daily and nightly watches bring the goblin men back to her. Her one memento of that delirious evening is a kernel-stone from a goblin peach. She tries planting it, but it never sprouts.

Laura sinks into decline, neglecting her chores, eating little. Lizzie, who still hears the goblins, longs to buy their fruit for Laura but fears the exchange will cost her too dear. At last, however, with Laura dwindling toward death, Lizzie waits by the brook in the twilight. When the goblins come, she offers them a silver penny for an apronful of fruit. The goblins insist she must feast on her purchase alongside them. When Lizzie refuses to stay, they attack her and try to force fruit into her mouth. Heroically virginal, she resists their efforts. At last the goblins angrily depart, leaving Lizzie to run home with her face and neck dripping with crushed fruit, “goblin pulp and goblin dew.” “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices,” she beseeches Laura—for Laura’s sake, she has “had to do with goblin merchant men.”

Laura’s appalled that Lizzie will now share her fate, but she can’t resist kissing and kissing her “with a hungry mouth.” Once so luscious, the goblin fruit now scorches her lips and tastes like wormwood. In a burning frenzy, she “gorges on bitterness” until she swoons. Will she die or live? Lizzie watches over her sister until morning, when Laura wakes with her vitality restored.

Years later, when both sisters are wives and mothers, Laura tells her children about her encounter with the goblins and how Lizzie won for her “the fiery antidote” to their poisonous fruit. There is no friend like a sister, is the lesson, and so she bids them to “cling together” as she and Lizzie have done.

What’s Cyclopean: There are pellucid grapes with sugar-sweet sap. The goblins themselves have all manner of animal features, but the most fascinating and out-landish may the wombat-goblin, “obtuse and furry”.

Weirdbuilding: Fairy markets are a common trope—places where all manner of fascinating and dangerous goods may be found for fascinating and dangerous prices. A couple such markets show up in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series: In An Absent Dream draws its title from this week’s poem.

Anne’s Commentary

Welcome to April and Poetry Month! My own first encounter with “Goblin Market” was in an undergraduate course on Victorian literature. I don’t think anyone in the class failed to pick up on the poem’s sexual overtones, but only a couple of students ventured to bring it up. Our instructor was quintessentially a PROFESSOR, tweed-clad and gray-haired and given to bow ties, no less. We didn’t want to come off like a bunch of horny sophomores or to offend someone of his staid demeanor. Midway through the session, we learned a lesson with ramifications far beyond nineteenth-century poetry: Don’t judge a person by their sartorial choices and typically dry address.

This professor had a subscription to Playboy. Or at least he had a copy of the 1973 issue that featured “Goblin Market” in its Ribald Classics column. Playboy credits Jonathan Cott, editor of the 1973 anthology Beyond the Looking Glass, for at last recognizing “the lurid sexual fantasies that raged in Miss Rossetti’s unconscious.” Cott described “Goblin Market” as “the most extreme depiction of repressed eroticism in children’s literature.” Apparently thinking its readership needed less high-flown language, Playboy translated Cott’s statement to “[Goblin Market is] the all-time hard-core pornographic classic for tiny tots.” The poem has had many illustrators over the years, including Christina’s brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Rackham, and Lawrence Housman. None of their illustrations were up to Playboy standards, so the magazine printed several by Kinuko Y. Craft. Our professor kindly let us have a look at Craft’s gorgeous but very much not-safe-for-work interpretations of “Goblin Market.” All kinds of trigger warnings could apply, including attempted rape, consensual but weird sex with semi-anthropomorphic beasties, and sibling incest. Oh, and fruits that look like human genitalia; in addition to their traveling market, the goblins could set up a Grow-Your-Own sex toys business.

Christina Rossetti would write many children’s poems, and it seems that she did publicly claim that “Goblin Market” was one of them. However, she also wrote to her publisher Alexander Macmillan that the poem was not intended for children; this suggests she was aware of the many “adult” interpretations her early masterpiece invited. That paragon of Victorian critics John Ruskin received a (prepublication) copy of “Goblin Market” from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who hoped he’d recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray for publication in Cornhill magazine. Instead Ruskin wrote back that while his sister’s work had “beauty and power,” it was also too riddled with “quaintnesses and offenses” for the marketplace. Maybe Ruskin was only referring to Christina’s atrocious disregard for classical meter and rhyming schemes, but maybe he also had other “quaintnesses and offenses” in mind.

Ruskin (gasp) was wrong: Macmillan published Rossetti’s first commercial volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862, to considerable acclaim from other critics. Not that the other critics were blind to certain “quaint” readings the title piece invited. I think Caroline Norton, who reviewed the book for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1863, nicely sums up the conundrum “Goblin Market” posed then, and may pose still:

“Is it a fable?—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love—or what is it? Let us not too rigorously inquire, but accept it in all its quaint and pleasant mystery.”

Norton does add that, in addition to working as a children’s ballad, “Goblin Market” is a piece that “riper minds may ponder over.” Lots of “riper minds” have, pondering up many allegorical interpretations: sexual/earthly love versus spiritual love, the homoerotic versus the heteronormative, a paean to female solidarity, humanity versus Faery as a parallel to upright Victorian society against foreign/otherly corruption. All that’s fine, but as a lover of the weird, I like Norton’s suggestion that we revel in the poem’s “quaint and pleasant mystery.”

Imagine the scope of the food forest these goblins have cultivated somewhere-elsewhere! Is there a lusher catalog of fruit anywhere else in poetry, or in prose for that matter? Or a “quainter” enumeration of the anthropo-zoological guises that goblins can assume? What’s in it for the goblins, this vending of fruit to maidens and maidens alone? Do they have a complicated fetish involving virgins and proxy oral sex via the virgins’ enthusiastic sucking of their ripe…almost bursting…juicy…fruit…

Because only virgin fructivores can satisfy the goblins’ quirk, they miss out on repeat customers. This is where their likeness to human dealers of addictive drugs falters. But maybe these roaming vendors are on the more malicious end of the goblin spectrum and derive wicked sustenance from the vitality that drains bit by bit from their victims. That the poison in the fruit is also its antidote is an interesting twist. I expect that since a victim can’t find the goblin market a second time, it’s always another maiden who must brave the little monsters in order to obtain fruit, with the second magical requirement being that this other maiden must truly love the first, perhaps in more than the common sisterly way.

The totally conventional ending strikes me as belonging to another and much less interesting poem. Was it meant to appease those of Rossetti’s readers who might have found the preceding stanzas unsettling ? Was it there because Rossetti herself was unsettled? She also dedicated “Goblin Market” to her sister, Maria Francesca. I guess it could have been embarrassing for Maria if the ultimate depiction of sisterhood wasn’t soothingly Victorian normal.

Nothing kinky to see here, folks. Get your nasty minds out of that gutter. And put down that Playboy, I don’t care if it was a professor who brought it to your attention. Oh, the moral perils of modern higher education!

Ruthanna’s Commentary

My longstanding association with “Goblin Fruit” isn’t particularly weird or even ominous. Instead, it’s a quote sent by the first woman I connected with through an online dating site in college. This was the late 90s, so you should be imagining less modern app or even OKcupid, and more the Personals section of the Valley Advocate translated into green-on-black text. And you should imagine my baby-bi self finally admitting that I was less interested in the gender of my dates and more interested in whether they adored mountain thunderstorms, exchanging missives with a marginally-more-experienced potential date, drinking in the promise of “bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, swart-headed mulberries, wild free-born cranberries…”—I definitely got the metaphor, but the pull-quote had no intimations of goblin men, nor of their tendency to disappear after one’s first taste of ruinous fruit.

The date itself was not so exciting as the quote, but I retained the positive—and sapphic—associations. Long-time readers will recall that I was generally inclined to find this kind of appeal where I could get it. For me the goblin market is in downtown Northampton, around the corner from the little store where I exchanged my freshman-year “straight but not narrow” button for “I’m bisexual and I’m not attracted to you,” perhaps in some shadowed corner of Thorne’s Marketplace.

Past the list of luscious produce, however, “Goblin Market” is pretty het in its centralization of female relationships. The core sisterly bond between Lizzie and Laura heralds Frozens to come. Lovers appear only metaphorically in the form of the wickedly tempting goblin men, and chastely off-screen in the form of the husbands presumably necessary for sisters to become “wives with children of their own.” The unnamed husbands are no source of fresh fruit. And a sister might be “kiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d” as the best of possible friends, but that familial passion serves to “cheer one on the tedious way.” Husband and children, by implication, being the correct but tediously un-zaftig choice.

One doesn’t come away from this poem without yearning for fig season. Or at least this one doesn’t.

Where is the boundary between fairy story and the weird? I’m not one for sharp sub-genre divisions, but I also feel like the distinction is real. “The Hide” falls on the weird side of the blurry line, and “Goblin Market” …falls on the side of making lines less blurry. These fae exist to mark the dangers of straying from the well-lit path. Victorian anxieties haven’t quite the nuance of Lovecraftian attraction-repulsion; they offer instead attraction whose repulsiveness is only revealed through Lizzie’s carefully taste-less rescue.

Compare “Whisperer in Darkness,” where alien fae draw travelers underhill and into the cosmos. Both glory and horror are a long way from sweet-talking boys who bed and then abandon. The Mi-Go may offer the ultimate in non-physical chastity, but they also offer alternatively unimaginable pleasures. And they’re faithful if cosmopolitan companions!

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the poem, simply because the opening has lived so long in my head without the rest of the story. If only goblin men hawk remarkable fruits, and only human men offer a safe-but-tedious alternative, that reflects something of Rosetti’s realities that I shouldn’t blame her for depicting. Yet even in fairy stories, I want the lands beyond safe firelight to offer something complicated. Laura’s life ought to be richer for tasting the goblins’ hazards and hazarding their tastes. Quoth Tolkien: “In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them.” 

I’ve been fortunate enough to spend the past couple of days with my not-at-all-tedious wife and sister, chasing down a wild cosmic experience by way of a certain amount of extremely practical logistics (i.e., eclipse road trip). The best real relationships, I think, include a measure of both elevating the mundane and grounding the transcendent. A sharp line between those two aspects seems false, as does any claim that only one belongs in a good life.

I’d have Laura take more than fables from her ill-advised fruit purchase. I’d have her relationship with Lizzie gain something beyond gratitude for her rescue. I’d have her children inherit something beyond warnings. But all of these require another tale. Perhaps we could tell it over a plate of greengages.

Next week, we wrap up the last two chapters of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit! What lies beyond the Crossroads, and how many alt-riders, not to mention semi-innocent bystanders in the rest of the universe, are going to survive it?[end-mark]

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Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From Ana Ellickson’s The Vanishing Station

A YA contemporary fantasy about an underground magic system in San Francisco—and the lengths one girl is willing to go to protect the ones she loves.

By Ana Ellickson

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Published on April 10, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Vanishing Station by Ana Ellickson, a young adult contemporary fantasy novel out from Amulet Books on April 30^th.

Balboa always sings a kundiman while he’s shaving, crooning to his own reflection in the mirror as he swipes a sharp blade across his chin—and I’m not talking Gillette razors, I’m talking a blade sharpened to perfection. A blade he keeps tucked away in his boot for emergencies. A similar blade lies hidden in my backpack, because there’s no way my father would let me wander San Francisco alone at night without a chaperone—even if that chaperone is a blade I’ve named Miss Marybeth.

I only know a miniscule fraction of Tagalog (yes, shame shame), but my dad has sung that kundiman love song enough times for me to know the lyrics backward and forward. It’s called “Dahil Sa Iyo,” and back in 1961, Nat King Cole came to Manila and sang it in Tagalog instead of English. It blew my dad away, hearing a Filipino ballad sung by the Nat King Cole. Like something in his own language was worth sharing with the whole wide world.

I wish he’d tell me more about his homeland.

Hell, I wish he’d tell me why we’re sinking further and further into debt.

With the secrets he spilled last night, I need more answers.

As the sun begins to peek through our slatted garage windows, I pretend to sleep. My dad sings to himself in the mirror, the usual kundiman. With all his rambling about deals with the devil and Six mentioning a debt, I refuse to blindly wait for him to tell me what’s wrong. What if he’s been gambling? He obviously already has trouble with addiction—what if he’s taken it one step further? What if I can stop him from making an even bigger mess? I need to know why we’re falling behind on my mom’s medical payments when he says that he’s working a full-time job. The rent payments are taking care of the property tax, house repairs, and funeral expenses. I’m taking on as many house-painting gigs as I can get, so I’m able to cover my own expenses and save a bit for when Stella breaks down. But somehow, we’re losing money. I’ve seen the overdue statements. It’s just not adding up.

The moment Balboa closes the garage door, I leap out of bed. I wrangle my arms into my backpack straps—all the extra clothes I’ll need for Chen’s Painting Service on this fine Saturday.

It’s not hard to follow him. I keep a block between us, ducking below trash bins when it seems like he’ll turn around. But he doesn’t turn back; he’s only ever trudging forward. At the station, my boots clamber down the stone steps until I’m deep below the earth, sucking in stale air and listening to the whirl of ticket turnstiles.

I pull a shimmering blue-and-white ticket from the machine. Dampened sunlight streams in at the far end of the platform where the concrete opens into air. Behind me, people speak in Spanish, Chinese, English, Hindi, and all sorts of languages mushed together. Balboa hovers a few yards away, far enough to not notice me with an inevitable hangover pulsing inside his head. My heart thuds when the sign flashes san francisco airport train: one minute. I stop listening to the cacophony of voices and the rustling of wings.

Instead, I’m listening for the train. I’m trying to feel its rumble in my bones.

When I was eight—before my dad came to live with my mom and me—I played this game where I tried to see how close I could get to the train as it ripped through the station. The conductors hated it. My mom freaked out on multiple occasions. But every time I was down here, I always ached to get as close as possible to that roaring wind.

Now, I feel that same urge thrilling through my veins. My eyes electric, my lungs savoring the intoxicating smell of metal burning bright. Wait—wait until the train comes howling into the station; wait, pressed up to that yellow warning line, until I’m only steps away from the roaring hot metal. I feel as if it’s a wild horse that I can snatch hold of and swing myself atop of in one daring leap. The train’s wake shoves me back, and I hold my ground against the wind, hold my eyes open to the silver rushing blur, hold on to the heartbeat hammering in my chest. I don’t even flinch.

And then, the doors open.

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The Vanishing Station

Ana Ellickson

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The Vanishing Station

Ana Ellickson

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Hot air blows out with a flurry of passengers going about their boring lives at Balboa Park station. Their hurried footsteps add more layers of grime and scuffs to the tile floors. I swallow down the pulse pounding in my throat. Every day these trains race below our city, nothing more than metal and electricity.

I hover on the platform and watch as soon-to-be travelers board the airport-bound train. They wedge themselves into the narrow blue vinyl seats, balancing suitcases and backpacks on their laps, cursing the fact that they brought too many pairs of shoes and books they’ll never actually read on their beachside adventure. A pang of envy rumbles deep inside my gut. What would it be like to have the freedom to go where I want, to follow my dreams?

A kid stares up at me when I stagger back from the yellow line. He saw, of course. In vain, I try to tamp down my wind-whipped hair. He tugs on my paint-splattered backpack, and his mother doesn’t notice.

“What did that feel like?” he says, little kid mouth agape.

“Like I was flying.”

He smiles.

“But don’t try it. It’s dangerous.” I wink. I really shouldn’t have winked. The last thing I need to do is encourage a seven-year-old to do harebrained stunts. But I can’t stop the adrenaline flooding into my chest. And I lied. It feels less like flying and more like I’ve jumped off a cliff into the roaring wind and I’m trusting that I’ll have wings.

It is dangerous. One wrong step and I’d be clobbered by 110 tons of metal.

Trust me, no one who knows me would ever call me a daredevil. I’m actually known as the Responsible One. The one who took care of her mother all through sophomore year of high school while she was battling breast cancer. The one who didn’t go away to college or travel abroad because too many people needed her here. I promise I’ll always keep those two steps between me and death. I swear it.

It’s just—I don’t know what makes me want to leap into that blur of blue and silver. It feels like I could leave this all behind and wake up somewhere else entirely. Somewhere brighter, bolder. It’s almost like there’s a wild heartbeat under the iron and steel, and all I need to do is reach out and grab the reins.

A horn blares.

I jump aboard before the doors slide shut, and the train shoots forward through the maze of tunnels twisting under San Francisco. I hide behind a thankfully large man and scan around his shoulder to see where my dad is sitting. Correction, standing. Leaning hard on his cane, but not wobbling an inch on this bumpy train. He stands beside the exit door on the opposite end of the car. The minutes tick by. Am I more nervous about him catching me on a BART train—or about finally finding out the truth? As we wait for the next station, my eyes roam across my fellow passengers. It calms my hammering heartbeat to imagine how I’d sketch their faces. Reality flips on full blast: the kid snoring beside me with a face like melting candle wax, the old man stuffing French fries in his mouth, making my stomach growl from no breakfast.

And a voice.

“Dahil sa iyo!” The Filipino words come swaggering down the aisle, an aisle so thick with passengers, I can barely see who’s singing.

But I don’t need to see.

I know his voice.

It’s the Sap Master himself.

My dad sings a wicked kundiman.

But why is he serenading an entire train car? I inch closer, still out of his range of sight among the crush of passengers. My legs wobble as the train curves underground, and I cling to a metal pole to keep from falling. Dried paint sticks under my nails. It’s been so long since I’ve walked on a train that my knees tremble with the effort.

Still, the song lures me across.

Dahil sa iyo…

Because of you…

His words come softly now, sweetly melancholy. His rich honey voice fades into the sound of brakes squealing against metal rails—dahil sa iyo, nais kong mabuhay. “Because of you, I want to live.” Something isn’t right— this isn’t the way he sings when he shaves in the mirror. His voice sounds mournful, broken at the edges.

A chill drips down my spine as I push faster through the crowd, the lonely words echoing in my ears. Is this really my father? It’s his voice, that much I know; but I’ve never heard this pain crackling down his throat. I shoulder through the crush of passengers blocking my way.

A flash of movement up ahead. His eagle cane, his shiny Elvis hair slipping away from the crowd toward the dark shadows. The train car’s connecting doors creak open. A blast of roaring wind pierces my ears. Am I the only one to hear it? None of the passengers flinch.

“Dad,” I say. “Dad, wait!”

The glass doors separating the two train cars begin to slide shut. I still can’t see with the last two passengers blocking my way. Through the crevice between their elbows, I catch my dad’s eagle cane as it disappears behind the doors. Fog swirls on the glass, and a spark of cobalt flashes across steel, rippling out like dewy spiderwebs.

“Hey, how about an ‘excuse me’?” a bald man grumbles as I shove past his shoulder.

I yank open the doors.

The heavy plexiglass slides open and leads into a space that reminds me of an old phone booth. An icy blast slaps my skin, as if the conductor has cranked the AC to max capacity. But that’s never the case on a BART train. It’s always too hot. Always too many people breathing in your ear, elbows out and sweat stains under armpits.

My breath leaves a mist on the glass, and I touch my fingers to the water droplets to make sure they’re real. A whiff of my dad’s coconut aftershave, his cracked leather jacket. He was here a moment ago. The two accordion walls crunch together as the train lurches to a full stop. It wouldn’t be able to turn inside the dark tunnels without these flimsy rubber walls bending with the curve. I don’t stay long. There’s nothing like imagining the train splitting into pieces while I’m standing on the bridge connecting the cars.

My eyes frantically scan the passengers’ faces before the doors open at Daly City station. Not-my-father, not-my-father. No! No slicked-back hair, no eagle cane, no leather jacket. Not on this train. It wouldn’t have been possible for him to push his way through all these passengers to the exit.

The conductor gives one final call.

Doors closing.

A warning beep blares into the tunnel.

“Dad?” I holler into the train.

Heads snap in my direction as if I’m a lost toddler. My cheeks redden at the sudden attention. I’m too old to be a little girl calling for her father. But I’m not worried about myself—I’m worried about him.

Before the doors slide shut, I gaze up at the ratty pigeons clinging to the ledges of the train station even though they’ve added spikes to scare them away. The train starts to speed down the tunnel in a blur of blue and silver. It scatters newspapers and feathers into the air.

In all the magic tricks, a dove always disappears and reappears.

We all know what really happens to the dove.

That will not be my father.

Adapted excerpt from the upcoming book The Vanishing Station by Ana Ellickson, published by Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams; © 2024.

The post Read an Excerpt From Ana Ellickson’s <i>The Vanishing Station</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Fantasy

Read an Excerpt From Mai Corland’s Five Broken Blades

It’s the season for treason in this fantasy debut…

By Mai Corland

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Published on April 9, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Mai Corland’s Five Broken Blades, an epic fantasy debut publishing with Red Tower Books on May 7^th.

Chapter One

Royo
City of Umbria, Yusan

Gold for blood—that’s my advertisement and the words I live by.

The merchant slowly counts out gold mun, his gloved hands shaking as each coin lands in his palm. He’s a little taller than me, but my shoulders are twice as wide.

“Hurry it up. I don’t got all night,” I say.

My deep voice startles him, and two bronze mun clatter onto the ground. He lets the coins roll away but pauses to consider chasing them down. Ten Hells. This is gonna take two lifetimes.

Finally, he slips the money into my hand, paying for the broken nose and leg. Then he darts away, fur-lined cape flapping in the night breeze. It’s not a noble living, being muscle for hire, but the upper class ain’t great neither.

I count my gold as I lumber between the soot-covered buildings. All there. I put the money in my coin purse and tuck it into my inner jacket pocket. Behind me, my latest victim whimpers in the darkness of the alley. If he keeps up that noise, the hael birds will peck him clean before morning. And the rich merchant prick didn’t pay for a kill.

“Can you stop that racket?” I say.

The whimpering dies down.

“Thank you,” I say. He’s silent—shut up by my manners or his pain.

I think about going back to help. I always think about it. But it’s none of my business. It’s not my problem, what happens after my jobs are done. Or why the merchant wanted to send a message in the first place.

Those are roads that lead nowhere. And I’ve got somewhere to be.

I blow a warm breath in my gnarled hands. This fucking cold. Frost shines on the cobbled streets, and the runoff has already started to freeze. What trees there are in this cramped city are long bare. Winter comes quick in Umbria. But then, death always does.

I should probably buy some warm gloves, but my stomach tightens at the thought of parting with even one silver mun. Every coin counts, and I don’t really need posh shit anyhow.

When I get to Inch Street, two well-dressed couples split around me. They’re all fur muffs and expensive, feathered hats. Swells. They give me a wide berth, then scurry away like I’m contagious or something. I guess if my size don’t intimidate people, the scar dividing my face does the trick. People stay away.

Good.

With a grunt, I shoulder open the heavy wooden door of Butcher & Ale. I’ve been in cleaner, nicer places with better grub, but those pubs don’t fit me. The tavern is warm without being hot and noisy, without being loud, and that’s all I need. Butcher & Ale is home. It’s where I started doing business ten years ago. Right after I turned fifteen, I set up shop in the corner—forty pounds less muscle with no scar on my face. They know what I do here, but I keep the place safe, so they look the other way.

I sit on my usual stool at the end of the bar. Yuri sees me and pours me a pint. He could be forty; he could be sixty. Who knows with that bald head. But he’s not the chatty type, and I like that.

He slides a beer across the worn wood. The glass is mostly clean. “Someone’s been looking for you.”

Buy the Book

Five Broken Blades

Mai Corland

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Five Broken Blades

Mai Corland

Buy this book from:

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• iBooks
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• Target

I raise my eyebrows and chug a gulp of ale. Somebody’s always looking for me—to fight, to hurt, to kill. This ain’t news. “Why should I care?”

Yuri puts the bar towel over his shoulder and leans forward. “It was a girl.”

I stop drinking. My heart thuds and then lodges in my throat. I will it back down and play it cool. “What’d she look like?”

“Pretty,” Yuri says. Not the most helpful description. I curl my hand into a fist and stare. His eyes widen, and he rubs his nose somebody else broke a while ago. Then he starts yammering. “About my height, big brown eyes, kinda short black hair. Around your age—like mid-twenties. Red velvet cloak.”

I swallow, digesting his words. A tall, twenty-something girl asking about me is unusual. And I guess “pretty” makes a difference—can’t remember the last time a pretty girl looked for me. Maybe she wants an old boyfriend taught a lesson or revenge on another girl. I don’t hurt girls, though.

“She’s staying at the Black Shoe Inn,” Yuri adds.

The nicest joint in maybe all of Umbria. So she has money and she’s not from here yet somehow knew to look for me. Here. This reeks of trouble.

“Not interested,” I say.

Yuri shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

He wanders down the bar to serve another customer. A guy looking old for his age sits on the stool four paces down from me. He only makes eye contact with Yuri, so he’s also here to drink alone. Sometimes it feels less lonely to drown your sorrows in a shared barrel of ale. To vanish in the pub crowd. Even if you don’t say a word to nobody. Most nights, that’s me.

But I can’t disappear tonight. I know in my guts it’s going to be one of those times when I can’t forget no matter how much I drink. So why give myself a headache that’ll hit behind my eyes tomorrow?

I down my beer, leaving the dregs. I push back from the bar, the legs of the stool scraping the sticky floor. “I’m outta here.”

Yuri’s bushy eyebrows rise. It’s like what he didn’t get on his head went to his face instead. “Already?”

He’s right to be surprised. I’m normally good for a few beers as I take up my corner and wait for my next job to come in. Trouble always has a way of finding me. Usually it’s quick, but sometimes it takes four beers. Tonight, it’s just the one.

“Headache.” I tap my temple like he don’t know where my head is. But it’s a lie. And from his beady eyes going side to side, Yuri doesn’t believe it for a second.

But he nods. “Night, Royo.”

I take a step to leave, and something strange happens. An off feeling hits me, like a heart skipping a beat. Out of the corner of my eye, I swear there’s a blur of red. I blink hard, look around, then glance into the bar mirror. Nothing. Just my scarred face and shorn head looking back at me. Nothing red in sight. I shake my head. I’m real off tonight. Best I leave now.

I trudge my way out of Butcher & Ale and back onto the frigid street. I’ll need to repair the laces of my boots soon, probably patch the leather again—they still got some wear left.

I swear it got colder when I was inside. My exhale now makes little fogs in the air. I blow a hot breath into my hands again as I walk.

Five blocks in the wrong direction later, I pass the Black Shoe Inn. I can’t help but slow down and stare at the lamps glowing in the windows. I wonder… then shake my head.

What am I doing? What am I even looking for?

I walk double time to get away. It’s too suspicious. Too off. My instincts are always right, and the scars I bear are reminders of the times I’ve ignored my gut. The last time cost me everything. I’m not doing it again.

It’s about a fifteen-minute walk along Avalon Road to my shack on the cheap end of town. The buildings get more run-down, smaller, as I leave the business district. Umbria’s been going downhill since King Joon rose to power back when I was a kid. The whole country has.

The road bends, and then I have the river on my left. You’d think being near the water would be nice, but not in Umbria. The only waterway we got is the dirty Sol River. People empty chamber pots and dump trash right into the thing. And it’s even colder, the bone-chilling kind, when you’re close enough to hear the water lick the filthy shore.

I try to stay aware of my steps, my surroundings. There are too many dangers in Umbria from gangs, from men like me, from the hael birds, to be caught sleepwalking. But I’m off my game. Distracted.

I blame Yuri. He’s a barkeep, not a messenger. He could’ve kept all that noise to himself.

But I’m not really mad at Yuri. Truth is, I’m thinking about her. When Yuri said it was a girl, I hoped. And hope is a jagged knife. Hope pieces together dreams out of broken glass only for reality to come and smash them all over again. Hope is the cruelest punishment of them all. Because without hope, I know: it’s not her, you fool. It can’t be. It can never be.

Because I killed her.

Excerpted from Five Broken Blades by Mai Corland. Reprinted with permission from Red Tower Books, an imprint of Entangled Publishing. All rights reserved.

The post Read an Excerpt From Mai Corland’s <i>Five Broken Blades</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Poetry

12 Poems That Consider the Cosmos 

From the Moon landing to Pluto’s orbit, these poems explore space and all of our weird human feelings.

By Holly Kybett Smith

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Published on April 10, 2024

Photo by Daniel Álvasd [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Daniel Álvasd [via Unsplash]

For as long as we’ve been observing the night sky and the movement of planets and stars, humans have been curious about the other worlds that might be out there. We’re adventurous creatures: we like to explore, and we like to make friends, too. This month, I’ve selected twelve poems to carry you on a journey through space.

Three… two… one… liftoff!

“Zero Gravity” by Eric Gamalinda

Published thirty years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, this poem takes a reverent look at the event through the eyes of a child. Possibility and longing suffuse each stanza, alongside a forward-reaching nostalgia.

“Model Solar System” by Michael Mesic

By contrast, Mesic’s poem invites the reader to look down on our solar system from above, the way a child might, creating a model for class. From this simultaneously childlike and godlike angle, one unveils the secret mechanisms that govern the workings of space; the tiny lightbulb inside the sun; the wires holding everything together. It is no less wonderful.

“Heliocentric” by Keith S. Wilson

This painful yet poignant poem tells the story of an astronaut caught between their beloved on Earth and the siren-song of outer space. It brims with love, and yearning—the yearning of fingertips brushing what’s just slightly out of reach.

“Sunflower Astronaut” by Charlie Espinosa

“Sunflower Astronaut”—with its accompanying illustration by Romie Stott—adopts a truly unique perspective on space travel, written in the voice of a sunflower seed.

“Life Centered Around” by Moon Bo Young (trans. Hedgie Choi)

Like Wilson in “Heliocentric,” Moon Bo Young’s prose poem uses the solar system as set dressing for a profound exploration of human emotion. In this instance, the narrator is not caught between two warring desires but trapped in a codependent orbit, like Europa around Jupiter.

“Wide Shining Craters” by Jace DeAngelo

I knew the moment it mentioned Laika that this poem would hurt to read, and I wasn’t wrong. A meditation on the sacrifices made in the name of scientific progress, “Wide Shining Craters”asks important questions about who is deemed disposable enough to sacrifice, and who makes those choices.

“Pluto Shits on the Universe” by Fatima Asghar

We reach now to the edge of our solar system, where Pluto looms defiant, forever a symbol of self-determination in the face of arbitrary, externally-enforced categories. In this lively, profanity-laden poem, Asghar gives Pluto a voice, imagining the erstwhile planet as a rulebreaker, jubilant in its flouting of the universe’s laws.

“Some Facts Are Difficult to Discuss” by M.E. Silverman

Beyond the solar system, there are nebulae where space dust glitters; the building blocks of the universe. Silverman writes of one such nebula in this prose poem, and even though the nebula in question is far away—4500 lightyears away, to be precise—his words bring it straight back home.

“Doppler Effect” by Lydia O’Donnell

With its experimental structure, its almost-duelling verses, “Doppler Effect”is an experience to read. It follows a researcher’s journey to determine whether life can exist on planets orbiting distant stars.

“I Roll Up to the Club in a Gundam” by Eric Wang

Meanwhile, this short prose-poem offers a snapshot into a glittering sci-fi future where a gaggle of space travellers reunite to pass an evening partying. Even though they are far-flung, galaxy-traversing adventurers, their loneliness—at only being able to see each other once in a blue moon—echoes the familiar loneliness we feel on Earth, when we grow up and all our friends move away to different towns.

“Earth Light: I” by Lynn Xu

Our penultimate poem is brief but dark, taking its narrators to the very edge of what is known. How to fill the endless, stretching silence?

“Everywhere That Universe” by John Ciardi

For our final poem, we descend back to Earth. The Universe is boundless, full of possibilities, but so is our own planet, right here at our fingertips. Look around with new appreciation. What do you see?[end-mark]

The post 12 Poems That Consider the Cosmos  appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Unseen Academicals, Part I

Archchancellor Preserved Bigger is a helluva name, really

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on April 5, 2024

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I regret to inform you that I know zero football chants. This will not be my finest hour.

Summary

Smeems, the Candle Knave of Unseen University, is doing his rounds in the middle of the night with Mr. Nutt, who is acting apprentice. They keep the candles lit all about the place, including the Emperor candle, which is never supposed to go out. (It does, frequently, but Smeems doesn’t discuss it.) Nutt is an unaccountably bright young man, who hopes to see more of the university as time goes on. The faculty finishing their Hunting of the Megapode, which Ponder signs into the record as their new Master of The Traditions. (Rincewind dressed up as the Megapode, and has to go for a lie down afterward.) Ponder has received this new position upon the revelation that no one has held the post for over two centuries. He takes it in part to help keep the staff’s mind off the fact that the Dean has just retired, a thing that wizards generally never do—and to teach at another university for money, no less. Ponder finds an important tradition that the university has ignored the past twenty years; they must play a football match or lose a very important bequeathal to the school from former Archchancellor Preserved Bigger. Downstairs, Glenda scolds her gorgeous friend Juliet for not showing up to work on time on account of watching football.

Turns out Nutt is a goblin, which is a group that endures a ton of prejudice thanks to a long-ago war that no one remembers very well. He does his best not to upset anyone as a candle dribbler, and does most of Trev’s work for him. Trevor Likely has also been watching football (on the opposite side to Juliet), and he takes Nutt up to the kitchens to get them some food from Glenda. Meanwhile, Ponder does some calculations and learns that they could get by without Bigger’s trust if they significantly cut down on food expenses. The wizards are horrified, and Ridcully uses that to get them on board with the football game (which they don’t have to win, but he’d like to). Trev tells Nutt he’s going to take him to the next football match and asks him to find out Juliet’s name from Glenda. Meanwhile, Juliet asks Glenda about Trev, while Glenda suggests that she could get a better gentleman if she tried to speak a little more posh. Nutt used to live in Uberwald in “Ladyship’s” castle, where he learned and read all the time and tried every discipline. He’s a bit bored at the university, but he’s safe there at the moment. Ridcully goes to see Vetinari, who already knows of their predicament and has already made plans to formalize football within the city, insisting that the wizards be a part to it.

It also turns out that Vetinari is aware of Nutt’s placement at the university (and is having him looked after there as a favor to Lady Margolotta). Ridcully asks a boy on the street where the next match will be so that he can observe it. Nutt asks Glenda for Juliet’s name, which Glenda gives knowing full well that Trev is the one who asked for it. She gives him Juliet’s last name too—Stollop, which is bound to cause more trouble for reasons Nutt doesn’t understand. Trev gets Nutt dressed in Dimmers football colors and is, in fact, upset to find out that Juliet is a Stollop because his dad was Dave Likely, a famous footballer who got more goals than anyone in a lifetime. They head to the match and Trev tries to teach Nutt to be more like one of the lads. The wizards are heading to their first match and Ridcully has asked they be accompanied by university bledlows, which makes the group nervous. On her half-day off, Glenda usually goes and sells wares to lady trolls for Mr. Stronginthearm, but she runs into Juliet again. The Librarian always goes to the football matches, and is bemused to find Nutt and his fellow wizards attending this time around. The wizards try to figure out where to stand and observe, while Trev introduces Nutt to Andy, whose dad is captain of Dimwell, and the rest of his friends.

Nutt is learning about being in the crowd of a game, and finds he’s very good and shoving his way through it. He spots Glenda, who has come with Juliet. As Trev is trying to talk to Juliet, she presses a Dollies team pin into his hand, which he hides on his person. Nutt catches an incoming ball, and asks what should be done with it—Glenda points toward the goal. Nutt makes the goal from a great distance, easily, and breaks the goal post. Trev knows this is going to get the crowd angry, so he drags them all away as fast as he can. While Trev is trying to find out about Nutt’s childhood and get help writing a love poem, Juliet’s brothers show up, and then Andy too. Trev tries to stop them from fighting, but Nutt makes a blithe comment, and Algernon Stollop hits him with a club, killing him instantly. The group dispatches, and Trev brings Nutt to Constables Haddock and Bluejohn, begging them to take Nutt to the Lady Sybil hospital. Angua questions Trev because if an Igor needs to revive you, Vetinari has decreed it was still murder. Doctor Lawn arrives to let them know that Nutt was apparently sleeping; he sat up in the hospital, asked for a sandwich, and left. On his way out, Trev is stopped by an Igor who tells him that he thinks Nutt is dangerous.

Commentary

As is sometimes the case in Pratchett narratives, the main arc of the plot is hardly a dour thing at all—the wizards aren’t going to starve regardless, and football’s induction into the larger societal fabric is hardly the most important political change the city has undergone in recent memory.

However, here we learn that Moist von Lipwig is far from the only person Vetinari is keen on giving their one shining chance to. Though, I suppose to a certain extent, we have always know this: Vimes was the first experiment the reader is exposed to on that front, and there have been many others. Vetinari’s entire schema is built upon it, and while it does nothing to eradicate poverty, war, or general suffering, it is true that on the Disc, if you are lucky enough to possess strange talents in need of nurturing, and happen to cross his path, Havelock Vetinari will do everything in his power to give you that one chance (and arguably many—Moist definitely gets more than one, no matter what he thinks) you need to reach your fullest potential.

It’s an imperfect system, but it does permit for a kinder than average world in certain respects. And, pointedly, if you squander the chance by using your own unique gifts to harm others, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork has no compunction about ending your journey, removing you from the body like a limb with gangrene. For an erstwhile assassin, he’s very particular about how death is employed, but has no difficulty being dispassionate about it.

This is how we wind up plunged into the story of Mr. Nutt, whose species has been basically unknown to us in some three dozen Discworld books so far. (We get out first real hint with Igor feeling the need to warn Trev about him.) There’s a deep Pygmalion-esque vein to this side of the story—even if the My Fair Lady reference goes to Juliet instead—though this is calling to mind my own favorite version, being the musical Bat Boy. Nutt is far closer to Edgar’s tale than he is to Eliza Dolittle.

Trev’s turnaround is one of the main factors that makes this book work, in my opinion. An entire novel that centers around all the terrible “lad” rules and behavior that football comes attached to would have been a slog for me. Having Trev snap to the moment he thinks that his friend has been killed by this sort of nonsense instantly makes me like him better as a character, and helps the story move along to more interesting places.

The structure of the book is still odd, however. It makes out as though we’re finally going to get a book that’s entirely about the university wizards instead of keeping them in their usual comic relief shenanigan sector. This works for a tiny sliver of time before we’re immediately introduced to the “below stairs” group at the university.

The satire is still strong with the collegiate stuffs, of course: Academicals is a word upended to more than one university team, and the Hunting of the Megapode is a send up of the Mallard Ceremony at Oxford. While in their version, someone carries a wooden duck around on a stick for the Fellows to follow, here we’re chasing Rincewind-with-feathers-on about the place. Why didn’t we didn’t get more of that.

Also, someone save Ponder. I realize the overworking is mostly his own fault, but he could use an assistant or something.

Asides and Little Thoughts

• The gap between this book and Making Money was the longest the world had gone without a Discworld book since the gap between its very first tomes. (This book is a bit longer than usual, at least.) And now I’ve made myself sad.
• The pickle carts? They have pickle carts? *cries in sadness that no one has wheeled a pickle cart over to me*
• Lord Vetinari forcing the Ankh-Morpork Explorers’ Society to rename to the Trespassers’ Society because everywhere they “discover” already has people living in it is… look, if you’re gonna be a tyrant, be this kind of tyrant. Inflict your correctness on people.
• Okay, but Alf and Nobby are related, right?

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read up to:

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Book Recommendations Dissecting the Dark Descent

Abnormal Psychology and Entomology: “The Roaches” by Thomas M. Disch

By Sam Reader

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Published on April 9, 2024

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Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.

Thomas Disch is a name which looms large over genre fiction. His bleak (and bleakly comic) novels and short stories carved a unique path through the more experimental frontiers of science fiction and horror. His willingness to push boundaries with queer and transgressive content, a cynical worldview, and occasional twisted humor added a much-needed dash of spice to several genres. While his horror work might not be as well-known as his sci-fi (or The Brave Little Toaster, the animated movie based on one of his novellas), it’s every bit as essential. “The Roaches” marries a science fiction premise (telepathic communication with roaches) and a paranoid horror premise to explore a darkly comic fable of toxic self-acceptance and self-affirmation.

Marcia Kenwell lives a mediocre life in New York City, where she has an utter horror of roaches. She sees them everywhere, whether it’s in the basement stockroom of a job she hates, in the wake of the loathsome people around her, or lurking in the apartments she visits. It’s a feature of the horribly filthy city with its filthy people, with Marcia’s only solace being her own apartment, two cozy rooms bastioned and fortified with Black Flag and potato wedges laced with roach poison, cleaned compulsively so no bugs could survive. Her peace and solace are interrupted when the Shchapalovs, a family of immigrants, move in next to her. As her isolation crumbles, she finds an unexpected power in the ability to telepathically communicate with the hated insects, using it to lash out at everyone who annoys her.

Can self-affirmation be a toxic thing? It usually isn’t presented as such, with a lot of fiction viewing self-discovery and self-acceptance as positive. Finding out more about yourself, accepting yourself as a whole person, is usually seen as a good thing, after all. Even in horror, how many novels and short stories end with the main character finally accepting their monster-hood, something framed as a happy ending? We’re encouraged to embrace the scarier parts of ourselves, the stranger aspects of our lives, because while they may scare others, they feel lovely and natural to us. Disch, meanwhile, explores the possibility in “The Roaches” that there are elements of our personalities that perhaps deserve to be worked on, interrogated, and perhaps not integrated with one’s life.

Which brings us to Marcia. Marcia reaches the darkly comic end of “The Roaches” having tried to murder the Shchapalovs using her telepathic control over cockroaches (she relents at the last possible second and settles for getting them evicted) and inviting roaches to writhe and surge over her body. Her repulsion became an obsession, and that obsession became a thing she loved. It’s hard to miss the self-acceptance narrative here, with Marcia spending most of the short story utterly horrified by cockroaches only to become their queen and mother as she happily lets them crawl all over her. It doesn’t feel affirming, as it comes after she tries to murder people just because she saw them as loud foreigners who didn’t clean their apartment properly. After watching a deeply unsympathetic person forcing someone to suffocate on roaches, it’s difficult to  turn around and applaud them for finally embracing their essential awfulness.

Further illustrating the issue is where and when the roaches start popping up: Whenever Marcia feels repulsed or sickened by something, she sees cockroaches. Within moments of describing New York apartments as filthy, roach-infested holes in the wall, Marcia wonders why people can’t just keep their apartments clean and follows this up with the statement that “they must be Puerto Rican.” It’s clear she also reads a ton of tabloids, as her rant in the paragraphs following her racist comment about Puerto Ricans mentions that every day she reads in the paper about women getting stabbed or mutilated, a tactic long used by papers like the New York Post to drive sales by publishing lurid stories about women getting murdered so they could also sell their conservative worldview that New York was a filthy crime-ridden hellhole that needed a “cleanup.” Her “favorite aunt” sees her off from the small hometown from with the parting declaration that New York is a filthy place full of cockroaches, something that probably leaves Marcia subconsciously looking for the insects at every turn.

That dichotomy between filth and cleanliness is also present in Marcia’s internal monologue. She wonders why people “don’t just clean up after themselves,” and sees her apartment as a clean and cozy space. It’s interesting that her space is suddenly invaded by roaches the day her physical space is suddenly invaded by the Shchapalovs. Suddenly her apartment building is playing host to a bunch of people she finds repulsive and foreign, and the roaches come flooding in. The roaches are the parts of Marcia she shouldn’t embrace, the repulsive aspects of her personality and tendency to look down on others (including her own landlady) that make her a worse human being. It’s no surprise that by the end, she’s fully embraced her own repugnancy. In a way, it’s a common theme in urban horror—the city is a hellhole that grinds you down until you accept it, it crushes you to death, or you become one with the awful parts of it and perpetuate them on others.  

By framing this downward spiral as a self-affirmation story, Disch pokes fun at both the idea of “city as relentless hellhole” and the idea of “embracing monster-hood.” “The Roaches” even has aspects of more self-affirming stories, with Marcia first experiencing revulsion, only to have the revulsion turn to obsession and finally love and acceptance. She does learn to accept the parts of herself that scare her, it’s just those parts really should scare her, since she uses them to drive people she hates out of her building via attempted murder. Rather than find positive aspects within herself, Marcia instead embraces her negative aspects, reveling in them and placing herself above others because of them. That personal metamorphosis is the “horrible thing” that the narrator alludes to happening at the beginning of the story, rather than being covered by a living, breathing carpet of roaches. Marcia is clearly happy and comfortable by the ending. The reader shouldn’t be.

That discomfort is essential to “The Roaches.” Everyone has things they can work on; there are always toxic traits that need to be addressed and unlearned. It’s easy to think “this is who I am,” or “if people can’t handle me, then that’s their problem,” but some attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors do need to change in order to coexist with others. Some individuals revel in their awfulness. Many even go on to harm others, just like Marcia does. By twisting the self-acceptance narrative to show the birth of a truly repulsive person, Disch uses his dark horror-comedy to show that even the worst people are capable of misguided self-affirmation instead of necessary change, to the detriment of everyone around them.

And now to turn it over to you: What was your first brush with Thomas M. Disch? Was Marcia’s journey of self-acceptance as awful as it seemed? Is this truly a story about toxic traits, or is there another possible meaning?  (Also, has anyone played Amnesia: The Dark Descent before?) Please join us next time when we’ll be discussing “Bright Segment” by science fiction luminary, coiner of Sturgeon’s revelation, and “Killdozer!” author Theodore Sturgeon.[end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Jo Walton Reads

Jo Walton’s Reading List: March 2024

Poetry, romance, science fiction, history, and a seafaring memoir all feature on this month’s list!

By Jo Walton

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Published on April 8, 2024

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I began March in Florence, with friends. I had a totally asymptomatic case of Covid, where I took a lot of long walks outside and read and worked inside. Halfway through the month I flew to Chicago to go to the Renaissance Society of America conference, where I told a lot of surprised academics that I loved their books. Then we started preparing for this year’s papal election of 1492, which is just going to eat April. I read eight books, and as usual they’re a mixed lot!

10 Things That Never Happened — Alexis Hall (2023)
So there are contrived set-ups where you throw the book across the room, and there are contrived set-ups where you sigh and go with it, and there are contrived set-ups that actually work. The difference is the motivation of the characters. If you’re in someone’s head and the ridiculous thing is a thing they would do, or if things are moving too fast for them to stop without making things worse, then the most implausible things can work. That’s the case here. Hall gives us long enough to get to know our first person narrator Sam before he gets hit on the head. The way that in his concussed fuddle he feigns amnesia then makes that feigned amnesia just seems like a thing he would do, for reasons that, if not perfectly sensible, are at least reasonable to him, and therefore to us, his invisible audience.

It’s a case of complicity, really, getting us to go along with it and be invested in it by having the character be a person who would totally do this nonsensical thing and be unable to back down from it, and having him confide in us why he is doing it and make us go along with it. This is a lot of over-thinking for a sweet romance of two guys who are very different but who each need what each other has to offer, but I got thinking about why it works. Sam’s voice is great, I was invested in his worries before the concussion so that his solution made sort of sense. The fact that other characters who were in on it also thought it was bonkers helped. So, in conclusion, sweet romance, excellent other characters, contrived premise: Hall is a very good writer.

Pietro Bembo on Aetna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist — Gareth D. Williams (2017)
This is a non-fiction book about Pietro Bembo’s 1496 account of his ascent of Mount Etna in Sicily, including the text of Bembo’s book both in the original Latin and in translation. It analyses everything about Bembo’s life, his father’s life, his choice to make the book a dialogue between them, his classical allusions, the volcano, the printing of De Aetna—it’s a very thorough book with tons of detail and discussion. If you’re interested in Bembo, in the Renaissance relationship with nature on the one hand and antiquity on the other, or early modern books, then this is great. It’s well written, but very long.

Selected Poems 2009-2021 — Roz Kaveney (2022)
A collection of Roz Kaveney’s poetry, showing her immense range of subject matter. The thing that unites these poems is a powerful ability with metre and rhyme, combined with Roz’s intense emotional engagement with her subjects. Although Roz is a fantasy writer, these are not for the most part genre poems; they deal with history, people, transition, queer and trans issues, life and death. Some of the most moving are those addressed to recently dead friends.

Murder by the Book — Martin Edwards (2021)
Another collection of Golden Age short stories, these themed around books and writers, and almost all of them excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed reading even the slightest of them, and some of them were truly engaging. I didn’t find any new-to-me authors I wanted to read more of this time, sadly, but what was here was great.

The Fair Miss Fortune — D.E. Stevenson (1937)
I wanted to read this for ages after Claire of the Captive Reader blog said that it was about twins setting up a teashop, which means there is an entire subgenre of twins setting up teashops in the 1930s. (The other two are Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Christopher and Columbus.) I was therefore disappointed that the teashop in this book remains an unaccomplished intention and never actually opens. This is one of those romance novels in which the setup provides all the obstacles. There are secretly two Miss Fortunes, they’re identical twins, so sometimes Jane isn’t as kind as other times because she’s actually Joan. All ends happily ever after, and though this is a very slight book it’s a pleasant enough read. Sometimes Stevenson is very good, and even at her shallowest her descriptions are sprightly and funny. So I wouldn’t start here, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Defiance — C.J. Cherryh (2023)
Volume 22 of the Foreigner series—talking about “don’t start here,” I think this would be completely incomprehensible if you did start here. This series is very strange. It starts off jerkily, which doesn’t do it any favours, and then it gets brilliant from books 2 to 6, and then it, weirdly, becomes a kind of soap opera set on an alien planet in which we are concerned with characters, most of them aliens—there’s one major human character, and some books have a handful of others. As so often with Cherryh, they are about being between cultures, between species, alone in a place where nobody is like you and home isn’t home if you go there. But what can I say about volume 22 except that I didn’t need a long recap at the beginning (even if it is on a train) and I no longer believe that the subplot with the Shadow Guild is actually resolved when it has seemed to be actually resolved too many times now. I’m just going to keep reading these for as long as Cherryh wants to keep writing them.

You Can’t Hurry Love — Portia MacIntosh (2017)
Sequel to Bad Bridesmaid. Sequels to romances are tricky, because the romance reader contract requires that the characters are happy ever after at the end, and if you undermine that it’s bad, and if they’re happy ever after, how do you have a plot? This is a story of Mia Valentine, who changed her life so she could be with her true love, but she did actually like her life and she misses it, and she does want to be with him forever but she doesn’t want to have a big fancy wedding…so essentially there are misunderstandings to do with her career and wedding, but they never really question each other’s love. It almost works, and it is funny.

Two Years Before the Mast — Richard Henry Dana Jr (1840) 
Re-read. Terrific memoir of a trip Dana took as a Harvard dropout on a sailing ship from Boston to California (then part of Mexico) around Cape Horn, as a common sailor. The details of the sailing of the ship and the working conditions, along with Dana’s own nineteenth-century point of view, are fascinating, and so is the account of the industry of California—hide curing—and all the detail of how he lives on the beach and gets picked up again by the ship, and how he’s worried about staying too long and not being able to get back to being anything but a sailor. There are also some very dramatic storms off Cape Horn. It’s also notable that when the Gold Rush happened a few years later this was the only book about California, so everyone read it, and his description of what a great location San Francisco would be for a city is one of the reasons it’s a city.

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Book Recommendations Nghi Vo

Announcing Nghi Vo’s Don’t Sleep With the Dead, a Gatsby Novella

A standalone novella following the Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby of Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful

By Reactor

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Published on April 8, 2024

Photo Credit: CJ Foeckler

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Photo Credit: CJ Foeckler

Tor Publishing Group is thrilled to announce that editor Ruoxi Chen has acquired Nghi Vo’s Don’t Sleep With the Dead, pitched as The Talented Mr. Ripley meets The Great Gatsby, a standalone novella following the Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby of Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful. The deal, for North American rights, was brokered by Diana Fox at Fox Literary. 

Buy the Book

The Chosen and the Beautiful

Nghi Vo

Buy Book

The Chosen and the Beautiful

Nghi Vo

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte Award, and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

Buy the Book

The Brides of High Hill

Nghi Vo

A novella of The Singing Hills Cycle

Buy Book

The Brides of High Hill

Nghi Vo

A novella of The Singing Hills Cycle

A novella of The Singing Hills Cycle

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Buy the Book

The City in Glass

Nghi Vo

Buy Book

The City in Glass

Nghi Vo

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The post Announcing Nghi Vo’s <i>Don’t Sleep With the Dead</i>, a Gatsby Novella appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Teen Horror Time Machine

The Perils of Time Traveling Teens: More From Christopher Pike’s Tales of Terror

Sometimes it’s up to Future You to stop Present You from starting a nuclear war.

By Alissa Burger

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Published on April 4, 2024

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While some of the stories in Pike’s Tales of Terror collections are serious, filled with revenge, murder and mayhem, like those addressed in the previous column, others are less bound by reality, exploring the porous borders of time, space, and perspective, with results ranging from deeply philosophical to incredibly amusing. 

Time travel and interconnectedness across time and space are a frequent theme in Pike’s books and Pike dives into this in his short stories with “Last Dawn” and “Time Spell” in Tales of Terror and in “The Tomb of Time” in Tales of Terror 2. Both “Last Dawn” and “The Tomb of Time” feature characters who get visits from future versions of themselves, who give them instructions on how they can avoid the apocalypse and the extermination of humanity. In “Last Dawn” the end has already come and gone, with an alien presence that has blocked out the sun’s light, dropped the Earth into a deep freeze, and killed almost all humans, with the exception of teenage brother and sister Jim and Dardee. A mysterious stranger shows up at their house, long after Jim and Dardee have assumed everyone else is dead, and they invite him to join them by the fire, trying to figure out who he is and where he has come from. Dardee goes outside to investigate an ominous sound and her brother is so absorbed in the visitor’s story of love, loss, and grief that he doesn’t realize his sister hasn’t come back until it’s too late. The visitor turns out to be Future Jim, who is responsible for the apocalypse and is now repentant, telling his young self that Dardee’s death was predestined: she died on this day in his own timeline (when she was hit by a boat while swimming) and she has now died on the same day. There’s no way to avoid her loss or Jim’s own pain, but young Jim can choose to not follow his future self’s dark path, avoid the blocking of the sun, and sidestep the otherwise inevitable apocalypse. 

In “The Tomb of Time,” the apocalypse hasn’t come yet, but is just around the corner, foretold by a series of earthquakes and interdimensional visitations from older, younger, and blonde alternate versions of teenage girl Shannon White, who attempt to warn her and make sure she gets together with Joel Kennealy, the guy she’s had a crush on all through high school. The fate of the entire universe apparently hangs on whether or not Shannon and Joel hook up, with two alien races cloning Shannon’s body in the future to send back these doppelgangers in an attempt to shift the course of events in their favor. In order to keep things on the positive path, Shannon must kill her evil blonde self, though that imposter is confident that “You cannot kill me … To kill is against your intrinsic nature,” to which Shannon responds “But I’m having a bad day” (105). While “a bad day” doesn’t really seem like reasonable justification for murder, the fate of humanity is a pretty good one and Shannon discovers that she’s actually capable of killing this evil version of herself, then setting up an ice cream date with Joel. There’s some confusion as Joel struggles to reconcile all the weirdness, but at some vaguely determined moment, the timeline simply resets, he forgets blonde Shannon and all the odd things that happened, and he and the real Shannon are free to go on their merry way. 

“Time Spell” is hands-down the funniest story in either collection, doubling down on interdimensional travel and teenage desire. The story begins millions of years in the future, with four disembodied “creatures of pure energy” (113) who are curious about their ancient ancestors, the humans. They are initially dismissive of the stories they have heard about humans being ruled primarily by strong emotions and biological desires, but once each of the four energy forces becomes grounded in the body of a 1990s teenager, they are quickly subsumed by their hosts’ feelings and sexual frustrations. Virginal Debra Firestone is dating Tony Keyes, who it turns out has been having sex with Debra’s best friend, Pam Church. Loner Mark Grunge has a crush on Pam, but she doesn’t know he exists. Add to all this conflict the fact that it’s Homecoming, with Debra and Pam pitted against one another for Homecoming Queen, and it’s a powder keg just waiting for a spark. The pure energy beings quickly become mired in the teenagers’ complex interrelationships, bantering their way through a dozen different colorful euphemisms for sex and casting aspersions on Tony by calling him “a weenie” (132). They end up manipulating their human hosts into all sorts of romantic and sexual entanglements, before discovering that their meddling may have changed the course of history, when Pam and Mark conceive a child who will grow up to become President of the United States and then start a nuclear war. The only solution to this problem is MORE sex: if they can get Debra and Tony to make up, have sex, and conceive a child, they have a 50/50 chance of saving humanity: if the baby is a boy, destruction will carry on in its preordained path, but it it’s a girl, Pam and Mark’s son will fall in love with her and become a better man, presumably the kind of man who does not order an all-out nuclear strike that will destroy humanity. The energy beings scheme and seduce, all the teenagers have sex, and both girls end up pregnant (though what this teenage pregnancy will mean for their lives and post-graduate plans never really comes up, other than avoiding future nuclear devastation). After wreaking all this mayhem, the energy beings return to their plane of existence, wiser and wittier. 

“Dark Walk”, in Tales of Terror, is an anomaly in ‘90s teen horror, with most of the scares being internally experienced rather than due to any specific external threat, and while this story foregrounds perspective similarly to “Time Spell,” this story’s humor is much darker. Not much actually happens in “Dark Walk,” at least right up until the shocking conclusion. Tim goes for a walk at night, then comes back to the house and tells his girlfriend Rachel all about it. He had trouble seeing (because it was dark) and got disoriented. He had a couple of scares when a dog growled at him and an apparently homeless man sleeping in the woods asked him if he had any booze. Tim swam out to a float anchored offshore, and when it came time to swim back, he became utterly convinced that there was a giant shark waiting under the dark water to bite his legs off.He had to nerve himself up to jump back in and swim like hell (and while Pike seems to suggest that there is no shark and no real reason for Tim to think there might be, there’s always the possibility that there could be, and that possibility remains absolutely unverifiable unless and until the Schrodinger’s shark bites off Tim’s legs—which it doesn’t). Tim’s walk back is much less uneventful and when he goes to tell Rachel of his exploits, she tells him “Stop … You’re scaring me” (186). Tim really feels the need to see his story through to the end though and just keeps talking. Once he’s finished, Rachel leads Tim into the backyard, tells him that “I get weird when I get scared … I do weird things, I can’t help it” (195) before braining him with a shovel and burying him in an already pretty darn crowded shallow grave in the backyard. There’s no real theme or message: a weird thing happens (Tim’s walk) and then it gets even weirder (Rachel’s unexpected murder-y habits). It’s odd and a bit nonsensical, but a good, fun punch of a story. 

Finally, many of Pike’s novels, including the Last Vampire series (1994-2013), explore different philosophical and spiritual traditions, including reincarnation, which is a theme Pike returns to in the short story “Bamboo” in Tales of Terror 2. “Bamboo” is bittersweet and quietly lovely. The story revolves around three friends—Gary, Teri, and Mark (the story’s narrator)—who all grow up together in the same California neighborhood. The trio is inseparable, but as they hit adolescence, some fissures begin to appear: Mark loves Teri, but Teri loves Gary. And while in another ‘90s teen story, this could be a catalyst for jealousy and violence, Mark only wants his friends to be happy, supporting them even when it breaks his own heart. The friends meet an old Indian man, Mr. Shambu, who moves to the neighborhood when they are children, and he graciously shares his hospitality, his food, and his stories with them, even when Gary is rude and dismissive. One of the stories Mr. Shambu shares with them is about bamboo. As he tells the kids, “bamboo is what is called a pranic tube … Prana is the subtle life force of your breath. It is what leaves your body when you die. It is the container for your soul, and bamboo has the unique property of being able to contain the prana” (118). He tells them the story of a man named Dhund whose soul was imprisoned in a stalk of bamboo following his death. The man’s sister Parvati completes a seven day long reading of the Bhagavad Purana in the bamboo and as each day is completed, one section of the bamboo stalk would “make a large popping sound … Each evening they would hear this sound. Finally, on the last day, when the ritual was completed, the top of the bamboo cracked open and a loud sigh faded away. At that moment, Parvati knew her brother had been set free” (119-20). Teri and Mark are moved by the story and while Gary remains skeptical and dismissive, Mr. Shambu’s tale sticks with them as they grow up. Their lives take some pretty tragic twists and turns: Teri and Gary get married, Gary is killed in action while serving in the military overseas, and Teri attempts to take her own life, overdosing and ending up in a coma. Though she is braindead, Teri’s parents are unable to let her go, and remembering Mr. Shambu’s story of the bamboo, Mark goes to the field of bamboo the old man planted and sets it on fire, which metaphysically releases Teri’s soul, frees her body (she dies in the hospital as the field burns), and grants her peace. While Mark is transformed by his grief, the love and friendship they all shared gives him a way to help Teri when all other recourse becomes impossible.

Pike’s Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror 2 offer a new perspective on this ‘90s teen horror icon. Some of the themes from Pike’s novels resonate and echo through these stories, providing brief detours and rabbit holes that Pike dives into to explore specific questions and play around with “what ifs?”. While many of Pike’s plot trajectories in his novels offer unique perspectives or a fresh take on a familiar narrative, leading readers on a merry chase, these stories ground the audience in a particular salient moment, a point of tension around which the story’s concise narrative revolves. We may not get to know Pike’s characters as intimately in some cases in these short stories and the worlds he creates are often more limited, but regardless of these shifts, each of the stories in Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror 2 welcome readers into Pike’s unique world, immersing us in their horrors, humors, and tragedies. [end-mark]

The post The Perils of Time Traveling Teens: More From Christopher Pike’s <em>Tales of Terror</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the Power of Pleasure

In three of her stranger works, Butler asks us to interrogate the nature of pleasure, and the relationships and connections made possible through desire.

By Logan Dreher

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Published on April 8, 2024

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As we’ve reached the year in which Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins, it’s become something of a cliché to comment on how prophetic the novel truly is. The Earthseed duology, which imagines a world ravaged by climate chaos and besieged by incipient fascism, is frightening prescient. It’s no wonder countless podcasts, think pieces, and social media posts have proclaimed, “Octavia was right!”

And don’t get me wrong, I love the Parable series. It certainly deserves its praise, as does Octavia Butler, whose visionary career paved the way for a new generation of Black SFF writers. But I also think the acclaim around the Parables sometimes eclipses Butler’s other work, which is just as fascinating, just as disturbing and challenging. Octavia Butler has more to tell us than what we can glean from Parable of the Sower.

I’ve been especially interested in revisiting three of her strangest works—her vampire novel Fledging; “Bloodchild,”a short story about a colony of humans living alongside an insectoid race of aliens; and the Xenogenesis trilogy, which explores human’s post-apocalypse relationship with a bioengineering race of extraterrestrials called the Oankali. Across these stories, I see a recurring fascination with the reality of our bodies, our needs and frailties, and the way our bodily desires inextricably link us to each other.

In each of these stories, humans are less powerful than their nonhuman counterparts, whether that’s the tentacled, pheromone-exuding Oankali in Xenogenesis or the three-meter long, centipede-like Tlic in “Bloodchild.” But for all of their physical superiority, the nonhuman characters are desperately reliant on their relationships with humans. In Xenogenesis, the Oankali can exude chemicals that drug humans with a thought and heal with a touch. They manipulate their own genetic makeup and easily heal their own bullet wounds. Yet they depend on their human relationships in order to live. Oankali adolescents go into metamorphosis where they are comatose—profoundly helpless—and rely on their human partners to care for them. In Imago, the final book in the trilogy, a young Oankali begins to physically dissolve, unable to survive because it does not have human companions to ground it in a stable form. As the narrator notes, “We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. One who could hunger could starve.”

And in Fledgling, the Inaaren’t your typical vampires who can feed on any convenient person. They instead form lifelong connections with human “symbionts” and hunger for physical intimacy just as they do for blood. This relationship is one of mutual symbiosis, as human symbionts live longer and healthier lives than typical humans. For both Ina and their symbionts, these relationships come with challenges; much of Fledgling is about navigating the tangled web of resentment and jealousy in these sprawling, polyamorous households as Shori, the novel’s vampiric protagonist, learns how to care for her symbionts and let them care for her.

There are similar themes in “Bloodchild.”In the story, the Tlic aliens rely on human hosts to carry their parasitic eggs. Tlic “grubs” born from human bodies are bigger, healthier, and more likely to live. It’s implied that the Tlic were sickly, perhaps even dying out, before humans crash-landed on their planet. The humans are restricted to a patrolled area called the “Preserve,” but the Tlic are dependent on humans for their own species’ survival; they regard humans with a “desperate eagerness.” “Bloodchild” references a past where humans were treated as little more than animals, but in the story’s present time Tlic are integrated into the families of their hosts and the position is one of honor. Humans are “necessities, status symbols, and an independent people.”

“Bloodchild” is sometimes interpreted as an allegory for slavery, an interpretation Butler flatly denies—“It isn’t,” she says in the story’s afterword. She describes it instead as “a love story between two very different beings”—between Gan, a teenage human boy, and T’Gatoi, the insectoid alien who will come to implant her eggs in his body by the story’s end. Butler also said she wanted to challenge herself to write a story where a man chooses to be impregnated “as an act of love.”

“Bloodchild” has a lot of body horror for a love story. Gan witnesses a Tlic birth gone wrong, a bloody and painful affair that seems to him like a form of torture as the ravenous grubs burst from a man’s flesh—Gan thinks, “it was worse than finding something dead, rotting.” There’s horror in Butler’s others stories, too. Shori, starved and gravely injured, kills and eats a man in one of the first scenes in Fledgling. And across the Xenogenesis trilogy humans struggle with their horror of the Oankali, their revulsion at something so alien, so different from our own bodies.

Despite their revulsion, despite the bloody horror of Tlic birth or the slimy Oankali tentacles, the human characters in these stories still chose to join with the alien, the nonhuman; to become their symbionts, to reach eagerly for those same tentacles, to be held still and impregnated with Tlic eggs. In “Bloodchild,” Gan chooses to be implanted out of obligation, but afterward, as he rests his naked skin against hers, he admits it was to also because he wanted to keep T’Gatoi for himself. In this choice I see Octavia Butler’s fascination with pleasure, its seduction, its irresistibility. She seems to be asking: what does pleasure do for us? What does it make us willing to give up?

The pursuit of pleasure is often treated as hedonistic or self-indulgent. As Audre Lorde says in her 1978 essay on the power of the erotic, “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” In Butler’s stories, characters follow their own pleasure, whether that’s the sensual bite of a vampire or the healing of the Oankali’s tentacles. But her characters aren’t punished for this pursuit. Pleasure is depicted as seductive, as addicting, but not shameful.

Instead, pleasure becomes a way of overcoming what Lorde calls the “threat of difference,” the means by which the human and nonhuman characters come to better understand each other. Pleasure is, as Lorde says, “a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.”

In the final book of the Xenogenesis series, the Oankali discover a group of humans who have resisted their influence. Hidden in the mountains, the human colony has persisted for generations to “preserve” the human race by refusing to birth constructs—the children born of both humans and Oankali. Generations of inbreeding has burdened the colony with congenital diseases that leave them in physical pain and increasingly disabled. Their young people are offered few other options than to marry and keep having babies; some of the residents are driven to suicide by the bleakness of their lives.

As the colony is seduced by Oankali, the residents’ desire for pleasure isn’t depicted as immoral or self-destructive. Pleasure is a guidepost, a way of moving the colony from a life of unnecessary suffering to one of healing, satisfaction, and connection. Once the residents experience the pleasure of being with the Oankali, it’s unimaginable that they could return to a life of such pain. This is the power of the erotic that Audre Lorde names: its ability to teach us the pleasure our bodies can experience, to demand of ourselves and the world the fullness of feeling we have learned we are capable of.

Fledgling, “Bloodchild,”and the Xenogenesis series aren’t without their violation or violence. There’s an aspect of coercion to all of these relationships; the Ina and Oankali have physically addictive qualities that make consent to their partnerships uncertain. The Oankali, especially, often manipulate and lie to their human counterparts as part of their seduction, and it’s eventually revealed that they will destroy the Earth through their habitation, leaving only an empty husk behind.

Despite Butler’s objections, you can read “Bloodchild”as a parable for slavery, or at the very least as a story of an alien race violently exploiting a captive colony of humans as meat for their parasitic children. And let’s not even get into the disturbing sexual politics of Fledgling, a book where a vampire in the body of a child seduces several adults into sexual relationships. To be sure, Butler explores violation alongside pleasure. But I think that’s intentional. Our own relationships are not without the complications of power, exploitation, or hierarchy. Pleasure is a bridge, and any connection has the potential for harm.

This is explicitly discussed in the climax of “Bloodchild.”After witnessing the gore of a Tlic birth Gan, sickened and terrified of his own fate, threatens his life with an illegal gun. Though T’Gatoi talks him down from any bloodshed, he convinces her to let him keep the gun despite the danger it poses to her safety. As Gan tells her, “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is a risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

All of these stories explore how to deal with this risk, and with how to care for ourselves and each other across such immense difference. Though they are capable of physically overpowering them, the Ina, the Oankali, the Tlic all learn to give back to the humans they come to see as partners; to share in pleasure, to heal, to care for them. They learn to make concessions for the benefit of their relationships, to give their human partners autonomy knowing that autonomy comes with risk. Sometimes that leads to violence, as it does it in our world.

Like the characters in Butler’s books our bodies, our desires, entangle us in relationships of mutual dependence, whether those relationships are sexual, platonic, or familial. And if pleasure is as Butler imagines it—addicting, irresistible; if it is not frivolous but necessary and life-sustaining as Audre Lorde argues, if our pleasure depends on the pleasure of others, then it also a responsibility. We all hunger, and anyone who can hunger can starve. With these stories I see Octavia Butler asking us to interrogate what we owe to the partnerships that shape our lives and our future, what our obligations are to the people we rely on, the ones who care for us when we’re sick and who share our joys as their own.[end-mark]

The post Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the Power of Pleasure appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations book review

H.A. Clarke’s The Feast Makers is Sharp as a Knife

A review of the final book in H.A. Clarke’s young adult fantasy series.

By Alex Brown

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Published on April 10, 2024

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It’s been a long four years since the first book in H.A. Clarke’s young adult fantasy series, The Scapegracers, and a year and a half since the sequel, The Scratch Daughters. Clarke closes out their trilogy with The Feast Makers. The real question is: Does the third book live up to the series hype? I think you already know the answer to that…

First, Sideways Pike was a loner lesbian with a sharp tongue and a bitter disposition. Then Sideways was a lost queer, missing their specter but surrounded by girls—Jing, Daisy, and Yates—who would kill for them. Now Sideways is the leader of a badass coven of ultra-cool high school seniors who hex bad dudes and party hard. The events of the previous two books come to a head here as all the local covens descend on the Delacroix House to sort out what to do with Madeline Kline and the recovered specter stones. Also piling into town are every witchfinder in the region, coming to bid farewell to a dead Chantry and get some witch hunting in for good measure. 

Sideways collides with one of the witchfinders, then collides with another. To save the girl they love, and protect their coven and the other witches, Sideways will have to take on the witchfinders one final time. The coven book devil, Mr. Scratch, is all too willing to help. The meaning behind the title sneaks up on you. It’s not what you think and it is so much worse, and I mean that in the best way possible. 

I could say a million things about how great this series is. Of The Scapegracers, I wrote that it “thrums with frenetic energy. Plots and subplots careen into each other like bumper cars at a carnival. Reading it felt like watching a primetime drama on The CW, all wild intensity and sizzling desire.” And of The Scratch Daughters I wrote that the “series has always been queer, but in this book queerness becomes a critical part of the plot. The ways these teens move through the branching paths of queerness directly impacts and is impacted by the main plot. Being queer isn’t a plot device—it is the plot.” The first point is less true in The Feast Makers, but the second Clarke doubles down on with a feverish intensity. 

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The Feast Makers

H.A. Clarke

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The Feast Makers

H.A. Clarke

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Like the sequel, the third book meanders a bit in terms of plot. The main action is sparse. We don’t meet the secondary antagonist until a good chunk of the way in, then they vanish and don’t reappear until the mad dash to the finish line; the main antagonist we’ve met before but they only show up at the end and don’t stick around very long. Most of the book is dedicated to Sideways and their coven figuring out their romantic and sexual feelings for each other and what they each want to do after high school, the coven convention at the Delacroix house, and the drama that is What To Do About Madeline Kline. I’m not complaining—I love spending time with these chaotic bundles of hormones—but it also means that the baddies are barely more than cartoon villains, two-dimensional monsters cackling and twirling their mustaches. 

On the other hand, Clarke continues the trend of each book getting ever more queer. There are no new identity announcements here, but the coven meet a variety of queer elders that help shape and confound their ideas of what queerness can be. There are no neat and tidy labels here. No one cares about appeasing the cisallohets’ delicate sensibilities. People find the spaces they feel most comfortable in and occupy them without shame or apology. Sideways can be a masc-leaning they/them and a lesbian and whatever other labels they want to attach to themself. Who cares. Queerness isn’t about fitting into a box but about freeing yourself of the very idea of boxes at all. 

This series also pushes back against the idea of “good” representation. Back in ye olden days when us marginalized folks had almost no rep at all and what we had was usually written by majority people parachuting in as tourists or saviors, “good” and “bad” rep was a big concern. Mostly because most of the rep we had was offensive caricatures. We were sidekicks, tokens, and stereotypes. We needed “good” rep. Nowadays, we are still pretty underrepresented when it comes to the publishing world, but we’re not rarities either. Queer YA horror is practically its own subgenre at this point. We’ve moved past the need for “good” representation; now what we need is representation in all its glorious, messy, complicated variety. We need shitty queers doing horrible things to each other as much as we need caring, compassionate queers saving the world. Clarke’s series doesn’t bother with “good” or “bad” representation but instead shows us queer people being people, warts and all. Shiloh and Madeline have hurt a lot of people and have been hurt in turn by a lot of people, and they both process their traumas in different yet destructive ways. Elder queer witches made for bad role models but offer glimpses into futures Sideways never even dreamed of. 

Like its predecessors, The Feast Makers is vicious. Sharp as a knife, brutal as a bomb, and lyrical as a song. It crawls under your skin and burrows into your brain. This is the kind of series I want to literally throw at teenagers like that GIF of Melissa McCarthy. It’s the kind of series I wish I’d had when I was 16 because I would have made it my entire personality. I would have been utterly insufferable about Sideways Pike. I would have tattoos of the cover art and too many piercings and pretend to like heavy metal just to get a taste of Clarke’s coven. Everyone (including me) compares this series to The Craft, but that movie wishes it was this cool and queer. Wherever August Clarke takes readers next, I’ll be first in line for the ride. [end-mark]

The Feast Makers is published by Erewhon Books.

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Book Recommendations

Five Science Fiction Stories About Involuntary Organ Donation

Back in the 1960s, there was certainly a trend for writing about organ procurement…

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 9, 2024

Photo by Nhia Moua [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Nhia Moua [via Unsplash]

I was intrigued to see a recent announcement that a pay-for-plasma clinic will soon open in Cambridge, Ontario. For too long Ontario’s poorer citizens have hoarded life-giving blood that would be better used by major pharmaceutical companies. Now these folk will be able to explore the fine line between financial stability and medicinal exsanguination.

Indeed, the various ethical hang-ups standing in the way of a free-flowing blood/plasma economy are part of a more general social issue, which is the unjust distribution of body parts. Why should some teenager enjoy perfect skin, a pain-free back, and functional joints when persons of my age could make much better use of these body parts? Yet such are the politically correct times in which we live that simply proposing, never mind implementing, mandatory organ¹ donations is considered somehow controversial.

Science fiction can see past the squeamishness of short-term social fashions to the glorious world we might have if we were willing to apply technology in a socially responsible—which is to say, one that benefits the people in charge—manner. Consider these five classic tales.

“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven (1967)

Advanced medical technology allows for large-scale organ transfer programs. Spiraling demand from the public for transplant organs is met by a responsive government; organs are harvested from prisoners who have run afoul of increasingly draconian laws.

Warren Lewis Knowles believes that the law under which he will be condemned and consigned to the organ banks is unjust. Legal reform is outside his resources but perhaps, if he does his utmost, Knowles can commit crimes worthy of dismemberment.

“The Jigsaw Man” is by no means the earliest organ bank story, but it is arguably one of the most famous, which is why I list it out of chronological order. Despite certain flaws in the premise², “Jigsaw” came in in second to Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in the 1968 Hugo Awards. In addition to its organ bank fame, the story stands out in a different way: the government in this setting efficiently provides citizens exactly what they want, which is a phenomenon not exactly common in real life or science fiction.

The Reefs of Space by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson (1964)

The Plan of Man provides all the people of Earth with useful roles appropriate to their abilities. In the case of mathematician Steve Ryeland, that role is to serve as a living organ bank, to be harvested piece by piece until he dies. Luckily for Ryeland, the Plan of Man’s Planner has a particularly grandiose scheme in which Ryeland will play a central role. Ryeland’s life expectancy is still dismal, but exploring the reefs of space will be far more interesting than waiting for that final, lethal organ donation.

Reefs features an intriguing deep space ecology in no way inhibited by plausible science. The use of political prisoners as involuntary organ donors is much more plausible.

“A Planet Named Shayol” by Cordwainer Smith (1961)

Shayol provides the worlds of the galaxy with a convenient oubliette for political prisoners. There they play a vital role as unwilling organ donors. Better yet, this world allows for the regeneration of excised organs. The galaxy need never worry that the supply of parts will run short; the condemned will live in endless pain.

The administrators of Shayol manage a very difficult trick by story’s end. They manage to discover an application of Shayol’s peculiarities that is so outrageous as to offend the relentlessly pragmatic Lords of the Instrumentality. Given what the Lords are willing to turn a blind eye to, finding an offense that prompts an immediate response as soon as the Lords learn of it is rather remarkable.

“Beyond the Weeds” by Peter Tate (1966)

The crown declines to directly increase organ supply. Her Majesty’s government prefers to leave such matters to private agents such as Anton Hejar. Unhappy relatives of Hejar’s victims think turnabout is fair play. Thus, Hejar is given the opportunity to play a new role in the supply chain.

It seems a little odd that it’s the British author in this list who went for the private enterprise solution to organ supply, whereas American author Niven foresaw a carceral solution.

Star Well by Alexei Panshin (1968)

Remittance man Anthony Villiers extends his stay in the deep space hotel Star Well rather than admit that he cannot pay his bill. His hosts, hoteliers Godwin and Shirabi, are unaware of Villiers’ reduced circumstances and guess at another explanation: Villiers could be a covert investigator aware of their “thumb-running,” the illicit organ smuggling from which Star Well derives its income. The thumb-runners resolve that Villiers must die. This is only the first of a series of terrible decisions by Godwin and Shirabi.

Isn’t “thumb-running” more pleasing to the ear than Niven’s “organlegging”? But for various reasons, Panshin’s Villiers books never won the prominence of Niven’s Known Space works, allowing organlegging to win out over thumb-running. SF authors, this is within your power to change!

These are but a few of the involuntary organ donation stories with which SF authors have delighted, entertained, and inspired audiences. (Oddly enough, such stories haven’t inspired any real-world legal reforms, that I know of.) If I happen to have overlooked your favorite works, feel free to mention them in comments below.[end-mark]

1. Ontario students wishing to graduate are required to put in forty hours of voluntary community service. Requiring them to voluntarily donate various organs would be a simple extension of this practice. ︎
2. It doesn’t seem to occur to any of the citizens that having the death penalty for the most trivial of crimes could land them in the organ banks. An inability to do even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis is, of course, not limited to characters in SF stories. ︎

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Book Recommendations book review

Love, Lust and Reincarnation: The Emperor and the Endless Palace

A review of Justinian Huang’s new queer romantic fantasy.

By Mahvesh Murad

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Published on April 9, 2024

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4 BCE China, the palace of the Emperor of the Han Dynasty. 

1740 China, a wayside inn by a forest. 

Modern day LA, glamorous, fabulous circuit parties.  

In each setting, two men impossibly drawn to each other, wondering why they feel so strongly, so surely about each other. 

What if what they are feeling, this inexplicable love and attraction, is a “feeling of metaphysical recognition, when your soul remembers someone from a previous life?” The Emperor and the Endless Palace asks the question, “how would that change the way you look at each stranger, knowing that they could be the epic romance across all of your lifetimes?”

Justinian Huang’s remarkably self-assured debut novel is a fantastic trip across centuries, a romp through grand palaces and lush forests and pulsating cities; the story of an everlasting connection between two souls bound to each other at every reincarnation, the story of obsession, betrayal and endless epic love. Two men are fated to be reborn into similar roles, destined to find one another, destined to always hunger and pine for one another, destined to always find each other, love each other, destroy each other; destined also make the same mistakes again and again and again. 

In 4 BCE China, we meet Dong Xian, a clerk in the imperial palace who is trying to navigate his way to a position of more importance, not knowing that the Emperor’s grandmother, the Machiavellian Grand Empress Dowager Fu has her sights set on him for her own schemes. In 18^th Century China, we meet Hi Shican, an innkeeper who is drawn to a nine tailed fox spirit under the guise of a mysterious young man named Jiulang, who needs help with something dangerous, help that Hi Shican cannot deny because of their immediate, inexplicable connection. In modern day Los Angeles, we meet River, a medical student who has only recently come out, and is experiencing L.A.’s gay party scene for the first time. He meets an artist from China who has somehow painted and sculpted River’s face dozens and dozens of times, though they have never met before. At least not in this lifetime. 

Buy the Book

The Emperor and the Endless Palace

Justinian Huang

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The Emperor and the Endless Palace

Justinian Huang

Buy this book from:

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• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The novel presents these three distinct timelines, each with its own narrative arc, but with echoes between them. Each pair of characters has to traverse complications, treachery and dangers, but each pair also finds a true love and a deep understanding in each other.

Huang effortlessly moves between the timelines and narratives, creating a rich world for each set of characters with equal aplomb. The writing is cinematic (which would make sense given Huang’s background as a creative for Sony), extremely readable and often thrilling (thrills of all sorts—danger, sex, violence), though it would be safe to say that Huang is equally adept at turning poetic phrases when the need arises. A character “…stared straight ahead as he spoke quietly, each word like the first raindrops of an approaching storm”; another is a “beautiful mystery to the very end.”

There is plenty of sex, and most of it drives the plot along, rather than existing just for cheap thrills or titillation when the plot is flagging. Huang’s treatment of the sex scenes is clever and thoughtful, especially with regards to the language he uses to describe both body parts and action—characters in 4 BCE would not refer to their penises the same way as a young man in contemporary L.A. would, for example. Huang uses metaphors that were common place in China at the time (peach, plum, influence), and while that may come across as purple prose to some, it is all entirely relevant to the setting and is historically accurate. And as much as Huang is unabashed about graphic sex, there are some poignant moments in those scenes too, such as one character describing the experience “…[moving] to an ancient rhythm between men.”

A great deal of The Emperor and the Endless Palace stems from actual history. Dowager Fu, Emperor Ai and Dong Xian are all real historical figures from the Han Dynasty, with the Emperor and his lover’s story (called “the passion of the cut sleeve”) being known as an affair that brought down an entire Dynasty. Hi Shican and Jiulang’s relationship is known from a short story considered to be an early narrative on homosexuality in China, which refers to the “cut sleeve,” a phrase that echoes the story of Emperor Ai. River’s story is probably familiar to many young Asian gay men who, upon coming out, may have searched for a community within a culture that isn’t always ready to openly celebrate them. Queer awakening, heartbreak, heritage, joy and fear all feature in the rich emotional landscape of the novel, reminding us of how much is just sheer human experience, no matter when and where. 

The Emperor and the Endless Palace is a celebration of being queer, being Asian, being both. The novel honours Asian queerness through the ages and proclaims loudly, proudly that the stories of Asian gay men, and their queer spaces are relevant and important. Huang wants to remind people that queerness has always been a part of Asian culture, that (as he recently said in an interview) “queer Asian folk are the protagonists of our own epic stories.” [end-mark]

The post Love, Lust and Reincarnation: <i>The Emperor and the Endless Palace</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations cover reveal

Revealing An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson

A student will find that the hardest lessons sometimes come outside the classroom…

By Reactor

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Published on April 11, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share the cover and an exclusive excerpt from An Academy for Liars, a new dark academia novel from Alexis Henderson—forthcoming from Ace / Penguin Random House September 17, 2024.

Alexis Henderson is the author of House of Hunger and the Goodreads Choice Awards finalist The Year of the Witching. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her tending to an assortment of houseplants or nursing a hot cup of tea.

Lennon kept driving for hours on end, as if powerless to stop. Following the directions on her GPS, she entered a small historic district in the shadow of a large mountain, used for skiing in the wintertime. There, the streets were narrow, canopied by the lush branches of the trees that grew on either side. She found her destination at the curve of a large cul-de-sac: an imposing, red-brick mansion set far off the street, half shrouded by a copse of overgrown hawthorns. Its roof was low slung over the second-story windows, and it made the house look like an old man frowning at Lennon’s approach.

She parked in the empty driveway and checked her phone. Seven missed calls (three from Wyatt and four from her mother) and twelve text messages (one from Wyatt, five from her mother, six from her older sister, Jaqueline). Lennon left everything unanswered—the text messages, the voicemails, and the countless questions she’d asked herself through the duration of her drive—got out of the car to rifle through the contents of the trunk, until she found the grease-blackened crowbar resting below the spare tire. She weighed it in both hands, nodded to herself as if to summon what little courage she had to muster, and then slammed the trunk shut.

The yard was large and covered in a dense carpet of grass. The hedges that lined the house were round and well-shaped. Lennon tramped through the plush grass, crowbar in hand, and stepped up onto the porch. The front door was set with a small window of stained glass that distorted the glimpse of the foyer behind it. Hanging on the wall beside the door was a large plaque that detailed the extensive history of the house (apparently it had been owned by some oil baron millionaire from the 1800s). The door’s knocker was brass and shaped like a quail.

Lennon knocked three times, hard and in quick succession. A brief pause then footsteps. The door creaked open. A man stood in the threshold, barefoot in a loose linen shirt and pants to match. He was only a little taller than Lennon, maybe six feet even, with lively blue eyes that wrinkled at the edges when he smiled, with all the warmth and fondness you’d expect from a friend who hadn’t seen you for some time. He appeared to be in his mid-forties and Lennon found him to be almost excessively good-looking. It was almost startling to see a person like that in real life, instead of on the screen or perhaps gracing the cover of a magazine.

“Well,” he said, still smiling at her, his teeth so straight and white they looked like a set of dentures, “you must be Lennon.” He glanced down at her crowbar. “Can I take that off your hands?”

Lennon handed over the crowbar with some reluctance. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure why she did it. She didn’t know or trust this man. She wasn’t sure if he was the only one in the house. But when he’d asked that question, and made to reach for the crowbar, her resolve had abruptly softened…and a calm had washed over her, as though she’d taken a valium.

He stooped slightly, leaning her crowbar against the wall by an iron coatrack. “I’m Benedict. Just like the breakfast dish,” he said, straightening, and ushered her inside with a grand flourish of the hand. He closed the door behind her but didn’t lock it.

The walls of the foyer were paneled in the same dark mahogany as the floors, and the house smelled of polish and potpourri. There was an ornate birdcage elevator to the left of the door, just beside the stairs. Benedict led Lennon past the elevator and down a narrow hall. As they walked, the floors groaned beneath their feet, in what seemed like a begrudging welcome.

Benedict led her past the kitchen and through the parlor to a little study off the back of the house, with a wall of windows and French doors opening out onto a small, sun-washed solarium. The study was covered in a grid of shadows cast from the window stiles and bars. Benedict settled into one of the two wing-back armchairs in the room. Lennon sat down in the second, on the opposite side of the desk. “I suppose I should tell you about Drayton,” said Benedict, and his eyes took on the faraway look of someone moved by memory. “I graduated years ago. You might’ve been just a fluttering in your mother’s womb back then. Maybe less than that, even. Little more than an egg and an idea.”

Benedict’s eyes came back into focus, and he blinked quickly, like he was only just remembering that Lennon was sitting there. “Tell me, what do you know of Drayton?”

“Nothing. I’ve never heard of it. I didn’t even apply.”

“Of course you did. Everyone’s applied whether they know it or not.”

“But how is that possible? Don’t I need to present a portfolio or take some sort of exam?”

“You’re already taking it. The first phase of testing begins at birth.”

“And the second?” Lennon asked, pressing for more.

“This interview.”

“And the third?”

“The entrance exam, but you shouldn’t worry about that,” said Benedict, looking mildly irritated. “Candidates always have so many questions when they come here, but most don’t make it past the interview. Besides, there’s little I can say to ease your curiosity. Drayton is to be experienced not explained. All I can tell you is that Drayton is an institution devoted to the study of the human condition. At least, that’s what they put on the pamphlets they passed out at my orientation. Perhaps its ethos has changed since then. It’s been many years.” Benedict stood up, one of his knees popping loudly. “Before we begin, let me make you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“And yet, you must eat,” he said, waving her off. “You can’t interview on an empty stomach. Besides, you’ll need it for the pain.”

“I’m not in any pain.”

“It’ll come,” said Benedict, and a sharp chill slit down her spine like the blade of a razor.

Excerpted from An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson Copyright © 2024 by Alexis Henderson. Excerpted by permission of Ace. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The post Revealing <i>An Academy for Liars</i> by Alexis Henderson appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations map design

Reality Meets the Invented: Revealing the Map for Masquerade

O.O. Sangoyomi’s debut novel imagines an alternate history of 15th century West Africa.

By O.O. Sangoyomi

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Published on April 10, 2024

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A young Yorùbá woman rises from social pariah to power in a reimagining of pre-colonial West Africa…

We’re thrilled to share the map from O.O. Sangoyomi’s debut novel, Masquerade—publishing July 2nd with Forge Books. Get a look at the full map by artist Virginia Allyn below, along with a note from the author.

The Yorùbá are one of the oldest and most notable inhabitants of West Africa. With a long history of hegemonizing neighboring tribes, their influence has become so widespread that most West African tribes can point to at least one aspect of their culture or language that was directly influenced by the Yorùbá. 

The premise of Masquerade takes this history of conquest and proposes a reality that extends the height of Yorùbá dominance. This is beautifully captured by the novel’s map, in which reality meets the invented. There are real cities such as Ilé-Ifẹ̀, which is regarded by the Yorùbá as the source of all civilization; Ọ̀yọ́, the seat of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire, arguably the most significant empire in Yorùbá history; and Timbuktu, the famous trade center that for centuries was a vital hub in the Trans-Saharan trade. 

There are also fictional cities that, though imagined, were placed with careful consideration for history and geography. For example, as a city that broke off from Ọ̀yọ́ to declare itself as the new seat of Yorùbáland, it only makes sense for Ṣàngótẹ̀ to not only be near Ọ̀yọ́ but also near the Niger, which grants it the same favorable commercial, agricultural, and defensive prospects that allowed Ọ̀yọ́ to be so powerful. Ìlọ́dẹ, the city of hunters, needed to be in the heart of the grasslands; Wúràkẹ́mi and Ògúndélé are placed near the gold and iron deposits that are respectively the pride of their cities.

In this alternate timeline, the borders of Yorùbáland have expanded far beyond the tropical rainforests of the south. They have enveloped Koumbi Saleh, the Ghana Empire’s former capital, and have also begun to creep northward into territories historically occupied by the Songhai and Mali Empires. Positioning Yorùbáland among these three great empires of pre-colonial West Africa establishes the supremacy of the reimagined empire in Masquerade, as well as the constant threat of opposition that comes with that ambition—a pressure that increasingly weighs on Òdódó, the novel’s main character, as she climbs her way to power.

Ultimately, the best part of this map is not its reimagined setting, nor is it the stunning designs done by Virginia Allyn, the map’s illustrator. Rather, the best part is that beneath all of that, this is simply a map of West Africa. This is not a different world; there is nothing fantastical about it. Pre-colonial Africa is largely underexplored in mainstream media, but as readers enter the world of Masquerade, this map serves as a reminder that many of the Medieval West African histories they are about to immerse themselves in were very real.[end-mark]

Buy the Book

Masquerade

O.O. Sangoyomi

Buy Book

Masquerade

O.O. Sangoyomi

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The post Reality Meets the Invented: Revealing the Map for <i>Masquerade</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations book announcement

Announcing Anji Kills a King, a Fantasy Adventure From Evan Leikam

An unlikely assassin attempts to escape the clutches of a legendary bounty hunter, in a tale of grit, dark humor, inventive action, and surprising heart.

By Reactor

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Published on April 9, 2024

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Stephanie Stein at Tor Books has acquired Anji Kills a King by debut author Evan Leikam, co-host of the Book Reviews Kill podcast. This breakneck fantasy adventure for fans of Nicholas Eames and Christopher Buehlman follows the unlikely assassin of a king as she attempts to escape the clutches of a legendary bounty hunter, in a tale of grit, dark humor, inventive action, and surprising heart.

Publication is planned for Summer 2025; Seth Fishman at The Gernert Co. brokered the three-book deal. 

Evan Leikam is a co-host of the Book Reviews Kill podcast, and a book influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Prior to his career as a content creator, he toured the United States and Europe as a drummer in various rock bands, where he read the biggest fantasy books he could get his hands on to pass the time on the road. Anji Kills a King is his debut novel.

The post Announcing <i>Anji Kills a King</i>, a Fantasy Adventure From Evan Leikam appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

The Path to the Dark Side: Max Gladstone’s Last Exit (Part 17)

Wonder and glory are worth a little heartache, aren’t they?

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on April 3, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 33-34. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

On the princess’s balcony, seeing both June the monstrosity and June the girl, Zelda’s torn between the conviction that they’ve reached the end of the world and the irrepressible bird-flutter of hope. “You can’t let yourself see,” June tells her. “There’s too much that’s not you in your head. But I can show you, if you let me.”

Zelda struggles toward June, Sarah beside her. High midnight arrives, and the black-flower path takes shape. At its end are the crossroads, whispering: What do you want? What will you give? Spin pours out of June. Black lightning flashes. Far off, striding to meet them, is Sal, no longer a demon but “just Sal herself.” Older, wiser, coming home. A moment later, Zelda sees only the horror of angles gone wrong, but now she knows it isn’t the truth.

June steps out onto the black-flower path.

Meanwhile, in the vizier’s room, Ish watches the black mirror resolve into the cowboy, who urges him to keep “walking the line.” He shows the image of June poised on the balcony above, the Sal-monster approaching, Sarah fallen and Zelda on her knees, eyes filled not with horror but with awe. Ramon regains consciousness. Ish knocks him out with the gun’s butt.

He struggles up to the balcony, led by the gun. June, “robed in spider legs and crowned with thorns” is on the path already. The gun raises his arm. He shoots—but Sarah knocks the bullet from its trajectory with her knack, and stands between him and June. She sees in his pale halo “the afterimage” of the cowboy’s hat. When did he yield to fear, changing from the “brave and tiny mouse” she used to imagine into “this old hand-me-down monster”? She holds her ground. Ish’s hand shakes, but the gun speaks and Sarah drops, gut-shot.

Ish was supposed to save her, save Zelda. Instead, the cowboy’s voice assures him, he’s done what was needful. June sees Sarah fallen. Distracted from the intent required to hold the black-flower path whole, she falls. Zelda lunges to catch her. Sal draws closer. Ish must go all the way, now, he thinks. He must reach the crossroads first, and so he jumps onto the path, three bullets left in his gun.

Zelda catches June’s wrist but hasn’t the strength to pull her up. Ramon, recovered from Ish’s blow, arrives; together they haul June to safety. The gravely wounded Sarah commands their attention. Zelda spots a white-hatted Ish on the path. Sarah tells her to go after him. June, Zelda sees, has expended all her spin to summon Sal. Ramon, too, is exhausted, but Zelda must trust them to get Sarah to a hospital back home while she pursues Ish.

Ramon and June carry Sarah out of the palace, but the cowboy himself now chases them. With June tending Sarah in the back seat, Ramon guns the Challenger across the drawbridge. The cowboy commandeers a robo-horse, and rides after them.

Ramon drives from alt to alt, through storm and bullets. The cowboy gains. His minions join the chase on motorcycles, in a squad car. June tells Ramon Sarah’s that fading. Of course there are more cowboys the closer they get to home: home is the cowboy’s place, and the alt-roads are his roads. Hearing this, Ramon conceives a desperate plan. His knack churning, the Challenger protesting, he veers off the road and into the dark, trailblazing.

The black-flower path abhors Ish, presses him back, makes his gun heavy and hot. Between steps, he finds himself back at college, on the Halloween fourteen years ago when he was to win Zelda, but instead she won Sal. He dodges through costumed partiers. Zelda comes up behind him. Ish, gun in hand, becomes the pursuer, Zelda the pursued. He must convince Zelda that she’s wrong about Sal and put things right. But he’s torn between the shadow under the trees, the serpent at the world’s roots, and a vision of Zelda’s hair shining in the sun.

Zelda races through the “shattering past.” None of the partiers notice the road splitting apart beneath them. Where are these kids now? Do they agonize too about whether they’ve fucked up? Whether they had any choice to begin with? She stunt-leaps across the rift, but so does Ish. They end up on the roof of the Brutalist A & A Building, Zelda and Ish and the cowboy. The cowboy offers to give Zelda what she wants out of saving the world: everything fixed, the monsters gone, herself safe at home with a girl who at least looks like Sal. Zelda realizes that the cowboy’s been inside her all along.

Ish watches the cowboy target Zelda. He tells himself to remember the serpent, but he thinks of the friends he’s failed, who are more real than either serpent or cowboy. He forces his gun up. It’s the cowboy’s gun Zelda spends her spin on fouling, while Ish’s bullet takes out the cowboy—and himself at the same time, as he knew it would.

The cowboy leaves no body. Zelda kneels by Ish’s. He lost so many times to fear and need, but at the end he understood, and won. The rest is up to her. A chain link fence at the end of the roof separates her from the crossroads. Sal taught her to climb it once. Now Zelda puts on Sal’s iron ring, says “I love you,” and climbs. She’s unfolding now, growing, seeing differently. She drops to the other side, where a hand lifts her and she hears the voice she’s missed.

“Took you long enough,” Sal says.

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: We’re still a long way from fully learning this world. Look, new species just dropped!

What’s Cyclopean: Ramon ponders the unicorn tapestry in Elsinore: “a symbol of purity in this place of poets stripped naked at knifepoint.”

Weirdbuilding: Are the wrong angles of the beyond a violation of the physics that keep us whole, or just the distortion of looking at the shore from underwater? The Hounds of Tindalos have opinions.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Everyone this week is less sure about what counts as sane, so it’s no surprise that the wind screams and laughs in “babbling mad voices,” that a “mad world” is contrasted with the gun’s “logic,” and that the Halloween party is full of “mad voices, whispers.”

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I’m the sort of person who hears about new popular music on NPR, and who got earwormed by “Texas Hold ‘Em” in the lobby of a theater. Which in combination are why I’m writing this to the strains of Beyonce’s newly-dropped Cowboy Carter, an album that deconstructs the mythoses both of country music and of ahistorically-white cowboy movies. (It’s also what I think the kids these days call a bop. Several bops? Can an album be a bop or only an individual song?) The Cowboy would not approve.

The thing about the lie that protects civilization-as-we-know-it is that it’s a lie. The white-hatted line-walker wouldn’t care to recognize the Native American vaqueros, or the formerly-enslaved Black cowboys making their homes on the range after the Slaveholder’s Rebellion, or Annie Oakley. The lie is that there’s only one line. That to imagine alternatives is to destroy everything, to let in the serpent and Cthulhu and the inevitable robot (translated from the Czech) uprising. That there’s nothing on either side of the road but tentacles and teeth.

One nasty truth from the liar: “So long as the world’s there, we can take the things we want from it.” But that truth leads to all the lies. The ability to extract is confounded with the ability to exist. The ostensible stakes are heightened until it only makes sense to follow the logic of the gun. To do what hurts because at least that way you know you’re still walking the line.

Poor Ish. Failing to fail, failing to allow for failure, failing to allow for being wrong. And putting on the white hat, just as Zelda and Sarah and Ramon are coming around to admitting that yes, maybe Sal was right. I love the way that, as they make that admission, the imagined alternatives waver between toothy tentacle and flowering otherland—and they glimpse Sal not as monster or college-aged innocent, but as herself a natural decade older, graying and strong with her experiences. It’s not an easy switch, that change in perspective. Glimpsing it once doesn’t make you immune to the fearful illusion. But the illusion is a little weaker afterwards. The cowboy tries increasingly desperately to argue for it—first that it’s the only real option, then that it’s the only option that won’t hurt.

Wonder and glory are worth a little heartache, aren’t they?

Over the fence, on the far side of the cowboy’s reality, everything looks like metaphors and references and questions. We need such tools, to grasp at a hint of trying to understand. We’re looking at angles skewed by the water’s boundary, or we’re wading through black flowers, or we’re cracking the world’s eggshell a la Utena. (We’re also having a car chase, just in case you were wondering whether that reference was deliberate.) (And “the cowboy followed,” maybe like the gunslinger in The Dark Tower.) We’re turning off the road, questioning the assumptions of the whole road trip genre. We’re standing in the gale from the “demon wind of yes”. (James Joyce reference? Yoko Ono?) We’re running through a Halloween party where Zelda once made a choice about who to be and who to love: the first place where she imagined possibilities she hadn’t before. Where else would you find the Crossroads? Where else would you finally put on a ring and climb a fence and complete that choice you started making all those years ago?

On the other side of the fence, through the metaphors, are the questions. Who are you? What do you want? (Babylon 5 reference there, though B5 wasn’t pulling the angel’s and devil’s questions from nowhere.) Could there be a world beyond this one—no. Wrong question. What worlds are beyond this one? What dreams?

Took you long enough to ask.

Anne’s Commentary

So much is going on for Gladstone’s characters in these chapters. Still. Today I’m all about Ish.

In his first inaugural address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” It’s decent rhetoric, but inaccurate. If you’re an alt-rider, you can legitimately fear lots of other things, like giant flying centipedes, post-apocalyptic cannibal cultists, and active lava fields. Henry David Thoreau may have come closer to the truth in an 1851 journal entry: “Nothing is to be so much feared as fear.” This assertion allows for the fear of giant flying centipedes, post-apocalyptic cannibal cultists, and active lava fields, even if you should also fear your fear of these things, since capital-F fear is more fearsome still.

Of course, the last word on anything must go to Yoda. Or should we say the first word, given he dropped his aphorisms “long, long ago”? Anyhow, he said: “Fear is the path to the dark side.” By “dark side,” he didn’t necessarily mean an actual “path of lower luminosity” ending up in a wardrobe composed entirely of black garments. Nor yet could he have meant by “path” the “black-flower” one that Gladstone mentions, what with Gladstone’s book not having been around in Yoda’s day. Not that I’d ever underestimate Master Yoda’s ability to see into the future of SFF publications.

The point is: If your fear leads you to duck giant flying centipedes before they can grasp your head in their venom-dripping mandibles, it’s a good thing. But if your fear becomes chronic, a caustic dye that stains your fundamental perception of the world and leaves you a serpent-conjuring paranoid wreck like Ish, it’s a bad thing. It amplifies your defenses into offenses.

It makes the White-Hat cowboy take notice of you, and smile. He’s so glad that you hear a snake gnawing away at the rooty underpinnings of everything, even though snakes don’t actually gnaw roots so much as, say, naked mole-rats do. The cowboy knows that metaphors don’t need to make sense to be of use to him – the opposite, in fact. They need to trigger visceral emotion. He’s thrilled that you see everywhere the shadowy forest edges where bloody deeds are done. Were done, to and by your childhood self.

There was a nervous moment for the cowboy when Ish found Zelda. When Ish imagined that the light reflected from her hair could banish his under-tree shadows, that the fire of her intellect could immolate the serpent. Luckily for the cowboy, Sal came along. First, Sal made Ish think he could win Zelda, setting him up to be crushed. Second, Sal won Zelda away from him. Third, Sal proved unworthy of Zelda by embracing the enemy rot, becoming a monster and leaving Zelda to welter in guilt because she couldn’t save Sal from monsterfication. Fourth, Sal had to have a cousin just as unworthy as she was! Another monster that fooled Zelda, making it that much harder for Ish to save her.

As for Sarah and Ramon, let them just try to snatch Ish back from the whiteness of the cowboy. He’s as doomed as any Ahab whose mortal wound is not to the body but to the psyche. The difference between the characters is that Ahab can’t be saved by Starbuck’s reminder of his family—Starbuck can’t break open his cannibal Captain’s heart with his “See, see! The boy’s face from the window! The boy’s hand on the hill!” Ahab casts the evocation of his child down, “his last, cindered apple to the soil.” Whereas Ish—

As the cowboy takes aim at Zelda, Ish still aches from his psychic wounds, still feels himself in “the shadow of the trees.” But he can look beyond the shadow to “other worlds than his. Ramon and Sarah, Zelda and Sal. Cynthia.” His friends are to him, in the end, “more real than the trees, more real than the serpent, more real than the cowboy.” The whale has become Ahab’s only reality, and so he can’t turn from his own destruction. Ish makes the emotional reconnection to his better humanity, and so can stop walking the cowboy’s line and kill him, though in full knowledge he’s gone too far into the whiteness to save himself.

Ish, I’m glad you were never meant to be a deathspian or a tragic hero lost to his fatal flaws. I’m glad you instead found your redemption.

Next week, we celebrate National Poetry Month with Christina Rossetti’s classic “Goblin Market.”[end-mark]

The post The Path to the Dark Side: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 17) appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations The Wheel of Time

Reading The Wheel of Time: Mat Faces a Gholam, and His Future, in Winter’s Heart (Part 13)

This week, Mat makes a spectacle of himself before both his current lover and his future wife…

By Sylas K Barrett

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Published on April 2, 2024

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This week in Reading the Wheel of Time, we are covering Chapters 16 and 17 of Winter’s Heart, in which Mat has not one, not two, but three fateful encounters, and in which his pathological demand avoidance has him appearing before his current lover and his future wife covered in mud and sporting a very cheeky attitude. For a man who always wishes to be safe and away from danger, he certainly does like to stick his neck out, doesn’t he? I love him.

Mat, Thom, Beslan, and Olver make their way back to Ebou Dar, and Mat notices how little damage was done to the city when it was conquered.

When they make their way through the gate everyone stops to stare at streets so full of Seanchan and carts and livestock that everyone can barely move. Mat realizes that the harbor had been full of ships as well, and that there could be even more beyond the horizon, waiting to dock.

Mat suggests that Beslan and Thom make their way to the Palace via back alleys. He also warns them not to try anything, to wait for Rand to come and sort out the Seanchan. Thom suggests that whatever Mat ends up doing will be far more dangerous than anything he or Beslan might try, but agrees to take Olver back to the Palace.

Left on his own, Mat goes looking for an inn where he can rent a space where he can hide clothes and small bits of money—taking very much at a time from his chests in the Palace will alert Tylin that he’s trying to escape her. But he doesn’t have any luck and eventually gives up.

He has fully memorized the back alleys of Ebou Dar during his recovery, so it’s easy to make his way back to the Palace without encountering many people. He’s nearly to the square in front of the Palace when he trips and falls over, landing in the mud. Someone trips over top of him, sprawling in turn, and Mat turns to see the gholam that attacked them in the Rahad. He realizes that if he hadn’t tripped, the gholam would have had him easily.

Mat throws his walking staff, buying himself a second to pull the foxhead medallion off and swing it. He manages to burn the gholam with it, but he’s tired and sore, barely able to keep the thing off of him. Suddenly he hears a voice shouting “He’s down the alley!” and “Hurry, he’ll get away!”

The gholam hisses at him that it has been told to avoid notice, and so Mat will live a little longer. Mat runs after it as it retreats, aware that the thing will just come back from him again and wondering if the medallion could kill the creature. But the gholam finds a small hole in the brick wall and slithers into it, astounding Mat and the old man who has come to his aid.

The old man admits there wasn’t anyone with him—he used the ruse to scare off Mat’s attacker. However, seeing what the creature could do, he thinks maybe he and Mat both have the Dark One’s own luck. He introduces himself as Noal Charin, and Mat thinks that the man’s face looks familiar, though he can’t place it. He offers to put Noal up in the Palace with his own men.

Suddenly Mat realizes that the dice hadn’t stopped spinning when the gholam attacked him. Which means there is something else out there, still waiting for him.

Mat takes Noal to one of the stableyard gates, where both Seanchan and Ebou Dari soldiers are standing guard. He greets the Ebou Dari officer politely, and is irked when the man remarks that “she” will be upset when she sees the state of him. When a Seanchan messenger asks the Ebou Dari guards, not the Seanchan ones, to be let into the palace, Noal asks what the Seanchan would do if the Ebou Dari refused. The officer tells Mat to educate his friend on what should and shouldn’t be said aloud.

They go into the stableyard, and Mat explains about the Seanchan Seekers, who make the Whitecloak ones look tame by comparison. He also observes the sul’dam exercising their damane. The ranks of the damane include Sea Folk windfinders and Teslyn Baradon. Mat mutters that he supposes being collared is better than being dead—the Mistress of the Ships and her Master of the Blades had chosen to die at the stake—but when Noal asks if Mat really believes that, Mat isn’t sure he does.

Mat takes Noal and introduces him to his men. Seeing the state of him, they are eager to fight whoever it is, but Mat has Noal explain what happened. The man is an excellent storyteller. Mat tells them in the morning he’ll give them gold so that they can buy passage out of the city, but they all refuse. Noal remarks he has seen great leaders like Mat before.

Mat leaves, heading to his own quarters to get cleaned up, but so many servants remark on the state of him, warning that Tylin won’t like it and offering to help him get cleaned up, that he gets annoyed. He also runs into Juilin, who is supposed to stay in the servants’ areas. Mat warns Juilin about the gholam, but Ju​​lin observes, looking guilty, that he has a reason to stay. Mat deduces that he has met a woman. He tries to advise that Juilin can meet plenty of others, but Juilin gets huffy with him, calling Mat “My Lord” and reminding him of what Tylin said she would do to Mat if she caught him in such a state again.

Mat sails brazenly into Tylin’s apartments and throws his hat across the room, only to stop dead when he realizes that there are other people with her—and more importantly the dice have stopped tumbling in his head. They land so hard his head is ringing, putting him in a state of shock as he takes in Tylin, Suroth, various servants, and a petite woman wearing a veil, with red-lacquered nails and a completely shaven head.

The woman, Tuon, begins scolding Suroth for not making the streets safe, and Mat can see that Tylin is angry with him for causing a problem. He tries to assert that he fell down, but Tuon can tell that he’s lying. When she suggests that this might be because Mat fears Tylin’s anger, Mat gets reckless again, telling her that he was hurt during the Seanchan attack. Tuon seems intrigued that Mat would have fought the Seanchan if he could have and circles him, taking particular note of his signet ring.

She invites Tylin to accompany her to her rooms and Tylin accepts. As the so’jin are fixing the High Ladies’ clothing, Tylin and Mat take a moment apart, and Mat explains about the gholam. He suggests it might be safer for everyone if he left, but Tylin asserts that the thing cannot have him, and neither can High Lady Tuon. Furthermore, she promises to dress Mat in pink as punishment for this interruption.

Tylin, Suroth, Tuon, and their entourage leave. Mat sits alone in Tylin’s room as a servant clears up, puzzling over the dice stopping and how nothing seems to have happened. Always before when the dice stopped something had happened to him immediately. But when Tylin returns and breaks out the pink ribbons, he has something else to think about.

I don’t understand Tylin. I really liked her character back when she was just interacting with Nynaeve and Elayne, but her behavior towards Mat is abhorrent. In the beginning it wasn’t too bad, and I thought it might be interesting for Mat to unlearn some of his beliefs about proper gender roles when it comes to who is “supposed” to be the pursuer and who is “supposed” to be pursued. The man likes money and nice things, after all, and gambling and relaxing and not having responsibilities. If being a “pretty” was just being a sugar baby for a while, I think he might actually really enjoy it.

But of course, it’s not working out that way at all. For one, Tylin doesn’t want Mat to have much freedom to do the things he enjoys, even though she must be busy and can’t be spending all her time with him. She seems to delight in making him uncomfortable, and when he doesn’t behave and do as she wishes, she punishes him. Ironic that she had to tell Tuon that Mat was a free man who couldn’t be bought or sold, given that she clearly does not want him to have much freedom, and is quite content to treat him as a prisoner, which isn’t a position very far from being owned. Mat himself could have laughed when Tylin uses the term “free man,” and for once, I wouldn’t say he was being dramatic.

It’s unclear how much of Tylin’s controlling and abusive behavior towards Mat is typical for Altaran/Ebou Dari culture and now much is specific to her and might be considered crossing a line by others from her nation. But even if the general shape of Mat and Tylin’s relationship is normal for Ebou Dar, even including some aspect of control exerted over the younger party, we do have clues that Tylin has gone too far even for her own culture. The biggest one is, of course, Beslan’s willingness to help Mat plan his escape. Beslan was initially very approving of his mother’s relationship with Mat, and even now has pointed out that his mother needs the distraction. If he is willing to help Mat escape her, and while he’s also focused on how to resist the Seanchan, I think Beslan believes that his mother has become more than “a little” too possessive. Of course he’s going to downplay what he says about it, but the action speaks louder than the words.

Even the servants, who used to be amused by Mat’s predicament, mostly seem concerned now about keeping him from getting in trouble. Maybe it’s because they need their mistress to be in as good of a mood as possible, given everything that has happened, but there also might be some genuine concern for Mat as well. Even Tuon, who has just met both of them, wonders if Mat is afraid of Tylin, and she is right about that, though Mat tries to downplay it in his own head.

And Tylin demands so much more of Mat than to let himself be cosseted and have a lot of good sex with her. She doesn’t just want him to let her spoil him and to make her feel wanted in return—she’s taking his clothes and controlling his access to his own money. When he doesn’t behave in the way she wants, she punishes him, including by withholding food and, it seems, in sexual encounters. Not to mention the extreme power imbalance here—as the queen she could do much more than order the servants not to feed him. If she wanted she could have him arrested, or possibly even executed. I don’t think she would, but the threat exists purely because of their respective positions in society. And when Mat brings up the gholam, Tylin doesn’t show much concern about his safety, or about the safety of the people who might be close to him.

I guess that there’s a chance that Tylin doesn’t really understand the full threat the gholam poses, but she was warned by Nynaeve and Elayne, and the thing is clearly shadowspawn. If she cares about Mat so much, it would certainly be in his best interest to be allowed to try to escape it, and if she loves her people, she should want to do anything in her power to get such a creature out of the city. And the only thing in her power is to let Mat leave and hope the gholam follows him. Instead, she just tells Mat “it can’t have you,” as though her saying so will make any difference at all.

I can certainly appreciate how impotent Tylin feels, however. She’s a very interesting queen, in that she has the authority of a ruler but only over a very small part of the country. Perhaps that is part of the reason she behaves the way she does—the status she holds and the power she wields is very great compared to those under her rule, but compared to other rulers you could almost say she isn’t really a queen in anything but name. Actually, in many ways she’s a lot like Berelain, who is the ruler of her own country but one who doesn’t get the respect of other rulers and even of high-ranking lords of larger, more powerful nations.

And now that I think about it, my response to the character of Berelain was very similar to my response to Tylin. When she’s interacting with other women Berelain is interesting, clever, and even admirable. But put her around Perrin (or Rand, before he scared her off) and she seems like a different person, and her motivations don’t make any sense. Like Berelain, Tylin had a great introduction and her interactions with Nynaeve and Elayne, especially that first one, really made her stand out among the nobility our Two Rivers’ heroes have encountered.  And then she met Mat, and she turned into this weird sex predator for no really discernible reason.

Of course, it’s not unrealistic for a person who seems interesting, smart, and even morally upright to have such a flaw, but after being so frustrated by Berelain, seeing such a similar story unfolding with Tylin and Mat makes me wonder if Jordan isn’t driving at a larger theme. The way The Wheel of Time navigates gender politics makes me a little wary of such an exploration, but I’ll try to maintain an open mind and see where this goes.

It is interesting, also, to note that Berelain and Faile actually are very similar people in many respects, and now Mat is trying to escape a queen while (as yet unknowingly) drawing closer to the future Empress he is fated to marry. As Tylin and Tuon attempt to understand each other, the one keeps Mat a prisoner while the other is going to be his wife.

The culture clash between the Seanchan and those they invade has always been interesting to watch. Every time it’s brought up, I find myself wondering if the Seanchan actually believe that these foreigners they are conquering understand the oath they are swearing. They certainly behave as though they believe it—but I think it’s more likely that they are so dedicated to their societal rules that they expect those they conquer to either adapt or suffer the consequences, which is no more or less than they expect from their own citizens. Mat notices the hanged people on the gates of Ebou Dar and that the Seanchan are punished equally for the same crimes—even those of the Blood are held to the same standards, and although their punishments are carried out differently, one can safely assume that if someone like Tylin or Beslyn were caught breaking a law, they would be also treated the way the Seanchan High Lords and Ladies are.

The Seanchan societal structure already relies on the idea that those who suffer consequences according to culture and law have brought it upon themselves, and whether it be through intentional illegal action, honest mistakes, or failures makes no difference. So why should it make a difference if those they conquer fail to uphold their oaths because they do not understand them, or because they swore them under duress, or because they lied while swearing with the exact intention of breaking the oath at the first opportunity. The consequences are the same, and the responsibility to act according to what is expected of you is on the individual. This is how some of Tuon’s siblings were made da’covale, even though they were children of the Empress herself. And in the same way, this is how those who perform with the most excellence find themselves raised in societal station.

It is a system that treats everyone equally, but not with equity. But for those who believe in it wholeheartedly, as Tuon does, the two would feel like one in the same.

We see this culture clash between her and Tylin. Tuon seems absolutely genuine in her desire for Tylin to be comfortable and content in her new role, for her not to fear Tuon and to see her as a sister (though not like the actual sisters she had to compete with, I’ll wager). It either would not occur to her or not matter to her that, from Tylin’s perspective, her home is being invaded and her culture replaced with that of the invaders. She might control more territory now that she did before the Seanchan’s arrival, she might be Queen of Altar in name, but she will not be passing her own laws, or ruling as she sees fit. She will be enforcing Seanchan laws, and answering to the Empress, and the consequences of failing to do so will always remain dire.

Perhaps many Seanchan find comfort in the intense hierarchical structure of their society. It prizes ability, after all, and at least in theory suggest that talent and strength and brains are (somewhat) more important than what class you were born into. Yes, it’s quite possible to fall very far through accident or failure, but the trade off is having life’s rules be very clear, if complicated. In theory, this sort of structure prevents the high from abusing the low for no reason other than their own whims or feelings of superiority—though in practice of course human nature will always play a significant factor, and any social system can be abused, or ignored, by those with power and influence.

And let us not forget, the Seanchan are invaders to the Altarans, but the Seanchan Empress and those of the Blood who trace their lineage back to Luthair believe they are reclaiming something stolen, and the people of this continent have forgotten who the land actually belongs to. This, too, is a mistake that brings its own punishment, and will earn little sympathy for those who might struggle to adapt to Seanchan rule.

Still, Tuon seems to be honest and dedicated, and loyal to both the letter and the spirit of Seanchan law. She performance penance when she abuses her power, she follows omens and listens to her Truthspeaker even when she does not agree with Anath, and she takes an active role in caring for the people in her charge. If one were to accept for a moment the morality of her culture, she would seem to qualify as a good person.

Of course, much of the Seanchan society is entirely amoral, especially the attitudes towards damane. But what’s interesting to me is the idea that a woman who is destined to be the Empress of this rigid, highly controlled society is also destined to marry Mat, who is figuratively and literally an agent of chaos and chance. What effect would such a person have on the ruler of the Seanchan, and how will that effect trickle down into the rest of society, especially when the Seanchan settlers mix and intermingle with the people of this continent, with all their varied cultural beliefs and different laws and customs?

That remains to be seen, but in the meantime, I, like Tuon, will take special note that Mat’s signet ring has ravens on it. Bought by chance, this object also seems to herald the wife he is destined to have, since the Roses and Ravens are the symbol of the Empress herself. And is he the fox, perhaps? He’s crafty enough for such a description, certainly.

I’m also so curious about Noal. He’s obviously someone important, and not just because Mat thought his face looked familiar. Some of the way he phrases things was very puzzling to me, such as when Mat explains the Seanchan Seekers.

I can certainly understand why someone might feel awkward and irritated at making a potentially dangerous mistake, but Noal’s reaction feels more like a kid’s reaction than that of an adult, as does the way he protests when the officer initially becomes upset with him. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the way he’s stumbled into Mat’s life, the way he says “I had no idea you were so important” as though Mat is someone he’s known for a long time just seems… significant. Plus, this is Mat. When is the last time he made a random fortuitous connection that wasn’t important.

Noal just seems to know things, and I think that will matter later in the story. I was also struck by his compassion and insight when Mat observed that being made a damane was still better than being dead, and Noal asked if he really believed that. Mat had the grace to realize that he didn’t, and the empathy to relate to the damane in their literal collars while he himself is trapped by a figurative one.

Will Mat succeed in escaping from Tylin? Will he find out who Tuon really is before he goes, or will the truth remain hidden until much later? What rebellious act are Thom and Beslan considering? Will Mat figure out Alludra’s riddle? And what exactly is Juilin up to? So many questions, but we’ll be staying with Mat in Ebou Dar as we continue on to Chapters 18 and 19. Until then, dear readers![end-mark]

The post Reading The Wheel of Time: Mat Faces a Gholam, and His Future, in <i>Winter’s Heart</i> (Part 13) appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations short fiction

Digging Through the Archives: 8 SFF Short Stories Told Through Notes and Documents

These stories come in many forms–fictional obituaries, scholarly articles, even a grant proposal–offering fascinating glimpses into unexplored realities.

By Ratika Deshpande

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Published on April 3, 2024

Photo by Joanna Kosinska [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Joanna Kosinska [via Unsplash]

One of my favorite forms of stories is what some call “found fiction”—diaries, documents, transcripts, excerpts, and so on. Reading these kinds of stories feels like coming upon a curious artefact that hints at more than what’s on the page, a world that invites us to fill in the gaps. Who left these documents here? Who wrote them? Who’s reading them, in the world of the story? How important is this document, in the larger scheme of things? There are so many questions—entering into these narratives is an opportunity to interact; you’re getting to play with and explore interesting worlds, questions, and ideas as if you were sleuth or a journalist. Here’s a selection of some of my favorites…

“Excerpts from a Scientist’s Notebook: Ancestral Memory in Europan Pseudocephalopods” by David DeGraff

I’m always fascinated by stories of space and of memory, and David DeGraff does an excellent job of combining both of these in this flash story constructed out of a series of notes on the memory of creatures found on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The happy ending is a bonus. 

“A Review: The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7” by Lars Ahn

Written as a review of a documentary, this story by Lars Ahn considers the methods filmmaker Manuela Riviera uses to bring together the surviving crew of a failed expedition to Mars and compel them to talk about what happened on board the spaceship. The reviewer takes a look at the lengths the filmmaker went to record the documentary, as well as the ethics of forcing people together to make them reveal details they’ve kept secret for decades. It gives you much to think about, raising questions about the lengths we’re willing to go to in the name of art, and to satisfy our curiosity about the lives of those pushed into the spotlight.

“Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” by Stewart C Baker

This in-world essay considers the roles companion animals play in a famous (fictional) animated web series whose creator(s) are unknown and which has garnered a large following online. This is a story about a story that also examines how we interact with media, especially stories we are deeply attached to, and our desire for answers. 

“Some Assembly Required” by Anne E.G. Nydam

How do you build a castle in the air, literally? Anne Nydam has got the instructions for you, along with lovely, surreal illustrations to help you put it all together. Do read the warnings carefully, though.

“Search History for Elspeth Adair, Age 11” by Aimee Picchi

Search histories are one of the most intriguing aspects of life on the internet—I’ve referred to mine when trying to trace my way back to a particular website or article; it’s quite an experience to see your train of thought mapped out step-by-step. Too bad they’re so easily deleted, because as Aimee Picchi shows in this excellent little story, our search histories can tell us a lot about how our curiosity can take us to unexpected places, both online and in the real world. A delightful little story that always makes me smile.

“Rising Star” by Stephen Graham Jones

The Meerschon Grant Selection Committee is considering proposals to fund research—research that will make the best use of a new technology that allows for time travel. The possibilities are endless; you could access and study documents that no longer exist, observe dinosaurs, or “watch the moon coalescing into a sphere.” But bearing witness to these moments, and even answering long-standing questions, won’t really impact our present. Our narrator has a proposal that trumps everything else, a proposal that will take a researcher far back into the distant past, on a one-way trip, with instructions to find and preserve knowledge that will survive thousands of years and help humanity in the present—unlike observing the moon back when it was young, for example. 

Reading SFF often leaves me wishing that magic was real, but after reading this story all I truly want now is the confidence to write a grant proposal with such absolute conviction. 

“In the City of Failing Knives” by Tara Campbell

In the City of Failing Knives, as the name suggests, knives don’t cut—they bind, which is why, when couples get married, they seal the deal with a knife (in some unfortunate cases, quite literally). Full of interesting anecdotes and footnotes, this curious little article for Popular Sociology makes one think about and reconsider the words we use to signify love and connection, and what they can really mean if we delve beyond the surface. A fascinating exploration of possibilities. 

“50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know” by Ken Liu

Given the torrent of articles we’ve all been reading since ChatGPT come onto the scene and the developments that have followed, this fascinating obituary for a famous “AI AI-critic” might as well be an actual article we’ll see in a decade or two. After reading this story, I finally understood what older people mean when they talk about stuff from SFF books becoming a part of their daily lives. A piece that starts with familiar concepts and leaves you haunted. 

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The post Digging Through the Archives: 8 SFF Short Stories Told Through Notes and Documents appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Front Lines and Frontiers

A Dazzling Collection of Classic Tales: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

In this brilliant follow-up to The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury expanded his scope and cemented his reputation as a master storyteller.

By Alan Brown

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Published on April 2, 2024

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In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.

Today I’m looking at a book from 1951, Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a follow-up to his popular fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles. At this point in his career, Bradbury was still largely a short fiction writer, but he was gaining wider attention and publishers were eager to publish another of his books. Bradbury still hadn’t completed a full standalone novel (that would come in 1953, with Fahrenheit 451), so—as with The Martian Chronicles—they were willing to accept a collection of short stories connected by a framing narrative.

For this review, I’m using a first edition Bantam paperback copy from 1952, discovered at my favorite local used book store. Like Bradbury’s other work, The Illustrated Man is full of cleverly constructed tales, all built with wonderfully evocative prose and brimming with a wide range of emotions. The book was very influential, inspired writers and musicians from a range of genres, and some of the stories served as the basis for a movie of the same name in 1969. I loved these stories when I first read them, even the scary ones, and my most recent reading confirms that I love them still.

About the Author

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was a prominent American science fiction and fantasy writer, playwright, and screenwriter, who started his career as an avid science fiction fan. I previously reviewed his 1957 book Dandelion Wine (find it here) a few summers ago. I’ve also discussed his 1946 collaboration with Leigh Brackett, “Lorelei of the Red Mist,” when looking at an anthology containing her work (find it here). And most recently, I reviewed his wildly popular anthology from 1950, The Martian Chronicles (find it here). You can see more biographical information in those columns. There are some earlier stories by Ray Bradbury available on Project Gutenberg, including “Lorelei of the Red Mist.”

The Anti-Science Science Fiction Writer?

In my review of The Martian Chronicles, I pointed out that Ray Bradbury was one of the authors who brought science fiction out of the confines of genre fiction and into the mainstream of popular culture. But while Bradbury often used science fictional elements like rockets, robots, and other planets in his stories, he was uncomfortable with being labeled as a science fiction author. In his Wikipedia entry, I found a quote from an interview that summed up his thoughts on the subject:

First of all, I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time—because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.

And at some point early in his career, Bradbury must have been perceived as having a bias against science itself. There is a rather defensive blurb on the back cover of the paperback I used for this review: “RAY BRADBURY is a little doubtful of the uses to which certain sciences are being put in the world. He thinks radio, television and motion pictures are wonderful, but decries the hogwash utilized all too often on these mediums by those in control. He believes in atomic power and automobiles, if used with common sense, but also believes that we may very well kill or maim ourselves with these devices if we do not put laws into effect to control them. He is not, as he has often been misquoted, against science, but rather against the mis-use of science by fools.”

But regardless of the labels applied to Bradbury’s work, it was clearly something special. He took themes from science fiction, fantasy, history, myth, and fables, and delivered them with wonderfully poetic prose, infused with heartfelt emotion, and written in a way even literary critics could admire. It is no surprise that, whatever he said about himself and his work, the science fiction community has always been proud to call him one of their own.

The Illustrated Man

This book has a thin but compelling framing device. The unnamed narrator, sleeping rough, is joined at his fire by a man who is covered by tattoos that mutate as you look at them; if you stare at them long enough, they tell you stories of the future. The man is tortured by their images, as they also warn watchers of the threat he might pose to them in the future. This framework allows the stories to cover a wide range of unconnected topics, and a number of those tales are set on the fictional Mars of The Martian Chronicles, a setting Bradbury was not yet willing to abandon.

The first story in the collection is one of Bradbury’s most widely known tales, “The Veldt,” which originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. If I am reading the ISFDB website correctly, in addition to The Illustrated Man, the story has appeared in at least a dozen anthologies in English, not to mention being translated into about sixteen other languages. I’m pretty sure my first reading of the story was in one of those anthologies, borrowed from the local library. The story features a “house of the future” of the kind suburban families dreamed about in the mid-20^th century, which can do everything its owners desire, not only chores and cooking, but providing entertainment as well.

At the heart of this home is a nursery that can bring anything a child imagines to life, an idea that predicted the virtual reality devices that are beginning to emerge in our own time. But in this case, instead of the antiseptic stories from their children’s books, the children conjure up the image of an African veldt, where a pack of lions seems to be either killing or eating their prey in a perpetual loop. When it comes to horror, an everyday threat presented effectively can beat any Lovecraftian eldritch being ever created, and here it is the amoral greed of spoiled children, amplified by the power of technology, which brings terror to the suburban family.

“Kaleidoscope” is the story of a rocket is destroyed in mid-journey, with its crew now floating in spacesuits, awaiting death. How they face their inevitable demise varies, and there is a bittersweet twist at the end.

“The Other Foot” is a follow-up to a story from The Martian Chronicles, “Way in the Middle of the Air,” in which the Black inhabitants of a southern town hire rockets to Mars, leaving the White inhabitants with no one to persecute. Now, the arrival of a rocket piloted by a white man is anticipated by a Black community on Mars, and among those who flock to see him are people who think they should treat the visitor in the same way they had been treated back on Earth. But when they hear an atomic war has reduced the population to a pitiful few who need to flee to Mars to survive, they see that maybe the old cycle of pain and prejudice should be broken.

“The Highway” is set on a farm along a backwoods roadway in Mexico. The people in the cars rushing by are concerned with nuclear war and the end of the world, but it is all a matter of perspective, as the farmer does not see anything that will affect his own life.

In “The Man,” the self-absorbed captain of an exploration rocket is frustrated by the indifferent reception he gets from natives of a new world. They are all talking about a man who recently visited, preaching peace, and healing the sick, and tell the captain he will not find the man here. The captain goes off to search the next world, not realizing it is his own anger that keeps him from finding what he seeks.

“The Long Rain” follows a military unit marooned on Venus, and here Bradbury’s evocative prose turns the rain and storms into an unending and visceral horror. The unit is trying to reach a Sun Dome, a snug installation that will provide shelter and safety. But storms and setbacks winnow down the personnel until only the lieutenant in charge reaches safety. Because of the madness that infected the unit, however, it’s not clear whether his success is real or imaginary.

In “The Rocket Man,” a young boy and his mother grapple with the frequent and extended absences of the space-faring father, who after bittersweet interludes at home on Earth with the family, always answers the urge to return to the interplanetary voyages that he loves. He is a modest man, and does not like to wear his uniform, but at one point they convince him to put it on, and Bradbury captures the moment with a paragraph I will never forget: “It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from a dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time.” The father finally relents, promising his family that the next voyage will be his last, which turns out to be true, but in the saddest possible way.

In another story set on Mars, “The Fire Balloons,” a group of Episcopal priests travel as missionaries, not to preach to humans, but to the Martians. Father Peregrine—who strikes me as an academic, as his concerns are always of a philosophical nature—travels into the wild with the more pragmatic Father Stone. The Martians they find are floating balls of glowing energy, and save the two priests from a landslide. Father Peregrine then decides to step off a cliff, and the Martians save him again. The glowing beings then speak to the priests about how they have transcended their physical bodies. The earthly Father Stone then has an epiphany that, just like there is a Truth on Earth, there is a Truth on Mars, and Truths on other planets as well, which make up a larger universal Truth. It is an ecumenical message that my young self found far more compelling than the narrow definitions of truth I heard from some of our ministers in church, and still resonates with me today.

“The Last Night of the World” finds that a contented couple might not need to do anything different when they face the end of everything.

“The Exiles” is another tale that echoes a story in The Martian Chronicles, in this case the story “Usher II,” where an eccentric genius builds a technological trap to destroy the government officials who are behind censorship on Earth. In “The Exiles,” the battle with censors is much more symbolic, with dead authors and their fictional creations working together to fight a rocket bringing the last copies of banned books to be destroyed on Mars. The story defies logic, but its emotional core holds a powerful message.

“No Particular Night or Morning” is the story of a space traveler overwhelmed by the immensity of space, and his descent into madness.

One of my favorite stories in the volume is “The Fox and the Forest,” the tale of a couple who travel back in time to avoid a dystopic future where a ruined Earth is plagued by war. Because the man is a scientist whose knowledge is essential to the war effort, they are pursued through time by government officials. But while they are willing to resort to murder to prevent their return, their efforts are in vain, and their fate as inevitable as history itself.

“The Visitor” is a tale in which Mars is used as a dumping ground for people with a new and fatal disease. A new patient arrives—a young man who can create mental images that transport others into a virtual world that helps them temporarily escape their plight. He soon becomes a pawn in a brutal battle over his services, which soon destroys the goose that laid the golden egg.

“The Concrete Mixer” posits a Martian invasion of Earth defeated not by military force or disease, but by overwhelming the Martians with the inexorable force of capitalism.

A man purchases a mechanical doppelganger in “Marionettes, Inc.”, which will allow him to take a vacation from a clinging and oppressive marriage, only to find the robot developing a mind of its own, and deciding to replace him once and for all.

An army unit from Earth moves into “The City,” only to find it uninhabited. But the cybernetic metropolis remembers what humans did the last time they encountered its late inhabitants, and has a plan for revenge. The plot is thin, but the story packs an emotional punch.

In “Zero Hour,” the children of Earth are all playing the same game, called “Invasion,” at the same time, at the behest of their imaginary friend. But if you are alien invaders looking for help from the other side of a dimensional barrier, who better to enlist for help than impressionable young children? And what greater horror can an adult face than having their own children turn on them?

In the last story in the collection, “The Rocket,” Fiorello Bodoni has always dreamed of going to Mars. But the junkyard operator finds he has only enough money to send one family member to Mars, and no one wants to leave the others behind. But then a full-sized prototype rocket is offered for sale to his junkyard—it can’t take them to Mars, but it can allow them to them pretend to take the trip together. Sometimes, the journey is more important than the destination, and this sweetly sentimental story celebrates the power of imagination.

The final segment of the framing device, however, turns to horror again as the narrator looks at the last tattoo on the Illustrated Man, where he sees himself being strangled, and runs away in terror.

Final Thoughts

The Illustrated Man follows in the footsteps of The Martian Chronicles by presenting a wide selection of well-written and compelling tales, but offers an even broader range of topics and subject matter. The stories run the gamut from sweet and sentimental, to wry commentary on the human condition, and even to outright horror. And they illustrate recurring themes in Bradbury’s work, insisting that censorship in any form is evil, and people need stories that spur their imaginations, even when they are unsettling.

Now it is your turn to provide your observations, whether they are about this book, or about Bradbury’s fiction in general. I look forward to hearing from you.[end-mark]

The post A Dazzling Collection of Classic Tales: <i>The Illustrated Man</i> by Ray Bradbury appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror

Read an Excerpt From Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest

An eerie and ensnaring horror novel set in contemporary Reykjavík.

By Hildur Knútsdóttir

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Published on April 2, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest, a horror novel translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal—publishing with Nightfire on September 3^rd.

1

“Can you describe your symptoms?”

I clear my throat. “I’m just so… tired all the time.”

“Not sleeping well?”

“No, no. I fall asleep and even sleep through the night. But when I wake up, I feel exhausted. My legs, my arms…”

As if they were evidence, I extend both arms. My hands dangle limply, and I have the bizarre impulse to shake them in the doctor’s face. But she nods. When I lower them, they drop into my lap like dead pieces of meat.

“I don’t feel like I’m waking up rested but more like I’ve been out on a rampage all night. My muscles are worn out. Not soreness like after working out, but sort of like when you’ve been slogging away at something and can tell that the next day you’re going to really feel it, you know?”

“And it’s only in the arms and legs?”

“Not only, but mostly there. I’m tired all over. Even my jaw.”

The doctor nods again.

I like her. She’s probably ten years younger than I am. If I had to guess, I’d say she probably hasn’t finished her residency yet. Which means she’s being very thorough. She will not let acute lymphocytic leukemia or some horrific neurological disease slip past her. She’s going to check out every possibility. Which is precisely what I want and what the previous doctor the health center assigned me to—some old, gray-haired prick— refused to do.

That guy had clearly had enough of women with unexplained symptoms. Hysterical women. I seriously wanted to lecture him about all the diseases women have had that have been misdiagnosed over the years— and how medication (not to mention everything else in this world) is designed for the male body—but I just didn’t have the energy for it. Or maybe I was chicken. Or maybe that’s the same thing because it’s a lot easier to gather your courage when you’re not dead tired.

When I left the prick’s office with orders to go home and “take it easy” for two weeks (he didn’t even suggest seeing a therapist, probably because he’s too old to believe in psychology), I made a beeline for the health center’s reception desk and asked for an appointment with a female doctor.

“Someone young,” I said. The receptionist looked at me like I was off my rocker but still gave me an appointment with this new doctor.

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Hildur Knútsdóttir

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Hildur Knútsdóttir

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Her name is Ásdís, and she has blond hair and two pimples on her chin that she’s done her best to cover with concealer. “Has this been going on for a long time?”

“A while, yeah. And getting worse.”

“Have you had the flu recently? Any kind of cold?”

“No.”

“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?”

I think about Stefán and how he had hissed at me that I was a bitch right before slamming the door in my face. How I had trembled like a twig in the wind and hadn’t been able to bring myself to move for over an hour after he left.

“No.” Stefán is a lousy guy, but I’d be giving him way too much credit if I blamed this on him.

“Do you eat a variety of foods?”

“Yes. I’m a vegetarian, but that’s not new. And I take B12, omega-3, and iron.”

She glances at the computer screen. “I see you had blood work done six months ago. Everything looks good there. But we’ll run it again.” Ásdís turns back to me with her full attention. She wears an expression that is at once concerned and kind. “With what I have here, I don’t see anything to indicate a serious condition. Not based on your history or my examination. So, tell me, what are you concerned about?”

A sensation begins to stir in my belly. Warm and soft. And I realize that I’m weirdly proud of her. Ásdís is going to be a truly wonderful doctor. For a moment, I feel as though I am her mother (Christ), or maybe a grandma (Christ! ), who watched her grow up through childhood and then become an unbearable teenager who blossomed into an intelligent woman who attended medical school and now speaks to her patients with respect and genuine concern. I almost tear up.

And then, I remember the fear that had overcome me as I sat and googled my symptoms.

“Myasthenia gravis,” I blurt. “Or…” I hesitate. Then I speak the acronym that’s been haunting me over the past few days. “ALS.”

Ásdís nods. I begin to sweat. Recently, I’ve been almost entirely convinced that I’m doomed to this future: experiencing my nervous system’s gradual failure. I’ve wondered how it might feel when parts of my body stop working, one after the other. Maybe it starts with numbness in my fingertips. Then I lose control of my hands, followed by my arms. Then my feet. Then I’ll lose all sensation below the waist. Stop being able to turn my head, speak, smile, blink my eyes. Maybe I’ll learn to hold a brush with my mouth and paint a few pictures. Then my respiratory system will stop working, and I’ll die.

Ásdís cocks her head. “I don’t want to sound dismissive of your experience, but I have to say that it strikes me as… an extremely unlikely diagnosis.”

Relief washes over me like the sea. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“So, you don’t think I’ve got some terrifying neurological disease?” I ask, just to hear her say it one more time.

“No. Of course, I can’t rule it out, but I don’t see anything to indicate it.”

Another wave of elation.

Then I remember what I was going to show her. “What about leukemia?” I stand up and tug my

pants down, showing her the large bruise on my hip that had appeared overnight. “Don’t you think it looks a little like spotting?”

Ásdís puts on gloves. She aims the tabletop lamp at me and leans over my hip. She runs her fingers over the bruise, so close that I can feel her warm breath moving the fine hairs on my skin. My god, she’s doing a thorough job. It crosses my mind that I might be in love with her, which is a little ridiculous.

“Did you bump into something?” she asks.

“No, I woke up like this.”

The bruise is the size of a little pancake.

Ásdís sits up and points the lamp back at the desk. I pull up my pants and take a seat.

“This appears to be a standard hematoma. But I’ll add a white blood cell count to your blood work. And we’ll look at your iron levels, of course.”

Ásdís stands up. The examination has come to an end. She extends her hand, her grasp firm and professional. She’s taller than I am, and yet I have this urge to pat her on the head or the cheek. I restrain myself.

Instead, I thank her and leave.

When I get home, Mávur is curled up on the porch in front of the door. The cat stands when he spots me, his tail rising with pleasure. I scratch him behind the ears, and he responds with a loud purr. He often tries to sneak in, but I know his tricks and am quick to shut the door behind me. By the time the latch catches, he has already lain back down, his eyelids drooping in the sunshine.

I know that the world’s sorrows are both abundant and profound and that a cat allergy is perhaps insignificant in the larger scheme of things. But there is something so unfair about loving cats and being relegated to do so from a distance.

2

Three days later, I receive a text saying that I have a message from the health center waiting for me. I open the medical portal and am asked to log in with my electronic ID. Like every Icelander, I have my kennitala, of course, but I’d never linked my national ID number with an online account. So I don’t have an electronic ID. Someone—I don’t remember who—told me they were just a plot to force all Icelanders into a monopoly with a cousin of some Progressive Party big shot in perpetuity. Or was it the Independence Party?

And the banks seem to be in on it, too, because they provide the ID numbers. When you think about it, it’s a little odd that banks generate our government IDs, but that’s commonplace Icelandic corruption for you.

I call the health center and request the results by phone. The woman who answers at the front desk says it’s not available. She says it in an offensively cheerful tone. I grumble at her, but she just gets cheerier.

During my lunch break, I go to the bank. All the muscles in my thighs ache when I walk up the stairs. I feel like I’ve been on a treadmill all night. (For the record, I have never used a treadmill.)

Two women are standing in the lobby of the bank and welcome me. I notice that there is only one cashier but at least four employees who seem to be working on linking kennitalas with electronic ID accounts.

It’s easier to get one than I expected. The man who helps me makes me sign some papers that I’m too tired to bother reading. He’s the officious sort who wants to cover his ass by making it “quite clear” that page three states that the service is free now but that he cannot rule out the possibility that it will have a fee later.

“Yes, I know everything about the Progressive Party,” I say, though, of course that’s not true.

He gives me a weird look. Maybe it was the Independence Party, after all. But I mean, really, what’s the difference?

The first thing I do when I get back to work is to log into the health center. There’s a message from Ásdís María Ómarsdóttir waiting for me. I feel warm inside just seeing her name. Then I take a deep breath and open the mail from her.

All the blood tests came out well. All results normal.

I stare at the message for a long time. When the letters start to blur, I realize that I’m—damn it—crying.

I sniff, wipe my cheeks, and glance around me. Fortunately, almost everyone is still at lunch, and no one seems to have noticed anything.

I get to my feet, go to the toilet, and clean myself up.

The lump in my throat swells. Staring at my reflection above the sink, I tell myself not to cry.

It’s not that I was hoping I was sick.

Except maybe I was just hoping for  something. Not ALS—never ALS—and not myasthenia gravis. But maybe something innocent. Iron deficiency, iodine deficiency, arthritis, some manageable metabolic disease, B12 deficiency—or perhaps a little hypoactive thyroid. Was that too much to ask?

Because there is nothing worse than having unexplained symptoms. Feeling like there’s something terribly wrong—but nothing that can be measured in exams, and you know the doctor thinks it’s all in your head.

I stare at my reflection, reminding myself, of course, that it could be much worse. The tests came out well. I should not be disappointed. I should feel relieved.

“You should be happy,” I hiss at the mirror.

And to my surprise, the trace of a malicious grin twists the side of my mouth.

“I’m not hysterical,” I tell my reflection.

She nods.

3

I increase my vitamin dose. Also, buy vitamin D. And calcium and something called spirulina that the girl in the pharmacy recommends. Then I google and read that spirulina can contain large amounts of heavy metals, so I throw it in the trash. My conscience twinges about throwing it in the trash (The heavy metals, where do they go? Landfills? Maybe into the groundwater?), but I don’t do anything about it.

I go to the bar with my friends after work. They say I need to be more active.

“That’s how you get energy! Not by lounging on the couch! I could explode after I ran ten kilometers! I felt like I could conquer the world,” says Ásta. She’s the CEO of a large company and has three children. She probably often feels like she can conquer the world.

“Go to yoga,” says Linda. “You just have to relax. Don’t you have too much to do at work? And you have tried essential oils?”

“Why don’t you just go eat some meat? We’re not meant to live on vegetables alone, you know,” says María, and takes a sip of white wine.

Looking grave, they all nod.

“But we don’t have true canines,” I point out.

They stare at me over their wineglasses.

“Carnivores all have canines.”

They glance at each other, not sure what to do with me, and an embarrassing silence stretches between us.

This always happens. Everyone will be having a good chat until I say something wrong and feel as though I’ve been exposed as the alien in the group. Ta-da! Did you think I was one of you? Hahaha!

I don’t know if it’s because they’re all the same age— two years older than I am—or because I joined their group late. Maybe it’s something different and more profound. I don’t remember whether I’ve always felt this way or if the feeling has gradually worsened.

“I know it sounds like the name of a cartoon character,” says Helga. “But Zumba literally saved my life after pregnancy.”

I take a big sip of red wine (rich in iron).

“Try walking more,” says Sigrún. “I read somewhere that walking is—by far—the healthiest exercise. You just need to walk ten thousand steps a day!”

“What happened there?” Ásta points to the bruise on my chest.

I had specifically chosen a shirt that would cover it.

But now I look down and see that as I bend forward, my neckline is gaping, and the bruise is visible. It’s a tiger stripe of dark purple.

I straighten and pull my collar up.

“Nothing.” Which is technically true.

They look at each other with worry wrinkles between their eyebrows. Ta-da! Unmasked again!

Helga places a palm over my hand. “Was that Stefán?”

“No.” I laugh.

“You know you can tell us anything,” she says understandingly.

Their nods are full of grave disbelief.

I take another sip of red wine.

Two minutes of “happy hour” are left when I finish my drink. At the bar, I see a man. He’s wearing a pale pink shirt (confident about his masculinity) and a blue, well-fitting jacket, and he’s staring at me like he’s seen a ghost.

I get embarrassed and look down at the drink list. When I look up again, he has half-turned away from me and is waving a credit card over a beer that the waiter is handing to him.

Then he looks back at me.

I’m trying to decide if I should smile politely or pretend not to see him, but I haven’t figured out what to do when he turns away and walks with his beer to a nearby table. Around it, well-dressed men sit, stretched out in low chairs (why do men always have to take up so much space?) and laughing.

Excerpted from The Night Guest, copyright © 2024 by Hildur Knútsdóttir.

The post Read an Excerpt From Hildur Knútsdóttir’s <em>The Night Guest</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations cover reveal

A Haunted Homecoming: Revealing The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee

A new YA horror novel for fans of She Is a Haunting, Stephen King’s It, and The Haunting of Hill House

By Reactor

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Published on April 1, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share the cover of The Dark We Know, a lyrical YA horror by debut author Wen-yi Lee—available on August 13, 2024 from Gillian Flynn Books.

Wen-yi Lee is a Clarion West alum from Singapore who likes writing about girls with bite, feral nature, and ghosts. Her speculative fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Uncanny, as well as in various anthologies. The Dark We Know is her debut novel. Find her on social media at @wenyilee_ and otherwise at wenyileewrites.com.

The post A Haunted Homecoming: Revealing <i>The Dark We Know</i> by Wen-yi Lee appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Dark Fantasy

Read an Excerpt From V. Castro’s Immortal Pleasures

An ancient Aztec vampire roams the modern world in search of vengeance and love…

By V. Castro

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Published on April 3, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from V. Castro’s new dark fantasy novel Immortal Pleasures—out from Del Rey on April 16.

Is it really our life? Perhaps we are gathered to dance to a shaman’s chant we cannot hear until we find ourselves moving to the beat.

Chapter One

It’s my last night in Dublin before I head to the south coast. Ireland was the first stop on my way to London because of its landscape, particularly its grass—that dreamy electric green surrounded by dark cold waters and even colder winds.

That landscape had called to me while I was flipping through an airline magazine during one of my business-class flights across South America. The advertisement showed a green pasture that ended with a cliff dropping to leaping waves in the shape of giant conch shells. I had to see that grass with my own eyes, feel it beneath my feet.

You see, my name is Malinalli, which means grass in my native Nahuatl language. The glossy photo ignited my soul with wonder, and I knew I had to overcome my irrational fear of exploring this part of the world, Europe. It was a European who changed my given name Malinalli to La Malinche and Doña Marina. Neither did I choose, nor could I refuse as a human. At least as a vampire I could take back my name. Small steps.

But you may wonder why a Nahua vampire from the sixteenth century like me would harbor a fear of anything after being an apex predator for so very long. After all, my blood is powerful and intoxicating—it comes from a vampire made by one of the very first vampires. However, like the demolished temple Tenochtitlán, my heart still bears the scars of history.

Before this trip was even an idea, my concentration on work had been waning. I kept finding myself slipping into daydreams of distant places. My heart would sink to depths of emotions I could not allow myself to wade in. In train stations and airports, I used to walk with a smug swagger past couples if I saw an obviously out-of-sync partnership, and families if I saw screaming children throwing themselves at the feet of exhausted parents. Ain’t no one holding me down or holding me back, I’d think. But recently I’d also think soon after: Ain’t no one waiting for me either. Walk enough crowded terminals alone, your hand swinging aimlessly by your side, and it starts to feel dead. And mine had hung empty for centuries. I could care less about the offspring. As a vampire, my bearing a child was not an option. But lately I’d wanted to feel an arm around my waist. A companionship that lasted longer than a night would be nice.

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Immortal Pleasures

V. Castro

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Immortal Pleasures

V. Castro

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Two days after the idea of traveling to Ireland first struck me, I received an out-of-the-blue opportunity to purchase rare Mexican artifacts from a dealer in London. I am a collector, buyer, and seller of antiquities from all over the world; however, my speciality is Mexico and South and Central America. As a blood huntress it was a natural fit.

Since 1972, I had made my living tracking rare objects, although I began my search for these objects long before I’d ever earned a cent. My career had begun not as a career, but as a sort of spiteful secret mission to reclaim our culture’s lost treasures one object at a time from the colonizers.  The more I learned about my new vampire life and all its strengths, the more I thought about my purpose in life.  My work has given me purpose beyond servitude or mere survival. I could create some good for myself and others. 

The artifacts are two skulls I first encountered when I was still human. When I read the email and saw the photos of the skulls, the excitement in my work that I’d lost came back,  and I nearly jumped out of my skin. My instinct told me these were the very same treasures I had been hunting for since I began my journey in acquiring antiquities. One skull is carved from pure clear quartz. The other is an embellished mosaic of turquoise and obsidian set in a human skull with most of the teeth still intact. Judging from the photo, the gold that once plated the human skull had been scraped from the bone

The skulls had once belonged to someone I loved dearly. Her name was Chantico. She was like a mother to me when I first became a vampire. She helped me find the will to live for myself.

I had been searching for centuries for these skulls with no luck, and I’d been on the brink of giving up on ever finding them. It wasn’t until the birth of the internet my journey began to gain a little momentum, though every path had led to a dead end until now. However, life can be as unpredictable as the height of waves crashing on a shore; now, at long last, the skulls were within my reach. The universe presented me the perfect opportunity to act on my desire to reclaim these treasures.

So I simply had to fly across the Atlantic to purchase those skulls and keep them safe. The catch was the skulls were now in London with a private collector. But this purchase was too important to leave to chance, to buy on the evidence of digital photographs alone, even if the photos I’d been emailed appeared legitimate. My usual London based antiquities broker, Horatio Hutchings, a trustworthy man in the business, assured me it was not a scam. However, he did not possess the same skill that I did in detecting forged objects—and I had seen my fair share in my many centuries of existence. To reclaim the skulls—and with them, a part of my soul—I had to take the trip. And that trip would be first class all the way, including the best hotels. Everything paid for by the business I had built from scratch and the antiquities I’d acquired over time. I deserved to have everything I wanted in this life. Divine timing can be a stubborn bitch, but when she comes through, she delivers divine rewards.

And so, eager to finally possess the skulls, and with a nagging desire to travel, I created a four-week itinerary to explore Ireland and England at the same time. Spain would be the next place I’d visit—where perhaps I could finally lay my anger at its colonizers to rest—and  finally Vienna, Austria to see the Penacho, a rare surviving Aztec headdress, bright green and feathered, that didn’t belong halfway around the world from its country of origin, in a museum for people who could not fully appreciate its true importance. Indeed, part of my mission has been to reach out to museums around the world and broker deals to give back stolen items to their original cultures. The treasures can then go on tour or on loan to museums in other lands; however, sole ownership belongs to the people who created them. This particular headdress had long been on my radar. I figured my kind emails to the museum were not doing enough, and that my power of persuasion in the flesh could serve me better. After years of practice, vampires can use their energy to influence the emotions of humans. We can’t force them to do something, just steer toward what we want from them. I was not opposed to using my vampire magnetism to get what I wanted, and I wanted this headdress back in Mexico City.

 In my human life, as a translator, I’d watched villages and temples be sacked by the conquistadors. The terror and sorrow of one’s powerlessness to stop the destruction of one’s home is something no one should experience or witness. And with the treasures of our past stolen, our children would grow up without anything to remind them of their history or story. The children of Europe had no tie to this object and could, at best, see it only as a unique piece of history of a people they could not fully understand, but more than likely, as just a nice artifact with pretty feathers from a bird they had never seen before. But the headdress had the potential to instill pride and awe in my people if returned to its rightful place in Mexico. And that is exactly what I was going to do. The Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand II was long dead—what would he care if an item he acquired out of imperialist greed was taken back? 

And as soon as I landed on the distant cool shores of Ireland, I knew I had made the right choice. Even the sight of the drizzle on the small window as we landed excited me. An undercurrent of expectation made my body alert to every sensation and sight. The climate in Ireland differs greatly from my home. Although it is summer in Ireland, there is always a damp chill in the evening air. What a change from the heat I’m accustomed to! This is exactly why I’d made the decision to cross the pond to explore the Old World. My trip would be a gust of change to rid myself of my inner demons—and perhaps introduce me to a few new ones along the way, just for laughs.

All of this to reclaim the freedom once stolen from me back when I was a mortal. Imagine going from “Will this be the day I die as a slave?” to becoming the very embodiment of death. And now I wanted to appease the restlessness that had settled over me the last few years. I am worth millions, but as life has shown me, cash only goes so far in creating a fulfilling life.

And so on this trip I felt open to the unexpected. Perhaps destiny had even brought me across the pond for a reason beyond the skulls. Part of me wanted to believe Chantico watched me from wherever her spirit hovered and sent me a blessing of joy.

* * *

Later that night, I am on my final stop on a pub crawl and my third glass of sparkling water with a wedge of lime. What a great way to end the evening: “Big Love” by Fleetwood Mac playing on speakers mounted on the front of the bar. The paunchy bartender wearing a rugby jersey bellowing “Last call” over the din of the bar. People guzzling whatever they’re drinking and shuffling toward the door. Through the thinning herd, I can now see the corner booth.

And there he is, sitting with his mates at a table covered in Stella Artois bottles and pint glasses. His blue eyes flash with the same allure as his smile surrounded by a light stubble. The sleeves of his T-shirt creep over defined biceps. Candy for the eyes and body.  A box of new books rests at his feet. The covers are all dark with red titles. One has a skeleton key and skull with what look like fangs. I chuckle to myself. He has a thing for vampires. I wonder if he is selling the books. Or did he write them? Doesn’t matter. I want the pleasure of his company, or at the very least the comfort of his body.

During my human life, romance and sex for pleasure had not been options for me. I had gone from being a teenage handmaiden serving the Tabascan royalty to being owned by the Spanish colonizer known as Hernán Cortés. Not only did I translate for him, we Indigenous women could not say no to any “advances” made toward us. First, he’d given me to one of his captains, Alonso Puertocarerro, then to himself, and finally to my Spanish husband, Juan Jarmillo, before my human death.

When I was reborn, I relished my newfound freedom, but I had much healing to do after the trauma of witnessing the conquest in all its horror—and the horrors inflicted on me. My history had left me with deep scars, one of them the fear of being used. There was the lingering paranoia that once my use was over so would be my worth, my life.

But after some time, I began to allow myself the luxury of physical pleasure even though I still was not able to give my heart freely. My experience of not being accepted, respected, or loved as a Brown woman by colonizer men made me self-conscious, about myself, and also my vampire nature. Not all vampires felt like this, as I found out centuries later, when I finally befriended one.

“Mortals only want one thing,” that vampire had once told me, shouting over pulsating disco at a nightclub in New York City in the 19070s. White light refracted across our faces from the spinning disco ball in the center of the dance floor. The vampire’s name was Catherine, and she was older than me by a few hundred years. She wore the best clothing in the current fashion and the brightest red lipstick, with a shine as blinding as the nail polish on the talons she filed to sharp points. Her life was a constant party; she was never not planning another wild bash, and she was never alone for long. If not planning that next party, she hopped shop to shop for the best her money could buy. So I was curious about her thoughts about life as a vampire.

“And what is that? A chance at immortal life?”

With her hot-blooded gaze, she flicked her feathered, bouncy honey-blonde hair and scoffed, “No, no. Very few mortals have the courage for that. Most really can’t stomach the idea of being a blood drinker day in and day out. They want to feel close enough to life after death to not feel afraid of death itself. Humans are so full of doubt and fear of the unknown. They can’t see the divine unless the signs hit them like battle axes and draw blood. And vampires tell them that death is an illusion.”

Her bright lips spread to a sinister smile. “But also vampires do not deny ourselves pleasure. And pleasure is everyone’s drug of choice.”

She raised a finger and motioned for someone behind me. A young woman slid next to her, exposing her bare shoulder blade as she continued to move to the music. Catherine laid a sticky lipstick kiss on the woman’s shoulder before pulling out a small velvet pouch from her metal clutch. The young woman giggled and purred with delight. From inside Catherine plucked a small white pill and placed it into the woman’s mouth. Catherine didn’t take her eyes off me as she bit deep into the shoulder blade of the young woman. Blood and lipstick stuck to her skin. The woman moaned and writhed in Catherine’s embrace. Catherine still had crimson beads clinging to her lipstick when she pulled away from the young woman.

“All the lords and masters are dead, Malinalli. It is our turn to celebrate in the streets. We are not dead. I hope they are all burning in hell while feeling the constraints of the tight corsets some of us were forced to wear. Let them choke on sulphur for a change.”

Catherine became a vampire during the thirteenth century in France. She had seen the evolution of Europe. As an aristocrat, she was by no means deprived or underprivileged in material wealth; however, her only worth was to be wed to create more of it.  Her words hit me in the center of my chest even harder than the bass from the music. My wounds opened for a moment as the faces of my many owners flashed before my eyes. I couldn’t argue with that sentiment. I hoped in death they knew intimately the pain they had inflicted. Part of me wanted to embrace the carefree nature Catherine had adopted, but my resentment still glowed a little too brightly. More time, something I had plenty of, was still needed.

She let out a wicked giggle before shouting, “I fucking love the seventies!” Her hand slid beneath the low-cut collar of the young woman’s thin pink polyester wraparound dress to massage her breast. The young woman tugged at the fabric to expose her nipple. Catherine used the tip of her nail to flick the erect pink flesh. One swift swipe drew a bloom of blood, causing the woman to groan. Catherine bit her lip before lapping up the red liquid jewel.

Catherine hadn’t cared about being inconspicuous. That was her way of getting vengeance against her former masters. And now, so many years later, I was slowly reaching the same point. I had once kept my true vampire self in shadows, and now it was rising to the surface.

The longer I am far from home, the more open I feel to wanting my vampire half and human half to be equally free. I have left my past in Mexico and I have travelled across the waters that brought the many colonizers to my world. It was time to confront their world. My work requires me to seem human. And I have kept my sexual relationships superficial so as not to reveal I am a blood drinker by nature. There was a time in my life when the thirst and the hunt gave me immeasurable pleasure, the only pleasure, as I had retreated into hiding as the last of my people attempted to fight off the invaders. I orgasmed in the throes of draining a soldier dry and tossing his corpse where I knew the Spanish sent scouts. Every part of me let go in blinding surrender. The look of horror when they saw the new me, the vampire me, let me know this was a side of me humans would never understand.

Yet the lack of intimacy in my life had only become another wound. My heart feels tied in ropes of thorn. I had tried to place a vast distance between me and others, as vast as the depth and length of the ocean between the New World and the Old. All the while I ached for real connection, for a profound love to blow away the profound hurt I was still healing from. But now I was resolved: I did not come this far or live this long to become a captive again. I want a lover to love all of me, the woman and the vampire.

But I don’t believe we find our true soul’s desire, or purpose—it finds us. Perhaps, when you meet a soulmate, it is a sign that all those long-lost particles blown to bits at the beginning of time have found their way to one another again—stardust finding itself in another body. Until we reunite with those parts of ourselves, our thoughts and desires will burn like meteors scalding skin, brain, bone, and soul. And that’s how we end up choosing the wrong people, feeling the kind of heartbreak that teaches us lessons. After centuries alone, I hoped to find my soulmate as I did the treasures that made me my fortune. My soul’s aching desire was to discover real love, to feel true equilibrium with my match. To make up for when I had been passed hand to hand in my youth without choice. At that time, I was merely a treasure to be taken.

As I look at the stranger, I can’t tell yet how deep an encounter might be with him, but fate is somehow telling me I’m not going back to my room anytime soon.

Excerpt from Immortal Pleasures by V. Castro, copyright © 2024 by V. Castro. Used by permission of Del Rey, an imprint of Random House Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Book Recommendations Mark as Read

On Letting Go of the Idea of “Keeping Up”

“So, what have you read lately?” It sounds like an innocent question, but it came with a pile of expectations.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 28, 2024

Photo by Jean Vella [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Jean Vella [via Unsplash]

The first time I felt the tiniest spark of competition where books and reading are concerned, I was probably eight years old, thrilled to bits by a librarian’s instruction to put a gold star inside a construction paper folder—one for every fairy tale I read. There were at least two long rows of stars by the time I was done. I was only competing with myself: I wanted as many stars as I could possibly get, and given my love for fairy tales, this wasn’t particularly difficult.

But lately—and by lately I mean the last decade, give or take a few years—I’ve noticed a different sense of competition about reading. And competition isn’t even exactly the right word; it’s not like people are jumping online to yell about being first to finish the next Brandon Sanderson tome. (If they are, don’t tell me.) But there’s no word that means exactly what I see and feel. It’s a combination of obligation, social performance, genuine curiosity, love of books, and a desire to be involved, plus a dollop of early-adopterism and cheerleading. 

All of these things are good, in balance. But they’re also easy to knock out of balance, shifting the vibe of talking about books online from “this thing I want to do” to “this thing we wind up feeling like we have to keep up with.”

Reading itself should be productive, in the sense that it produces ideas and feelings and thoughts and empathy and a lot of other things, too, across the whole range of human experience. The kind of productivity I mean is the quantifying kind, the kind that wants to get to a certain number of books read, or tick all the bingo boxes, or simply read more books than someone else did. Sometimes it arises in the form of a complaint: “Ugh, I’m so behind on my Goodreads challenge.”

For one thing, this is just a branded way of saying “I’m not reading as much lately as I’d like to be.” This is Goodreads inserting itself into your reading life and reshaping the way you talk about books. But it’s also more than that. It’s turning reading into a task, a tickybox, a number of pages or books. It’s setting a productivity framework around something that doesn’t need it. Yes, you set your own goals, but even if you’re entirely self-directed and pay no attention to the norms or the huge numbers of books other people read, some of us aren’t quite so independent. Those numbers influence people. They make reading very fast, tearing through book after book, seem like the norm. 

If you read slowly, that’s okay. If you read very few books, that’s okay too. The secret truth is that there is absolutely no reason to care how many books you read in a year, unless you like stats and numbers and tracking things and in that case, might I suggest a spreadsheet and doing your own tracking, far from the Goodreads crowd.

About a decade ago, I had only just discovered that a person could stumble into rooms where people hung out, discussing books. They were also discussing authors and gossip and how bad the box wine was and how long the subway ride home would be, but they were there because of books, because these rooms were bookstores during author events. I had moved back to New York, which had a lot more bookish events than the college town where I’d been living. I got myself a bookstore job and became part of the book ecosystem, delighting in access to galleys and trying to find just the right book for customers.

It was a world I had not expected to find myself in, and I loved it. I loved the conversations and the enthusiasm and the lit gossip and the people, and I loved feeling like part of it. But there was a weird side to it, sometimes. There could be a sense of just having to hold opinions about certain books or authors, or having to have already read new books. And then the weirdest thing happened: I found myself in a situation where I simply did not want to talk about books. At all. 

This was an extremely strange experience, anathema to everything I’d ever felt where books were concerned. But in the basement of a bookstore, a friend’s friend asked, an intense gleam in their eye, “So, Molly, what have you read lately?”

It sounds like an innocent question, but it came with a pile of expectations. This person kept up with everything. This person wanted to know what they could tick off the list with me. Had I read Big Book X? Had I gotten my hands on an advance copy of Massive Novel Y? Did I have opinions about the books a person in my job “ought” to have opinions on?

I did not, and what’s more, in that moment, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk about what I’d been reading in the way this person wanted me to respond. I suddenly wanted to hold my cards, and my books, extremely close to the chest. Reading felt gamified, like a thing where you went down a list of titles and got points for which ones you’d read. This was no longer gold stars inside a folder. This was something else entirely.

This vibe has crept into so much online book discourse. People stress about not having time to read—a fair complaint, but one that has a different tone when the subtext (or text!) is “I’m getting behind.” Behind on what, and to whom? Who is served by all this stress, by reading challenges and goals and lists and shelfies and book hauls? What is it for? What are we getting out of it? What difference does it make if you read a book that came out last week or one that came out last century?

If these things bring you joy, by all means: continue. If you just don’t even notice them: Bless you, I envy that ease! But if, like me, you find both that you can’t ignore the social-media side of reading and find it sometimes overwhelming, and depressing, and makes you feel like there’s a right and a wrong way to read a book, please: Give yourself space. Step away from the internet. Ignore the websites that want you to rate and review art like it’s a toothbrush or a new pair of sneakers. Don’t even keep a list of books read, if you don’t want to. What we get from reading is not quantifiable, not a statistic to earn or an item to collect. It’s an experience, a process, an education, a gift. You will get something out of it whether you read 10 books a year or 100. And no one has to know, either way.[end-mark]

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Book Recommendations new releases

All the New Young Adult SFF Books Arriving in April!

Meet teenage musicians, witches, assassins, and more in this month’s new titles

By Reactor

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Published on April 3, 2024

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Here’s the full list of new young adult SFF titles heading your way in April!

Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change.

April 2

Your Blood, My Bones — Kelly Andrew (Scholastic)
Wyatt Westlock has one plan for the farmhouse she’s just inherited—to burn it to the ground. But during her final walkthrough of her childhood home, she makes a shocking discovery in the basement—Peter, the boy she once considered her best friend, strung up in chains and left for dead. Unbeknownst to Wyatt, Peter has suffered hundreds of ritualistic deaths on her family’s property. Semi-immortal, Peter never remains dead for long, but he can’t really live, either. Not while he’s bound to the farm, locked in a cycle of grisly deaths and painful rebirths. There’s only one way for him to break free. He needs to end the Westlock line. He needs to kill Wyatt. With Wyatt’s parents gone, the spells protecting the property have begun to unravel, and dark, ancient forces gather in the nearby forest. The only way for Wyatt to repair the wards is to work with Peter—the one person who knows how to harness her volatile magic. But how can she trust a boy who’s sworn an oath to destroy her? When the past turns up to haunt them in the most unexpected way, they are forced to rely on one another to survive, or else tear each other apart.

Something Kindred — Ciera Burch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers)
Jericka Walker had planned to spend the summer before senior year soaking up the sun with her best friend on the Jersey Shore. Instead she finds herself in Coldwater, Maryland, a small town with a dark and complicated past where her estranged grandmother lives—someone she knows only two things about: her name and the fact that she left Jericka’s mother and uncle when they were children. But now Jericka’s grandmother is dying, and her mother has dragged Jericka along to say goodbye. As Jericka attempts to form a connection with a woman she’s never known, and adjusts to life in a town where everything closes before dinner, she meets “ghost girl” Kat, a girl eager to leave Coldwater and more exciting than a person has any right to be. But Coldwater has a few unsettling secrets of its own. The more you try to leave, the stronger the town’s hold. As Jericka feels the chilling pull of her family’s past, she begins to question everything she thought she knew about her mother, her childhood, and the lines between the living and the dead.

Draw Down the Moon — P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast (Wednesday)
Wren Nightingale isn’t supposed to have any elemental powers. Born of magickal parents but not under one of the four fated astrological full moons, she is destined for life as a Mundane—right up until she starts glowing on her eighteenth birthday. In a heartbeat, Wren’s life is turned upside down, and she’s suddenly leaving her home for the mystical Academia de la Luna—a secret magickal school on a hidden island off the Seattle coast. Lee Young has always known about his future at the academy. He has three goals: pass the trials, impress the Moon Council, and uphold his family’s reputation. But he wasn’t expecting to be attending alongside the girl he’s been secretly in love with for as long as he can remember. As Wren and Lee are thrown into the academy’s grueling trials, they quickly learn there’s something different—and dangerous—about the school this year. Wren will have to navigate a web of secrets, prophecies… and murder. And Lee will have to decide what to protect: his family’s legacy, or the girl he loves.

The Black Girl Survives in This One — edited by Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell (Flatiron)
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology. The bestselling and acclaimed authors include Erin E. Adams, Monica Brashears, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Daka Hermon, Justina Ireland, L.L. McKinney, Brittney Morris, Maika & Maritza Moulite, Eden Royce, and Vincent Tirado. The foreword is by Tananarive Due.

Call Forth a Fox — Markelle Grabo (Page St Kids)
The western wood is where Ro’s father built their garden, taught her to forage, and told her tales of the faeries who live there—how to summon them, how to protect herself, and warnings of what they are capable of. Now, her father is gone, the garden has withered, and their family is struggling. Her mother and sister want to move into town, but Ro doesn’t want to give up the memories of her father and his stories—or the charming village girl who shares Ro’s love of the trees. The forest isn’t ready to let Ro go either. One winter night, on her way home from foraging, Ro encounters a bear attacking a fox. She fights the bear to save the fox’s life, only to see the bear turn into a boy after her sister shoots him with an arrow. When the boy wakes, he has no memory of who he is—all he knows is Ro’s name and that he has to kill the fox. Ro never believed in the faeries from her father’s stories, but she can’t deny the magic surrounding her and that both the boy and the fox are victims of a faerie curse. She’ll have to remember everything her father taught her in order to extract herself from this deadly game and keep her precious fox out of harm’s way.

Otherworldly — F.T. Lukens (Margaret K. McElderry)
Seventeen-year-old Ellery is a non-believer in a region where people swear the supernatural is real. Sure, they’ve been stuck in a five-year winter, but there’s got to be a scientific explanation. If goddesses were real, they wouldn’t abandon their charges like this, leaving farmers like Ellery’s family to scrape by. Knox is a familiar from the Other World, a magical assistant sent to help humans who have made crossroads bargains. But it’s been years since he heard from his queen, and Knox is getting nervous about what he might find once he returns home. When the crossroads demons come to collect Knox, he panics and runs. A chance encounter down an alley finds Ellery coming to Knox’s rescue, successfully fending off his would-be abductors. Ellery can’t quite believe what they’ve seen. And they definitely don’t believe the nonsense this unnervingly attractive guy spews about his paranormal origins. But Knox needs to make a deal with a human who can tether him to this realm, and Ellery needs to figure out how to stop this winter to help their family. Once their bargain is struck, there’s no backing out, and the growing connection between the two might just change everything.

Wrath of the Talon (Talons #2) — Sophie Kim (Entangled Teen)
Everyone thinks the Reaper of Sunpo—eighteen-year-old assassin Shin Lina—is dead. The only ones who know the truth are her cherished little sister and Haneul Rui, the icily gorgeous Dokkaebi Emperor, who she was sent to kill… and kissed instead. Now, with the potent Imugi venom surging in her veins, Lina’s returned to right all wrongs. Already her body is changing, growing stronger, stealthier, and more agile, with serpentine scales she can call at will. She is living vengeance, seeking retribution for the massacre of the Talons. She’ll become the sword who cuts down the rival Blackbloods gang, along with their ruthless crime-lord leader. And when she is through, she will take the kingdom as her own. But there is a mysterious side to Lina’s growing power, a dark voice inside her that whispers and guides her as she slips through the shadows of Sunpo’s streets. One that warns her not to trust the Dokkaebi, especially Rui. Because if her destiny isn’t to love him… it must be to destroy him.

Fate Be Changed (Twisted Tale #17) — Farrah Rochon (Disney-Hyperion)
If you could change your fate, would you? Merida understands that as princess of Clan DunBroch, she has certain obligations—but that doesn’t mean she has to like it. Especially when one of those obligations means losing her freedom by becoming betrothed to a man she has never met. Merida balks at this tradition, but her mother Queen Elinor insists that Merida must do this to embrace her role as future queen. Determined to chart her own path, Merida follows magical wisps to a witch’s cottage, where she is given a magic pastry and promised it will incite “a great transformation” in her mother. But instead of feeding Elinor the pastry, Merida eats it herself. Merida awakens in the past, a now-teenage Elinor holding a knife to her throat and accusing her of espionage. She’s been transported to a time when the Clans MacCameron and DunBroch are bitter enemies. And it just so happens that the timing of Merida’s arrival has kept Elinor and Fergus from meeting. Will Merida be able to bridge the rival clans, help her parents fall in love, and change her own fate?

Darker by Four — June CL Tan (HarperTeen)
Rui has one goal in mind—honing her magic to avenge her mother’s death. Yiran is the black sheep of an illustrious family. The world would be at his feet—had he been born with magic. Nikai is a Reaper, serving the Fourth King of Hell. When his master disappears, the underworld begins to crumble… and the human world will be next if the King is not found. When an accident causes Rui’s power to transfer to Yiran, everything turns upside down. Without her magic, Rui has no tool for vengeance. With it, Yiran finally feels like he belongs. That is, until Rui discovers she might hold the key to the missing death god and strikes a dangerous bargain with another King. As darkness takes over, three paths intersect in the shadows. And three lives bound by fate must rise against destiny before the barrier between worlds falls and all Hell breaks loose—literally.

April 9

Against the Darkness (Buffy: The Next Generation #3) — Kendare Blake (Disney-Hyperion)
For generations, the Slayer was supposed to be the chosen, the one girl in all the world with the power to stand against the vampires, demons, and forces of darkness. When Willow used the scythe to call up all the potential slayers at once, it changed everything. For years, the slayers have been working and fighting together as a team. Then the Darkness came, killing many slayers and trapping the rest in an alternate dimension. And Frankie Rosenberg, the world’s first Slayer-Witch, found herself fighting evil alone. Sort of. After their latest confrontation with the Darkness, the Scooby gang is more fragmented than ever. Jake is having a werewolf identity crisis, and the return of his troublemaker brother Jordy is only making things worse. Hailey is off pretending to be one of the rogue slayers. Sigmund is burying his broken heart in books. And Frankie’s mom, Willow, and Watcher, Spike, only seem to care about bringing Buffy back. Now, Frankie must forge her own path, save the slayers, reunite her friends, and lead the charge to defeat the Darkness once and for all.

The Smoke That Thunders — Erhu Kome (Norton Young Readers)
In this mesmerizing fantasy rooted in Urhobo and West African folklore, sixteen-year-old Naborhi longs for a life away from her small, traditional clan in Kokori. But as her rite of passage approaches and she is betrothed to an arrogant young man, Naborhi feels her dreams slipping away from her. Then Naborhi becomes bonded to a mysterious animal and begins having harrowing visions of a kidnapped boy. She soon meets Atai, the son of an Oracle from a rival queendom, and learns that she is being guided by the gods. She and Atai, along with Naborhi’s eager-for-adventure cousin, Tamunor, set off across the continent to rescue the mysterious boy. But when they find him—and find out his true identity—Naborhi realizes there is more than just her freedom at stake: she must stop a war that has already been set in motion.

Dragonfruit —Makiia Lucier (Clarion)
Hanalei of Tamarind is the cherished daughter of an old island family. But when her father steals a seadragon egg meant for an ailing princess, she is forced into a life of exile. In the years that follow, Hanalei finds solace in studying the majestic seadragons that roam the Nominomi Sea. Until, one day, an encounter with a female dragon offers her what she desires most. A chance to return home, and to right a terrible wrong. Samahtitamahenele, Sam, is the last remaining prince of Tamarind. But he can never inherit the throne, for Tamarind is a matriarchal society. With his mother ill and his grandmother nearing the end of her reign. Sam is left with two choices: to marry, or to find a cure for the sickness that has plagued his mother for ten long years. When a childhood companion returns from exile, she brings with her something he has not felt in a very long time-hope. But Hanalei and Sam are not the only ones searching for the dragonfruit. And as they battle enemies both near and far, there is another danger they cannot escape… that of the dragonfruit itself.

Without a Shadow — H. J. Reynolds (CamCat)
Adlai Bringer remembers going to the desert market with her father: The colorful tents, the wink of gold, and her father’s shadow, black as night, as it moved of its own accord and stole whatever trinket she wanted. He called it the Shadow Game. After her father disappears, Adlai keeps going back to the market determined to find some trace of him and stealing what she can with her shadow. Until one day she picks the wrong mark—someone who knows her little trick and tries to take her shadow for himself. Everything Adlai thought she knew about her shadow is turned upside down, and her father’s disappearance takes on a new light as she’s forced to flee the city or risk being hunted. From the desert to the shadow world to even more unlikely places, Adlai knows one thing for certain: her shadow is a gift worth killing for.

April 16

Merciless Saviors (Ouroboros #2) — H.E. Edgmon (Wednesday)
That day at the First Church of Gracie changed everything for Gem Echols, and not just because Marian and Poppy betrayed them. Forced to use the Ouroboros knife on Zephyr, who had kidnapped their parents, Gem now has the power of the God of Air. While for any other god things might work out okay, the Magician—whose role within the pantheon is to keep the balance—having the power of another god has thrown everything into chaos. The Goddess of Death can now reanimate corpses; the God of Art’s powers are now corrupted and twisted, giving life to his macabre creations; and, while the God of Land has always been able to communicate with creatures of the Earth, now everyone can hear their cries. As Gem, Rory, and Enzo search for a way to restore the balance without sacrificing themselves, new horrors make them question how far they’re willing to go. In the end, Gem may be forced to fully embrace their merciless nature and kill off their own humanity—if it ever really existed in the first place.

King of Dead Things — Nevin Holness (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Eli doesn’t know who he is or who he came from. Three years ago, he was found by his now-best friends, Sunny and Max, who gave him a home in a magical sanctuary doubling as a Caribbean restaurant. What Eli does know is that he can heal a wound with just a touch and pluck magic from a soul like a petal from a flower—and there is nothing he wouldn’t do to survive and keep his new family together. Malcolm would do anything to forget where he comes from. Desperate to escape his estranged father’s shadow and plagued with an inherited death magic he doesn’t fully understand, Malcolm has just one priority: save his mother, no matter the cost. Malcolm and Eli’s paths collide when Eli and his friends are sent to track down the fang of the leopard god Osebo, a deadly weapon that can eat magic. In a job filled with enigmatic nine nights and Caribbean legends, the teens must face their own demons as they race through the magical underbelly of London to retrieve the fang… before an ancient and malevolent power comes back to life.

Calling of Light (Shamanborn #3) — Lori M. Lee (Page Street YA)
Queen Meilyr is dead, and a tenuous peace has settled over Evewyn. King Meilek’s acension has ended his sister’s oppression of the shamanborn, marking a new start for the country where Sirscha, once a prisoner, has been elevated to a position as the King’s Shadow. Yet, beneath the surface, tensions between shamanborn and other citizens remain high. Conflicts rage at Evewyn’s borders. The Soulless still lurks in the darkness. And while some might call Sirscha a hero for allegedly killing the Queen, to many she’s a monster— soulrender just like the Soulless. Sometimes Sirscha even believes that herself.But Sirscha recognizes the Soulless as the world’s common enemy, and she is determined to hunt him down to prevent yet another war. As the Soulless reemerges and both his power and the Dead Wood grow, Sirscha knows time is running short. She’ll have to trust in her true friends—and her own power—if she hopes to end the Soulless’s hold over the land for good. But when defeating him requires a sacrifice too terrible to conceive, Sirscha will have to decide how far she’s willing to go to save Evewyn.

The Kill Factor — Ben Oliver (Chicken House)
A brand-new game show that offers young criminals the chance at freedom has been greenlit. Little do they know, winning is their only chance at survival. A captivating examination of the dark truths around the criminal justice system, Ben Oliver, critically acclaimed author of The Loop trilogy, delivers an action-packed thrill ride with deadly high stakes. Fifty contestants. Five mental and physical challenges. One winner. In a near-future where a virtual currency of digital content fuels a fame-hungry society, a brand-new experiment that combines social media and reality TV has been greenlit. Voted on, and contestants are sent to a maximum-security reform camp on an island where they can have no contact with the outside world. To lose means prison. But to win is to be free. The most popular young offender with the most upvotes by the end is given both a second chance in society and a cash prize. This kind of money could mean everything to Emerson and her family who live in the Burrows, one of the subterranean villages where the government have buried affordable housing. It’s more than freedom. It could mean the chance to change her family’s circumstance and finally find a place in the society they’ve never been allowed into. But what Emerson doesn’t know, what the viewers don’t know, is that the prison on the island is empty. Those who lose, those who are voted off aren’t incarcerated. Each challenge will leave more and more contestants to die. And the only choice they have is to win over viewers before it’s too late.

The Lady of Rapture (Bones of Ruin #3) — Sarah Raughley (Margaret K. McElderry Books)
For years, the elite secret society called the Enlightenment Committee has waited for the apocalyptic force known as Hiva to destroy the world as it has so many times before. What the Committee didn’t know, however, was that Hiva wasn’t an event—it was a person. Iris Marlow. An African tightrope dancer with no memories of her past. A girl who cannot die. At least, she couldn’t die. Until her own friends discovered her one weakness and murdered her once and for all. The world-ending threat she posed should be gone too, but there’s one more Hiva out there, and unlike Iris, this one has no love for humanity. In her absence, this Hiva has taken it upon himself to judge if humanity deserves to live. But when it comes to Hivas, the judgment is always the same. The ending is always total destruction. And while Iris is dead, she’s not gone—and after the betrayal that ended her life as Iris, she is now out for revenge. The world’s days are numbered. The Cataclysm has begun.

Deep Is the Fen — Lili Wilkinson (Delacorte)
Merry doesn’t need a happily-ever-after. Her life in the charming, idyllic town of Candlecott is fine just as it is. Simple, happy, and with absolutely no magic. Magic only ever leads to trouble. But Merry’s best friend, Teddy, is joining the Toadmen—a secret society who specialize in backward thinking and suspiciously supernatural traditions—and Merry is determined to stop him. Even if it means teaming up with the person she hates most: her academic archnemesis, Caraway Boswell, an ice-cold snob who hides his true face under a glamour. An ancient Toad ritual is being held in the sinister Deeping Fen, and if Merry doesn’t rescue Teddy before it’s finished, she’ll lose him forever. But the Toadmen have been keeping dangerous secrets, and so has Caraway. The farther Merry travels into Deeping Fen’s foul waters, the more she wonders if she’s truly come to save her friend… or if she’s walking straight into a trap. There’s nothing the Toadmen love more than a damsel in distress.

April 23

Blood Justice (Blood Debts #2) — Terry J. Benton-Walker (Tor Teen)
Cristina and Clement Trudeau have conjured the impossible: justice. They took back their family’s stolen throne to lead New Orleans’ magical community into the brighter future they all deserve. But when Cris and Clem restored their family power, Valentina Savant lost everything. Her beloved grandparents are gone and her sovereignty has been revoked—she will never be Queen. Unless, of course, someone dethrones the Trudeaus again. And lucky for her, she’s not the only one trying to take them down. Cris and Clem have enemies coming at them from all directions: Hateful anti-magic protesters sabotage their reign at every turn. A ruthless detective with a personal vendetta against magical crime is hot on their tail just as Cris has discovered her thirst for revenge. And a brutal god, hunting from the shadows, is summoned by the very power Clem needs to protect the boy he loves. Cris’s hunger for vengeance and Clem’s desire for love could prove to be their family’s downfall, all while new murders, shocking disappearances, and impossible alliances are changing the game forever. Welcome back to New Orleans, where gods walk among us and justice isn’t served, it’s taken.

Fall of the Iron Gods (Mechanists #2) — Olivia Chadha (Erewhon)
Despite hard-won victories, the revolutionary forces known as the Red Hand are more endangered than ever: the Planetary Alliance Commission—the PAC—has branded them public enemy number one, ramping up their efforts to eliminate the Red Hand’s remaining members even as the pandemic rages on.   In order to protect the progress they have made, the team must adopt new tactics. Ashiva, armed with a new bionic upgrade, leads a team back into the fray on a dangerous mission across a toxic wasteland wracked by storms. Synch sets out to fortify their hidden Himalayan stronghold, but his presence may hurt their cause more than the Red Hand knows. And Taru, determined to prove herself, punches deep into the heart of governmental research facilities in a desperate gamble to bring down the regime from the inside. Greedy and unyielding, the PAC is all too willing to sacrifice the people of a province to achieve their optimal results, leaving Ashiva, Synch, and Taru to save their homeland from a government claiming to act for the greater planetary good.

Song of the Six Realms — Judy I. Lin (Feiwel + Friends)
Xue, a talented young musician, has no past and probably no future. Orphaned at a young age, her kindly poet uncle took her in and arranged for an apprenticeship at one of the most esteemed entertainment houses in the kingdom. She doesn’t remember much from before entering the House of Flowing Water, and when her uncle is suddenly killed in a bandit attack, she is devastated to lose her last connection to a life outside of her indenture contract. With no family and no patron, Xue is facing the possibility of a lifetime of servitude playing the qin for nobles that praise her talent with one breath and sneer at her lowly social status with the next. Then one night she is unexpectedly called to the garden to put on a private performance for the enigmatic Duke Meng. For a young man of nobility, he is strangely kind and awkward, and surprises Xue further with an irresistible offer: serve as a musician in residence at his manor for one year, and he’ll set her free of her indenture. But the Duke’s motives become increasingly more suspect when he and Xue barely survive an attack by a nightmarish monster, and when he whisks her away to his estate, she discovers he’s not just some country noble: He’s the Duke of Dreams, one of the divine rulers of the Celestial Realm. There she learns the Six Realms are on the brink of disaster, and incursions by demonic beasts are growing more frequent. The Duke needs Xue’s help to unlock memories from her past that could hold the answers to how to stop the impending war… but first Xue will need to survive being the target of every monster and deity in the Six Realms.

Off With Their Heads — Zoe Hana Mikuta (Disney-Hyperion)
In a world where Saints are monsters and Wonderland is the dark forest where they lurk, it’s been five years since young witches and lovers Caro Rabbit and Iccadora Alice Sickle were both sentenced to that forest for a crime they didn’t commit—and four years since they shattered one another’s hearts, each willing to sacrifice the other for a chance at freedom. Now, Caro is a successful royal Saint-harvester, living the high life in the glittering capital and pretending not to know of the twisted monster experiments that her beloved Red Queen hides deep in the bowels of the palace. But for Icca, the memory of Caro’s betrayal has hardened her from timid girl to ruthless hunter. A hunter who will stop at nothing to exact her vengeance: On Caro. On the queen. On the throne itself. But there’s a secret about the Saints the Queen’s been guarding, and a volatile magic at play even more dangerous to Icca and Caro than they are to each other…

A Whisper in the Walls (Waxways #2) – Scott Reintgen (Margaret K. McElderry)
Ren Monroe is a wolf among lions. After infiltrating one of the greatest Houses in Kathor through her successful bond with Theo Brood, she finds Theo’s father is two steps ahead. He exiles Theo and isolates Ren, strategically working to break her unwelcome grasp on his son—and foiling Ren’s first step to enacting the revenge she’s been planning her whole life. Ren might have more resources than she’d ever imagined growing up, but she’ll still get nowhere without allies. Enter House Tin’Vori. Years ago, House Brood led an unprecedented raid to destroy a fellow House of Kathor. But a few siblings survived, and they haven’t forgotten the horrors waged against their family. Quietly, they’ve plotted their own revenge, waiting for the right moment to strike. And Ren Monroe might be their best chance. Like fire, the Tin’Vori siblings are as dangerous as they are useful, both gifted in rare magics. Ren must decide how to unleash them against House Brood without hurting Theo in the process. Her feelings for Theo are growing past the boundaries of their bond, and Ren finds herself balanced on a knife’s edge, a breath away from immense power or utter ruin.

Saint-Seducing Gold (Force & Fracture #2) — Brittany N. Williams (Amulet)
There’s danger in the court of James I. Magical metal-worker Joan Sands must reforge the Pact between humanity and the Fae to stop the looming war. As violence erupts across London and the murderous spymaster Robert Cecil closes in, the Fae queen Titanea coerces Joan into joining the royal court while holding her godfather prisoner in the infamous Tower of London. Now Joan will have to survive deadly machinations both magical and mortal all while balancing the magnetic pull of her two loves—Rose and Nick—before the world as she knows it is destroyed forever.

April 30

The Vanishing Station — Ana Ellickson (Amulet)
Eighteen-year-old Filipino American Ruby Santos has been unmoored since her mother’s death. She can’t apply to art school like she’s always dreamed, and she and her father have had to move into the basement of their home and rent out the top floor while they work to pay back her mother’s hospital bills. Then Ruby finds out her father has been living a secret life as a delivery person for a magical underworld—he “jumps” train lines to help deliver packages for a powerful family. Recently, he’s fallen behind on deliveries (and deeper into alcoholism), and if his debts aren’t satisfied, they’re going to take her mother’s house. In an effort to protect her father and save all that remains of her mother, Ruby volunteers to take over her dad’s station and start jumping train lines. But this is no ordinary job. Ruby soon realizes that the trains are much more than doors to romance and adventure: they’re also doors to trafficking illicit goods and fierce rivalries. As she becomes more entangled with the magical underworld and the mysterious boy who’s helped her to learn magic, she realizes too late that she may be in over her head. Can she free her father and save her mother’s house? Or has she only managed to get herself pulled into the dangerous web her father was trapped in?

Sound the Gong (Kingdom of Three #2) — Joan He (Roaring Brook Press)
All her life, Zephyr has tried to rise above her humble origins as a no-name orphan. Now she is a god in a warrior’s body, and never has she felt more powerless. The warlordess Xin Ren holds the Westlands, but her position is tenuous. In the north, the empress remains a puppet under Miasma’s thumb. In the south, the alliance with Cicada is in pieces. Fate has a winner in mind for the three kingdoms, but Zephyr has no intentions of respecting it. She will pay any price to see Ren succeed—and she will make her enemies pay, especially the enigmatic Crow. What she’ll do when she finds out the truth… Only the heavens know.

Return of the Vengeful Queen — C. J. Redwine (Balzer + Bray)
Charis Willowthorn is a queen without a throne. A Rakuuna invader holds Charis’s kingdom of Calera captive, leaving her desperate—and ruthlessly committed to vengeance. But with her allies reluctant to intervene and her enemies hunting her across the open sea, Charis is left with only one choice: forge a temporary alliance with Tal Penbyrn, the boy who betrayed her—and, at all costs, keep him out of her heart.  Tal is imprisoned, both by the Rakuuna and the weight of his guilt. Though he once betrayed his love, he knows that he can help turn the tide in Charis’s favor, if only he can regain her trust. But the Rakuuna have an ally of their own—one who knows Charis’s every move and will stop at nothing to see her destroyed. With threats closing in and every allegiance in doubt, Charis must be stronger, faster, and more vicious than her enemies to reclaim her kingdom—and her future.

Powerful (A Powerless Story) – Lauren Roberts (S&S BYR)
Adena and Paedyn have always been inseparable. Fate brought them together when they were young, but friendship ensured they would always protect each other and the home they built in the slums of Loot. But now Paedyn—an Ordinary—has been selected for the Purging Trials, which means almost certain death. Now alone in Loot, Adena must fend for herself. After attempting to steal, she’s rescued by a mysterious man from the market. Mak’s shadowy past and secretive power set him apart from the other low-level Elites of Loot. And as the pair team up to see their loved ones before the Trials, the quest tests their loyalty, their love, and their lives.

To a Darker Shore — Leanne Schwartz (Page St Kids)
Plain, poor, plus-size, and autistic, Alesta grew up trying to convince her beauty-obsessed kingdom that she’s too useful to be sacrificed. Their god blessed their island Soladisa as a haven for his followers, but to keep the devil at bay, the church sends a child sacrifice to hell’s entrance every season—often poor or plain girls just like Alesta. With a head full of ideas for inventions, Alesta knows her best shot at making it to adulthood is to design something impressive for the festival exhibition so she might win a spot in the university—acceptance could guarantee her safety. But Alesta’s flying machine demonstration goes awry, a failure that will surely mean death. What happens is worse: Her best friend and heir to the throne, Kyrian, takes the blame expecting leniency but ends up sacrificed in her place. To stop the sacrifices forever, Alesta plans to kill the monster that killed her friend. Prepared to save her kingdom or die trying, she travels to the depths of hell only to find Kyrian—alive, but monstrously transformed. There is no escaping hell or their growing feelings for one another, and the deeper they descend into hell, the closer they come to uncovering a truth about the sacrifices that threatens to invoke the wrath of not only monsters but the gods as well.

The post All the New Young Adult SFF Books Arriving in April! appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations new releases

All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in April!

Visit a divided colony ship, a war-torn galaxy, a “perfect” town, and more in this month’s new sci-fi titles

By Reactor

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Published on April 2, 2024

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Here’s the full list of the science fiction titles heading your way in April!

Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change.

April 2

Four Minutes — Brian Andrews & Jeffrey Wilson (Blackstone)
Special Operations Chief Tyler Brooks might not know quantum mechanics, or have an eidetic memory, but he is the very best in the world at one thing: leading covert ops. When an unpredictable enemy causes the catastrophic loss of his entire SEAL team, Brooks is recruited by Pat Moody to lead a new elite squad, Task Force Omega. Moody’s promise—access to mind-bending tech that grants a glimpse of the future. Together with Navy Intelligence Specialist Zee Williams, Brooks leads a new kind of counterterrorism task force, one that collects intel from the future to stop attacks in the present. But there’s a catch. Each mission can only last FOUR MINUTES. Stakes quickly escalate when Omega discovers an unprecedented future attack against America threatening the lives of millions—including Tyler’s daughter. Despite their prescient advantage, Brooks and Williams find themselves thwarted at every turn as they try to stop the plot. To make matters worse, they have somehow gone from hunter to hunted, targeted by an unknown enemy hidden in the shadows. With the country on the brink of nuclear war, Tyler’s daughter in mortal danger, and a commanding officer they’re not sure they can trust, Omega Team faces a terrible dilemma: Even if you know the future, is FOUR MINUTES enough time to change it?

Calypso — Oliver K. Langmead (Titan)
Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew’s descendants, who revere her like a saint. She travels the ship with the Calypso’s creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept. She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth—a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind’s past. And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.

A View From the Stars — Cixin Liu (Tor Books)
A View From the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu’s prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu’s experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.

Disquiet Gods (The Sun Eater #6) – Christopher Ruocchio (Baen)
The end is nigh. It has been nearly two hundred years since Hadrian Marlowe assaulted the person of the Emperor and walked away from war. From his Empire. His duty. From the will and service of the eldritch being known only as the Quiet. The galaxy lies in the grip of a terrible plague, and worse, the Cielcin have overrun the realms of men. A messenger has come to Jadd, bearing a summons from the Sollan Emperor for the one-time hero. A summons, a pardon, and a plea. HAPSIS, the Emperor’s secret first-contact intelligence organization, has located one of the dreadful Watchers, the immense, powerful beings worshipped by the Pale Cielcin. Called out of retirement and exile, the old hero—accompanied by his daughter, Cassandra—must race across the galaxy and against time to accomplish one last, impossible task: To kill a god.
The end is nigh. It has been nearly two hundred years since Hadrian Marlowe assaulted the person of the Emperor and walked away from war. From his Empire. His duty. From the will and service of the eldritch being known only as the Quiet. The galaxy lies in the grip of a terrible plague, and worse, the Cielcin have overrun the realms of men. A messenger has come to Jadd, bearing a summons from the Sollan Emperor for the one-time hero. A summons, a pardon, and a plea. HAPSIS, the Emperor’s secret first-contact intelligence organization, has located one of the dreadful Watchers, the immense, powerful beings worshipped by the Pale Cielcin. Called out of retirement and exile, the old hero—accompanied by his daughter, Cassandra—must race across the galaxy and against time to accomplish one last, impossible task: To kill a god.

Toll of Honor (Honorverse) — David Weber (Baen)
Lieutenant Brandy Bolgeo has come home from the Battle of Hancock station wounded in both body and spirit. She will need months to regenerate her lost leg, but how long will it take to heal her heart? She’s come home to find that her wounds, her ship’s brutal damage, the deaths of so many friends, were the fault of an arrogant, aristocratic coward who broke and ran in the face of the enemy. Who left her ship to pay the price for his craven desertion under fire. And whose powerful political allies are determined to protect and preserve him at any price.

April 9

Mal Goes to War — Edward Ashton (St. Martin’s)
The humans are fighting again. Go figure. As a free A.I., Mal finds the war between the modded and augmented Federals and the puritanical Humanists about as interesting as a battle between rival anthills. He’s not above scouting the battlefield for salvage, though, and when the Humanists abruptly cut off access to infospace he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary, and responsible for the safety of the modded girl she died protecting.

A Better World — Sarah Langan (Atria)
You’ll be safe here. That’s what the tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer’s hus­band, Russell, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001 percent. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They’d be crazy not to take it. With the outside world falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens’ last chance. But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow… but what exactly is Hollow? It’s Linda who brokers acceptance, by volunteering her medical skills to the most influential people in town through their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyper­ventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have become secretive, but living in Plymouth Valley is worth sacrificing their family’s closeness, isn’t it? At least they’ll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow’s ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming. Linda is warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?

Star Wars: The Living Force — John Jackson Miller (Random House Worlds)
The Jedi have always traveled the stars, defending peace and justice across the galaxy. But the galaxy is changing, and the Jedi Order along with it. More and more, the Order finds itself focused on the future of the Republic, secluded on Coruscant, where the twelve members of the Jedi Council weigh crises on a galactic scale. As yet another Jedi Outpost left over from the Republic’s golden age is set to be decommissioned on the planet Kwenn, Qui-Gon Jinn challenges the Council about the Order’s increasing isolation. Mace Windu suggests a bold response: All twelve Jedi Masters will embark on a goodwill mission to help the planet and to remind the people of the galaxy that the Jedi remain as stalwart and present as they have been across the ages. But the arrival of the Jedi leadership is not seen by all as a cause for celebration. In the increasing absence of the Jedi, warring pirate factions have infested the sector. To maintain their dominance, the pirates unite, intent on assassinating the Council members. And they are willing to destroy countless innocent lives to secure their power. Cut off from Coruscant, the Jedi Masters must reckon with an unwelcome truth: While no one thinks more about the future than the Jedi Council, nobody needs their help more than those living in the present.

April 23

Ocean’s Godori — Elaine U. Cho (Zando – Hillman Grad)
Ocean Yoon has never felt very Korean, even if she is descended from a long line of haenyeo, Jeju Island’s beloved female divers. She doesn’t like soju, constantly misses cultural references, and despite her love of the game, people still say that she doesn’t play Hwatu like a Korean. Ocean’s also persona non grata at the Alliance, Korea’s solar system–dominating space agency, since a mission went awry and she earned a reputation for being a little too quick with her gun. When her best friend, Teo, second son of the Anand Tech empire, is framed for murdering his family, Ocean and her misfit crewmates are pushed to the forefront of a high-stakes ideological conflict. But dodging bullets and winning space chases may be the easiest part of what comes next.

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