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New Releases: 4/17/18

Happy New Release Day! Here’s what went on sale today.

By His Own Hand by Neal Griffin

Placeholder of  -85 The body of a young man has been found in the woods outside Newberg, dead from a close-range shotgun blast. The gun—his own—lies beside the body.

Certain things don’t add up for Detective Tia Suarez. Where did the fat envelope of cash in his pocket come from? Who called the police to report the body, then disappeared before the cops arrived?

Head On by John Scalzi

Image Placeholder of - 91 Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Avengers of the Moon by Allen Steele

Poster Placeholder of - 95 Curt Newton has spent most of his life hidden from the rest of humankind, being raised by a robot, an android, and the disembodied brain of a renowned scientist. Curt’s innate curiosity and nose for trouble inadvertently lead him into a plot to destabilize the Solar Coalition and assassinate the president. There’s only one way to uncover the evil mastermind—Curt must become Captain Future.

The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis

Place holder  of - 45 They say it’s not the fall that kills you.

For Josette Dupre, the Corps’ first female airship captain, it might just be a bullet in the back.

On top of patrolling the front lines, she must also contend with a crew who doubts her expertise, a new airship that is an untested deathtrap, and the foppish aristocrat Lord Bernat, a gambler and shameless flirt with the military know-how of a thimble.

Night Magic by Jenna Black

Image Place holder  of - 30 Philadelphia is locked in the grip of an evil magic that transforms its streets into a nightmare landscape the minute the sun sets each night. While most of the city hunkers down and hopes to survive the long winter nights, Becket Walker is roaming the darkened streets having the time of her life.

Once, the guilt of having inadvertently let the night magic into the city—and of having killed her onetime best friend—had threatened to destroy her. But now she’s been Nightstruck, and all her grief and guilt and terror have been swept away—along with her conscience. So what if she’s lost her friends, her family, and her home? And so what if her hot new boyfriend is super-controlling and downright malevolent?

NEW FROM TOR.COM

The Atrocities by Jeremy C. Shipp

When Isabella died, her parents were determined to ensure her education wouldn’t suffer.

But Isabella’s parents had not informed her new governess of Isabella’s… condition, and when Ms Valdez arrives at the estate, having forced herself through a surreal nightmare maze of twisted human-like statues, she discovers that there is no girl to tutor.

Or is there…?

NEW IN MANGA

Monster Girl Doctor Vol. 2 Story by Yoshino Origuchi; Art by z-ton

Spirit Circle Vol. 3 Story and art by Satoshi Mizukami

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John Scalzi’s Head On Sweepstakes

Poster Placeholder of - 57 We want to send you an advance copy of John Scalzi’s upcoming novel Head On, the sequel to Lock In!

About Head On:

John Scalzi returns with Head On, the standalone follow-up to the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed Lock In. Chilling near-future SF with the thrills of a gritty cop procedural, Head On brings Scalzi’s trademark snappy dialogue and technological speculation to the future world of sports.

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.

Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth—and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.

Comment on this post to enter for a chance to win an advance copy of Head On!

No purchase necessary. Open only to legal residents of the 50 United States, D.C. and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are age 13 or older. Entry period begins at 9:30 AM Eastern Time (ET) on April 4th and ends at 11:59 PM ET on April 8th. Void where prohibited. For full Official Rules, visit https://www.torforgeblog.com/john-scalzis-head-on-sweepstakes-rules/. Sponsored by Tom Doherty Associates, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10010.

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Hadens, Chris Shane, Gender and Me

Poster Placeholder of - 45 Written by John Scalzi

About five years ago, when I started writing Lock In, for which my upcoming novel Head On is the sequel, I decided one important thing about the protagonist, Chris Shane: I decided that I would not know, and would not seek to know, Chris’ gender.

I decided this for a couple of reasons. One reason was that in the world of Lock In (and now Head On), there’s a thing called Haden’s Syndrome, in which people are locked into their bodies by a disease. Because of that disease “Hadens” encounter the world through an online community called the Agora, and by remotely piloting android bodies called “threeps.” Chris is a Haden and presents in a threep, and threeps are not (necessarily) gendered. So when people encounter Chris out in the world, they would not know if Chris is male, or female, or non-binary, or other, unless Chris chose to say. My feeling is that Chris wouldn’t say—even to me. Because it’s not necessarily anyone else’s business. So there’s that.

But another reason is that I thought that Hadens, because of various aspects of how they interact with the world and how they interact with each other, would not necessarily always place the same emphasis on gender that other humans might traditionally do. As noted above, Hadens have the option of not presenting any obvious gender at all, but more than that, they might decide, as part of the natural development of their community, that gender simply isn’t as important, or, even if it were, that it could be flexible in various contexts—one might present as male to some people, female to others, or non-binary or non-gendered to still others. When you meet people with your mind first, they are not prejudiced one way or another with your body (they still might be prejudiced in other ways, of course).

That being the case, while I think many Hadens would feel and be strongly gendered, I thought that many would not be, and would feel more at ease being non-binary or on a gender spectrum—and even many of those who felt gendered might not choose to make that gender known publicly. To those they trust, sure. To the public at large, maybe not so much. Because that was an option, and because that could be a growing aspect of an emerging Haden culture. It’s a speculative aspect of a speculative community.

To get back to Chris, knowing that I wouldn’t know Chris’ gender even before I started writing my novel (now novels) meant I spent a non-trivial amount time thinking about presenting my character in the world, and through speech and action. What I didn’t want to do was write a gendered (and given my own defaults, that meant probably male) character and then just erase all mention of gender. It’s not enough to just drop pronouns. I wanted to make an authentic non-gendered presentation, for a person who chose not to have gender a topic for general discussion, and lived life accordingly.

Whether I did this convincingly is up to the individual reader. I can say that after two books writing Chris, I’m happy that readers tend to gender Chris—or not!—depending on their own inclinations. My wife is convinced Chris is a woman and uses the corresponding pronouns when she discusses the character. Other people are convinced Chris is a “he” and proceed accordingly. Still others picture Chris’ gender as fluid. Some, like me, choose not gender Chris one way or another—or at least choose to follow Chris’ lead in keeping gender out of the general discussion.

As the author, I don’t have any particular problem with readers gendering Chris to their own satisfaction, whether male, female, non-binary or none of the above, and I think it’s interesting watching how people choose to answer that question for themselves, and how that influences and changes the experience of reading Lock In and Head On.

I should be clear that my choices in presenting Chris as a character are my own, and that I don’t see myself as a spokesperson on gender issues in general. Like many “cishet” folks, I’m still learning and trying to stay open to the experience of life that people outside gender norms live and choose to share with me and others. I’ve especially been grateful to the non-binary people I know who have talked to me about the world of Lock In, and their own thoughts about Chris, whatever those thoughts may be. They help inform my thinking, and the development of the world of the Hadens. And that’s a good thing, I think.

Order Your Copy

Image Placeholder of amazon- 24 Place holder  of bn- 65 Image Placeholder of booksamillion- 49 ibooks2 67 indiebound

Follow John Scalzi on Twitter, on Facebook, and on his blog, Whatever.

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On the Road: Tor/Forge Author Events in April

Tor/Forge authors are on the road in April! See who is coming to a city near you this month.

W. Bruce Cameron, A Dog’s Way Home

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Saturday, April 14th
Palm Beach Book Festival
Palm Beach, FL
3:00 PM
Books provided by Follett Bookstore.

Spencer Ellsworth, Starfire: Memory’s Blade

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Thursday, April 26th
Powell’s Books
Beaverton, OR
7:00 PM
Also with Joseph Brassey.

Neal Griffin, By His Own Hand

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Tuesday, April 17th
Warwick’s Books
San Diego, CA
7:30 PM

Saturday, April 21st
Book Carnival
Orange, CA
2:00 PM

Saturday, April 28th
Poisoned Pen
Scottsdale, AZ
2:00 PM
Also with Robert Dugoni and Baron R. Birtcher.

Margaret Killjoy, The Barrow Will Send What It May

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Tuesday, April 3rd
Firestorm Books
Asheville, NC
6:00 PM

Kimberly Reid, Prettyboy Must Die

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Thursday, April 5th
Boulder Bookstore
Boulder, CO
6:30 PM

John Scalzi, Head On

Tuesday, April 17th
Literati Bookstore
Ann Arbor, MI
7:00 PM

Wednesday, April 18th
Prairie Lights
Iowa City, IA
7:00 PM

Thursday, April 19th
Barnes & Noble
Roseville, MN
7:00 PM

Monday, April 23rd
St. Louis County Library
St. Louis, MO
7:00 PM
Books provided by the Novel Neighbor.

Tuesday, April 24th
The Strand
New York, NY
7:00 PM

Wednesday, April 25th
Politics and Prose at The Wharf
Washington, DC
7:00 PM

Monday, April 30th
Troy-Miami County Public Library
Troy, OH
6:30 PM
Books provided by Jay and Mary’s Book Center.

Paula Stokes, Ferocious 

Tuesday, April 24th
Longview Library
Longview, WA
6:00 PM
Also with Sheryl Scarborough and Tina Connolly.
Books provided by Vintage Books

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Excerpt: Head On by John Scalzi

amazons bns booksamillions ibooks2 76 indiebounds

Image Place holder  of - 4 Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.

Is it an accident or murder? FBI agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth—and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.

Head On will be available on April 17th. Please enjoy this excerpt.

Read the prologue here.

Chapter One

I almost missed seeing Duane Chapman die.

I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that I was running late for the “special exhibition game experience” that I was supposed to be having along with my mother and father. The North American Hilketa League really really really wanted my dad to be a minority investor in the league’s upcoming Washington, D.C., franchise, and thought wooing him in a luxury skybox would do the trick.

I was doubtful about this—Dad knew his way around skyboxes, as both a former NBA player and current real estate billionaire, and didn’t see them as anything particularly special—but I did know that my flatmates, Hilketa fans all, were glowing green with envy that I was attending the game. This had been literally the case with the twins, Justin and Justine, who for the last three days had set the LED piping of their threep to pulse green at me anytime I walked past them. I thought that was overdoing it, personally.

I had left the house in time to make it to the start of the game, but public transportation had other plans for me. I spent the first half of the game in a tube, surrounded by increasingly agitated passengers.

Where are you, my mother had texted me, once the game had started.

Stuck on the Metro, I sent back. The train stopped fifteen minutes ago. We’re all looking at each other deciding who to eat first.

I think you’re safe, she replied.

Don’t be too sure, I sent. I can see some of them sizing up my threep to part it out for battery power.

Well, if you survive, try to hurry up, Mom texted. Your father is being swarmed by German businessmen and I’m being condescended to by PR flacks. I know you won’t want to miss any of that.

I hear there’s a game going on too, I sent back.

A what now? she replied.

Eventually the train decided to move again, and ten minutes after that I was heading into the stadium, threading my way through other Metro stoppage victims, rushing to see the second half of the game. Some of them were in Boston Bays white and blue, others were wearing the Toronto Snowbirds purple and gray. The rest were wearing Washington Redhawks burgundy and gold, because this is Washington, D.C., and why wouldn’t they.

“I can help you,” a gate attendant said to me, waving me over. She had very little traffic because most of the attendees were already in the stadium. I flashed my ticket code onto my chest monitor and she scanned it.

“Skybox, very nice,” she said. “You know where you’re going?”

I nodded. “I’ve been here before.”

The attendant was about to respond when there was a commotion behind us. I looked over and saw a small clot of protesters chanting and waving signs. HILKETA DISCRIMINATES, read one of the signs. LET US PLAY TOO, read another one. EVEN THE BASQUE DON’T LIKE HILKETA, read a third. The protesters were being shuffled off by stadium security, and they weren’t happy about it.

“I don’t even get that sign,” she said to me, as they were being hustled away.

“Which one?”

“The Basque one.” She pronounced the word “baskee.” “The other ones I get. All the Hilketa players are Hadens and these guys”—she waved at the protesters, none of whom were Hadens—“don’t like that. But what does that other sign even mean?”

“The word ‘Hilketa’ comes from the Basque language,” I said. “It means ‘murder.’ Some Basque people don’t like that it’s used. They think it makes them look bad.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m not Basque.”

“Everyone’s got a word for murder,” the attendant said.

I nodded at that and looked back at the retreating protesters. Some of them saw me and started chanting more forcefully. Apparently they were under the impression that because I was a Haden, their grievances were my fault. A couple of them had glasses on and were looking at me in the fixed sort of way that indicated they were either storing an image of me or trying to call up my public information.

Well, this was a new threep and I didn’t keep my information public when I wasn’t working, so good luck, there, guys. I thanked the gate attendant and headed in.

The particular skybox I was going to was a large one, designed to fit a few dozen people, a buffet, and a full-service bar. It was basically a hotel conference room with a view of a sporting field.

I glanced around, looking for my parents. I found Dad first, and this was not entirely surprising. As a former NBA player, he towered above most other people in most rooms. And as Marcus Shane, one of the most famous humans in the world, he was generally thronged.

As he was here—two concentric rings of admirers arrayed themselves around him, holding drinks and looking up at him raptly as he related some story or another. Dad’s natural habitat, in other words.

He waved when he saw me but didn’t wave for me to come over. I knew what that meant. He was working. A few of the people who were thronging him glanced over to see who he had waved at, but seeing only an anonymous threep, they turned their attention back to Dad. That was fine by me.

“Oh, good. Here, take this,” someone said, and shoved a glass at me.

I looked up and saw a middle-aged suit. “Pardon me?” I said.

“I’m done with this,” he said, waggling the glass.

“Okay. Congratulations.”

The man peered at my threep. “You’re catering, yes?”

“Not really.” I considered flashing my FBI identity information at the suit and then enjoying the fumbling that would follow. Before I could, someone in a white blouse and an apron appeared. “Let me take that,” he said, taking the suit’s glass.

The suit grunted. “And bring me another. Jack and Coke.” He walked off in the direction of Dad.

“Sorry about that,” the catering staffer said.

“Not your fault.” I looked around the room. “Interesting, though.”

“What is?”

“A skybox full of non-Hadens, here for a game played by Hadens, and the first thing that dude does when he sees a threep is hand over his drink glass.” I nodded to the glass the caterer had in his hand.

“I better go get him another one,” the caterer said.

“Do. Try not to spit in it.” The caterer grinned and walked off.

I walked over to the glass wall partitioning the inside of the skybox from its balcony and went through the door there, going to the balcony railing and taking in the roar of the spectators. If the size of the crowd was any indication, the league wasn’t wrong to want to expand into Washington. The stadium was jammed to the upper decks.

“I still don’t know what’s going on,” a man said, next to me, to another man standing next to him.

“It’s not complicated,” the second man said, and pointed at the field, to a threep whose head was ringed with flashing, blinking red lights. “That threep’s the goat. That’s the player the other team wants to rip the head off of. They try to take his head, while his team tries to keep him from having his head ripped off.”

“And when the head is taken, they try to punt it through the goalposts.”

“Punt it, toss it, or carry it through, yes.”

“And everyone has swords and hammers and bats—”

“They have those because that shit’s just fun.”

The first man stopped to consider this. “Why ‘goat’?”

The second man began to expound on this, but I went back inside to find Mom.

Who I found in the seats facing toward the field, drink in hand, smiling tightly while some young and overenthusiastic dude chatted her up. I recognized the smile as the one Mom used as an alternative to murdering someone. I went over to her, to save her from the overenthusiastic dude, and to save the overenthusiastic dude from her.

“Chris, finally,” Mom said as I came up. I bent over to receive a peck on the cheek. She turned, acknowledging her seatmate. “This is Marvin Stephens. He’s with the league’s PR department.”

Stephens stood and held out a hand for me. I shook it. “A thrill to meet you, Chris,” he said. “I’m a big fan.”

“I didn’t know FBI agents had fans,” I said.

“Oh, well, not of your FBI work,” Stephens said, and then produced a slightly startled look. He was worried he’d made a faux pas. “I mean, I’m sure your FBI work is good.”

“Thank you,” I said, dryly.

“I meant when you were younger.”

“Ah, you meant when I was famous for being famous.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.” Stephens’s startled look was back. “I mean, you were a symbol for Hadens everywhere.”

I thought about poking at Stephens a little bit more, and finding out just how many permutations of his startled look I could get out of him. But it wouldn’t have been nice.

And anyway, he wasn’t wrong. When I was young, I was a symbol for Hadens everywhere, the poster child for an entire group of humans, all locked into their bodies by a disease and using machines and neural networks to get through the world, just like I did, and do. Being a poster child was a nice gig, until it wasn’t. Which is why I stopped doing it and went to work for the FBI instead.

I could have explained this all to Stephens, who was still standing there, looking increasingly worried that he’d just stepped in it. Stephens was just trying to be complimentary, just like lots of other people who unintentionally blurted out a reminder I currently resided in the “where are they now” category of fame and then thought it was a bad thing, instead of something I hoped for and planned to happen.

But that would have taken time and it would have meant having a long conversation of the sort that didn’t mix well with a sporting event.

“I was,” I said. “Thank you for noticing.”

Stephens relaxed and sat back down.

“Marvin was explaining the game of Hilketa to me,” Mom said, waving toward the field, on which the Bays and the Snowbirds were currently going after each other with melee weapons. “In detail.”

“It’s an amazing game,” Stephens said to me. “Are you a fan?”

I shrugged.

“Chris was more into video games growing up,” Mom said.

“Hilketa is a video game too,” Stephens said. “In fact, the NAHL sponsors several virtual leagues to help train our athletes and to find new talent. Hadens and non-Hadens both.”

“I ran into some non-Hadens protesting outside,” I noted. “They didn’t seem to feel they were well represented in the league.”

“Well, there’s a skill gap,” Stephens said. “Non-Hadens still lag behind in piloting threeps. It’s a reaction-time thing.”

“Is it.”

“That’s the official response, anyway.” Stephens got that startled look again. He realized what he’d said and how he’d said it. I wondered how long he’d been in his job. “I mean, it is the reason. It’s not just an excuse. The NAHL is open to qualified athletes regardless of Haden status.”

“Good to know.”

“It’s just that piloting threeps is tricky. You know . . .” He motioned to me, or more accurately, my threep. “Without a neural network, getting around in a Personal Transport requires a lot of skill and attention.” Stephens pointed out toward the field, to a Toronto tank threep that was pounding the hell out of a Bays player with its fists, to cheers. “When I started this job, they put me in a VR getup and had me try to pilot a tank threep around an open field, so I could get a feel for how the players did their job.”

“How did you do?” I asked.

“I walked it into a wall,” Stephens admitted. “Several times. I just couldn’t get the hang of it. So it doesn’t surprise me that we don’t have non-Hadens playing the game at a professional level yet. It’s the one place Hadens have the advantage over the rest of us.” The startled look returned. “Well, I mean, not the only place. . . .”

Mom glanced over at me on that one and then tinkled the ice in her glass at Stephens. “Would you be a dear and top off my drink for me,” she said, and Stephens practically fell over himself to grab the glass and extricate himself from the situation.

“He seems nice,” I said, watching as he sprinted toward the bartender.

“He’s clueless,” Mom said. “I’m sure he was assigned to me because he was the only apparatchik the league could spare to babysit the spouse of the man they wanted to extract money from.” She motioned with her head to Dad, who’d grown another ring of admirers. “I’m sure they thought he’d be relatively harmless.”

“Do they not know who you are?” I asked.

“They know I’m Marcus’ wife.” Mom did a hand movement that was her rather more elegant version of a shrug. “If they missed out on what else I am, that’s their problem.”

Mom, that is, Jacqueline Oxford Shane, on the board of Shane Enterprises, executive vice president of the National Haden Family Association, ferocious fund-raiser, and scion of one of Virginia’s oldest and most politically connected families, who dated the current vice president before she met and married Dad. Rumor was the VP still regretted ever letting her go. I didn’t regret it. I wouldn’t be here if she’d stayed with him.

I tilted my head at Dad. “So how’s he holding up, anyway?”

“He’s fine,” Mom said. “He’s doing his thing.”

“His ‘special exhibition game experience’ is apparently being mobbed by international businesspeople.”

“You didn’t think we were invited to this because the league was trying to impress your dad, did you?” Mom said. She waved at the businesspeople. “We were invited so he could impress them.”

“Does that mean Dad is going to invest in the new franchise?” I asked.

Mom did her shrug wave again. “We’re looking at the numbers.”

“How are they?”

Before Mom could respond, two gentlemen appeared, gave slight bows, and then one spoke in Japanese.

“Mr. Fukuyama apologizes for the intrusion, and wishes to know if you are a player in the Hilketa game,” the second man said, clearly the translator.

I had known what Mr. Fukuyama said because my onboard translator had given me a translation as soon as it recognized Fukuyama was not speaking English at me.

I stood and gave a small bow. “Please tell Mr. Fukuyama that I regret that I am not.”

“This robot is not a player,” the translator told Fukuyama, in Japanese.

“Damn it,” Fukuyama said. “I was promised that I would get to meet players on this trip. Why they think I will invest in an Asian Hilketa league when they can’t even show me the goods is beyond me.”

“Perhaps you will meet a player after the game, sir,” the translator said.

“I better.” Fukuyama nodded his head at me. “Get this robot’s autograph anyway. I promised my grandson I would get one from a player.”

“But this is not a player,” the translator said.

“My grandson won’t know the difference.”

The translator reached into a suit pocket and produced a small notebook and a pen. “Please, an autograph?” he asked, in English.

“Of course,” I said, taking the pen and signing the notebook with it, adding “I am not a Hilketa player” in English below the signature. I closed the notebook and handed it and the pen back to the translator. He and Fukuyama bowed and departed.

“You’re famous,” Mom joked to me.

“It’s a step up from when I came into the skybox and someone shoved a drink glass in my hand.”

“Who did that?”

“That one—” I pointed to the suit, now in the outer ring of my father’s admirers.

“Oh, him,” Mom said. “I’ve met him. Smarmy little jerk.”

“You were talking about the league numbers before we got interrupted,” I reminded her, to get her off the topic of the smarmy suit. “You were about to tell me how they were.”

“They’re marginal.”

“Ah, that good,” I said.

“The NAHL likes to call itself the fastest-growing major sport in North America, but all the other major sports are decades old, so that’s just marketing,” Mom said. “Hilketa’s attendance and merchandising are growing but the league spends a lot. Your father has questions about the value proposition of investing in a franchise.”

“You mean, you have questions about it.”

“We both have questions about it,” Mom said. “The league just doesn’t appear to realize your father and I talk to each other.”

“That’s going to end well.”

“We’ll see.” Mom looked up at me as if she suddenly remembered something. “Where’s Leslie?” she asked. “I thought she was thinking of coming with you.”

“She’s busy,” I said. “Leslie” in this case was Leslie Vann, my partner at the FBI, where we were part of the Haden affairs division.

“She’s busy? Doing what?”

“Avoiding sunlight. It’s a Sunday, Mom.”

Mom snorted, delicately, at this. “Leslie needs fewer late nights, Chris.”

“I’ll let her know you’ve volunteered to be her life coach.”

“I just might take the job. Leslie is lovely”—and here I did an internal smirk, because in the year I’d been partnered with Vann, “lovely” was an adjective used about her exactly once, right now—“but she’s aimless.”

“She likes aimless.”

“Yes, well. If it makes her happy, I suppose. Look, here comes the problem child again.” She pointed to Stephens, who returned with Mom’s glass.

A roar went up from the stands. Not because Mom got her drink, but because on the field, Duane Chapman’s head was ripped clean off.

Mom grimaced. “I hate when that happens.”

“The player is fine,” Stephens assured her. “It looks violent, but that’s a threep body. The player and his actual head are as safe as can be. He’s a Haden, after all.”

My mother looked at Stephens, blankly and silently.

“Which, uh, you knew,” Stephens said, awkwardly.

Mom continued to stare blankly at Stephens.

“You know, I’m going to check in with my boss to see if she needs me for anything,” he said, and sprinted off again.

Mom watched him go, and then returned her attention to the game, where Duane Chapman’s headless threep sprawled on the Hilketa playing field. Meanwhile his head, carried off by the opposing team, was making its way down the pitch, one threep-crushing meter at a time.

“It disturbs me to see a headless threep body on the field,” she said. “It makes me think about you.”

“None of my threeps ever lost its head,” I said.

“There was that time you rode your bike out in front of that truck,” Mom pointed out. “When you were eight.”

“In that case it was less my threep losing its head than it was it hitting a truck and disintegrating and losing everything.”

“That’s my point,” Mom said. “Threep bodies aren’t designed to have body parts removed.”

I pointed to the field, where the Snowbirds and the Bays were literally going after each other with swords and war hammers. “Those threep bodies are,” I said. “Decapitations and severed limbs add to the drama of the game.”

As if to accentuate the point, one of the Snowbirds slashed viciously at a Bay, whose arm lopped right off. The Bay responded by bringing a mallet down on the Snowbird’s threep skull. Then both of the players ran off in the direction of Duane Chapman’s head. The entire exchange brought more cheers from the crowd.

Mom grimaced again. “I’m not sure I like this game very much.”

“All my flatmates do,” I said. “When they found out I was coming to the game they plotted about how to kill me and take my ticket. They’re fans.”

“But you don’t like it very much, do you?” Mom asked. “You shrugged when Stephens asked you if you were a fan. And I don’t remember you being much for it growing up.”

“I liked basketball better.”

“As you should,” Mom said. “Basketball’s done very well for our family. But that’s not the question.”

I paused and tried to frame an answer.

The long version of which would be:

I have Haden’s syndrome. I contracted it when I was so young that I have no memory of not ever having it. Having Haden’s syndrome means you are locked into your body—your brain works fine but your body doesn’t. Haden’s affects about 1 percent of the global population and about four and a half million people in the United States: roughly the population of Kentucky, in other words.

You can’t keep the population of Kentucky trapped in their own heads—especially when one of the victims of the syndrome was Margaret Haden, the then first lady, for whom the disease is named. So the United States and other countries funded a “moon shot” program of technologies, including implantable neural networks to let Hadens communicate, an online universe called “the Agora” to give us a place to exist as a community, and android-like “Personal Transports,” better known as “threeps,” that let us walk around and interact with non-Hadens on a near equal basis.

I say “near equal basis” because, you know. People are people. Regrettably, many of them aren’t going to treat someone who looks like a robot exactly the way they’d treat a person who looks like a standard-issue human. See Mr. Smarmy Suit handing me a glass the second I walked through the door as an example of that.

Not only that, but threep bodies are literally machines. Despite the fact they’re generally rated to operate within the usual human range of strength and agility, threeps in sports are generally a no-go. Have a co-worker in a threep for your office softball team? Fine. Playing shortstop for the Nationals? Not going to work. Yes, there were lawsuits. Turns out, in the eyes of the law, threeps are not the same as human bodies. They’re cars, basically.

So here’s Hilketa. It’s an actual sport, designed to be played by people operating threeps—which meant Haden athletes. And it’s a popular sport, even (and, actually, especially) with non-Hadens, which means the Hadens who play the sport have become bona fide celebrities outside of Haden circles. In just a decade since its inception, the NAHL fields twenty-eight teams in four divisions across the United States and Canada, averages 15,000 spectators a game in the regular season, 95 percent of whom are non-Hadens, and has athletes earning millions and becoming posters on kids’ walls. That matters, for Hadens and for everyone who cares about them.

Of course, I thought as I watched Duane Chapman’s head sail through the goalposts, giving the Snowbirds eight points, the reason Hilketa is so popular is that the players score points through simulated decapitation, and go after each other with melee weapons. It’s team gladiatorial combat, on a football field, with a nerdy scoring system. It’s all the violence every other team sport wishes it could have, but can’t, because people would actually die.

In doing so, it makes the players something other than fully human. And that matters too, for Hadens and everyone who cares about them.

Basically, Hilketa is both representation and alienation for Hadens.

So: It’s complicated.

Well, for a Haden. For non-Hadens, it’s just cool to see threeps pull off each other’s heads.

“It’s okay,” is what I finally told my mom.

She nodded, took a sip of her drink, and then motioned toward the field. “What’s going on down there?” she asked. Now that the play was done, Duane Chapman’s headless threep was being loaded onto a cart and sent off the field. From the Bays sideline, another threep came in for the next play.

Before I could answer, I got an internal ping from Tony Wilton, one of my roommates. “Are you at the stadium?” Tony asked me.

“Yes. In a VIP suite.”

“I hate you.”

“You should pity me. It’s mostly filled with corporate suits.”

“Your life fascinates me. Be that as it may, you should access the stadium Haden feed if you can.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s something really weird happening with Duane Chapman. We’re watching the pay-per-view Haden feed. One minute he’s there and the next he’s not.”

“He was taken off the field. His threep was, anyway.”

“Right. But player stats and vitals are supposed to be live for the whole game whether they’re on the field or not. All the other player S&Vs are live but his. People are talking about it. I want to know if it’s just a glitch in the feed we’re getting.”

“I’ll check,” I said. “Let me get back to you.” I disconnected and turned back to Mom, who had noticed the pause.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“I have to check something,” I said. “Give me a second.” She nodded.

I opened up the Haden view of the game.

The game field, previously green and blank, exploded with data.

Data on the players, on the field, and on the sidelines. Data about the play currently being executed. Data about the field itself. Data about the stadium and attendance. Current data, historical data, projections based on data coming in real time, processed with AI and by viewer sentiment.

This view of the data, and the game itself, could be displayed from any angle, up to and including the first-person view from the players themselves. Thanks to the overwhelming number of cameras framing the game and the amount of data otherwise filling in and modeling any gaps the cameras missed, one could virtually walk the field while the game was afoot and plants one’s ass down in the very center of the action.

That’s the Haden view of the game.

To be clear, the Haden view was not accessible only to Hadens. Aside from being discriminatory, it would also be bad business for a sport whose fan base was massively skewed toward non-Hadens. People pay extra for the Haden view, and it would be stupid to limit access to 1 percent of the possible fan base. Even in the stands at the live event, the faces of non-Haden spectators glinted with the glasses streaming Haden view information into their eyeballs.

The reason it was called “Haden view” was that the user interface was designed with Hadens in mind—people so used to living in an alternate electronic reality that what seemed like mad chaotic data overload to non-Hadens was the Haden equivalent of a standard spreadsheet. Non-Hadens could use it and view it, but it wasn’t for them. They simply had to manage it as best they could.

Ironically this became a selling point for the Haden view. It seemed “exotic” to non-Hadens and made them feel like they were getting a glimpse into what it was like to be one of us, and to get access into the deeper areas of our life and experience.

And, well, sure. It was like that, exactly in the way going to Taco Bell is like living in a small village deep in Quintana Roo. But then, Taco Bell has thousands of locations, so you tell me.

In the Haden view, I pulled up the player stats and vitals for the Boston Bays.

Tony was right: All the data for every Bays player was there, in exhausting detail—every single possible in-game statistic, from meters run in the game to the amount of damage their threep had taken, and where, and how close they were to losing a limb or having their threep shut down entirely—to every conceivable bit of career or historical data, relevant or otherwise. Not to mention health data, including heartbeat and some limited neural activity.

Which might seem strange at first glance. Haden athletes play Hilketa in threeps, not with their physical bodies. But threeps have full sensory input and output. A Haden feels what their threep feels, and that’s going to have an effect on their brains. And like anyone else, Hadens are affected physically by their emotional states. Our hearts race when we’re in the middle of the action. Our brain activity spikes when we feel danger or anger. It’s all there for us.

And it was all there for every single player on the Boston Bays.

Except for Duane Chapman. His stats and vitals were nowhere to be found.

I scrubbed back several minutes to when I knew Chapman had been on the field. His player box was there but the data from it was gone. Someone had retroactively gone back and pulled all the data for Chapman out of the feed.

Which was stupid. Thousands of people would have been recording the game’s Haden view data for their personal use. They weren’t supposed to—“Data feeds provided by the North American Hilketa League are the exclusive property of the NAHL and may not be recorded or stored in any form or fashion without the express written consent of the NAHL and its governing bodies,” as the boilerplate read—but they did. Whatever the NAHL was trying to erase was almost certainly already being shared, in the Agora and other places online.

But they did it anyway. They had to be doing it for a reason.

I glanced over to where Dad was, surrounded by his throng, and saw a couple of the people there being grabbed by apparatchiks and pulled out of Dad’s adoring circles. I did a face recognition on a few. They were NAHL bigwigs.

One of them, leaning in to hear the apparatchik whispering in his ear, noticed me looking at him. He turned his back to me. A minute later he walked out the door, followed by several others.

“Uh-oh,” I said, out loud.

“What is it?” Mom asked, looking up at me.

“I think something really bad just happened on the field.”

“With the player who had his head torn off?”

“Yes,” I said. “His information was wiped off the Haden view feed and a bunch of NAHL executives just left the skybox.”

“That’s not good,” Mom said.

“I don’t know if it’s entirely legal,” I said.

“Leaving the skybox?”

“No.” I glanced at Mom to see if she was making a joke. She wasn’t, she was just trying to process what I was saying to her. “Removing data from the feed. If it was an official data stream for the league, they could be tampering with information they’re legally obliged to keep.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I might have to go to work,” I said, and then opened a line to my partner.

She took her time to answer. “It’s Sunday, you asshole,” Leslie Vann said to me, when she finally picked up.

“Sorry,” I said. “I think we’re about to get some overtime.”

“What happened?”

“I think something bad just happened to a player at the Hilketa match,” I said.

“Jesus, Chris,” Vann mumbled. “That’s the whole point of the frigging game.”

“Not this time,” I said. “I think this one may be a special case.”

Vann grunted and hung up. She was on her way. I went back into the skybox to see the PR people begin to deploy on the would-be investors.

 

Copyright © 2018 John Scalzi

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8 Sci-Fi Cops Having a Bad Day/Week/Month/Life

Solving crime in a science-fiction universe is a heck of a headache, as any one of these eight unlucky protagonists could tell you. Between parallel universes, marauding androids, and neverending darkness, solving the crime of the future has plenty of unique challenges.

Chris Shane from Head On by John Scalzi

Place holder  of - 17 In John Scalzi’s near-future novel Head On, a small percentage of the population is locked into non-functional bodies. They interact with the world through “threeps”, expensive robots that walk and talk like regular people–and have the added bonus of being less delicate than human bodies. That’s a lucky fact for Chris, an FBI Agent who seems to end up in a lot of situations that destroy threeps: fires, car crashes, defenestrations…let’s just say Chris, or more specifically Chris’s threeps, are having a very bad week in Scalzi’s latest.

Jon Phillips from Dayfall by Michael David Ares

Placeholder of  -20 Manhattan has been shrouded in darkness for years thanks to a nuclear winter, cut off from the world by a seawall keeping out the rising water. Crime thrives, and a corrupt and apathetic police force can’t keep pace. Then, just as the sun starts to return, a serial killer appears.

Flown in to help, Jon Phillips is a small-town cop who’s collared a serial killer before. Out of his depth in the big city, Jon doesn’t just have to stop a killer, but also stay alive in an unfamiliar city where he can’t trust anyone. Easy as pie.

Takeshi Lev Kovacs from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Poster Placeholder of - 60 It’s the twenty-fifth century, and people are now able to transfer their consciousness between bodies. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-soldier turned private investigator, hired to investigate the possible murder of a wealthy man – living again in a new body, but with no memories of the two days before his death. Kovacs himself is fresh off his own traumatic death, re-embodied and thrown in the deep end of a far-reaching, vicious, conspiracy.

Elijah Baley from The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

Image Place holder  of - 9 Isaac Asimov’s novel is a classic of the sci-fi detective genre, and the first in a series. Elijah Baley, a New York detective, isn’t very fond of the wealthy Spacers who left Earth behind. When one is murdered, however, Elijah is sent into space to solve the crime and assigned a partner – who turns out to be an android with the face of the murder victim and the ability to detect human emotions. It’s not exactly the easiest working conditions for Baley.

Marid Audrian from When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

Image Placeholder of - 11 In the cyberpunk future of this novel, people can modify their brains using chips that provide anything from basic skills to full personalities. Marîd Audran has avoided enhancing himself, priding himself on his independence, but after being hired by the shadowy overlord of the city where Audrian lives, that independence is at risk. Then there’s the killer he’s hired to catch, who seems to be modifying himself to embody figures like a murderous James Bond or infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper.

Tyador Borlú from The City & the City by China Miéville

The cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same geographic space, but they’re perceived as two separate cities, separated largely by the will of their citizens. Tyador Borlú’s investigation into a seemingly routine murder of a student uncovers a nationalist plot that aims to destroy the balance between the two cities, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Mack Megaton from The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez

Mack Megaton was designed to be a machine of war, but he’s finished with all that, and just trying to make a living as a detective. All he wants to do is demonstrate that he’s not just good for crushing tanks, but things just aren’t that easy. They only get harder when Mack’s neighbors are kidnapped, sending him deep into the underbelly of Empire City and into the path of a conspiracy that runs all the way to the top.

Rick Deckard from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick

The book that inspired Blade Runner follows the bounty hunter Rick Deckard
as he attempts to find and “retire” rogue androids that look and act just like ordinary human beings. All he wants is enough money to replace his imitation electric sheep with a real, live, animal. The trouble is: how do you distinguish an extremely advanced robot from a human being? And the further Deckard goes, the more he has to wonder how much of a difference there really is – an existential question that makes his job a lot more difficult.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. 

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7 Times Science Fiction Made Sports Better

Next week is a big week in the sports world. Sunday is Super Bowl LII, and Friday, February 9th marks the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics, a worldwide contest that’s been going on since ancient times. We have a few fans here on staff, but a lot of us feel that, well, modern day sports are a bit lacking. We prefer the sports we find in the pages of science fiction novels. Here are just a few of our favorites. What’s your favorite science fiction sport?

Head On by John Scalzi

Poster Placeholder of - 93 The goal of the game in Head On is to decapitate a select player on the opposing team and throw their head through a goal post. Members of each team attack each other with hammers and swords. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible, much less unethical. But in Hilketa—a violent and fast-paced popular past time—all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Runtime by S. B. Divya

Place holder  of - 36 Ever run a marathon? How about an ultra-marathon? Now add cyborgs, and you’ve basically got the Minerva Sierra Challenge in Divya’s novella Runtime. Most runners in the race have corporate sponsorships, top of the line cyborg parts, and great support teams to make it little less dangerous (only a little). Running without those things is practically a death sentence, but there are always those out there willing to give it a try, even if the system is rigged against them. This is one for perpetual underdogs everywhere (I’m looking at you, Cleveland Browns).

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Image Place holder  of - 41 Okay, so we know the competition to gain control of the OASIS in Ready Player One isn’t actually a sport. It’s a game, with puzzles, video games, and trivia contests. But we think it fits on this list anyway, because the consequences can still be deadly—as Wade discovers when goons from Innovative Online Industries start trying to kill him and his friends.
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Steel by Richard Matheson

Placeholder of  -28 Frankly, we think a lot of sports could be improved by upgrading the technology involved—and we don’t just mean better replay cameras. Why not replace the athletes with robots? We love the robot boxing depicted in Matheson’s story more than we love actual boxing, to be honest—it’s much more fun to picture giant robots slugging it out than men. Less bloody, too.
 
 
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Image Placeholder of - 74 Growing up, we all knew a few kids who would rather play sports than study. Too bad they weren’t growing up on Kurt Vonnegut’s Mars, where that’s the reality! The only problem: the only sport Martians play is German batball. Imagine baseball, but with no bats, only two bases, and a ball the shape and size of a big, heavy honeydew melon. Sounds fun, right?
 
 
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

The entire premise of Ender’s Game is, well, a game—a video game simulation of a war. Putting that aside though, there is definitely a sport in Ender’s world: the Battle Room. Children at Battle School are organized into armies and go into zero-g combat games against other armies. While we don’t necessarily want to attend Battle School, we definitely want to join Dragon Army someday. Somebody get to work making that a reality, will you?
 
 
Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

Some sports and games have a LOT of rules to remember. Others are like Brockian Ultra-Cricket, from Life, the Universe, and Everything. It’s a game where the goal is basically for players to hit each other with whatever’s at hand, then retreat a safe distance and apologize—for points. The lack of rules means games pretty much never end, and often devolve into all-out warfare. Sounds like a great way to work out some frustration!

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