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Spoiler Recap: The Ruin of Kings

Image Placeholder of - 17Can’t wait for The Name of All Things? Same. But don’t worry, it’s just a few more months.

We know the wait is hard though and that details are sometimes even harder. So just in case you’ve forgotten any details from February’s blockbuster epic fantasy The Ruin of Kings, we’ve got you covered. Or well. Senera has you covered. But she’s really only cares about her side of the story, so she leaves out some important details about sea monsters and dragons and zombie choirs. But she gets the gist.

Spoilers for Book 1 below, so read at your own risk.


Excerpted from a letter to Lord Var:

…one last thing, my lord.

I suppose I should explain what really happened in the Capital.

Long story short: this is all Gadrith’s fault. Our favorite undead necromancer decided that he and he alone was the answer to all those prophecies. Thirty years of him plotting to snatch Urthaenriel away from everyone, us included, just came to a rolling boil in the Capital. It didn’t work out well for Gadrith. Or for the Capital.

Gadrith needed the Stone of Shackles, which was a problem, because he had no idea where it was. We did—but he didn’t ask us, did he? No, instead he plotted and schemed and recruited a couple of royals to his cause—Darzin D’Mon must have been a real coup—until he finally figured out where it was: around the neck of a High Lord’s long-lost son, Kihrin.

Except that to get to that point, Darzin D’Mon’s mimic Talon had killed, oh, pretty much anyone Kihrin had ever spoken to. Kihrin hated Darzin’s guts. Still, Darzin claimed Kihrin was his son and laughable as that idea is, Kihrin’s real father let Darzin get away with it. After that, Darzin tried to mind fuck the poor kid into giving up the Stone of Shackles, mostly using Thurvishar D’Lorus and some slave girl Kihrin was sweet on.

It didn’t work. Kihrin gets no credit here. It didn’t work because Talon screwed it up, as you’ll find she’s in the habit of doing. Talon is the one who put Kihrin on that slave ship, and ultimately who we can thank for letting the Black Brotherhood get their claws into him. And while Kihrin did come back to the Capital eventually, it was four years later, with friends, and having been trained by literally the best swordsman in the whole world. Nice job, Talon.

But Kihrin underestimated Gadrith’s willingness to break the rules of polite villainy. The wizard took over the Blue Palace and started executing Kihrin’s family until he finally agreed to hand over the Stone of Shackles. Which Kihrin did. After which point Gadrith promptly killed him.

Or rather, Gadrith had Darzin kill him, sacrificing Kihrin to the demon Xaltorath during what was no doubt stage 517 of Gadrith’s great ‘conquer the world’ plan. You’d think being sacrificed to a demon would be enough to kill Kihrin for good, right? No. Once again, we can thank Talon. Neither Gadrith nor Darzin realized Kihrin had been gaeshed while he was away. Talon knew. So she’d grabbed Kihrin’s control talisman as a souvenir. Combined with our very own Janel personally escorting Kihrin’s soul to the Land of Peace in the Afterlife, it was enough for Thaena to bring Kihrin back.

And that, as they say, was that.

Sure, Gadrith probably thought his plan was coming up rainbows and puppies. Xaltorath had started a Hellmarch in the Capital, luring Emperor Sandus into the open. Gadrith then tricked Sandus into killing him while Gadrith wore the Stone of Shackles. And–since that’s what the stone does–that meant Sandus was now dead and Gadrith, now living in Sandus’s body, was the newest Emperor of Quur. Nobody could stop him–he’d killed his own daughter Tyentso when she tried and left her body to rot on the Arena floor. Everything was going great.

Funny how quickly your fortunes can change when you’ve just murdered one of the Goddess of Luck’s favorite people. Kihrin might have been too weak to stand after being Returned, but he still managed to kill Darzin, find Urthaenriel, and destroy both the Stone of Shackles and Gadrith at the same time. Destroying the Stone broke every gaesh made using it, so that means all the demons are free now too. So’s Kihrin’s mother, Khaeriel. Who, by the way, killed every single member of House D’Mon Gadrith hadn’t already finished off except Kihrin’s father, whom she’s kidnapped. Pretty sure she has no idea her son’s alive. Do with that as you will.

Just to add insult to injury, remember how I said Gadrith killed his daughter? Thaena returned her without even being asked. After Kihrin had slain Gadrith, and after the magical barriers had gone up to keep the Crown and Scepter locked away until the next Great Contest. All Tyentso had to do to crown herself Emperor of Quur was reach out and grab the damn things.

So good news: we have a new Emperor. One who hates the Royal Houses. I’m excited to see where that leads.

And Kihrin? Kihrin did one smart thing: he left town. I can’t use magic to find him because he’s wearing Urthaenriel now, but I have a pretty good hunch he’s headed to Jorat.

Which means everything’s going exactly as planned.

Ever your faithful and obedient servant,

Senera

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Leprechauns, Unicorn, and Deadmen

Placeholder of  -83Written by Sherrilyn Kenyon

When I was a small child, my grandfather talked about how everything, even the rocks on the ground, held a spirit and essence inside it, and my mother, on St. Patrick’s Day, had me convinced there were Leprechauns and Clurichauns cavorting in festive revelry under her favorite rosebush (and tormenting my puppy). I’ve been enchanted with the notion of the “unseen” world that exists side-by-side with our own ever since. Let’s face it, when you come from a family with as colorful a history as mine, you learn early on that what the eye sees is but a pittance of what makes up “reality.”

And the fact that we had a ghost living in my early childhood room didn’t help matters either. A ghost that was so active, my cousin refused to ever step foot into my room again, or to stay over with me. She saw my “friend” once and it was quite enough for her.

But I was never afraid. Quite the contrary. I inherited my grandfather’s defiant spirit and by the time I was sixteen, I was a regular participant on paranormal investigations—and this decades before anyone knew what they were. In fact, this was before the Poltergeist and Ghostbusters movies (yeah, I really am that old).

All the while, my writer’s imagination was soaking everything up. Every year of experience. Every location studied and investigated for its past and present. All the research materials went rolling through my mind. It’s impossible to be that steeped, that long, in history and the paranormal and not have your imagination run loose.

As historians, we give substance to our predecessors. We fill in as many missing details as we can, with as many facts as we can uncover. As writers, we fill in the emotions and motivations. Like Victor Frankenstein, we breathe life into our creations and make them living, thriving entities that if we’re lucky will go on long after us and reach immortality. There’s a not a writer ever born who doesn’t strive to touch that elusive bolt of lightning.

It is our Holy Quest. Our beloved unicorn. To create a world so vibrant and real that a reader is enraptured with it. That they, like us, want to live there. To breathe it. Feel it. Experience it, over and over again. Not once, but to return for countless adventures and to be eager to discover every single corner of it.

There’s no greater gift to any author in the world than to hear a fan say that they love our universe. That the countless hours of our lives and years of research we’ve put into it, and all the bullets we’ve sweated and dodged while struggling and fighting to make it unlike anyone else’s were worth it. That is the sweet symphony we crave. And it is the moment in our minds when we throw our heads back and laugh at the sky while shouting, “it’s alive!”

Yes, that is the unseen world in a writer’s mind. When you’re talking to us and telling us that you liked our work, we might look calm and collective on the outside. Inside, we’re turning cartwheels and somersaults. We are spiking that ball at the goal post. We are the three year old on a sugar high, screaming around the sofa that someone other than our mothers believe we don’t suck! It’s true. Just think about that the next time you meet an author.

And right now, as we begin this new adventure with Captain Bane and his Deadmen, we’re at the knuckle-biting stage. While it’s a part of the Dark-Hunter world, it’s a whole new realm and whole new time period. It’s uncharted territory. Something not done before. And like all the books and series I’ve written previously, it’s a setting not typically used, crossing genres in a way not typically done. But then I like defying the odds and blazing new trails. And I hope you’ll join me for this latest quest where the Deadmen finally get to tell their tales.

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Follow Sherrilyn Kenyon on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

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Write Like A Painter

Placeholder of  -34Written by Veronica Rossi

On May 16th, Seeker, the sequel to Riders, will release. I’m really proud of it, but for part of writing process, I felt utterly lost in the woods. I wanted to bring sword fights and swoons to the story, but deep themes like forgiveness and redemption kept showing up instead. Not what I wanted. Clearly, I’d gone wrong somewhere. Then I remembered: there are no mistakes in art. There is only process.

We writers think we have control over our creative process, but the best we can really do is coax it along. We read books that teach us how to structure scenes and how to create characters. We attend conferences and join critique groups. But in the end, the book has its own ideas about what it wants to be. More and more, I believe we’re simply the vessel, holding the story inside us. If we’re clumsy, hasty, disrespectful, we make a mess as we spill our tale. But if we take our time, the pour is clean.

Before I officially and wholeheartedly became a writer, I was a painter. I attended the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and I painted every day, and dealt with the struggles of working in that art form—how to stay inspired, how to paint with skill, how to marry inspiration with skill to produce something true. Sound familiar? It is, very much so. Creativity is a journey with many roads leading to the same place—Art. Here are a few of the similarities I’ve discovered between writing and painting:

Art is Work – Part of being a creative person is committing to the work involved in discovering your style, your voice. How do you do this? Devour the things you love. If you love a book, let that love be an obsession. Dig in. Read the book again and again. Buy the audio. Transcribe a chapter. Study. Highlight. If it’s a painting, try some sketches inspired by the piece. Your job is to figure out why you love it. Internalize the art until it’s inside you. Your internal artist has an incredible storage system called the subconscious. Nothing ever gets lost or wasted. Just get the good stuff in there. The rest is not really up to you.

Watch Out for Mud – Part of trusting the process is not forcing the process. In painting with oils, you can overwork a canvas to the point that paints blend together, creating an awful muddy color. It’s actually worse than mud—it’s the color of a cadaver. Usually this happens when you’re overthinking it. You’re creating with your head, not your heart. You’re saying, “It could be a little more this, or a little more that,” instead of asking, “how can I make this more true, more honest?” I do this all the time. I think it comes from wanting so badly to create something great. But greatness cannot be rushed or forced. Greatness requires patience. It requires trust and confidence. So, slow down. If you think you’re making mud, back off. Take some time to meditate on the piece, or the scene. Wrong turns are part of the process. It’s up to you to see them, and to correct your course.

Turn Your Canvas – One of the earliest tricks I learned in art school was to flip the canvas by 90 degrees and step back. This simple trick allows you to see the composition in a new way, giving you a fresh perspective. I use several methods to achieve this “turn of the canvas” in my writing; some are incredibly simple and effective:

  • Change the font
  • Open your document on an e-reader or in another program
  • Print and bind your pages
  • Send your scene to an audio program and listen to your writing
  • Read your writing out loud, or have a friend read it to you

Learn the Rules So You Can Break Them – I loved this rule in art school. We embraced it. We copied the masters. Renaissance painters like Michelangelo and Da Vinci. We copied Picasso, Dali, Monet, Matisse. We fell incredibly short most of the time, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to learn the strokes, the colors. By learning the language of art, you can play with it. Defy it, bend it, stretch it. In writing, you read to learn the art of language. So read broadly. Read everything—things you hate, things you love, things you never thought you’d ever read. Just read. Then forget the rules and have some fun.

Trust the Process – Such a cliché, isn’t it? Yet, after half a dozen books written, I have to remind myself of this all the time. Trust the process. Trust. The Process. And remember that it will never be the same process twice. You’re never writing the same book, or painting the same painting. Even if you’re rewriting or repainting something, you are not the same the second (or third or fourth or hundredth) time. You’ve had new experiences. You’ve learned something (even if you don’t know it.) Trust the process. Do it.

Once, in art school, I was trying to forcibly squeeze oil paint from a tube that had coagulated. I was standing in front of a painting that was almost done when I did this. You know what’s coming, right? A geyser of paint exploded across a piece I’d spent all day perfecting. Raw Sienna. A beautiful color. Like dirt that’s alive—dirt that has the ruddy life of blood in it. Beautiful, but not when it’s everywhere. After this materials eruption, I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or cry. I think I did both. But then it was time to adapt. I could’ve tried to scoop the paint away with a palette knife—and likely ruined the entire canvas. Instead, I took a brush and got to work—and got exactly the painting that was asking to be made, a painting rich with earth tones. A piece with a pulse, bolder than it would’ve ever been had I not trusted the process.

Art loves mistakes, they say. Knowing that, why not create full-throttle?

What are some of our approaches to creativity?

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Follow Veronica Rossi on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

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The Evolution of Technology in The Guns Above

Place holder  of - 20Written by Robyn Bennis

The Guns Above has not always been the book it is now. The title alone has changed several times. Paul Lucas, my agent, sold it under Bring Down the Sky. I worked on it under the title Mistral, which is still the name of the airship at the center of the story. Just before I started writing, however, title and airship were both Zephyr. In the development stage, they were Esper—which I could have sworn was a weather phenomenon, but which turned out to be something I half-remembered from Final Fantasy VI.

Much as the title changed, the technology evolved over the course of development. In the earliest outlines, my protagonist had only recently invented dirigible airships, and the technology was firmly rooted in the story’s original inspiration, Poe’s “Great Balloon Hoax.” In that fabricated newspaper article, Poe describes a propeller-driven airship whose ballast is regulated by a long rope dragged behind.Placeholder of  -63

I soon realized that Poe’s drag rope might also allow an otherwise unpowered airship to sail against the wind. You see, a sailing ship can make headway against the wind because it is rooted in a denser, resisting medium: water. An unpowered airship, with nothing to resist its leeward motion, cannot harness the power of the wind to travel in another direction, but can only drift on it.

However, if a drag rope could generate comparable resistance to a ship in water, a balloon could theoretically propel itself with sails and even tack into the wind. To make this a little more plausible, I made the setting an expansive archipelago, so that the line, and perhaps even a drogue anchor, could be dragged across water rather than land. This was all the better, because now my hero could use her new invention to out-sail the merchant ships that plied those waters, racing ahead of the news of shortages and surpluses, and so finance her inventions with commodities speculation.

Oddly enough, David D. Levine faced a similar problem (in regard to technology, not the commodities market) when designing his interplanetary sailing vessels for Arabella of Mars, and he solved it in much the same way. His ships employ a set of kite-like drag devices which are sent off into adjacent air currents of the interplanetary winds. The idea is quite plausible in that setting, because the difference in wind speed is said to be so great between currents, and the resistance is consequently high.

Image Placeholder of - 98My drag rope idea, though similar on the surface, would prove to be anything but plausible. It turned out that a drag rope had already been tried in S. A. Andrée’s Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897. Far from out-sailing seagoing vessels, Andrée reported that his balloon could only steer ten degrees from the direction of the wind, and modern experts believe that even this meager claim was an absurd exaggeration. Worse, the failure of their sailing scheme was a contributing factor to the deaths of all three expedition members.

My drag rope scheme was a documented failure—the bane of all clever sf/f ideas—so I pushed the technology forward a hundred years or so, past the failures of the poor, doomed protagonist in the early concept. Sails became nacelle-mounted gas turbine engines, crude wicker gondolas became sturdy wooden decks, and—because the first thought of human society whenever presented with new technology is, “that’s great, but how do I kill people with it?”—my age of invention transformed into an age of grinding, brutal warfare.

To match the aesthetic, I imagined the crew of my airship fighting off their enemies with explosive and incendiary rockets. Due to the inaccuracy of such weapons, airships would engage envelope-to-envelope, much like the yardarm-to-yardarm battles of the age of sail. But, as cool as that sounds, it just didn’t play well on the page. Image Place holder  of - 87Broadsides of rocketry don’t have the satisfying thunder of cannons, and I could think of no plausible way of following my broadsides with a boarding action—and without a boarding action, a broadside just feels empty, doesn’t it?

I therefore retreated a bit, moving the setting from dieselpunk to steampunk, and splitting the difference between my first two concepts. My gas turbines became a crude steam turbine and my decks returned to wicker. My ship became dramatically more fragile for the change, but it also became lighter. What, you think I wasn’t estimating the ship’s weight through all this? Please. My rough calculations indicated that, if my envelope were as large as my dieselpunk concept, but my decks were as light as my sailing concept, I had about a ton and a half of weight to spare.

Poster Placeholder of - 70And you know what weighs about a ton and a half? Two twelve-pounder carronades, plus ammunition and minimum gun crews. I decided not to waste time or risk disappointment by rechecking my math, but proceeded straight to sketching out the placement and capabilities of what would become Mistral’s light cannons, or “bref guns.” Now, bref guns are still implausible for other reasons—we won’t even contemplate the real-world effect of their recoil on Mistral’s airframe—but let’s be frank here; if you can find the merest excuse to put cannons on your steampunk airship, you put cannons on your steampunk airship, or you’re a damn fool.

Which brings us to His Majesty’s Signal Airship Mistral, as she stands in The Guns Above. Story and technology evolved together over the course of development, laying the groundwork to make the unbelievable into the believable. That, plus the trivial matter of actually writing it, produced a book that ought to satisfy all but the hardest of hard-steampunk aficionados.

Just don’t double-check my math, or we might have to change the title to The Gun Above, and that would just be unfortunate.

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Find Robyn Bennis online on Twitter (@According2Robyn), Facebook, or visit her website.

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8 Great Forest-y Books of the Fantastic

Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya DyerWritten by Thoraiya Dyer

Give me your Fangorns and your Lothloriens, your Green Hearts and your Elvandars.

Evoke your Haunted Forest Beyond the Wall complete with creepy weirwoods, your Steddings and your Avendesoras. Send me pleasant dreams about Totoro’s Japanese Camphor and the Forest Spirit’s kodama-filled canopy.

Or, y’know, tree cities full of Wookiees instead of elves. I will take them all!

Here are a mere eight of my fictional favourites:

  1.  The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. When telling people I’ve written a novel about a magical forest, the most common response so far has been: “You mean like The Magic Faraway Tree?” This staple of English-speaking childhoods was indeed beloved by my smallish self, not only for the magic tree which grew all kinds of leaves, fruit and nuts on the one plant but the vast cast of magical creatures which made the tree their home.
  2.  jungle-bookThe Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Of course, the jungles of the subcontinent aren’t fictional. It’s just that this was the first book where I saw a wilderness treated remotely in fiction like an ally and protector, with its own languages and laws, instead of a hostile thing to be conquered. Wiser people than I have much valid criticism to heap on this book, and yet I still sometimes dream of stretching out on a rainforest limb beside Bagheera and Baloo.
  3.  Robin Hood. Ah, Sherwood Forest. Again, a real forest, populated by larger than life characters. Sherwood has been a forest since the end of the last ice age, apparently, and yet one man, the King of England, “owned” every deer in it. Hahahaha! I have my suspicions about what the druids would have had to say about that. Ancient oaks, here as elsewhere, form the heart of this forest, including the one that famously served as the archer-thief’s hideout.
  4.  The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkienhobbit-cover. The Hobbit seems to be about dwarves, elves and metaphors for sensible, down-to-earth English folk, but really, it’s all about the trees. More, it’s about how trees are good and the industrial revolution is bad.Tolkien lovingly names and describes them—oak, ash, beech, birch, rowan, willow. Tom Bombadil, a forest god, and Goldberry, a river goddess, seem the only incorruptible aspects of Middle Earth. Baddies cut trees down. Goodies, in contrast, reside in or amongst trees. Or hide in them from wargs. Galadriel’s magic sustains the Mallorn trees of Lothlorien which, instead of losing their leaves, turn golden and glitter. These trees, along with others of Mirkwood, the Old Forest and Fangorn can accumulate wisdom, act in the interests of good or evil, and are as beautiful, vital and alive as the speaking characters.
  5.  The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. “I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!” —yes, I have been known to utter this in despair at parties when developers ask in all innocence why I don’t seem excited by the innovative architectural design. Even a toddler can grasp that when the last truffula tree is cut down, and the swomee-swans, humming fish and bar-ba-loots are gone, all the money in the world can’t save your soul, and it doesn’t matter that the glorious truffula forest is completely made up.
  6. word-for-world-is-forest The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. LeGuin. The title says it all, really (it’s a great title, isn’t it?) With it, LeGuin reminds us that our home planet is “Earth.” In many science fiction stories, including this one, we appear as “Terrans.” We’re all about the dirt, not the ecosystems supported by it, not just because agriculture is the basis of Western civilisation but because our religions or philosophies of superiority rely on separating ourselves from “lower” forms of life.
  7.  Walking the Tree by Kaaron Warren. The title says a lot here, too. In this fantasy world, Botanica, a continent dominated by a single mammoth tree is circumnavigated by girls in a five-year-long rite of passage. Walking the Tree is a strange and beautiful book with a complicated, likeable protagonist to keep us company on our journey across the colourful patchwork of her world.
  8. broken-kingdoms The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. Like Warren’s work, the second book of Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy is set beneath the canopy of a single, enormous tree. I loved the transformative power of this tree, the monolithic inability to ignore it. The rustle of its leaves was part of the music of this rather musical book—the main character couldn’t see—and the roots and branches grew and disturbed the order of the city of Shadow. But also, as with the Warren, the tree was a power that divided people, as opposed to bringing them together.

Forests in speculative fiction novels have a special place in my heart. Especially tree-cities. In real life, all forests seem magical to me.

I can’t think of a culture that has not populated them with myths or religious figures. In Australia, First Nations people will tell you about ancient spirits dwelling in our forests whether tropical, temperate or dry. Proud Lebanese will tell you that their cedar forests were used for Solomon’s Temple and to build Noah’s ark.

They may not know that those same cedar forests appeared in the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BC. Those heroes fought off monsters and cut down the trees. In contrast, the characters of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion travel on treeships beyond the stars.

Take me there. I’m with you! As long as trees are, too.

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Follow Thoraiya Dyer on Twitter and on her website.

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Arcanum Unbounded Audio Excerpt


Arcanum Unbounded by Brandon SandersonAn all-new Stormlight Archive novella is the crown jewel of Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection, the first audiobook of short fiction by New York Times best-selling author Brandon Sanderson, read by Micahel Kramer and Kate Reading.

The collection includes eight works in all. The first seven are “The Hope of Elantris” (Elantris), “The Eleventh Metal” (Mistborn), “The Emperor’s Soul” (Elantris), “Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania, Episodes 28 through 30” (Mistborn), “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” (Threnody), “Sixth of Dusk” (First of the Sun), and “Mistborn: Secret History” (Mistborn).

Originally published on Tor.com and other websites, or published by the author, these wonderful tales convey the expanse of the Shardworlds and tell exciting tales of adventure Sanderson fans have come to expect, including the Hugo Award-winning novella The Emperor’s Soul. Arcanum Unbounded also contains a currently untitled Stormlight Archive novella that appears in this audiobook for the first time anywhere.

Michael Kramer and Kate Reading are audiobook narrators, recognized by AudioFile Magazine’s Earphones and Best Voice Awards, Audie Awards, and Publisher’s Weekly Listen Up Awards, among others. They have recorded hundreds of titles to date, and love to hear from fans of Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan on their Facebook page.

Listen to the audio excerpt of Brandon Sanderson’s new Cosmere collection Arcanum Unbounded now!

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Going Rogue: A Pirate’s Life

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The Nature of a Pirate by A. M. DellamonicaWritten by A. M. Dellamonica

About a century ago, as the portal flickers, on a sea-glutted world dotted with hundreds of tiny island nations, there were five barren, unpromising little rocks whose people made their living by attacking the ships and coastlines of the weaker nations of Stormwrack.

Piracy! The word conjures up dashing, seafaring renegades. Errol Flynn! Geena Davis! Cutlass-wielding outlaws loose on the high seas, puncturing the egos and draining the treasuries of government buffoons and rich, wig-wearing bastards with twee accents. How jolly! Not quite carrying on like Robin Hood, you understand—there’s no great piratical tradition of giving to the poor—but still, definitely stealing from the rich. Why steal from anyone else?

In fiction and in Hollywood, pirate characters run a villainous gamut. Take the oily, spineless Captain Hook of Neverland, the bumbling yet somehow cuddly Captain Jack Sparrow, or all the varied ruthless and bloody-minded enemies of Captain Flint, in Black Sails.

We romanticize our pirate characters, usually, just as we create mafiosi who are charming (if occasionally murdery) criminals. They are outlaws, sticking it to the system. Or misunderstood. Perhaps, some stories suggest, they’re even a little admirable.

On Stormwrack, the world where the Hidden Sea Tales takes place, pirates weren’t cuddly; they were a deadly nuisance, sowers of misery. It took a massive military effort, gobs of unsexy statecraft, and a lot of magic to (mostly) bring a halt to the raiding and looting that had destroyed so many ships, countries, and lives.

End it the Fleet of Nations did, for just over a century. But in my trilogy’s first novel, Child of a Hidden Sea, a woman from San Francisco stumbles upon a first attempt by old-guard, traditional pirates to break up Stormwrack’s peacekeeping fleet and go back to the predatory ways they too romanticize and see as a sort of cultural imperative. Ah, the good old days! Wasn’t it awesome when all we ever did was loot, pillage, take slaves, go raiding, and count up the booty?

In that first book, the Piracy tried but failed to trigger a treaty-shattering war, one that would have let them get back to the business of pillaging. Now, in the upcoming The Nature of a Pirate, they have targeted the Fleet’s weak point, slavery, an issue that often strains the political alliance almost to the point of breaking.

As a writer, I found it entertaining to think about piracy as a cultural construct. Once they had been defeated, how did these five rogue nations get by? Four are unrepentant, obeying international law out of necessity, using their loot to play the money markets, and sulking over their defeat. The fifth, the penitent nation of Issle Morta, has established a monastery that attempts to make reparations for old crimes.

How do you dress, think, feel, and talk if you’re a pirate who can’t openly practice piracy? As a defeated nation with a bloody reputation, what do you teach your sons and daughters about the past? Creating a narrative where the attackers became the attacked, wronged, maligned, and banned from a legitimate cultural practice, they spent generations claiming the right—the hereditary privilege, you might say—to test the weak at sea. In so doing, they have created a long-standing grudge and nurtured a longing among their young to bring back the days of the sword.

In The Nature of a Pirate, new intrigues are in the works.

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Follow A. M. Dellamonica on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

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Is a real utopia possible?

Is a real utopia possible and do we want to achieve one? We interviewed three political science fiction authors about the future societies they create in their novels.

Infomocracy, the debut novel from humanitarian worker Malka Older, is a post-cyberpunk thriller that envisions a future where elections play out on a worldwide scale. It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the Supermajority in the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, sabotage is threatened, and everything’s on the line, testing the limits of the biggest political experiment of all time.

Too Like the Lightning, historian Ada Palmer’s first novel, is set in a peaceful, affluent future where superfast transportation makes it commonplace to live on one continent while working on another and lunching on a third. Antiquated “geographic nations” have been replaced by borderless governments whose membership is not determined by birth, but by individuals choosing the nations which reflect their identities and ideals, while rulers and administrators of inestimable subtlety labor to preserve the delicate balance of a world where five people affected by a crime might live under five different sets of laws.

From Robert Charles Wilson, the author of the Hugo-winning Spin, The Affinities is a compelling science fiction novel about the next ways that social media will be changing everything. In the near future people can be sorted by new analytic technologies—such as genetic, brain-mapping, and behavioral—and placed in one of twenty-two Affinities. Like a family determined by compatibility statistics, an Affinity is a group of people most likely to like and trust one another, the people one can best cooperate with in all areas of life: creative, interpersonal, even financial. It’s utopian—at first. But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war with one another. His most recent novel is Last Year.

How do you draw the lines of political division in your novel?

Malka Older: Because Infomocracy is set during an election, the actors spend a lot of time drawing the lines of division themselves—with political advertising, in debates, in their informal discussions. But the setting of micro-democracy, which in the book has existed for decades, also allowed me to show some of the ways that these different political approaches might play out in practice. As characters move from one centenal—a geographic unit with a population of 100,000 people—to another, which in a dense city could be every couple of blocks, they see changes in laws, cultures, and commerce. It’s a fun place to hang out, at least for political geeks and writers.

Ada Palmer: Because my governments are based on choice instead of birth, the divisions are based on identity, and on what kinds of underlying principles people want their governments to have. For example, there is one group that focuses on warm and humanitarian activities, education, volunteerism, and attracts the sort of people who want to be part of something kind and giving. There is another group that has stern laws and an absolute monarchy, which attracts people who like firm authority and strong leaders, but it can’t get too tyrannical since, if the monarch makes the citizens unhappy then no one will choose to join that group; so the leader has to rule well to attract subjects. There’s another group that focuses on progress and future-building, imagining better worlds and sacrificing the present by toiling to build a better future. So the differences aren’t liberal vs. conservative really, or one policy vs. another, but what people feel government is for in the first place, whether it’s about strength, or about helping people, or about achievement, or about nationhood, or about being a good custodian of the Earth, the big principles which underlie our thinking before we start judging between candidate 1 and candidate 2.

Robert Charles Wilson: In a sense, the lines are drawn by my novel’s premise. Over the course of the story we get a look at the personal and internal politics of the Affinity groups, the politics of inter-Affinity alliance-making, and the relationship of the Affinities to the conventional political and cultural institutions they attempt to co-opt or displace.

Why did you choose your main character as the narrator and how do they engage the audience?

Robert Charles Wilson: Adam Fisk is a young man facing a broad set of the familiar problems the Affinity groups claim to address—a less-than-perfectly-functional birth family, money woes, a stalled career path, a social isolation he can’t quite climb out of. He embodies a certain longing we all feel from time to time: the sense that a better, more fulfilling, more meaningful way of life must be possible. Like many of us, he’s looking for a door into a better world. Unlike most of us, he becomes convinced he’s found it.

Ada Palmer: Mycroft Canner is a very peculiar narrator, based closely on 18th century memoirs and philosophical novels, especially Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. This kind of narrator has very visible opinions, often interjecting long tangents about history or philosophy and using direct address, “Gentle reader, don’t judge this frail man too hastily, for you see…” I wanted to write in this Enlightenment style because authors of that era, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, loved to ask big questions about things like government, law and religion, questioning whether elements people thought of as “natural” and “universal” like aristocracy, or retributive justice, or gender segregation, might not be so natural and universal.

Modern science fiction is very much in that tradition, of course, imagining other ways society might be set up and using them to make us question our assumptions about our own world, but I love how Enlightenment narrators voice the questions overtly instead of having them be implicit, because the narration is like a time capsule. When we read an Enlightenment novel like Candide or Jacques the Fatalist today, we don’t have the same questions about the events that the authors ask in their narration, because we come from a different time and have different big questions on our minds. We’re at a different stage in the history of social class, gender equality, monarchy vs. democracy, religion, so the questions Voltaire or Diderot ask about these issues, preserved in the time capsule of their narration—are often more surprising and delightful to us than the stories themselves.

Malka Older: Infomocracy shifts among the points of view of multiple main and secondary characters. This reflects the multi-polar nature of the world and the multiple layers of information and misinformation, but it also serves to engage the readers across multiple competing but valid perspectives. Most of the main characters are working hard for an outcome they honestly believe in; allowing them each a voice gives the reader a chance to identify with each and, hopefully, engage more deeply on these difficult questions.

Would you describe the society in your book as a utopia? Why or why not?

Robert Charles Wilson: The Affinities is a book about the utopian impulse, of which (I feel) we should be skeptical but not dismissive. Part of the book’s premise is that the advance of cognitive science has made possible a practical utopianism, a utopianism that derives from a genuine understanding of human nature and human evolutionary history rather than from the imagined dictates of divine will or pure reason. And the Affinity groups aren’t the last word in that struggle. The book holds open the possibility of even newer, more radical communal inventions.

Ada Palmer: I think Bob’s characterization applies well to all three of these books, that none is a strict “utopia” in that none of them is trying to portray a perfect or ideal future, but they are all about utopia and utopianism, about human efforts to conceive and create a new, better society. In that sense they’re all addressing hope, not the hope that a particular set of institutions would solve all humanity’s problems, but the hope that humanity will move forward from its current institutions to try new ones that will work a bit better, just as it moved to the current one from earlier ones. There is a lot of anti-utopian science fiction, in which we are shown a world which seems utopian but turns out secretly to be achieved through oppression or brainwashing etc. It’s refreshing to me to see a cluster of books which aren’t that, which are instead about new ways the world could be run which would be a step forward in some ways, if not in others. My book’s future especially I think of as two steps forward, one step back: poverty has been dealt with but censorship has come back; religious violence has ended but at the cost of lots of religious regulation; current tensions about race and gender have evolved into new different tensions about race and gender. Looking at real history, that is how historical change tends to work, improvements on some fronts but with growing pains and trade-offs; for example, how industrialization let people own more goods and travel more freely, but lengthened the work week and lowered life expectancy, gain and loss together. I think all three of our books suggest—against currents of pessimism—that that kind of change is still valuable, and that “better” is a meaningful goal even if “perfect” is off the table. Certainly it’s meaningful to discuss; this kind of thought experiment, exploring alternate ways of living, is so much of what science fiction is for.

Malka Older: It sounds like we’re all on the same page in terms of utopias. As Ada says, I think it’s a very positive step not only to be writing with hope, but also writing stories that move away from the absolutes of utopias and dystopias (as a side note: it’s interesting how trendy the dystopia label has become recently; among other things, it means the bar for calling something a dystopia is far lower than that for labeling a utopia < \pet peeve>). Imagining a perfect society can be paralyzing: as a narrative function it requires a kind of stasis that’s not very exciting, and as a policy prescription it becomes the enemy of incremental, imperfect solutions. At the same time, without expecting perfect, we need to keep demanding better, and better, and better.

Robert Charles Wilson: Seems to me that utopia—if we define utopia as a set of best practices for enabling justice, fairness, freedom, and prosperity across the human community in its broadest sense—is more likely a landscape of possibilities than a single fixed system. Maybe utopia is like dessert: almost everybody wants one, but not everyone wants the same one, and only a generous selection is likely to satisfy the largest number of people.

What do you want readers to take away from your novel?

Robert Charles Wilson: I wanted both to validate the discontent Adam feels—yes, we should want better, more generous, more collaborative communities than those we currently inhabit—and to offer a warning against what one of the characters calls “walled gardens,” communities that thrive by exclusion.

Malka Older: It’s easy to assume that the particular configurations of our specific place and time are part of the landscape: decided, almost invisible in their unquestioned existence, all but immutable. I hope Infomocracy brings readers to question their assumptions about democracy, nation-states, and government in general, to think creatively about all the other possible systems out there and the ways in which we might tinker with ours to make it more representative, equitable, informed, and participatory. For me, Infomocracy is a hopeful story, because even if the new systems don’t always work out as planned, the people who care about them keep trying to make them better.

Ada Palmer: Lots of new, chewy ideas! I love when readers come away debating, not just “Which political group would you join if you lived in this world,” which is fun, but debating the different ways of thinking about what social institutions like government or organized religion are, or are for, in the first place. Real world politics often gives us space to debate the merits of different policies, but it doesn’t often invite us to go past “Should farming be regulated X way or Y way” or “Should there be separation of Church and State?” to the more fundamental question of what the purpose is of regulation, government, Church, or State in the first place. What I love is when readers first debate which government they would chose, and move from that to debating how having a choice of governments in the first place would change the way we participate, and the way we do or don’t think of national identity as part of ourselves.

Malka Older is a writer, humanitarian worker, and Ph.D. candidate at Sciences Po, studying governance and disasters. Buy her novel Infomocracy at AmazonBarnes & NobleiBooksIndiebound

Ada Palmer is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Buy her novel Too Like the Lightning at AmazonBarnes & NobleiBooksIndiebound

Robert Charles Wilson was born in California and grew up in Canada. He has won the John W. Campbell and Philip K. Dick awards, as well as the Hugo Award for Spin. His most recent novel is Last Year. Buy his novel The Affinities at AmazonBarnes & NobleiBooksIndiebound

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Introduction to The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

frank-herbertBy Frank Herbert

I have tried to teach writing, only to discover that you cannot teach writing. You can teach the plumbing—which pipe connects to which elbow. The actual writing is something you must teach yourself. You learn by doing. The knowledge comes from the inside and it leans most heavily on the oral tradition of language, much to the despair of those who would like it all orderly and neat with explicit rules to follow.

It comes as a shock to many in our print-oriented civilization to be told that language, the basic tool of the writer, is more oral than written. Contemplate those thousands of years of oral tradition before we ever ventured to carve symbols in clay and stone. We are most profoundly conditioned to language-as-speech. The written word is a latecomer.

Before you will believe the reality of a story, someone must stand up on that printed page and speak. His words must have the characteristics of speech. They must reach your ears through your eyes. Under the onslaught of non-print media (TV, film, radio, cassette players…) this is becoming ever more necessary. The oral tradition has never really been subjugated.

True to that tradition, I find I must have a sense of joy in what I do. There has to be some fun in it which you can feel even in the darkest moments of the story. This is the entertainment business. I’m the jongleur visiting your castle. I bring songs and news from other castles I have visited, and some of those are strange indeed. I sing for my supper and those other castles of which I sing are only partly figments of imagination. We may share a consensus reality which demands our service, but if you write science fiction you crowd the edges of that reality.

When we say “science”, we usually mean technology. Science fiction is deeply involved with technology and the questioning of the human future. To write science fiction, you make a connection between technology and the myth-dream of human immortality. We inevitably deal with the alienation of man brought on by his immersion in a welter of things which he is told he wants/needs, but which always seem to remove him from an essential contact with his own life.

This is not really a recent development.

The company of science fiction writers is a venerable troop. We go back somewhere beyond Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd Century AD. We number in our company such lights as Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, Thomas More (who gave us the word Utopia), Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell—which represents only the barest listing.

We are, as a rule, concerned with mankind living on other planets. (Lucian sent his hero to the moon on a waterspout.) Often, our concern is touched by the realization that no animal species can survive forever on one planet. Even as we most freely express our fears that the human, species is in danger of extinction, we parade our differences from other animals via our stories. We have imagination and, occasionally, touches of reason. Much of science fiction says these may be our ultimate strength in facing that chaotic unknown which constantly threatens to reduce us to zero.

Freud once said: “When you try to conceal your innermost thoughts, every pore oozes betrayal.”

When you write, the printed page absorbs all of that ooze—all of you, the wise and the silly, the profound, the shallow and the in-between. It all hangs out in these talking letters. I want to write for as large an audience as possible, all of you sitting around the castle fireplace after a four-star dinner, all of you raptly enjoying the sound of my lute. There’s no sense trying to hide that; it’s in everything I do. And always there’s the upcoming story in which I hope to do it all better. The current work, about which I will not talk because that wastes the energies which should go into the creation, remains my favorite. I will pour as much of myself into it as I am able, holding back nothing. You cannot lose by this. You destroy nothing. You are creating the egg, not the goose.

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The Happily Invisible Co-Author

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tor-invisible-planetsWritten by Ken Liu

Invisible Planets is the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction. Inevitably, the question arises of just how “faithful” the translations are. The simple answer is: “very” and also “not at all.”

I often compare translation to the performing arts, but that’s not quite right. We (rightfully) celebrate a concert pianist’s brilliance in interpreting the dead notes in a score, and we argue over which actress’s version of Viola gives the most interesting twist to Twelfth Night, but we are hesitant to say much about the translator’s contribution to our enjoyment of a book, even though comparing any two versions of the Bible ought to convince the most skeptical reader of how much difference translation makes.

Some of this is because the distinct contributions of the translator (like the contributions of a skillful editor), are often difficult to see. While listeners can often compare many different performances of the same musical composition, most modern works of fiction are translated into English only once. While anyone can read the text of a play and readily see the additions, both verbal and nonverbal, made by an actress, only those who can and have read the original novel or short story can fully appreciate the choices and changes made by the translator. Since translation appears opaque to most of us, we are hesitant to attribute much to the translator.

But I think there’s a deeper cause for the unease we feel toward translators: since we do not fundamentally believe what they do adds value to a work of art, we do not trust them.

A piece of music performed by an orchestra is no longer just markings on the page; rather, it’s a living, beating heart that makes its presence felt through time. A play that is performed by actors is no longer a textual artifact; rather, it’s a complex, multi-sensory experience. But after a translator is done with a text, we still have nothing more than a text.

The translator is thus seen as a necessary evil—merely a passive lens necessary to decode the hieroglyphics of people who are not so fortunate as to write and speak our language. The best that a translator can do is to be unnoticeable, and anything short of perfection would be deemed a “distortion.” Thus, the most value that a translator can add to a work is precisely zero (and many times, readers work from the assumption that translators subtract rather than add).

This sentiment is expressed by readers and writers in countless ways: from reviews that attribute anything the reader disliked to the translation, to omissions of the translator’s name when works in translation are nominated for awards. We do not, fundamentally, believe that translators add anything.

There isn’t enough space in this essay for me to delve into all the ways in which translators do, in fact, transform works of art. Suffice it to say that a “faithful” translation, the ideal of many readers, is simply impossible. Cultures are distinct from each other, as are the ways they have chosen to partition and shape experience linguistically. Every translation is thus an act of cultural negotiation, a performance for (at least) two audiences balanced on the edge of betrayal and subversion. The translated text is a new work of art derived from the original, but with its own internal life, logic, and separate aesthetics. Betrayal is not only inevitable; it is desirable.

I think it’s most useful to think of the translator as a co-author. And like any collaboration, a translation is full of internal tensions and contradictions: between the intent of the author and the intent of the translator, between the expectations of the original audience and the expectations of the target audience, between the literary tradition that the original is in dialogue with and the literary tradition that the translation is thrust into, between the desire to assert that the text is universal (in spite of language) and the need to defend the unique cultural milieu in which it was written (despite translation).

The tension between the translator and the author is rarely acknowledged, though all writers whose works have been translated have felt it to some degree. Many authors view being translated with anxiety, as though their work is being taken away from them, and their chief concern is the desire to retain control. But like any act of collaborative adaptation and performance, control by the original author is neither possible nor even desirable. A good director or musician will not feel bound by the desires of the playwright or composer — for the performance is a distinct medium with its own needs and rules, and the same is true of translation into a new linguistic medium.

For writers and readers alike, I posit that it’s best to think of the translator as an invisible co-author. Like the titular objects in Invisible Planets, the translator’s presence cannot be seen but can be felt. They open up new vistas and sling new trajectories.

And indeed, I suspect most translators rather enjoy the unique role of being an invisible co-author. The lack of focus on their art paradoxically also gives them more space to experiment and push boundaries, to betray and negotiate in the tunnels of the word-mines in darkness. Translation may be the one performance art that thrives in the anonymity of its performers.

As you read the stories in Invisible Planets, I invite you to think about the imperfection of any attempt at communication, trans-linguistic or otherwise. We are each our own translators, forever adapting and shaping our internal representations of the external world, betraying endlessly.

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