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Do Your Neglected Houseplants Want Revenge?

February 5, 2018April 6, 2018torforge1 Comment

Do your houseplants hate you? Want you dead? No, they don’t, no matter how much you neglect them. In fact, they’re praying to their green gods for your longevity. They’ll struggle on as best they can, offering you beauty and silent non-judgmental companionship in exchange—they hope—for more or less regular watering and a spot near sunlight.

Plants need you, no matter how inconstant you are. A lot of the vegetable kingdom depends on animals, in fact, and plants haven’t always chosen well.

Consider this story of apples and oranges—osage oranges, to be exact.

First, the apple: colorful and tasty. Many animals love sugary treats. Apple trees make sweet fruit for us to munch on so we’ll throw away the core, and the seeds can germinate in a new place. (They don’t trust us much, though. They’ve made their seeds too bitter to consume so we’ll do our job right.)

How has this strategy worked out?

Apples originated in central Asia, and ancient peoples brought them east and west. When apples reached North America, they found a champion named John Chapman, “Johnny Appleseed,” who brought orchards to the United States frontier. In the 20th century, with more human help, the trees conquered large portions of Washington State. Now, 63 million tons of apples are grown every year worldwide, much of them in northern China.

From the apples’ point of view, it doesn’t get better than this. They grow worldwide and get lots of tender loving care. Human beings have served them very well.

In contrast, there’s the osage orange tree. It also produces fruit: green, softball-sized, and lumpy, full of seeds and distasteful latex sap. No one eats it. The tree originated in North America and once grew widely, but by the time European settlers arrived, its territory had shrunk to the Red River basin in eastern Texas. How did it fail?

The fruit had appealed to the Pleistocene giant ground sloth, a member of North America’s long-lost megafauna. The sloth scarfed them down, not chewing much, and the seeds traveled safely through its digestive system, emerging in new territory. Then, 11,000 years ago, human beings came to North America and couldn’t resist the allure of a couple of tons of meat per slow-moving beast. Giant ground sloths disappeared, and six of the seven species of osage orange also went extinct.

Why haven’t the remaining trees adapted their fruit to contemporary tastes? Because trees live for a long time, and 11,000 years ago for them is like the High Middle Ages for us. Lucky for them, humans find their wood useful and rows of the trees effective windbreaks, so they currently grow across the United States and the world.

Still, useful wood isn’t much to offer the animal kingdom. Plants usually bribe us with food, the way that prairie grass entices grazers like bison to clear its domain of weeds. The bison nibble away weeds at the same time they munch on tasty grass leaves, which grass plants can easily replace. There used to be a lot more bison in North America, though. This strategy is starting to look shaky.

Flowering plants give bees nectar in exchange for hauling pollen from flower to flower, but bees seem to be having a rough time these days, too. If they go, both wild and domestic plants are in deep trouble.

Plants find animal partnerships tempting. We’ll work hard for a fairly low price. But we’re unreliable and short-lived as individuals—and too often as species.

Back to your houseplants. Many of them likely originated in tropical rainforests. Your living room resembles a jungle: warm, reasonably humid, and moderately lit. Growing in confinement there isn’t such a bad life.

You, on the other hand, are fragile, distractible, hyperactive, and a bit murderous of your own kind as well as other species. Have your houseplants fallen into good hands? Can apples rely on us, and for how long? Are osage oranges one more extinction away from their own disappearance?

Your houseplants suffer from existential angst. Food is love, and so is fleeting beauty. They give their all for you. Go water them, offer reassurance, and consider what you owe to plants. You—and other species—need to be there for them now and in the future. Make them happy. Survive.

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Follow Sue Burke online on Twitter, her website, and her blog.

Author Features / On Writing

A Series by Any Other Name: The Dark Art of Titles

January 3, 2018March 5, 2018torforge7 Comments

Written by David Mack

Titling a novel can be hard as hell. Finding a good title that actually fits one’s story is sometimes one of the most difficult steps in a novel’s creation. But conceiving the right title for an entire series might be the most frustrating creative hurdle of all.

A good rule of thumb for a title is that the larger the body of work it needs to comprise, the shorter the title should be. For instance, a work of short narrative prose or an episode of a television series can have a wordy title (e.g., “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”), while such verbiage would be unwelcome on the cover of a novel, and certainly would not work as the name of a series. Another reason to keep the series’ umbrella title short is to conserve space on book covers for the title of the individual work and the author’s byline. So let’s establish that rule one of series titles is: Concision is your friend.

When I was but an undergraduate studying screenwriting at NYU’s school of film and television, I was taught that while clichés are frowned upon in most forms of writing, learning to subvert or recontextualize clichés with puns or changes in word order can be an effective technique for developing catchy titles. Phrases that have a long history of usage in the common vernacular are especially ripe for this treatment, and depending upon the subject matter of one’s work, a title that comes pre-loaded with double entendres can be a marketing boon.

Among the many reasons I titled my first Star Trek trilogy Destiny was that it was short, which meant it would be printed large beneath the Star Trek logo. For the same reason I kept the titles of the trilogy’s three constituent volumes short, as well: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls. Minimizing verbiage on the covers left more room for art, and using titles drawn from the common parlance made them easier for the sales team to promote and market.

I applied these same principles a few years ago when I prepared Dark Arts, my newest series of original novels, to go out into the market in search of a publisher.

Before I had the title, I had my series concept: a contemporary epic fantasy, coupled with secret history, that follows a small group of sorcerers through key moments of geopolitical history. I wanted to see how these characters would navigate the modern era through periods of war, international espionage, economic upheaval, societal collapse, and more. They would be more than mages in a world that was quickly outgrowing them: they would be soldiers, spies, assassins, and political advisers.

As I developed the first novel, I considered dozens of possible titles. None felt right to me until, inspired by Erich Maria Remarque’s wartime classic All Quiet on the Western Front, I wrote “The Midnight Front” in dramatic-looking script. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I had my title.

Because I wanted to set my second book in the Cold War 1950s, and the third novel in 1963 immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I applied the same technique to those works’ titles: I found a phrase or an entity that embodied the period and put a black-magic spin on it. The phrase I chose to represent the 1950s Cold War was “The Iron Curtain,” from which I derived The Iron Codex. The assassination of JFK led to the formation of the infamous Warren Commission, from which I concocted The Shadow Commission.

I still needed an overall title for my new series. One that could also work for short prose tales I might add to it, and that would apply just as well to book one as it would to book three and beyond. During the writing of the first novel, I noticed a reference in my manuscript to black magic as a “dark art.” That was when I recalled hearing that same expression be applied to politics, as well as to covert special warfare, hostile-takeover economics, public relations, media manipulation, and many other professions of dubious ethics and morality—all topics that I plan or hope to delve into with this series as it progresses.

And thus begins my upcoming foray into the world of Dark Arts, starting with book one, The Midnight Front, at the end of January. I hope you’ll be coming along for the ride.

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Follow David Mack on Twitter, Facebook and on his website.

Author Features

The Other Nemo

December 20, 2017February 22, 2018torforge1 Comment

Written by C. Courtney Joyner

My first glimpse of a cinematic Captain Nemo was at a funeral. That beautifully staged ceremony from Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with Nemo leading the procession, holding aloft a cross made of shells.

On board the Nautilus, when James Mason reveals himself to intruders Kirk Douglas, Paul Lucas, and Peter Lorre, he decides to drown them, with Verne’s famous, “I am not what you would call a civilized man,” as his reasoning.

Mason, buttoning his coat over a turtleneck that has him resembling a U-boat commander, instantly became the bitter genius in that moment. Like Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, Mason’s incarnation is the Nemo that jumps to memory whenever the character is mentioned.

Also like the monster, many others have taken on Nemo, from Lionel Barrymore to Michael Caine, but only Herbert Lom in 1961’s Mysterious Island ever cut as deep an impression on this eight year-old, watching from the first row of a kiddie matinee.

Of course, Lom’s Nemo was surrounded by Ray Harryhausen’s animated creatures, which left me goggle-eyed. But when he strode out of the sea with a giant shell strapped to his back (as an oxygen tank), a shock of white hair, and that commanding voice, Lom was Nemo, no doubt.

The Charles Schneer/Ray Harryhausen production was green-lit by Columbia in 1960, when films based on Verne’s work, like Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth consistently reaped profits. The studio already had a history with Mysterious Island, as “B” movie king Sam Katzman (The Giant Claw, Rock Around the Clock, and hundreds more) had produced a ragged serial in 1951, with hero Richard Crane battling Leonard Penn’s Nemo and Katzman-style aliens.

A decade later, Schneer wisely decided to adjust the story to take advantage of his and Harryhausen’s success with creature-driven fantasy, but still honor Verne by following the novel’s structure, from the prisoner escape by balloon, to the crash-landing on the island. Then, they were in monster-land, complete with giant bees and crabs.

But if Harryhausen seemed to be steering away from Verne’s original, he was in good company. The author himself hadn’t included Nemo in his first manuscript until told by his publisher to put the Captain into the final chapters; an old man dying, confessing his sins.

That inclusion from the novel was a master-stroke that brought Nemo and the Nautilus fully into the screenplay, tying the film forever to 20,000 Leagues.

Once-blacklisted Cy Endfield’s sure direction puts adventure at the forefront, with the creatures a wondrous addition to the story, but not the focus, until Nemo appears from the sea, and then the film belongs to Lom and his performance. Unlike Mason, Lom’s complexion is darkened, to hint at Nemo’s Indian heritage as Verne intended, without overtly stating it.

Lom’s Nemo is disillusioned, and no longer the angry genius. Endfield, who was soon to make his own masterwork, Zulu, gives Nemo the voice of a man who tried to help mankind but was rejected. Now, all he wants is his solitude, with the now-disabled Nautilus as his eventual coffin.

Lom’s performance is a perfect continuation of the Nemo from 20,000 Leagues. World-weary and living with his past, but willing to give mankind one last chance by saving the castaways if they promise to share his best scientific discoveries with the world. A promise ended by a volcanic explosion.

Among the monstrous Harryhausen wonders, Jules Verne’s original messages in Mysterious Island still ring clear, and delivered by a favorite Captain Nemo of the long-gone kiddie matinee.

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Author Features

Other Story Ingredients beyond World, Characters, and Plot

December 4, 2017May 8, 2024torforge

Written by Ada Palmer

The more I talk to other authors about craft the clearer it is that novelists use a huge range of different planning styles. People talk about “Planners” vs. “Pantsers,” i.e., people who plan books and series in advance vs. people who plunge in and write by the seat of their pants. Each category contains a spectrum, for instance people who plan just the major plot points vs. people who plan every chapter. But even then, authors who are improvisational about some parts of storymaking can be very much plotters when it comes to others.

Characters, plot, and setting, or—for genre fiction—world building are very visible. They tend to be what we talk about most when geeking out about a favorite book: a plot twist, a favorite character’s death, the awesome magic system or interstellar travel system. Sometimes an author will develop a world or characters in detail before writing but not outline the chapters or think through a plot. I develop the world first, then develop characters within the world, and then make my chapter-by-chapter outline. But even those stages of world building and character aren’t the first stage of my process. I want to talk about some of the less-conspicuous, less-discussed elements of a novel which, I think, a lot of writers—pantsers or plotters—begin with.

“Too like the lightning which doth cease to be/ Ere one can say ‘It lightens’.”

The Terra Ignota series was born when I first heard these lines while sitting through a friend’s rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet after school. The speech didn’t give me plot, characters, world, or setting—it gave me structure. In a flash, I had the idea for a narrative which would revolve around something incredibly precious, and beautiful, and wonderful, something whose presence lit up the world like lightning in the night, that would be lost at the midpoint of the story. The whole second half would be about the loss of that thing; the world and all the characters would be restructured and reshaped because of that one, all-transforming loss. All at once I could feel the shape of it, like the central chords that structure the beginning, middle, and end of a melody, and I could feel the emotions I wanted the reader to experience in the brightly-lit first part, at that all-important central moment of loss, and in the second half. It was so intense I teared up.

I had no idea at the time whether this series would be science fiction or fantasy, Earth or another world, past or future, but every time I re-read or re-thought that line, I felt the structure vividly, and the power it contained. Over the following years I developed the world and characters—what could be so precious, and what kind of world could be ripe to be transformed by its loss. At last I sat down to outline, working out, chapter by chapter, the approach to that central moment, and its consequences. Now that The Will to Battle is coming out, and I’m working on the fourth and last book of the series, I’m sticking to that outline, but even more I’m sticking to that structure, and feeling that emotional finale that came in the flash so long ago finally taking on a form that will let other people feel it too.

I’ve heard a lot of authors use different words to discuss this sense of structure: knowing the beats of a story, knowing where it’s going, knowing the general shape, knowing the emotional arc. Some sit down to write with a very solid sense of structure but no chapter-by-chapter plan. Some—like me—use this sense of structure, not only to write an outline, but to shape the world and characters. And some writers plunge into chapter one without a sense of structure, working out the emotional beats as the character actions flow. And I think this difference—when, during the process, different authors develop the structure of a book or series—is just as important as the difference between outlining vs. not outlining, or world building in advance vs. world building as you write.

You can design a world and characters and then think about whether a tragic or triumphant ending would be best for them, or you can have a tragedy in mind and then design the characters to give maximum power to that tragedy, with very different results. But since we rarely discuss structure as a separate planning step, I think many developing writers don’t consciously think about structure as separate from plot, and don’t think about when the structure develops relative to other ingredients. After all, you can sit down to outline—or even to write—and only discover at the end that the story works well with a tragic ending, or you can feel tragedy coming from the beginning, and plan the chapters as steps toward that inexorable end.

Of course, sometimes genre brings some elements of structure with it. Think of Shakespeare sitting down to write a tragedy vs. a comedy—some of the beats of these structures are pre-set, but Shakespeare varies them by deciding how early or late to resolve the main romantic tension, or whether the most emotionally-powerful character death will come at the very end or at the two-thirds point so the last third can focus on mourning and aftermath. Shakespeare thinks a lot about structure, which is how he can get you with structural tricks, like how Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to resolve the romantic tension about half-way through and then disrupts it at the end, or how King Lear has so many tragic elements that you start to feel there has been enough tragedy already and there may not be more coming, a hope Shakespeare then uses to powerful effect.

Modern genres too contain these sorts of unspoken structural promises, such as disaster movies, which promise that the plucky central characters will make it through, or classic survival horror, which used to promise that the “good” characters would live while the “flawed” characters would be the ones to die. One of the major reasons that the first Japanese live action horror series that saw U.S. releases—like The Ring—seemed so stunning and powerful to horror fans was that their unspoken contract about who would live and who would die was different, so the deaths were extremely shocking, violating traditional unspoken structures and thus increasing the shock-power of the whole. Varying the expected structural promises of genres like epic fantasy, particularly regarding when in the narrative major characters die, has similar power.

Another major ingredient which different authors plan out to different degrees and at different stages is voice. Is the prose sparse (a sunny day) or lush (fleecy cloud flocks flecked the ice-blue sky)? Are the descriptions neutral and sensory (a bright, deep forest) or emotional and judgmental (a welcoming, unviolated forest)? Is there a narrator? One? Multiple? How much does the narrator know? Are we watching through the narrator’s eyes as through a camera, or is the narrator writing this as a diary years later? I’ve spoken with people who have started or even completed drafts of a first novel without ever actively thinking about voice, or about the fact that even very default choices (third person limited, past tense but movie camera type POV, medium-lushness prose) are active choices, as important as the difference between an ancient empire and a futuristic space republic in terms of their impact on reader experience. We’re all familiar with how retelling a fairytale from the villain’s point of view or retelling a children’s story with a serious adult tone can be immensely powerful, but any story, even a totally new one, can be transformed by a change in voice. Often the stories I enjoy most are the ones where the author has put a lot of thought into choosing just the right voice.

Terra Ignota’s primary narrator, Mycroft Canner, has a very complicated personality and idiosyncratic narrative style, so central to the book that I don’t exaggerate when I say that switching it to being fantasy instead of science fiction would probably make less difference than changing the narrator. But while many people ask me about how I developed this narrative voice, few ask about when I developed it: before or after world building, before or after plot. Mycroft Canner developed long after the structure, and after the other most central characters, but well before the plot; at about the midpoint of developing the world. Mycroft’s voice had a huge impact on how world and plot went on to develop, because (among other things) Mycroft’s long historical and philosophical asides mean that I can convey a lot of depth of the world and its history without actually showing all the places and times that things took place. This allows a very complicated world to be portrayed through a comparatively limited number of actual events—a high ratio of setting to plot. With a more clinical narrator I would probably have had to have more (shorter) chapters, and portrayed more actual events.

Mycroft’s very emotional language acts as a lens to magnify emotional intensity, so when a scientific probe skims the surface of Jupiter I can use Mycroft’s emotional reaction to make it feel like an epic and awe-inspiring achievement. If I had a less lush, more neutral style, I would have to do a lot more event-based setup to achieve the same kind of emotional peak, probably by having a character we actually know be involved in creating the probe. Movies use soundtracks to achieve the same thing, making an event feel more intense by matching it with the emotional swellings of the music, and movies with a grand musical score create very different experiences from movies with minimalist soundtracks that have to gain their intensity from words, events, or acting.

Voice—in Terra Ignota at least—also helped me a lot with the last story ingredient I want to talk about here: themes. Stories have themes, and these can be totally independent of plot, characters, all the other ingredients. Let’s imagine a novel series. We’ll set it on a generation starship (setting). Let’s give it two main narrators, the A.I. computer and the ghost of the original engineer (voice), who will be our windows on a cast that otherwise changes completely with each book (characters). Let’s say that there will be three books showing us the second, the fifth, and the last of the ten generations that have to live on the ship during its star-to-star voyage, and each book will be a personal tragedy for those characters—the first with thwarted love, the second with some people who dream of launching off on their own to explore but have to give it up to continue the voyage, and the third with the loss of someone precious just before the landing (plot)—but that the whole voyage will be a success, juxtaposing the large-scale triumph with the personal-scale tragedies (structure). Even with so many things decided, this story could be completely different if it had different themes. Imagine it focusing on motherhood. Now imagine it focusing heroic self-sacrifice. Try techno-utopianism. The will to survive. Plucky kid detectives. The tendency of tyranny to reassert itself in new forms whenever it’s thwarted. Art and food. The tendency of each generation to repeat the mistakes of its past. The hope that each generation will not repeat the mistakes of its past. Try picking three of these themes and combining them. Each one, and each combination, completely reframes the story, the characters, and how you can envision the events of the plot unfolding.

So, returning to plotter versus pantser, when in planning a story do you choose the themes? For some writers, the themes come very early, before the plot, possibly before the genre. For others the themes develop along with the characters, or with the voice. Some don’t have a clear sense of themes until they come to the fore at the very end. Some genres tend to bring particular themes with them (the potential of science in classic SF, for example, or the limits of the human in cyberpunk). And voice can make some themes stronger or weaker, easier or more possible.

In Terra Ignota a number of the major themes come from Enlightenment literature: whether humans have the ability to rationally remake their world for the better, whether gender and morality are artificial or innate, whether Providence is a useful way to understand the world and if so what ethics we can develop to go with it. Mycroft Canner’s Enlightenment-style voice makes it much easier to bring these themes to the fore. Other themes—exploration, the struggle for the stars, how identity intersects with citizenship, how the myth of Rome shapes our ideas of power, whether to destroy a good world to save a better one—I bring out in other ways. Some of these themes I had in mind well before the world and characters, so I shaped the world and characters to support them. Others emerged from the world and characters as they developed. A couple developed during the outlining stage, or turned from minor to major themes during the writing. In that sense even I—someone almost as far as you can get on the plotter end of the plotter-pantser scale—can still be surprised when I discover that a theme I expected to come to the fore in chapter 17 comes out vividly in chapter 8. Knowing the themes helped me in a hundred different ways: Where should this character go next? If she goes here, it will address theme A, if she goes there theme B… right now theme B has had less development, so B it is!

All three of these ingredients—structure, voice, and themes—could be the subject of a whole book (or many books) on the craft of writing. For me, this brief dip is the best way I can think of to express how I feel about the release of The Will to Battle. Yes it’s my third novel, but it’s also the first part of this second section of Terra Ignota, the pivot moment of the structure, when we’ve lost that precious thing that was “Too like the lightning” and have to face a world without it. It’s the moment when other people can finally experience that sequence feeling that I felt years ago, so intense and complicated that I couldn’t communicate it to another human being without years of planning and three whole books to begin it, four to see it to its end. It feels, to me, completely different from when people read just book one, or one and two. And that’s a big part of why I think, when we try to sort writers into plotter or pantser, the question “Do you outline in advance?” is only one small part of a much more complicated process question: Setting, plot, characters, structure, voice, themes: which of these key ingredients come before you sit down to write the first chapter, and which come after?

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Follow Ada Palmer on Twitter, Facebook and on her website.

Author Features

Me and Alice

November 30, 2017May 8, 2024torforge1 Comment

Written by Ellen Datlow

There have been many books written about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion volume Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found by Lewis Carroll: exploring their meaning—psychological, political, mathematical—and about their author, Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898), a mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer—and his relationship with the model for his heroine, Alice Liddell.

I’ve loved Carroll’s two classics since I was young. I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed, but I’ve been a collector of illustrated versions for many years, especially appreciating the enchanting illustrations of books by fine artists such as Mervyn Peake, Arthur Rackham, Barry Moser, Ralph Steadman, Lisbeth Zwerger, Salvador Dali, Rodney Matthews, Anne Bachelier, Maggie Taylor, and so many others, some relatively unknown.

But I must admit that my vision of “Alice” herself has been subverted by the 1985 movie Dreamchild, in which the adult Alice Liddell, who is visiting New York, flashes back to her childhood, where we see the dark-haired little girl (seen in photographs), who inspired the tales and is very different from the long-haired blonde image created in John Tenniel’s ubiquitous illustrations. In that movie, which is very much about the relationship between Dodgson and Liddell and how his creation of her fictional counterpart might have influenced her life as an adult, there are darkly magical partially-animated interstitial sections with amazingly creepy Wonderland inhabitants imagined by Jim Hensen. In fact, it might be the creatures in Carroll’s works that are even more likeable than Alice herself that bring readers back over and over again to the land beyond the looking glass.

Everyone is familiar with the 1951 animated musical Walt Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, which took him about twenty years to get off the ground, and made an indelible mark on child’s psyches with its colorful renderings of the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, White Rabbit, March Hare, the Hookah-smoking caterpillar, and one of my personal favorites Dinah, the kitten.

In 1971, Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer made a short animated film based on the Jabberwocky, and in 1987 made the full length feature, the darkly surreal Alice, which in its original language was called Something from Alice. Its tone was entirely different from the Disney.

In 2010 and 2016 Director Tim Burton interpreted the two volumes in his own inimitable way, and love them or hate them, they did create a whole new set of images that one can savor. Then She Fell, a marvelous immersive performance piece created by the theater company Third Rail Projects continues to play in New York City since 2012 demonstrates how strongly Carroll’s work continues to be loved.

So with all this in mind, I was so very happy to be able to gather round other “Alice” lovers and put together an anthology dedicated to the girl whose adventures have inspired and continued to inspire us—and to her creator.

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Follow Ellen Datlow on Twitter and on her website.

Author Features

Unfinished: Writing Through Grief

November 13, 2017May 22, 2018torforge16 Comments

Written by Kari Maaren

When you’re a debut author, everyone assumes you’re writing like mad. You should be writing like mad. You defeated the odds and got your work accepted by a publisher, right? So where’s your follow-up? Have you hauled out six trunk novels and polished them? Are you working on a sequel? Two sequels? A brand new novel in a different genre? Seventeen short stories, all of which you’re sending diligently out to magazines at the speed of light? How energised are you? And how’s that panic doing? You’d better get something done. You don’t want people to forget about you, do you? You don’t want to drop off the radar. How’s your writing? I bet it’s good. I bet it’s amazing. Where is it?

I haven’t finished a novel in seven years.

This essay probably isn’t going to go where you think it’s going to go. It’s not a story of high expectations and anxiety and the sophomore slump. It’s a story of grief.

I wrote Weave a Circle Round in 2010 and edited it until the summer of 2011. In the spring of that year, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We—my father, my sister, my sister’s young family, and I—had suspected for a while that this diagnosis was coming, but the anticipation was nothing compared to the confirmation. The summer in which I completed the initial edits on my novel was a summer I spent sad and scared and furiously angry. I screamed at people who didn’t deserve to be screamed at. I burst into wrathful tears when I couldn’t find a friend’s apartment building. I’d experienced grief before, but this was new. This was like being tortured by the universe. And the worst bit was that it wasn’t actually me the universe was torturing. It was my wonderful mum, who didn’t deserve what was happening to her and who was herself sad and scared and angry to a degree that dwarfed my own feelings. And because I didn’t even live in the same place as her—my parents were, at the time, living on what was basically a road through a forest on Vancouver Island—I couldn’t even be there to comfort her or my dad. My mum was losing pieces of herself, and I wasn’t there.

At the time, I didn’t realise what was happening. I thought I was in a bad state, but surely I would still be able to function to some degree. And I did. I kept on at my comics. I started writing and performing music on a regular basis, and as the years went by and my mother’s disease progressed, I even produced a couple of CDs. I shopped out my novel to publishers. And I wrote. I did write. I just didn’t finish a single story. I started a sequel to Weave a Circle Round, and I got halfway through before I stopped. The story wasn’t working. There were too many characters. I’d chosen the wrong character to be the protagonist. The story was going on and on without getting anywhere. Years later, after I’d got my acceptance from Tor, and there was suddenly a lot more urgency in the air, I tried again with another novel, then with a novella. With the novel, I got several chapters in before I lost the thread. With the novella, I again got halfway through. I knew I had to write, but my mind was blank. I’ve always loved going for walks because I imagine out stories while I’m doing it. Now I couldn’t. I would go through spurts where everything seemed normal again, but the blankness would always return.

And my mum was getting worse. She declined by leaps and bounds. She was miserable; she understood what was happening to her, even towards the end, and she hated it. We all knew it. Even as our lives went on—even as my sister’s family grew and moved to a new city, and my parents followed her to a province they’d never lived in before, and my niece and nephew shot up into small human beings, and I pumped out comics and music and taught my students about thesis statements, my mother’s life was on a strange pause we all knew would never end. She would never get better. She would always, in a way, be unfinished.

Grief is weird. You don’t necessarily know it’s happening when it is. It doesn’t wait until after someone dies to pounce; it gets its claws right into you while the person for whom you’re grieving is dying. My mother died on December 16, 2016, with her family around her, but we mourned her for years before that. The mourning continues. It’s different now. It’s for our loss, not for hers. For over half a decade, we watched her lose more and more even as she desperately clung to what she still had. “My guy,” she would say to my father in the last few months, when she had hardly any words left, when she didn’t know who or where she was. The last thing she clung to was what she had loved.

I sometimes feel guilty or inadequate that I haven’t finished any writing in years. I’m letting myself and others down. Writing is what I’ve always done and what I’ve always wanted to do; I’m not wholly me without it. But I think I’m going to have to accept that seven-year pause as something that needed to happen. I’m writing again now. This summer, I completed the first draft of a new novel. When I go out for walks, I find myself spontaneously thinking out stories, imagining my way through the scenes, just as I used to. Grief is still everywhere, but it’s a different kind of pain. And one of the new novel’s major characters is the protagonist’s mum.

It was painful, but still wonderful, to finish her story.

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Follow Kari Maaren online on Twitter (@angrykem), Facebook, or on her website.

Author Features

Starships and Old Cruisers

November 6, 2017May 8, 2024torforge2 Comments

Written by Richard Baker

The most important ship in Valiant Dust is USS Olympia.

You might think I’m referring to a starship that appears in my novel, but I’m not. I mean the old cruiser commissioned in 1895 and preserved as a museum ship in 1957. Olympia served as Commodore Dewey’s flagship at the Battle of Manila Bay, and you can see it today at the Independence Seaport Museum at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia.

Olympia doesn’t appear even once in my book. But my long-ago visits to the museum ship inspired much of the world-building behind Valiant Dust, including elements of naval technology, culture, and the strategic challenges Sikander North’s star navy faces.

Let’s start with the technology. From the get-go, my Sikander North books were intended to be naval-themed military sci-fi. I’m a former naval officer and a serious history buff, and it’s important to me to write what I know. Several other writers are engaged in universes that do an excellent job of bringing the “missile age” of naval warfare to space. (As someone who earned a Surface Warfare qualification, I appreciate the thought that writers like David Weber or Jack Campbell put into missile tactics.) But I want to create battles that feel distinctive in this subgenre. Olympia suggests a different era of naval combat as an inspiration: the era of steam and iron, big guns and short-ranged torpedoes. In the Sikander North universe, point-defense fire is so effective that missiles can’t get through to score hits. The primary shipboard weapons are powerful rail guns (or kinetic cannons) and warp torpedoes that exit normal space for self-protection during their attack runs.

The cultural inspiration provided by Olympia is a little harder to explain, but I’ll give it a try. If you spend any time walking around a modern warship, you’re struck by how plain things are. The interior decks are covered by linoleum, the weather decks by something that looks like roofing material. The wardroom—the space where officers gather to eat, relax, or entertain, presumably the nicest part of the ship—is fitted with furniture that frankly wouldn’t cut it in a cheap motel. But Olympia is a relic of a different age; the wardroom is finished with beautiful paneling and china cabinets, the decks are (or at least were) real teak, and brilliant brass fittings gleam at every turn. Olympia exudes an atmosphere of gentility and elegance that modern ships lack. The officers of the Age of Steam were expected to be gentlemen and observe social niceties that had fallen out of use by the time I served in the Navy. I’m not saying that Olympia’s time was better, mind you; I’m just saying that it was different, and I wanted to capture that feeling in my depiction of a starfaring navy of the far future.

Finally, Olympia’s moment in history pointed me toward a complex and changing era of “geopolitics” to serve as the backdrop for Valiant Dust. A multipolar galaxy with Great Powers fighting over prized colonial possessions provides a wealth of rivalries and crises to explore. Sikander North and his shipmates live in a universe where rising powers are challenging established powers and imperial systems are being tested by restive subject populations. A military sci-fi story needs sources of conflict, and those conflicts need plausible driving causes. Valiant Dust isn’t the Spanish-American War in space, but I definitely drew inspiration from a different near-conflict in the same era (the Second Moroccan Crisis, if you’re curious). I find that borrowing a bit from history helps a story to feel “real,” simply because if it happened in our own world it’s not crazy for a writer to suggest that something similar could happen in the future.

USS Olympia isn’t mentioned once in Valiant Dust. But you can sense its presence in dinner parties and military formalities, k-cannon salvos and torpedo runs, and exotic worlds where imperial powers shamelessly engage in the Great Game. Throughout months of worldbuilding, I found myself closing my eyes from time to time to recall how it felt to walk Olympia’s decks or imagine what it would have been like to be a naval officer in the 1890s instead of the 1990s. Maybe I’m the only person who would ever notice or care about that hidden influence in Valiant Dust, but it’s there. If you’re anywhere near Philadelphia and you’re interested in military history, I’d encourage you to make the visit—Olympia’s a national treasure.

Oh, and there’s one other thing. Take a moment to Google USS Olympia, and check out the paint scheme: the gleaming white hull, the red waterline, the buff superstructure and black funnel caps. I borrowed the same white, buff, and red colors for the Aquilan Commonwealth Navy in Valiant Dust. I didn’t even tell my editor why I chose those colors, but now you know.

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Follow Richard Baker on Facebook and on his blog.

Author Features

Seanan McGuire’s 3 Favorite Video Games

October 2, 2017November 1, 2017torforge3 Comments

Written by Seanan McGuire

One of the great things about games, and role-playing games in particular, is having a blank canvas. Essentially they are plays in which all the plots and beats are written, except, of course, for the characters. Players are allowed to fill these fantastic worlds with whomever, or whatever, they choose. It’s the ultimate game of “what if?”. Over the past few years we’ve had the pleasure of diving into some of these great worlds, both digital and print, and few have been as fun as the Deadlands.

Built around every Weird West trope you can imagine, Deadlands is the perfect blend of horror, steampunk, fantasy, and good ol’ Americana. An added feature of the books is that, like any proper campaign, they each standalone, focusing on a different aspect of this grand Western. That’s where author Seanan McGuire comes in. Combining a love of games with the ability to subvert expectations, she’s written a novel with monsters and madmen and maestros. A novel that ties in perfectly with her own love of games. Here, she counts down her favorite video games.

I do not play a great many video games, but the ones I play, I play whole-heartedly and with a horrifying intensity of focus that sometimes unnerves my teammates. I have been known to buy a console for a single game and feel that I got my money’s worth, because I’ve managed to log so many hours on whatever it was I wanted to play. So these are my three current obsessions.

SPLATOON 2: Remember that comment about buying a console for a single game? Well, that was me and the Wii U, bought entirely for Splatoon. There was really no way I was going to let the sequel pass me by. In this cartoony first-person shooter, you play an Inkling, aka, a kid who is also a squid, and you do your very best to paint as much of the world as possible in the color of your team. Whoever wins the paintball war gets money that can be spent on new clothes and better weapons, thus improving your ability to lay down the ink and represent for your side. I loved the first game; the second is more of the same.

POKEMON SUN/MOON: The Ultra versions of these games are probably going to come out before I can complete my Pokemon journey, and I’m okay with that: I have long since accepted that the road to Pokemon mastery is long and winding and doesn’t necessarily respect the fact that I am not eleven years old with a monofocus on this specific adventure. This isn’t my favorite Pokemon game—that honor is reserved for X and Y, which were a stunning elevation of the form, and which may not be matched for a very long time. Still, Sun and Moon take some risks and make some changes to the format, freshening something that could easily grow stale.

OVERWATCH: And then there is Overwatch. It is difficult to describe how much time I spend playing Overwatch, mostly because if I stopped to think about it, I would probably be deeply horrified. This superheroic FPS allows you to take on the role of one of more than two dozen heroes (and villains) and fight for a better future. The character roster is diverse and engaging; every character plays differently, forcing you to up your game if you want to get good and be an asset to your team; the game itself rewards good team composition and thoughtful choices. Every time I think I couldn’t love this game more, it adds something new and forces me to learn it all over again. It’s so good. (I play on PS4; my handle is “SeananM”; we’re always looking for new folks to roll with us.)

So what’s your favorite video game?

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Follow Seanan McGuire on Twitter and on her website.

Author Features

Where are all the women?

October 2, 2017January 19, 2018torforge44 Comments

Written by Elizabeth Bear

If women existed in the real world at the same ratios in which we exist in epic fantasy, the human race would be obliged to reproduce as do anglerfish. Which is to say, with one large female swimming along, going about her business, while a plethora of smaller males clamp their jaws onto her flanks, graft their bloodstreams to hers parasitically, and allow themselves to be dragged along with her wherever she happens to roam because it’s their best chance of having the opportunity to release a stream of milt over the eggs that she will inevitably deposit.

But human beings are not anglerfish. In fact, our gender ratios tend to slightly favor females, barring outside intervention such as female infanticide.

Which begs the question, in a typical epic fantasy: where are all the women?

You’ll generally find a few—one or two—in the well-worn roles of hard-bitten female mercenary (or female knight-errant), femme fatale, and love interest for the male protagonist. And there are arguments made that medieval women just didn’t do anything interesting, so why would there be stories about them? Sure, there were a few stand-out exceptions, but we can’t have more than one exceptional woman in a book, can we?

And certainly there are homosocial environments that one might be writing about, if one is writing a fantasy grounded in or directly inspired by the real world. Cold War submarines, for example. Monasteries. Men’s prisons. You know the sort of thing.

But most fantasy novels don’t necessarily take place in de-facto homosocial environments, unless the author decides to build their world that way. Women, historically, handled logistics; learned trades and practiced them either as their husbands’ unacknowledged partners or widows; kept the economic engines of their societies and homes turning whether the men were home or were off at war. Women also ran off to become pirates and scientists and great statespersons at a rather alarming rate, given the barriers to entry and the chance of erasure during and after their lifetimes. If those women were exceptional, well, no more so than the exceptional men who surrounded them. And yet, we don’t have a problem with writing about men who break the rules or stand above their peers.

Those rules are apparently only intended for women.

I think the problem is that some writers (and some readers) have spent a lot of time internalizing our societal narrative that women… just aren’t interesting. The things we do and have done don’t make good stories, or if they do, those stories are women’s stories, and not for general consumption.

I get asked a lot about how I manage to find stories for so many women (and gender-diverse people) in my books. It’s pretty easy: I manage because I think women are interesting people—at least as interesting as men—and that women have really cool adventures, and that books should have stories about cool adventures in them.

I’m not trying to write books specifically for women, or specifically about women, but rather books about people. People having adventures. People who are powerful and privileged in certain ways and not in others. People who may chafe at their social roles, or accept them even when they are not necessarily comfortable or healthy. People who do what they can do with what they have on hand, because it’s interesting to present the perspectives of the scrappy underdog, the person who is struggling with societal constraints, whose freedom of action may be limited but who still has problems to fix and places to be.

Stories. About people. Having adventures and learning things.

I hope you like those kinds of stories too.

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Follow Elizabeth Bear on Twitter.

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