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What Is a Changeling, Really?

September 6, 2016May 10, 2024torforge

And now, a few unsettling words from Sarah Porter, the author of Vassa in the Night.

The baby wakes everyone with an ungodly yowl in the depths of the night. Its head looks distended, its eyes bulbous and glowering. Surely it didn’t appear so grotesque when you sang it to sleep? And that cry: it hardly sounds human at all.

Conversely, the baby is so silent that you rush to its side, terrified that it might have died while you dreamed. It gawps at you with an expression morose and wooden. Its tiny limbs feel dry, airy, and rotten. But those eyes, bulging, pale, at once vacant and horribly knowing: they never leave your face, not while you change its diaper and tuck it in again, not while you croon at it, Sleep tight, my poppet, all is peaceful, all is well, and back out of the nursery. You can barely force yourself to switch off the light.

Feed it, and it will suck so ravenously that you will thrust it away in sudden dread, sure that it means to drain your blood once it has finished your milk.

What is this thing that lies in your cradle? Is it truly your own sweet child?

Anyone familiar with the ways of the world will tell you, Why, no. Your child has been stolen by the faeries. They have left you this hideous effigy in its place.

The folklorist Charles G. Leland wrote that the faeries who steal children are personified fevers, the spirits of pox and typhus and cholera that snatched so many infants in the days before antibiotics. There are other connections between faeries and the land of the dead: one is the well-known rule that eating anything in either Faerie or Hades will trap you there forever. Catherynne Valente called the law permitting human-stealing “the Persephone clause” in her Fairyland books. And the medieval English poem Sir Orfeo, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, makes the association even more explicit. In it, the harpist has to rescue his wife not from the underworld but from the faerie king, who holds his court in the midst of a field of butchered, but still living, bodies: people wrongly believed to be dead when they were actually transported to his realm.

Take another look, then, at that monstrous, babyish lump staring at you with such resentment. Are you sure it’s even there? Are you sure you aren’t remembering your lost child, however imperfectly; that your longing has not made this projected memory appear as something solid and alive? The changeling’s distorted features are a bit too much like the warped and uncertain faces that those we love wear in dreams: He didn’t look anything like you, but I knew it was you anyway. And could anything living, truly living and present in the room with you, be quite so hungry? Only ghosts, monsters, or memories consume so much of us.

One traditional way to get rid of a changeling is to subject it to sadistic abuse. In theory, its otherworldly parents will be so appalled that they will remove it from your custody, and return your rightful child. I wouldn’t count on it, personally.

The other method is to make the changeling laugh. Brew coffee in an eggshell, say; the creature will betray its real nature by cackling in surprise, and once exposed, protocol demands that it go.

That’s what the stories say. In practice, your changeling might stay right where it is, and keep on laughing at you. The one you mourn was taken, like Eurydice was taken, and like her will not be returning. What laughs in the cradle is your own swollen, relentless, and insatiable grief; that is what the faeries leave behind.

Follow Sarah Porter on Twitter and on her website.

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Representing My Equals

September 6, 2016May 10, 2024torforge6 Comments

Written by Nisi Shawl

The voices of Everfair are many. I wrote it from eleven characters’ viewpoints, so the novel showcases many different spiritualities. Fabian socialist Jackie Owen is an atheist and proud of it. USian “Negro” missionaries Martha Livia Hunter and Thomas Jefferson Wilson are of course Christians–at the book’s start. King Mwenda relies on his bond with his “spirit father” and thus on his practice of local indigenous traditions, while his more cosmopolitan favorite wife, Queen Josina, has adopted some of the ways of the Yoruba nation. When Josina shares her esoteric learning with European Lisette Toutournier, it transpires that Lisette’s relationship to spirituality is more distant than that of her tutor. Tink, aka Ho Lin-Huang, also relates less than fervently to his religious practice, choosing a path matter-of-fact acceptance of the propitiousness of certain moments, numbers, and so on. And for the rest of Everfair’s main characters, spirituality plays roles of even less significance.

How did I dare to hope I’d do justice to all this variety of focus and intensity with my writing?

I began with the knowledge that I couldn’t.

My exploration of ways of “Writing the Other” (both as an author and a teacher) has shown me that it’s best to accept the likelihood of failure from the get-go. And then to endeavor to win anyway.

I have friends who are atheists, and I’ve read atheist essays and treatises, so I used those influences to model Jackie’s atheism. I’ve participated in Yoruba-derived ceremonies for decades, and, again, I’ve read about Yoruban and other animistic religions. That experience, those books and articles, contributed to my depiction of Josina’s spirituality–and to my depiction of East Congo and Central African belief systems as well.

Because while I loathe the sort of lazy writing that equates, say, Angolan and Ethiopian cultures when those two countries lie approximately 2000 miles apart, I do think that congruencies (as opposed to exact equivalencies) exist between different African cultures. They undoubtedly exist between different non-African cultures; why should this one continent be exempt from that sort of interlinkedness? True, when formulating these congruencies you have to take additional factors into account such as climate, terrain, and neighbors. You have to avoid assumptions and question what your sources accept as obvious. But as difficult as doing such things may seem, you should persist in developing these congruencies–especially in cases where millions of people have died, silencing the majority of firsthand witnesses by rendering entire stretches of the countryside you want to describe into skeleton-filled graveyards. As occurred in the Congo under the watch of Leopold II of Belgium.

While writing Everfair, I drew connections between what I knew about, what I extrapolated from that knowledge, what had been recorded, and what was lost. I imagined. I dreamed. I prayed to the orisha. I received their answers. I listened to them.

Here’s one example of what resulted: a scene in the book’s first half in which a prisoner is being interrogated. His interrogators pay more attention to the divinatory scratchings of a hen eating grain than to his lying answers. I based the scene’s action on a chapter in a book by English anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard. But I changed it in several respects, since foreign anthropologists’ informants often deliberately misrepresent their own culture to outsiders–not to mention the fact that these outsiders often misunderstand informants’ statements due to their own prejudices.

Another story element, disabled orphan Fwendi’s “cat-riding,” owes its existence to my growing familiarity with the “Man-Eaters of Tsavo.” As I researched my novel’s setting, I learned that in the late 1890s a pair of unusually large lions hunted and consumed workers on the Kenya-Uganda railway. Local speculation about the Man-Eaters’ supernatural provenance noted their supposed ties with indigenous royal family members and the legendary ability of certain individuals to control and direct lions. I imagined that ability and those ties to be a bit more widespread, and adjusted the nature of Fwendi’s mounts to match her milieu.

When I found primary sources, I used them. Maps, photos, news stories, music, and more contributed to my understanding of the philosophies underpinning my characters’ diverse worlds.

Though decimated, the peoples of the area where I set Everfair weren’t totally wiped out. Descendants of the historical figures who inspired many of my characters exist to this day. They can–and probably will–critique my attempts at creating a vivid, moving, and above all, plausible fictional version of their ancestors’ lives. Expecting that, I’ve done my best to create this fictional version with real respect. I’ve been told that the gaze I turn on my characters is “level.” Your gaze is always level when turned on an equal. All these characters and the people they represent are my spiritual equals.

Follow Nisi Shawl on Twitter and on her website.

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A Twist in Prophecy’s Tale

August 1, 2016May 10, 2024torforge1 Comment

Written by Blake Charlton

In epic fantasy, a good prophecy is unpredictable. The prophecy must come true, but it must come true in a novel way that most readers might have, but did not, imagine. The science fiction analogy to prophecy might be precognition. There’s a bit of Houdini in authors who insert prophecy or precognition into their series; they ostentatiously bind themselves in the cliché, implicitly promising that, at the end of the pages-by-the-pound epic, there will be a refreshing twist on and escape from the prophecy cliché. Or, at least, that’s how I’ve always felt.

Sixteen years ago, when I started the Spellwright Trilogy, I aggravated about how to lock myself into an ostensibly simple epic fantasy prophecy. Now that Spellbreaker, the third and final book in the series, is about to publish, I’m anxious to learn if readers approve of the results.

In the first book, the protagonist, Nicodemus Weal, was thought to be the proverbial Chosen One, prophesized to rebuff a demonic invasion via great skill in magical language. Unfortunately Nicodemus has a profound learning disability–akin to dyslexia–and any contact he makes with a magical spell causes it, literally, to misspell. Things go rather spectacularly wrong, quickly.

Now in the third book, the world is a different place. The prophecy of an impending demonic invasion has been proven true. All of humanity has been preparing. There’s only one problem: The demonic invasion is late. Thirty years late. The order of the world is fraying; disastrous war between human kingdoms looms. Spellbreaker opens in this precarious environment with Leandra Weal, Nicodemus’s roguish daughter, who has a dangerous interest in prophetic magical language. The novel’s first sentence, I hope, demonstrates Leandra’s proclivity for dangerous situations: “To test a spell that predicts the future, try to murder the man selling it; if you can, it can’t. That, at least, was Leandra’s rationale for poisoning the smuggler’s blackrice liqueur.”

Sometimes authors find their own objectives aligning with those of certain of their characters. Leandra is my ally in the exploration of prophecy and precognition. She gets her hands on the above-mentioned prophetic spell, but something goes spectacularly wrong. (In novels, doesn’t it always?) She learns that in one day’s time, she is destined to either die or kill someone she loves. The problem is she doesn’t know who. This puts her in a unique situation–a sort of inverse murder mystery. As Leandra asks herself, “How can one investigate a murder that hasn’t yet been committed? And how, exactly, should such an investigator proceed when she will become the murderer?” As you might suspect, this investigation turns out to be intertwined in prophecy. Things become even more fraught when she learns that both her parents–whom she thought safely thousands of miles away–have recently arrived in her city.

The different books of the Spellwright Trilogy take place decades apart. So Spellbreaker can be read as a standalone, but it will also provide the returning reader with plenty of new backstory. For example, early in the book, Nicodemus learns that his daughter is worried that she might try to kill her mother. His reaction hints at how the novel will explore the past as well as the prophesized future: “‘Oh damn it all,’ Nicodemus groaned, ‘not again.’”

Follow Blake Charlton on Twitter, on Facebook, and on his website.

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The Power of Place

August 1, 2016May 10, 2024torforge1 Comment

Written by Leanna Renee Hieber

When crafting my magical system for The Eterna Files series, I wanted to present something unique and deeply personal in terms of how magic is wielded. My books are very character-driven, and characters cross from one series to the next, though each series is distinct and stands alone. One of the aspects that sets my Eterna series apart is the practical magical system I’ve created for the trilogy.

In the Eterna series, I champion the idea of localized magic as a defensive weapon. My characters create protective Wards that mix an area’s soil, air, and water, in addition to other identifying and power-invoking items, in a glass tube. The tube can then be set aflame or its contents pressed into a sachet or poultice. These Wards are placed strategically in a building or on a person to keep the Summoned—demons wielded by the antagonists—from getting too close. The variable ingredients depend on the location being defended and the person creating or carrying the Ward.

For example, in New York City, my protagonists combine shards of bone from a potter’s field and pieces of a dollar picked up on the floor of the stock exchange with the air, water, and soil. This acknowledges the extremes of poverty and wealth that have overarched the city since the Dutch colonists drove the Lenape tribe off Manhattan Island. The Wards—and my characters—do not shy away from horrors done on the land, but consider the creation of Wards as a representation of their desire to do better going forward. This is part of the personal journey of my heroine, Clara, as she struggles to ground a magic that must be based on land that was taken by force.

In another instance, a Salem, MA Ward, crafted by my characters in the first Eterna book, involves mixing water and air of the harbor that is vital to the town with also soil from haunted areas still scarred by the witch trials. To this is added a piece of a Hawthorne novel or other literary legacy, thus calling forth elements of both pride and shame, critical to the area’s identity and lasting power. The local Ward is then personalized by whoever wields it.

In Eterna and Omega, when my characters create a local Ward and then infuse their own meaning, energy, or prayers, or include bits of their own sacred talismans or beloved keepsakes in the Wards, the protective effects become exponentially stronger. I wanted the “magic” of the Eterna world to be tactile and accessible; something any layman could use, not rarified, not elite, but drawn from heart and hearth.

Adding to the theme of accessibility, my characters come from a range of racial, class, gender, faith, and sexual identities. They are united by location, living in New York, or in the case of my British team, in London. The Wards are a broad-based template focused on the idea of a place having its own energy and inherent worth. The Wards are personalized in many ways throughout the series.

While the power of place is furthered by the power of person, without those additional elements the Wards would still work because of the power inherent in the locations to begin with. Considering I write with Gothic flair, a critical aspect of that genre is bringing setting and locale to life as character in and of itself, so localized magic goes hand in hand with the visceral, palpable atmosphere I hope to create.

The power and practical magic that my characters wield is deeply emotional, often hard to wrestle with, and defies the world they once knew. Many of my characters shy away from using the word magic at all but consider their work an extension of their spiritual practice. They grapple with the same divine mysteries, the same great questions of life, death, and purpose that haunt all of us, no matter where we come from. That’s a universality I hope to maintain through every one of my stories.

Happy Haunting!

Follow Leanna Renee Hieber on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

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Ghost Talkers Deleted Scene

August 1, 2016May 10, 2024torforge3 Comments

Written by Mary Robinette Kowal

When planning a book, a lot of times you wind up with scenes that don’t make it into the finished novel. In the case of Ghost Talkers, I wrote the entire book from the point of view of Ginger Stuyvesant, one of the mediums in the British Intelligence department’s Spirit Corps. In my fictional version of WWI, this group communicates with the ghosts of soldiers to get instant updates on battlefield conditions.

My plan had been to go back and add scenes from the point of view of Helen, a West Indian medium, who created the protocol for conditioning soldiers to report in upon death. These scenes were intended to be flashbacks to show the creation of the Spirit Corps. I wrote the first one, and then realized that the flashbacks destroyed the forward momentum of the novel.

I still like the scene though. In a way, it’s a ghost in its own right.

Helen knew the soldier in bed seven had died because his soul sat up and said, “Fuck. I’m dead.”

She paused, in the process of tucking the sheets in on bed five, and glanced across the ward. The sisters on duty had not noticed the new ghost, which wasn’t surprising.

Towards the front lines, an explosion lit the top of the hospital tent. The concussion reached Helen a second later. She waited until it rolled past, and checked the soldier in bed five. Still asleep on morphine.

She walked over to bed seven. The soldier’s body was limp and even with the bandage wrapped around his head, it was obvious that most of his jaw was missing. She put a hand on the bed to steady herself and pushed her soul a little out of her body. The ward fluctuated with remnants of souls, but not as badly as it had yesterday.

“Your work is done.”

The soldier’s ghost spotted her and his aura went bright red with excitement. “Hey! Hey, you can hear me.”

“Yes. I am so very sorry that you have passed over.”

He shook his head. “I need to talk to the captain.”

She sighed. This was so common in the recently deceased. She had seen some ghosts rise from their bodies and head straight back to the front lines. “Please. Be at peace.”

“Fuck that. My buddies are pinned down. You gotta send someone to help them.”

“Do you really think they survived when you did not?”

“Hell, yes.” He swept a hand through his hair. “Collins was hit in the leg, so I volunteered to crawl to get help. Fat lot of good I did. Point is, though, they’re still there.”

“If you tell—”

“Pardon me.” The red-headed nurse stood at the end of the bed.

Helen jumped and turned. “Sorry, ma’am. I think this man has died.”

The other woman tilted her head and her eyes unfocused. “And… am I mistaken, or were you speaking with him?”

Follow Mary Robinette Kowal on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

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The Power of a Great Time Travel Story

July 5, 2016May 7, 2024torforge1 Comment

Written by Ann VanderMeer

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life. —Robert Louis Stevenson

A few months ago I was interviewed on BBC4 Radio along with Dr. Ronald Mallett, a physicist from the University of Connecticut. Our subject was time travel. Some might find it odd that a fiction editor promoting a new anthology would be appearing on a show with a noted scientist to talk honestly about time travel. But Dr. Mallett isn’t just any scientist. His life was changed completely after encountering The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

Prior to the interview I had spent several months completely engrossed in the subject. Time travel stories exhibit an astonishing variety. The very conundrum of time travel—Can you actually change the past or future? What happens if you meet yourself in the past?—has resulted in a number of amazing stories. Time machines may be the most popular vehicle for such travel, but hidden doors, mutations, or rips in the space-time continuum can also send travelers hurtling into unexpected moments of history—or into the future. And not all time travelers go willingly.

Then I read Dr. Mallet’s book, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality. When Mallett was ten years old, his father passed away suddenly of a heart attack. Greatly affected, he lost himself in reading, a pastime his father strongly encouraged, and discovered The Time Machine. Motivated by a powerful desire to see his father again, and maybe even prevent his death at the all-too-early age of thirty-three, Mallett dreamed that he could build his own time machine. As he has said, “My fundamental goal in life has always been to build a time machine” (quoted from the YouTube video, “Dr. Mallett Builds a Time Machine”).

As we talked in the interview, it struck me that reading a science fiction story so deeply shaped his future and set him on this journey. Often stories are influenced by real life, but in this case, a story that was over 100 years old not only gave hope to a young boy, but eventually led him to become part of a team of scientists trying to create a real, working time machine.

I was happy to discover that all of Dr. Mallet’s classic favorite time travel stories were in The Time Traveler’s Almanac. And he shared with me that he found many new stories in the anthology that he enjoyed.

Some of the best time travel stories, indeed the best science fiction stories, are about the connections that people make with each other through science. Reaching into the past to better understand history, sending a message or warning to prior generations or just having the opportunity for a do-over. For more than a century, readers have been enthralled by time travel stories. Whether adventurous, cautionary, or thrilling, these imaginative what-if tales transport us to other worlds.

Today, time travel is as familiar a concept to readers as space travel. Such stories are more popular than ever, including such recent bestsellers as Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife attest. The resurgence of iconic TV series like “Doctor Who” has fed into this trend. Time travel also has been popular with teens ever since the publication of such classics as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, extending to the present-day and such popular youth novels as When You Reach Me by Newberry winner Rebecca Stead. Meanwhile, movies like The Terminator, Back to the Future, Looper, Time Bandits, Donnie Darko, and Safety Not Guaranteed have shown the cinematic range of such tales.

The power of a great time travel story is that not only can it change the reader, as we see with Dr. Mallett, it can also change the course of the world.

* This post originally appeared in the March 17, 2014 newsletter.

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All Roads Lead To Galactic Rome

July 5, 2016May 10, 2024torforge

Written by Claudia Christian and Morgan Grant Buchanan

And here we are in the south of the city on the Via Appia, at the foot of the Caelian hill. We’re going to travel clockwise around the city, finishing at the Colosseum, where we’ll board a shuttle for the last part of the tour. Note the elegant channels of light-emitting crystal that infuse the marble beneath our feet.

Now look up. See the aer chariots, divans, and palanquins? The wealthier classes don’t frequent the streets. The people milling about us in cheap togas are the plebeian classes who manage the storefronts. Over there in the segregated pedestrian lanes? Barbarian slaves. Don’t worry, they won’t attack you. They’re trained captives from a hundred conquered worlds, carrying out their masters’ tasks. The ones that can’t be trained, like that scaled Ichthyophagi in a cage, end up in an arena where their ferocity can entertain the public. See that small white body hefting a power cell? The thing with the large red eye in the center of its forehead? That’s an Iceni. And there, the massive blue-skinned, bull-like creature carrying its master’s trunk? That’s a Taurii. They’re strong and brave but in the end, every last one of them knelt before our golden eagle.

Okay, climb aboard the tour palanquin and we’ll take a leisurely cruise above the city. Hold onto the rail. Up we go. Make note of the seven sacred hills as we pass by. There are eight major houses and although each one rules its own galactic province, their administrative headquarters are located here in Rome, one house per hill. What about the imperial family? Since there are eight houses but only seven hills, Mother Earth herself is considered the emperor’s “hill”.

There, beside the Aventine, is the Circus Maximus, where the essedarii races are underway. They’ve had two-dozen fatalities this season. The leather reins the drivers wrap about their forearms allow them to manipulate the chariots’ anti-gravity engines but also ensure that even the slightest error results in the charioteer being dragged to death.

Of course, you recognize the ancient buildings of the Forum. There’s the Senate House and the majestic Arch of Septimius Severus. Admire the countless classical buildings of the city. Yes, they’ve been restored many times over thousands of years to preserve their historic integrity. You’ll be pleased to hear that even the most experimental architects are never permitted to dilute the city’s traditional style. To the west there’s the sacred Tiber river and to the north the sky-scraping Palladium, the giant statue of the city’s protectress Minerva, spear held aloft, ready to strike down any threat.

Hold onto your rail! That alarm means someone is violating the aerway safety laws. Everyone look to your right, as we approach the Colosseum. No, ignore the girl on the aer chariot to our left. She’s flying outside the demarcated lanes. It’s outrageous, not to mention extremely dangerous. The Praetorian guard will deal with her, I assure you. Yes, I know who she is. She’s been on the local vox populi network lately. Accala Viridius Camilla. The green and gold robes mark her as a member of House Viridian. The Viridians are an ancient family, headstrong and proud, but their protracted conflict with House Sertorian has left them all but broken.

The girl? She was in the news for all the wrong reasons. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but her mother and brother were killed in a Sertorian bombing attack and ever since she’s been pestering the Senate to let her join the legion and fight. Imagine that, a woman soldier? Equality of the sexes? The young have no sense. Next, they’ll be demanding we make citizens of the barbarians! When she didn’t get her way, Accala became a common gladiator, so she could fight against Sertorians in the arena. They call her Lupa She-Wolf. What must her father think?

Now, let’s get back on track. Behold the Colosseum!Rising up around the ancient arena are what we call the four horns–the towers that contain the city’s greatest ludi–gladiator training schools. As you know, the Viridians and Sertorians have gathered allied houses to their sides and are engaged in a civil war. The emperor, in his infinite wisdom, has declared that the upcoming Ludi Romani, the great games of Jupiter, shall be used to decide the winner of the conflict. The houses are fighting the final qualifying rounds to see who’ll be on the final teams. That’s why it’s swarming with fans down there. Seats for those matches are sold out but we can watch the giant-sized holographic projections of the matches in the air above the arena.

Who’s fighting in the next round? The girl who nearly ran us down in the traffic? No, I wouldn’t think so. Oh, you’re correct. It seems she was on her way to a fight. Yes, it says here she’s been denied a place on her family team but has found a loophole—she’s set to battle her own trainer to try out for a place with House Calpurnian’s Black Ravens. But we’re not really here to watch the gladiator fights. Let’s move on before the crowds start to leave. The traffic’s bad enough as it is.

Okay, now that we’ve landed, please exit the palanquin and board the shuttle, we’ll be leaving Mother Earth’s atmosphere in a few minutes.

Here we go. The last thing on our list is the Spatium Portus. Big, isn’t it? Most of you would have arrived at space port from your home province in a deceres class transport but I bet you never saw the rogues dock. Here private mercenaries and deep-space explorers hire themselves out to mining companies. Others are fortune hunters or religious missionaries prepared to head beyond the safety of the Barbaricum Wall into the uncivilized regions of the galaxy.

Why go home to a boring old life in the provinces? Anyone want to sign on with a rogue ship before we head back to the city? I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, it might sound exciting, but they have an even shorter life expectancy than chariot drivers. And don’t take what I said about the provinces to heart, there’s still hope for you, because however far you travel beyond the centre of civilization, we have a saying–all roads lead to Rome. Somehow, you’ll always find your way back here, to the jewel of the empire, to her marble streets and the Palladium’s ever-watchful gaze. Thank you for choosing Olympian Travel Tours.

No, I don’t know the outcome of the gladiator fights and I don’t really care what happened to the Viridian girl, unless the Praetorians ask me to stand as a witness against her for violating traffic law, which I’ll gladly do. I’m a tour guide, not a sports commentator. If you want to know what happened to her you’ll have to go and look it up yourself.

Follow Claudia Christian and Morgan Grant Buchanan on Twitter, and keep up with Claudia and Morgan on their websites.

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Interplanetary Airfaring Technology of the Nineteenth Century

July 5, 2016May 10, 2024torforge4 Comments

Written by David D. Levine

My novel, Arabella of Mars, takes place in an alternate 1814 in which the solar system is full of air and you can travel to other planets by sailing ship. How could this possibly work? I spent a lot of time during the development of the book working out how interplanetary travel might be accomplished using the technology of the Napoleonic Wars.

The first challenge is getting into orbit from the Earth’s surface. Given that the atmosphere extends into space, you can do this with a hot-air balloon—but, without propane or similar high-energy-density fuels, it would be difficult to carry enough fuel. I worked around this by giving the ship a boost of exceptionally hot air from ground-based furnaces, which is then kept warm with coal for the rest of the ascent. Eventually you reach orbit, where you are in a state of “free descent,” and you can deflate and fold the balloon envelopes.

Once you’re in orbit, how do you navigate? Despite pictures you may have seen of fanciful 19th-century airships, there’s no point in putting sails on a lighter-than-air craft. A balloon is, in effect, a giant sail already: it moves with the wind. Adding more sails doesn’t change that appreciably, nor would sails allow you to change course or speed. The only reason a sailing ship of the sea can travel in a direction other than with the wind is that it has a keel, embedded in a different medium.

Furthermore, if space is full of air, there would be a general flow of wind due to the Earth’s motion around the sun… and when I say “general flow of wind” I mean a planet-scouring gale, because the Earth’s orbital speed is 67,062 miles per hour. To avoid this, Mary Robinette Kowal suggested that the interplanetary atmosphere (which she called the “cosmic tide”) moves around the sun at the same speed as the planets, while each planet’s atmosphere moves at the planet’s own rotational speed. This implies some really complex and nasty weather where the two atmospheres grind against each other, an area which I eventually named “the Horn.”

After considerable thought and discussion with like-minded geeks, I decided that the complexity of the weather at the Horn was the key to navigation. Once in this zone of chaotic winds, you simply find an air current that is going in the direction you want and put yourself into it. To move the ship from one current to another I invented “propulsive sails,” or “pulsers”—a pusher propeller of wood and canvas, built like a Greek windmill, driven by the crew using bicycle-like pedals. In this world you can always tell an aerial sailor by his enormous calves and thighs.

So once you are in orbit, you strike all sails to reduce air resistance (except for the fore-and-aft sails—spinnakers and spankers—which are used for steering and to keep the ship from spinning counter to the rotating pulsers), pedal into a favorable air current, then set all sails to catch that wind. Then you can simply drift with the current until the next course change.

Of course, when you are floating in midair in free fall, you have the problem of figuring out where you are and how to get where you are going…but that’s a topic for another essay.

Follow David D. Levine on Twitter, on Facebook, and on his website.

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False Hearts’ San Francisco and Mana’s Hearth

June 6, 2016May 10, 2024torforge2 Comments

Written by Laura Lam

Imagine you live in this future.

The San Francisco in False Hearts rises from a bay that glows green at night from the algae farms. You take one of the many MUNI tunnels that burrow underneath the city, the glowing green light filtering through your train carriage, stinging your skin. When you reach your stop, you step onto mica-flecked pavement. There are no homeless people, palms out and eyes hungry. Poverty is one of those unfortunate aspects of a past best left forgotten. Orchard skyscrapers, filled with fruit trees and vegetable patches tower above you, woven among the tall residential housing. Every room in every house is fitted with a wall screen, with the ability to plug into a virtual reality that sometimes seems truer than the real thing. Every head is fitted with an auditory and ocular implant, able to stream data behind closed eyelids. When you sleep, you can choose to brainload more information directly into your cortex. When pent up emotions become too much, you may go to one of the many Zeal Lounges throughout the city and plug into the drug that lets you exorcise your darkest desires; you’ll come out of the trip refreshed, soporific, a little more tractable.

If you become sick or are injured, hospitals have everything you need. Nearly all diseases can be cured. Advanced prostheses, such as mechanical hearts, can be fitted easily. It’s all free. Leaving the hospital, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror. Gene therapy is helping, but you think the skin around your eyes looks a little loose. You walk into one of the many flesh parlors scattered through the city and tighten things up for about the price of a coffee. You walk back to your home, order your dinner from the replicator, not even noticing all the many camera drones watching your every move. You look out across the glowing bay to a patch of darkness—the redwoods where the cult of Mana’s Hearth stands.

Someone else lives there, among the tall trees instead of skyscrapers. They know nothing of implants, of the great wide world out there. They know only of the Mana-mas who have led them over the years, told them what is right and good. They know only that small patch of land, surrounded by an impassable swamp. Perhaps things seem simpler there. No noisy clamor of data, no flashing ads vying for their attention every spare moment. You’ve heard they meditate a lot out there, and raise their voices to the rafters of their wooden church during service. Yet you’ve also heard that if someone grows ill or is hurt, rudimentary herbal medicine is all that is offered. If that fails, or if the person requires surgery or advanced medical help, then the members of the Hearth must bow to the will of the Creator and either survive or rejoin the Cycle of the Universe.

You wonder if anyone on that side of the bay would want to leave, if they somehow found out about the world outside. You wonder how easy it would be, and what they would think of this San Francisco, if they made it here.

Find out more about Laura Lam on Twitter at @LR_Lam and on her website.

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What Are You Fighting For?

June 6, 2016May 10, 2024torforge1 Comment

Written by Kameron Hurley

When I die, I want to leave behind an exceptional body of narrative. To do that requires a dedication to creating novels and essays and stories at a clipped pace. I get asked a lot about how I find the time to write, which is a little like asking someone how they have the time to raise children. If it matters, you find the time. Sometimes you aren’t great at it, though, just as sometimes the best you can say is that you’re the world’s OK-est parent. But there are days when you’re the best, too, when you feel like you’re the most accomplished person in the world, and no one has parented quite like you have. And then there are the days your kids drive you nuts, and you feel so overwhelmed that you lock yourself in the bathroom and sob.

Yes, writing is a lot like that.

We’re all fighting some kind of battle. Life itself is a game that none of us are going to win. It’s just not set up that way. We have to decide what to do with the time we’re given.

I’ve chosen to write.

Charles Bukowski once wrote, “Find what you love and let it kill you,” and this is something I think about when I’m not writing. I think about it when I see my reflection in the Netflix loading screen. I think of it when I’m playing video games, tapping some keys to kill hordes of fake digital objects in exchange for fake digital goods. I think of it while scrolling through the reams of outrageous things people say on Twitter. My day job is in marketing and advertising, and so I’m keenly aware that we have built a society that would prefer that we consume content instead of create it. Consumption has always been easier than creation. But I want to leave more behind me than a series of unfulfilling temp jobs and a top score on Angry Birds.

We are each awarded a finite amount of time. For me, it will be shorter than most. I have a chronic illness, which is mostly invisible, but I know it will get me eventually. It inspires me to type a little faster. Probably too fast. But when I consider what else I’d rather be doing with the time given, I can’t come up with any alternatives.

It is this type of work, this work that you must carve out time for, work that is worth giving up so much for, that should be the work that kills you. It should be the work you are engaged in with your last breath. None of us will wish on our deathbed that we had spent more time answering work email. But it requires fighting. Not just against a society that would rather we consume, but against our own negative self-talk, our own internalized negging.

But our life’s work is worth fighting for.

So what will you fight for? What do you want to die doing?

Go and do that, because life is shorter than your Netflix queue.

Follow Kameron Hurley on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

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