A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  Olivia nods. “Well, it’s your funeral. Except, of course, it’s not just yours. It’s also mine. It’s everyone’s. And we’re running out of time.”

  It’s the kind of threat she loves to make, and the kind that Cameron is used to ignoring. Only this time, he can’t help noticing that Olivia’s words are accompanied by a number of silent alarms from the software inside her. Her heart rate, elevated above normal. Her cortisol levels, spiking. And something else: the nervous click-click-click as she taps one bionic finger against the other, over and over.

  “You seem stressed,” Cameron says.

  Olivia smiles thinly. “Do I.”

  She ushers him through the doorway, lifting a finger to her temple as she does. The lights in the room dim, and the far wall disappears, replaced by a deep, dark void punctured by faint pinpricks of light. He’s looking at a star system—a familiar one. He’s seen this image before, in this same room, months ago. Only something has changed. The last time he was here, a single bright star hovered near the center of the system.

  That star is missing.

  Cameron’s skin starts to crawl.

  Olivia’s bionic fingers click again, and the image changes.

  Cameron’s stomach drops.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Olivia ignores him.

  “As you know, it’s been difficult for us to monitor the ins and outs of the transit system that the Inventor and Xal used when they made their journeys to Earth. Even now, we don’t truly understand how it works. But Xal and her ship did contain galactic coordinates for certain junctures in the system—like an intersection or exit ramp, places we might expect a vessel on the same journey to pass through. The first image was captured at the farthest of those junctures.”

  Cameron stares at the screen.

  “And this one?”

  Olivia comes to stand beside him, gazing at the image of what once appeared to their eyes as one large star, burning quietly in the far reaches of outer space. But it’s not a star, and there’s not just one. There are dozens of points of light in this picture, all of them in motion, streaking through the blackness like meteors.

  But they’re not meteors, either.

  Even at a great distance, the curved silhouettes of the Ministry’s ships are unmistakable. They are coming, and with them comes a war.

  Olivia’s face is grim.

  “I hope you’re ready, Ackerson,” she says. “They’re almost here.”

  Afterword

  Over eight decades, Stan Lee sat down at his desk each morning to do the serious work of storytelling. Though his characters frequently manifested fantastical identities, inhabiting varied media and countless worlds—which have remained as relevant today as when he created them—what got Stan out of bed and into the office well into his nineties was the opportunity to broaden the Earth-bound minds of his readers. From the X-men, Stan’s proxy for the civil rights movement, to Black Panther, which provided a socially conscious vision for the future, to Silver Surfer’s meditations on the darkness that drives us, to conflicts in Vietnam and elsewhere, Stan saw the opportunity for his simple “what ifs” to pose much bigger questions about who we are and how we choose to live.

  We saw this magic taking shape firsthand.

  Years ago, Stan kindly invited us into his writer’s bullpen to co-create what would eventually become the Alliances universe, the first installment of which you have just read. Over the years that we worked with Stan, we had the great fortune of experiencing his writer’s room as the inspired—sometimes physical, sometimes virtual—place we’d imagined it to be when we were kids. Like many of you, we were avid fans of the fantastical yarns found in Stan’s comic books and of Stan’s “Soapbox” features at the back, each of which provided a peek behind the curtain at how our favorite storylines and characters came to be. Those insights demystified the writing process for us, and challenged us to embrace our own paths to storytelling. Like countless others drawn into Stan’s thrall, because of his work and his generous access to the collaborative nature of the writer’s community, we became lifelong readers . . . and writers.

  * * *

  How did the characters you’ve just met in A Trick of Light come to be? How did the tenacious, super-smart, and heroic Nia become both the protagonist and the antagonist of our novel?

  These are the kinds of questions Stan loved to answer—and that we loved to read—in his “Soapbox” features. The ideation process for Nia’s character hews closely to classic Stan character creation. Everyone who collaborated with Stan can tell some version of the moment that set off a complete Stan rewrite. And it always began with his declaration, “Hey, I’ve got an idea!” In the case of Nia, the magic happened like this:

  If you’ve ever seen photos of Stan sitting at the desk he occupied in an unassuming office building in sunny Southern California, you know that the workplace where Stan chose to spend his time was anything but unassuming. It featured a riot of color. Artwork of all kinds: paintings, prints, and mixed media thoughtfully arranged alongside merchandise and memorabilia representing Stan’s work, Stan’s own fandom, as well as objects given to him by friends and fans expressing their love of his creations. Looking around the room, your eyes might land on a movie poster for Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood or a lion figurine or pop artist Steve A. Kaufman’s painting of Stan facing off with the Amazing Spider-Man. And of course, there were also innumerable photos covering a wall behind Stan’s desk. Photos of Stan and his wife Joan and of Stan with countless celebrities and historically significant figures, each wearing an expression of delight to be standing with their hero. Exciting as it was to have time alone with Stan, no guest in that office could stop their eyes from wandering off to draw inspiration from the very ideas and people who inspired Stan.

  On that particular day, we were gathered in Stan’s office with Stan, POW! President Gill Champion, and our real-life-superhero literary agent, Yfat Reiss Gendell. By the luck of the draw, Yfat and Gill occupied a pair of sturdy club chairs that had been pulled over from the seating area, whereas we sat perched on mysteriously wobbly guest chairs, perhaps, we imagined, stress-tested during an especially lively writing session with Dr. R. Bruce Banner. The four of us faced the real Stan, who sat across from us, leaning forward with his elbows on his mammoth desk, the wall of faces looming behind him. “Let’s start with Cameron,” he suggested. “What do we think his power should be?”

  Tick, tick, tick, tick.

  Stan meant it as a rhetorical question and there was no analog second hand taunting us, of course. Stan was no more waiting for us to answer than we were waiting for him to come up with the whole thing on his own. And, yet, we wanted to impress him. Despite all of the professional work we had done, which had allowed us to be sitting across from him in the first place, we reverted to our younger fanboy selves. In our imagined movie version of this scene, every celebrity and several former presidents emerged from the photos behind Stan to taunt us, “What are you guys doing here, anyway?”

  “Right, we were thinking Cameron is like the opposite of Tony Stark, a kid who creates inventions that never work . . .” We rattled off examples of failed contraptions, alongside other traits and backstory details that would shape our male lead.

  Stan took this in.

  “Actually, let’s go back to the Inventor,” Stan suggested.

  Each of us turned to the front of our notebooks, flipping past the now-massive collection of story tidbits, character quirks, small and large twists of fate, and darkly funny plot points that would provide the flesh and bones of a whole new universe of characters.

  The Inventor was a character Stan had developed for the Alliances universe early on. He imagined that the scientist would serve as the enticing center of the plot and of all the action that followed. We’d discussed having this figure living in a world where technology had put its inhabitants in a kind of fugue state. In drawing our attention back to the Inventor Stan was nailing down the basic law
s governing the world in which the Inventor’s story would take place.

  “What kind of alien is he?”

  “How far away is his planet?”

  “How many people are on it?”

  “What’s the currency that they use on that world?”

  He was laser-focused and machine-gun fast.

  We threw out ideas that expanded on previous thoughts he’d expressed; Stan endorsed some, discarded others. When he’d heard enough, or when we’d simply taken things too far or too big or had strayed into details that he regarded as unnecessarily technical, he leaned forward, elbows back on the desk, and declared, “Ok, great. How about we make it simple?” And then he laid it out: “Earth is the closest planet to the Inventor and that’s why he lands here with his greatest weapon . . . People don’t care about all of that alien and computer stuff. It’s the characters. They care about them. Let’s get back to who they are.”

  Stan talked about the characters he considered great, many of which were represented in the room around us. He gave a quick lesson about what made Moriarty the perfect nemesis to Sherlock Holmes, made a passing reference to the elegant simplicity of Superman’s origin story (yes, that Superman), then brought us back to the work of assembling the characters who would inhabit the Alliances world. How they would relate to one another. He said, “There is always something menacing in the world. . . .” And, “It’s the people you care about. You want to see their relationship to the other people. If they are in a jam, how are they ever going to get out of it? How are they going to save themselves? It’s all about the people.”

  The jam, as it turned out, would be his master stroke in the creation of the world of Alliances and A Trick of Light. Though this fictional world would be artfully glazed with the near-future tech that enthralled him, Stan wanted the heart of the story to feel as human and familiar to readers as any friend or family member seated across the dinner table. Stan paused and considered these characters. We could see his eyes squinting slightly behind his iconic glasses. An idea was formulating. He raised his arm, draped in the green cardigan he favored, extended a slim, elegant, and powerful index finger to point not at us, but past us, as though the idea would free itself from the tip of his finger and hurl into the boundless sky behind us.

  “Now, I could be wrong here. But . . . What if . . .”

  Those two unmistakable words: “what if?” were responsible for countless complete story-arc pivots and so many of Stan’s most beloved characters. (What if a boy was bit by a radioactive spider? What if a scientist was exposed to Gamma Rays? What if a war monger became an armor-clad hero?) He’d figured it out.

  “What if . . . one of our main characters is both the hero and the weapon? And what if she is the Inventor’s A.I.?”

  We leaned in as he continued. “We’ve all seen computers take over the world, we’ve seen video games serving a bigger purpose, we all know about A.I.” His outstretched finger came back to rest on the table. “What we need to show the audience is something they haven’t seen before!”

  And with that, Stan created Nia. In less than the time it took to write this paragraph, Stan had centered the organizing principle of the entire Alliances universe in Nia, a pivotal character but also the embodiment of an essential question for any of us engaging in technology-enhanced modern living. Suddenly, we saw her vividly. Nia, strong, yet illusory: A trick of light.

  In his raspy, but still strong and unmistakably Stan voice, he said nonchalantly, “Good. Now that we got that licked, what else we got?”

  * * *

  In his introduction to this novel, Stan wrote, “What is more real? A world we are born into or one we create for ourselves?” In A Trick of Light, Stan posed this existential question—at once new and long-standing: are the avatars we choose for ourselves aspirational or self-indulgent illusion? In the new world of what may be authentic tech-generated interaction, Nia is a fully rendered, sentient, artificial being, who refuses to play the muse.

  With this, Stan returned to a classic building block of the superhero paradigm. Nia is her own alter ego, and perhaps a version of our future selves. Like so many of Stan’s works of fiction, A Trick of Light features characters bravely asking the questions on our minds as we move into an uncertain future.

  * * *

  Participating in Stan’s collaborative process, watching him bring this novel to life alongside the inimitable Kat Rosenfield, felt magical (and humbling, and illuminating . . .). It is a creative gift we each take with us.

  Like all great magicians, Stan made the impossible seem possible. And after years of effort, each a labor of love for Stan and this bullpen, we’re grateful to you for spending time in Stan’s gateway to what he hoped would be the first chapter of many to come.

  Ryan Silbert and Luke Lieberman

  Acknowledgments

  In a novel focused on connection in all of its forms, the following supporters served as the vital points of contact that made it possible to bring this legacy project to True Believers everywhere.

  Our sincere thanks to our agent Yfat Reiss Gendell of Foundry Literary + Media, whose lifelong passion for pop culture is unmatched and whose enthusiasm and care for this project unbounded.

  Our appreciation goes out to the entire Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment team, particularly Gill Champion, Rachel Long, Mike Kelly, Kim Luperi, Bob Sabouni, Grace Yeh, and to the late, great Arthur Lieberman, whose partnership with Stan and Gill set this project in motion. Additional thanks to the late Marc J. Silbert, our collaborator in spirit.

  We’re ever grateful to our visionary editor Jaime Levine at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books and Media, who bravely marched an early version of this manuscript into the offices of bosses who had met her only recently, convincing them all to champion the literary ambitions of an author and a team untested in traditional trade publishing. Her subsequent contribution as a passionate editor made this an immeasurably better book. To those trusting bosses, Ellen Archer, Bruce Nichols, and Helen Atsma, who read the words on the page before passing judgment, and who continued to support the project based on a personal love of story and a respect for the fans who voiced their enthusiasm on the long road to the release date. Many thanks to the entire HMH team, including editorial associate Rosemary McGuinness, senior vice president and associate publisher Becky Saikia-Wilson, senior vice president of publicity Lori Glazer, manager of publicity Michelle Triant, senior vice president of marketing Matt Schweitzer, marketing designer David Vargas, director of marketing Hannah Harlow, vice president of production Jill Lazer, managing editor Katie Kimmerer, senior director of manuscript editing and composition Laura Brady, copy editor Alison Miller, director of design Chloe Foster, designer Emily Snyder, interior designer Chrissy Kurpeski, lead production manager Rita Cullen, vice president of creative services Michaela Sullivan, director of creative services Christopher Moisan, lead designer Brian Moore, and jacket artist Will Staehle. This book could not get into the hands of fans without the enthusiasm and support of vice president of sales Ed Spade, vice president of sales Colleen Murphy, and the rest of the dedicated HMH sales team. Our ongoing thanks to vice president of subsidiary rights Debbie Engel and senior director of finance Dennis Lee, without whom we would still be grateful, but expressing that gratitude from the sofas of supportive friends and families.

  This project could not have come up at a lunch between our literary agent Yfat Reiss Gendell and our print and ebook editor Jaime Levine were it not for another lunch that took place several years earlier, between Yfat and Keith O’Connell, newly charged by Audible to develop innovative original audio projects for the long-tenured publishing veteran. Was Keith a Stan fan? Of course. But it was the favor she was certain to curry with sons Philip and Jim (thank you, gentlemen), for whom Stan’s cameos served as special mother-son touchstones, that caused her to pick up the red phone and create what became a truly first-of-its-kind original storytelling event with the help of visionary development executive Andy Gaes. This su
pport lives on in Cynthia Chu and Beth Anderson, and has expanded to be Audible’s first global original event with the help of Michael Treutler and Jessica Radburn. We’re grateful to our editor Steve Feldberg, who rolled up his sleeves and helped us smooth out some very rough edges. Thank you to Dave Blum for his ongoing support of the project. For this first-of-its-kind project planned for release under unique conditions, Audible was generous to include us in far more of their creative and release processes than any author would normally see, and for this we are grateful and humbled to observe the level of talent assembled under one roof. A special thanks to director of publicity Elena Mandelup and our project publicist Rosa Oh, along with director of marketing Sarah Moscowitz and marketing and art team Christian Martillo, Les Barbire, Amit Wehle, Tito Jones, Santoshi Parikh, Robyn Fink, Allison Weber, Kasey Kaufman, Georgina Thermos, Amil Dave, and Kathrin Lambrix. Our gratitude to Yara Shahidi for elevating this project with her thoughtful performance on the audiobook and to Lisa Hintelmann in talent acquisition. A thank you to our Audible international partners, including Lauren Kuefner, Katja Keir, Beverly See, Zack Ross, Sophia Hilsman, Esther Bochner, Manny Miravete, Tatiana Solera, Paulo Lemgrubber, Pablo Bonne, Arantza Zunzunegui Salillas, Francesco Bono, Massimo Brioschi, Dorothea Martin, Lukas Kuntazschokunow, Eloise Elandaloussi, Neil Caldicott, and Stephanie McLernon-Davies.

  Every superhero needs a solid HQ—so thank you to the team at Foundry Literary + Media for giving this project a place to hang its cape. A special thank you to Jessica Felleman for her editorial and contracts support, Klara Scholtz and Sasha Welm for their ongoing support, to controller Sara DeNobrega and assistant to the controller Sarah Lewis, a big thank you to foreign rights director Michael Nardullo and team members Claire Harris and Yona Levin, along with Foundry’s foreign coagent team at the Riff Agency, Abner Stein, Andrew Nurnberg, La Nouvelle Agence, Mohrbooks, Read n’ Right, Deborah Harris Agency, Italian Literary Agency, Tuttle Mori, KCC, Graal, MB Agencia, and Ackali Copyright. A thank you to director of Filmed Entertainment Richie Kern, along with special appreciation for the hard work of contracts director Deirdre Smerillo and team members Melissa Moorehead, Hayley Burdett, and Gary Smerillo.