Conservation of Shadows
Page 33
The setting was loosely inspired by the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the subway ride owes something to the years I spent riding Seoul’s subways. I went back there a little while ago and was impressed at how much better it had gotten, but maybe it was because I wasn’t traveling during rush hour, when I used to have to wedge my way through the crowd with my viola case. A viola or violin (in a hard case) is about the right size for this job, by the way. A guitar would probably work too.
I still don’t know how I feel about asymmetrical warfare, on the grounds that if you’re a much weaker opponent, running up to the enemy in a full frontal assault just seems stupid, but on the other hand, there has to be some limit to what you can ethically get away with. I guess I will think about it some more.
“Conservation of Shadows”
This is what happens when (a) you fall in love with “The Descent of Inanna” in 8th grade, because there’s a Mesopotamian unit in World History and the teacher tells you about Inanna so you look her up in the school library, and (b) you watch your husband play Portal. I loved the voice-acting and the writing for that game, although I have still never played it because I am convinced the puzzles would kill me. I mean, beyond the fact that they start being lethal to your character.
I have this thing where I can dial prose up or I can dial prose down. Or I can pastiche someone. I am a style sponge, which makes me picky about what I read while I’m working on a long project, because as much as I adore Simon R. Green, it’s weird when my words come out that way when I’m working on a story that wants to be non-Green-like. For this one I dialed it up, which I usually avoid doing. There is always the danger of overwhelming the material with tinsel and I am already prone to that fault, but it’s worth doing once in a while.
Publication History
“Ghostweight” first appeared in Clarkesworld, January 2011.
“The Shadow Postulates” first appeared in Helix, June 2007.
“The Bones of Giants” first appeared in F&SF, August 2009.
“Between Two Dragons” first appeared in Clarkesworld, April 2010.
“Swanwatch” first appeared in Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams, 2009.
“Effigy Nights” first appeared in Clarkesworld, January 2013.
“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” first appeared in Lightspeed, September 2010.
“Iseul’s Lexicon” appeared for the first time in this collection.
“Counting the Shapes” first appeared in F&SF, June 2001.
“Blue Ink” first appeared in Clarkesworld, August 2008.
“The Battle of Candle Arc” first appeared in Clarkesworld, October 2012.
“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” first appeared in Tor.com, August 2011.
“The Unstrung Zither” first appeared in F&SF, March 2009.
“The Black Abacus” first appeared in F&SF, June 2002.
“The Book of Locked Doors” first appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2012.
“Conservation of Shadows” first appeared in Clarkesworld, August 2011.
About the Author
Yoon Ha Lee is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.