Clarkesworld: Year Six
Page 56
They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.
In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.
This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic, they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.
Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.
You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.
“I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”
To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.
About the Authors
Erik Amundsen has been removed from display for being zoologically improbable and/or terrifying to small children. He has been sighted in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us and Jabberwocky but his natural habitat is central Connecticut.
Helena Bell is a poet and writer living in Raleigh, NC. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Upgraded: A Cyborg Anthology, The Dark, and the Indiana Review.
Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over fifty short stories have been translated into seventeen languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.
Suzanne Church juggles her time between throwing her characters to the lions and chillin’ like a villain with her two sons. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror because she enjoys them all and hates to play favorites. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Cicada and On Spec, and in several anthologies including Urban Green Man and When the Hero Comes Home 2. Her collection of short fiction, Elements is available at bookstores and Amazon from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.
Gwendolyn Clare resides in North Carolina, where she tends a vegetable garden and a flock of backyard ducks and wonders why she ever lived in the frozen northlands. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Daily Science Fiction, among others. Despite the siren lure of writing anything other than her dissertation, she recently completed a PhD in mycology. She can be found online at gwendolynclare.com.
Tom Crosshill’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Latvian Annual Literature Award, and has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the Intergalactic Medicine Show. After some years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, worked in a zinc mine and co-founded a salsa school, among other things.
Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. His fiction has appeared in publications and anthologies including Asimov’s and Apex Magazine, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (St. Martin’s Press), Aliens: Recent Encounters (Prime Books) and Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond (Rosarium Publishing). He is a grateful graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award to attend the former. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia and is currently in Vancouver working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, critic, TV extra, game tester, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood. He is represented by Sally Harding of the Cooke Agency. Follow him on Twitter @IndrapramitDas.
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in a flat in Paris, France: she has a day job as a System Engineer, and doubles as a speculative fiction writer by night. Her stories have appeared in Interzone, Lightspeed and the Year’s Best Science Fiction, and have won a Nebula, Locus and British Science Fiction Association Award. Her latest release is the space opera novella On a Red Station Drifting, a Nebula, Hugo and Locus Award finalist. Visit http://www.aliettedebodard.com for recipes, fiction and rants.
Peter M. Ferenczi has written extensively about technology for national magazines and the web, sometimes as a cheerleader, sometimes as a catcaller and concerned citizen of the world. He writes speculative fiction in the hope that he may infect others with the bone-deep reading addiction that’s plagued him since he resolved the alphabet into words.
Born in California, he’s drifted east over the years and now resides in France. Along the way he acquired a couple of degrees, a love of photography and a taste for travel. He lives in Paris with his wife and daughter.
Michael John Grist is a science fiction & fantasy author and ruins photographer who lives in Tokyo, Japan. His stories can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and Andromeda Spaceways, and he is currently writing an epic fantasy novel. He runs a website featuring his writing and photographs of the ruins or ‘haikyo’ of Japan; filled with dark short stories and matching images of abandoned theme parks and ghost towns. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/michaelgrist.
Kij Johnson is the author of three novels and a number of short stories, a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (including in 2010, for her Clarkesworld story, “Spar”), and a winner of the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Crawford, and Asimov’s Reader Awards.
Rahul Kanakia is a science fiction writer who has sold stories to Clarkesworld, the Intergalactic Medicine Show, Apex, Nature, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He holds a Master of the Fine Arts program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in Economics from Stanford, and he works as a consultant in the international development field. If you want to know more about him then please visit his blog at http://www.blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/rahkan.
David Klecha is a writer and Marine combat veteran currently living in West Michigan with his family and assorted computer junk. He works in IT to pay the bills, like so many other beginning writers and artists.
Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial arts instructor, and stay-at-home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Escape Pod. He has a short story forthcoming in Apex Magazine, and a Pathfinders Tale novel forthcoming with Paizo Press.
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He is a winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.
Alexander Lumans was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction has appeared in Story Q
uarterly, Gulf Coast, Daily Science Fiction, Cincinnati Review, and The Normal School, among others. He has been awarded fellowships/scholarships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, ART342, Norton Island, RopeWalk, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He received the 2013 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, 3rd place in the 2012 Story Quarterly Fiction Contest, and the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review. He is co-editor of the anthology Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days (Upper Rubber Boot Books). He graduated from the M.F.A. Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a doctoral candidate in sociology and a writer–like object whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, as well as multiple Year’s Best anthologies, all of which has provided lovely reasons to avoid a dissertation. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co–written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. Their solo–authored novel Crowflight is available from Masque Books.
Mari Ness has always loved to watch things shoot up into the sky. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Goblin Fruit. She can be followed on Twitter as mari_ness. She lives in central Florida.
An (pronounce it "On") Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.
Ben Peek is the Sydney based author of Black Sheep, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Above/Below with Stephanie Campisi. His most recent books are the collection Dead Americans and Other Stories and fantasy novel, The Godless. He can be found at theurbansprawlproject.com.
His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including anthologies and magazines such as Paper Cities, Polyhony, Leviathan, Forever Shores, Overland, Aurealis, and in numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He has a doctorate in literature and has published reviews and criticism, a psychogeographical pamphlet, and an autobiographical comic, Nowhere Near Savannah, which was illustrated by Anna Brown. His collection, Dead Americans, is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications.
Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over two-hundred shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella A Billion Eves. He is currently working on a Great Ship trilogy for Prime Books, and of course, more short pieces.
Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.
Sofia Samatar is a fantasy writer, poet, and critic, and a PhD student in African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies twentieth-century Egyptian and Sudanese fiction, and is writing a dissertation on the uses of fantasy in the works of the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih. Sofia’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places, including Ideomancer, Expanded Horizons and Strange Horizons. Her poetry can be found at Stone Telling, Bull Spec and Goblin Fruit, among others; one of her poems was reprinted in the anthology The Moment of Change. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria, was published by Small Beer Press in 2013.
Chris Stabback is an undersized moss giant who plays music, writes words, and cares for miniature humans. Chris lives in an ailing 1920s flat in Sydney, the interior of which is illuminated with distressing regularity by the flash of the red light camera outside. More information can be found at chrisstabback.com.
Sarah Stanton grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Halfway through university, she abandoned a promising career in not having much of a career when she transferred from an opera performance course into a Chinese language major, having fallen for the Middle Kingdom more or less overnight. Three ecstatic years cheating lung cancer in Beijing later, she has settled in San Francisco as a freelance translator, editor, and writer. Her work has appeared in a variety of international journals, including Clarkesworld, Going Down Swinging, and Cha, and she was shortlisted for the 2011 James White Award. Find her online at http://www.theduckopera.com.
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama. His other novels include the Bookman Histories trilogy, The Violent Century and A Man Lies Dreaming, and comics mini-series Adler. He has a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella for Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God and a BSFA Award for non-fiction and is the prolific author of many other novellas and short stories.
E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first novel is now available. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, http://www.ecatherine.com.
Catherynne M. Valente is The New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
Carrie Vaughn is the author of The New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, the most recent installment of which is Kitty in the Underworld. Her most recent novel is the superhero story Dreams of the Golden Age. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of seventy short stories. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
As an undergraduate, Ms. Xia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis, “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” Currently, she’s pursuing a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University and chose “Chinese Science Fiction and Cultural Politics since 1990s” as the topic of her dissertation. She has been publishing science fiction and fantasy since 2004 in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. Besides writing and translating science fiction stories, she also writes fi
lm scripts and teaches science fiction writing. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Ms Xia’s surname is listed first on this story.)
Clarkesworld Citizens
Official Census
We would like to thank the following Clarkesworld Citizens for their support:
Overlords
L A George, Renan Adams, Claire Alcock, Thomas Ball, Michael Blackmore, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Shawn Boyd, Jennifer Brozek, Karen Burnham, Barbara Capoferri, Morgan Cheryl, Gio Clairval, Neil Clarke, Dolohov, ebooks-worldwide, Sairuh Emilius, Lynne Everett, Joshua Faulkenberry, Fabio Fernandes, Thomas Fleck, Eric Francis, Bryan Green, Andrew Hatchell, Berthiaume Heidi, Bill Hughes, Gary Hunter, Theodore J. Stanulis, Marcus Jager, Jericho, jfly, jkapoetry, Lucas Jung, James Kinateder, Daniel LaPonsie, Susan Lewis, Philip Maloney, Paul Marston, Matthew the Greying, Gabriel Mayland, MJ Mercer, Achilleas Michailides, Adrian Mihaila, Adrien Mitchell, Overlord Mondragon, MrMovieZombie, Mike Perricone, Jody Plank, Rick Ramsey, Jo Rhett, Joseph Sconfitto, Marie Shcherbatskaya, Tara Smith, David Steffen, Elaine Williams, James Williams, Doug Young
Royalty
Paul Abbamondi, Albert Alfiler, Raymond Bair, Kathryn Baker, Nathan Blumenfeld, Marty Bonus, David Borcherding, Robert Callahan, Lady Cate, Richard Chappell, Carolyn Cooper, Tom Crosshill, Michael Cullinan, Mr D F Ryan, Sky de Jersey, David Demers, Cory Doctorow, Brian Dolton, Alexis Goble, Hilary Goldstein, Carl Hazen, Andy Herrman, Kristin Hirst, Colin Hitch, Victoria Hoke, Christopher Irwin, Mary Jo Rabe, Lukas Karl Barnes, G.J. Kressley, Jeffrey L Lewis, Jamie Lackey, Jonathan Laden, Katherine Lee, H. Lincoln Parish, David M Oswin, Sean Markey, Arun Mascarenhas, Barrett McCormick, Kevin McKean, Margaret McNally, Michelle Broadribb MEG, Nayad Monroe, James Moore, Anne Murphy, Persona Non-Grata, Charles Norton, Vincent O’Connor, Vincent P Loeffler III, Marie Parsons, Lars Pedersen, David Personette, George Peter Gatsis, Matt Phelps, Gary Piserchio, Lord Pontus, Ian Powell, Rational Path, RL, John Scalzi, Stu Segal, Maurice Shaw, Angela Slatter, Carrie Smith, Paul Smith, Richard Sorden, Chugwangle Sparklepants, Kevin Standlee, Neal Stanifer, Josh Thomson, TK, Terhi Tormanen, Jeppe V Holm, Sean Wallace, Jasen Ward, Weyla & Gos, Graeme Williams, Jeff Xilon, Zola