On your blog, you recently posted a list of “Random Words I Kinda Love,” including Hacienda, Spyglass, and Waistcoat. What do you look for in a word? Is it the sound? The meaning? Mouth feel? Associations? And likewise for “Random Words I Hate”.
Meaning first, of course. Rhythm is next in importance (partially mouth feel and sound), then associations. I love the musicality of hacienda, just as I love the period that spyglass and waistcoat evoke. They’re such proper words, so ornate, and they conjure up images of polished brass and places to go. Wendigo has such a great rhythm and it sounds wonderful when spoken with an Australian accent (something happens to the “o” that makes it even more strange than it already is). Egypt is a word I love to write, physically, with pen and paper. All those loops connected in cursive — try it. It’s such a fun word to write down.
And, yes, the same random rules apply for words I hate. Moist sounds like someone smacking while chewing their food, and the images it evokes are always gross. I use ‘moist’ in stories if I want the character to seem disgusting or sleazy (if only to me!) As a child, I hated tummy because I thought it sounded babyish and stupid — and I still do. I will use the words I hate, almost as much as the words I love, but when I do it’s nearly always to make the characters seem uglier, more disgusting, more repellent than they would otherwise be.
What’s next for you?
I’ve recently won a grant from Arts SA, which has bought me almost a year of full-time writing time to complete my first novel, The Familiar. This is the first book in a dark fantasy trilogy focusing on witches and lunatic shapeshifters in the city of Stokenveld. There’s magic! Dead cats! Did I mention the shapeshifting lunatics? Meanwhile, finishing Midnight and Moonshine is also a top priority. Later this year, I’m heading up to Toronto for the World Fantasy Convention — and it’ll be great to meet some of you there.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.
2011 Reader’s Poll Results
Neil Clarke
The results from our 2011 Reader’s Poll have been tabulated and your feedback gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Without further ado, I give you this year’s winners:
COVER ART
THIRD PLACE
(TIE, listed in order of appearance)
Nautili
by Julie Dillon
The Towers of KEILAH
by Ferdinand Ladera
Off Road
by Facundo Diaz
SECOND PLACE
Planetary Alignment
by Julie Dillon
FIRST PLACE
A Sense of Importance
by Bryn Jones
FICTION
THIRD PLACE
Ghostweight
by Yoon Ha Lee
A Militant Peace
by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell
SECOND PLACE
Silently and Very Fast
by Catherynne M. Valente
FIRST PLACE
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
by E. Lily Yu
CONTEST
The winner of the contest for a signed hardcover copy of Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente is Pat Wyatt.
Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to everyone who participated!
About the Author
Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.
Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 66
Table of Contents
Sunlight Society
by Margaret Ronald
The Bells of Subsidence
by Michael John Grist
From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit
by Gary Kloster
The Romance of Ruins
by E. C. Ambrose
The Biker Chick Who Rides Her Own Bike: A Conversation with Nathan Long
by Jeremy L. C. Jones
Writing Is Magic: A Conversation with John R. Fultz
by Jeremy L. C. Jones
And Now for a Few Short Words from our Editor
by Neil Clarke
Dead Space Girl
Art by Sergio Diaz
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Sunlight Society
Margaret Ronald
When the Fourth Street biolab went up, I didn’t think of Casey right away. I was working in the far side of the complex, which meant I was one of about four hundred people who got to see the entire dome rise up off its foundations, rotate counterclockwise ninety degrees, and shoot up into the sky. My immediate reaction followed the same pattern as everyone else: first What the hell, then, just before a needle of light vaporized the biolab, Are those people up there?
I could hazard a guess at the second question; I’d gotten that far into the shadow organizations, even then. I knew enough to guess at the identities of some of the blurry shapes darting through the smoke, shapes that official press releases would call confabulation and that the conspiracists would call aliens or Muslims or Freemason-built androids. The shadow orgs had been sloppy that time; usually they didn’t like to be seen at their work, but there’d been so little warning that they’d had no choice but to break out the big guns. Literally, in this case.
But that wasn’t what came to mind as I stared up into the sky, the glare of that solar blast fading bit by bit from my retinas, my nethead links relating the intensity of that blast, the projected knock-on effects on the rest of the Niobe web, the first stirrings among the dataminers. Instead, I just thought Casey would love this. I kept coming back to that thought over the next few weeks, even after word got out about the low-rent terrorists who’d gotten so close to taking over the biolab that vaporizing the whole place was the only alternative. Even after the arrests started.
I still think it’s true.
Today marks the first time I’ve been allowed into the Albuquerque facility. My credentials have been checked and re-checked so many times that they could probably tell you the weight and density of my last three bowel movements. Even so, they’ve been cutting corners on security, just so they can get me in here.
I fully expect that within twenty years, someone will have figured out a way to install nethead technology in anyone regardless of individual brain structure. But until they do, I’m pretty much guaranteed work wherever I go. And there’s even fewer of us netheads with the proper security clearances to get into the Madison facility, let alone Albuquerque. I’m a valuable commodity.
The facility isn’t much to look at: any decent biolab would have more apparent security. My nethead links are telling me otherwise, though; streams and warnings buzz against my skull so hard I can almost feel my teeth rattle. It unnerves me in a way that Madison didn’t, and Madison’s where they keep the host site for the Niobe satellite web. Enough solar power to — well, to blow up a biolab, for instance — focused onto the energy collectors for five dozen countries, and it’s still less well protected than this place.
It’s cool and dark inside the guard shack, and the back of my neck prickles after the blazing heat outside. The guard’s got a laser sight wired into his left eye; the silver tracery of it fades into his pale complexion much more smoothly than the similar patterns on my own skin. He gestures to the marks while the machines verify my ID. “Looks nice.”
“Thanks.” It’s striking, or so the nethead PR department says. They claim that’s why they want my image for their publicity stills, not just to provide the illusion of diversity. Some days I
think they even believe it.
“Been here before?” The guard knows I haven’t — a glance at the screens could tell him as much and more — but sometimes courtesy trumps efficiency.
I shake my head. “I’ve been to Madison.”
“Madison, pfft.” He grins. “That’s nothing to what we got — ” He stops and turns red, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. I used to have that reaction, way back when I was sharing what I knew with Casey, when I tried to tell her that the comics we’d read were — well, not true, not close to true, but had some basis in reality.
“Got what?” I ask, as the computers spit out my ID and agree that yes, my fingers and retinas appear to be my own.
“Well, you know. Them.” He opens up the doors, and the flickering readouts in my periphery flare and scramble into new configurations. “The heroes.”
The official story of Casey and me is that we were kids together, grew apart, came back together, screwed around, and then split up for good once I realized how crazy she was. Both times it was the heroes that brought us together, the first time through the comics that had come out in the wake of Maxentius sightings and the rumors about the Sixth Seal group. We read them all, regardless of quality, lying on our backs in the vacant lot behind her house, ink on our fingers and intent discussions of whether Mistress Fivepoint could beat Jack o’the Green or if they’d just team up against Memetek. The second time it was because in my first months as a full nethead I learned so much about the shadow organizations, the reality behind all those rumors, and I could only think of one person I wanted to share that with — Casey, who could rattle off the Liberty League’s oath or Red Knight’s transformation mantra as easily as the Pledge of Allegiance.
Both times it was her head, or what was wrong with it, that split us up.
It’s a useful official version. But one thing you learn when you start getting involved in the shadow orgs is that the official version means very little. After all, none of them show up in any official version, except in the records of what didn’t happen, the plots that failed, the disasters averted.
Or, sometimes, in the lists of people who’ve disappeared.
The transport behind those metal doors takes me maybe eight floors down, with that bone-twitching stutter you only get from passing through negation fields. I don’t notice it; I’m too busy dealing with the sudden silence in my head. I can handle it — mental stability is one of the most important factors that they test for in determining nethead fitness — but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Particularly because the one link that does remain is the one that got implanted when I started working for the shadow orgs. For insurance, they told me. The Niobe GPS link.
I remember the Fourth Street biolab, and the back of my neck goes abruptly hot again.
When the doors open again, though, all thoughts of the world outside vanish. The visual input’s bad enough: between the scream of light on my right from what might be a laboratory and the dizzying drop twenty feet ahead of me, I can barely register mundane details like the polished-glass sheen of the floor, the central spindle of memory staves, the man waiting for me just to the side.
But all that’s nothing compared to the chatter of computers on every side, the information in patterns I’ve never seen before. It’s like being picked up from one set of rapids and dropped into another, and it takes all of my concentration not to drown.
The biggest difference is that there’s not much trace of nethead work. It’s tradition to leave our marks on the usernodes, stegans encoded into the streams of data like graffiti in a canal, but here there’s only two: Klaatu Barada Nikto! from the designer of the Niobe web, and Welcome to Olympus (plus a handy map) from a woman who’s now on permanent detail with the Secret Service. If this were a normal job, I’d be tempted to add my own mark to the tabulae, but right now I don’t trust what I’d leave.
A permanent link unscrolls with the boxy look of official work. IN RESIDENCE: Kazemusha/Lady Nettle/Oculus/Matthew Glendower/Maxentius . . . The list goes on, code names and real names (not that it matters which is which, this far in) and designations I’ve only seen in the most hidden records. Names to conjure with.
And finally I recognize the man who’s been standing just to the side of the entrance. They’ve sent the shining face of the org to meet me.
He’s just like Casey and I always imagined, resplendent in ivory and gold, and while he doesn’t have the red cape the comics gave him, I get the sense he’d like one. Barrel chest, brilliant smile, voice with enough bonhomie for a tri-state area. “Bit overwhelming, eh?” Maxentius says
“A bit,” I agree weakly.
“It does that to me too, sometimes.” No it doesn’t, I think, but he’s not talking about the information overload. He gestures to the vista behind him: dozens of circular floors leading off a central shaft, lifts and elevators between for those who can’t just fly. “This sight — when I tire of it, then I’ll know the skein of my days has run out. Good to meet you, Seth.” He clasps my hand and shakes it vigorously.
“Good to meet you.” I’ve read papers on how much force that hand can exert, how many diamonds it can crush into powder.
“And you’re here to see Glendower. Splendid.” He turns and strides forward across the gleaming floor. I follow, and if it looks like I’m not gawking, that’s because I’m only doing so in my head. Of the levels I can see, some are sterile white and glassed in; some hold weapons and implements I can only guess at; a few look inhabited, homes for those who can’t or won’t stay outside in the world they claim to protect. A blur on the next floor up, across from us, resolves into a sparring match between two figures I’ve only heard rumors of, and even then I have to slow the visual down by a factor of ten to get a glimpse.
At the far end of the walkway, Maxentius glances over his shoulder. “Come along, lad! Mustn’t keep him waiting!”
Of all the members of the shadow organizations, Maxentius has read too much of his own press. He really does talk like a comic book; ‘lad’ is nothing to worry about.
Still, it bothers me, and not just because I can remember one too many cops calling my father ‘boy’ on one too many late-night drives.
There are some things I know for sure about Casey: she loved superhero comics; she didn’t keep in touch with her family after graduating; she wrote pamphlets for the Oakland Anti-Gnosis society; she couldn’t keep a job for more than six months at a time; she could make fantastic biscuits out of damn near any ingredients she had at hand. When her parents moved away the first time, when we were in school, it was because the first round of mandatory testing had come through. I was on the track to being a fully-functional nethead; Casey had tested positive for a number of dysfunctions, including predisposition to schizophrenia.
There are things I wonder about — whether the chemical imbalances in her brain were caused by her father’s exposure to some of the nastier weapons of the Second Chinese War, whether she knew what a risk I was taking associating with her, whether we should have gone ahead and slept together after all.
There are things I’ve been told about her in the wake of Fourth Street, about her mental state and the company she kept. These are things I will never believe about her.
Maxentius leads me around one side of the silo shaft, through what looks like a trophy room (it’s not, according to the nethead stegans). He’s rapidly figured out that I’m not listening to him, but that doesn’t stop him; in fact, I think he’s taken it as license to ramble on.
I catch a glimpse of someone I think is Pale Rider down one hallway. If it is him, that means this particular shadow organization has gone global. Most of them have; a few nationalists cling to their identity in places like Turkmenistan and France, and somehow I’d always assumed the U.S. shadow orgs would be the same way.
Of course, they have the Niobe web. That automatically makes them global; I’ve got the reminder in my skull if I ever forget that.
We walk past cases holding remnant
s of past work, plots unraveled, events that were hushed up and now only remain as a footnote to history. Still talking, Maxentius gestures vaguely at what looks like a giant pair of shears. “. . . didn’t tell us that the phase shift had affected only half of her, and the other half was stuck in another dimension entirely!” He chuckles, and I remember to smile. “Down this way. Glendower, are you there?”
A gray-haired man in a white shirt and bow tie — there’s even a tweed jacket, the kind with the elbow patches, tossed over a chair — waves back without looking. He’s talking to a woman I don’t recognize. I wouldn’t know her if we met on the street; I’d only know her if she wore her mask. She folds up her clipboard, nods to Maxentius, and fades into invisibility with a faint scent of calla lilies.
Glendower’s in his late fifties but looks older. He walks with a cane, and while he doesn’t have the same build as Maxentius, he’s not a small man either. His gray hair is still thick, but there are autofocusing spectacles perched on his nose, and when he pulls a chair over and sinks into it, it’s clear that standing for so long was a strain for him. He’s the one who pushed through my security clearance, since the virus affected the orgs’ datalogs and he’s the one who has to work with them. Bookkeeper to the gods. “Well, Mr. Carson, what do you think of our little home?”
“It’s amazing,” I say, truthfully, and then a touch of the perverse prompts me to add, “if a little rough on visitors.”
To my surprise, it’s not Glendower who answers, but Maxentius. “The price of our work,” he says with a regretful sigh. Maxentius doesn’t hide his feelings much; the man’s all surface, glossy and deep as a four-color page spread. “These days, to defend the innocent requires one to have a home of which all are innocent.” He sees my expression and shakes his head. “I assure you, lad, we’re all on the same side here. We are protectors of the world we love, sworn to defend it.”
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 15