Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  “My arms enfold you—until again.”

  Next instant the paper bird of Jintha struck—not the paving of the esplanade, but the vertical wall of the sea. Against the glass-painting ice blue holiness of it, the witnesses saw a vivid yet nonviolent flash, like an exploding pearl. From this, the most radiant yet translucent sparks poured away and melted into thin air. Harmless, silent, couth.

  Nothing remained then. Nothing at all.

  Everything.

  PINIONS

  The Authors

  Marie Brennan is the author of five novels and over thirty short stories. A Star Shall Fall, the third installment in her series of London-based historical faerie fantasies (following Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie), will be out from Tor Books this autumn.

  About “The Gospel of Nachash,” she has this to share: “One night, while out at dinner with a motley group of friends, I discovered that one fellow—a friend of my husband’s I’d never met before—was an Episcopal priest. Since he was also a folklore major in college, and I'm writing the Onyx Court books, I mentioned that I might want to pick his brain about the Church of England’s eighteenth-century theology, particularly with respect to faeries. This resulted in him telling me about how eighteenth-century priests, inspired by developments in astronomy, began speculating as to whether there was life on other planets…and whether that life had been saved by Jesus Christ, or whether they would need their own messiahs.

  “To which I said, ‘That makes me want to write about a faerie Christ.’

  “By the time my husband and I had driven home, I had the bones of the story, and a finished draft just over a month later. Many thanks to Rev. Devin McLachlan, my husband Kyle Niedzwiecki, Jessica Hammer, and Yonatan Zunger for helping me work out all my Old Testament/New Testament/Jewish Midrashim/faerie lore details. (For the record, this story is not background to the Onyx Court novels.)”

  * * *

  Tori Truslow was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Thailand, and studied in the UK. She has spent the last two years in Bangkok, working as writer-in-residence at an international school, directing experimental theatre, and researching for a novel. She travels as much as possible and could happily spend the rest of her life roaming the world, writing stories about stories about stories. You can find her online at http://toritruslow.com.

  About “Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day,” she tells us, “Despite falling in love with Andersen’s fairy tales as a young child, I never got on with the way the strange and magical world of ‘The Little Mermaid’ was funnelled into such a neat and didactic ending. When the seeds of this story’s world were planted—simultaneously by Shakespeare’s striking image of the ‘moist star’ and a collaborative exercise I ran for my old writing group—I knew at once that it was the setting I needed in which to try a new telling of the love between a mermaid and a man. A setting that would resist neat conclusions and morals; a situation that would resist straightforward sexuality.

  “This is a story of gaps and overlaps, written after reading too many tales (both fictional and academic) that demand to be read in just one direction.”

  * * *

  Georgina Bruce writes mainly speculative fiction. Her stories appear in various places, including Dark Tales, Expanded Horizons, and Strange Horizons.

  About the writing of her story in this volume, she says “‘Crow Voodoo’ is mysterious. I had the first sentence for a year, but no idea what it meant or what to do with it. But it kept whispering to me, and one night I sat down to write and found the story at my fingertips. Writing is not usually like that, and most stories have to be built, shaped, carved, forced, and coaxed into life. This one was waiting to be found, its little heart already beating.”

  * * *

  Michael M. Jones is a writer, editor, and book reviewer, which occasionally leads to some confusing moments involving books from the future, odd looks from the neighbors, and awkward encounters with the UPS guy. He lives in Roanoke, VA, with an extraordinarily understanding wife, a pride of cats, and a plaster penguin which once tasted blood…and enjoyed it.

  Recent publications include “Claus of Death” (The Dragon Done It, Baen, 2008), “The Muse’s Mask” (Like A God’s Kiss, Circlet, 2009), and “After The Hunt” (Like A Queen, Circlet, 2009). Under his editorial guise, his first anthology, Scheherazade’s Facade, is slated to come out from Norilana Books in October 2011. Visit him, and an ever-growing archive of book reviews, at www.michaelmjones.com.

  About “Your Name Is Eve,” he confesses: “This story came to me, and I almost hate to admit it, in a dream. Or perhaps in that twilight moment between dreaming and waking. The characters and their relationship sprang into my mind fully formed, already aware of who they were and the roles they were to play. While subsequent rewrites over the years may have changed some of the details and enhanced the emotional connections between Clancy and Eve, the ending has never changed significantly. Like all good dreams, it can be interpreted in a variety of manners. For the movie version, I’m hoping they’ll get Crispin Glover for Clancy, or maybe a young what’s-his-name. You know the guy.”

  * * *

  Gemma Files has been a film reviewer, teacher, and screenwriter, and is currently a wife and mother, even though—like Yukio Mishima—her heart’s leaning has always been for Night, and Blood, and Death. Her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild’s 1999 Best Short Fiction award. She is the author of two short story collections (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues—Book One in the Hexslinger series—is available from CZP Publications.

  “Though it stands alone,” Gemma writes, “‘Hell Friend’ can be read as a sequel of sorts to my novella ‘The Narrow World’ (Queer Fear II, Arsenal Pulp Press), which introduced the character of Grandmother Yau Yan-er. Other influences include vague musings about the sociological effects of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series on modern-day teen girls and years spent watching movies from Hong Kong and similar quarters, which is how I first encountered the phenomena of Hungry Ghost Month, the Gods Material shop, and Hell items; Kelvin Tong’s The Maid, from Singapore, is owed a particularly concrete research debt. Finally, though I’ve tried to add enough emotional realism to elevate this work beyond mere ‘exotic’ sensation fiction, I’m obviously playing with cultural cues that are not my own, and therefore apologize for any offense I may have unwittingly caused in advance.”

  * * *

  C.S.E. Cooney grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois. In a garret. Her work has appeared in Subterranean Press, Doorways, Ideomancer, and Goblin Fruit. She has two novellas forthcoming in Black Gate Magazine issues 16 and 17, and a short story in Pseudopod. Occasionally, she will write a horrific theater review for Killer-Works, an online repository for all things disturbing, and a slightly less horrific theater review for Centerstage Chicago.

  Claire (for that’s how we know her) writes that “Braiding the Ghosts” was “one of those rare stories that shot out of my brain fully formed, like Athena in her brazen greaves, or maybe like a baby chicken. It has since been extensively rewritten. I also want everyone to know that I have a Mima, a Nana, and a Grandma, and they are all the loveliest grandmothers ever, and this story is no reflection on them.”

  * * *

  Cat Rambo meandered through the groves of academe for a while, studying with John Barth and Steve Dixon. After the earth was destroyed by the aliens, she turned to writing speculative fiction and now lives in the Pacific Northwest with two cats, a software developer, and an ever-expanding library.

  She writes, "'Surrogates' is a meditation on marriage and addiction - the implicit promises one makes to a partner and the ways those promises get broken. It started with the idea of Belinda and Bingo getting married and turning in their old surrogates, but when the idea of the Insanity Chip came
to me, I knew that was the core of the story. The world is heavily influenced by Stanislaw Lem in terms of its texture, and it's one that seems unlikely economically, but it was a lot of fun to write, particularly Belinda's hallucinations. I love the name Bingo too; he may require his own story at some point."

  * * *

  Gregory Frost’s recent duology Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet was voted one of the best fantasy novels of the year by the American Library Association. In reviewing Shadowbridge, Dave Truesdale called it “a creation unique, I believe, in fantasy.” The two-book story was also a finalist for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009, and received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly.

  Greg’s previous novel was the historical thriller Fitcher’s Brides, a finalist for both World Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for Best Novel. Author of fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers, as well of short fiction, he has been a finalist for every major sf, fantasy, and horror award. Publishers Weekly proclaimed his 2005 collection, Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories, “one of the best fantasy collections.” Recent stories include “The Final Act,” in Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow; “The Comeuppance of Creegus Maxin” in The Beastly Bride, edited by Ms. Datlow and Terri Windling; and “The Bank Job” in Full Moon City, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. He has taught writing at the Clarion, Alpha, and Odyssey workshops, and is the current director of the undergraduate fiction writing workshop at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA.

  About “Lucyna’s Gaze,” he says, “I give writing students in my workshops a lot of both in-class and take-home writing exercises. Every now and then I start thinking ‘Well, how do I know this particular exercise is actually any good? It’s possible that what seems compelling or interesting is in fact just something that sounds clever.’ So on numerous occasions I’ve given myself the same exercise. Sometimes I write alongside the students in class. Sometimes I try it at home. I performed the latter twice recently. The first time, Ellen Datlow had just asked me to write a story for her Poe anthology. I’d been thinking about that, about what obscure work of Poe’s I was going to ping off. And at about the same time as I figured that out, I was teaching a class where I’d given them an exercise that begins with the prompt ‘Two people come out of a building…’ And I thought, ‘What would happen if I took my idea for the Poe story and used this exercise as a launching point?’ The result was a story called ‘The Final Act,’ which is as mean and perverse a story as I’ve ever written.

  “A few months later, I was flipping through a book in search of another exercise and came across one that sprang from the premise ‘Write a story about two people who are naked.’ This time I had no project in mind, in fact nothing in mind at all. I read that, and went on to the next exercise, and then maybe a few more; but for whatever reason that premise had got stuck in my head, and within the hour I was working out what evolved into ‘Lucyna’s Gaze.’ Thus have I determined that the exercise is valid—which means I’ll continue torturing students with it.”

  * * *

  Shweta Narayan has lived in six countries on three continents, read and loved folk tales and fables in all of them, and gotten pretty geopolitically confused in the process. The internal narrative within this story is based on an Armenian tale, “Clever Anaeet,” which Shweta says she has loved since she was seven or so but did not recognize as non-Indian till much later.

  Other stories of the clockwork bird have appeared in Realms of Fantasy and the Clockwork Jungle Book issue of Shimmer; Shweta’s other fiction can be found in places like Strange Horizons and the Beastly Bride anthology, and her poetry in Goblin Fruit. She was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the Clarion workshop in 2007. Her Web site is shwetanarayan.org.

  About “Eyes of Carven Emerald,” she writes, “To me, this story’s primarily about worldviews and motives. The events are adapted from history (for the outer narrative) and an Armenian folk tale (for the inner one); my part was figuring out the mind-games of two particularly ornery main characters. The rich real-world background made Alexandros’ and the bird’s verbal sparring a lot of fun to write—but getting their reasons onto the page involved a lot of hair-tearing and red pen. Turns out megalomaniacal geniuses only explain themselves in movies.

  “A linguistic note: Michael Ellsworth, historical linguist extraordinaire, put a lot of work into figuring out period and language-appropriate names. He even derived some etymologies himself. This gave me a range of somewhat different sounds, which hinted at differences between the cultures without pausing the story to do so. In a couple of places, I even had the same character referred to by two names: for example, the man we would call Darius of Persia is called Dareios by Alexandros and Darayu by the bird. This is an early hint about their vastly differing points of view.

  “Any error in historical accuracy is my own, as is the decision to use the Persian form Rokhshna rather than the Greek Roxane, and the modern form Anaeet rather than the probably-accurate Anahita (which sounded too close to Sanskrit.)”

  * * *

  S.J. Hirons (sjhirons@yahoo.co.uk) was born in Greenwich, England in 1973. Educated at Rugby and Cambridge, he currently resides in Leamington Spa, where he works for Warwickshire’s Asylum Seekers Project. He has studied creative writing at the UK’s National Academy of Writing and Birmingham City University. More of his short fiction can be found in print in: Title Goes Here:, Subtle Edens: An Anthology of Slipstream Fiction (Elastic Press), 52 Stitches: A Horror Anthology (Strange Publications), and online at: The Absent Willow Review, Pantechnicon and A Fly in Amber. His current favourite listening is the Dirty Projectors masterpiece, Bitte Orca, though he usually mixes up the running order, and his preferred reading is a bit of Bolano.

  He says that the idea for “Dragons of America” literally “fell out of a clear blue sky in front of me, like a piano in a cartoon. And, much the way it is with any piano that’s taken such a tumble, putting it back together was no easy task. Fortunately our esteemed editor proved to be singularly adept at getting the ramshackle heap I presented to him to play in tune, and I thank him for that very much.”

  * * *

  John Grant is author of some seventy books, of which about twenty-five are fiction, including novels like The World, The Hundredfold Problem, The Far-Enough Window and most recently (2008) The Dragons of Manhattan and Leaving Fortusa. His “book-length fiction” Dragonhenge, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was The Stardragons. His first story collection, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 2004. His anthology New Writings in the Fantastic was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award. His novella The City in These Pages has recently appeared from PS Publishing.

  In nonfiction, he coedited with John Clute The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and wrote in their entirety all three editions of The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters; both encyclopedias are standard reference works in their field. Among his latest nonfictions have been Discarded Science, Corrupted Science and, in Fall 2009, Bogus Science. He is currently working on a book about film noir, on an investigation of Fundamentalist US hate groups, and on “a cute illustrated rhyming book for kids about a velociraptor.”

  As John Grant he has received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and a number of other international literary awards. Under his real name, Paul Barnett, he has written a few books (like the space operas Strider’s Galaxy and Strider’s Universe) and for a number of years ran the world-famous fantasy-artbook imprint Paper Tiger, for this work earning a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award. His Web site is www.johngrantpaulbarnett.com.

  About “Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight,” he explains, “The idea that shadows disappear at high noon on the equator has always fascinated me. The reason they do so is clearly no mystery, but that doesn’t stop it seeming somehow a miracle to someone who’s spent all his life in highish latitudes. A while back, while I wa
s letting my mind play for the zillionth time with the notion of solar shadows disappearing at equatorial high noon, it suddenly occurred to me that it’s less easy to say where they go at ‘low midnight,’ when they're equally nonexistent. In mundane terms, the sun casts no shadows at midnight for the thunderingly obvious reason that it’s on the wrong side of the planet; but that’s to attend only the surface meaning of the question. An image popped into my head that was at once deeply silly and, it seemed to me, very beautiful. Other ingredients were added to the ferment before the story told me it was ready to be written…and then it proved, damn its eyes, to be astonishingly difficult to write, I guess because I wanted coldness and warmth, wisdom and ignorance, and humanity and nonhumanity all at the same time.”

  * * *

  Kenneth Schneyer resumed writing fiction in 2006, after a hiatus of twenty-six years. During that interval he acted with a Shakespeare company, practiced corporate law, taught in a college, managed IT projects, got married, had children. The fiction reboot provided an escape from the one-bedroom apartment his family shared during a home renovation, and has not stopped since. His work has appeared in GUD Magazine, Nature Physics, Odyssey Magazine, Niteblade, and the anthology Misfit Mirror, with more to come in Analog: Science Fiction and Fact. He is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop. Born in Michigan, he now lives in Rhode Island with the ritual artist and singer Janice Okoomian and their strangely artistic children.

  He details the origins of “Lineage” thus: “The thought of a recurring spirit, manifesting in different people at different times, has haunted me for a few decades now. At first I brooded on a revolutionary anima, one that would appear in singular and timely catalysts like Lenin or Robespierre, who likely would have been useless outside of the context of their historical moments. Later I was drawn to a sprit of self-sacrifice, a thing that willingly dies over and over, yet cannot die itself. Then the weird smiles and golden apples came to me one Thursday afternoon in the spring.