Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  Gradually, Gennady began to be able to hear again. He came to realize that monstrous thunder was rolling across the steppe, like a god’s drumbeat in time with the flashes. It faded, as the flashes faded, until there was nothing but the ringing in his ears, and the orange flicker of flame from the launch site.

  He staggered out to find perfect devastation. Once, this must once have been a common sight on the steppe; but his Geiger counter barely registered any radiation at all.

  —And in that, of course, lay a terrible irony. Egorov and his people had indeed divided history in two, but not in the way they’d imagined.

  Gennady ran for the command trailer. He only had a few minutes before the air forces of half a dozen nations descended on this place. The trailer had survived the initial blast, so he scrounged until he found a jerry-can full of gasoline, and then he climbed in.

  There they were: Egorov’s servers. The EMP from the little nukes might have wiped its drives, but Gennady couldn’t take the chance. He poured gasoline all over the computers, made a trail back to the door, then as the whole trailer went up behind him, ran to the leaning-but-intact metal shed where the metastables had been processed, and he did the same to it.

  That afternoon, as he and Egorov were watching the orderly queue of people waiting to enter the New Tsarina, Gennady had made his final plea. “Your research into metastables,” Gennady went on. “I need it. All of it, and the equipment and the backups; anything that might be used to reconstruct what you did.”

  “What happens to the Earth is no longer our concern,” Egorov said with a frown. “Humanity made a mess here. It’s not up to us to clean it up.”

  “But to destroy it all, you only need to be indifferent! And I’m asking, please, however much the world may have disappointed you, don’t leave it like this.” As he spoke, Gennady scanned the line of people for Ambrose, but couldn’t see him. Nobody had said where the young American was.

  Egorov had sighed in annoyance, then nodded sharply. “I’ll have all the formulae and the equipment gathered together. It’s all I have time for, now. You can do what you want with it.”

  Gennady watched the flames twist into the sky. He was exhausted, and the sky was full of contrails and gathering lights. He hadn’t destroyed enough of the evidence; surely, someone would figure out what Egorov’s people had done. And then . . . Shoulders slumped under the burden of that knowledge, he stalked into the darkness at the camp’s perimeter.

  His rented Tata sat where they’d left it when they first arrived here. After Kyzdygoi had confiscated his glasses at the Tsarina site, she’d put them in the Tata’s glove compartment. They were still there.

  Before Gennady put them on, he took a last unaided look at the burning campsite. Egorov and his people had escaped, but they’d left Gennady behind to clean up their mess. The metastables would be back. This new nightmare would get out of the bottle eventually, and when it did, the traditional specter of nuclear terrorism would look like a Halloween ghost in comparison. Could even the conquest of another world make up for that?

  As the choppers settled in whipping spirals of dust, Gennady rolled up the Tata’s window and put on his glasses. The New Tsarina’s EMP pulses hadn’t killed them—they booted up right away. And, seconds after they did, a little flag told him there was an email waiting for him.

  It was from Ambrose, and it read:

  Gennady: sorry I didn’t have time to say goodbye.

  I just wanted to say I was wrong. Anything’s possible, even for me.

  P.S. My room’s going to have a fantastic view.

  Gennady stared bitterly at the words. Anything’s possible . . .

  “For you, maybe,” he said as soldiers piled out of the choppers.

  “Not me.”

  First published in Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

  About the Author

  Canadian writer Karl Schroeder was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and has been working and writing there ever since. He is best known for his far-future Virga series, consisting of Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Hero, but he has also written the novels Ventus, Permanence, and Lady of Mazes, as well as a novel in collaboration with David Nickle, The Claus Effect. He’s also the co-author, with Cory Doctorow, of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Engine of Recall. His most recent book is a new novel, Lockstep.

  Song for a City-Universe:

  Lucius Shepard’s Abandoned Vermillion

  Jason Heller

  It takes a long time to read an issue of Vermillion. Relatively speaking, anyway; each of the twelve issues of the brilliant, overlooked science-fantasy comic book series—written by the late SFF master Lucius Shepard and published in 1996 and ’97—is composed of as many pages as your average comic. Within that basic framework, though, Shepard sought to accomplish the near impossible: depict, in graphic-narrative form, his vision of a city called Vermillion, a megalopolis that spans light years instead of blocks and encompasses infinite distortions of time, space, biology, and being.

  That’s a tall order. Then again, this is Shepard, whose Dragon Griaule stories—collected in 2012 as The Dragon Griaule and concluded, posthumously, in 2014 with the novel Beautiful Blood—imagined the city of Teocinte, built against the body of vast, sleeping dragon. Vermillion is limitlessly more ambitious, to the point where it’s justified to wonder how Shepard ever thought he could sell the idea, let alone execute it. Jonathan Cave, the series’ protagonist, is vague, abstruse, self-absorbed, and borderline amoral; the sprawling, technologically advanced yet oddly Renaissance city he lives in has no rules, order, or structure. In other words, there’s little for a reader to cling to, especially those who crave some form of sympathetic bond with a comic’s main character. Often, it’s not even clear what he desires or pursues; Shepard seems bent on breaking every rule he can, not just of writing comics, but of writing fiction.

  Shepard wasn’t trained in the art of comics scripting, and it shows. Anyone familiar with his classics and his 1987 novel Life During Wartime know well how lush and labyrinthine his tangle of prose and ideas could be. Not to mention enveloping, enthralling, and luxuriantly time-consuming.

  Comic books—at least not the twenty-four-page variety—don’t always work well under that kind of weight. Vermillion was serialized, but Shepard either failed to grasp or refused to surrender to the format’s formal boundaries—much in the same way the city of Vermillion itself sprawls far beyond the realm of reality or reason.

  Instead of meshing symbiotically on the artists he collaborated with, so that they might convey their share of the story’s information, Shepard wrote and wrote and wrote, crowding the panels with fields of words until language itself became a key visual component. It’s as if he ripped one of his sumptuous novels into fragments then pasted them on top of artwork that sometimes bore only a tenuous connection to the text. His lengthy descriptions and philosophical perambulations made Vermillion stand out from so many of its contemporaries on the shelves; they also contributed to Vermillion’s demise.

  Vermillion was conceived as an open-ended, ongoing series, with a new issue coming out each month. It was unceremoniously canceled after a scant dozen issues. Shepard—who died last year at the age of seventy—had never written comics before undertaking Vermillion. Tellingly, he never would again. The series was an experiment for him, just as much as it was an experiment for its publisher. DC Comics, after finding much success in the early ’90s with sundry supernatural, horror, and weird-fiction themes thanks to its Vertigo imprint (led by Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking The Sandman), decided to do something similar—only with science fiction and fantasy.

  That new imprint, Helix, failed abysmally. Only one of its titles, Warren Ellis’ gonzo-dystopian Transmetropolitan, survived Helix’s short life. Not even the series written by an even more legendary SFF author than Shepard, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse
, endured. But during its two-year existence, Helix took huge risks. Vermillion was one of them.

  Entering Vermillion is a disorienting experience. Yet there are familiar signposts, at least for those fortunate enough to have grounding in genre. Vermillion has its precedents in the form of other fictional SFF cities that their creators habitually revisit, each time looking in at a different angle: Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Michael Moorcock’s Tanelorn, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, Edward Bryant’s Cinnabar.

  The most obvious nod, though, is to J. G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands—not a city per se, but a near-future resort in which technology, perception, and consciousness are reordered like so many building blocks. Vermillion’s first story arc, which comprises the first seven issues of the series, is its shakiest, due to Shepard’s overbearing narrative hand—not to mention the stiff murky art of Al Davison, who just doesn’t seem able to keep up with Shepard’s boiling imagination. Stories are nested within stories, and nested again, until they form a recursive puzzle.

  Even at its trickiest, though, that initial, seven-issue arc boasts some stunning ideas, including the almost magical singularity known as Starlight Drive—a close cousin to M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract—and a sinister church of AI mysticism that’s almost a pastiche of certain elements of Frank Herbert’s Dune. At times, Shepard zooms out to a profound scale, contorting the fundamentals of the cosmos to a degree so horrific, it might have made Lovecraft proud. It’s dizzying stuff. The universe of Vermillion is one “where whales once ferried the cold tonnage of their souls over reefs made from drowned kingdoms.” Similarly, Shepard is more concerned with letting these grand, terrifying visions dominate Vermillion, rather than plot.

  The story tightens and sharpens—and turns more fantasy than SF—during Vermillion’s second and final arc. Gary Erskine takes over the art duties, and his crisp, intricate work is a big step up from Davison’s. Accordingly, Shepard reins in his extravagant wordage; as Cave spends much of this disjointed story arc delving into the mysteries of the goddess Lady Manganese and her all-too-mortal husband Lord Iron, Shepard’s writing sheds much of its excess.

  Cave becomes more of a bystander, and occasional catalyst, rather than anything resembling a hero. By the time the series’ abrupt finale, issue #12, arrives, Shepard has hit his stride, crafting a collection of framed vignettes that verge on folklore and fit together like clockwork. Or so we must assume; DC Comics, eager to wash its hand of the flop that was Vermillion, was so negligent that it printed the pages of #12 out of order, so that the reader has to skip around to try to piece together an already piecemeal tale. Somehow, it’s the most fitting way Vermillion could have ended.

  In Shepard’s afterword to the first issue of Vermillion, he explained the comic’s conception by saying,

  I eventually came to understand that [the city of] Vermillion was not merely an exercise in wish fulfillment, but also a metaphor for my inner life, in effect a habitat like an enormous head in which trillions of thoughts and fragments of dreams dressed up as strangers and monsters and lovers prowled the endless galleries.

  At its heart, that’s what Vermillion is all about. Given the chance to get his foot in the door in the comics industry, he intrepidly, selfishly decided to turn his scripts into the most personal artistic expressions. In the series high point, the standalone issue #8, Cave takes a drunken traipse through his own psyche, one that turns increasingly psychedelic before finally settling into a Dante’s-Inferno-meets-Alice-in-Wonderland spiral of poignant lunacy. He’s advised by giant insects and finds insights in a grotesque amusement park. He’s also the mouthpiece for some of Shepard’s best prose; in fact, he becomes Shepard in all but name, echoing his creator’s ruminations on his perverse ability “to pass through oblivion into a space where grief becomes power and the wind shapes mournful vowels from the broken stones of a life.”

  That the art in Vermillion #8 is rendered by John Totleben—the best artist to have worked on Vermillion, previously known for his collaborations with Alan Moore on Miracleman and Swamp Thing, both of which are subtly evoked here—only cements issue #8’s status as the apex of the series’ truncated run. It’s also one of the most poetic, albeit unrecognized as such, single issues of a comic book every made, as rich in depth, sensitivity, lyricism, and emotional truth as anything Neil Gaiman accomplished with his formidable The Sandman.

  “Beauty is a deception. A lie we tell to cover the paucity of our lives,” says Ildiko the Immaculate, an angelic avatar of the apocalypse, when Cave and the others adventurers in their party linger too long on an idle conversation about the whys and wherefores of physical attraction—yet another one of Shepard’s ornate tangents that exterminates tension while adding rich texture. She then sagely adds, “My people had a saying: What is beautiful is what is not lost.”

  When Shepard wrote those words, he had no way of knowing that Vermillion was destined to become both a miserable failure and an overlooked gem in his body of work. But he must have had an inkling of how deceptively beautiful, and how beautifully deceptive, he’d made Vermillion itself. It’s not a short read, any more than Vermillion is an easy place to navigate. But it’s worth lingering in every polyglot market square, biotech-oozing back alley, and magical cul-de-sac.

  About the Author

  Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.

  Exploring the Frontier:

  A Conversation with Xia Jia

  Ken Liu

  It’s hard to keep up with Xia Jia: literary scholar, filmmaker, actress, painter, translator, and, oh right, speculative fiction author. She speaks fast, as if she has to cram an unusual number of syllables into each unit of time to keep up with the speed of her thoughts. In the middle of one of our chats she informed me that she had to run because she needed to make it to the taping of a TV show before coming back later to deliver a special lecture on the history of Chinese science fiction to a packed auditorium. In addition, that night she needed to prepare a semester’s worth of PowerPoint slides for classes she teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

  I wondered whether she was in possession of Hermione Granger’s Time-Turner.

  Xia Jia published her first short story, “The Demon-Enslaving Flask,” in 2004 (English translation by Linda Rui Feng in the November 2012 issue of Renditions), when she was still a college student. The story, a retcon science history in which Maxwell’s demon was a literal demon instead of a thought experiment, catapulted its author into the limelight by winning her a Yinhe (Galaxy) Award for Best New Writer. At the same time, the story, which was published in the “Twilight Zone” section of Science Fiction World, China’s biggest SF magazine, “spawned a series of heated debates about how (and whether) we should blur (or further defend) the boundary between science fiction and other genres,” says Xia Jia.

  Exploring the twilight frontier between worlds would become a constant theme in Xia Jia’s career. Trained to be a physicist as an undergraduate, she leapt into film studies and comparative literature for graduate school (her Ph.D. dissertation is titled “Fear and Hope in the Age of Globalization: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics (1991—2012)”). Her works are imbued with the tension between shifting tradition and revolutionary modernity, core and periphery, the written word and the moving image, rational analysis and intuitive recognition.

  A multiple winner of the Yinhe (Galaxy) and Xingyun (Nebula) Awards for Chinese science fiction, Xia Jia is beloved by many fans and praised by fell
ow writers, but as a woman writer in a male-dominated field whose work defies easy categorization under schemes such as “science fiction / fantasy” or “hard / soft SF,” her stories have also continued to generate controversy.

  (Although Xia Jia and I usually communicate in a mixture of Chinese and English, at her request, this interview was conducted in English.)

  Welcome, Xia Jia. In the past, you’ve described your fiction as “porridge SF.” Can you explain what that means?

  Thanks, Ken. Glad to talk with you. I never imagined that one day I would have to tell this story to the English world.

  I didn’t invent the term “porridge SF.” Many years ago, after I showed my best friend Yang Qing a short story I wrote in high school composition class, she said, “If we consider Ted Chiang’s ‘Tower of Babylon’ as a masterpiece of soft SF, then I must congratulate you on having created this beautiful piece of ‘porridge SF’!”

  Chinese people describe steamed rice as “hard rice” or “soft rice” based on the water content, and porridge is obviously softer even than “soft rice.” Porridge SF thus describes a story mixed with so many non-science elements (e.g. myth, legend or folklore) that it can hardly be classified as “science fiction” anymore, like “Tower of Babylon.”

  Since both Yang and I were big Ted Chiang fans, the phrase was intended as a compliment.

  After the controversy around whether “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” was really “science fiction,” in 2005 I published my second story “Carmen,” a space opera mixed with a gothic legend of the mysterious dancing girl Carmen. In a postscript, I declared that “no matter how many may refuse to acknowledge the ‘SFnal cloak’ around this story, I will continue to devote myself to this seemingly promising career in ’porridge SF.’” “Porridge SF” thus became the phrase to describe my style, which is usually regarded as the opposite of hard SF or so-called “core SF,” as exemplified by Liu Cixin’s works.