Why? What’s happened?
The Ad Astra ship. She’s been sending out blast warnings. She’s preparing to send an impact probe. I’ve tried to tell the captain that you—
Damn her! Put me through to her. Now. Collier’s grip on the tether cable tightened. An impact probe could easily split the asteroid in half if it struck the rock well enough: the fissure itself was evidence that the asteroid was fragile and could break in two if—
Isa’s voice sounded tense in his helmet. Col? Where’ve you been? I’ve been sending out blast warnings for the last—
Damn it, Isa, didn’t you believe me? I’m on the goddamn rock, like I told you. Placed a claim beacon. Can’t you see me now?
We saw two tethers, one of which was stuck to the rock. The other looked like it went down some kind of crevasse. But—
Yeah, that was me. I must have been down in the canyon. It doesn’t matter. So now you know I am here, and you can’t legally mine this rock unless I sell the rights to you. Which I am not going to do. I’m here, I’ve already begun my sampling. So fuck off, he added, feeling the pain of the past few years seep into his words.
I’m afraid not, Col. You’ve begun sampling, you say? What did you get?
It made no sense to tell Isa what he had found. There was nothing that could be gained from revealing his findings to her. But the smug power behind his knowledge was too much for his fragile wisdom to contain. He needed her to know he had made a strike, just like he always said he would. The sting of the words in her letter was almost as fresh as it had been when he had first read them. You’re a dreamer, Col. That might be okay for you, but I can’t live on dreams. The Belt isn’t a place for dreamers. And neither is our relationship. If you really loved me, you’d put away your toys. But you’re not really a man. You’re a boy. I need a man. So long.
Nine-three-six P, he said, clearly emphasizing each digit. Did you hear that? he almost shouted. It wasn’t really a question: she hadn’t time to respond. He knew what he sounded like, but at that moment, he didn’t care. He let himself be petulant. Nine-three-six! And that was just the first sample! What do you think of that, Isa? And don’t think I’m going to take you back, either. You had your chance. Even as he spoke the last words, he knew he had gone too far. Not that he had hurt her, but that he had squandered his chance to redeem himself, even a little bit, in her eyes. He was merely being a boy some more.
Isa drew her breath. Nine-three-six, you say, she drawled, her voice as calm as Collier’s had been manic. Quite a find. I was right to follow you. She was evidently ignoring his final outburst. A sarcastic comment would have been kinder than silence. Anyway, Col, she said after an eloquent pause, You should head on back to the Dulcinea soon. We’ll be ready to launch our probes pretty soon. I’m going to crack this rock open and mine her dry.
You can’t, Isa, he repeated, keeping his voice calmer. Belt law clearly gives me right of first. There’s nothing subtle about it.
And what are you going to do about it, Col? Isa’s voice was dangerously smooth and soft. Run to the Authority? Please don’t tell me your childish idealism has gone that far, she chuckled cruelly.
The claim beacon, Collier said, is planted. It’s sending data to my ship and I’m sending it to Ceres.
Isa sounded almost sorry. No, it’s not. We’re jamming your transmission.
Sancho! Collier snapped.
I can’t confirm that yet, Skipper. Haven’t received verification of reception from Ceres, but that could be from slowness on their part.
Isa continued. It’s going to come down to our word against yours. And the corporation has a loud voice.
Collier swallowed. Isa was right: if she decided to flout the law, the worst the Authority could really do was slap a fine on the Ad Astra Corporation. And even that was unlikely. He had no money to defend a claim, besides his ship. If he lost the claim (which, despite the circumstances, was quite possible given the skill and resources available to the Ad Astra’s lawyers) he would lose his legal deposit. He couldn’t afford to lose. Therefore, he couldn’t afford to fight.
Why, Isa? His voice carried all the meaning he needed to convey.
She sighed. Don’t make this more than it is, Col. I’m a captain in the Ad Astra Corporation. It’s what I do.
And what if I stay here and mine? Would you kill me, Isa?
Jesus, Col, do we have to make this so dramatic? No, of course not. I’ll still fire the impact probe, maybe it’ll crack the rock open, maybe not, but the concussion will disrupt anything you’ve put down. Might even damage or destroy your equipment. Then what? You won’t be able to mine, even if you wanted to.
Collier’s fingers flexed in his suit. He knew she was right: she could probably place the impact probe close enough to him to shake him off the rock but far enough away not to hurt him. And she had plenty of probes to waste if the first one didn’t do the trick. Now that she knew the asteroid was a nine-six-three, she could afford to be liberal in her attempts to shake him off.
I need water, he said, lamely.
Isa voice indicated she saw through the ruse immediately. I’m sure you do, after your idiotic stunt. I think I can spare a few cubic meters of ice so you don’t need to sleep your way back to Ceres.
This isn’t right, Isa. You know it’s not.
There’s no such thing as right and wrong out here, Col. Just what a girl can grab.
Grab and hold onto, you mean, he amended.
As you say. Grab and hold onto. You were never good at holding onto things, were you, Col?
Collier turned his eyes toward the stars. He wasn’t looking for Isa’s ship, since it was far too distant still to be made out by eye, but was imagining her as she was during those promise-filled months. He could see her long face as she held it in her cupped palm, her elbow denting the mattress. In his mind, she was smiling slightly—not a smile of occasion because of something in particular he had said or done, but a smile of circumstance. But then again, perhaps what he saw was not a memory but a creation of his own brain. Had she really ever been happy with him?
I guess not. So I’ll go back to the Dulcinea and you’ll arrange for an ice transfer?
Yes. So that’s it, then? You’re leaving the rock?
Collier’s head snapped back to the horizon. Isn’t that what you want?
Of course. I just didn’t … you’re being reasonable about it. Isa sounded surprised and even a little disappointed.
What choice do I have? If I stay, you’ll wreck any mining equipment I use. I won’t see a gram of P from this rock, and I’ll have to try to replace my tools. What do you want me to do, Isa? Throw sand at you when you hover over me? Spit at your impact probe? You’ve got me by the balls, Isa, and I know when it’s time to cut my losses. So just send over the damn ice, without any of your gloating.
You were never reasonable, Isa said evenly. That was the whole problem. Are you saying you’re coming around to—
Damn you, Isa. You can’t just win, can you? Just like you couldn’t just leave me. You had to follow me. And now, now that you are going to take right out from under me the biggest strike I’ve had in years, you can’t just do it. You have to talk to me about it. Well, how’s this for talk: you’re nothing but a corporate whore, Isa. You might have had a heart at one time, may have been your own person. But now you’re nothing but another Ad Astra whore, doing what they tell you, hoping the suits will see fit to send some money your way. I’m glad you left. Sancho, cease receiving from that damn ship.
His radio went dead.
© 2016 by Sean O’Brien. Excerpted from Beltrunner by Sean O’Brien. Published by permission of the author and EDGE-Lite, an imprint of Hades Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean O’Brien is an educator and writer from Southern California. He is married and has two children along with an ever
-growing number of animals. He was named Educator of the Year by the California League of High Schools and has been a head varsity football coach, television broadcaster, and Gilbert and Sullivan singer (though not a good one). He’s the author of A Muse of Fire, Wondrous Strange, and Vale of Stars.
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Movie Reviews: January 2017
Carrie Vaughn | 1531 words
Moana
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements
Disney, November 2016
1 hr. 53 min.
This is one of the more gorgeous films I’ve seen in a long time. The depiction of voyaging Pacific Islander culture—particularly the sequence showing the ocean-going outrigger exploration fleets during the song “We Know the Way”—is spectacular and inspiring. (Does anyone know of any good epic fantasies inspired by this culture? Because if not, there should be.) Moana is a great, funny, self-rescuing princess. (“You wear a skirt and have an animal sidekick. You’re a princess.”) This is a true depiction of how having a chicken sidekick would really work. (Spoiler: Not well.) I liked a lot of things about this, but one of the things I really liked is that there isn’t a villain, per se. Moana and demi-god Maui must confront a Big Bad, the hideous lava creature Te Kā who is destroying life on island after island. And then it turns out Te Kā is a symptom, not the cause. It’s a physical manifestation of the imbalance in the world caused by trickster Maui’s theft of the heart of Te Fiti, an earth goddess’s mystical amulet that brings life to the islands. Restoring this balance transforms the monster. It’s a story of mending and reconciliation, not of dominance and destruction, and that’s just lovely to see.
The film raised much conversation and concern about the accuracy of the depiction of Pacific Islander cultures and the importance of making good-faith efforts to represent cultures one may not be familiar with when telling stories about them. Smithsonian Magazine has a good short article on how well the film did, which in some parts were really good, and in some parts were really not: bit.ly/smithsonian_moana.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
directed by Gareth Edwards
Disney, December 2016
2 hr. 13 min.
Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars is at a point where we need to get used to the idea of having new, slick movies on a regular basis that will be a little like fast food. This isn’t fine art that’s going to revolutionize anything, and if you’re not already a fan of the franchise in question you may not want to bother. But if you are a fan, and you need to satisfy a craving, there’s nothing better than getting a new installment of your favorite thing. Rogue One is the movie I’ve wanted for twenty-five years, ever since that year-long West End Games RPG campaign in college, when our rag-tag band of Rebel spies caused havoc wherever we went and somehow, with a liberal application of Force points, managed to sock it to the Empire, at least a little bit.
This is a secret history, a story that we knew was there but that we haven’t seen. It’s not the main saga, no matter how seamlessly it folds into A New Hope. That seamlessness was a shock and a delight. I didn’t expect them to take it so far, literally to the opening moments of the original film. This is a really good example of how knowing exactly what’s going to happen—as you do in the last five minutes of Rogue One —actually increases tension to an almost painful degree. If you didn’t know what happened next, you might think the Rebel fleet has a chance to escape. And when they don’t, that would almost be anticlimactic. But because you know the only ones that escape are that blockade runner and the all-important data disk, you know you’re going to be watching one tragedy after another unfold, and it’s almost too much to bear. The rest of the film is pretty good. Those five minutes are inspired.
Rogue One is also its own thing. It doesn’t have an opening scroll. No John Williams score. This was sort of jarring, but I also loved it. This really opens up the possibilities for future Star Wars storytelling in film. There’s more than one way to make these movies, and if we can have Star Wars without the opening scroll, without some of the other familiar trappings—well then, what else can we do? Here, we can have a PG-13 war story that maybe has as much in common with The Dirty Dozen as it does with other movies in the Star Wars franchise. It’s interesting. It’s the same, and different, which is part of the difficulty and delight of maintaining a franchise like this.
Passengers
directed by Morten Tyldum
Columbia Pictures, December 2016
1 hr. 56 min.
If you never realized how fine a line there is between romantic comedy and horror, this movie will demonstrate it to you.
The trailers tell you the premise: two passengers on an interstellar flight wake from hibernation ninety years too soon and are stuck depending on each other for survival. Naturally, they fall in love.
What the trailers don’t tell you is Jim wakes first, and then purposefully sabotages Aurora’s hibernation chamber because he fell in love with her sleeping form and passenger manifest (Aurora = Sleeping Beauty. Get it? Get it?!). He lies and tells her the chamber accidentally failed like his did. He wines and dines her, she falls in love with him. At this point I was thinking the only way the film can redeem itself is if she learns the truth and then shanks him in his sleep. So, she learns the truth and gets really furious, as well she should, and I almost get my wish. But then the ship starts to break down and they have to work together to save it and the rest of the passengers.
What I found most infuriatingly frustrating: the story of them saving the ship could have been awesome. Aurora gets some really badass action scenes and even rescues Jim from Certain Doom. But what Jim did to Aurora—essentially kidnapping her to face a long, lonely, monotonous life trapped on the ship—is so awful, so irredeemable, that I never have sympathy for him. He doesn’t deserve saving. The film could have handled the entire premise a dozen other ways. After all, this—waking up too soon, alone, on an interstellar journey—is one of the oldest tropes in modern SF. (In fact, a friend of mine just sent me a story from the comic book Weird Science #20, from July-August 1950, called “50 Girls” in which a man wakes up early from suspended animation. Only he did it on purpose so he can systematically work his way through all fifty women on the ship in the eighty years before the ship reaches its colony. But he gets his when the second woman shoots him. Love it! Let’s make that movie!) Both Jim’s and Aurora’s pods could have failed at the same time. Have her be a crewperson woken up automatically when the ship starts to fail. Have them be partners instead of making Jim a kidnapper and basing their entire relationship on false pretenses.
But the story didn’t make any of these better choices. Worse, the film seems to understand that this situation is deeply, horrifically problematic—and doesn’t care. Aurora herself calls it murder—he stole her life, the life she should have had. But the movie chose to go this route anyway because somehow, for some unfathomable reason, the story it’s most interested in telling is Jim’s redemption. Aurora’s agency? Justice for what happened to her? Nope. Instead, we’re forced to consider: Can Jim be heroic enough to earn her forgiveness? I mean, he was so lonely, and she’s so pretty—she understands, doesn’t she? The movie thinks Jim can be redeemed, and that the two of them should get a happy ending.
No, no, no. Any energy or interest in the action-packed third act is DOA because I mostly keep wanting Aurora to shank him. Let him fly off into the black of space, his broken tether hitting his ass on the way out.
And then there’s the part when Laurence Fishburne’s crewman character shows up, and I think, oh good, he’ll save us from this super-problematic romcom and finally get us to some classic SF action-adventure. But he dies ten minutes later, and I think, My God, this movie brought on a black guy from out of nowhere just so they would have a black guy to kill off first.
You’ll notice I haven’t said a word about the science-fictional elements of the starship and hibernation pod scenarios. That’s because, for the most part, they don’
t make a lick of sense and are kind of boring. Why does this ship have no redundant systems? Why isn’t some senior crewperson automatically woken up the minute things go wrong? Is colonizing other worlds really that profitable? Why is there only one autodoc for 5000 passengers? Why does the bar look like the one from The Shining? And on, and on.
But mostly, I’m furious that the filmmakers really thought we’d want to see a movie about how this stalker and kidnapper really isn’t such a bad guy.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show. Her newest novel is a planetary adventure, Martians Abroad. Bannerless, a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, will be released by John Joseph Adams Books in July 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.
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Book Reviews, January 2017
Andrew Liptak | 1223 words
To start off this year, I decided that I wanted to take a look at the second novels of a trio of new authors. It’s often said that someone has a decade to write their first novel, but just months to write their second. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because following up a first act is a tough challenge: an author has to replicate everything that worked in their first book, while working to make sure that they’re not writing essentially the same book. Much like with a musician’s sophomore album, a second novel can tell you much about how any particular author is approaching their craft, and in the case of a series, it can show you how much they’ve plotted out their series.
Indomitable: The Chronicles of Promise Paen
W.C. Bauers
Ebook / Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0765375445
Tor, July 2016
368 pages
Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Page 23
