Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35

by Nina Allan

  Lightspeed Magazine

  Issue 35, April 2013

  Table of Contents

  Editorial, April 2013

  “Bellony”—Nina Allan (ebook-exclusive)

  The Red: First Light—Linda Nagata (novel excerpt)

  Interview: Jane Yolen

  Interview: Brandon Sanderson

  Artist Gallery: Armand Baltazar

  Artist Spotlight: Armand Baltazar

  Deus Ex Arca—Desirina Boskovich (SF)

  A Love Supreme—Kathleen Ann Goonan (SF)

  Schwartz Between the Galaxies—Robert Silverberg (SF)

  Deep Blood Kettle—Hugh Howey (SF)

  Smoke City—Christopher Barzak (fantasy)

  The Visited—Anaea Lay (fantasy)

  A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain—Karin Tidbeck (fantasy)

  Dinner in Audoghast—Bruce Sterling (fantasy)

  Author Spotlight: Nina Allan (ebook-exclusive)

  Author Spotlight: Desirina Boskovich

  Author Spotlight: Anaea Lay

  Author Spotlight: Karin Tidbeck

  Author Spotlight: Hugh Howey

  Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak

  Author Spotlight: Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg

  Author Spotlight: Bruce Sterling

  Coming Attractions

  © 2013, Lightspeed Magazine

  Cover Art and artist gallery images by Armand Baltazar.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  www.lightspeedmagazine.com

  Editorial, April 2013

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue thirty-five of Lightspeed!

  Just as we were going to e-press with this issue, we got the good news that Lightspeed is again a Hugo Award finalist for best semiprozine, and your humble editor is again a nominee for best editor, short-form. We’re extremely honored to be nominated again, so please allow me to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who voted for us.

  Speaking of awards, in case you missed the news last month: The Nebula Award nominees for this year have also been announced, and Lightspeed has two finalists in the short story category: “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley and “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu.

  So congrats again to Ken and Maria, and also to all of the other nominees for both the Hugo and Nebula.

  In other news, your humble editor had two new anthologies come out recently. The first, from Tor, is The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, featuring original stories by Diana Gabaldon, Seanan McGuire, Austin Grossman, Naomi Novik, and many others. For more information, visit johnjosephadams.com/mad-scientists-guide.

  Also just out is Oz Reimagined: New Tales From the Emerald City and Beyond, which I co-edited with former Realms of Fantasy editor Douglas Cohen. It features all new stories by Jane Yolen, Seanan McGuire, Tad Williams, Orson Scott Card, and many more. Plus, the cover and each individual story is illustrated by Lightspeed illustrator Galen Dara. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/oz-reimagined.

  With all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

  We have original science fiction by Desirina Boskovich (“Deus Ex Arca”) and acclaimed indie bestseller Hugh Howey (“Deep Blood Kettle”), along with SF reprints by Kathleen Ann Goonan (“A Love Supreme”) and the legendary Robert Silverberg (“Schwartz Between the Galaxies”).

  Plus, we have original fantasy by Anaea Lay (“The Visited”) and Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck (“A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain”), and fantasy reprints by Bruce Sterling (“Dinner in Audoghast”) and Christopher Barzak (“Smoke City”).

  We also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Jane Yolen and Brandon Sanderson. And for our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Bellony” by Nina Allan, and our featured novel excerpt is The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata.

  Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

  It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

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  Before I go, just one last thing. Remember that custom-built ebookstore I told you about back in the February editorial? Well, it’s now finally up and running! So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format.

  And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe via Amazon.com or from our friends at Weightless Books. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

  Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  Bellony

  Nina Allan

  For Chloe Mavrommatis

  It was further than it looked on the map. Even on a Thursday afternoon, when there was less on the roads than usual, even in Janet’s new Audi, the drive from London to Deal took her almost two hours. Terri left the car in the station car park, which was close enough to the centre and less expensive than the metered spaces along the front. It was a hot day. She walked down through the town, past the pedestrianised shopping area and then across Beach Street to the promenade and pier entrance. There were plenty of people about, and Terri guessed that many of them were on their holidays.

  Like so many English seaside resorts, the town was both charming and drab. There were a number of newer chain stores in the precinct, but the narrower side streets were mostly crammed with dismal-looking tourist shops selling the kind of cheap souvenirs you would never dream of buying unless you were killing time in a place like this. The once-resplendent Georgian terraces showed similar signs of wear and decay, the peeling paintwork and faded awnings a familiar outward sign of more general neglect. There was a resigned insularity about everything. People seemed to be enjoying themselves, but in a restrained manner that spoke of predictable pleasures, of aging relatives and wet Sundays, of a cloying tranquillity whose inevitable end was the claustrophobia
of stasis and the need for escape.

  Terri felt both exalted and frightened. New places excited her; no matter how unpromising they appeared on the surface, there was always something to be discovered, a story that could be written. Terri believed that if you returned from an assignment empty-handed, it was not the place that had failed but the imagination. It was this appetite for the seemingly mundane that had produced her initial successes at the magazine where until a week ago she had worked as a junior feature writer. It was only with hindsight that she realised the editor had made use of her, keeping her in line with vague promises whilst continuing to fob her off with assignments so outrageously turgid that no one else was interested in covering them.

  She excelled at such work and even enjoyed it, but she had come increasingly to resent the implications of being taken for granted. Now, in this small and faded town on the east Kent coast, she began to wonder if the editor had guessed her level all along. The Allis Bennett story was her first good idea for an assignment since taking the decision to go freelance. But now that she was here in Deal, she feared the town and most likely the subject had exactly the same qualities of dullness and parochialism as all the jobs that had been foisted on her while she was working for the magazine.

  She did a turn of the pier, then started along the promenade in the direction of Walmer, the smaller residential suburb that lay immediately to the south of Deal. Walmer had its own castle and its own history, but the building developments of the nineteen-sixties made it impossible to tell where one town now began and the other left off.

  Walmer had been the home of the children’s writer Allis Bennett. She had lived there for thirty years, and then she had disappeared. Nobody had seen or heard of her since. Terri had told herself there had to be a story in that, that stories about missing persons always sold. Now she was starting to think the best thing you could do with a place like this was go missing from it. The thought made her smile, and all at once her spirits began to rise.

  She was looking for a missing person. Even if she failed in her search it would make an interesting story. Perhaps she would go missing herself, at least for a while.

  Terri first read a book by Allis when she was ten. The book was called Bellony, and was about a girl who finds a doorway to another universe. The girl in the story was named Vronia. Her sister Annabel had recently died, and Vronia invented a game with a door in her house as a way of being with her again. The door itself was ordinary—just a side door leading to the concrete passageway between Vronia’s house and the house next door—but the act of passing through it was not. In Vronia’s imagination, the world on the other side was always different from the world from which she emerged.

  The book was unlike other books Terri had read, where children pursued adventures in magical realms full of vampires and talking animals. The worlds behind Vronia’s door appeared at first to be the same as the world she had left. It was only gradually that the differences became apparent. Usually these differences were small but they coloured everything—everybody wore the same clothes, say, or speaking aloud in public was illegal.

  At the climax of the book, Vronia became trapped in a world where no one recognised her. In this version of reality, her sister was alive but every time Vronia tried to speak to her she disappeared.

  Terri found the story frightening, but this did not stop her reading it. The book came into her life shortly after she went up to senior school. Her closest friend Melinda had been sent away to a girls’ boarding school in Dorset, and Terri for a time felt very alone. She came to identify strongly with Vronia, who wore glasses and had few friends, and she searched for more books by the same writer, Allis Bennett. Those that she found, she enjoyed. She liked the way that inexplicable things could happen in Allis’s books and not be resolved.

  When she was older she discovered that Allis Bennett had once been Alicja Ganesh and that she had been born in Poland. She had written ten novels for children altogether. Her one adult novel was a semi-autobiographical work, about a Polish writer who flees to England to escape the Nazis. The small number of critical essays that had been written about Allis all suggested that the darkness and ambiguity in her stories had its source in her childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, and in the fact that her parents and sister had died in concentration camps.

  Bellony, the strange-sounding title of the novel Terri had loved as a child, turned out to be the name of the street in Warsaw where Allis’s family lived before the war.

  Terri walked on along the promenade, taking note of the sights she had read about and was trained to look out for: the castle, the bandstand, the blue Art Deco dome of the old Regent Cinema. Once she was clear of the town, there were fewer people. The tide had begun to go out, and the beach seemed to stretch for miles. Like most of the beaches on the Kent and Sussex coast, it was notable only by being featureless, an unvaryingly flat expanse of shingle. But the landward edge, a strange, tangled hinterland of tamarisk and valerian, sea kale and exotic orange flare-ups of kniphofia, was interestingly wild, an unkempt no-man’s-land between the coastline and the countryside beyond.

  She looked out across the stones to where a small power boat was drawn up on blocks, surrounded by a chain of its rusting entrails. Just beyond it was a row of beach huts, painted alternately in yellow and white. It was like a scene straight out of A Letter from Sabine, one of Allis’s novels that had been set on this part of the coast. A memory came to Terri then of the first time she had read Sabine and the pleasure and the mystery she had found in it. She supposed it was no coincidence after all that she was here. Allis’s writing had first become important to her during a time of change, and this also was a time of change. She had resigned from her job and finally she had found the courage to end her relationship with Noel, her boyfriend for the past five years. She had known for eighteen months that Noel wasn’t right for her. Leaving him had been the right thing but it still wasn’t easy. She was on her own, as she had been alone before, when Melinda had been sent off to Broadhurst.

  It had been Allis’s stories that had helped her last time. Now it was Allis herself she felt drawn to. Since making the decision to write about her, she had increasingly come to think of her as a friend.

  Allis’s house was on Wellington Parade, a little over a mile from the centre of Deal. The access to the houses was very narrow, over an unmade strip of raked-over shingle and sand. Some of the dwellings were new-build, uninspiring seventies chalets with red-tiled roofs and plate glass windows. But most of the houses here were older than that, a disjointed assemblage of post-war prefabs, colonial-style villas dating from the nineteen-thirties and clapboard bungalows with gently rusting cast iron verandah rails. They formed an intriguing spectacle and something wholly unexpected. In the mismatched incongruity of styles there was for Terri something almost dreamlike, as if each house was a concrete expression of its owner’s fantasies.

  Here at last she began to see what might have attracted Allis to this place and caused her to stay. She knew Allis had been attached to the town because she had set several of her books here, or at least in an imaginary place that looked exactly like it. It was a kind of miracle, the way she had transformed this rather tired seaside town into somewhere special. And yet even as she was thinking this, it occurred to Terri that what Allis had done was not after all so different from what Terri was trying to do here herself. She was looking for the story behind the story. For Allis Bennett as for Terri, even the most ordinary things had the potential to become extraordinary if you described them properly.

  It was strange to think that Allis had once walked where Terri was now walking, maybe even thinking similar thoughts.

  Allis’s house was right near the end, one of a pair of Victorian semis that had been built as mirror images of each other. The house on the left had a freshly painted pink exterior and the flagstones that formed a path to the door looked recently scrubbed. The house on the right, Allis’s house, was in a state of decline. The yellow paintwor
k had faded to a bleached ochre. Instead of a neat strip of lawn, there was overgrown grass. The windows, long unwashed, were spattered with grime. Terri felt drawn to the house instantly. As she came closer, she saw that the signboard of a local estate agent had been hammered into the ground to the right of the gate. The house was being advertised as “To Let.”

  She walked back along the front in a kind of daze. When finally she reached the car she called the agent, who confirmed that the house was still available, but on a short lease only. The long-term tenants had recently vacated and the owner was thinking of selling.

  Terri said that would be fine.

  “How soon could I move in?” she said.

  “Well,” the agent hesitated. “Normally we would expect references. And I should warn you it’s a bit run down. Don’t you want to see inside? I could drive you round there now if you like.”

  “I don’t have time, I’m afraid. But so long as the roof is watertight, there’s really no problem. It’s the house’s position I’m interested in. It’s perfect for what I need.”

  She told the agent, whose name was Cahill, that she was prepared to pay three months’ rent up front if it would hurry the process along. “You’re more than welcome to check my references, but I’d like to move in next week if I can.” She gave him the contact details for the magazine’s finance office and the letting agency that handled her flat in Camden. She felt tempted to take Cahill up on his offer of showing her the house, but made herself hold back. She did not want her initial impressions of the place muddied by the blandishments of an estate agent.

  On the drive back to London, she made a pretence of reflecting calmly on the day’s events, but in reality she was barely able to restrain her excitement. The idea of living in Allis’s house was like a dream come true. It was not just that it would bring her closer to Allis in ways she had never previously imagined; she believed she might also find the peace and solitude she needed to help her work out what kind of writer she wanted to be.

  She would be getting away from London, and away from Noel. Everything had happened so quickly it was hard to take in.