Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

My main complaint, and reason my interest flagged, was that both the characters and setting seemed flat.

  —SF Reader on A Shadow in Summer

  . . .an imagined world of this quality: for a city as graceful and fascinating as Saraykhet, and for such persuasively human characters.

  —Strange Horizons on A Shadow in Summer

  One of the things that my wiser friends and acquaintances told me when my first book, A Shadow in Summer, came out was not to read the reviews. The bad ones would hurt my feelings and the good ones would swell my head. Seriously, it’s a dumb thing to do.

  So yeah, of course I did it. Still do. Terrible habit.

  The thing that confused me then, and for several years since, is how often thoughtful intelligent, committed, professional readers can bring their best critical faculties to a book and come back with totally incompatible reports. The world-building is great, or it’s strictly paint-by-numbers. The characters are fascinating and complex, or they’re cardboard. The plot is full of well-crafted surprises, or it’s all telegraphed from page one.

  I came to the same conclusion that all authors reach: the reviewers who liked me are intelligent, deep-souled bastions of wisdom, and the ones who didn’t are a bunch of weak-brained punks. Mystery solved.

  But here’s the thing. Once the initial emotional rush plays out and my amygdala calms back down to its natural state, I start to think that maybe something else is going on here. That maybe I’ve misunderstood what reading is.

  There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.—The New York Times on Lolita, 1958

  Technically it is brilliant, Peter-De-Vries humor in a major key, combined with an eye for the revealing, clinching detail of social behavior. . . one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year.—Also The New York Times, also on Lolita, also in 1958. Seriously. WTF, folks?

  On one level, everyone knows this. Every reader brings their own experience to a story. How you read something depends on who you are. I’ve had that experience myself. I tried four times to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and couldn’t get into it for love or money. Then the fifth time, I fell into it and read the whole damn thing in three sittings. I’ve had books that I loved at one point in my life, and reread only to discover that the suck fairy had come and left great big piles of ohmigodthisisawful. It’s one of those things that we all tacitly understand, usually without thinking too much about why it’s true or what it means.

  So let’s talk about your neocortex for a minute.

  There’s this fairly brilliant book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee that talks about a model of brain function that gets the shorthand of memory-prediction. I’m not going to dive very deep into it here, but if you get the time, it’s seriously interesting stuff. The one point that I want to borrow is that many times more neurons come into the visual neocortex from deeper in the brain than do from the eyes.

  The theory Hawkins puts forward (and I find it fairly persuasive) has it that most of what triggers activity in the visual neocortex is predictive information from other parts of the brain. Or, more loosely translated, most of what we see, we evoke. And that also matches my experience as a reader.

  I remember one time in late high school or early college, reading a book that was particularly working for me. I’d been in it for hours, picturing the action, hearing the voices, listening to the narrator’s voice. When I put the book down to go make dinner, it was physically disorienting. I had been chasing the villain through a ruined castle, and now I was halfway to my kitchen. It felt dislocating. It felt like still being halfway in a dream.

  I’ve always heard the idea of reading as evoking a “literary dream” attributed to Damon Knight, but I suppose he may have gotten the phrase from someplace else. The thing that it’s taken me decades to figure out is that the phrase isn’t a metaphor. If I’m right, the mechanism that lets me look at a white sheet of paper with black inked letters on it and see the Balrog pulling Gandalf into the pit is the same one that lets me close my eyes at night and see my old elementary school filled up with bats or whatever my brain is handing up to my visual centers. And the same holds true for other aspects of my reading experience. The sounds I hear, the scents I smell, the emotions I feel are all being drawn up from deep inside of me and experienced just the way they would be in a dream.

  A really objective review of a book would be about a book as. . . well, as an object. “I find the use of a sans serif font problematic, and the thick bond of the paper gives the book a weight that exaggerates its true word count.” Or, you know. Whatever. Point is, it wouldn’t be useful.

  I don’t want an objective review of a book. I want an idea of what kind of subjective experience I’m likely to have when I read it. I’m assuming that’s what most readers of reviews are looking for too. As an extra added bonus, it would be nice if the review added some insight or depth that would help me experience the story in a way that was even more compelling and involving than I would have managed on my own. But hey, no pressure.

  In that light, the reason that two reviewers can come to the same text and come back totally dissimilar reports is pretty clear. They aren’t describing the same experience.

  I’ve seen three productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The first one was in high school, and as I recall most of the right words were spoken in more or less the right order. The second was at a Shakespeare festival, and it was a much better, much more interesting play. Same words, same order, but a different company and director and just plain all-around better. The third one was on Broadway with Patrick Stewart as Prospero, and a lot of really interesting and deeply non-period production and design decisions that made the play into a comment on race relations and the legacy of American slavery. Each time it was the same script, the same story, but the variations in the performance made it utterly different.

  And that’s the thing. When we read, we’re performing. We read a sentence like “Wet cobblestones glittered in the sudden sunlight like a thousand golden coins,” and maybe we see a wide street glowing in pointillist yellow-white. Or maybe we picture a couple dozen cobbles and a picture of goldwork we saw in National Geographic once. Or maybe we just agree that the rain stopped and it got sunny before skip ahead to the sword fight coming up next.

  With every story, every book, we are the acting troupe and the director and the props and special effects folks. How well we are able to evoke a dream from the words on the page—what decisions we unconsciously make, what experience and history we have to draw from, how comfortable we are with the style of the writer who gave us the story — is going to vary. Some acting troupes do really great comedy but they’re only so-so for drama. Some have actors who can really embody a tragic character, but seem wrong when doing a song-and-dance bit. When we pick up a book, we’re like that too. Some books we’re ready to read. Some we’re suited for. Others, not so much.

  That doesn’t mean that the text doesn’t matter. It does. Some writers are brilliant at guiding us through a dream, evoking sensory detail and drawing out emotions and weaving in philosophical and aesthetic abstractions in ways that make everything in the story seem deeper and more profound. Some write cool sword fights, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Some aren’t very good.

  When a reviewer sets out to tell us what they thought, the experience they’re talking about is their private—can we call it intimate?—performance. It’s never something we can really share, and it may or may not be decent predictor of the experience we’ll have if we pick up the same book. Every review is like the description of a production of The Tempest put on once, for an audience of one, not repeated and not repeatable. Every story any of us read is the same.

  For me, reading reviews of my stuff, this model of what it means to read pulls some of th
e sting. A bad review is disappointing, but it isn’t an indictment. There isn’t a perfect and certain judge of literature looking down from the bench and condemning me and my little offering now and forever. It’s more like a date that didn’t go well. Still sad. A little heartbreaking sometimes, if it’s someone whose opinion I care about. But it’s always something quiet and personal that happened—or didn’t happen—between the two of us, and that makes the failures a little more humane.

  About the Author

  Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 68

  Table of Contents

  Prayer

  by Robert Reed

  Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

  by Suzanne Church

  All the Things the Moon is Not

  by Alexander Lumans

  The Fairy Tale in the TV Age

  by Alethea Kontis

  Straightforward & Unadorned Adventure: A Conversation with Michael J. Sullivan

  by Jeremy L. C. Jones

  Another Word: Dear Speculative Fiction, I'm Glad We Had This Talk

  by Elizabeth Bear

  From the Editor's Desk

  by Neil Clarke

  Sci-fi Farmer

  Art by Jessada Sutthi

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Prayer

  Robert Reed

  Fashion matters. In my soul of souls, I know that the dead things you carry on your body are real, real important. Grandma likes to call me a clotheshorse, which sounds like a good thing. For example, I’ve always known that a quality sweater means the world. I prefer soft organic wools woven around Class-C nanofibers—a nice high collar with sleeves riding a little big but with enough stopping power to absorb back-to-back kinetic charges. I want pants that won’t slice when the shrapnel is thick, and since I won’t live past nineteen, probably, I let the world see that this body’s young and fit. (Morbid maybe, but that’s why I think about death only in little doses.) I adore elegant black boots that ignore rain and wandering electrical currents, and everything under my boots and sweater and pants has to feel silky-good against the most important skin in my world. But essential beyond all else is what I wear on my face, which is more makeup than Grandma likes, and tattooed scripture on the forehead, and sparkle-eyes that look nothing but ordinary. In other words, I want people to see an average Christian girl instead of what I am, which is part of the insurgency’s heart inside Occupied Toronto.

  To me, guns are just another layer of clothes, and the best day ever lived was the day I got my hands on a barely-used, cognitively damaged Mormon railgun. They don’t make that model anymore, what with its willingness to change sides. And I doubt that there’s ever been a more dangerous gun made by the human species. Shit, the boy grows his own ammo, and he can kill anything for hundreds of miles, and left alone he will invent ways to hide and charge himself on the sly, and all that time he waits waits waits for his master to come back around and hold him again.

  I am his master now.

  I am Ophelia Hanna Hanks, except within my local cell, where I wear the randomly generated, perfectly suitable name:

  Ridiculous.

  The gun’s name is Prophet, and until ten seconds ago, he looked like scrap conduit and junk wiring. And while he might be cognitively impaired, Prophet is wickedly loyal to me. Ten days might pass without the two of us being in each other’s reach, but that’s the beauty of our dynamic: I can live normal and look normal, and while the enemy is busy watching everything else, a solitary fourteen-year-old girl slips into an alleyway that’s already been swept fifty times today.

  “Good day, Ridiculous.”

  “Good day to you, Prophet.”

  “And who are we going to drop into Hell today?”

  “All of America,” I say, which is what I always say.

  Reliable as can be, he warns me, “That’s a rather substantial target, my dear. Perhaps we should reduce our parameters.”

  “Okay. New Fucking York.”

  Our attack has a timetable, and I have eleven minutes to get into position.

  “And the specific target?” he asks.

  I have coordinates that are updated every half-second. I could feed one or two important faces into his menu, but I never kill faces. These are the enemy, but if I don’t define things too closely, then I won’t miss any sleep tonight.

  Prophet eats the numbers, saying, “As you wish, my dear.”

  I’m carrying him, walking fast towards a fire door that will stay unlocked for the next ten seconds. Alarmed by my presence, a skinny rat jumps out of one dumpster, little legs running before it hits the oily bricks.

  “Do you know it?” I ask.

  The enemy likes to use rats as spies.

  Prophet says, “I recognize her, yes. She has a nest and pups inside the wall.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling nervous and good.

  The fire door opens when I tug and locks forever once I step into the darkness.

  “You made it,” says my gun.

  “I was praying,” I report.

  He laughs, and I laugh too. But I keep my voice down, stairs needing to be climbed and only one of us doing the work.

  She found me after a battle. She believes that I am a little bit stupid. I was damaged in the fight and she imprinted my devotions to her, and then using proxy tools and stolen wetware, she gave me the cognitive functions to be a loyal agent to the insurgency.

  I am an astonishing instrument of mayhem, and naturally her superiors thought about claiming me for themselves.

  But they didn’t.

  If I had the freedom to speak, I would mention this oddity to my Ridiculous. “Why would they leave such a prize with little you?”

  “Because I found you first,” she would say.

  “War isn’t a schoolyard game,” I’d remind her.

  “But I made you mine,” she might reply. “And my bosses know that I’m a good soldier, and you like me, and stop being a turd.”

  No, we have one another because her bosses are adults. They are grown souls who have survived seven years of occupation, and that kind of achievement doesn’t bless the dumb or the lucky. Looking at me, they see too much of a blessing, and nobody else dares to trust me well enough to hold me.

  I know all of this, which seems curious.

  I might say all of this, except I never do.

  And even though my mind was supposedly mangled, I still remember being crafted and calibrated in Utah, hence my surname. But I am no Mormon. Indeed, I’m a rather agnostic soul when it comes to my interpretations of Jesus and His influence in the New World. And while there are all-Mormon units in the US military, I began my service with Protestants—Baptists and Missouri Synods mostly. They were bright clean happy believers who had recently arrived at Fort Joshua out on Lake Ontario. Half of that unit had already served a tour in Alberta, guarding the tar pits from little acts of sabotage. Keeping the Keystones safe is a critical but relatively simple duty. There aren’t many people to watch, just robots and one another. The prairie was depopulated ten years ago, which wasn’t an easy or cheap process; American farmers still haven’t brought the ground back to full production, and that’s one reason why the Toronto rations are staying small.

  But patrolling the corn was easy work compared to sitting inside Fort Joshua, millions of displaced and hungry people staring at your walls.

  Americans call this Missionary Work.

  Inside their own quarters, alone except for their weapons and the Almighty, soldiers try to convince one another that the natives are beginning to love them. Despite a thousand lessons to the contrary, Canada is still that
baby brother to the north, big and foolish but congenial in his heart, or at least capable of learning manners after the loving sibling delivers enough beat-downs.

  What I know today—what every one of my memories tells me—is that the American soldiers were grossly unprepared. Compared to other units and other duties, I would even go so far as to propose that the distant generals were aware of their limitations yet sent the troops across the lake regardless, full of religion and love for each other and the fervent conviction that the United States was the empire that the world had always deserved.

  Canada is luckier than most. That can’t be debated without being deeply, madly stupid. Heat waves are killing the tropics. Acid has tortured the seas. The wealth of the previous centuries has been erased by disasters of weather and war and other inevitable surprises. But the worst of these sorrows haven’t occurred in the Greater United States, and if they had half a mind, Canadians would be thrilled with the mild winters and long brilliant summers and the supportive grip of their big wise master.

  My soldiers’ first recon duty was simple: Walk past the shops along Queen.

  Like scared warriors everywhere, they put on every piece of armor and every sensor and wired back-ups that would pierce the insurgent’s jamming. And that should have been good enough. But by plan or by accident, some native let loose a few molecules of VX gas—just enough to trigger one of the biohazard alarms. Then one of my brother-guns was leveled at a crowd of innocents, two dozen dead before the bloody rain stopped flying.

  That’s when the firefight really began.

  Kinetic guns and homemade bombs struck the missionaries from every side. I was held tight by my owner—a sergeant with commendations for his successful defense of a leaky pipeline—but he didn’t fire me once. His time was spent yelling for an orderly retreat, pleading with his youngsters to find sure targets before they hit the buildings with hypersonic rounds. But despite those good smart words, the patrol got itself trapped. There was a genuine chance that one of them might die, and that’s what those devout men encased in body armor and faith decided to pray: Clasping hands, they opened channels to the Almighty, begging for thunder to be sent down on the infidels.