In four years Sylvie will be Mrs. Charles Patterson 19 million per. It’s over and they began to dance. Charles was a swell dancer. He promised to be sweet to her when he got through with training and they were married. He promised to make everything as normal as possible. As little as possible should change. The quintet struck up Mendelssohn.
Sylvie pulled her silence over her and it was good.
Fade to white.
CLOSE-UP of a nice-looking Bobby, a real lantern-jaw, straight-dealing, chiseled type. [Note to Casting: maybe we should consider VP Kroc for this spot. Hair pomade knows no demographic. Those idiots at Brylcreem want to corner the Paternal market? Fine. Let them have their little slice of the pie. Be a nice bit of PR for the re-election campaign, too. Humanize the son of a bitch. Ray Kroc, All-American, Brother to the Common Man. Even he suffers symptomatic hair loss. Whatever—you get the idea. Talk to Copy.] Bobby’s getting dressed in the morning, towel around his healthy, muscular body. [Note to Casting: if we go with Kroc here we'll have to find a body double.] Looks at himself in the mirror and strokes a 5-o’clock shadow.
FEMALE VOICE OVER: Do you wake up in the morning to a sink full of disappointment?
PAN DOWN to a clean white sink. Clumps of hair litter the porcelain. [Note to Art Dept: Come on, Stone, don't go overboard. No more than twenty strands.] Bobby rubs the top of his head. His expression is crestfallen.
VOICE OVER: Well, no more! Now with the radiation-blocking power of lead, All-New Formula Samson Brand Hair Pomade can make you an All-New Man.
Bobby squirts a generous amount of Samson Brand from his tube and rubs it on his head. A blissful smile transforms his face.
VOICE OVER: That feeling of euphoria and well-being lets you know it works! Samson Pomades and Creams have been infused with our patented mood-boosters, vitamins, and just a dash of caffeine to help you start your day out right!
PAN DOWN to the sink. Bobby turns the faucet on; the clumps of hair wash away. When we pan back up, Bobby has a full head of glossy, thick, styled hair. [Note to Art Dept: Go whole hog. When the camera comes back put the VP in a full suit, with the perfect hair—a wig, obviously—and the Senate gavel in his hand. I like to see a little more imagination from you, Stone. Not a good quarter for you.]
VOICE OVER: Like magic, Samson Brand Pomade gives you the confidence you need. [Note to Copy: not sure about 'confidence' here. What about 'peace of mind'? We're already getting shit from the FDA about dosing Brothers with caffeine and uppers. Probably don't want to make it sound like the new formula undoes Arcadia.]
He gives the camera a thumbs-up. [Note to Art Dept: Have him offer the camera a handshake. Like our boy Ray is offering America a square deal.]
Bold helvetica across mid-screen:
Samson Guards Your Strength.
Fade to white.
Ten Grays
Martin watched his brother. The handsome Thomas. The promising Thomas. The fruitful and multiplying Thomas. 29 million per mil Thomas. Their father (24 million) didn’t even try to fight his joyful tears as he pinned the golden dove on his son’s chest. His good son. His true son. For Thomas the Office in the city. For Thomas the planning and pleasing and roasted chickens and martinis. For Thomas the children as easy as pencil drawings.
For Martin Stone, 2 million per milliliter and most of those dead, a package. In a nice box, to be certain. Irradiated teak. It didn’t matter now anyway. Martin knew without looking what lay nestled in the box. A piece of paper and a bottle. The paper was an ordnance unknown until he opened the box. It was a lottery. The only way to be fair. It was his ticket.
It might request that he present himself at his local Induction Center at 0900 at the close of the school year. To be shipped out to the Front, which by then might be in Missouri for all anyone knew. He’d suit up and boot it across the twisted, bubbled moonscape of the Sea of Glass. An astronaut. Bouncing on the pulses from Los Alamos to the Pacific. He would never draw again. By Christmas, he wouldn’t have the fine motor skills.
Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work. The most important work. Only Brothers could really view things objectively. Big picture men. And women, Sisters, those gorgeous black chip girls with 3-Alpha running cool and sweet in their veins. Martin would probably pull Department of Advertising and Information. Most people did. Other than Defense, it was the biggest sector going. The bottle would be Arcadia. For immediate dosage, and every day for the rest of his life. All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do. They said it tasted like burnt batteries if you didn’t put it in something. The first bottle would be the pure stuff, though. Provided by Halcyon, Your Friend in the Drug Manufacturing Business. Martin would remember it, the copper sear on the roof of his mouth. After that, a whole aisle of choices. Choices, after all, make you who you are. Arcadia or Kool. Brylcreem or Samson.
Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world. You could work your way into the Art Department. Keep drawing babies in carriages. Someone else’s perfect quads, their four faces laughing at you forever from glossy pages.
Suddenly Martin found himself clasped tight in his Father’s arms. Pulling the box out of his boy’s hands, reading the news for him, putting it aside. His voice came as rough as warm gin and Martin could hardly breathe for the strength of his Father’s embrace.
Thomas Walker squeezed his Brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.
Velocity Multiplied by Duration
Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.
Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.
She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.
It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.
On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo in ’45, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Berlin and Rome swept clean and blank as pages. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie. Something opening over and over, with nowhere to burn itself out but in.
“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”
Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.
“I love
you,” whispered Clark Baker.
On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.
Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.
Fade to black.
And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:
Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!
About the Author
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.
The Spell of History: Magic Systems and Real-World Zeitgeists
Jeff Seymour
Systems of magic in fantasy can be as varied as the worlds they inhabit. Some novels feature rigorous, intensely scientific collections of spells, reagents, and forces whose causes and effects can be measured, mapped, and predicted. Others treat magic as whimsical, unpredictable, and fantastic in every sense of the word. In those worlds, a spell can be as likely to blow up in the caster’s face as to go off successfully, or even have a will of its own. And sometimes, magic is just treated as a given. The reader may never learn more about it than he or she absolutely needs to.
Every system of magic is a product of its creator. Robert Jordan gave us saidin and saidar. Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman gave us Solinari, Nuitari, and Lunitari. Brandon Sanderson gave us Allomancy. But systems of magic are also the products of the cultural forces that act on, inspire, or dismay their authors as they create their secondary worlds. And if we do a little digging, we can unearth the zeitgeist that helped give birth to a system of magic, put the two side by side, and learn a bit about how the one can influence the other.
We can start as far back as 1872, when a British professor and minister named George MacDonald penned The Princess and the Goblin, a fairy tale about a princess and a miner’s son outwitting the goblins who live below them. The book went on to influence several of the seminal authors of modern fantasy.
Magic in The Princess and the Goblin falls very much into the “given” category. It’s used very sparingly, and it’s focused around a grandmother who gives the titular princess a magic ring and a ball of thread. Neither the princess nor the reader learns how the magic works. It simply does, and the princess uses it to escape from the goblins when they capture her. Magic, in the world of The Princess and the Goblin, is decidedly unscientific.
When we look into what was going on in Britain in 1872, we get a glimpse at one reason that might be. Despite the Industrial Age revving into full force, the world as mirrored through the pages of British newspapers doesn’t seem to contain a great deal of science either. In 1872, the Empire’s major papers reported on plenty of economic stories and lots of religious ones. They were crawling with foreign affairs pieces, murders, and poisonings. They did not spend much space on science coverage. The Guardian ran a regular short feature called “Art, Literature, and Science” that seems to have focused primarily on art. The Times (of London) covered the occasional scientific expedition or society meeting. That’s about it.
Fast-forward eighty-two years to J. R. R. Tolkien, who began publishing The Lord of the Rings in 1954. There’s a similarly nonscientific system of magic in a very different cultural moment. Magic in Middle-Earth shares a lot in common with the magic of The Princess and the Goblin. It is rarely used and often focused around objects, and while it’s necessary for the story to proceed, the mechanics of the magic itself are not at the heart of it. Gandalf and Saruman occasionally use magic. The One Ring possesses extremely powerful magic. But the particulars of how any of it works are left to the imagination. Magic just is.
1954 was a tumultuous time in Britain. World War II had been over for nine years, but the Cold War was heating up. In the months surrounding the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Times covered a shortage of science teachers, awards for new glider designs, the development of new jetliners and the crashes of old ones, and the advent of nuclear energy and failed attempts to de-escalate the nuclear arms race. On the day the book came out, The Times ran a scathing disapproval of British diplomacy. The world was growing smaller, Britain’s place in it was changing, and you can feel the societal tension crackling in the headlines.
How magic in The Lord of the Rings plays into all that is a little difficult to tease out. One need not reach beyond Tolkien’s feelings on religion and science to find an explanation of his magic. But Tolkien also held strong opinions on the changes taking place in his country, and given the upheaval of 1950s Britain, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to see the simple magic in The Lord of the Rings,or at least its resonance with readers,as a throwback to a simpler age.
Several decades later, the world seems to have grown more interested in the future than the past. On November 12, 1984, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight came out in the United States, spawning the incredibly successful Dragonlance fantasy franchise. Ronald Reagan had just won a buoyant reelection campaign. Time was running articles on extra-solar planets, plans for the Star Wars missile defense program, and an infant who had received a heart transplanted from a baboon. The advertisements running between the stories (”Introducing the ultimate VCR: The end of an incredible journey”) sported inspirational, glowing imagery and a sense of the magical even within the technological.
Dragonlance, which owes its existence to the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying games, introduced a magic system that was much more scientific than those MacDonald and Tolkien had developed, but still left plenty to the imagination. In the world of Dragonlance, spells take time to memorize and vanish from the caster’s mind once used. They sometimes require reagents. They take a toll on the body, and they’re related to three of the gods in the Dragonlance pantheon.
But that’s about all the reader learns in the early books of the series. How spells do what they do, and exactly what forces are being manipulated, goes unsaid. There’s a great deal of unpredictability and even playfulness to the magic, although it’s better explained than much of what came before it. And the feeling in the news that anything is possible feels well-suited to the lively, anything-might-happen atmosphere of the magic.
A little more than half a decade later, the optimism was slipping. The Soviet Union was cracking and dissipating, communist bloc countries were falling to uprisings, and the American economy was still recovering from the savings and loan crisis. The New York Times covered racial iniquities in schools and terrorist attacks in Peru. And in January 1990, The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan’s mind-bogglingly massive epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time, was released.
Magic in The Wheel of Time revolves around a mystical font of energy called The One Power, which can be channeled and woven by individuals for various purposes. The results of a given weave of The Power are repeatable, and there’s an element of empirical experimentation present. In one of the later novels in the series, a character discovers how to restore a person’s connection to The One Power by playing with different weaves until she succeeds.
But The Wheel of Time leaves many things unexplained. How exactly The One Power changes from mystical energy into another form is left unexplored, as is why some people can grasp it while others cannot. In The Wheel of Time, magic has measurable, repeatable effects, but it remains incompletely understood, like gravity or the strong force. And in the face of the uncert
ainty of 1990, it could be that Jordan’s semi-scientific magic system, in which cause and effect made a definite appearance but magic kept an almost spiritual undertone, appealed to readers.
In 2006, the headlines showed a lot of uncertainty again, and the first volume of another fantasy saga, Mistborn: The Final Empire, was released mid-year. In Mistborn, written by Brandon Sanderson, magic revolves around the use of metals. Allomancers can “burn” them in their bodies to gain certain powers. Feruchemists can store magical power in them. And Hemalurgists can steal power from others using spikes driven through the heart. All three types of magic are precise and provide predictable, often physics-driven outcomes, while the metals used in the magic range from the real and common (iron, copper) to the real and uncommon (cadmium, chromium), to the imaginary.
The cultural moment of July 2006 makes for an interesting contrast with Sanderson’s scientific magic. George W. Bush was president. Stem-cell research was on the outs. Headlines and articles in U.S. publications covered flaws in the Dolly sheep-cloning experiments and problems in Einstein’s personal life. One can feel a palpable distrust of, or at least disillusionment with, science in the headlines. In that environment, skeptical readers may have rewarded Sanderson for creating a system they could trust to behave in predictable ways.
Sanderson makes an interesting segue into another genre in which magic and science often intersect: steampunk. He recently jumped 300 years ahead in the Mistborn timeline to write The Alloy of Law, which takes his magic from a more traditional fantasy setting into the middle of a time period roughly analogous to the late 19th century. Though the origins of steampunk reach all the way back to the Victorian Era it so often emulates, the term itself didn’t crop up until the 1980s, and it makes sense to start our investigation of magic in the genre there, with Tim Powers’ seminal novel The Anubis Gates.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 59
