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fantasy fiction football (soccer) historical fantasy Lethe Press novelette novella Rahab SF short stories spec fic

book news

Long ago at the beginning of time—in 1976, that is—the first piece of fiction I was ever paid money for appeared in print. If I remember correctly, that story paid for my first electric typewriter. I’d written it longhand in a prep-school spiral-bound notebook, then typed it up on a portable manual Hermès that might be worth some money now if I still had it.

Let me do the math: Sometime in 2016 I will have been a Published Author for forty years. How is that even possible?

To mark the anniversary, I thought, how about a collection of stories, new and old? Not quite as old as forty years—I reread some of that apprentice work from the 1970s and ’80s. I don’t hate it (much) but don’t feel like preserving it either. Let future scholars and heirs do that after I’m dead. So the initial date I chose is 1990, the year I acquired my first computer (an Apple Macintosh SE of blessèd memory) and determined once for all the name I wished to be known under.

I brought the notion to Gentle Publisher, who agreed with good grace (although he nixed my proposed cover in no uncertain terms) and surprised me utterly by saying, “I’ll find somebody interesting to write an introduction.” I am as curious as you are who that will be!

At any rate, barring unforeseen mischance, out in July 2016 from Lethe Press will be a massive tome entitled Not Here. Not Now. collecting thirteen stories and novellas from a quarter century’s work in (and out of) multiple genres.

table of contents

  • “Composition with Barbarian and Animal” [written 1992/published 1994]
    Science fiction, a tale of barbarian merchants in the strange worlds of the far future.
  • “You Deserve” [2013/2013]
    Contemporary dark fantasy about a teenager and his dads, dreadful impulses and dreadful powers.
  • “Michael in the Library” [1991/1998]
    Quasi-historical fiction set in Roman Alexandria, concerning a scribe at the famous library and his lover, a novelist.
  • “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens” [2010-2012/2014]
    Contemporary fantasy: American tourists. Greek island. Sirens.
  • “A Handbook for the Castaway” [1996/1997]
    Quasi-historical fiction, the shipwreck narrative of an eighteenth-century pirate.
  • “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke” [2013/2013]
    Semi-historical* romance revolving around an Irish artist’s gorgeous illustration for a minor Poe story.
    *(do the 1960s count as history?)
  • “Dramma per musica; or, The Frenzy of Alexander” [1995/previously unpublished in full]
    Faux-autobiographical fiction containing, as in a matryoshka, a narrative of Baroque-opera castrato erotica.
  • “Three Men I Want” [1995/1997]
    A non-fiction short story, deceptively autobiographical, ambiguously confessional.
  • “The Hyena’s Blessing” [2012/2013]
    Quasi-historical fantasy set in eleventh-century Egypt, involving an assassin, a caliph, and, well, zombies.
  • “Captain of the World” [2010/2011]
    Contemporary sports fiction. No, really. Narrated by a Turkish-American soccer goalkeeper.
  • “#duranperi” [2013/previously unpublished]
    Contemporary fantasy, a kind of fairy tale taking place at the edges of the Gezi Park protests in İstanbul during the summer of 2013.
  • “Two Dead Men” [2012/2012]
    Secondary-world fantasy, a supernatural love story set during and ten years after a vicious civil war.
  • “The New People” [2008-2009/2011]
    Science fiction, an exploration of the society evolved on an isolated colony world three hundred years after all the women died. And a love story. And a fan letter to Israeli singer-songwriter Ivri Lider.

Categories
recommendation SF

reading recco

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit, 2013)

9780316246620Not, let me say flat out, a recommendation to every reader. You’ll have to enjoy and appreciate science fiction. By which I mean real SF, not comforting archetypes and mythic tropes dressed up in flashy magic-tech that reassure you about eternal (Western, Anglo, patriarchal) verities, like, say, Star Wars and its interminable ilk. This is a tremendously disorienting novel—rewardingly, even intoxicatingly so, to my mind, but tastes and expectations differ.

Full disclosure: In her capacity as editor/publisher of on-line speculative-fiction ’zine GigaNotoSaurus, Ann Leckie has purchased and published two of my stories, “Tattooed Love Boys” (March 2012) and “A Man Not of Canaan” (July 2013). My professional acquaintance with her has been cordial, amiable, and I have tremendous respect for her editorial acumen. I was aware she wrote fiction as well as editing it but had never got around to seeking any of it out. Admittedly, I mightn’t have paid quite so much attention to the pre-publication buzz around Ancillary Justice, her first book, absent that slight connection. But the buzz was sufficiently intriguing for me to put down cash money for a copy, a rare thing these impoverished days. Took me a few weeks to get around to reading it (I’ve been busy. And whatnot), but when I did, bang! all night, one sitting. Within the year, I expect I’ll read it again.

I said disorienting. On the first page of Ancillary Justice, the first-person narrator comes across an injured, unconcscious person on a snowy street of an isolated hamlet on an unimportant planet far from any center of civilization. Whom she recognizes. As an officer she served under. Whom she believed dead. For more than a thousand years. Not much later, we learn she herself has been aware, alive, at least two thousand years.

I call the narrator she. Her native language doesn’t mark gender and Leckie has chosen to translate that language’s ungendered, human third-person pronoun with English’s feminine. The narrator is aware many other languages do mark gender (more insistently than English, some of them, it seems), that in some cultures the distinctions between female and male are as critical as those between human and other. When dealing with people of those cultures, speakers of those languages, she’s always a bit uncertain, wary of misunderstanding or giving offense, because the first question in her mind, meeting a new, clothed person, isn’t man or woman? even when it’s culturally appropriate, and without such gross clues as big bushy beards she doesn’t always guess right. We never learn the narrator’s gender but the injured person, Seivarden Vendaii, also called she throughout, is (so the narrator notes aside) male.

I mentioned the distinction between human and other. Some persons who know the narrator well refer to her as it. Because she isn’t human. She’s a device, a tool, a weapon: an artifical intelligence created and programmed as the brains of an interstellar troop transport. In effect, just as you and I are our bodies as much as we are the mush of grey matter within our skulls, she is the Radchaai vessel Justice of Toren. She is also the troops she transports (though not their officers), all the multiple thousands of her simultaneously—granted the majority are usually in cold storage—which can pass for human among the unwary because their ancillary bodies started out as human corpses. For the purposes of one thread of the novel, the narrator, Justice of Toren, is primarily the ancillary troop decade One Esk, supporting with her multiple bodies and viewpoints her human decade lieutenant in the city of Ors on the recently annexed planet Shis’urna. In another (the novel’s present), she is the single remaining fragment of Justice of Toren after the ship and all its other ancillaries (and human officers, and three instances of the Lord of the Radch) were destroyed in an act of terrible betrayal. In this thread, the isolated ancillary formerly identified as One Esk Nineteen goes by the assumed name Breq and pretends to be an idle, wealthy traveller from the Gerentate, far distant from and not terribly familiar to inhabitants of Radchaai space.

I said three instances of the Lord of the Radch. Analogously to Justice of Toren‘s ancillaries, the millennia-old emperor of the Radch and Radchaai space, Anaander Mianaai, possesses—is embodied by, distributed among—thousands of instances, cloned bodies, the links between them sometimes stretched thin by interstellar distances, sometimes as nearly instantaneous as the nervous impulses between your own brain and fingers, semi-autonomous but all always the same person. As a result of events a thousand years ago (one aspect of which had led Justice of Toren to believe Seivarden Vendaii dead), Anaander Mianaii is clandestinely at war with herself.

Confused yet? It’s all handled much more deftly and delicately than I’m doing here, but if you aren’t willing to be confused, immersed in confusion—the plot is nearly as tangled as the setting—Ancillary Justice is probably not for you. Through much of the novel Justice of Toren/One Esk/Breq’s voice is peculiarly alienating, chilly, inhuman, as it would have to be, given what she is. I found that invigorating but YMMV, as they say. One review I’ve run into felt Leckie’s treatment of gender and unconventional use of pronouns were obtrusive, getting in the way of all the admirable goshwow (need I mention that reviewer was male and, so far as I know, straight and cisgender?), whereas I view them as an essential part of Leckie’s narrative strategy. It seems to me Leckie has been more clever about pronouns than Ursula K. LeGuin in The Left Hand of Darkness and more thoughtful than Samuel R. Delany in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and I believe those two novels to be nearly perfect.

Ancillary Justice, I think, is not quite nearly perfect, but damn, is it exciting—sweeping and intimate at once, thrilling and intelligent, vivid, challenging, strange, affecting, painstaking, both intelligent and clever. There’s an old saw, usually attributed to the late Terry Carr: the Golden Age of SF is twelve. It’s funny because it’s half true. You fall in love with Andre Norton (raises hand) or Star Wars (drops hand real fast) at twelve, but then—whether or not you grow up—you want more. Ancillary Justice is more. (I’m not a big fan of the cover, though.)

Categories
Deprivation fiction SF short stories

gratifying newses

Busting out all over!

I’m not about to start using this site as a soapbox for broadcasting my political and/or social/cultural opinions. But I’m nonetheless pleased, and pleased to acknowledge my pleasure, by the Rhode Island State Senate’s decision today to pass the same-sex marriage bill and take a decisive (if belated) step toward bringing the state where I reside into the twenty-first century along with the rest of New England, Iowa, New York, DC, Washington state, and Maryland. …And the eleven enlightened nations, and the several states within Mexico and Brazil, where committed gay and lesbian couples may expect to have their relationships granted the dignity of legal recognition.

On a much more personal level, I was deeply touched this morning to receive an e-mail from a reader—a citizen of one of those enlightened nations, in fact, though currently expatriate—about one of my stories. One of my very rare politically engaged stories, the politics coincidentally having to do with marriage (not simply same-sex marriage): “The Arab’s Prayer,” originally published in 2011, reprinted last summer in You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home and (where the reader encountered it) in Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. It’s very much not my place to say anything more in public, except to note, Gentle Reader, if you happen see this post first, that I am composing a reply.

On a professional level, I’m startled and gratified by a review of Deprivation posted today at Lambda Literary. (Scroll down: it’s the fourth of four reviews.) I have my own longstanding issues with the Lambda Literary Foundation into which I will not delve, as well as with the bizarre placement of the book in question within the rigidly defined genre of “romance,” but Lambda’s romance columnist/reviewer Dick Smart won me over with his thoughtful—indeed smart—response and analysis. (Even though he got Ben’s father’s name wrong.)

So three cheers.

Categories
BrazenHead fiction novella SF spec fic

Time Is! Proclaims the Head of Brass

A welcome: BrazenHead’s second title, the deceptively simple, intensely peculiar post-apocalyptic fantasia Green Thumb by Tom Cardamone, is now available in print, soon in e-book.

To whet your appetite, three reviews:

Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2012

Benito Corral Reviews, 27 June 2012

Out in Print Queer Book Reviews, 30 July 2012

Further praise from luminaries including Kathe Koja, Gemma Files, W.H. Pugmire, and BrazenHead’s own Dayna Ingram on Green Thumb’s dedicated page. Go. Read. Buy.

Categories
fiction novelette SF short stories spec fic You Will Meet a Stranger…

praise, belated and advance

These are lovely.

 

Over the weekend, I encountered a thoughtful and complimentary 1 February review of Steve Berman’s  anthology of inspirational stories for queer teens Speaking Out, released last September. On the GayYA.org blog (a resource you should bookmark right fast), Lydia Sharp writes:

 

 

And as much as I hate to play favorites, I have to admit that my personal favorite of all the stories is “Captain of the World” by Alex Jeffers.

 

Then just this morning I was forwarded the first blurb for my forthcoming story collection You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home…from legendary speculative-fiction writer TANITH LEE, author of Tales from the Flat Earth, Disturbed by Her Song, etc, &c, whose work I have been reading a very long time:

 

It’s a marvelous book. This guy is a major talent…. The stories compliment yet satisfyingly differ from each other, the atmospheres are like different-colour palettes. Jeffers can be cruel, pragmatic, tender, sweet, funny, sexy, and devastating. The stories, and their underlying themes and currents, linger. A most collectable collection.

That may give me the oomph required to go out and do a nearly literal ton of laundry….

Categories
BrazenHead fiction novelette SF short stories spec fic The Abode of Bliss The New People The Unexpected Thing

the year that was

Well, it’s a tradition, I suppose, the year-end sum up, hardly subverted by being posted on the first day of the new year instead of the last of the old. So.

In 2011, I published two books, a marvel of unprecedented proportion.

The New People (and its companion-between-the-covers, Brandon Bell’s Elegant Threat) made little impression on the world that Google can discover. Sad but not surprising for a book from a micro press whose publisher’s real life (read: more-than-full-time job) seems to have swallowed him whole in the last six months and at least one of whose authors is pathologically averse to self promotion. But it’s out there.

The Abode of Bliss: Ten Stories for Adam did somewhat better. The first month’s excellent reviews are catalogued here. Since, the estimable Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews published George Seaton’s appreciation. Hilicia of Impressions…of a Reader, who reviewed Abode very thoughtfully back in August, named it as her favorite LGBT read of the year and among her three favorites in any genre, and I am immensely gratified. [edited to add: Novelist and critic Alan Chin calls Abode one of his five favorites of 2011.] The book’s publisher, in his own year-end sum up, lists it among the titles he’s most proud to have released in 2011.

I published four stories, a personal best as far as my inadequate records reveal.

“The Arab’s Prayer” appeared in January in the second-anniversary issue of Chris Fletcher’s ’zine M-Brane SF (#24) and the print M-Brane SF Quarterly (#2) in March, some months before his job swallowed him up and the ’zine went on hiatus. Chris has plans to revive M-Brane SF in different, probably less frequent than monthly, form in the near future. Its return will be welcomed. Meanwhile, “The Arab’s Prayer” has been selected as the lead story in Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction.

“Captain of the World,” a story I was hounded into writing, appeared in the anthology of inspirational stories for GLBT teens Speaking Out, edited by Steve Berman and released by Bold Strokes Books in September. There is some thought of expanding the story into a novel. We’ll see if anything comes of that.

“Liam and the Ordinary Boy,” second in an on-going series, appeared soon after in the fall issue (#10) of Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. First in the series, “Liam and the Wild Fairy,” previously appeared in Icarus #5 (Summer 2010). Whether Icarus will take the third, “Liam and His Dads,” or the contemplated but as yet unwritten fourth through seventh remains in question.

“Turning,” finally, a long magical-realist story, appeared in the first issue of Chelsea Station. Under an earlier title, “Like Spinning Stars, Like Flowers,” it was one of fourteen finalists selected by John Berendt for the annual short-fiction competition of the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. Not one of the ten selected for the annual anthology, though. Just as well, perhaps: Chelsea Station’s editor, Jameson Currier, suggested several very productive changes.

I sold two long stories to appear before the midpoint of 2012. Both, coincidentally (they were written two years apart), tales of American teenagers on vacation in Europe. “Tattooed Love Boys,” written first, sold second, will appear on line at GigaNotoSaurus.org, probably in March. “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy” is scheduled for May, in Boys of Summer, Steve Berman and Bold Strokes Books’ follow up to Speaking Out.

I wrote three stories—not a record, but not bad. All, oddly or not, for projects edited by Steve Berman. The aforementioned “Captain of the World” in late winter and “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel…” in late summer/early fall. Between them, “Ban’s Dream of the Sea,” which may or may not appear in The Touch of the Sea, an anthology of marine fantasy scheduled for July publication.

I sold a collection of fantastical stories, tentatively titled You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, which Lethe Press has scheduled for July release, just in time for my mumblety-fifth birthday. The table of contents keeps changing but needs to be fixed soon, as production of Advance Reader Copies can’t be delayed much past February. But I have to write one more story….

As editor/designer/entrepreneur, I published the first BrazenHead novella, Dayna Ingram’s ferocious and delightsome Eat Your Heart Out, which garnered BrazenHead’s parent Lethe Press its first starred review in Publishers Weekly and, I’m told, is selling briskly. (More briskly than my books.) Any day now, I hope to see the revised MS of the novella I expect to release as BrazenHead #2. Submissions are always open to works of queer spec fic between thirty and sixty thousand words.

As designer, I laid out a bunch of handsome books, the last several months’ worth of which have not yet made an appearance in the gallery. Because I have been busy with other things. Later in the day, perhaps.

As novelist, I completed a draft of The Unexpected Thing, an immense novel that I love unreservedly. Whether anybody else will love it I have no notion: potential early readers have mostly begged off—“144,000 words? I don’t have time!” they cry. Reasonably enough, I suppose. (No, I don’t.) Anyway, one of these days soon I’ll pester my agent, who’s had a copy of the MS since May. One of these days soon I’ll come up with an all-consuming project to take its place in my head.

And that’s it. What, you expected a recount of my personal, everyday life and interactions with the real world? Not bloody likely. (Charlotte and Jane are both well.)

Categories
Lethe Press music SF short stories spec fic

best of the year?

Oh, unlikely. But still a flattery: my bite-size science fiction story of the very near future, “The Arab’s Prayer” (M-Brane SF #24, January 2011), has been selected for reprint in Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. A book I will most likely copyedit, design, and lay out. Meta or what?

I will take the opportunity, as I do just about every time I mention “The Arab’s Prayer,” to embed the video for Israeli pop star Yehonathan’s anthemic “Waiting for You (Tel-Aviv),” which provided both inspiration and soundtrack.

 

Categories
novella Rahab SF The New People

freshly hatched

All new and…well, not shiny, new and matte!

 

AX has a novella to read. Aside, that is, from the BrazenHead slushpile.


A minor note: Through some eminently forgiveable oversight, the acknowledgments I meant to append to The New People were left out. So here they are:

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Betty Harrington for a sensitive, insightful, tactful reading of the first draft.

Thanks to Christopher Fletcher for publishing this later draft, to Jeff Lund for the artwork, and to Brandon Bell for sharing the covers.

Thanks to the late Terry Carr and to Robert Silverberg who, eons ago, rightfully declined to publish the first attempt at wrestling some of these themes into submission.

Thanks especially to Ivri Lider for the music that inspired and soundtracked the work, notably the exhilarating CD Ha’anashim Ha’chadashim and the blistering singles “Rak Tevakesh” and “Hasadot Ha’adumim.”

 

Categories
fiction novella Rahab SF The New People

glimpsed in the wild

In its native environment, on the virtual shelves at barnesandnoble.com, the rare and elusive M-Brane Double:

Evidence of its passage has also been discovered in the Amazon basin:

And the Double has been sighted in pampered captivity, on the St Louis, MO, deck of M-Brane publisher Chris Fletcher and cover artist Jeff Lund (Jeff, let it be noted, is more elusive than the Double and is not seen here):

 

Intrepid naturalists may read Chris’s introductions to my and Brandon Bell’s novellas here (as well as order the Double direct—Chris has indicated he will keep the Special Bonus Lots of Extra M-Brane Goodies Offer open indefinitely). Brandon has a number of posts about his Elegant Threat on his own blog. I have the first chapter of The New People posted here and a page on the work’s inspirations and composition here.

What off earth are you waiting for?

Categories
fiction first look novella Rahab SF spec fic The New People

M-Brane SF Double #1

Today was meant to be the release date for M-Brane SF Double #1, partly in honor of the birthday of Jeff Lund, who created the nifty cover art and who puts up with M-Brane publisher Chris Fletcher on a daily basis. Alas, the coincidence of a tiny glitch in the cover layout (not Jeff’s responsibility) and the long Memorial Day weekend has caused a delay. A week perhaps. Which may mean the pre-publication special is still open: the print Double plus a passel of electronic-form M-Brane merch, all for the low low price of $14.95. Why not head over to M-Brane Press and try?

Meanwhile, in my quixotic fashion, I will continue to claim 31 May 2011 as official pub date. And so, to welcome you into my half of the book, herewith the 1,300-word first chapter of my ~30,000-word novella.


The New People

 

1: Haven-city, Haven-archipelago: EJ 313 Zizdy 03

Running blind, he collided with somebody or something, stumbled, nearly fell, but kept running. The endless clamor in his ears was like surf magnified, roaring. Surely people were screaming, sirens wailing. The phone was out—even if he could have heard anything under the roar—a dead, cold weight on the bone of his jaw. The second time, he couldn’t keep his balance. Unseen paving rushed up to strike palms and knees, hard and hot. He rolled onto his shoulder. Something punched his side and he continued rolling until the low seawall stopped him. He kept blinking, trying to see, but there was only light. He felt the inarticulate grunts and moans in his throat but couldn’t hear them, couldn’t stop them. Pavement shuddered under his cheek as the tower continued to collapse. Shuddering himself, he lay there for what seemed like a very long time, arms crooked around his head, knees pulled up to protect his belly, panting, sobbing.

Eventually the throbs of light in his eyes began to slow and dim, though the dull roar continued in the bones of his skull. When he could distinguish the movements of his fingers, he sat up, leaning against the wall. The fog of brightness made everything hazy and flat. Nobody was running now but he saw people in the eye-burning yellow of Emergency Response moving against the backdrop of indistinct buildings. The façades glowed with a white clamor pierced by prisms of hot glass that made his eyes tear. Unless it was shock, fear, horror that made him cry.

They weren’t supposed to have, to use weapons. The new people, if that was what they called themselves. The manifesto spoke of reform, of change—not killing. He had wanted to join them, further their aims. They had bombed the nursery.

Pulling himself to his feet, he turned his back on the corniche and its buildings, placed his hands flat on the top of the seawall. Morning sun threatened to blind him again if he looked up. Below, the beach lay deserted, abandoned belongings forlorn on disturbed sands. Waves lapped unconcerned onto the sand, surf burst on the reef. Far across the water, the silvery ribbon of the elevator climbed from the horizon to pierce the zenith, longer than anything, taller than anything—immeasurably taller than the nursery spire before it fell. If he looked right, down the beach, only a little way, there would be débris where the tower had collapsed, broken on the sand. Débris. Bodies. Babies.

Madmen. Only madmen could deliberately kill babies.

Something touched his shoulder. He tried to shrug it off, but it was a hand that grasped hard and forced him to turn. The man in ER yellow was talking to him. “I can’t hear you,” he said, unsure whether he could be heard himself. “I don’t think I’m hurt badly but I can’t hear anything except—” The man seemed to be shaking his head. “I can’t see very well either.”

Wielding some medical implement, the man inspected his ears, then changed the setting to irradiate his eyes. That made him blink, but afterward his vision came clear. Ears remained blocked to any sound but the constant rumbling in his skull of the bomb’s aftershocks. The man held up a hand and he understood he was meant to count the fingers: “Three.… Two.… Four.… My name is Jafet. I arrived from Away last night—I’m on vacation. Do you need my ID?”

The man nodded.

Jafet reached for the lozenge on its chain around his neck, suddenly aware he hadn’t picked up his satchel when he fled the café. But it was ID the man wanted and he carried that on his person. Tugging it free, he handed it over, scarcely noticed the man slipping it into his journal’s aperture. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to sit down.”

Faltering, he reached behind to be sure of the wall and sat. Below the frayed hem of his sarong, ash and dust crusted his legs. There were scratches and streaks of muddy blood—the worst of it from his fall but some might be shrapnel. He lifted his hands: more scratches, more blood, more dirt, on palms and forearms.

Another hand appeared, returning his ID. Jafet took it and looked up. The man’s blinding coverall wasn’t dirty but creased and crumpled as if he’d pulled it on only a moment ago. His name was stitched across the breast in red, NISIM, above the municipal emblem. His face was blank with concern as he searched his pockets. Finding what he needed, he leaned over Jafet with a different tool, pressed it to the muscle and tendon of Jafet’s jaw where the phone was bonded to the bone. A thin, angry whine sliced through the roar in Jafet’s ears. He winced.

The man, Nisim, inspected his implement, made an adjustment, pressed it against Jafet’s jaw again. The whine modulated down to an easy, not unpleasant tone, then cut out. Nisim made another adjustment.

“Can you hear me now?”

Muffled and distorted by the continuing roar, the voice from the aether was nevertheless distinct. “Yes,” Jafet said.

“How close were you?”

“In the café.”

Nisim’s black eyes opened wide. “Judgment! And you got out before the rest of the building fell on you?”

Jafet shook his head. “I told you—I’m from Away. I’ve been running out of buildings since I could run. It’s like an instinct. I hope—”

In turn, Nisim grimaced. “Probably not. We know about typhoons in Haven, but typhoons give you warning, and you run inside. The nursery was typhoon proofed.”

“How…how many?”

“Too soon to tell.” Biting his lip, Nisim looked away. “Staff, expectant fathers, other visitors: a few hundred, probably. Most of the babies should survive if we can dig the bottles out fast enough. I should—”

Jafet took a breath. “Yes, you should. Now. I’ll be fine.” He took another breath. “Thank you for telling me about the babies.”

“The bottles are tough.” Nisim almost smiled. “Here.” He handed Jafet a foil sachet. “Put this on your scratches after you wash. If the tinnitus hasn’t faded by morning, or if anything else feels weird, get yourself to a clinic. My phone knows you now, so I’ll check in tomorrow.” He nodded, turned away, then looked back, a crooked grin ready to turn to tears. With a start, Jafet comprehended the young man’s astonishing beauty. “On behalf of the municipality,” Nisim said, “I apologize for your vacation being spoiled.” Then, trotting, he was away down the corniche.

What’s that supposed to mean, Jafet wanted to say. He was breathing hard again, nearly hyperventilating. He didn’t want to watch Nisim reach the ruins—the café where the waiter who’d served him, the cook who’d prepared his breakfast, the other customers must all have been crushed when the nursery behind and above collapsed and fell on them. He hadn’t authorized payment for his meal before fleeing. It was the second explosion that blinded him: he had paused for an instant, stupid, not twenty meters from the café doors, looked back, looked up. The slender spire of the nursery—first and largest nursery in the world—was moving, jerkily swaying. He knew it was designed to move, but not like that. At the top of the spire, the titanic sculpture gleamed and flashed as sunlight caught on its facets and curves: stylized father nurturing stylized son.

But then as he watched, the babe in his daddy’s arms flared blue-white like a little star, brighter than the sun, searing Jafet’s eyes before he could turn and run, before the concussive blast deafened him.

The first explosion had done the job—the second was merely symbol.

Jafet swallowed dry. Madmen. If it were the new people, he wanted nothing to do with them—he wanted them punished, however noble their aims. His hotel was half a kilometer up the corniche, an easy stroll. He started walking.


Intrigued? You might also want to look into issue #10 of M-Brane SF (November 2009), led off by “Jannicke’s Cat,” a novelette from two hundred fifty years earlier in the history of The New People’s planet; and M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 (October 2010), containing “Annie,” a short story roughly contemporaneous with “Jannicke’s Cat.”

Both those stories, along with The New People and much else, are meant one day to be folded into a volume of conventional-novel length. A Boy’s History of the World (working title) will be a sweeping sci-fi panorama of the extra-solar planet Rahab, from the foundational trauma of Eve’s judgment, when all the women began to die, to the first tentative recontact with a human universe containing two sexes.

That’s the plan, anyway. Logistics are complex. Watch this space for progress reports.