The room pulsed around him, its fetid breath almost palpable even through the helmet. The bodies of Commander Wu Suzhen and Major Sam Harris were woven into the wall, a superimposed lovers’ embrace developed in resin and red light. Their shapes were fuzzy; the inside of Matt’s helmet sticky with condensation like his hair was sticky with sweat. His inner ear couldn’t find north or down, his eyes stung and he could taste something salty, but whether blood, sweat or tears, he couldn’t tell. Why did you live?
Matt LeWald had no idea what he was getting himself into when he joined the Marines. He was expecting a few years of service, but instead found himself thrust into a mission gone horribly wrong. As the only survivor, he is left with questions that haunt him: why did he live when everyone else died?
If you enjoyed Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, you will be enthralled with this strange and haunting tale of first contact and redemption. The reviewers are calling it “not your Dad’s military SF.” Buy it now, read it over your lunch break, and think about it the rest of your life.
This story is a rewrite of a story I wrote when I was 11 or 12, the only one of the series of novelettes that seemed worth the effort. And boy, was it ever worth the effort. With Melissa’s gorgeous, hand-painted cover, I debuted it just before WorldCon in San Jose, and it shot to the top of my KU reads and sales. It’s been my most consistent earner ever since…despite the mid-story switch in subgenre.
And if you haven’t inhaled its svelte 7,800 words, here’s your chance – I’m offering it for free for five days.
This is officially the 200th post on R. Jean Mathieu’s Innerspace! I can’t believe it any more than you can!
A final confrontation between Old China and New in the mad depths of the Cultural Revolution, come meet “The Man Who Shot Lü Dongbin.“
The Old must go that the New may come.
So the Great Helmsman said.
We must eliminate the Four Olds.
So his generals and ministers said.
But there were more than four. There were so many more than four.
Bi Yadie’s grandmother had believed Lü Dongbin, wise leader of the Eight Immortals, was a saint, a being of compassion that would intercede when she begged hard enough. Bi Yadie knew better. Bi Yadie’s mother had believed Lü Dongbin was merely a story, told to delight the simple and the childish. But Bi Yadie knew better. He knew that Lü Dongbin was a capitalist-roader, an old-style feudalist of the worst kind.
The year is 1964. Bi Yadie, Group Leader of the Heaven-Earth Harmonization Task Force, has tracked the last of the Chinese gods, the Taoist Immortal Lü Dongbin to his mountain fastness. His mission is simple: to eliminate Lü Dongbin from the new Liberated Era of the People’s Republic of China.
But old legends do not die so easy. Lü Dongbin has prepared for this moment, and armed himself…with a cup of tea.
Cambermann’s Painter: A Scientifiction– The story of a disruptor with a disruptive new technology that will disrupt art forever! …I speak of photography, of course! A flash that speaks to 2023 through 1823, if you’ve been following the AI news, you’ll bust a gut.
“You mean to say that contrivance painted this…this wonderful woman’s image?!” The bewhiskered mayor stuttered.
“No paint was involved whatsoever, nor painter!” Cambermann cried. “For too long have the painters of Paris rolled like butter in milk in their sumptuous garrets and Montmartre alehouses! This technology will destroy the gatekeeping of the likes of artistic guilds and this very Institute! The whole race of painters will disappear from the face of the Earth as every man can now instantly paint any scene before him!”
When Mackenzie embarked Marie-Pier Corriveau’s ancient Prius after winter finals, the muggy slurry of rain had been falling on Montréal for two weeks. A La Presse headline bubbled up in her Google-vision that it was officially the heaviest since the 2045 tipping point, and recommended some journalistic debate on whether this meant climate change was plateauing. She waved it away as if it were one of the malarial mosquitos that had plagued Quebec since she’d enrolled at McGill. Finals were over, and she didn’t have to worry about risks of the Quebec City dikes failing and flooding the Plains of Abraham, or persistent malaria outbreaks in Three-Rivers, or threats to the wine grapes in what remained of the Gaspé peninsula.
“Bonjour-hi!” she chirped, clapping the passenger door shut. Marie-Pier replied in kind. “What’s with the blue-and-white bumper sticker?”
“Protective camouflage.” Marie-Pier’s French accent was the carefully precise and internationalized sort favored by Quebec’s more cosmopolitan classes. “We are going upriver to the heart of the Republic.”
Come in out of the warm and wet into the bite of the last land that is not land, but winter. Buy “Glâcehouse” today…before winter disappears completely.
The honorable mention of the 2006 Tellus Prize, first story I ever sold, here is “Gods of War,” available for free for one week only.
It was about three in the afternoon, at least that’s what it would’ve been on Earth. The sky was an angry purplish, like blood on the inside of your helmet, and it was ripping around, trying to kill us. The worst was behind, but the destruction lay ahead.
Marquez, a Mandarin-speaking Earth boy, and Harris, a grim Martian colonist, are Red Cross volunteers traversing the Martian wastes. They come to the Chinese settlement of Zheng-we, decimated by a dust storm, and hunt for survivors. They thought there would be none. They were wrong.
“Gods of War” was the first of my “Asian philosophical SF,” stories where I explore concepts I’ve read and learned from China and elsewhere, concepts like the difference between do and jutsu, the ineffability of the Dao, or the extent of iron-body techniques. It’s always been one of my favorites, for the multicultural Mars and for the sense of active, muscular hope under pressure. Hope is not something you have, it is something you practice, and nowhere do I say that clearer than in “Gods of War.”
Long-gone MindFlights.com published it, paying me a handsome $25 for it. At the time, I was working in my father’s company, videotaping government meetings. I got the news checking my email surreptitiously some five minutes after a California Coastal Commission meeting had broken for the day, the commissioners still easy in their chairs. I rushed to the public podium, switched it on, and announced to the sitting Commission that I’d just made my first professional sale, and got paid for it. The august politicos broke out in applause for me, and my father grinned from behind the switchboard. This will always be one of my fondest memories.
Some of them even read the story when it came out. I hope you do, too.
For one week, to celebrate the coming of les printemps, “Gods of War” is free on Amazon. Get your copy today, and be swept away to the red sands of Mars, after the storm Guan Yu has passed leaving so much devastation in its wake…
Originally the last word in Triangulation: Dark Skies, now available for the first time standing on its own.
Five thousand years before the end of the Earth, the star called WR-104 went supernova. Over the intervening centuries, its deadly gamma-ray burst hurtled across silent planets and empty space on a death-errand to that distant world. And, in the intervening five thousand years, Earth learned to listen, and learned to see, and learned to contemplate its coming demise.
Robinson and Campbell are the last two astronomers left at Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory as downtown Hobart, and the whole world, descend into chaos. The Earth’s biosphere is coming to an end, thanks to a gamma ray burst five thousand years in the making. There will be nothing left. Except that the two astronomers might, just might, be able to leave a message encoded in Earth’s Sun, a message to whoever is out there, and whoever comes after…
What message do they struggle to gift to a vast post-Earth universe? Find out in “Earth Epitaph” on Amazon.com.
This is the opening scene of a story I’m shopping around, “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box).” Next time someone asks “what is solarpunk?” I’m showing them this, because these dozen paragraphs are pure, distilled solarpulp.
Credit to Kim Schmidt, as always
“I wonder what they hold over you, Doña Ana Lucía.” Said Anni Talavalakar. “Did you ‘retrieve’ a relic from your own museum? Seduce a Senator’s lover? I like to think you killed a man, it’s the romantic in me.”
“It is a little of all three.” Doña Ana Lucía smiled — a feral smile on her imperious, cultivated features.
The two Syndicate goons juddered her a little.
“And you still won’t tell me where my venuswood box is…? A pity.” Anni looked up, out toward her stars, gears ticking beneath her silver streak. “But since you have done me the honor of revealing your unspoken truth, I can freely give you this…with your consent.”
“F-freely given.” Confirmed the stunned archaeologist.
She leaned up, and pressed naked lip to blood-red. Her mouth was rich and full, with the confidence of age and the playfulness of youth. Anni even marked the end with a little flick of her tongue that hit Doña Ana Lucía like the sting at the end of a melody.
Anni lingered there, her dark hand caressing Doña Ana Lucía’s morena cheek, her gaze taking in as much of the archaeologist as she could. The Syndicate goons filling the train car looked on respectfully, without a sound.
Finally, Anni drew back and took a deep, regret-filled sigh.
“Toss her.”
The taste of her goodbye kiss lingered on Doña Ana Lucía’s lips as they threw her over the drumhead.
She knew the fall was not far: two meters, if that. But it went on forever, long enough that Ana Lucía could see the stars overhead all wink out in the harsh, cold light of day before she hit the ground.
By the look on her face, I figure she’s stoned, and by her odd clothing, I guess she’s a hipster, so I have to show her something daring. I point to the Morbier. Illustrating the structure with my hands, I tell her, “It’s got two layers: the end of the day’s curds on the bottom and the beginning of the next day’s curds on top, separated by a layer of ash.
It starts with the introduction of Mara, the woman without a past, who until last year had no social security number, no birth certificate, no fingerprints or DNA on file. Trish introduces her, Trish, the smoker sous-chef with some extra pudge around the middle and an eye for the beauty of women like Mara.
In the double-space to a new scene, a new moment, we cross the ash, from today’s curds to yesterday’s, when they met at the farmer’s market, and where Trish pointed out the Morbier. We cross, back and forth, across the ash, from yesterday to today, over the course of the story – and twice across into tomorrow’s curds, once in the middle of the story and at the very end. Today is in the depths of winter, and yet
I’m at the farmer’s market again. It’s springtime, all puddles and pollen. The girl is gone and she’s not coming back.
But our next double-space across the ash, to today, is to describe the other great food metaphor of the story: the chocolate fountain.
A chocolate fountain is a biological weapon disguised as a dessert. Once deployed, the fountain burbles out an invitation to every guest who has just scratched a rash or picked a nose to stick their germy fingers into the brown downpour. For fear of injury lawsuits, the chocolate (which is always of low quality) is not hot enough to kill bacteria – instead, it is diluted with a generic vegetable oil to maintain its runny consistency. By the end of the night, it becomes a sweet, gushing petri dish.
I’ve never eaten of a chocolate fountain, and I never will. Not after these fruits of Benedict’s exhaustive research.
Mara and Trish work at an exclusive Connecticut country club, Trish in the kitchen (but she smokes with the waitstaff) and Mara on the waitstaff. They set up and tear down the chocolate fountain, feed their blue-blooded and well-heeled guests on Costco stuffed grape leaves, steal bottles from the cellar when they can get away with it. It’s all they, and their colleagues, Ivan, Jake, and Peggy, can do. Those well-heeled bastards and blue-blooded heiresses treat them as subhuman. Mara is notable for being the only waitress or waiter who hasn’t barricaded herself in the closet to cry, even after the short litany of personal abuses and degradations Trish off-handedly relates.
Mara saves that for home at the apartment, with Trish, where she checks the fridge five times a night to make sure her leftover spaghetti is still there, where she curls into a ball in the bed for Trish to wrap herself around and hope, where she trembles when two friends of theirs, James and Geoffrey, announce their engagement. “Oh God,” Mara trembles, “the government has you on a list now. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
No one’s sure what to make of Mara, the girl without a past. Her therapist assures her that her memories of time travel, of a terrible future somewhere beyond the ash, are confabulations, but teams of doctors can only wring their hands and wonder if she’s not from some Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt bunker instead. She has a scar on her temple where she says they put in an implant (now, thankfully, finally dead). Once, while high, Trish asks Mara why they would have sent her. Mara just shrugs, “experiments need guinea pigs.”
And, slowly, we piece together where Mara is going, if not where she comes from.
One of the worst of the guests is a tech-lord named Helmut Geier, and his son, Hal. The father cannot meet any eye, speaks in a low monotone mumble, and communicates entirely through his assistant. All he ever communicates is “fire that waiter.” Some, like Jake, have made a game of it, getting fired and showing up again the next day. Helmut does not see the waitstaff as distinct enough people to bother differentiating. All except Mara, who performs with preternatural knowledge of his tastes and preferences.
This time, the assistant’s message is: “he wants you to wait his table from now on.”
And so, when Helmut stays over a week at the club with his son in tow, for his son’s birthday, Mara works breakfast, lunch, and dinner, serving the billionaire’s peculiar needs. Usually before he voices them. Of the son, Hal…well…he’s eleven years old, speaks in grunts instead of his father’s mumbles, spends his every waking hour either on bloodthirsty video games or oversexed anime. Mara serves him as well, at his birthday party:
“Hal Geier has a taste for fried foods, but he doesn’t like to get grease on his device. So every item of food on his plate must have a toothpick in it to keep his fingers clean. He wants chicken tenders and those little French fries shaped like smiley faces. Put broccoli on his plate, too, but only to satisfy his father – the boy will not eat it. And he’ll want a big squeezy bottle of ketchup to go with it.”
“How did you figure all this out?” I ask.
“Research,” she says.
The chocolate fountain burbles on.
And something funny happens at Hal Geier’s birthday party.
It starts with the hypochondriac grandmother, the one who communicates entirely in racist slurs and fatphobic comments, complaining of stomach cramps, whisked away by her personal physician. Then an uncle, the heavy drinker and heavy eater, so no worries. Than a blonde boy who loves to steal food and let his mother emerge from her vodka long enough to laugh at the waitstaff who was too slow for him. Then a little girl named Gertrude – and that’s when it stops being funny, when the kitchen stops making side bets on the next guest to fall.
Now we cross the ash, to the weekend before Christmas, to the loading dock, where Trish is smoking with the waitstaff. Peggy the shift manager pops a question, a hack question for a hack amateur sociologist: “Would you kill baby Hitler?” Only Trish thinks to question the givens, asking if Hitler is predestined, if her attempt was predestined, whether she was doomed to fail. And then Mara answers, pointing to the long history of European anti-Semitism, to the brutality of WWI and the inadequacy of the peace, all the people who willingly participated in the Third Reich. If you killed Hitler, someone else could step into his shoes.
Peggy happily writes up “whether great men make history or history makes great men.” And Mara takes a last pull on her smoke, and gives her real answer, Benedict’s real answer, the heart of the story and the question she set out to ask:
[To prevent the Holocaust,] “You have to kill a lot more people.”
When Trish finally emerges from the kitchen, back across the ash in the present, the bodies have been moved out the back door, the party guests gone, the teardown crews “unaware they’re interfering with a crime scene.” The buffet is cooling in one corner, the stuffed animals deathly still in the centers of the tables, the party streamers hanging limp. The guests who aren’t dead, will be.
And Mara is standing next to the putrid petri dish of wealthy excess: the chocolate fountain, with the red juice of a strawberry and a speck of chocolate at the corner of her mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come,” are her last words. Along with “I’m sorry.”
We cross the ash one last time. Into the future, where Trish wakes up every morning in “the wrong life,” hounded by police and reporters, wondering if her girlfriend really was from the future, really had to kill all those people to prevent it, if she was just crazy, if Trish herself is crazy.
It’s a life cut in half by disaster, and the past lies buried beneath a layer of ash.
(If you’re racking your brains trying to remember where you heard of R. S. Benedict before, she was the Main Character of Twitter for about 36 hours, because of a dumbass opinion on fanfic. You may also notice that nowhere in this summary does fanfic come up. Her opinion of fanfic has no bearing whatsoever on this story. A person can have a shitty opinion and still be a good writer, published in F&SF. No matter what Twitter tells you.)
Many reviewers, then and now, compared “Morbier” to 12 Monkeys. The crazed time traveler, the sympathetic love interest here in the present, the unfathomable disaster to come, the brutal things to be done “in the present.”
It is not.
It is La Jetée.
I love that this cover is composed like a slice of Morbier.
Both 12 Monkeys and “Morbier” derive from La Jetée, but “Morbier” hones closer to the disjointed, nightmarish effect of the original. It was only on the third reread that I caught the calls-forward, the rhythm of the temporal displacements, the creeping hints that Mara is not crazy – the hints Trish doesn’t quite pick up on, even as she relates them.
This story creeps. It creeps up your spine and down your gorge, and then stays there.
“You’d have to kill a lot more people” is Benedict’s answer to the hoary old question, and Mara unflinchingly acts on that answer. She tries to save the waitstaff, the class innocents, from her bacteriological guillotine (since no staff member is dumb enough to eat from the fountain) but she can’t save them from the disjoint, from the horror of waking up in the wrong life ever after. She truly loves Trish, but has to keep her at arm’s distance. If you truly believed in killing baby Hitler, and killing a lot more people besides, to prevent a Holocaust, you would have to be Mara.
Ask yourself if you could do it. I still don’t have an answer myself.
Ladli dabbed at her brow with the hem of her sari. It was not Proper, but then, neither was she. A proper auntie would not have wasted what few rupees they had on electricity from the neighbourhood’s jugaar solar install, not have wasted yet more on roadside dhaba meals so she’d have time to work, not have sent Maandhar diving into the deep on mad bright dreams instead of honest cons like the rest of the diver-boys.
The thought had occurred to her, in the shadows of the multinationals, as she queued for water. The ubiquitous cloud of diver-boys swarmed any out-of-towners or people who looked rich.
“Many diamonds, uncle, from the old days!”
“Only two hundred rupees investment!”
“Prizes from the deep!”
Ladli and her family live on the shores of sunken Surat, seeking sustenance from the waters that were once the downtown Diamond District. Her promising nephew Maandhar dives for treasures and tricks gullible tourists, her brother-in-law Guarav from the fish that gather fewer and fewer every year. Ladli looks down into the dirty deep and the bones of the city that once was, and dreams of a garden, a garden of beauty and wealth, that might rise from the waters again…
In Québec, there’s a long tradition of telling scary stories on the darkest nights of the year. As “mon pays, ceci n’est pas un pays, c’est hiver”* fills with endless snow and the days grow short, people gathered together around the campfires and told tales of werewolves, demons, devils, and wendigos. Some of the most famous stories in Québécois folklore, like Rose LaTulippe or the Chasse-Galerie, arise from these long-ago campfire tails in the dead of subarctic night. And none are more scary, none more hair-raising, than the tales told on New Year’s Night, when the stars are bright and cold and clear and the dim fire throws shadows that could be loup-garou with cold breath, and the chill is always hovering too close to the tiny circle of warmth.
So here, free, two days only, is mon conte de Nouvel’An.
In 2109, there is no more space program.
No more Discovery.
No more Final Frontiers.
I wrote “No More Final Frontiers” after they announced the Space Shuttle program was ending, with no clear hope forward other than hitching a ride with the Russians. SpaceX remained unclaimed. Since it’s been claimed, since the Dragon roars through the sky…I still see this as a possible future, one to warn against. The more Elon Musk tries to gobble up outer space as his personal demesne, muscling out competition while deriding nonprofit or governmental space exploration, crowning himself King of Mars with wannabe serfs lining up for the pleasure, the more I wonder if one hundred years from now, anyone will remember or care after he inevitably burns out.
I dedicated it to two men who died that year – Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Kyle Bruner, a shipmate of mine on the Lady Washington who died trying to save a woman from getting robbed in the Bahamas. The deaths of these two men are what inspired this particular horror story, this story of time forgot.
For the next forty-eight hours, “No More Final Frontiers” is available for free on Amazon. It’s the story of “Space Dennis,” one of the last crews of a historical reenactment space program, and one of the last to get the news that it’s been shut down. He and his shipmates hatch a plot to steal the space shuttle, but even abandoned property is harder to steal than it looks, and they’ll be faced with the question whether it’s even worth it…
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