"The Tentacle and You" at Pseudopod

Greetings friends and fellow conspirators! It's about to be a very busy series of months, with a series of story publications, convention appearances, and wild announcements. And it all starts today.

It starts with the return of one of my quirkiest stories: "The Tentacle and You." This little story is like if a TV pitchman was trying to sell you on alien parasites living in your body. It's going to be the next big thing!

"The Tentacle and You" walks the line between humor and Horror, and as such is one of my favorite stories to perform. That's why it's so great to hear this story as part of Pseudopod's podcast. Owen Duffy provides a chipper interpretation of my tentacled marketer.

You can listen to the story for free right at this link.

March is #NaNoReMo – Help me pick my book!

This March is National Novel Reading Month, dedicated to getting more people to read classic literature. It’s moved back from last year to help a few people’s schedules, and sits neatly in-between the U.S.’s Black History Month and the April A-to-Z Challenge.

We all have those books we’ve put off reading for too long. Maybe we’ve owned them, or eyed them in the library, or have just heard about them our whole lives. Each reader is responsible for what he or she thinks is a classic. Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights are classics to most people, but if Ray Bradbury looms heavily over you, then you get to Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

Then across March we all blog about our journeys through our classics. Does the book measure up? Are there things about it you're surprised you've never heard of? Even if you hate it (and I did, one year with Jane Austen), it's worth sharing the experience of canons.

Like the last two years, I’m asking for opinions on which classic I should knock off my list. Because writing my own novel is taking up a great deal of my mind and time, I’ve cut the 1,000+ page novels from the list. I simply wouldn’t do The Infinite Jest or Les Miserables justice this March. This leaves me with five possible books:

1. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

2. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

3. John Irving's The World According to Garp

4. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities

5. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

I have only ever previously read Wolfe and Nabokov, but never these two particular great novels. Dickens is one of my great hollow spots, while The Master and Margarita is the most commonly recommended to me.

So, friends and fellow readers, which of these five do you most recommend?

Lit Corner: Embarking on the Next Novel

Photo of controversial non-celebs?
So topical! I feel more bloggy already.

Happy January, everybody! I hope your New Years had minimal embarrassments and car wrecks.

One thing I learned at the end of 2013 is that I’m very bad at traditional blogging. Divert massive amounts of brain juice to write fiction every day? Can do. But personal missives and polemics every 2-3 days? I clearly need to learn. Let’s take a crack at this.

Because it’s January, I’m embarking on another novel. For now the project title is We Don’t Always Drown. January has been kind to my compositions for the last three years and is fast becoming the ritual spot to start new books. I know this project is right because I wound up bailing on everything last night just to outline bits of it. It’s demanding a more robust plot skeleton than usual, possibly because I’ve had this idea for two years and plot vines kept growing out of it. There are so many matters to consider when Fantasy criminals compete for a corpse stuck in an ice cube.

Results from a brainstorming session
on genre blending.

We Don’t Always Drown is the direct sequel to The Last House in the Sky, which I haven’t published, and which makes the sequel composition seem slightly dubious. Yet I’ve invented a very big world and have at least five novels in store for this cast – in addition to thirteen more ideas that might require their own novellas and novels later. The first book was such a hit with test readers that I’m tempted to rush it out, but because this is the beginning of a long undertaking, I want to make sure the limb holds. There’s no sin equally contemptible as retconning all the important bits in after a book’s been out.

December went well. I managed to finish drafts of all four target stories, and submitted three in earnest. If you don’t know, both Strange Horizons and F&SF opened to digital submissions a short while ago. One straggling short story needs a little more time in the pressure cooker; I’ll probably straighten it out in the spring after this novel is drafted. Most importantly, that old Magical Girl story is out the door and making the rounds in what feels like a truly finished form. Six years of haunting, finally exorcised. It’s striking how draining what ultimately turns out to be so few words can be.

Awful author selfie?
Okay. Now it's a blog post.

My 2014 convention schedule is almost set. I have to make Boskone in February to see my old VP peeps, and am currently trying to figure out how to fit both ReaderCon and NASFiC into the same week this summer. My room is already booked for World Fantasy in D.C. Who will I see there?

To the general reader public: #NaNoReMo is coming back, but as you guessed, it won’t be in January. We had some folks request it be moved forward a bit, and so we’ve settled on March. Silly as I may be, February is Black History month, the only official month of anything that I actually respect and refuse to compete against. So you’ve got two months to pick out that classic book you’ve been putting off for two long. There ought to be a blog post about that soon. I love #NaNoReMo after last year’s intimate weeks plumbing Middlemarch, which is still challenging my view of how fiction operates.

So how was your December, everyone? And how’s January opening up?

Kicking off #BestReads2013

You're cordially invited to share your favorite books of the year. Not what was published during the year, but you got to for the first time. The blog hop is a few weeks away, giving everyone time to check their lists twice.

Best Reads 2013 launches on Saturday, December 28th, the weekend after Christmas. Up until then, anyone on Twitter is invited to an open chat about their favorite books of the year using the hashtag #bestreads2013. If you’ve got a blog or Tumblr, you can post a list of your favorite books there, only make sure to come back and link it here by the 30th so I can include you in the master list. For those without Twitter or blogs, you're still welcome to discuss your favorites in the Comments section. Everyone is welcome, readers and authors alike.

So think on it. What are your favorite books that you read this year? Not what was written or published in 2012, but that you personally read and loved for the first time. Fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry and sequential art are all welcome. I guarantee you at least one comic book will show up on my list. It's Middle Grade, too. My list will be between 5-15 books long, with 1-2 paragraphs for each entry on what I got out of them. You can handle the number and format as you like.

Feel free to launch questions below. We'll field them together.

The Best of Beta Reading

I make it no secret that I love my beta readers. On both of my recent novels I've been gifted with some smart, incisive critiques. But sometimes the best of it are when they lose their composure, to laugh, or to mock me, or fighting to grasp what just happened.

A few of those moments bear sharing today. They're all anonymous, unless a reader wants to come forward as having typed one of these beauties.

Blogspot is being very testy about image sizing. Please let me know if any are illegible or won't embiggen when clicked upon.

How couldn't you love these folks?

The Succubus Argument

I don't see why we're always monsters. I mean, we are "monsters," but we're at least the best kind, better than vampires. They're walking STDs. They literally just want your blood; any sexy atmosphere is just a front to treat you like a juice box with two straws in the neck. We succubae want to screw you to death. You should love us!

At first, you evolved to eat and have sex, and though I didn't take notes, I know which one most of you seemed more enthusiastic about. Then you got culture, and prudence, and we drifted apart. But that was you playing coy. You invented capitalism and communism and skyscrapers – and all for what?

To ensure that you could have a place to stay. For what?

To ensure that you could afford clothing. For what?

So that you could stay safe, alive and warm?

Pff. Those are all excuses, means to the end of sticking it in my end. They're all ruses to get you more food and sex.

Well to a succubus, sex is food. Sex is the best food – the cream-filled puff of life itself. We're on your side. We've always been on your side, even when you got really scary. Modernity has jacked up some suicide rates. Poor little guys throwing away food – my food. My food with shattered little feelings that deserve nursing.

A succubus cares about your feelings. All the licorice strings of your insecurities, the robust stew of life experience, and just a sprig of prudential nervousness. We get it. We want you to be the happiest you've ever been, because that's when you're finger-licking good. I want you to feel comfortable, trusted, at ease and then at ecstasy. Loved, even. I love you as much as anyone on The Food Network has ever loved a dish.

I don't want you to die alone. I don't want you to spend tonight alone, and you don't want to be alone anyway! You want to curl up with someone who looks like… me. Who looks like a dream and knows all your fetishes in advance. I'll sit on your chest all night if that's your thing.

Look, if all your life is a struggle to get resources to hunt down sex, then why not give up the struggle and have the best imaginable? And trust me: it's the best imaginable. I'm mostly imaginary, which is why I only show up when you're asleep. We're sweet dreams, the cure to suicide and ennui, and the very best of homicide. Why toil? That's what seems monstrous to me.

Don't trust incubi, though. They're all pricks.

Nine Times I Got an Author's Gender Wrong

I revel in human fallibility, and even love my own failures when they're taken out of judgmental spheres. You can shame someone for their failures, but this is usually the result of forgetting all of your own. It's better to recognize them, share them and learn.

It's for this noble end that I here expose some of my most boneheaded mistakes: nine times when I blatantly got an author's gender wrong. There's one writer, and I won't say who, but I met him without knowing he was a man. None of these nine entries are quite that bad, but I'm hoping to open a dialogue and find out if others have been so silly. If not, I hope to at least make you laugh.

1. Kim Stanley Robinson – That's Heteronormative Thinking with Names 101, which may be the most pedantic class in all of academia. But I have to take a certain ownership over the Kim-possibility given that I'd read the bio on the inside cover and still made it fifty pages before feeling like I had something wrong about her. In my defense: there was no author photo.

2. C.S. Lewis – This came less from the ambiguity of his shortened name, and more that everyone who tried to foist The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe on me as a kid was a woman. I was so young, and so into that Boys Vs. Girls mentality, that I just assumed the book girls kept telling me to read was by one of them. I hope I've outgrown that.

3. J.K. Rowling – I think she got reverse-Lewised. And then, as though to level the playing field for all the big male authors I'd mistaken as female, I mistook the bestselling female author of the decade for a guy. I've actually gone back and checked, and the copies of the first three books I read had no author-information on them whatsoever. I was reading "him" in some ignorant vacuum, possibly assigning gender because Dumbledore always felt like a stand-in for the author. Actually, much like the paternal figure the kids in Lewis's first book lived with.

4. Terry Pratchett – I thought she was so darned funny.

Bathroom Monologue: Rescuing Pacific Rim

Dear Stacker Pentecost,

I notice that you are devoting your life to fighting the giant enemies of civilization. As a mechanical being that has not only spent its entire existence in this service, but was actually built for it, I am deeply sympathetic to your cause and wish your organization the best of luck.

I actually wish you more than luck for, as someone built to help in this struggle, it's often been an issue that I was not built larger. Like my creators, you seem to have constructed robot armors at approximately the same height and mass as the monsters you face. Unlike my creators, though, you seem to have at least four times the resources, given that you have four machines, where there is only one of me. I know, also, that you have several outdated machines of similar dimensions, and all of these are also similar to the titanic crabs, pterodactyls and whatever the glowing squidy thing was.

Have you ever considered taking all the material for several machines and making one that was much bigger than the giant monsters you face? Given that your plan of attack is always fisticuffs (my favorite professional approach, as well), punching the things to death would be considerably easier if they were much smaller than you. Many have been the days on which I wished I hadn't been built to the specifications, down to the meter, of the monster I had to pursue. If only I was as much bigger than him as he was than my creators, then the fight would have been over very quickly, perhaps leaving you time to get that nice Asian lady some psychotherapy.

Best,

Mechagodzilla

The Last Eight Books I Abandoned and The Psychology of Abandonment

Recently an interesting infographic has been circulating from Goodreads. Elizabeth K. Chandler tried to sort out why readers continue reading or give up on a book, peppered with interesting quotes from a few of the participants. It caused me to reflect on the books I've given up this year.

Lit Corner: Remembering Matheson By Reading *What Dreams May Come*

Having grown to admire Richard Matheson's work in recent years, I had to pull another of his books off the shelf during the outpouring over his death. I've already written about his substantial contributions to the Speculative Fiction canon, and today only want to discuss What Dreams May Come. It's an odd one to read as a farewell, being about a writer of novels and screen who dies and uneasily tours the afterlife. If the original audience felt he was writing about himself with all his sentimentality, abandoning much of his Horror roots, it reads even eerier this weekend.

I don't really remember the movie. Pretty sure this ain't in the book.

My copy contained an odd preface in which Matheson claimed only the characters were fictional. He'd studied so many near-death experiences, particularly those following suicide attempts, that he was convinced his vision of an afterlife was as accurate as it could get. Quite the claim from the guy who tried to make vampires plausible in I Am Legend. I largely tried to put it out of my mind as I consumed the book. It's a funky artist's statement to put in front of something otherwise so infinitely interpretable.

Whatever else I can say for What Dreams May Come, I never stopped wanting to read it. When I woke up Saturday morning, and my second thought was to read another chapter. That's an engagement very few books get, especially ones with so little plot. It's a simple novel, half a tour of a new-age Heaven ala Dante's Divine Comedy, and half a rescue mission into the incoherence of Hell.

Lit Corner: Three Things Every Scene Needs

So The Bathroom Monologues is going to have a Sunday feature on the crafts of writing and storytelling. 'Lit Corner' is as temporary a title as it gets. Have an idea for a better permanent title? Please drop it into the comments below!

Recently on Reddit's /r/Writing forum, someone asked what things every scene needs. Not "chapter," not "act," but "scene." It was a wonderful thing to reflect upon because I'm a very scene-specific writer. Some of my scenes are as long as professional short stories.

Yet I try not to ask too many specific things from every scene because something so varied can have so many different appeals. The old Vonengut chestnut that every character ought to want something is fine, but honestly, Mieville's Perdido Street Station has some scenes that are almost all setting and they're splendid.

So here are my petty few. My Magnificent Three. I'd say to shoot for two of these three in any given scene:

1) Something that makes me glad I've read what came before it. Obviously this doesn't work for your opening scene, but pretty much any one after it ought to build, extend, reference, counterpoint, disagree with, or in some other way respond to something earlier, I ought to feel I'm benefiting from having read this far.

Think plot continuity or twists, think revelations, think character development. It can be Alice returning to a cherry tree she planted thirty years ago and seeing how it's changed, or it can George R.R. Martin killing off another parental figure.

2) Something that makes me want to read on. Usually not a cliffhanger, but something in this scene that is a good reason to want to read another scene later.

Will the Romans come back for Jesus?

Will Gatsby reach out to that girl?

What's in JJ Abrams's Mystery Box?

It can be much subtler than all of those, even just something the ominous in the background that I'll hope I'll learn more about or see more of later. This is the reflection of #1; it's making me feel I will be rewarded for reading on.

3) Something that's intrinsically entertaining, important or just worth reading in this damned scene.

Because you can't just rely on what came before and setting up what comes next. It can be some funny Douglas Adams one-liners, or you can have plot payoffs in every single scene. Inconsequential or hugely consequential. Are you one of those conflict-on-every-page guys? That's great if you can make your conflict worthwhile. Just make sure that there's something in this scene that is worth reading for other than it having to be here.

All three of these are exceedingly fuzzy items because storytelling is extremely fuzzy. J.K. Rowling and Jennifer Egan have insanely different strengths; you can't tell them both to write to the same scene-appeals. But if every scene does at least two of the above three things, I'm guaranteed to finish reading the book.

‘Z’ is for ‘The Z,’ the world’s only zombie reservation.

‘Z’ is for ‘The Z,’ the world’s only zombie reservation. It’s the farthest thing from appearing in any of my scheduled books, at present the tentative setting for my seventh down the line, and so it’s closing out the A-to-Z challenge.

The Z lies deep in the north-west of The Frontier (see ‘F’), and is the only place in the world that still experiences zombieism. Zombies are very old hat for this world, a vestige of an apocalypse so old there is no record of it. It’s widely believed that zombieism is caused by magical bacteria, which is why The Z is such a quizzical place. That the infected only spawn from this place seems more like a curse.

A nice place to keep your undead.

The geographic area is a mild plateau featuring jungle flora and extreme humidity. Anyone who dies there rises, yet people who spend significant time there and die elsewhere do not rise. Zombies exported from The Z can spread the condition through fluid transfers, yet the infection spreads much less quickly in such cases. This has been documented by Red Brigadier Wisemen (see ‘R’) who were willing to subject themselves to the condition for the betterment of common knowledge. Searching for the cause is impractical do to the myriad flesh-hungry beings that live there, and because of The Z’s wardens.

Regardless of the cause, The Red Brigade has set up a barrier around the entire plateau, and thousands of believers spend their entire lives there, ensuring no zombies escape. They do not begrudge the risen, seeing it as merely the final change and likely one coming from The Fifth, their most feared god. A zombie is a fellow to be respected, just as a farmer who turns into a scholar is. What the Red Brigade do they view as both in service to the rest of the world, and ensuring peace to their undead brothers and sisters. The task is so great that many zealots seek other infections, such as vampirism and tentacalia, to assist in keeping zombies away from their borders.

The Red Brigade also serve to prevent other creatures from entering ‘The Z,’ as zombiefied humans and triclopes are bad enough. A zombie centaur or hadrosaur is much worse. The apex zombie predators are stuff of legend, roaming in the very depths of the plateau, along with a lost tribe of scientists who were allegedly seeking to weaponize the area’s unique bacteria.

‘Y’ is for ‘Yegg.’

'Y’ is for ‘yegg,’ individuals particularly interested in safes. Their particular interest is getting inside them and taking their insides elsewhere, or if the safe is small enough, taking the entire endeavor elsewhere. Preferably to a workshop with good sound-proofing.

Yeggs are common because safes are common, having been left behind by so many civilizations that thought they were going to live longer. Apocalypses destroyed many possessions, but a sturdy box has outlasted many an owner. Most of the known history (and the better part of the gossiped and unreliable history) are from documents found in safes.

Of course, so are the few functional guns and most of the powerful magic items in circulation. Any worthwhile scavenger has to know how to crack safes, and the really good ones get famous. In The Frontier, Kazh Anzhel gained fame for cracking two gremlin vaults, the only person ever known to perform the feat twice. Being human, he was a pride of the Empire of Gold and Jade, even though he was known to rob them as well. His skill with locks was so great that it was rumored to merge all-chemistry, forging keys that opened doors not only in walls, but in the ground, in the earth, and within gravity itself.

Kazh Anzhel quit the safe-cracking business a few years ago on account of apparent death. His daughter, Ninx Anzhel, has done an excellent job honoring his memory by outdoing him. All of her targets are deemed impossible, like a life-sized statue of a tyrannosaur and the stage from the world’s first theatre. She recently stole the ceiling from The Empire of Gold and Jade’s royal palace. Anyone who knows how she did that should contact their nearest magistrate.

Ninx is one of the main characters of Last House in the Sky.

And no, I didn't make up the word 'yegg.'

‘X’ is for ‘Xenophobia.'

‘X’ is for ‘xenophobia,’ the fear of people or things different from yourself. This is most typically applied to one species’ dislike of another; the hatred humans harbor for the imps that enslaved them an apocalypse ago, or the triclopic disdain for how badly gremlins screwed the world over. While no census has ever been taken, it’s presumed the majority of any given sapient species dislikes automatons, robotic creatures that spend their entire existences consuming and combusting sapient species. It’s undetermined whether automatons are xenophobic of biologicals; their constant chasing and consumption might be considered an unhealthy xenophilia.

Loves you to bits.

Everyone’s felt the pangs toward “the other.” You aren’t my family. You aren’t my species. And you comets, they definitely aren’t from around here, and I wish they’d slow down as they plummet from the sky. How can I trust you?

Fear of the “other” is hardly limited to other species or races. The Human Age alone has wide discontents, its hermits who hide in the frozen south, and tens of thousands of Red Brigade pilgrims who left the secular Empire of Gold and Jade for The Frontier. “Misanthropy” was coined describing human opinions of other humans. There’s a political theory that if any species’ population rises high enough, it’ll divide into groups that will set against each other. Imperial economists are looking into this, to either remedy or monetize conflict.

City-states in The Frontier have self-congratulatory reputations as melting pots, where imps are not judged by their ancestors’ failures, where triclopes will tinker with remains of gremlin technology, and where centaurs and nine-legs set aside feuds so ancient that no other cultures understand them. The anthropologically-inclined believe this has only set up different group practices of segregation; consider how the sick or little-familied in Clemency are often hunted for public entertainment. In the city-state of God’s Lap, home of the world’s last skyscraper, many floors of the grand building have low- or zero-tolerance policies for visitors from any other floor. Intolerance finds a way.

And tolerance isn’t always for the best, either. Consider: of 300 gremlin automobiles ever recovered by triclopes who moved past their loathing of gremlin technology, 288 of them self-detonated. It turns out gremlins did not like “the other” touching their things. They’re dead now, but so are the budding mechanics.

‘W’ is for ‘Armed Conflict,’ or, ‘Escalating Hostilities,’ or, ‘Police Action.’

‘W’ is for ‘Armed Conflict,’ or, ‘Escalating Hostilities,’ or, ‘Police Action,’ or... what's the word...?

First he heard them. They were late, two hours since dawn, before crawling out of their holes, camps all hidden under the palm canopies, all out of sight. Three days of failed attempts to siege his position and their smartest decision had been to sleep where his crew couldn’t see them. The humans came groaning, and rustling over brush they couldn’t name, and scratching at infections they’d never seen, and hid. Hees heard them hide in the great walls of foliage below his hill, and glanced three eyes down into their pocket of the valley, at the lip of the only slope leading up the only high ground for a quarter of a league. It was a bump in the terrain compared to the canyon walls east and west, but it was the only foothold available if your empire wanted to siege across to the Uncanny Valley’s western cliffs.

Hees remained at the precipice, flies crawling through his hair and ears, and raised up the sauropod leg that ought to have been his breakfast. It sweated more than he did, and he smeared it across the trees around him, painting their bark with gore. So did Matou and Yaw’s crews, and Alpee and Hamam, even though they’d been up the entire night butchering. Further up they burned pyres of the stuff, dispersing a stench unbearable even with gum stuffed in his nostrils, and he glanced between all the panting and painting triclopes, then up to the southern sky. Only the faintest hint of smoke over the pissavas, and no rumbling yet. Doa was a day late.

Ten, then fifteen, then eighteen green and yellow uniforms in the basin below, their petty two-eyed lives leading them to believe they were hidden amid tall brush. The Empire’s soldiers wore trousers and sleeves, not at all suitable to this boiling climate. Yet they judged Hees and his crew as savages for painting the trees with carrion in their underwear. He heard them. They had the same number of ears as Hees and yet seemed to think he couldn’t hear them.

“Superstitious…”

“What is that smell?”

“I can hit that one.”

And the creak of a bowstring. Two bow-strings amid the leaves, distinct while attempting harmony. He prayed south for Doa to hurry, and for the smoke to hasten.

He jerked the stump of leg up and caught the arrows with two wet thucks. Then the foliage below parted, from the ground to the canopies, and his three eyes drowned in hundreds of humans. They unleashed a swarm of gilded arrows, glittering as they sailed up the slope. Hees rolled inland, but Yaw was struck in the shoulder, and their crews cried, and everyone reeled from the slope, leaving access bare. Into that nudity rushed flanks of humans behind tower shields, beating rhythms with spears, beneath the watch of their archers in the trees above.

Hees fell to the pens, but husky Alpee was already there, yanking an arrow from the wood and drawing its head to slash the bonds. Hees yanked open the cage and hollered inward, two heavy hoots, and their theropods spilled out. Three days of siege and they knew where they were allowed to feast. Twice as long as he was tall and tails erect behind them, swaying and sibilating, snapping their fangs. He spanked one in the hindquarters and snatched its head-crest, riding along its side back to the cusp of their ridge. The monolophosaurs didn’t care about archers, and they considered tower shields good landing spots. Hees had to release as his steed leapt off the ridge and on top of three humans, craning its jaws over their crumpling shields to gnash at them.

"Monolophosaurus" by Michael Skepnick

The monolophosaurs didn’t care about archers, but they felt pain, and they soon shrieked with it. The ground palpitated as the Empire’s specialized archers peeled through, spitting lightning up the hill. Three days their wizard snipers had finally arrived. All Hees could do was swing his sauropod arm and hurl it over the ledge, smashing one of the bastards in the face and painting him with gore.

The throw earned his perch a blast from their snipers, and the ground beneath his feet exploded. Alpee’s crew had to catch him, and two looked in his eyes, and he blinked assurance that he was alive, and they dumped him in the ferns. Good men and women, one and all.

His triclopes went to the ledge with javelins, and loosed the trebuchets, made from trees and launching stumps. He felt their impacts in his guts, a satisfying alternative to breakfast, until one half-fossilized stump froze still in the air. Then another, and a third, an insult to all triclopes, as those wizard snipers caught projectiles. In the next instant, they reversed and plummeted into the ranks of triclopes.

He inhaled in shock, and the stench of carrion painted everywhere made him retch. He must have wretched south, for several strings of smoke greeted his watering eyes, thick in the nearground.

“About time,” he muttered, rubbing a fist to his lips. A three-eyed banner waved briefly above the pissavas before it was ditched, and its triclopic owner ran for his life from his cattle. Doa. Three days was long for her to find and goad automatons into chasing her crew, but this close, autos would stay for the smell of biologicals.

Hees backed from the slopes, tugging at anyone near him, and hollering for them to fall back. The first Auto Drones punched through the tree-line, perfect spheres of rust and steel, smoke billowing their asses. They rolled at him, but he had high ground, and so they rolled at the Empire of Gold and Jade first. Wizard snipers sprayed them with lightning, and some drones stuttered, but were immediately climbed over by their kin. Dozens climbing upon dozens, fiery ports opening in their hulls, sucking in spears and arms and bodies.

Some Auto Drones ignored the feast of humans, spiraling spherical bodies up the slope and heading immediately for his fragrant high ground. They’d probably never smelled anything so appealing, and he left it to them. Already the jungle trembled for the crane arms of greater automatons, Mammoths and worse tearing near, who would soon impregnate this entire league of the Uncanny Valley. No one was going to be able to cross it. What a shame. He saluted to the scurrying humans before departing to find and congratulate Doa.

'V' is for 'Vampires,' their dynasty and apocalypse.

'V' is for 'vampires,' that mildly evolved undead. An executive zombie, really. According exclusively to one series of accounts from the annals of the triclopes, this strain emerged shortly after an apocalypse of meteors wiped out all dinosaurs and most plant life. The skies were blotted out by seemingly eternal clouds of ash, which were the perfect circumstances for vampires to give living a shot.

A vampire's best friend.

So you knock off most of the sauropods, and most of the giant plants. That left the mammals in control, which is when vampirism really took off. The World of Night, where rats and fanged birds carried the plague across the entire continent. Tribes of infected centaurs and humans laid waste to any straggling healthy civilizations.

It was vampirism like the world has never known since. There were so many that they were forced to hold each other back and let blooded critters breed. They farmed people, region by region. The imps and centaurs still live where vampires stuck them, claiming ancestral birthright, even though that birthright was a nightmarish pen. The wars of that period were of impatient vampires against cultured ones, killing each other over the expiration dates of mammals. And then there was the apex predator.There’s the legend – the awesome legend – of the infected tyrannosaur rampaging the south coast. It never spread the disease because it just ate anything it came across – centaurs, dorads, anything. Your people hid in a cave? Then a bat flutters in, and before you realize it, the bat turns into a vampire tyrannosaur and he’s eaten your entire tribe. I love that people believe it’s still skulking in the volcanoes of the south. I don’t even care if it’s real. Who doesn’t want to believe in a vampire tyrannosaur, blending in with lava mist or drinking sharks at the bottom of the sea?

Surprisingly unsafe from inventive vampires.

If it’s still swimming around, it’s almost all that survived. Because under the torrents of dust, they were unbeatable kings and queens, spreading their disease at will and treating the planet as a buffet. Then the planet closed for business by clearing its atmosphere. It was the first morning in nine hundred years. The sun crawled across this continent, frying skinny-dipping biters, their ranchers and warlords, some fleeing in the forms of bats or wolves, though still more standing slack-jawed in awe. They’d thought the sun was a fairytale.

Funny that they all turned to fairy dust. I hear faeries eat vampire bones, and pay handsomely if you can find some.

Hands-down, the best apocalypse. It was just a sunrise. A little twinkling of a nearby star, checking to see how we were doing and eradicating most of the undead in existence. If only it was that easy to get rid of tentacle monsters.

'U' is for 'The Uncanny Valley.' You probably saw this coming.

‘U’ is for ‘Uncanny Valley,’ something you’ve doubtless heard of by now. The Uncanny Valley is a titanic canyon dividing the continent, running from the north-edge of the ocean and splitting into three smaller valleys at the most southernly border. It is so vast that it is the only thing that has prevented The Empire of Gold and Jade from colonizing The Frontier in the west.

The Uncanny Valley sports several unique features. Its basins are notoriously warm, supporting multiple broad jungles that themselves are home to most of the world’s deluxe-class sauropods like brachisaurs and tyrannosaurs. The northern region is the exclusive home of gryphons, and the world’s only manticores live in its southern region. These large biological creatures have also attracted most of the world’s remaining automatons, holdovers from the Gremlin Age, who hunt sauropods and manticores alike. In addition to its vastness, these dangerous inhabitants make it still harder to cross. There are families of triclopes who advertise their ability to help you cross, though it is some of the most hazardous work in the world.

A unique geological feature, The Uncanny Valley is believed the result of an apocalyptic quake that split the continent, but it predates any written history. It has famed depths, creases and cracks in its basin allegedly running deep into the core of the planet, or to the origin of the World-Ocean. He first succubae were discovered slumbering deep within its crevices, along with structures like underground temples that also predate any doradic or impish culture. Optimists believe answers to the world’s apocalyptic cycle could be down there. Pessimists think succubae are the beginning of the awful things you’d be better off leaving alone down there.

Though a wonder of the world, most cultures stay away from The Uncanny Valley. Its wildlife is too dangerous to approach unless you’re deliberately rustling sauropods or farming gryphon feathers for all-chemistry. The Empire of Gold and Jade have plans to build a bridge across its gap, yet no structure of such a size has been erected for the entirety of the Human Age. Humanists consider that a good reason to build one.

UPDATE: This addition is for Larry Kollar, who in a previous post asked why the Uncanny Valley doesn't flood. After all, if it's a canyon stretching from ocean to ocean, it ought to be wetter than it is. I meant to be ambiguous about this, but not so ambiguous as to not answer it at all. The Empire of Gold and Jade has charted the southern end on the Uncanny Valley, which terminates in a half-frozen ocean, and found it mildly above sea level, and usually quite waterlogged, if not lake- or river-logged. Their attempts for expansion in the south have mostly been ocean-based with their fledgling fleet. However the northern edge has never been charted, in part due to the extremely hot climate, and in part due to the high population of gryphons. Human eyes may never have laid upon the northern opening of the Uncanny Valley - something my fiction is going to go into, and which makes a little mum about.

'T' is for 'Timeline,' dedicated to Richard Bon.

‘T’ is for ‘Timeline.’ Richard Bon asked for a comprehensive timeline of my fictional world, and while I don’t want to spoil everything, I am willing to lay out a thousand years for T-day. I hope he enjoys it!

0 Years – The undetermined baseline of modern history. Many cultures and apocalypses are believed to have existed before this period, but are not widely recorded or recognized. Triclopes, Nine-Legs and Centaurs had something going on around this point. Much less afterward.

~1 Year - Apocalypse of Sauropods

-Sauropods, theropods and winged creatures, thought to be long-extinct, return in enormous numbers; reappearance unexplained.

-Cities trampled, ancient diseases reintroduced, various civilizations collapse.

~10 Years – Lands both east and west of The Uncanny Valleys become grazing land and hunting grounds for dinosaurs. Anyone who wants a civilization better be discrete.

~150 Years – Gremlins amass enough technology to erect anti-sauropod strongholds and safe zones. Progress begins.

~250 Years - Apocalypse of Gremlins

-Gremlins launch flying cities that sauropods cannot touch.

-Lightning cannons used to police populations of sapient creatures; immediately regulate what technology other species may have. Show favoritism to submissive tribes of triclopes.

~280 Years – Gremlins “adopt” triclopes as laborers.

~315 Years – Gremlins “adopt” imps as pets; begin breeding them like show-dogs.

~350 Years – Gremlins perfect automaton technology; relations with triclopes terminated.

-Automatons begin work in construction, maintenance, medicine.

~400 Years – Triclopes return to ancestral territory in northern Uncanny Valley. Seem to be building strongholds as though not trusting this to last.

~550 Years - Apocalypse of Autos

-Gremlin technology turns against them; all flying cities crash, explode; gremlins go extinct.

-Gremlin technology ‘automatons’ hunt and consume all living things. Motives unknown.

-Imps escape extinction; seek refuge in far west; establish underground cities with dorads and humans.

~580 Years - Automatons have tough time with sauropods, gryphons, cyclopes; feuds begin; automatons amass more greatly near Uncanny Valley, entrenched in warfare they’re not programmed to recognize they’re engulfed in.

-Every other life form still relatively screwed; nomadic cultures reign.

~650 Years – First rumblings of an “Imp Empire” far out west.

~750 Years - Apocalypse of The Shock

-Continental electrical storm fries majority of automatons; divine intervention?

-Imps claim responsibility for The Shock; “befriend”/”enslave” humans for labor in expanding a magic-based empire.

~770 Years - Imps formally establish empire in the far west, based on magic and manipulation of elements; magically-enhanced agriculture becomes food source for many cultures.

~820 Years - Impish empire flourishes throughout regions west of The Uncanny Valleys. Dissidents flee east.

~900 Years - Imps undertake great project to “wake their ancestors” for next great age.

~920 Years – Triclopic scholars uncover imp fraud; imps did not cause The Shock; minor war breaks out between triclopic tribes and imps.

~930 Years – Triclopes, Centaurs, Satyrs have minor land-wars with imps over ‘sacrifices’; humans begin to flee enslavement in favor of tribes in the east.

~980 Years - Apocalypse of Demons

-Imps’ ancestors, The Demons, awake and set planet on fire.

-Half of the world’s imp population dies; millions from others species perish.

-Beginning of a pan-species war against Demons, sweeping eastward.

~981 Years – The Human Age

-Golden Emperor and Jade Empress, both humans, unite their tribes, use all-chemistry and golems to stop tide of Demons.

-Humans now most populace species in the east; Golden Emperor and Jade Empress establish a proper empire. The Human Age begins.

~1000 Years – Massive campaign undertaken to document world history undertaken by humans. Other focuses applied to all-chemistry and agriculture.

~1010 Years – All non-human species begin to flee the east; Empire of Gold and Jade provides some groups with treaties to keep land in ‘The Frontier,’ lands west of The Uncanny Valleys, or to serve as second-class citizens domestically. Religion is outlawed. Mass exodus of Red Brigadiers.

~1160 Years – Large number of golems attempt to rebel against The Empire of Gold and Jade; are defeated and destroyed. According to government records, there are no casualties. Viewed as first apocalypse to be stopped by a ruling empire.

~1190 Years – The Empire of Gold and Jade begins to move west of Uncanny Valleys; claims to need land for expansion. Triclopes and Red Brigadiers declare formal war against them.

~1200 Years – Massive famine that government records as having no deaths. Thwarted by all-chemical agriculture. Recorded as second apocalypse averted by the standing empire.

~1260 Years – Present. Things are going great, according to government records.

'S' is for 'Sauropods.'

‘S’ is for ‘sauropods,’ the great beasts of burden in The Frontier. They were considered either extinct or purely mythological for much of pre-history, until that one apocalypse where millions of them returned from the dead. Where exactly they’d gone or how they’d returned is still a mystery, the very answers trampled beneath their titanic feet. And while they wiped out a few minor civilizations with their come-back, they’re generally easy to cohabitate with today.

‘Sauropod’ is a wildly misunderstood word that is often used to refer to all dinosaurs and anything dinosaur-like. Even dactyls, which have more in common with giant birds than anything, are referred to by the name.

"No, you tell her she's not a sauropod."

The most famous strain are deluxe-class sauropods. Convoys moving between city-states will often purchase brachiosaurs, using their sheer size to scare off raiders. Ankylosaurs, too, are favored by impish convoys, as their tails double as defensive weapons in skirmishes. And though not technically “sauropods,” would-be heroes have been trying to saddle tyrannosaurs for a thousand years. No one’s made it work, but the first one to succeed is going to be famous, and probably win their first war by intimidation alone.

Sauropods are generally misunderstood by those who don’t directly deal with them. Often theropods are lumped in with them, and because of the fame of brachiosaur and hadrosaur pods, they have a reputation for gigantism. In fact most sauropods and theropods are smaller than humans; compsognathus is so insignificant that, even though numerous, it is considered a common pest or food source in much of The Red Crescent. Most cultures are plentifully exposed to sauropods and ought to know they range wildly in size, but they simply don’t care. They only care when they’re being attacked by them, or betting on the hadrosaur races up north.

'R' is for 'The Red Brigade.'

'R' is for 'The Red Brigade.'

The Red Brigade is the dominant sect of a disorganized religion worshiping five absent gods: The Bold, The Wise, The Provider, The Deceiver, and The Fifth. These gods are explicitly abstracts, not thought to inhabit a distant plane like other religions, and are seldom anthropomorphized. Rather, someone who wears the red jacket or wristband of the Red Brigade strives to embody one of the five, and their good works in that form are considered both prayer and divinity.

Exact practices vary wildly based on your geography, and there is no central body governing The Red Brigade. The most common form of The Bold is the soldier or warrior, such as those insurgents fighting against The Empire of Gold and Jade’s incursion into The Frontier. The Wise are most commonly scholars or strategists, while The Deceivers are most infamously spies who infiltrate other societies. Most cherished are The Providers, such as parents, educators and farmers. The Fifth god is seldom mentioned by name, and is the only one for whom, after you converted to its ways, you cannot convert back.

It is also dogma that Red Brigadiers change from one phase to another as is needed by their people. Most Red Brigadiers are yetis, centaurs or humans, though it is spreading among triclopic peoples. Secularists pin the recent trend in triclopic Brigadiers on it being such a time of strife for them, what with their presently losing a war to foreign secularists and all.