New Fiction: "Demonic Invasion or Placebo Effect?" at Sunday Morning Transport

Today I'm happy to share a brand new story with you all: "Demonic Invasion or Placebo Effect?" 

It follows a pair of demon scientists who are out to prove a controversial hypothesis: demons are not creations of the human imagination. They've isolated an entire town and intend to stimulate as much Satanic panic as it takes in order to prove demons don't sprout into being just because people believe in them. Demons love a little human experimentation. But as things start to go haywire around the old infernal lab, the demons themselves will have to question their faith--or at least question their control group.

You can read "Demonic Invasion or Placebo Effect?" for free by clicking right here. 

It's the kind of story that my high school teachers told me to quit. But some things stick with a boy!

Sunday Morning Transport is an upstart magazine that's venturing into publishing through Substack. They've published great SciFi and Fantasy writers such as Katherine Addison, Sarah Gailey,  Yoon Ha Lee, and Maurice Broaddus. I was honored to be asked to join their ranks.

I was also a little surprised they accepted my gonzo story. It is one of those things I cooked up on a painful late night, unable to sleep due to disabilities, and weaving narrative to keep my spirits kindled. It is equal parts Horror and Comedy - equal parts Theology and Science Procedural.

Great Things I Read in July and August, 2017 Edition

I'll miss you, Summer 2017! Fun as it was to see people at so many cons, it's nice to have the weather cool down and be able to stay home for a while. While I can't tell you some of the projects I'm working on yet, I am happy to share some of my favorite free reads from over the last two months. As always, everything here is free to read. Just click the link. If you like what you read, please consider donating to the author's Patreon, or subscribing to the related magazine. So many places are struggling to get it done right now.

Fiction

"Skills To Keep the Devil In His Place" by Lia Swope Mitchell at Shimmer Magazine
-This is somewhere between a possession story and Slipstream. Slipstream usually bends towards the Fantastic, so seeing it wax toward Horror intrigues. Here a girl is going through the typical pains of adolescence - how to bond with people while protecting her psyche, conflict with a mother who seems alternately ambivalent and overbearing. But at the same time, she feels like the Devil himself is sometimes in her eyes, or sitting in her lap, sometimes in disgustingly vivid detail. The story teases us with how this sort of possession will overlap with the person she's turning into simply as a teenager, and whether she'll do right by anyone in her life - her mother, her BFF, or even Satan. The most poignant part is when she's so horrendously bullied at school that the strange demon slithering out from under her bed at night feels like a viable companion. Possession stories don't examine human isolation often enough, but Mitchell gets it.

"Never Yawn Under a Banyan Tree" by Nibetida Sen at Anathema Magazine
-A literally and figuratively spirited story! Dating advice is usually awkward, but especially when it comes from a ghost you accidentally swallowed. Our interloper here is a pret, which fell from a banyan tree and into our narrator's gullet. The pret thinks our narrator could do better than her current romantic prospects, and kicks off a delightful series of events that I don't want to spoil. But I've re-read this story three times over August, just to smile to at certain bits.

Great Things I Read in February, 2017 Edition

This is a few days late, isn't it? I had to postpone a little for my Mock Oscars, covering Logan, and a certain wonderful event in my family. I'll share that last good news with you in my next post, but for now, I want to share some amazing stories and journalism. It includes not one, but two Science Fictional stories of birds that just happen to be true.

As always, everything listed here is free to read with no paywall. I've linked directly to each piece. If you like what you read, consider grabbing a subscription to the publisher or dropping money into an author's Patreon.

Short Stories and Flash Fiction

"The Unknown God" by Ann Leckie at Uncanny Magazine

Such a thoroughly charming story from its first chatter between a frog and a mighty god about all the weird things the local atheists believe. There's quirky personality to its very eschatology, bouncing between personal lives and grand stakes. It's a chatty story, but the dialogue makes lightness of such heavy matters, and gives the motion of the story life, all the way to crystallizing its conclusion. There's wisdom here.

Great Things I Read in February

February is one of those months when I'm grateful to do lists like this. I've been so busy with healthcare problems and editing that, until I checked the list, I thought I hadn't read anything special. Life can get so busy that it's easy to forget all the great art that flies by.

As usual, I'm collecting great short fiction and non-fiction that's free to read on the web.

Fiction

"Between Dragons and Their Wrath" by An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky at Clarkesworld

-No short story has haunted me more in the last month than this. The dragons are a metaphysical terror, casting a shadow of mutations across the landscape of two absolutely lovely characters. With scenes whipping by, each has a punch, even in the last line.

"43 Responses to In Memory of Dr. Alexandra Nato" by Barbara Barnett at Daily Science Fiction - I love stories that creatively use unusual real world formats, and here's a story told through a Comments thread. It's a bunch of believers who might be experiencing a haunting, since one of their dead friends seems to have shown up and is poking at their insecurities. It can't help but be funny and creepy at the same time, which is hard to pull off, especially with such limitations. Masterful work.

"Lotus Face and the Fox" by Nghi Vo at Uncanny Magazine

-Two god-masked figures pull off a little robbery in the dead of night, and it keeps up its creative enthusiasm from there. It feels flash-length despite being longer because of energetic pacing and a lovely handling of its world.

"Ars Longa, Amor Brevis" by David Twiddy at The Sockdolager

-Two pretentious master-artists bicker over their accounts of a calamity that their magical arts *may* have brought about. A fine use of homunculi! I actually beta read this story, but it's only grown stronger since the version I saw in 2015.

Great Things I've Been Reading (December/January Combo Edition)

December ended busily with Books of the Year and Games of the Year posts, so I couldn't fit my normal short story/non-fiction round-up. January is now in our rear-view mirrors, so I figured I'd lump the two months together now.

As always, the rule is that whatever I link is free-to-read with no paywall. The selection will be bigger for this post, but it still feels too short, mostly for the December stories that melted from my memory with the pressure of deadlines and the holidays.

"The Terrible" is live at Daily Science Fiction

My superhero short "The Terrible" is now up and free to read at Daily Science Fiction! It follows The Terrible, the self-proclaimed greatest villain in America's greatest city, as he thinks to finally kill off his heroine. Tonight is not going as he intended. It springs from the relationship I wish more heroes and villains had. No spoilers.

I want to thank Max Cantor, Tam MacNeil, and Cassie Nichols for beta reading this thing, and convincing me that while demented, it was a good kind of demented. Also to Sunil Patel, whose Twitter goading got me to keep the heroine's name. It is my favorite superhero name I've ever invented.

In other news, I'm packing up for my last convention trip of the year, to the annual World Fantasy Conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. Last year's was one of my all-time favorite cons, and this year I'm doing a panel! Drop by at 4:00 PM on Thursday, when I'll be part of Monsters as Devourers, discussing the psychological roots of why we tell so many stories about zombies and werewolves coming after us. It should be a blast.

They All Fall - #fridayflash

Gravity was a good god, and that was his downfall. He always did his job, pulling things down or together, and did so with such reliability that humans could measure him. How Loki laughed at the idea of a god with such low self-esteem that he let himself be measured. But Gravity broke none of the rules: humans still couldn’t see him or talk to him directly, and he never tampered with someone else’s domain. Loki never had to fear Gravity playing tricks.

The problem came, then, that humans didn’t fear him like they did Loki or Zeus, and they certainly didn’t revere him as they had the sun or that Jesus kid. They made planes, helicopters and went to the moon without so much a prayer – except the typical calculations for landing and such. Even when he did something nasty it was always the suicidal prick that jumped off the bridge that got the credit, not Gravity for providing the very force that enabled the tragedy.

The rise of scientific thought only insulted him further as people believed less in his friends, but never even bothered to question his existence. He wasn’t even part of the cultural debate. One year Carl Sagan, of whom Gravity had always been very supportive, actually mocked theology by saying no one prayed to gravity. Then one morning Gravity picked up Scientific American (well, not “picked up” – he never picked anything up that he didn’t have to) and saw some theorist asking why gravity was so weak in this universe.

“So weak.”

Gravity snapped and finally took old Loki’s advice. They’d regret not appreciating him. They’d regret it when gravity ignored them, and they learned the terror of floating.

There Is No Generation X

I didn’t have a meltdown the other day, and neither did Michael Bay. He was on my television for no good reason and for lots of money. Beneath my television sat a box of non-perishable food I was about to run over to the local Methodist Church. Bay’s teleprompter malfunctioned and so he stammered, failed to adlib, apologized, and walked away from the giant curved television he was supposed to pretend to like. Then I walked to the car to drive food out for the homeless

This is what we have in common.
Unless you like Beta Ray Bill.

The real news story is that CES has celebrities pitching 100-inch televisions that cost $5,000 on the same day that Obama arm-wrestled the Senate over unemployment benefits. This is one of the great examples of our union barely being united, and the notion of a “generation” being meaningless. It’s not about Haves and Have-Nots, which is a blisteringly false dichotomy. It’s about difficulty pretending we’re all one.

It pings off a recent screed that “Generation X is Tired of Your Bullshit.” As though there is a Generation X. Generation X has as many bullshit-producers and -profiteers as any previous generation – perhaps more, with technology and secularism providing more pulpits.

There is staggering disparity of experience among my generation, and more in the generation that followed. Some of the children I grew up with make six figures on Wall Street. Some can’t afford the internet and sleep in parks. Some are dead.

What does any generation have in common? Being born within a few of the same decades before life happened to them? Genes, economic background, religion, sex and gender and sexuality, and the experience of all those items is wildly disparate. Most of my generation doesn't know what it's liked to be pulled over at 2:00 AM for driving too nice a car, yet my generation contains both the profiled and the profilers. Half of Generations X and Y never opened a book last year, and more of Generations X and Y have published books than any in American history. These generations are in the Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, Anonymous, political lobby firms, the unemployment line, the military, and the living room on X-Box Live.

The first non-ironic version of Ascent of Man you've seen in years.
We have this in common!

It’s beautiful and ugly and irreconcilable It’s why I can read Avarind Adiga while my brother watches Howard Stern clips on Youtube, both of us busy while my sister bakes cupcakes shaped like snowmen. That’s why Facebook walls are full of political memes that three people Like and eighteen people roll their eyes at and scroll past. That’s why the media says the media is lying. By disregarding the monolith, more people have opportunities at satisfaction. And more people means less in common.

If you’re waiting for me to say that I hate or love this, you’ll be disappointed. I experience both of those emotions towards this issue, and other emotions. It’s a complicated response that has changed and will likely change again. If I, one person, occupy so shifty a node on so obvious an issue, how are we supposed to pretend that New Yorkers, white people, Americans or Homo sapiens sapiens think one thing?

Best Reads 2013 is Live

This weekend and into New Years, we're celebrating Best Reads 2013. The rules are simple: list up your favorite books that you read for the first time this year, and write them up however best shares what moved you about them. I'll evangelize Middlemarch in a moment, but first: the #bestreads2013 master list:

1. Mary Garber

2. Mark Kerstetter

3. Katherine Nabity

4. Beth Matthews

5. Melanie Schulz

6. Cindy Vaskova
7. Elephant's Child
8. Ross Dillon
9. Katherine Hajer
10. Sonia Lal
11. Alexia
12. Margit Sage
13. Beverly Fox 

If you've blogged about it yourself, comment below and I'll add you. If you don't have a space to write about it, you're welcome to just post your list in the comments.

Now, as far my favorites...
George Eliot’s Middlemarch
My pick for #NaNoReMo in February just about ruined long Fantasy novels for me. My copy was a scant 1,000 pages and needed every page, something not many books can claim. It starts so simply, with a feminist joke of a woman at a dinner party who’s afraid she might have to start thinking for herself. But her wealthy suitor doesn’t want a wife who thinks or remembers what she reads to him; only one who reads clearly and doesn’t interrupt. There’s another man who might be better for her, but he’s too preoccupied with trying to introduce scientific medicine to the town. That science seems blasphemous to many local political figures, who attempt to prevent his entry, or court him if they’ll help him with something.

 Middlemarch keeps adding points of view and dares head-hop, sometimes multiple times within a paragraph, to show the myriad ways we conflict with each other. It’s a painstaking novel about mishearing out of fear, paying selective attention, hiding things capriciously or for reasons you don’t even know are pointless. It’s the anatomy of conflict, often embarrassing, sometimes funny, and all too often, utterly damning to the rationalizations I’m guilty of every day – but it’s expanded beyond a character, or her family, and out into an entire community.

It needs every page it gets to cover its ground. I’m not the sort who believes in the Best Novel of All Time, but for the first time in years, I understood why people would think that sort of nonsense.

Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Stars
The novel that restored by faith in long Fantasy. After the existential crisis that Middlemarch caused, I had several failed runs reading Epic Fantasies that were not nearly complex enough to need their page space. There was one particularly bad experience with a Fantasy about farm hands striving to rescue kidnapped children that, after six hundred pages, couldn’t even resolve the God-damned kidnapping. I briefly wondered if I wasn’t in the wrong genre. And then Kay released River of Stars.

Elegance is a big part of it. The emperor sees himself as kind even though his actions are highly proud and capricious; a young female poet defies the social order of her world by getting an education reserved for men; a dashing outlaw raids convoys that the government won’t even miss. And yet there’s a government official who falls in love with the charm of the outlaw, and the poet’s father cherishes her in oblique ways, such that not everyone is the center of their own world, but everyone has a distinct and dynamic life. The country is so vast, with so many walks of life that even when it’s brought to war with the country to the north, not everyone experiences it the same way. It challenges the notion of a large body having a mono-culture or a shared value, for what’s universal if thousands of people can die in a war and there are citizens who don’t even know it’s happening? The various players keep interacting in novel ways, enriched by brilliant themes of how history is made and remembered. It’s not just what a war hero means to himself in the moment, or the troops around him, or the family he left at home that can’t know what he’s going through, but also what his sacrifices amount to in the next battle, and after the war. There’s a terrible permanence that pings all the way to the last page.

Tom Holt’s Blonde Bombshell
The funniest Science Fiction I’ve read in years, and easily the best novel that could ever have been published with such a title. It references one of the protagonists: a sentient bomb that has second thoughts about destroying earth. Holt has thought out bomb psychology very thoroughly, including why, among all machines, they’re the only atheists (a bomb only needs the satisfaction of a job well done). The bomb winds up taking humanoid form to explore our planet with some zany culture clash, but we’re also treated to a female Steve Jobs who’s afraid she’d being haunted by unicorns and, well, very quickly I realized I needed to buy this as birthday presents for several people.

Takako Shimura’s Wandering Son
The second Middle Grade comic to ever show up on my lists, and a series that feels destined to become one of my favorite works of sequential art of all time. There are plenty of good books, a surprising number of great books, but few things make me think that if everyone read them the world would be a better place. Wandering Son is on that extremely short list. It is the tender story of a kindergartener who wishes he was a girl and begins experimenting in trans* - at first in secret, just touching or trying on a dress, and then seeing if he’s noticed when he goes out in public. It’s not about prurience. It’s about not understand why everyone expects you to behave a certain way, and even as a cis-gendered guy, it touched on several questions I had at seven years old but figured were stupid because no one else ever brought them up and gender policing was so strict. This is a beautiful series that opens up the conversation in a way kids can understand. It probably would have made me a more tolerant kid.

Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal
The other manga on my list, and one of my all-time favorite Historical Fantasies. It’s a series that keeps me coming back and pacing out its entries so that there will always be more for future years. This year I read volumes 15-18, which covered most of the incredibly disturbing turn into Body Horror, as the immortal Manji was abducted and the subject of experiments for what happened if parts of his body were transplanted to others. It’s only because Samura is so good at storytelling and pacing that I stuck around for two straight volumes of incredibly disturbing imagery. Typically I want such stories to suck, so that I can dismiss them and walk away. It’s so much harder when a story is well-written and has hooks, like the slipping psychology of the physician who can’t keep patients alive, and I’m forced to admit I’m fascinated.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos
I don’t think I’ve ever read another novel where the central point of interest was the identity of the narrator. Who the hell is telling this story? Sometimes it references being present, but it also references a future where humans are hunted by killer whales, and seems to have introspective knowledge of multiple characters in multiple continents. Is it a god watching use evolve? Is an alien anthropologist? Is it a time traveler checking out what went on back when humans still had legs? The stranding of the voyagers and the ominous tones of impending doom on humanity-as-we-know-it are interesting plot points, but the whole thing works because Vonnegut decided to make the storyteller ambiguous. The result is my favorite Vonnegut novel I’ve ever read.

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl
An annoying number of Horror movies ask the question, “Is the hero haunted or crazy?”

The Drowning Girl has the genius idea of answering, “Both.”

Kiernan has crafted a masterpiece of dark fiction, focusing on a first person narrator who is struggling to become and stay reliable. Her schizophrenia complicates her ability to keep track of the people she’s really met, and the feelings she’s really had, while she encounters people who may well be ghosts that can’t help but drive people mad. While Kiernan resists labeling the novel “Horror,” the section where our narrator goes off her meds for several pages is as harrowing a piece of prose as I can remember reading.

And the great trick to The Drowning Girl isn’t figuring out if her lover was dead all along, or who really put the weird painting somewhere, but to opening yourself to empathizing with people who are can’t help but hurt.

And if you don’t like that, well, there’s Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story
The fricking mother of all ghost stories. I was blown back by how many elements I recognized from the novels of Stephen King, the movies of John Carpenter and Wes Craven, and pretty much every spooky videogame I’ve ever played, all of which came after this novel. It was like coming home to the house I didn’t know I’d grown up in.

Here is a small club of storytellers who love to share ghost stories. A member died several years ago, seemingly in terror of an empty room. Ever since they’ve had inexplicable moments that inspire more stories: a woman turning into a home wrecker out of nowhere, or being stalked by wind, or the thing that was in one of their stories years ago being reported as slaughtering the local cows. What’s haunting them isn’t a conventional ghost, but almost a zeitgeist of the stories they can’t leave alone. Often creepy, often eccentric, it keeps building until it pays off in one of the most satisfying conclusions of any Horror novel I’ve ever read. And I haven’t even been stalked by anything from the book since.


Steven Strogatz’s Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
Confession time: it took me four years to read this book. I don’t understand people who can read this thing in a weekend unless they live and breathe science. I would pick the book up, read half a page about why bridges sway in rhythms under foot traffic, or how body temperature commands sleep rhythms, or how a room temperature liquid can move through a solid, and need to digest it, or run to Youtube to see evidence of the claim. There are pages in this book that I read two dozen times, trying to wrap my head around room temperature super conductors and the nanoscopic traits of lasers. It’s all interesting, but furthermore, it all amounts to a staggering hypothesis: despite entropy, the universe is full of a highly suspicious amount of spontaneous order.

My only non-fiction book on the list. Most of my non-fiction diet is from blogs, websites and magazines, but this is some of the best science writing I’ve ever read. Strogatz tackles the bizarre theory of complexity and spontaneous order. In a universe that seems bound by entropy, we still see complex order emerging in almost every major system, not only star systems that immediately lapse into gravitational patterns, but inside your own body, inside biological societies, and even on trafficked bridges and inside super-heated beakers. While the book doesn’t claim to know why order emerges so rapidly, it pushes at the boundaries of how we understand the laws of the universe.

Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni
The only book I stayed up until 2:00 AM reading this year, and in this case, two nights in a row. What a debut novel, audaciously mixing the Genre and the Literary into a hauntingly introspective set of narratives. We follow a newly created golem and an ancient jinni as they are stranded in New York City, circa 1899, and following the Melting Pot into ethnic ghettos. There’s the poignancy of a golem, built out of Jewish tradition, failing to appreciate the teachings of the rabbi who shelters her, as well as the thrills of the jinni trying to get drunk and party with locals.

We anticipate a love story whenever these two finally discover they’re not alone in the sea of humanity, but the novel holds a much bigger payload. Its ending is the least binary of any novel I’ve read since Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, because as the golem is hunted by her creator and the tools to re-enslaving the jinni emerge, there are so many ways it could close. It’s not about beating Voldemort or rescuing the princess anymore. It’s about hearts that could change, and people who could disappear off the streets forever. A heck of a debut novel.

Girl of Steel w/ Magnet

Theirs was barely a love story. And the attraction? Unfair. She was the Girl of Steel, and he was a magnet. She never bent, she never broke, but she couldn't let go of him. They met in the middle of a Chemistry exam: an alloy plus an object possessed of a magnetic field equaled true love. Neither were consulted about the affair they'd never stop having. They were merely equated, as romance tends to work.

It hurt the Girl of Steel's self-esteem. She was used to resisting, to withstanding, and at her favorite times, upholding. But this boy walked by and she instantly zipped to his side, and she never minded it. She minded that she didn't mind. She minded what others would think, too.

The world still needed her to build cars and skyscrapers and specific models of cans. They needed her for frying pans and satellites. There was not a country on the planet that didn't view her as a one-woman industry. Not a country on the planet that wouldn't judge the affair with this boy with his lopsided electrons.

He didn't see her as an industry. The magnet didn’t even see her as industrious; she got no work done around him. They looked into each others' eyes, studying the ripples in electron behavior, and watching countless hours of The Food Network. It was stuff the other major materials made fun of – the stuff she'd made fun of until that fated exam. The stuff she'd thought was cliché without having ever considered how clichés established.

He said that perhaps clichés were an industry. Was not all industry repetition?

That was trite, and she knew it, and she couldn't help liking it anyway. Not giggling, certainly not giggling like he did at her slights and insights. He was so enthusiastic, despite never having been asked to love her, to always be there, to, in his own way, always zip to her side, which, when she paid attention, she realized he did, being less massive than her. Sometimes bites of him chipped off on impact. The Girl of Steel collected those bits of him, and turned them into earrings, since they were clingy. He called her industrious. She called that trite, and she was right, and she didn't care, and that ambivalence bothered her, and she didn't care about that either.

Soon they went on public dates to every Friday exam at the lab, to see what other couples Science would pair up on paper. To see what else would come out the other side of equations. It was difficult to understand, and the magnet never really understood, but it felt nice. That was the Girl of Steel's reasoning, too, not that she ever said it. It was easier watching the inexplicable when the explicable didn't work. Love and the Friday exams were exasperating.

The 4 Ways Marvel Really Got Thor Wrong

Recently, Marvel Comics released their second movie about Thor. It’s part of their Avengers franchise of movies, which show very little scholarship about mythology. Many of us wonder if Marvel cares about anything more than making lots of money by way of vapid movies that are a lot of fun to watch. In doing so, they've utterly ruined the character forever. This must be remedied. Here are their four greatest transgressions.

Why would they do this to him?

1. Thor Speaks English At All
Some critics have pointed out that, historically, Marvel made Thor speak in a bad impression of Shakespearean English. A Norse god wouldn’t sound like Shakespeare. But this ignores the real contention: a Norse god wouldn’t be speaking English at all. He should be bantering in a dialect of Old Norse that’s unrecognizable even to modern Scandinavians. It would seriously help the authenticity of Marvel films if everything Thor said was utterly incomprehensible to any typical American moviegoer.

They didn't have contact lenses, either.

2. The Race Card
Some people have complained that Heimdall is blackwashed in the Thor movies, played by Idris Elba. Idris Elba is blacker than the average American imagines the average Icelander is. The average American doesn’t know much about how many ethnicities spread across Europe by the 13th century, and the average theologian has barely cracked why gods do anything, much less why they pick a specific skin tone or bone structure. However, Idris Elba has an amazing gravitas that we can all agree every god should have. Because Idris Elba is only one actor, most of the gods in the Thor movies don’t have this gravitas. Marvel screwed this up big time by not cloning Idris Elba.

No one asks if Tom Hiddleston is the right race to play a trickster god.

3. Thor Coexists With The Hulk
Look, it’s not that hard. The pre-Christian Nords didn’t know about radiation. There is nothing in their lore or cycles that references gamma waves or their implausible relationship to human emotion. The Incredible Hulk is simply irreconcilable with any of Thor’s mythology. Any modern science has no place in a shared universe with Thor, even science as miraculously bad as what supports the Hulk’s existence.

Yup. Pride, Instagram and Haar.

4. Thor Wasn’t a Comic Book Character
Our primary sources for the Norse gods are the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Gesta Danorum. While some of the manuscripts in the Prose Edda were illuminated with beautiful imagery, the stories of Thor were never relayed in screen-printed sequential art. Frankly, everything Jack Kirby ever drew looked entirely inaccurate to visual stylings of the 13th century Scandinavians. Worse: they didn’t have movies. Making the things into movies is fundamentally inaccurate. If Marvel had any cultural sensitivity, they would force audiences at all their premieres to starve around camp fires in the middle of a blizzard and have Stan Lee recount the tales orally. He’d probably do it. He loves cameos.

This is actually 100% historically accurate.

It's my hope that by starting a dialogue about Marvel's failure to accurately capture their source material, that we will bring about change. By forcing blockbuster movies to be entirely accurate to someone else's vision, and by stripping anything that anyone was having fun with, we will create films that no one wants to see. And once no one will go see them, no one will ever complain about them again.

The future is in your hands, True Believers.

Bathroom Monologue: Oxytocin & Oxycontin

There are many more chemicals in the world than there are letters in the alphabet or syllables in the English language. Certainly many more chemicals than the syllables Hazel knew. She was two weeks too late to realize "oxytocin" and "oxycontin" weren't the same thing.

Oxytocin was a chemical related to love, and particularly the love that formed in a mother towards her child. Too little of it might have explained why Hazel's mother never wanted to talk, never made her lunch, and was so out of patience with her at every question. If there wasn't enough and her mother didn't want her, though, oxycontin didn't fix anything. It only created an addiction that took her further from Hazel.

She hated chemistry ever afterward.

RAQ 2013: The Rarely Asked Questions

It's my birthday! And that means it's time for the R.A.Q. – the Rarely Asked Questions. Here, I celebrate my birthday by collecting and answering questions that readers normally never ask anyone. They can be as serious or as absurd as they liked. Here we go…

1. Nicholas Sabin asked: If Jesus Christ played Dynasty Warriors, who would he play as? Follow-up: Could he defeat Lu Bu at Hu Lao Gate?

Nick Sabin, going for blasphemy out of the gate.

I suspect Christ would play as one of the Qiaos, as he was about empowerment of the least of us, and they are the youngest, the least consequential, most disenfranchised and most underpowered characters. He might co-op with his Dad as the other Qiao.

And by Dynasty Warriors 7, anyone can beat Lu Bu at Hu Lao Gate. Christ, however, wouldn't need to abuse the save feature and by the end Lu Bu would be renamed "Paul".

2. Tony Noland asked: If using normal baryonic matter accelerated to 0.2C, how hard would I have to hit Mars to initiate a self-stabilizing magnetic field?

Understand that if you've already fixed your matter and your speed for impact, then adjusting the "hardness" of the blow is quite difficult. Moreso the Moh's hardness for pentaquarks. Given that you're hoping to initiate a field, which must mean rebooting or hijacking Mars's own, I'll hazard that you'll have to hit it quite hard indeed.

3. Chaz asked: The Greek description of the sky is 'bronze' for it shone as bronze. If there were no color adjectives or understanding how would you describe the sky? Blood? The ocean after a storm?

Chaz here is clearly playing to my deep and abiding love of Homer. God bless you, atheist.

I suspect my system would be based on decoration and opacity. Here night and day are irrelevant, as during both there is some illumination that defines by degree of presence. We'll describe the sky by how many clouds and how thick they are; partially cloudy, overcast, mild and diffused haze, or the super-cast as when you can't even make out the contours of the cloud system taking up the sky. Storm lighting utterly differs, and so it stands out. This also allows for days and nights of particularly light-intensity. Cloudlessness would be "full sky," whereas a super-cast time would be "absent sky." When the sky is full of birds, "birdy sky." Full of locusts, "pestilent sky."

By not actually describing the sky itself here, but rather degrees of interference with its visibility, we will supply young artists the ability to feel clever at the expense of the vernacular for generations to come.

4. Danielle La Paglia asked: I know everyone likes to ask funny questions, but I'm not a very funny person, so...what book has had the biggest emotional impact on you? Whether it made you actually cry or laugh or love (despite your granite heart) or whether it changed you in some profound way or gave you hope or spurred you on...whatever your definition of "emotional impact" is, I'll take it.

You're right that it's difficult for fiction to have significant effects on me. I know Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Roger Zelazny's "Divine Madness" both got me to gasp and take a few minutes to collect my mind at their conclusions – maybe the only thing the two stories have in common are absolutely crystalline final paragraphs. Zelazny's Lord of Light did that to me at least four times over the course of the novel, so that would be a leader in the category. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the only poem to suck me in deeply for its poetry.

But as far as writing, let me hazard that it's the junction between two authors: J.R.R. Tolkien and Akira Toriyama. The former wrote The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, so classic, so immersive, so brilliantly escapist that two generations of writers ripped him off to disgusting degrees. But very shortly after I read these books, I read Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball (not the later Dragon Ball Z – though I happily read that later).

Tolkien gave me kings and wizards on horse back with staves and swords and magic rings out to fight armies of orcs and braving into a volcano.

Toriyama, abruptly, gave me a monkey-boy who thought a magic ball was his grandfather, cars fleeing from dinosaurs, a perverted martial arts god in a Hawaiian shirt and clouds you can only ride in you're innocent.

If I'd gone from Tolkien to Wheel of Time or Lyonesse or Sword of Truth, I might have gotten mired in the Medievalist mindset forever, but because I had these two wildly different visions of the Fantastic, it left me always thinking about how much fit in Fantasy's boundaries. It's why, today, I'm stunned by how little apparently fits into what's supposed to be "Epic Fantasy."

That's certainly why you got Puddle out of me.

5. Katherine Hajer asked: When do you sleep?

Answer: Optimally, from midnight to nine in the morning. It's been off lately since visiting Texas's timezone and WorldCon's insane anti-sleep schedule. You are now amply educated to rob me.

6. Helen Howell asked: How do you stop your worm from slipping down the plughole when you wash it in the sink? (worms are covered in dirt!)

While I have limited experience with worm-cleansing, I would always stop the plughole up with a drain cover before cleansing began. This prevents aquatic descent.

7. Larry Kollar asked: You're in your writing spot. You look out the window (if you don't have one, pretend). What do you see?

I'm fortunate enough to have a real writing spot – my desk, by my window, in my room. I have a privileged view of the top of the woods descending toward the lake, and while I cannot see any water, the other half of my view is raw sky. For more on that view, see Chaz's question.

In Winter it snows over; other seasons I get to watch the life span of leaves. I cherish working to it.

8. Valerie Valdes asked: If you could have written any story or novel by someone else, which would it be?
Ooo, there have been very few works that struck me with serious writing envy, but they definitely exist. Most commonly I find a work fascinating and am grateful for the creator, thinking about their process, rather than imagining emulation. Jo Walton's Among Others, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars – I wish I had the time write like that too while also writing the works I already do, I wish I'd done something in that neighborhood, but really, I'm just inspired by their existence. I don't envy or desire to swipe destiny.

The second Lupin the 3^rd television series was one envy-project – so funny, such character, and when my Trio novels see the light of day, you'll see the obvious influences. Similarly, I'd write the heck out of Gail Simone's Agent X and was unduly influenced by her.

The movie Stranger Than Fiction explored and even executed several meta-fictional ideas I'd been playing with for years. That's a case of someone beating me to the public. I envied them insofar as I wanted to get my take on something so defined by ideas that I couldn't write it and stand apart after they got to it. Jerks. Smart, talented jerks.

9. Medeia Sharif asked: Think about your skills, talents, quirks...everything. If you were a computer software, what would be your function in someone's computer?

Firefox browser. Dozens of tabs open, studying several topics and participating in too many conversations for my own good until I trip over my own re-hashed coding and crash.

10. Scribbler asked: How important is the reader?

Important enough that I'm answering any questions they have!

The slightly more serious point is that they're vital to the career of any good writer. I had the pleasure of boarding a plane Monday with Mary Robinette Kowal, who played down that she'd succeeded because of talent or hard work. To her it was the readers who supported her career and gave her this status.

11. Elephant's Child asked: Is life random, or is there meaning?

Both suppositions are exceedingly true. Complexity Theory demonstrates for us that many systems in which life exists or is comprised have chaotic and random sets of particles and outcomes. However, elements of randomness can only be identified because they are meaningful. If anything were meaningless, we wouldn't be able to recognize it. Finding, creating and encouraging positive meaning has been much of my best experiences of God.

12. Peter Newman asked: How would you define yourself as a D&D character? I'm talking class (or multi-class), race, alignment, stats.

Did Peter ask this because he knows I hate the false reductionism of D&D? That's a question I don't normally ask.

The first time friends goaded me into playing D&D, I defined myself as a midget orc. Thus I had lower than average intelligence and appearance, but none of the physical benefits of being monstrous. True to myself, his religion was ALL, and he believed himself to be chaotic-something-or-other. For the sake of the experiment, let's say I'm Chaotic Good because I mean well but don't know what I'm doing as often as I ought and that takes me down many ethical alleys.

And that wraps up everyone who asked me rare things this year! I'm off to find birthday cake. Did you enjoy the Q&A?

Bathroom Monologue: The Catch

The breath caught in Ade Akingbola's throat for the last time as the doctor explained his heart condition. Well, the second to the last time, and as he looked at x-rays and listened to possible surgeries, he calculated to not permit the true last catching of breath for a damned long time.

He explained to the others that they'd be losing their second-best shortstop. How he loved softball, and he'd still come, and still bring the home-made limeade, though he'd add less sugar from now on. That, too, was a loss.

More doctors, these cardiovascular elites called "specialists," explained that the condition was spreading to his lungs. Except "spreading" here meant "atrophy" or "corrosion." In a month, it was in his bones too. How did your heart rob your bones? By being too weak.

In a month the softball season started up again, too. By then he needed a wheelchair. A second wheelchair, actually, a motorized one after he could no longer safely move him. The effort, you know, was often hard on people.

The spring was too hard on too many people. Ade only had to visit the hospital three times a week; his friends had to lose at softball on four. He couldn't play shortstop, he couldn't even yell to support them. He could dump vodka in the limeade, though, and by Week Five, he strongly suspected it was helping more than their coach. They still lost – he'd been their second best shortstop because all but Nelson and Idrissa lacked reflexes – but they were cheerier about it an hour later. Sometimes they played morning games hung over, and no hangover changed how badly they lost. Sometimes they came closer to winning, sliding into first while trying not to throw up on the opposing team.

Ade watched every game from his mechanical chair, a sippy cup of water to keep himself hydrated and an iPhone full of cardio stats he had to monitor. There was, it appeared, an app for your heart turning against you. An app for it taking your lungs and bones with it.

He used the phone to count the unhappy winners. Team after team waddled off the field as softball season grew deep, complaining about their backs, frowning at their bats, squinting at their cars as though they hadn't played a game for several hours, as though softball had been a square traffic jam and the dugouts a miserable off-ramp preventing them from hitting their cars. God, Ade hoped he'd enjoyed playing more than all these winners did. He remembered himself having loved it, but also remembered complaining more than he liked, the mere memory making his breathing speed up, which he couldn't abide. Not if he wanted to postpone the last time his breath would catch in his throat.

Ade Akingbola found his lips smiling – had to raise his hand and feel his mouth to be sure of it, and moving his hands idly like that was no easy task anymore. He was fondling his own smile as a winning relief pitcher, who'd shut out Ade's friends for the last three innings, grimaced, spat chaw in the red dust, and walked for his Volvo. Ade pushed the switch to wheel backward, to get out of the miserable winner's way. The miserable winner wouldn't look him in the face; looked him in the chair, sure, briefly, before ticking his head away. Winning must have been so hard on some people.

Bathroom Monologue: Wolfman Op-Ed

To any well-meaning bodies at NASA,

Ever since humanity grew tired of hunting down werewolves for sport and pretended to give us human rights, it's been suggested that we ought to play our role. To do our part. To contribute to man's world. The most recent evidence of this thinking is a suggestion at the TED Talks that we go into space where more mortal man has difficulty. This is a plainly racist presumption.

To be a werewolf is to suffer the curse of immortality. I myself still attempt to take my life on an annual basis even though I can't. Do you think this makes me durable? Well immortality is not invincibility. And just as I feel the sting of the knife, so I would feel my ass freezing off in the depths of space.

Have you ever seen one of us transform? It's hard on the wardrobe. Any space suit is going to rip and then you turn us into immortal ice cubes floating around the Sea of Tranquility.

What galls me is the suggestion that we're doing this because we're forgiven. The proposal acts like we're supposed to be happy to get a supply of oxygen. Suffocating and starving still suck even if they don't kill you, and there's no guarantee all of us won't wolf out on the shuttle or on the surface. Trust me that when you arrive expecting me to have built a space station, my hairy ass will have been in no mood to greet you.

On behalf of the damned among you: we politely decline.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Talbot

Bathroom Monologue: Werewolves on the Moon

If it is a curse from God, then it is for humanity to forgive. We can give them a better and brighter future, and they can send down a ladder so that we may climb up after them.

It's been their antagonist for millennia. Yet wolfsbane cannot grow there, and most of its surface is absent of silver deposits. Our engineers suggest there is no real moonrise in space, and so they ought not to turn, especially not in a shuttle without windows.

The bounty will arrive upon landing, for once a werewolf stands on the moon, he will not ever again see it rise or set in full. There will be no further changes or demonic impulses. They are cursed to live eternal, but they will live eternal as men and women. There is no howling on the moon itself.

If their immortality is so great that they cannot take their own lives, then can they suffocate? If not, then they can live on the surface as they erect our way stations. If they can, then we will support them, sending as much air as they will need for years.

Despite their legendary appetite, we know werewolves cannot starve themselves to death. Too many wretched souls have tried. Thus they will require no food as they become the explorers, the miners, and the maintenance crews for the stations that will erect our shuttles to Mars and beyond. They'll never have to leave the moon, and play a hand in the culture that grows there as it becomes the first stop in interplanetary travel.

One great experiment, too: to see what changes in the breast of man when he sees a full in earth his sky.

And for the dissenting opinion...

Bathroom Monologue: "Why can't the computer just take the novel out of my brain instead of me having to write it?" –Anonymous Friend

Soon it will! With the march of progress, the innovations of neuroscience and tidy monthly fee, you too will never type again. You'll be jacked in to an industrial word processor, an air tube running up one nostril and a food tube down the other, fed a steady drip of chemicals to stimulate the parts of your brain that crank out ideas. You'll be held in an eternal sleep of pre-selected, pre-programmed dreams, free to enjoy them without the pesky freedom to recognize they're happening, all while your unconsciousness is milked of stories by the latest Microsoft Notepad, which will translate your imagination into immaculate blocks of text and tropes. You'll never have to worry about writing again. You won't be allowed to, either.

Bathroom Monologue: Suspect

The story makes no sense if you look at the whole picture – the land lady's perfect bill of health, the suspect holding the knife, the ex-husband everyone thought would come after her. That stuff is distraction. If you had been in the car with me on the ride to the station, you'd know. Our suspect is something unreal.

Our suspect suffers from something weakly diagnosed as high-functioning autism. That he lived alone with such an acute condition was unfortunate, a failure of the system. His father should have been there, but he died in Iraq. His mother should have been there, but two years after her husband died, she had a catastrophic psychotic meltdown, seemingly out of nowhere. The suspect's sister took care of him for a year before she had a catastrophic psychotic meltdown, also seemingly out of nowhere. This family had no history of mental illness before the last decade. He got extremely close with these two people before they lost their minds.

It was the sister's apartment where the suspect was living, occasionally looked in on by the land lady. According to another tenant, she didn't want him to go homeless.

You need to take the week of March 3^rd as Week One. That's probably when the land lady leaves a book in his apartment, or somehow he walks off with it. That is The Portable Jung. I've fingerprinted it, and he read this thing. He even tore some pages.

Week Two, he purchases four books on psychology. He can't talk or write, but apparently can read and browse for books. Tell me how that works. I'm going interview the bookseller tonight. Of these books he bought, it appears only three were ever opened. Passages were torn from their bindings, mostly relating to one subject that makes sense in Week Three.

Week Three: he purchases six books on neuroscience. He reads the first half of two of these, again tearing out sections, making the collage that covered up his bathroom mirror. It's all about brain chemistry.

Week Four: he buys eleven books on chemistry. He tears passages relating to cell structure from all of them and collages his shower walls.

Week Five: nine books on molecular physics. It's as though he read a couple of chapters out of four of them, but removes nothing. This is the same week his land lady has a psychotic episode, out of the blue, and kills herself. And he's in her apartment when she does it.

I'm not saying he stabbed her. That theory was always bunk, and the two tenants who discovered him say the knife he picked up, he was trying to turn on himself. That's what he says, too.

Driving him to the station, I heard him. I turned around at a stop light, and his lips weren't moving. The guy can't talk with his mouth, but he was crying inside my head, so loud that tears were spilling down my cheeks. He kept apologizing and begging me in this garbled nonsense, and I actually ditched the car for a few minutes just to get my bearings. I thought my head was going to burst. I had to radio another officer to take him the rest of the way, and when I call her, she hasn't answered any of my messages. I bet she had a wild ride.

Look. He started with Jung, then he went from psychology to what made up our brains and how, skimming the whole thing because none of it was new to him. He only needed missing bits/ He didn't have to read that much because he'd always intuited it. He cracked our code because he's desperate to talk to someone, but his voice is dangerous. I'm pretty sure what he kept asking was for help.

So either this is some kind of horrible telepathy case, or I've gone crazy. And given the history, if I've gone crazy being around him, that's just more evidence that he's the real deal, and he definitely needs someone's help.

‘D’ is for ‘Drones.’

‘D’ is for ‘Drones.’

The Drone-class of automaton is the most common in the world. Once upon a time they were cleaning and maintenance drones, sometimes used for defense or transportation, easier to manufacture, store and replace than slave labor. They are land-based and spherical, running on a sort of combustion engine that can utilize various compounds. For reasons no one has yet identified, they actively seek to combust biological compounds. They started with their creators, the gremlins, and have never let up. They are often found in packs, flocking around larger automatons, such as the Mammoths, former construction vehicles that have turned carnivorous.

I originally derived the name from ants, never anticipating the U.S. drone program to get so prolific and ugly. I’ve gone back and forth over this name. It’s perfect in-world, and honestly, the U.S. drone program is so heinous that the thought of the name now being applied to an unmanned killing machine that wiped out its originating society is artistically appealing. I’m inclined to keep it, but I’d love opinions on the topic.

Tomorrow: ‘E’ for that obnoxious empire the humans are building.

My Foot Stopped Working: Needles in My Legs

I thought I’d experienced every nerve test. I’ve had sweat tests, blood tests, muscle biopsies, shock tests, tests where they strapped electrodes to me and tossed me onto a treadmill. I have what are likely exaggerated memories of an hour spent in a room with gradually elevating temperature and currents being run through my left arm.

But this “Nerve Shock Test” I got in Fishkill was a new one. The technician stuck needles into the muscle tissue of my legs, then electrified the needles to record nerve reactions. It may be the first time I’ve ever bit my lip to keep from yelling. Didn’t help that the technician was a jerk who talked down to me for the entire test.

What a nice place to be electrocuted.

Then I got off the table and heard exactly what anyone who’s been electrified for their own health wants: “This shows there’s nothing wrong. That’s a good thing.”

A good thing because, according to a glib explanation, it ruled some problems out. It’s probably not Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. He didn’t even think it was neuropathy, though he didn’t have an alternative to suggest. Now all I had to do was get another neurology appointment to come up with more tests. Recall that last time, the Nurse Practitioner was drawing a blank on what it could be and what to do.

The only good thing I’ve experienced is that the numbness hasn’t spread far. For the last few days I’ve felt it in the ball of my left foot. Otherwise it is located in the toes and periphery, and every time I’ve checked, motor control has been available. Sweet, sweet ability to walk.

I waited two weeks before posting this, just in case. Bruises the size of my thumbs still mark where the needles “probed.”

Eight days after Nerve Shock Test. My leg doesn't look like Jupiter anymore!