DP Fiction #14: “The Blood Tree War” by Daniel Ausema

My roots felt only earth. Thin, and good for nothing but wild grass. As I stretched under the ground, I caught the tang of metal, something sharp and not yet rusted. Clean metal, likely dropped when this patch of land was well behind the battle line. Still, the promise it made helped me exert all my energy into those roots, willing them deeper and farther out.

Sunlight glistened off my barbed leaves, feeding its pale energy to my efforts.

I was not the only blood tree growing on the battlefield, and my concentration broke when my sister began chanting. She was double my height already, as if she’d focused her efforts on leaves and branches instead of roots, but her chanting told me she hadn’t needed to work hard below ground. By instinct I recognized the nature of her words, the cadence of syllables sighing from the pores in her leaves. She chanted the lives of those whose blood she drank.

I sent a root toward her, running just beneath the surface. There was blood, battle-spilled blood. My purpose, my need, a far greater energy than the sun’s.

Her roots fought back. They sliced the tip off my root, so I branched out to either side, but they bludgeoned those runners into a pulp. Already, the blood had made her strong.

Over the silent warfare of our roots, my sister’s voice kept chanting the lives of the fallen.

She grew taller, and her leaves turned a green so dark it was nearly black.

I needed a different approach. For several days I tried focusing nearby, redoubling my efforts to dig deep, to widen my circumference. I found one patch of blood, but it was old, no part of the recent battle. It fed me, but its energy was gone too soon, and my voice had no life to chant. The nutrient-poor soil kept me small. Too long of this, and my sister would be able to block the sun from my leaves, as well as the blood from my roots.

My first break came when I discovered I could send a root over the ground. I sent a dozen one night, sipping at the earth as they went deep into her territory. Ah, the blood. She had no defense, since she wasn’t even aware of my presence. I kept them moving, never letting them sink too deeply into the patches of blood, so I might keep their presence a secret.

But my voice I could not keep silent. When the sun rose, I had no choice but to chant. Harsh lives and brief, I sent their deeds into the air. A child who’d lied about his age. A peasant unsure what to do with the weapon in his hands. A woman in disguise who brought down a dozen enemies before she finally fell. One of her victims a veteran of earlier wars who should have been allowed to rest at home.

The words tumbled out into the dawn, and my sister broke off her chanting to counterattack. By noon my runners were dead, spilling no blood by which they might be remembered. My sister’s chants went on.

As the last of the stolen blood passed up to the buds on my twigs, I discovered that even when it was gone I didn’t have to be silent. I had no more lives to chant, but I could sing a strange cry. The blood-fed buds rang out my voice. I imitated my sister’s chants, made up lives to speak. She wasted energy pursuing my roots, trying to find the blood she thought I drank.

She would discover the truth soon. My words wouldn’t fool her forever.

I played with the sounds of my voice, trying other noises that didn’t resemble our usual chants, and a bird came near to investigate. Birds avoid our kind, but my song overcame its instinct. I strangled the bird with a vine and added its blood to my song.

What else might I attempt? I changed the patterns, and squirrels came to see. Their blood tasted of hard nuts and high leaps, and their fur made my leaves droop in distaste. They made my song wilder and louder.

My sister’s trunk twisted in her desperation to find the source of my song. Her own chants continued, of warriors and the many lives lost to blade and spear, but less sure as the days went on. Doubt bled her, even though the blood of birds and rodents couldn’t give me the strength of her soldiers.

Larger animals came to my call, in the days and months that followed. An elk’s blood is strong, but the animals are wary. Wolf blood is rarer still, but when I managed to catch one, it gave me a fierce strength to rival my sister at her greatest. Deer and feral pigs and jittery pronghorns made me grow, made my bark thick.

My sister grew taller than me, though. She tended the battlefield’s blood with care so it aged beneath her without its strength leaching away. We were no longer saplings when she gave up trying to find my secret source of blood and took to attacking me directly. We know the many ways animals hunt, we trees–slow or fast, in darkness or from hiding–and we’ve chanted enough human lives to know the ways of war. When trees hunt, it is like and unlike those. Slower, no doubt. A gradual advance where each of us aims for a sense of the inevitable. But just as bloodthirsty and mindless, a single focus of angry contempt. I wondered if her sap would taste of blood when I defeated her, wondered if I would someday chant her life as I drank all that remained of her. I imagined ruling the entire plain of the battlefield on my own. But most of the time I knew well that I wouldn’t win. Eventually she would drink my sap-blood, would chant my sorry life, would rule alone.

If it was to be a battle, I would need more blood.

I wasted no energy on defense. Nor on attacking. Instead I crafted a new song, put every dram of blood into a summoning.

Humans. They are always ready for war. A simple push, a siren’s call, and they will march. Two armies drew toward me.

As my sister’s branches reached toward me to block the sun, the armies closed in. With my roots I pulled at the ground, channeling their charges toward my meager shade, where I waited to drink. Their clamor tasted of the brightest sunlight any tree has known. I drank and chanted their lives and grew strong.

My sister’s branches shrunk back, and her roots tried desperately to break through to the fresh blood. My chanting became laughter as I beat back every attack she sent. My unlikely dreams of ruling the field might even come true.

Then the humans did something new. Was it simply a flight of fire arrows? An arcane spell? New and explosive technology? I didn’t know, but my sister and I both burst into flame. No amount of blood could put out the fire.

By the time the flames were out, I was reduced to charred roots and a single spire of dead wood. I had no buds to sing even a simple summoning. My sister was similarly broken, her proud strength now nothing.

Every drop of blood in the field was gone, drunk by flames even more greedy than I.

Author’s Note: This one started as a writing exercise. An online writing group I’m part of meets together, roughly once a week, as many as can manage. Someone will post a topic, and we’ll have an hour to come up with whatever we can manage. It’s a great exercise for simply getting used to turning off that questioning voice inside and just writing, so even if none of the exercises turn into viable stories, I recommend it strongly. But given how frequently the members of the group manage to turn those one-hour starts into complete short stories that sell to a variety of places or key character development pieces for their novels, it’s even better than just an exercise, but a great way to get a story down on paper. I can’t even recall the exact prompt for this one, and I’m sure I hadn’t completely finished it when the hour was done, but that was where the story began. Besides, I love trees, and carnivorous plants are simply cool, so the idea of cruel and carnivorous trees that feast on spilled blood was one I knew I had to finish as soon as it occurred to me!

Daniel Ausema headshot A runner, writer, reader, teacher, and parent, Daniel Ausema has had fiction and poetry appear in many publications, including Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction. He is also the creator of a steampunk-fantasy, serial-fiction project, Spire City, which is now entering its third and final season. He lives in Colorado, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

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Ray Bradbury Award Review 2016

written by David Steffen

The Ray Bradbury Award is given out every year with the Nebula Awards but is not a Nebula Award in itself. Like the Nebula Awards, the final ballot and the eventual winner are decided by votes from members of SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (which despite the name has an international membership).

I like to use the award every year as a sampler of well-loved science fiction and fantasy movies from the previous year. I have been very happy with this tactic, and this year is no exception. I try to watch every movie on the ballot that I can find by rental (usually via RedBox, or occasionally from Comcast On Demand) and review them all within the voting period.

This year, on the ballot but not on this list is the episode of the TV show Jessica Jones titled “AKA Smile”. Since I haven’t seen any episode of the series, even if I could get a copy to watch I didn’t feel it would be fair to review a single episode of a show I’m not familiar with.

At the time I am writing this preliminary post, I haven’t yet rented The Martian, but I intend to.

1. Max Max: Fury Road

Humanity has wrecked the world. Nuclear war has left much of the earth as a barren wasteland. Humanity still survives, but only in conclaves where those in control lord their power over the common people. Those in power hoard water, gasoline, and bullets, the most important resources in this world, and guard them jealously. Immortan Joe is the leader of one of those conclaves, with a vast store of clean water pumped from deep beneath the earth, and guarded by squads of warboys who are trained to be killers from a young age. Despite these relative riches, what Immortan Joe wants more than anything is healthy offspring, his other children all born with deformities. He keeps a harem of beautiful wives in pursuit of this goal. When his general Imperator Furiosa goes rogue and escapes with his wives in tow, Immortan Joe takes a war party in pursuit, and calls in reinforcements from Gas-Town and Bullet Farm to join in the fight. Mad Max of the title is captured at the beginning of the story and strapped to the front of a pursuit vehicle to act as a blood donor for a sick warboy, to give him the strength to fight.

I am only a bit aware of the original Mad Max franchise. When the previews for this movie came out, I thought it looked completely unappealing. I honestly didn’t understand what other people were raving about when they were so excited about it as the movie’s release date approached, and after they saw it in theaters. I wasn’t expecting to see it at any point, so I read some reactions and found them interesting but still didn’t feel compelled to see it. I finally decided I would see it when I heard some reviewers giving the movie a bad review because they thought it was awesome and action-filled but that this concealed a feminist agenda and they were angry that they had been tricked into liking a movie that had a feminist message.

I finally rented the movie, expecting it to be pretty much just okay, but really quite enjoyed it.

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa was badass, and I hope there are more movies with her in this role. Tom Hardy as the eponymous Mad Max was also solid. Really, great casting all around, and it was really cool to see a woman in one of the lead roles of an action movie where she is an essential part of the action.

Probably one of the coolest things about the movie are the vehicle designs. Since most of the movie takes place on the road in pursuit, there is plenty of opportunity for these vehicles to be showcased. They are so much fun just to look at, that I more than once laughed in delight at the absurdity of a design. My particular favorite was the sports car with tank treads driven by the leader of Bullet-Farm.

Similarly, costume design and other character design were incredible. It’s… hard to play a flame-throwing electric guitar as serious, but it’s just one example of the over-the-top design that should be stupid, but somehow it all works and ends up being both exciting and hilarious.

It had a lot of striking images, sounds, moments. In this bleak, most desperate of landscapes you see the most depraved of the depraved of the most heroic of the heroic. There were heroes to root for, but even those heroes are no pristine blameless creatures, because no such people have survived so long. Rather the heroes are those who want to try to make some small change for the better in the world around them. The movie is basically one long chase scene, full of action, full of surprising and epic and violent moments. I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone, by any means. But I thought it was a really incredible film, despite coming into the movie with reservations.

2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

(this review copied verbatim from my review of the movie posted in January)

The movie picks up about as many years after the original trilogy as have passed in real life, I suppose. The First Order, the still active remnants of the Empire, is still opposing the New Republic that replaced it. A group of storm troopers of the First Order raids a Resistance camp on the desert planet Jakku, looking for information. Resistance fighter Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) hides the vital information in the droid BB-8 and sends it away from the camp before he is captured. One of the stormtroopers known only as FN-2187 (who is later nicknamed Finn) (played by John Boyega) chooses to turn his back on a lifetime of training and chooses not to kill anyone in the raid. Finn helps Poe Dameron escape. Together they meet Rey (Daisy Ridley), a Jakku scavenger and they join forces to get BB-8’s information to the people in the Resistance who need it.

I enjoyed this movie. It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen but I enjoyed it from beginning to end and I am glad to see someone has been able to turn around the series after the mess Lucas made of the second trilogy. The special effects were good, and not the fakey CG-looking stuff that was in the second trilogy. The casting of the new characters was solid and it was great to see old faces again. To have a woman and a black man be the main heroes of the story is great to see from a franchise that hasn’t historically had a ton of diversity. It was easy to root for the heroes and easy to boo at the villains. The worldbuilding, set design, costume design all reminded me of the great work of the original. I particularly liked the design of BB-8 whose design is much more broadly practical than R2D2’s. Kylo Ren made a good villain who was sufficiently different than the past villains to not just be a copy but evil enough to be a worthy bad guy.

Are there things I could pick apart? Sure. Some of it felt a little over-familiar, but that might have been part of an attempt by the moviemakers to recapture the old audience again. I hope the next movie can perhaps plot its own course a little bit more. And maybe I’ll have some followup spoilery articles where I do so. I don’t see a lot of movies in theater twice, but I might do so for this one so I can watch some scenes more closely. I think, all in all, the franchise was rescued by leaving the hands of Lucas whose artistic tastes have cheapened greatly over the years. I know some people knock Abrams, and I didn’t particularly like his Star Trek reboot, but Star Wars has always been more of an Abrams kind of feel than Star Trek ever was anyway.

I enjoyed it, and I think most fans of the franchise will.

(You also might want to read Maria Isabelle’s reaction to the movie, posted here in February)

3. Inside Out

None of us is a single person. Within each of us are variations of alternate selves that all vie for control in any given situation. We feel like different people depending on the people around us or the setting, and that’s because we can be different people. This movie takes that idea and makes it literal. In the world of Inside Out, each of us is basically a machine and our mental space is made of warehouses for memory storage, vaults for the subconscious, and the all-important control room. In each person’s mental control room are five versions of themselves: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. They negotiate to handle the control panel which determines the person’s every action. The outer storyline follows an 11 year old girl named Riley whose family is moving to a different city. Her excitement about the movie is changing to sadness as she misses friends left behind, and has trouble coping with other changes in her life that was going just the way she wanted it. Her parents always want her to be happy and her internal reaction is for Joy to always keep Sadness away from the controls. The conflict between the two emotions sends both of them out of the control room and into the confusing labyrinth that is the rest of the brain. If Joy ever wants Riley to be happy again she has to get herself back to Riley’s control room, and Sadness is along for the ride.

This movie was a lot of fun. The casting was great all around, but especially with the casting of Amy Poehler as Riley’s Joy. Most of the structure of the inside interactions within Riley’s head were based on what we understand of human psychology, which made it not just fun but also a pretty apt analogy for the circus we’ve all got going on inside our heads at any given moment. There’s a lot to be examined here: among other things, the importance of the other emotions besides just happiness. Both Riley’s inner story and her outer story are interesting in their own right and are twined together to make an even more satisfying whole.

4. The Martian

During an American manned mission on Mars, a fierce storm strikes the base camp of the astronauts. One of the astronauts, Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is left behind and presumed dead as the rest of the crew aborts the mission and leaves the planet to escape the storm. But Mark is not dead. He is alone on the planet with only enough food to last for a year when the soonest he can expect rescue (if anyone realizes he’s alive to attempt a rescue) won’t be for several years. Determined to live, he sets about the task of survival–cultivating enough food and water to live, and contacting NASA so they can send help.

I can see why this movie got so much critical acclaim. Usually my tastes don’t align with the Oscar Awards much, but I can see why this one did. There was a lot to love about the movie–soundtrack, solid casting and acting, great writing, a cast of characters that support each other and succeed through cooperation. Most of all it managed to capture that sense of wonder that surrounded the exploration of the moon decades ago. As real manned trips to Mars come closer and closer to reality, it’s easy to imagine this all happening. (Note that I don’t have enough background to know to what extent the science in the movie was authentic or not, but it felt pretty plausible at least, which is good enough for me)

5. Ex Machina

Software engineer Caleb Smith wins a week-long getaway to the home of Nathan Bateman, the reclusive CEO of the tech company where Caleb works. Bateman reveals that he has been working privately on the development of AI and the contest was arranged to get Caleb to his private lab in isolation. The AI is housed in a human-like body with realistic hands and face but with a visibly artificial rest of her body, and she goes by the name Ava. After agreeing to extreme secrecy, Bateman reveals that Caleb has been brought there to determine if she passes the Turing Test, a theoretical experiment in which one examines an AI personality to determine if it can pass for human.

I was skeptical of this from the first reveal that it was going to be based around the Turing Test. I am skeptical of the Turing Test as more than a momentary discussionary point because it claims to be a test of intelligence, but it’s really a test of humanity-mimicry. For an artificial intelligence to appear to be truly human would probably mean that it would have to feign irrationality, which is a poor requirement for a testing of an intelligence. I thought the movie worked pretty well with the flaws in the concept of the test by moving beyond the basic theoretical Turing Test and starting with a later development of the same concept in which the tester already knows the AI is artificially created, but wants to see if the tester can still be convinced emotionally of the being’s humanity despite knowing its humanity is manufactured. This still has the flaw that the thing being tested is human-mimicry and not actual intelligence, but it seemed like the movie was aware of this continued flaw and in the end I thought that by the end I was satisfied that the AI had not just been treated as a human-analog but a separate entity in its own right, which made the movie much more satisfying than I had thought it would be.

Anime Review: The Perfect Insider

written by Laurie Tom

the perfect insider

The Perfect Insider is based on the Mephisto Award winning mystery novel Everything Becomes F: The Perfect Insider by Hiroshi Mori. Unlike most anime novel adaptations, which are based on light novels (Japan’s equivalent of YA), Everything Becomes F is geared towards adults, and it shows in the sensibilities of the characters, the subject matter handled, and the ages of everyone involved.

Professor Souhei Saikawa and his students visit a remote island as part of a university outing, but also because it’s part of a research facility housing the infamous genius, Dr. Shiki Magata. Fifteen years ago, when Magata was a child she killed her parents, but was found non compos mentis (not of sound mind).

Instead of a more conventional way of isolating her or integrating her back in society, it was decided to shut her away in this research facility where she could work to her heart’s content. The benefits of her genius could still be reaped and she would be unable to kill again. For her part, Magata insists that she never killed her own parents, but that the deed was done by a doll.

Moe Nishinosono, one of Professor Saikawa’s students, is one of the only outsiders who has had a video call with Magata (who has never left her quarters or taken any visitors in those fifteen years). Intrigued by Magata, who seems to know details about Nishinosono’s past, she convinces Saikawa to go with her to the facility to try to get another audience with her.

Unfortunately the AI and security program that runs the facility malfunctions, causing the door to Magata’s quarters to open for the first time in fifteen years, and Magata’s fresh corpse rolls out on an automated cart dressed in a wedding gown.

It’s a locked room murder mystery!

How did someone get through the heavy 24/7 security and enter Magata’s quarters without being seen? How did they leave? What is the meaning behind the wedding dress? What happened to the rest of Magata’s body? (It’s only her head and torso on the cart. Her arms and legs are missing.) Why did the AI fail at this one moment when it was supposed to have been a perfect system devised by Magata herself?

Due to the island being an isolated research station, help is not coming anytime soon so Saikawa, Nishinosono, and the research facility staff promptly look into what could have possibly happened, realizing that the killer is likely still with them, somewhere inside the facility.

The Perfect Insider is not a thriller, so even though there is one additional murder early on, it’s more mystery than action series. To solve the mystery, Saikawa and Nishinosono need to learn more about Magata’s history, the stories of the other staff members, and do a lot of thinking. Not just how the murderer got in, but what needed to happen in order for the murderer to get in. (The former casts too wide a net, but the second narrows the possibilities considerably.)

Not a lot happens in each episode, possibly a result of trying to stretch a single novel into a 11 episode TV series, but there’s enough to keep the suspense going, and that’s a feat considering that the majority of the story takes place over a few days on an island with people mostly sitting around (at times literally sitting) trying to figure out the crime.

The mystery plays fair in that the audience is given all the same clues the protagonists are, but those with a programming background will have a considerable leg up on figuring out how the security system was foiled and the meaning behind the mysterious phrase left behind on Magata’s computer.

The rest of the mystery takes a considerable logic jump that I wouldn’t have made. Yes, it works, it doesn’t contradict any previously given material, and the meager evidence supports it, but it is such a jump that I don’t know anyone could have realistically made it except in hindsight.

For pacing reasons it’s worth noting that the 11th episode is just an epilogue and is mostly skippable as it does not answer further questions, so prepare for everything to be answered by the 10th. A single cour show is usually 12-13 episodes, and even before this point it’s possible to see how thinly the story is stretched to go even this far. I suspect the production team couldn’t get away with less than eleven episodes for broadcast scheduling reasons, but for the end viewer it works better as ten.

There aren’t many anime mystery shows that encourage the viewer to try to solve the mystery along with the protagonists, so I would recommend this to mystery fans.

Number of Episodes: 11

Pluses: audience is privy to all the same clues as the protagonists, significantly more mature offering than most anime fare, mind blowing how they did it

Minuses: pacing is slow, mystery is probably not solvable by most viewers, most characters are not particularly sympathetic

The Perfect Insider is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Sentai Filmworks has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

Winter 2016 Anime First Impressions

written by Laurie Tom

The winter season has arrived, and there are no holdovers from fall for me to watch, so my schedule is completely free! As usual, I’ll pick two or three series to watch, though a fourth might make its way in if it comes highly recommended.

Erased

Why I Watched It: The original Japanese title Boku Dake ga Inai Machi (lit: The Town Where Only I Don’t Exist) is evocative and the premise is that the twenty-nine year old protagonist has a limited ability to go back in time to fix events that will prevent people from dying, but when he’s framed for his mother’s murder his jump back takes him all the way to 18 years ago, one month before a classmate of his goes missing.

What I Thought: Wow! There’s a lot crammed into that opening episode, covering not only Satoru’s unique ability (which usually only takes him a few minutes back, not 18 years), but also a serial kidnapping/murder case that was not actually solved even though the books had been closed with a culprit found guilty. The statute of limitations just ran out because, guess what, it’s been 18 years. Satoru’s mom is a very canny woman and figures out the events of 18 years ago didn’t actually end, and presumably the real party responsible is the one who then murders her to keep her quiet, leaving Satoru to take the rap, except that Satoru’s ability then yanks him back in time to stop the real reason for her murder.

Verdict: I’ll be watching! I was disappointed Satoru’s mom got fridged so early because as far as anime moms go, she’s awesome, but we’ll presumably be getting more of the past her now that Satoru’s gone back in time. My biggest concern is that the manga is still running, but it’s ending soon and the anime production team is promising that the anime itself will have an ending as well, so it won’t finish unresolved.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash

Why I Watched It: Can there be too many series about people trapped in a medieval European fantasy RPG world? Apparently not. This is not the only one this season, but the only one I’m watching. The twist in this one is that the participants seem to be unaware that they’re in a game, or even what a game is.

What I Thought: It’s not clear whether they’re actually in a game, but as a portal fantasy it works fine too. Somehow, a group of about a dozen people from our world wake up in a tower with no memories of their prior lives, but sometimes words and concepts spill out and they have no idea what they mean or how they know them. They’re escorted to a town where they’re told they can make a living as volunteer soldiers since the real army is too busy to focus on local dangers. The POV party collectively fills roles common in fantasy and gaming fiction, but they’re comically terrible at it (as might be expected of random people from our world); unable to handle the weakest monsters in the forest. I was turned off by the odd 2-3 minutes spent debating the bust size of one of the female characters, but if that’s a one off I can move past it.

Verdict: I’ll probably watch this one. I like Manato (the priest and party leader), and being the most competent person in the group he probably should have taken a different role so they could actually earn some money, but then maybe if he hadn’t the rest of the party wouldn’t be alive.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Phantasy Star Online 2: The Animation

Why I Watched It: I only checked it out because I dropped a lot of hours into the original Phantasy Star Online, which was an Diablo-style RPG. The sequel never made it to English speaking shores, but its anime adaptation has. Unfortunately the word is that it’s terrible, so this is strictly a curiosity viewing. Rather than taking place inside the world of the game, it follows teenagers who play the game. Wha?

What I Thought: Not as horrible as I thought it would be, but PSO2 seems to be be suffering from trying to do two different things at once. It wants the game world to be its own entity with its own set of stakes, but at the same time it wants a plot that runs through the offline world and the people who play the game. I suspect that the in-universe PSO2 will end up being more than just a game and conflict will spill over from the online to the offline, but it doesn’t quite come together, especially since this is a real world game that exists in our world. The characters go to Seiga Academy! Say it out loud. Yeah, the reference is that blatant. And if that’s not enough, the fountain in the center of their school looks like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Verdict: I’m going to pass. While it’s nice seeing some of the designs animated for a game I had dropped well over a hundred hours on when I was just out of college, it’s just not what I’m looking for.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Prince of Stride: Alternative

Why I Watched It: This seems like a slower season compared to most and I’ve never watched a sports anime before so I figured I’d try one. In high school I did hurdles and the high jump for track and field, so a series about a parkour/relay race team seems up my alley.

What I Thought: I had no real expectations going in, so I was pleasantly surprised. If stride was a real sport (I don’t think it is) I would certainly have considered it in high school. It’s very showy and well choreographed. I loved the detail the animators paid to warming up, with one of the athletes doing a common ankle exercise. Even though the show will presumably showcase their matches, the first episode gets the tension rolling with a more mundane concern when protagonist Nana Sakurai comes to Honan Academy only to find out the stride club possesses so few members it can no longer race competitively. Though they get enough people by the end of the episode, it’s clear the reason for the stride club being in such bad shape will come up later.

Verdict: I’ll be watching! It looks like fun, and even though I probably won’t try another sports anime after this one, this hits close to my heart.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Schwarzesmarken

Why I Watched It: Even though it’s a prequel/spin-off to the Muv-Luv series (which I haven’t seen), there aren’t many anime set in East Germany, so that piqued my interest. The art style is less cutesy than its predecessor and closer to my tastes so I figured I’d give it a shot. Schwarzesmarken translates into “Black Marks” and is the name of the 666th Squadron the story follows.

What I Thought: I’m not sure what year it takes place (1980-something?), but East Germany still exists and they’re fighting invading aliens with mecha. What makes this more unique compared to other mecha series is its setting, with the protagonists being soldiers in a communist state who aren’t necessarily happy with their country, as seen through the eyes of Second Lieutenant Theodor Eberbach, who appears to have made an attempt to flee the country at some point before being forced into the military. I’m not entirely sure where the series is going since the aliens are pretty brainless and being a prequel they’re likely here to stay, but there’s stuff involving a West German pilot defecting to the East in search of someone, and Theodor’s CO might be a Stasi informant, and nobody wants to mess with the secret police.

Verdict: I might end up watching, I’m not sure yet. I’m a bit put off by the spray-on body suits the female pilots wear, but I like the unusual setting and the fact that Theodor feels threatened by human enemies just as much as the alien ones. I feel like in most mecha anime Theodor’s army would be the bad guy’s side, but instead they’re up against aliens and they’re the dubious good guys.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju

Why I Watched It: I’m not sure there’s a good way to translate this title, but suffice to say it’s a Showa era (1926-1989) period piece steeped in Japanese culture about an ex-convict who wants to become a rakugo performer; rakugo being a centuries old art form where a single storyteller/performer entertains the audience with a verbal performance of a comedic story.

What I Thought: It’s a slower sort of show, but definitely takes newcomers through what rakugo is by including the entirety of a single performance in the opening episode and making the telling of the story reflect upon the character who is telling it. Main character Yotaro is not terribly bright, but is very enthusiastic, wanting to learn rakugo because it was the bright spot during his incarceration. Being an ex-con with no money and no place to go he manages to convince his idol to take him as his first apprentice, even though Yotaro is the last person anyone would expect to become an artist. Trouble follows him around so things never get too easy, but he takes to the art faster and more successfully than I expected he would.

Verdict: I’m not sure. It felt more educational than entertaining. Though I did laugh at some of the rakugo performance, the show needs more than that to hook me and I’m not sure where it’s going to go from here.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Conspicuously missing:

Ajin – Some people are mysteriously discovered to be immortal, but only after being killed, so no one knows how many there actually are, and being immortal is a raw deal as the government is capturing those immortals to find out what makes them tick. This has been licensed by Netflix, which means that it will not be simulcasted. In an era where localization companies like Funimation are trying to get even their dubs out faster to the online audience, Netflix’s half year delays on releasing licenses feels like a backwards way of doing things.

Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

Interview: Jonathan Maberry

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

JONATHAN MABERRY is one of the most versatile and prolific writers in the speculative fiction. His specialty is horror, but he also writes fantasy and science fiction, as well as mystery, thriller, western, and humor. He has 5 wins and many nominations for the Bram Stoker Award, wins/nominations for other genres and encyclopedic nonfiction, and recognition from writer and librarian associations. His first novel was in competition with one of Stephen King’s novels for the Bram Stoker Award. Several of his projects are in development with Hollywood. He has worked with Marvel and other major comic book companies. He has consulted/hosted for Disney, ABC, and The History Channel. He has written several series, most notably the Joe Ledger international thriller sci fi series and the Rot & Ruin young adult horror series. His has edited several anthologies, most notably an X-Files series. He has participated in a multitude of writer conferences and workshops, most notably Write Your Novel in Nine Months, Act Like a Writer, and Revise & Sell. He writes/speaks as an expert on the cannonal background and cultural phenomenon of the horror genre. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, Horror Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers Association, International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrators . He is a contributing editor of the ITW’s The Big Chill newsletter. He is a cofounder of The Liars Club writer network. His novelization of the Wolfman film – starring Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt, and Benicio del Toro – reached #35 on the New York Times bestseller list. Not surprisingly, Publishers Weekly featured him on the cover.

Jonathan Maberry’s full bio. Jonathan Maberry on Amazon. Jonathan Maberry on Good Reads. Jonathan Maberry’s website. Liars Club writer advice page.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHICH OF YOUR NOVELS IS BEING ADAPTED BY HOLLYWOOD?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I’m fortunate to have several of my projects in development for film and television. My Joe Ledger thrillers are being developed by Lone Tree Entertainment and Vintage Picture Company as a possible series of movies, likely beginning with Extinction Machine, the 5th in the series. And my vampire apocalypse series, V-Wars, is headed to TV, with a brilliant script by former Dexter head writer, Tim Schlattmann. Several other properties, including Rot & Ruin, The Pine Deep Trilogy, and others, are being discussed.

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW LONG AND HOW HARD IS THE JOURNEY TO THE SCREEN?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Like most writers I’ve coasted the edges of the Hollywood experience for years. There are some frustrations, of course, but that’s part of the game. For example, back on 2007 I co-created a show for ABC-Disney called On the Slab, which was a horror-sci fi-fantasy news program. Disney paid us to develop it and write a series bible and sample script; and then there was a change of management in the department that purchased it. Suddenly the project was orphaned and therefore dead in the water. Another time producer Michael DeLuca (Blade, Magnolia) optioned the first Joe Ledger novel, Patient Zero, on behalf of Sony, who in turn took it to ABC, who hired Emmy Award-winning TV writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost) to write a pilot. Then after we’d gone a long way toward seeing it launch they decided instead to focus on the reboot of Charlie’s Angels, which flubbed badly. That’s Hollywood. I don’t take this stuff personally, though. And I never lost my optimism.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT ARE THE ROUTES TO TAKE AND NOT TAKE?

JONATHAN MABERRY: It’s important to focus on presenting a positive brand and to turn out quality products. Being a prima donna doesn’t help you get in through the door. Being someone people can and want to work with is a big plus. Patience is also very, very important.

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW MUCH CONTROL AND INVOLVEMENT DO YOU HAVE IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS?

JONATHAN MABERRY: For most Hollywood projects the author has little input. I have a lot of friends who have had books optioned and developed, like Charlaine Harris (True Blood), Isaac Marion (Warm Bodies), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), and others. And although they dig what’s been done with their work –at least for the most part—they are often observing from a distance. That said, I own half of the V-Wars property, sharing ownership with IDW Publishing, so I will probably have a little more input there. And I’ve become friends with the producers who optioned Joe Ledger, and as a result they’ve invited me to participate in creative discussions.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHO DO YOU SEE CAST IN WHICH ROLES?

JONATHAN MABERRY: My dream casting for my characters changes on a daily basis.

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW INVOLVED HAVE YOU BEEN IN DEVELOPING THE CHARACTERS AND PLOTS OF WHICH MARVEL PROJECTS?

JONATHAN MABERRY: With Marvel my creative involvement varies. On projects like Marvel Zombies Return, the world was already created and I was asked to join a writing team along with Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Fred Van Lente (Cowboys and Aliens) and David Wellington (Monster Island). We each had one issue to write and could pitch our own story, but that story had to fit into the overall five-issue arc.

With Black Panther, I was asked by Marvel’s editor-in-chief Axel Alonso, to come in and take over the book from Reggie Hudlin (producer of Django Unchained) who was leaving. I had to finish a few of Reggie’s storylines and then tie them into my own story arc, which I further developed into the DoomWar limited series.

Everything else I did for Marvel was entirely based on original pitches, including Captain America: Hail Hydra, Klaws of the Panther, Punisher: Naked Kills, and my series, Marvel Universe vs The Punisher, vs Wolverine and vs The Avengers.

I moved on from Marvel because I wanted to write horror comics and focus entirely on my original characters.

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW BIG OF A FISH ARE DARK HORSE AND IDW IN HOW BIG OF A POND?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Dark Horse and IDW are blowing up. If Marvel and DC are the top tier, then Dark Horse, IDW, and Image are the next level. They also deal with a lot of licensed products. Dark Horse has Aliens and others. IDW has Transformers, X-Files, GI Joe and many more. And, of course, Image has The Walking Dead.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT TYPE OF RELATIONSHIP DO YOU HAVE WITH THEM?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I had a lot of fun working with Dark Horse, but I only really pitched that one idea to them.

My relationship with IDW is much bigger and covers several product and formats. I did the Rot & Ruin: Warrior Smart graphic novel, which was a one-off; but my deepest involvement is with V-Wars and The X-Files. The V-Wars project began as a series of shared-world prose anthologies. I’d write a large framing story and then invite other writers in to do individual stories. The third volume, V-Wars: Night Terrors, just debuted. I also did a run of comics which have been collected into graphic novels as V-Wars: Crimson Queen and V-Wars: All of Us Monsters. The V-Wars TV series is in development and on Feb 15 we launch a board game, V-Wars: A Game of Blood and Betrayal, with insane rules written by legendary award-winning game designer Rob Daviau.

I did Bad Blood for Dark Horse, with brilliant art by Tyler Crook, and two books so far for IDW –both of which are based on my novels, Rot & Ruin and V-Wars. However these are not straight adaptations of my novels but instead new stories set in those worlds.

CARL SLAUGHTER: X-FILES MADE A COMEBACK WITH A MINISERIES THAT STARTED AIRING IN JANUARY 2016. FOX MADE AN ANNOUNCEMENT IN MARCH 2015. YOU EDITED AN X-FILES ANTHOLOGY THAT CAME OUT IN JULY 2015. DID FOX COMMISSION THAT PROJECT?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I’m editing a series of X-Files anthologies. The first, The X-Files: Trust No One sold out its initial print run in record time. The second, The X-Files: The Truth is Out There, debuts February 16, and The X-Files: Conspiracy Theories is in development. The idea was cooked up by Ted Adams, CEO of IDW Publishing, and he asked me to come aboard as editor. Initially it was planned as a single anthology, but I talked him –and FOX, who holds the license—to let me do at least three. This was something we started working on before Chris Carter announced that he was doing a new series of the show.

CARL SLAUGHTER: JOE LEDGER SEEMS TO BE SHERLOCK HOLMES, JAMES BOND, RAMBO, INDIANA JONES, AND VAN HELSING ALL ROLLED INTO ONE. IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN’T DO, ISN’T CUT OUT TO DO, DESPISES DOING, REFUSES TO DO?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Joe is actually based on several real-life Special Ops guys I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. They are a remarkable breed, and they need to be capable of extraordinary things in order to do what they do. They aren’t like other people. They have high intelligence, good language skills, amazing coordination, and they are deeply trained in a variety of skills. There’s nothing Joe Ledger does that these elite special operators can’t –or don’t—do.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT ARE HIS WEAKNESSES?

JONATHAN MABERRY: If Joe has a weakness, it’s the same thing as his strength: he is not motivated by politics but is instead a humanist. That means he gets hurt a lot, but it also means that he is damned hard to stop when he is doing what he feels is right.

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW IMPORTANT ARE HIS TEAMMATES / PARTNERS AND HIS INTERACTION WITH THEM? OR IS HE PRETTY MUCH THE STAR OF THE SHOW?

JONATHAN MABERRY: The team dynamic is what makes the Ledger series work. Although Joe Ledger is often alone for large sections of each book, his team always matters in getting the job done. That team includes the administrative genius of Mr. Church and Aunt Sallie, the tech skills of Bug and Dr. Hu, and the men and women of Joe’s field teams, notably Top and Bunny –his right and left hands. Without them, Joe would have died a long time ago; and with them he is a far more interesting character to write and, I’m told, to read.

CARL SLAUGHTER: YOUR 8TH JOE LEDGER NOVEL IS COMING OUT IN APRIL 2016. HOW LONG WILL THE JOE LEDGER SERIES CONTINUE?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I have no plans to stop the Ledger series anytime soon. In fact I just sat down today to begin writing the 9th Ledger book, Dogs of War, and we have two cool projects coming up that support the series. The first is The Joe Ledger Companion, which is a nonfiction book that takes readers behind the scenes of Ledger and his world. It’s being written by Mari Adkins and Preston Halcomb, and I’ll be contributing to it as well. And then there’s Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, an anthology of all-original short stories about Ledger being written by wonderful A-list writers including Scott Sigler, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Steve Alten, Weston Ochse, Mira Grant, Jon McGoran, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Joe McKinney, Jeremy Robinson, Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, Dana Fredsti, James A. Moore, James Ray Tuck, Larry Correia and others. That will be out in 2017.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT’S THE EXPLANATION FOR THE VAMPIRE / ZOMBIE WAVE? WHY NOT GHOSTS, OR WEREWOLVES OR MERMAIDS OR UNICORNS OR DRAGONS?

JONATHAN MABERRY: People will always love monsters, but zombies and vampires have a very special appeal to writers and readers. Zombies are a blank canvas; they represent a massive shared catastrophe which impacts the lives of every character in equal measures. The characters have their lives, their hopes and dreams, their protections and resources, all stripped away and must struggle for survival while at the same time trying to discover who they truly are. One introduced, the zombies become immediately less important that their effect on the lives of the human characters, and therefore the true focus on these stories is about people in crisis. That is an endlessly renewable creative canvas.

Vampires, on the other hand, represent a variety of other metaphorical problems: rape, abuse in all its forms, jealousy, fears of sickness, dreams of immortality, forbidden love, and so on. The vampire stories were once straight horror but now they’ve either become romances or they are a kind of super hero tale, much like the myths and legends of gods and demigods. Again, there are a lot of stories you can tell with that model.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS HORROR SUBGENRES?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Horror is a genre of fiction that has dozens and dozens of variations, including Gothic, body horror, suspense, psychological horror, ghost stories, religious horror, existential horror, monster stories, zombies, vampires, folkloric horror, extreme horror, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, science fiction horror, and so on.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHICH ARE THE MOST POPULAR?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Groups like the Horror Writers Association has awarded its coveted Bram Stoker Award to books as diverse as Thomas Harris’ crime thriller Silence of the Lambs to Stephen King’s subtle Lisey’s Story to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, to Joe McKinney’s brutal zombie thriller Flesh Eaters.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHICH ARE YOUR SPECIALTIES?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Most of what I write tends to be hug on the scaffolding of the thriller, which is a model applicable to virtually any genre. I love the race against time to prevent something dreadful from happening. But I’ve also written in a variety of sub-genres in both long and short fiction and often go cross-genre.

Among the categories in which I’ve written we have vampires/American Gothic (Ghost Road Blues and its sequels), ghost stories (the short story “Property Condemned”), paranormal mystery (“Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Greenbrier Ghost”), psychological horror (“Doctor Nine”), serial killer (“Saint John”), horror movie adaptations (The Wolfman), zombie apocalypse (Dead of Night andFall of Night), urban fantasy (“Mystic”), paranormal mystery (“Like Part of the Family”), dark fantasy (“We All Make Sacrifices”), weird western (“Son of the Devil”), historical ghost story (“Red Tears”), epic fantasy (“The Damned One Hundred”), Lovecraftian horror (“Dream a Little Dream of Me”), science fiction horror (Patient Zero andAssassin’s Code), weird science thriller (The Dragon Factory, Code Zero), post-apocalyptic existential horror (“The Wind Through the Fence”), Alt-History Steampunk horror (Ghostwalkers: A Deadlands Novel), post-apocalyptic zombie horror for teens (Rot &Ruin), folkloric horror (“Cooked”), historical horror comedy (“Pegleg and Paddy Save the World”), and so on.

Do I have a favorite? No, not really. I’m most in love with whatever genre or sub-genre I’m writing at the moment.

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU TAKEN HOME THE BRAM STOKER AWARDS? HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU BEEN NOMINATED? HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU NOT BEEN NOMINATED?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I’ve been fortunate to win five Bram Stoker Awards. I won Best First Novel for Ghost Road Blues, then shared a win for nonfiction with David Kramer for a book on the paranormal we wrote called The Cryptopedia; after that I won two back-to-back Stokers for Young Adult novels for books two and three of the Rot & Ruin series (Dust & Decay and Flesh & Bone); and more recently picked up on for Graphic Novel for Bad Blood. As for how many times I’ve been nominated…I’m not really sure. Maybe ten or twelve times.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHERE’S THE STIFFEST COMPETITION?

JONATHAN MABERRY: Every year there is such amazing horror writing being published, and often by close friends. It’s odd –but also fun—to be nominated alongside people you like and whose work you respect. That way, no matter who wins…it’s a party.

My first time out, however, I was up against Stephen King. Ghost Road Blues had been nominated for both Best First Novel and Novel of the Year. I won the Best First but King took Novel of the Year for his wonderful book, Lisey’s Story. If you have to lose…there is zero shame in losing to Stephen King.

CARL SLAUGHTER: YOU’VE BEEN CRANKING OUT 2 OR 3 NOVELS A YEAR FOR THE LAST 6 YEARS. PLUS COMICS, SHORT STORIES, ANTHOLOGIES, NONFICTION BOOKS AND ARTICLES, WORKSHOPS, BLOGS, BROADCASTS AND WEBCASTS, DOCUMENTARIES, PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION LEADERSHIP. WHAT’S YOUR SECRET? DO YOU HAVE A DOZEN CLONES? AN ARMY OF ANDROIDS? A GENE THAT OPTS YOUR BODY OUT OF SLEEP?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I was trained as a journalist and that doesn’t encourage one to be a slowpoke. Some of my professors were very aggressive and had us cranking out a couple of thousand words in the space of a few hours. After college I was a magazine feature writer part time, but even though I was working day jobs (variously –bodyguard, bouncer, jujutsu instructor, college teacher, graphic artist), I wrote over twelve hundred articles and at least three thousand reviews and columns. And I wrote more than a dozen textbooks and nonfiction books on subjects ranging from a history of competitive sparring to the folklore of supernatural predators.

When I switched to fiction a little over ten years ago I brought that same work ethic with me. I like the fast lane. Not everyone does. I have friends who prefer to write a book every couple of years. That’s not for me. I put it in high gear and keep my foot on the gas. And I write my best stuff under tight deadlines.

The last two years I’ve written four to six books per year, plus comics and a slew of short stories. I just signed an agreement last week to add a fourth book to this year’s slate, and there’s a possibility I’ll do a fifth.

Nowadays writing is my full time job. I write, on average, eight hours a day, and usually log about four thousand words. Between novels, comics, short stories and novellas I write about a million and a quarter words for publication per year.

That wasn’t how fast I started, of course. My first novel took years to write and revise. I got faster as I studied my own process and worked to improve my habits and deepen my understanding of the writing craft. It’s fun, though. And writing so many projects means that I’m always exploring new creative areas. I write for adults and teens, and I write in a variety of genre including thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, Steampunk, alt-history, weird science, action, westerns, mysteries and more. I am never bored.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT WORKSHOPS, ADVICE COLUMNS, BLOGS, WEBSITES, AND BOOKS DO YOU RECOMMEND FOR WRITERS?

JONATHAN MABERRY: I always advise new writers to attend writers conferences. The classes are useful and the networking is golden. The only writing book I ever recommend, however, is Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. It’s brilliant and incredibly useful, either for helping you feel your way through the plot or revising a draft.

CARL SLAUGHTER: ANY ADVICE TO ASPIRING SPECULATIVE WRITERS?

JONATHAN MABERRY: There are several important things to know about becoming successful as a writer. Things I wish I’d known earlier in my career.

First –be very good at what you do. Having a natural gift for storytelling is great, but you need to learn the elements of craft. That includes figurative and descriptive language, pace, voice, tense, plot and structure, good dialogue, and many other skills. Good writers are always learning, always improving.

Second –learn the difference between ‘writing’ and ‘publishing’. Writing is an art, it’s a conversation between the writer and the reader. Publishing is a business whose sole concern is to sell copies of art. Publishing looks for those books that are likely to sell well. There is absolutely no obligation for anyone in publishing to buy and publish a book totally on the basis of it being well written. It has to be something they can sell. A smart writer learns how to take their best writing and find the best way to present it to the publishing world, and then to support it via social media once it’s out.

Third –you are more important than what you write. A writer is a ‘brand’. That brand will, ideally, generate many works –books, short stories, etc. Each work should be written with as much passion, skill, love, and intelligence as possible, but when it’s done, the writer moves on to the next project. And the next.

Fourth –finish everything you start. Most writers fail because they don’t finish things. Be different.

Fifth –don’t try to be perfect. First drafts, in particular, are often terrible. Clunky, badly-written, awkward, filled with plot holes and wooden dialogue. Who cares? All a first draft needs to have in order to be perfect is completeness. It is revision that makes it better, and makes it good enough to sell. So, don’t beat up on yourself if your early drafts are bad. Everyone’s early drafts are bad. Everyone.

Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

DP FICTION #13: “One’s Company” by Davian Aw

He finds a forest clearing on a planet of perpetual night in the two hours out of a thousand years that stars spread twinkling across its sky. It’s pure luck that he lands there on his random planet sampling. It’s the most beautiful, peaceful, ethereal place that he has ever seen.

There are no people on this planet. It will never be inhabited. Life evolved to little more than trees (if they are trees, those branching things) that get their food from the soil beneath and what sun that struggles through the clouds. Rocky outcrops ring the clearing in sharp relief against the sky. Beneath the starlight, he forgets about his life and loneliness.

He’s still alone here, but it’s different in the fresh unsullied alien air that fills his lungs as he rests between untrodden grass and unwitnessed skies, different from spending each evening alone in a busy, crowded city, full of strangers he’s too shy to talk to and too scared to try and understand.

Clouds crowd back across the gap, shrouding starlight behind their familiar shield. Darkness falls to rule the clearing. Peter knows it’s time to leave.

He logs the coordinates on his device.

This place would be perfect.

***

Excursion Two

The next evening, he tweaks the saved coordinates to arrive some distance away. His office cubicle fades from view. And there he is, his younger self: gazing spellbound at the stars. There’s no need to bother him. It might risk a paradox thing. But it’s nicer, all the same, having someone else around. He smiles.

***

Excursion Three

He pops up near the tree line. Work-exhaustion pains his face. He sees his two selves in the distance and thinks it might be nice to greet them: just to have someone else to chat to, because people do that after work. But nervousness still stays his feet. Tricky things, paradoxes, and knowing how to talk to people.

He looks around for the fourth. There’s no one else there. Yet.

***

Excursion Four

“Hi,” says Peter shyly to the third when the latter turns to search for him. “Tough day at work?”

His other self blinks, and tries a smile. “Yeah.”

His memory warps and changes. He remembers this exchange from the other end. It feels exceedingly, self-consciously redundant. They stop talking, and rest in the quiet. Each other’s company is enough.

***

Excursions Five to Forty-Seven

But the silence has been broken, and each time he gets more daring. Tentative greetings turn to conversations, uneasy handshakes to awkward hugs. It’s been so long since he’s talked to someone, too long since he’s touched another person. They’re not quite other people, here, but he can still pretend. If they close their eyes, they can all pretend.

They don’t talk about their lives because they’re all of them living the same one. Futures talking to pasts and sharing tales… that makes bad things happen.

But they can talk about this place that they have taken for their own. They map out constellations, invent stories to explain them. They study the alien trees and shrubs and give them cool scientific names. They gather piles of broken rocks and build rough forts upon the grass, then split into teams and play at sieges, fighting off invasions of themselves.

His memory rewrites itself in overused palimpsest till there’s nothing left he knows for sure and all his past becomes a blur. Events back home grow indistinct in the dullness of their repetition. His one surety is this place, his one joy each night’s respite in the comfort of its familiar faces.

He never steps into the same crowd twice.

***

Excursions Forty-Eight to Three Hundred and Thirty-Six

Someone brings fireworks – he can’t remember who, but he recalls setting them alight and shooting colour into the sky in bursts of fire that draw applause from the homogeneous crowd below.

He can barely remember his original visit: the darkness, the quiet, the mystified awe. He recalls stepping instead for the first time into the midst of a roaring party, music blaring and people dancing beneath strings of lights and hanging lanterns: people like him, who welcomed him warmly and made him feel like he belonged, people who understood him, people who liked him, people who knew and bore his name.

He brings a guitar and an amplifier and starts strumming a favourite song. The next day he brings a keyboard; then a drumset, bass guitar, mikes for singing and backup singing.

He doesn’t sing very well. It’s okay. No one in the audience sings any better.

***

Excursion Three Hundred and Thirty-Seven

The live band is belting out upbeat covers of emo band The Cutting Age. The audience loves it: jumping and screaming lyrics, and he smiles at their energy as he stands at the edge of the crowd with a sandwich in his hand.

A drunk bumps into him and slurs out an apology. As he stumbles away, he remembers doing that.

He’s been everyone at the party. He’s been everyone in the crowd. He’s been part of every conversation, part of every quarrel, part of every friendly hug and every drunken brawl. It’s easy to forget that if he doesn’t look at their faces. It lets them seem like any other people. It’s better to think that he’s managed to find an entire crowd of willing friends; better than it being just himself pitifully entertaining himself on an empty planet.

But it’s all a fragile, delicate balance. It’s a miracle they have lasted here this long. His memories are a blur, his pasts a confusion, his body a shifting, changing thing of scars and bites and injuries as his selves change each other’s histories and history changes them.

He thinks it’s enough proof of how this time travel works, and the clearing is now too full of him. The party can never get bigger than this. There’s no more space. The forest is impenetrable. He doesn’t know what lies beyond. His next week here might be the last; perhaps this night might be the last.

He thinks of once more spending each night in the void of his room with that void in his heart, and despair drives his feet to walk him to the spot where he made his first excursions.

He doesn’t waste time thinking when his fourth self materialises. He tackles him, grabs the space-time device, and crunches it firmly beneath his shoe and the open-mouthed horror of his younger face.

The music cuts silent. The multitude winks out. He feels the relief of a thousand memories erased from the worn-out tape of his mind. He vanishes too, with his final act of destruction, and a cold wind sweeps the empty grass.

***

Excursion Four

There are four people in a clearing that has not yet known a crowd.

“Hi,” one says shyly to another when the latter turns to search for him. “Tough day at work?”

The other blinks, and tries a smile. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t know it yet.

But he will never be lonely again.

Author’s Note: Back when I was working in NYC, I attended a free concert in Central Park by the New York Philharmonic. It was crowded, lively and slightly surreal with the field full of shadowed human figures moving around to music beneath the night sky. I had the stray thought – what if all of them were the same person? Whereupon I went home and wrote out the first draft of this all in one go.

Davian Aw’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Stone Telling, LampLight and Star*Line. He also wrote roughly 240,000 words of Back to the Future fan fiction as a teenager and has never been that prolific since. Davian is a double alumni of the Creative Arts Programme for selected young writers in Singapore, where he currently lives with his family and a bunch of small plants.

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens – The Feminist Movie We Need

by Maria Isabelle

Even before The Force Awakens hit the big screen, Star Wars fans were instantly enchanted by the effects, mysterious storyline and intriguing but relatable characters. In particular, Rey has become the heroine of every young girl’s’ dreams and has since resonated with a vast majority of audiences because of her admirable independence and unmatched strength. In a series that has focused for so long on its young male heroes, it’s high time that a fully-formed female character like Rey has come into the limelight.

The Force Awakens takes place thirty years after the defeat of the Empire in Return of the Jedi, and since then, the galaxy has reorganized itself. Luke Skywalker has disappeared and Leia, now the general of the Resistance, leads a splinter group that fights against the new Empire, the First Order. Rey first appears as a nobody, a scavenger on the backwater desert planet of Jakku, who is drawn into the conflict after she rescues the adorable droid, BB-8, who houses vital information about Luke’s whereabouts. Like both Luke and Anakin Skywalker before her, she goes from her humble beginnings in the desert to participating in events that shape the galaxy – and like them, she also discovers that she is strong in the Force.

Rey is a hero for today’s world, vulnerable and strong in equal parts. She is able to scavenge for herself and has developed many survival skills because of this. However, we see that she is utterly alone in the world of Jakku, waiting for someone who may never come back. Despite this, she forms bonds quickly and we see this through BB-8 and former stormtrooper Finn. Later on, we find her in a pseudo-father-daughter relationship with Han, which is both lovely and heartbreaking, considering the unknown origins of her own parents. Rey’s strength comes from her abilities to take care of herself as well as her hope that someone will come back for her.

Her relationships with the male characters of The Force Awakens also show her developed character. Despite Finn’s obvious interest in her, this love interest is not fully formed and instead focuses on using Finn to show Rey’s abilities. When they first meet and are found by the First Order, Finn repeatedly takes Rey’s hand to run, to which Rey responds with “I know how to run without you holding my hand.” Han Solo also recognizes her skills and even offers her a job aboard the Millennium Falcon and a blaster gun on the planet of Takodana because he knows she can take care of herself. Rey also shows her independence in multiple situations where she saves herself: when people try to capture BB-8, she successfully fights them off with her staff and when she is captured by Kylo Ren, we find her performing her own escape plan and Han Solo, Chewbacca and Finn (unnecessarily) trying to save her.

Rey’s skills are not only present in her knowledge of how to survive in the desert, but in how she adapts to the galaxy at large. Her scavenging is directly related to her ability to understand and repair starships, thus winning Han Solo’s respect. Her melee skills with her staff- because as Finn points out, nobody on Jakku seems to use blaster pistols – serve her well when she receives a lightsaber. And her latent skills in the Force may be the most useful of all. It seems obvious that Rey may have received training at some point in the past, and these forgotten abilities come to the forefront once she meets Kylo Ren. The Sith Lord in training attempts to seduce Rey with promises of instruction, reaching into her mind to pull out memories. Rey is able to turn the tables and this moment seems to flip a switch in her. Like Luke before her, all she needed to do was close her eyes and trust in the Force.

Rey is not a damsel in distress like many female characters of the 1970s were, nor is she the hypersexualized heroine so common in the late 1990s. She has more in common with Katniss Everdeen than she does the heroines of the pulp films that inspired Star Wars. She lets audiences see that women can be heroes and fighters in a galaxy far, far away. When fans watch previous films and Star Wars spinoffs on DVD or on local channels, they can see that The Force Awakens continues a proud tradition of following along Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey – only this time, the hero just happens to be a heroine.

Maria is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy.

Japanese Drama Review: Death Note

written by Laurie Tom

death note live action Death Note is the story about Light Yagami, who discovers a notebook (the titular Death Note) that allows him to kill anyone just by writing their name inside it. It originated as a popular manga series that has been translated thus far into an anime, a series of live-action movies, and even a stage musical.

Most recently, it has become a live action TV drama series, and because the story of Death Note is known fairly well by the target audience at this point, the drama made a point to promote that it would feature a new ending.

Though Death Note the live action series is certainly watchable by those who have never experienced the original material, I think those who have either watched the anime or read the manga will get more of a charge out of it, as there are some changes made specifically to sway the expectations of those who think they know what’s coming only to throw them a curveball.

To go along with that, they make some fundamental changes to some of the characters. Light is now an easy-going college student of no notable skill level instead of the genius high schooler he is in the original. He works part-time at a restaurant and is hoping to get a decent job in civil service after graduation. Nothing crazy. Living a contented life is one of his biggest desires.

Unfortunately, he discovers the Death Note dropped by the shinigami (death god), Ryuk, which comes with instructions on how he can use it to kill people. Unlike the original Light, who takes to murder like a duck to water, the drama Light is horrified by the realization that the Death Note is no joke. It really works.

It’s only when his police detective father is taken hostage by a killer that Light intentionally uses the Death Note for the first time, to save his father’s life.

This results in a differently motivated Light than before, and while the story hits many of the same beats as the original, this Light is much more sympathetic because we can see why he chose to use the Death Note to punish the criminals the police could not stop themselves. At the same time, there are moments where making drama Light follow the manga plot doesn’t work as well because he’s a different person. You can see the show strain to justify why this nicer, more compassionate Light would justify murdering people and becoming the supernatural serial killer known as Kira.

As we know, power corrupts, and though Light is a more sympathetic character, he still slides down the slippery slope. This adds an element of tragedy that wasn’t in the original, because we can see how far Light has fallen, and that he had started down this path out of a sincere wish to make a better world.

One of the best changes from the original is the dynamic between Light and his father. Soichiro Yagami is one of the best middle-aged characters in manga. He’s devoted to both his family and his job as a police investigator, and though a supporting character, he does some pretty smart things to save the day. So I was surprised by his drama incarnation, who is much more distant and has a strained relationship with Light to the point where they are no longer close.

But even if they have difficulty talking, it’s clear that drama Soichiro still loves Light, and it makes their relationship that much more tragic as Soichiro is duty-bound to stop Kira while realizing that Kira is probably his son.

Overall, the drama condenses a lot of the manga plot, often running through a volume or two in a single hour long episode, which makes for breathless viewing, but on the other hand, there is no such thing as a filler episode. Something is always happening.

Despite all the stabs at upending the expectations of viewers already familiar with Death Note, the drama always manages to get back to the main plot, without ever completely breaking the backbone set by the manga. It might be kinder to some characters, who survive the story when they did not in the original, but even the ending was not as different as I expected.

The ending might actually be the weakest episode of the run. After the breakneck pace of the previous episodes, the last one hits the brakes with the last two-thirds happening in a single location, with a lot of ranting and talking that could have been done in half the time. While it might have been interesting if the show had ultimately gone in a different direction, the deviations from the original were not strong enough to put up with all the verbal recap of how things came to be. With some edits the final episode probably would have been fine.

I’m not sure that I would recommend Death Note the drama to people who haven’t read the manga or seen the anime since it can be a bit uneven, but for those who have it’s a strong alternate take on the story.

Number of Episodes: 11

Pluses: sympathetic protagonist, Light’s dynamic with his dad, fresh takes on same situations

Minuses: overly drawn out last episode, some plot changes seem arbitrarily done just to yank the chain of experienced viewers, can’t seem to decide how original it wants to be

Death Note is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.

Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published inGalaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, andCrossed Genres.

Anime Review: School-Live!

written by Laurie Tom

School-Live! really needed to be promoted more accurately to find its target audience, because based on the promotional art (bunch of cute school girls) and the title (very similar to Love Live!, which is about young girls becoming pop stars), I never would have guessed that this was about trying to survive several months into the zombie apocalypse!

The creative team behind it was probably trying to keep the reveal a surprise due to how the first episode is similarly set up to hide the premise, but it really doesn’t do the show any favors.

When we first meet Yuki and the School Living Club, it seems like a common slice of life show where slightly goofy/lazy Yuki doesn’t seem to do everything right, but always gives it her best. Though there are a few things that seem a little off about how other people behave around her, and there is a corridor of the school that is oddly barred off with desks stacked one on top of another, the first episode mostly plays everything as Yuki wishes things to be.

Until the veil cracks at the end, and we see the viewpoint of the most skeptical member of the School Living Club, who has come to retrieve Yuki, who is standing in the middle of a shattered classroom talking with students who are no longer there.

Though the zombie outbreak is covered to a certain degree, most of School-Live! is about staying sane in a world where stepping outside is likely to get the girls killed. The four main characters are holed up in their high school, which fortunately has solar power and a rooftop garden. They do need more than that to survive and go on dangerous supply runs when they have to, but mostly they’re able to stay inside and keep their sanity through the group they’ve formed.

The School Living Club gives the girls a sense of purpose instead of mindlessly ticking off the days that go by, and also serves as a way to control the delusional Yuki, who understands that the School Living Club is a special club that lives at school and is not allowed to leave it. In return, Yuki’s insistence on maintaining normal activities such as club trips and competitions, allows for levity in a situation where the other girls would otherwise have lost any reason to smile.

Each of the other three carries a weight with her. Yuuri is the leader, trying to hold the group together. Kurumi is the warrior, who patrols the school daily to make sure no zombies have made their way inside their safe area (and if slaying must be done, she takes care of it with a shovel). Miki is the skeptic, who knows just how bad it is to be alone at a time like this, having survived separately on her own in a shopping mall before being found by the others on a “club trip.”

Because of Yuki’s delusional nature, the show is not as dark as it could be, and there is something absurd about a club excursion that involves driving a teacher’s car out of a parking lot full of zombies, but the series is not without its more serious moments, especially after the halfway point.

Even though it seems like Yuki’s delusions shouldn’t be tolerated, it becomes easier to see that indulging her is actually helpful to the other girls as many of the things she suggests they’re able to twist into activities that benefit life in their sanctuary while simultaneously lifting their spirits. As Miki knows from her time in isolation, surviving is not the same as living.

I am not particularly a fan of the moe art style, where teenage characters are drawn much younger (even the girls’ teacher, who is probably in her 20s, looks like she’s 15). The characters are all the Japanese equivalent of juniors and seniors in high school, but they’re drawn with proportions that are closer to someone who is ten or twelve. This makes the occasional fanservice scene a little squicky.

On the other hand, the cutesy art style does help establish the incongruity of living a normal school life while there are zombies outside in the courtyard. It’s just not to my personal tastes.

School-Live! is a definite mish-mash of elements that are not usually combined. Whether it’s fake camping trips (while there are zombies outside) or a swimming episode (while there are zombies outside), it wears them very well, which makes the dark lead-in to the finale genuinely nerve-wracking as we see the destruction of what happiness the girls have been able to find.

Though the zombies themselves are not particularly different from the traditional movie zombie, the series itself is a refreshingly novel take on the sub-genre, where optimism and even happiness can still find a place. I heartily recommend it.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: interesting take on how to keep sane and even happy when surrounded by zombies, capable all female cast, build up to the finale is extremely well done

Minuses: the occasional fan service feels really wrong given the moe art style, sometimes Yuki gets a little too out of control and I’m surprised the others don’t invent a way to tamp down on it, even though one of the solutions at the end is plausible it still feels too easy

School-Live! is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Sentai Filmworks has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published inGalaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, andCrossed Genres.