Featured Essays Star Trek: Discovery

Why Star Trek: Discovery Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek

After a rocky start, Discovery has become a sterling example of Trek’s ability to ask big, challenging questions while still being a whole lot of fun..

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on April 10, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter saying that you can love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds without putting down its sister show, Discovery. Which is true! I love both shows a whole lot. I also am obsessed with Lower Decks, which I rewatch pretty obsessively. I have a lot of love for Star Trek: Picard as well. And I’ve grown to appreciate Star Trek: Prodigy greatly since it moved to Netflix. We are truly blessed to have so much amazing Star Trek right now, and there’s no need to pick one show over the others.

And yet, I still feel the need to come out and say it: Star Trek: Discovery is my favorite Trek of the 21st century so far. 

The final season of Discovery launched last week, and I’ve been remembering why I adore this show so much. These characters have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been loving the exploration of Starfleet in the 32nd century, centuries after the other Trek shows. Discovery has become a thoughtful, expansive show that asks big, challenging questions, while also being a whole lot of fun. 

Minor spoilers for the most recent episodes of Discovery below… 

Discovery got off to a rocky start, to say the least. Annalee Newitz and I discussed the first season in the very first episode of our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and there was a lot to talk about. Season one leaned into being a war story, something that Deep Space Nine had already done brilliantly, and then veered into the Mirror Universe, which is one of those settings that gets less interesting the more you see of it. The first season featured a lot of upheaval behind the scenes, with co-creator Bryan Fuller leaving early on and the replacement showrunners being let go. Season two served as a backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds, while also unspooling a somewhat tangled storyline about black ops and A.I. from the future.

Much like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Discovery really hit its stride in its third season. That’s when the crew of the Discovery traveled forward into a far more distant future than Star Trek had ever explored before. The show gained a new lease on life and the Federation felt wide open once again, with so many new places and ideas to explore. 

Season three of Discovery tells a nuanced, brutal story about rebuilding the Federation after a huge setback—and questions how far our heroes are willing to go restore what has been lost. Season four is a rich story of first contact, in which aliens from outside the galaxy have unknowingly unleashed an anomaly that threatens civilized worlds, and we have to learn to communicate with them before it’s too late. Season five, without going into too much detail, is following up one of the most tantalizing stories from TNG, about the Progenitors, those ancient humanoids who seeded the galaxy with humanoid life long ago. 

(Side note: this trope of ancient humanoids who spread their DNA around the galaxy is sorta adjacent to all those “Ancient Aliens” memes. It seems to emerge from Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, and it inspired the movie Prometheus as well. A huge part of my young-adult novel Victories Greater than Death is my attempt to deconstruct and subvert this trope, by having my ancient superscientists turn out to be basically eugenicists who wanted to breed humanoids to be part of a bizarre weapon. I originally wanted to have everyone refer to my ancient beings as the First Humanoids, but the She-Ra cartoon introduced some ancient creatures called the First Ones. So I decided to change them to the Shapers, which was honestly a little bit less catchy.)

Anyway, at this point, I should probably lay out some criteria. What makes for a good Star Trek show, in my view? 

There are a few elements that seem really important. I love Star Trek when it explores humanism, using huge cosmic stories to show the resilience and ingenuity of human beings, and to explore what it means to be human. Exploration feels like a key part of Star Trek‘s DNA as well: not just traveling to places where no human has gone, but also finding vastly different forms of life and learning to understand creatures who are nearly incomprehensible at first glance. Finally, I like Star Trek when it explores the relationships among the crew, and lets us see how they help each other to grow and reach their full potential, something that Gene L. Coon was keen to explore on the original series and which became a key element in TNG. 

Resilience and ingenuity have been at the core of Discovery, especially since the third season. The crew are forced to grapple with a radically different future, one in which the Federation has suffered some huge setbacks, and they use their wits and pure inventiveness to help the Federation rebuild and regain its ability to travel at warp speeds. The fight against the oppressive Emerald Chain, which enslaves people and exploits whole worlds, includes many temptations to compromise the Federation’s values, and it’s gripping to watch our heroes struggle to stay true to their beliefs.As mentioned above, Discovery’s storylines have also involved the struggle to understand creatures whose way of thinking and communicating is vastly different from our own, which forms the climax of season four. 

At this point, Discovery has a robust cast of science geeks. Engineering is actually getting a bit crowded, what with Stamets, Adira, and sometimes the wonderfully deadpan Jet Reno all standing around being geniuses—and that’s before you add Tilly, who is capable of being an absolute science mastermind in her own right. If you missed all those scenes in TNG where Data, Geordi and the other crew debate scientific problems and technical solutions, then Discovery has been serving up huge chunks of catnip for quite some time now. 

A lot has been written about just how gay Discovery really is, from Stamets and Culber’s marriage to the T4T relationship of Gray and Adira to Tilly’s lesbian fungus fling. Plus, again, there’s Jet Reno. But the thing I really love about Discovery, going into its final season, is just how much beautiful romance there is across the board in this show—even besides the stuff I just mentioned. Saru has been having a whirlwind courtship with T’Rina, the president of Ni’Var, which is the reunified Vulcan and Romulan homeworld. And Captain Michael Burnham has a stormy on-again-off-again love affair going with Book, a smuggler she met when she first arrived in the 32nd century—I’m really rooting for those two to work out their problems, because they have ridiculous chemistry. I’m not used to seeing Star Trek put romance front and center for so many of its major characters, and I love it.

Finally, the thing I love about Discovery is how its characters have been allowed to change and grow, something the first two episodes of season five take great pains to remind us of. Out of the characters who’ve been there since the first season, none of them is the same person they used to be, and we’ve gotten to see them evolve over time. In particular, there’s a huge emphasis on redemption arcs, which is a subject close to my heart. Michael Burnham starts Discovery as a disgraced mutineer, and is now a highly respected captain with a twinkle in her eye. But a lot of these characters have been allowed to make terrible mistakes and learn from them, becoming better people as a result.

When people call Star Trek an optimistic show, I don’t think they’re just talking about fancy technology. I believe Star Trek’s true power is its optimism about people: our ability to keep being better than we were, and to choose kindness and understanding over brute force. More than any other Star Trek show right now, Discovery exemplifies this belief in our potential as a species, which is something that I personally really need right now.[end-mark]

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Why <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations book culture

Prestige Creates a Permission Structure for Experimentation

Thoughts on literary snobbery, creative experimentation, and how our preconceptions shape our reading experience…

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on March 27, 2024

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I absolutely loved the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace when I read it back in the day. I devoured it, forcing myself to read all of those bloody footnotes to pick up every weird bread crumb, and reveling in how silly and yet cohesive the whole thing felt. It was one of the books that fueled my determination to try and write fiction myself, along with Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring.

But I often think that if you stripped the cover off of a copy of Infinite Jest and slapped on a less-artsy cover that claimed this book was the work of a middle-aged lady in Nebraska, nobody would have liked it. They wouldn’t even have given it a chance. Book nerds would have taken one look at the time-jumping structure, the rampant non-sequiturs, the plethora of strange conceits, the unconventional narration—and said that this lady needed to learn how to write.

This is something I think about all the time when I’m writing my own stuff. My books come out from a science fiction publisher and I didn’t get an MFA or fellowship from a fancy school, so I assume that I need to “hook” the reader on page one, and reassure them in various small ways that I know what I’m doing here, and I’m not going to waste their time (too much). I can get experimental and confounding, sure enough, but page one—and probably also page ten—need to be engaging and exude a kind of quiet competence.

I swear I’m not writing this to whine about literary snobbery, which has benefited me at various points in my career and failed to benefit me at others.

I’m actually super interested in the ways that our preconceptions shape our reading experience, and the permission this gives some artists to create works that ask more of their readers. Speaking for myself, I know that when I pick up a book that is packaged as “literary,” I might read a bit more slowly and carefully because of the assumption that every word has been chosen with care by a Craftsperson. And I might also give the book slightly more of a chance to win me over, instead of expecting it to suck me in by page three. I’m also pretty convinced that certain kinds of stylistic and narrative experiments are a bit more feasible if you’re either a recognized literary writer, or an underground experimental writer being published by a small press.

This is part of what I was getting at in my writing advice book Never Say You Can’t Survive, when I said that you always have an ideal reader in your head—that ideal reader may in fact be a different person, depending on the genre and other designations of the book you are writing. Very few books, in fact, are written for “everybody.”

And here’s a good place to reiterate what I’ve said many times before: What we call “literary fiction” is actually several different types of writing that we lump together, encompassing breezy beach reads as well as dense, challenging books that deliberately avoid giving you any personal information about their protagonist(s). Being categorized as “literary” doesn’t require authors to push the limits of the novel, it merely grants them a certain amount of permission to do so, in my experience. Literary publishers include Knopf and FSG, but also tiny university presses that reach a few hundred people.

Also, before anyone else says it, the walls between genre and literary books are getting wobblier all the time—recent books like The Archive Undying and The Saint of Bright Doors are as experimental and full of literary signifiers as anything coming out of Tin House or Graywolf, and I’ve seen no shortage of straight-up, well done science fiction and fantasy come out from “literary” imprints.

And yet, my subjective sense is that the prestige gap remains: If Infinite Jest came out today, it would still be given more careful mainstream attention when packaged as a high-brow literary book than in most other circumstances.

You see the prestige gap most strongly in television, where shows that at least dabble in messing with narrative and feature less straightforward characters are actually called “Prestige TV.” (See the career of Jonathan Nolan: Person of Interest is brilliantly complex and has many eloquent things to say about surveillance and technology, but it received a tiny fraction of the attention that Westworld garnered because it was a case-of-the-week procedural and didn’t feature Anthony Hopkins, Thandiwe Newton, and Jeffrey Wright.)

Sometimes, a lucky creator gets catapulted from “obscure weirdo” to “beloved craftsperson” seemingly overnight. You see it in the case of so-called “Outsider” artists like Henry Darger, whose obscure work becomes celebrated in mainstream circles. Something of the sort happened for a while to Philip K. Dick, who gained a literary cachet in the 1990s that had eluded him during his lifetime.

For those of us who are operating outside of the innermost circle of literary prestige, making weird storytelling choices can sometimes involve a smidgen of social engineering. You have to trick people into paying attention and then bamboozle them with some bonkosity.

Case in point: my novel All the Birds in the Sky has a pretty weird structure and breaks a lot of what were considered ironclad genre-fiction rules at the time I wrote it. (It’s a bit YA and a bit adult, it has an occasionally omniscient narrator, there’s some strong sexual content, characters discuss the Categorical Imperative for a long time, etc.) Indeed, almost every literary agent who looked at All the Birds rejected it for various reasons. At the same time, I sweated endlessly over the first few pages of the book, making sure you were drawn into Patricia’s situation and empathized with her instantly. I actually love doing this, because it feels like a fun trick to lure the reader in and then start whacking them over the head once they’re fully inside the story. Ironically, the moment when I was convinced most readers would throw the book away in disgust—the shopping-mall scene where Patricia and Laurence sit under the escalator and speculate about people’s shoes, only to be correct about the assassin Theodolphus—turned out to be many people’s favorite moment in the book. So you really never can tell.

Similarly, N.K. Jemisin’s breakout hit The Fifth Season contains some really startling stylistic choices, including second-person narration and a brilliantly time-jumping POV structure. (Trying to avoid spoilers here, for the handful of people who haven’t yet read it.) But I swear I read an essay that Jemisin wrote back in 2015-ish in which she talked about trying to “hook” the reader right away with a big splashy event, the destruction of the city of Yumenes. (I can’t find that essay now, in part because Google ain’t Google anymore.) And on her blog, there’s an essay about “Tricking readers into acceptance” of her main character, Essun.

Of course, it’s not just literary prestige that plays a role in shaping the expectations you approach a book with. You inevitably bring everything you know (or think you know) about the author when you crack a book open. The same book might read very differently if you believe the author is a Fox News commentator, versus an anarchist labor organizer. And of course, we expect marginalized creators to serve up stories about their own marginalizations, in a way that sometimes can feel a little bit tokenizing or exploitative. Especially in this day and age, when authors are increasingly encouraged to market themselves as personalities online, as I wrote about recently, your perceptions of an author’s persona will inevitably bleed into how you receive their work. Oftentimes, this works out great—e.g., if an author cultivates a snarky funny persona online and also writes funny snarky books.

This brings me back to the thing I wrote a while ago about J.K. Rowling and the question of separating the author from their work. I think there may have been a time when authors were intensely private people and you came to their work untainted by any preconceptions about the human who produced it. (John Updike certainly moaned a lot when he felt like this was going away.) Those times are absolutely over, and they’re not coming back, and authors and their work will always be intertwined in ways that can be delightful or toxic.

I guess in part, I would like to separate the concept of “prestige” from the notion that a piece of art might require you to do a little bit more work as you consume it, but that work will pay off because you’ll be rewarded with a rich story. (And of course, the concept of “doing work” is complicated too—a hard science fiction novel with long, math-heavy discussions of orbital mechanics also requires “work” from the reader, but it’s not exactly the same kind of “work” as a very literary book that makes you comb through footnotes to figure out what the heck actually happened here.)

We associate the idea of reading something experimental or challenging with a certain level of education, or other things that easily become class signifiers. But anyone who’s paid any attention to the world will know that class and education level do not correspond that neatly to reading taste. And people contain multitudes! A single person can enjoy all kinds of books, and the books you read don’t define who you are. If anything, I would say that the notion that a highbrow book conveys some sort of aura of privilege or prestige to its reader is bad for anyone who writes the kinds of books that could feasibly be labeled as “highbrow.” There is a great, distinct pleasure in reading an expectation-defying book like Infinite Jest (or The Saint of Bright Doors, or or or…), and that pleasure exists independent of any pride that you might feel in being seen as a fancy bitch because you read a fancy book. To reduce the value of a book to status marker is to downplay or deny that pleasure, because it implies that reading is not its own reward.

I apologize for the rambly nature of the above thoughts—this stuff is hard to talk about, and murky as hell, and I feel like I am raising questions way more than offering answers here. Hi ho. Please share your own thoughts in the comments…

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Prestige Creates a Permission Structure for Experimentation appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Extraordinary

The Funniest SFF TV Show You’re (Probably) Not Watching

Great comedies are easy to miss these days, but “Extraordinary” may be the funniest, most delightful show since “The Good Place”

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on March 4, 2024

Credit: Hulu

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Credit: Hulu

One of the frustrating things about loving television is the extent to which a small number of shows seem to suck up all of the attention—and if you love TV comedies, it’s even worse. As many have noted, a lot of TV’s most acclaimed comedy series barely even try to be funny of late.

You’d never know that we’re living in a golden age of TV comedy right now. We’re utterly blessed with shows like We Are Lady Parts, Poker Face, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Abbott Elementary, the recently-ended Letterkenny and Reservation Dogs, and the gone-too-soon Minx, Mrs. Davis, and Rutherford Falls. That list barely scratches the surface of all the good stuff coming out right now, and a lot of those shows have barely gotten any of the fanfare they deserve.

There’s one TV comedy that I love wholeheartedly and wish everybody was watching and talking about right now—and unlike most of the shows listed above, it’s still coming out. That show is called Extraordinary, and I am obsessed with it—I’ve already seen every episode at least twice. Extraordinary is one of those shows that manages to be sidesplittingly funny, and also make you care deeply about its characters. It’s up there with The Good Place in terms of great characters and fascinating worldbuilding—words I do not type lightly.

Season two of Extraordinary arrives on Hulu on Wednesday, March 6, so there’s still time to marathon the first season (it’s only eight episodes) and get caught up. Here is the trailer for season one:

Warning: minor spoilers for the first season of Extraordinary ahead…

Extraordinary takes place in a world where almost everybody has a superpower. Some people have awesome powers, like flight or super strength, but many people have powers that are simply weird or annoying. The main character, Jen, is one of the few people who hasn’t manifested a superpower, and this turns her into a second-class citizen, stuck in a dead-end job.

Jen is on a quest to unlock whatever her power turns out to be, helped by her flatmates Carrie and Kash. Carrie has the power to channel any dead person, and she mostly uses this in her job as a paralegal to bring back deceased clients so they can settle questions. Kash, meanwhile, has the ability to rewind time about fifteen minutes, and wants to be a superhero despite being utterly rubbish at it. (Because of a thing called “superhero fatigue,” I must emphasize that this is not a show about superheroes, apart from that one extremely silly subplot.)

There’s a fourth main character, whose nature I can’t spoil, since it’s a huge storyline in season one. Suffice to say that he’s my favorite character in the show, and you can glimpse him in the above trailer.

So…. I compared extraordinary to The Good Place earlier—overweening hubris!—and I stand by it. Jen, The main character, is very reminiscent of Eleanor Shellstrop: selfish, shallow, an underachiever who wants awesome things without having to work for them. Jen is on a similar path to Eleanor, I think: slowly growing a little bit more of a conscience and an awareness of other people, while also learning to live with herself.

Most shows about superpowers are inevitably about good versus evil, or how to use your powers wisely and responsibly. Extraordinary sidesteps these issues and mostly treats superpowers as an annoyance, or as a cheat code to allow people to be a little bit more self-centered and get away with stuff. The characters who are most eager to be defined by their unique abilities tend to be the least interesting otherwise, as if having a flashy superpower provides a substitute for a real personality.

If anything, this show uses the concept of having a special trait to comment on conformity: everybody is expected to have a superpower, no matter how pointless or cruddy, and society overvalues something that mostly has no real social value. Jen doesn’t want powers because she can do great things with them, she just doesn’t want to be left out and looked down upon.

And the powers, at times, are off-the-chain funny—one thing I love about Extraordinary is the way it keeps finding ridiculous new uses for superpowers. The first season finale has one of the cleverest time-loopy storylines I’ve ever seen.

When I first started watching Extraordinary, I was a tad worried that it was going to be full of cringe humor—the British really love to put self-centered people into humiliating situations. (Case in point: Fawlty Towers, a lot of Tom Sharpe’s oeuvre.) And yes, there are some very cringey scenes here and there, especially when Jen gives in to her worst impulses and winds up in a mess as a result. But this is a show that genuinely seems to like its characters, and keeps finding new sides to them rather than playing the same side over and over again. Even just over the course of one season, the four leads have evolved a lot, and Jen in particular seems to grow up a bit. I quickly found myself super invested in Jen and Carrie, in particular—and Kash is utterly lovable despite being, at times, a bit of a wanker.

Extraordinary is funny enough to make up for the total lack of funniness among most of the award-winning, celebrated comedy shows on recent TV. It’s also a constantly inventive piece of speculative fiction, that bursts with ideas. I cannot wait to see where season two takes its themes of manky empowerment and cruddy chosen family. Please give this show a chance—like I said, if you start right now, you’ll be caught up in time for season two![end-mark]

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post The Funniest SFF TV Show You’re (Probably) Not Watching appeared first on Reactor.

Here are ten live-action space-based TV shows that deserve way more love and appreciation:

Space Cases

Peter David and Bill Mumy created this YA TV show about kids exploring space, including a young Jewel Staite. It aired for two seasons on Nickelodeon, and it was cute as hell, not to mention quite subversive at times. George Takei plays an alien conqueror named Warlord Shank, and when I say Takei chews all the scenery… You’ll see tooth marks all over the sets. This show was sort of a precursor of Star Trek: Prodigy, and I remember it being fun as all heck.

Quark

Quark was a short-lived spoof of Star Trek and Star Wars that aired in 1977, featuring a host of campy characters. The thing is, it had so many cool ideas in the mix: Long before Firefly (or even Alien), this is the story of the crew of a humble blue-collar starship—a garbage scow, in this case—getting involved in vital, dangerous shenanigans. There’s a gender-fluid character, a pair of clones who both insist they’re the original (just like the Maulers in Invincible!) and a plant in humanoid form. In many ways, Quark was ahead of its time.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Yes, I know… this is a list of shows that don’t get enough love, and Hitchhiker’s is one of the most famous science fiction properties of all time. And yet, the original TV series of Hitchhiker’s really does not get the love it deserves, thanks in part to Doctor Who-level VFX. And I love the 1981-1982 TV version with all my heart: it’s got more or less the same cast as the original radio drama, and uses the format of television to good effect. The guide’s narration is actually quite well animated, and the fake-looking prosthetics they fit Zaphod Beeblebrox with actually look perfect. The story of Hitchhiker’s has been told in pretty much every format by now, but I think this TV version covers the first two books extremely well. And it’s zippy fun space action!

Thunderbirds

Gerry Anderson made a whole bunch of puppet-based science fiction TV shows in addition to Space: 1999, and this is quite possibly the best. The story of a family of space heroes who go out and get their Flash Gordon on, Thunderbirds is both campy and thrilling. They live on their own private island and each have their own space jet! There have been a few attempts to bring Thunderbirds back, most notably a 2004 movie directed by Jonathan Frakes, but scandalously this show is all but forgotten nowadays.

Space: Above and Beyond

A dark, somewhat more realistic space-war show from two of the X-Files writers, Space: Above and Beyond features humanity at war with some ruthless aliens who’ve destroyed some of our colonies. This show plays with some interesting notions—for example, humanity lacks the ability to travel faster than light, but our alien foes have limited FTL. I recently rewatched the pilot episode, and it’s definitely aged badly—there’s a whole subplot about discrimination against artificial soldiers created via in-vitro fertilization, or “in vitroes,” that feels like a ham-fisted attempt at an allegory on real-life prejudice. But this show remains groundbreaking and this type of (somewhat) more realistic space war still hasn’t been depicted on television that much.

Lexx

Okay, back to campy spoofs. This Canadian show with a rock-bottom budget is just a silly delight. A group of misfits commandeer a living spaceship that wants to eat planets, and one of them is kind of a space vampire assassin? The main character is basically a space custodian, and everyone seems endlessly horny. There’s a disembodied head that’s madly in love. This show sometimes veers into actual pathos and weighty storytelling—especially about the imperfectly brainwashed sex slave and the undead assassin—before swerving back into silly camp. We need more low-budget Canadian space opera! (See below for more low-budget Canadian space opera.)

Space Island One

Okay, seriously. This is one of the greatest science fiction TV shows of all time, and when I get a moment I’m going to do a whole newsletter about why it’s the greatest. (I expect that newsletter to be read by dozens of people.) Space Island One takes place on a corporate-funded space station that’s doing pure science—with commercial goals. The crew includes a veteran astronaut struggling with bone density loss after too much space travel, and the show often grapples with real ethical issues. Like, in one episode, they are given the last remaining sample of smallpox to study, and some of the scientists on board want to destroy it. The space science is handled much more carefully than is typical on television, and the implications of allowing science to be controlled by corporations are endlessly debated. This show has some clunky episodes—what show from the 1990s doesn’t?—but it remains a high-water mark for science fiction television.

Star Cops

Chris Boucher wrote for Doctor Who and then became the showrunner (sort of) of Blake’s 7. Then he finally won the ability to create his own show about a space-based police force. Don’t let the silly title fool you! This show starts off great, with dark, conflicted characters, some of whom are very ethically compromised. The storylines are more grown-up than most SF television of the era would allow, and Boucher’s flair for wickedly sarcastic dialogue is on full display. Over the course of its one and only season, the show kind of falls apart—in the DVD special features, Boucher talks honestly about how he wasn’t ready to run his own show, and he lost control of it. But the early episodes are incredible.

Vagrant Queen

Now for two recent shows, both of them Canadian (and aired on Syfy in the U.S.) Vagrant Queen, based on a graphic novel by Magdalene Visaggio and Jason Smith, is the story of a space queen whose mother is apparently killed in a coup. She goes on the run and becomes kind of a bandit, teaming up with two other misfits and roaming the galaxy. But there are loyalists who want to return the Queen to the throne. This show was utterly delightful, with a really beautiful mixture of humor and feels. Tim Rozon from Wynonna Earp plays a very different character than Doc Holliday, with hilarious results. Unapologetically queer and subversive, Vagrant Queen is one of my favorite TV shows of the past five years, and it deserved way better than it got.

Killjoys

And finally… this show is just everything. Dutch is a bounty hunter, along with her two friends, but she’s also a former assassin who was under the thumb of a creepy dude. There’s a whole walled-off city of undesirables, who are constantly being oppressed and attacked. Killjoys takes the Firefly template (small scrappy crew of underdogs against powerful entities with secret conspiracies) and gets much weirder and more irreverent with it. During the brief era when Killjoys and then Vagrant Queen were on Syfy, you could almost pretend we were back in the 1990s golden age of fun, devil-may-care space television.

I really hope one of the gosh darn streaming services out there decides to make some space TV shows that (A) aren’t Star Trek or Star Wars, and (B) don’t feature characters who scowl at each other.

Note: I know I’m gonna get hate mail for not including shows like Farscape, Babylon 5, Blake’s 7, Andromeda, yadda yadda. But consider: I would also get hate mail if I did include those shows, because I’d be implying they don’t have large robust fanbases. Which, y’know, they do. I feel comfortable saying the shows listed above don’t have the fanbases they deserve.

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Ten Space TV Shows That Don’t Get Enough Love appeared first on Reactor.

For those who missed it, Vaughn said a while ago that he would love to direct a Star Wars movie, but only if he could retell the story of the Skywalker family. To Vaughn’s mind, the story of Luke and his dad is the story of Star Wars, and it deserves to be rebooted, the same way Batman and Spider-Man already have been.

He’s right, of course.

I know there’s a lot of reflexive skepticism around the idea of reboots, and I have contributed to that in the past myself. Some reboots do feel like cynical cash grabs, or attempts to rehash for the umpteenth time a story that has already been told perfectly well. That said, nobody would want Batman to be stuck forever in the Tim Burton-Joel Schumacher continuity, with every Batman film required to call back to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance as Mr. Freeze. I’m actually quite pleased that we got the Nolan trilogy and The Batman.

How do you know if a reboot is necessary? There are probably a bunch of factors. Like, how long has it been since this story was last told? Are there aspects of the earlier telling that now feel dated or even problematic? Did the original version brush over key parts of the story that a newer telling could explore in greater depth? Most importantly, perhaps, is there a potential that a new refreshed continuity can prove fertile and give rise to an exciting new set of stories?

All of these factors weigh heavily in favor of rebooting Star Wars—with the exception of the length of time since the last installment. We have definitely not been starved for Star Wars content of late, especially on television. That said, there hasn’t been a Star Wars film since 2019.

Still, on balance, the saga of Anakin and Luke is crying out for a fresh retelling. It’s nearly fifty years since Mark Hamill first appeared as Luke Skywalker, and filmmaking has, to put it mildly, changed a lot since then. The prequels and the original trilogy are full of important events which George Lucas brushed over or simply ignored. Some of this was because Lucas just didn’t care about it—but a lot of the backstory became hopelessly tangled after the retcon in The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader is Luke’s father.

I would actually love to see a series of movies that took these characters’ emotional journeys more seriously. From Anakin’s harsh childhood to his introduction to the Jedi to his romance with Padmé and his fall from grace, there’s so much rich material that the prequels were unable to explore in much depth. Anakin Skywalker ought to be an Aristotelian (or Shakespearean?) tragic figure: a noble man who is brought down by a tragic flaw. (You certainly glimpse some of this in the Clone Wars animated series.)

And then you get the original trilogy, where a lot of those inconsistencies pop up. Why doesn’t Darth Vader ever notice a kid named Luke Skywalker living with his relatives on his old family farm? Why doesn’t he notice that Senator Organa has a daughter who seems uncommonly strong in the Force?

I’ve written about this before, but I would love a version of the Original Trilogy that focuses more heavily on the central question about Luke Skywalker: Will he go bad, the same way his father did? This is a theme that comes up from time to time in those three films, but it deserves a much deeper examination.

Most of all though, I would really welcome a new film series that took the female characters of the saga, especially Padmé and Leia, more seriously. Why does Padmé like Anakin anyway? Isn’t it kinda weird that she knew him as a little kid first? In general, she deserves a stronger character arc (the kind of stuff the Clone Wars animated show dipped into), and of course a much better death. And meanwhile, to my mind, Leia is as much a protagonist of the original trilogy as Luke—but her feelings are often swept under the rug, including when her family and friends are murdered by the Death Star. The Empire Strikes Back drops some tantalizing hints that Leia has the potential to be as powerful a Jedi as Luke, but nothing much ever comes of it, apart from a few cool moments in The Last Jedi. Even as a child, I remember being disappointed at Leia’s lack of mastery of the Force in Return of the Jedi.

Also, a rebooted original trilogy could do so much more with Lando Calrissian! 

And what if even a hint of the political sophistication we see in Andor could find its way into a retelling of the prequels and original trilogy? Exploring how a democratic society can fall prey to fascism—and the ways that people continue to resist fascism until it is finally banished—is one of the coolest ideas George Lucas ever had. But I believe it could be explored with more depth, both of ideology and of feeling, in a rebooted version.

The original Star Wars was not just a product of its own time—it was a crucible of nostalgia. George Lucas was looking back on the movie serials of his youth, as well as World War II movies, Westerns, and Samurai films, and borrowing liberally from them. I love the original Star Wars, but many of its shortcomings come simply from its strong connection to 1940s and 1950s culture, and all of the assumptions that went with it.

As always, it’s worth pointing out that any Star Wars reboot would not erase the original, which would still be there for anyone who wanted to watch it.

Bear in mind that the original Star Wars has already been retold in other media, with some versions making an effort to explore the characters in greater depth. (There have been novelizations and comics adaptations, including a comic based on Lucas’ original unfilmed script.) Most notably, National Public Radio adapted the Original Trilogy for radio in the early ’80s, with A New Hope turning into thirteen half-hour episodes. (George Lucas sold the radio rights to Star Wars to his local NPR affiliate for $1.) These radio plays (which you can pretty easily find on YouTube) take a lot more time to explain the characters and their motivations, and provide some hint as to the places a new version might go. It takes a full hour to get to the start of A New Hope!

So when journalists ask Matthew Vaughn to clarify his comments about wanting to reboot Star Wars, I hope he doesn’t shy away from what he said. I hope he doubles down, in fact. Rebooting Star Wars is not only a good idea, it is absolutely going to happen at some point. Disney has invested too much in this property to ignore such an obvious opportunity.

That said, I do disagree with one aspect of Vaughn’s comments: I don’t think the Skywalker family is the only interesting part of Star Wars. I still wish that ancient, distant galaxy would spend more time exploring the stories of people who’ve never even heard of the Skywalkers—or even the Jedi. Star Wars would not be nearly as popular as they are today if people weren’t in love with this expansive, immersive setting—and I would love to see Star Wars take more risks and explore more far-flung corners of the galaxy. I’m ridiculously stoked to watch The Acolyte, the brand new Star Wars show from Leslye Headland, which apparently takes place long before the prequels.

But if it’s a choice between recasting Luke Skywalker and seeing Mark Hamill’s face digitally de-aged or recreated using CG, I know which one I’d prefer. As long as Star Wars continues to tell stories that weave in and around the nine films of the Skywalker Saga, why not just retell the story itself?

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Rebooting <i>Star Wars</i> Is a Great Idea, Actually appeared first on Reactor.

As someone who was so successful at being a man that I actually graduated, I want to help!

So it’s a really good thing that science fiction and fantasy offer us so many excellent examples of guys who are secure in their masculinity and ready to do the right thing, even when it’s tough.

Superman (DC Comics)

The best word I can think of to describe Superman is “nurturing.” There are so many images online of Supes hugging someone or offering comfort to someone in pain. The most powerful superhero is also the most tender and compassionate, to the point where his greatest superpower is the ability to take care of people in pain. My favorite onscreen Superman is now Tyler Hoechlin’s gentle, self-effacing dad from Superman & Lois, who wears his heart on his sleeve and is willing to open up about his feelings. Superman doesn’t just have super-hearing—he has super-listening.

Ballister Boldheart (Nimona)

Ballister starts out as an underdog—the first knight chosen from among the common folk—and then he loses everything after being framed for a terrible crime. You’d forgive him for turning bitter and closed off—but when he meets the shapeshifting Nimona, he’s still willing to see the good in her and to become her partner in crime. He keeps doing the right thing, even when he’s in pain, and forgives his boyfriend Ambrosius for some truly hurtful behavior (albeit in the line of duty). Sir Ballister is a mensch.

The Middleman (The Middleman)

At first blush, the titular hero of the criminally underrated superhero show appears to be just an uptight caricature of an Eisenhower-era square-jawed straight arrow. He drinks milk instead of anything with caffeine or alcohol, and delivers ridiculous lines with a deadpan delivery. But over the course of one brilliant season, the Middleman reveals layers of character, along with a keen sense of honor. One of my favorite episodes puts the Middleman in contrast with his predecessor, a toxic tool who gives really bad advice to the Middleman’s friend Wendy.

King T’Challa (Black Panther)

Just as Superman is absurdly powerful, T’Challa has it all: he’s not only one of the greatest superheroes in the Marvel Universe, he’s also king of one of the most advanced countries, Wakanda. He’s also suffered grievous loss, including the death of his father, King T’Chaka. But as played unforgettably by Chadwick Boseman, T’Challa is a wise leader, one who’s able to laugh at himself but also willing to listen to his council and do the right thing. Even when it costs him a lot, he upholds his code of honor. (And I highly recommend Christopher Priest’s formative run on Black Panther for more of T’Challa being a great ruler and a good man, though he’s willing to fight dirty when circumstances warrant.)

Captain Pike (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds)

Star Trek is full of men who uphold lofty principles while holding their heads high. But Christopher Pike is pretty much the platonic ideal of a good dad. He’s strong and resolute, but also generous and fair. He’s surrounded by people who are good at their jobs, and he doesn’t second-guess  them or try to undermine them in any way—instead, he lifts them up and gives them more confidence. Confronted with a scary vision of his own future, he works through it by talking it through with the people he trusts. And he still manages to be a relaxed, reassuring presence. Plus he’s always cooking delicious food. Pike is exhibit A for being secure in your own masculinity.

Steven Universe (Steven Universe)

For most of the episodes of Steven Universe, Steven is a bundle of cheerfulness and friendliness, always willing to see the best in everyone—even if they’re trying to kill him. He finds a way to save the people he loves, sometimes against terrible odds, and he even helps the genocidal, imperialist diamonds to be better people. He’s happy to have a shield while letting his friend Connie wield the sword. But most of all, in the sequel show Steven Universe Future, he does the hard work of confronting his trauma, even if he struggles with admitting it at first.

Cheese (Reservation Dogs)

Reservation Dogs isn’t classified as a genre show, but it does feature a lot of magical realist elements. And Cheese is an incredible character, a turbo-nerd artist who usually gets the best lines of dialogue. In particular, though, I’m blown away by “Frankfurter Sandwich,” an episode in the final season where Cheese goes on a male-bonding trip with some older men and winds up leading them gently to confront their buried traumas. It’s one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever seen.

Uncle Iroh (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

A former military leader, Uncle Iroh has settled into drinking tea and goofing off, and serves a gentle mentor to his hotheaded nephew Prince Zuko. He’s a huge part of the reason why Zuko becomes a better person over the course of ATLA. To be sure, Iroh did some terrible things when he was younger, but now he’s gotten over himself and just wants to hang out and make really good tea. (Note: I came up with Iroh thanks to this Reddit thread.)

Din Djarin (The Mandalorian)

Okay, sure: the Mandalorian works as a bounty hunter, and sometimes his job is a dirty one. But the thing I admire about Din Djarin is the fact that he has a code of honor that he sticks to—except that he’s willing to break it to save his adopted son, Grogu. Specifically, he takes off his helmet when there’s no other way to rescue Grogu, and he pays the price for it. The only reason that he adopts Grogu in the first place is because he decides there are lines he won’t cross, and selling a child to bad people is one of them. And he’s a really good dad! Plus when he gets the Darksaber, he doesn’t cling to it, but rather finds a way to give it to its rightful owner, Bo Katan.

Sunny (Into the Badlands)

In a post-apocalyptic world, five hundred years from now, Sunny is the right-hand man to the Baron Quinn, one of the warlords who dominate the Badlands. Sunny is constantly thrown into situations where he has divided loyalties, or where he has to choose between following orders and doing the right thing, and he usually finds a way to do the right thing. (Even though he’s done some pretty terrible things in the past.) When he takes M.K., an orphan with a mysterious power, under his wing, he does everything he can to teach and protect his new charge.

Henry Deacon (Eureka)

In a “town full of geniuses,” Henry Deacon might just be the smartest of them all—but when this underrated show begins, he’s working as a mechanic because he has ethical objections to the work that Global Dynamics is doing. Henry isn’t just the guy who steps in and fixes things when all the out-of-control science goes off the rails, he’s also the town’s moral center. (And eventually, he becomes its mayor.) Emmy-winning actor Joe Morton, who plays Henry, also plays a resourceful, kind alien refugee in the movie The Brother From Another Planet.

Frodo and Samwise (The Lord of the Rings)

In a world of warriors, wizards, and supernatural badasses, Frodo is just a humble regular dude, who takes on a burden that would crush almost anybody and carries it (almost) to the finish line, battling temptation the entire way. And Samwise is the steadfast friend without whom Frodo couldn’t possibly have made it.

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult trilogy Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She co-created Escapade, a trans superhero, for Marvel Comics, and featured her in New Mutants Vol. 4 and the miniseries New Mutants: Lethal Legion. She reviews science fiction and fantasy books for The Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

The post 12 Male Role Models From Science Fiction and Fantasy appeared first on Reactor.

As someone who thinks about Doctor Who all the time (it’s true!) I’ve been musing about spin-offs I’d like to see. Here’s a bunch. (Warning: Spoilers for old Doctor Who stories ahead…)

U.N.I.T.

There have been lots of reports that this is the most likely new spin-off, including a Deadline report from last March that cited official BBC sources. And I’m so on board. Jemma Redgrave is great as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and the groundwork has already been laid for former companions like Tegan or Ace to work as field agents. The concept sells itself: a paramilitary science organization deals with threats to Earth when the Doctor is off doing stuff elsewhere.

Note: I’m not including a Torchwood revival on this list, because it sounds like a U.N.I.T. spinoff is a done deal, and Torchwood and U.N.I.T. would cover a lot of the same territory—and Torchwood could easily appear on a U.N.I.T. show as a rival organization.

The Eighth Doctor

This is one that’s been bandied about—basically, since Paul McGann only got to play the Doctor in one TV movie and one minisode, why not give him a show of his own? After all, he’s been incredible in all the Big Finish audios. I have to admit, I don’t quite see this one, because having two actors playing the Doctor on screen at the same time could be a mite confusing for casual viewers. And if any past Doctor could get their own show, I’d vote for the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin). But this is one that people keep talking about, so I thought I’d mention it here.

The Paternoster Gang

Apparently this one has been a possibility at various times. For those who missed it, past showrunner Steven Moffat introduced a lady Silurian (Madame Vastra) and her human assistant/lover Jenny, living in Victorian England. They were eventually joined by Strax, an oddly peace-loving Sontaran warrior, and made several appearances during the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi eras, as well as some Big Finish audios. A lesbian dinosaur lady solving mysteries with her friends in Victorian England honestly just feels like a no-brainer. Why doesn’t this exist already?

Clara and Lady Me: The Immortals

Another hold-over from the Moffat era. The Doctor’s longtime companion Clara became immortal, teamed up with another immortal named Lady Me, and stole a TARDIS. And then… they were never seen again. I would give a few teeth (someone else’s, natch) to see what happened to these two unkillable ladies who used to be human. How much trouble can they get up to? (How much you got?) The main question is whether the quite-busy Jenna Coleman would come back to play Clara again.

(Side note: Borusa’s scheme in “The Five Doctors” seems increasingly silly, considering how easy it was for these two characters, along with Captain Jack Harkness, to become immortal. Five out of ten, Borusa!)

Porridge the Emperor

Neil Gaiman’s second Doctor Who story introduced a genuinely fascinating character: a galactic emperor who decided to quit and go work at a circus, Hedgewick’s World of Wonders, under the name Porridge. I stan a reluctant ruler! And watching this guy try to defend all the civilized worlds against alien armadas, when he’d really rather be sleeping in a barn and playing chess, would be super fun. Mostly, though, after falling in love with the TV show Willow and being supremely bummed that there’s no second season, I want more of Warwick Davis as a tired, burned-out warrior who’s still doing his best.

Clyde and Rani

I miss The Sarah Jane Adventures. So, so much. I’m still mourning the incredible Elisabeth Sladen, who meant so much to me as a child, too. My favorite characters in the show, apart from Sarah Jane herself, were the wise-cracking Clyde and the resourceful Rani. And the recent Tales of the Tardis episode with Clyde and Jo Grant made it clear that Clyde is in love with Rani. So now I want a TV show about Clyde and Rani as a couple who try to carry on Sarah Jane’s work while also trying to figure out who they are to each other. Also, Rani could meet the latest incarnation of the Master, and sparks would fly! (Rani is played by Anjli Mohindra, whose romantic partner is current Master actor Sacha Dhawan.)

The Masters

Speaking of the Master… Big Finish has already shown how fun it is to have different Masters team up/fight each other, plus there was that John Simm/Michelle Gomez crossover in Peter Capaldi’s penultimate story. A TV series, or at least a miniseries, would be so fun! Basically, take the Simm/Gomez dynamic, and throw Sacha Dhawan into the mix, and you’ve got wonderful chaos. I would watch each episode five times.

Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer!

Saturday’s Doctor Who episode was a loose retelling of the comic strip “The Star Beast” from Doctor Who Monthly. So on that subject, there’s another Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic that I’d like to see adapted for the screen: Abslom Daak. Basically, Abslom Daak is a criminal who gets a choice between execution and being sent to kill Daleks. (Guess which he chooses.) He just goes around cutting up Daleks with a big chainsaw, and occasionally tangles with Draconians and other aliens. He eventually gathers a crew of rascals who become a kind of chosen family, including an Ice Warrior. It is SO FUN. (Though I would leave out the girlfriend in the refrigerator, please.)

Class

Besides Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures, there was one other Doctor Who spinoff: this lovely show about high-school students who have to clean up some messes the Doctor left behind. One of the students and one of the teachers are both refugees from the same genocide, and it gets intense for various reasons. (Mostly because the Twelfth Doctor does not clean up after himself very well.) I really loved this show, and I’m still not over the fact that it only got one season. It ended on one hell of a cliffhanger, plus I need to see what happened to these characters. Okay, so they wouldn’t be teenagers anymore, but we could get a sequel with some new characters in the mix. Call it Class 2.0.

Martha and Mickey, Defenders of the Earth

And finally… this could just be part of a U.N.I.T. show, but I’d really love to see Martha Jones and Mickey Smith teaming up to save the Earth. They’re both really fun characters, and we never got to see enough of their relationship. And I would watch Freema Agyeman do literally anything. She could boil eggs for an hour and I’d be into it.

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult trilogy Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She co-created Escapade, a trans superhero, for Marvel Comics, and featured her in New Mutants Vol. 4 and the miniseries New Mutants: Lethal Legion. She reviews science fiction and fantasy books for The Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

The post Doctor Who Spinoffs I’d Love To See appeared first on Reactor.

First, Superman and Lois is ending with its upcoming fourth season. This bums me out, because I love that show. Tyler Hoechlin is the best live-action Superman since Christopher Reeve, and this show zeroes in on exactly who Superman really is: a nurturing father figure, and an actual family man. I’m a little nervous about the final season, because this show’s excellent supporting cast has been downgraded from regulars to “possibly making appearances,” purely due to budgetary constraints. Overall, I’m sad to see this wonderful show disappear.

Meanwhile, Marvel will put a new banner called “Marvel Spotlight” on its upcoming TV show Echo. This label signifies that Echo has only loose connections to the increasingly byzantine continuity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and you don’t need to have watched a thousand hours of live-action Marvel content to understand what’s going on. I’m not entirely clear as to what this really means: is Echo canon in the MCU, or not? I guess we’ll find out.

The thing that unites these two pieces of news is the issue of whether TV shows should be tied into sprawling multimedia universes.

Superman and Lois was twice removed from wider DC continuity. First, it started as part of the Arrowverse, which held itself apart from the DC movies at the time, including Zack Snyder’s DCEU. (Which is why both Tyler Hoechlin and Henry Cavill could be playing Supes.) Then, by its second season, Superman and Lois was also making clear that it did not take place in the Arrowverse after all, which freed it to ignore everything that the Supergirl TV show had established, including an entire city of Kryptonians. This move also freed S&L to reinvent Lex Luthor somewhat drastically. The Echo news, on the other hand, seems to indicate a similar desire to make a TV show that is not quite so beholden to a massive interconnected saga.

I feel like studios keep learning the same lesson over and over again: shared universes are great for movies, under the right circumstances—but they tend to drag TV shows down a bit, over time. And a TV show that exists in the same universe as movies will always be secondary at best to the bigger budget, higher-stakes films. At worst, TV shows that tie in with movies will tend to become glorified bonus material for fans of the film franchise.

The classic example, of course, is Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. During its first season, MAOS worked strenuously to associate itself with the larger MCU continuity, to the point where storylines were unable to advance until the movie Captain America: Civil War had come out. As soon as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D was cut loose from Marvel continuity, it became the best superhero to show on TV at the time, and one of the best superhero shows of all time. Agent Carter, on the other hand, had no choice but to contradict the Marvel short of the same name, because it was telling a bigger and more nuanced story about Peggy Carter’s rise to super-spy superstardom.

The Arrowverse was utterly brilliant, and I miss it every day. There is literally nothing on the air like Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, Black Lightning, or Supergirl, and we are all poorer as a result. I loved (most of) the occasional crossovers between the different Arrowverse shows, but mostly what I adored was the vibe that these shows had: melodramatic, unabashedly whimsical, full of ludicrous plot twists. We’ll never have shows like these again, because they were so much a product of The CW as it was before it was sold off and remade into the home of FBoy Island.

And yet, I understand perfectly why Superman and Lois had to leave the Arrowverse behind. Batwoman and Supergirl were never going to clash all that much, because they took place in very different worlds: Batwoman didn’t need to feature much Kryptonian stuff, and Supergirl wasn’t about to mess around on Batman’s turf. Superman and Lois occupied exactly the same slice of DC Comics as Supergirl, so everything Supergirl established about Krypton and related topics affected this loose spin-off. You could see how this was going to become a straitjacket narratively, plus a lot of people who watch Superman and Lois have probably never seen Supergirl and shouldn’t need to have a deep knowledge of Kara Danvers’ adventures to appreciate Clark and Lois’.

TV shows are different from movies—even though some TV shows have tried in recent years to be a single extra-long movie carved up into episodic segments. Even a very serialized TV show will burn through plot after plot after plot, just to keep things interesting. A phrase I heard a lot during my stint in a couple of writers rooms was, “TV eats story for breakfast,” and it’s really true. You might think you have enough twists and turns and situations to fill out a whole season of TV, but you often burn through them faster than you thought you might. Now imagine trying to feed that ravenous beast while avoiding any storylines that might be too similar to a recent or upcoming movie in the same universe. (I honestly can’t.)

If a TV show feels as though everything is just building toward the big battle in the season finale, that’s probably not a fun TV show to watch—but that’s a perfectly good format for a movie.

For me, the pleasure of a TV show is getting to spend more time with the characters, and seeing how they change over time and how their relationships evolve. Plunging the characters into different extreme situations, one after the other, is a way to stress-test their characters and force them to grow and learn about themselves. Where a movie might give a character one fairly legible arc, a TV show might take them to all kinds of places, letting them play the hero, the villain, the fool, and the lover all in a row.

(Side note: I admire Doctor Who’s commitment to completely revamping its canon, including the Doctor’s origins, based on whatever will make an interesting story at the time. I’m not being sarcastic here—I genuinely think this is one of the show’s strengths. Case in point: Peter Capaldi’s era established that the real reason the Doctor left Gallifrey is because of a prophecy about an immortal “Hybrid” that the Time Lords were freaked out about. I don’t expect this ever to be mentioned again on TV, though I guess you never know.)

So I guess what I’m saying is that TV shows and movies have different uses for plot devices and different uses for story structures, and when you try to force them to share the same toybox, it inevitably gets messy.

Probably a huge part of the problem is just that the needs of movies will always come first: they have a much longer lead time and have to hit a single release date, and you can’t change a movie’s plot to fit something cool that the writers of a TV show set in the same universe came up with after an especially spicy lunch. A movie might have a $250 million budget and the fate of in-person moviegoing riding on its success, so making a movie work is always going to be more important.

But as someone who loves superheroes on TV more than anything, I really hope we’re finally moving away from the idea of TV shows as supplemental content to fill the gaps between big tentpole films.

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult trilogy Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She co-created Escapade, a trans superhero, for Marvel Comics, and featured her in New Mutants Vol. 4 and the miniseries New Mutants: Lethal Legion. She reviews science fiction and fantasy books for The Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

The post The Lesson That Superhero TV Shows Keep Learning appeared first on Reactor.

The Jedi knights and the Vulcans had been an essential part of these iconic universes from the very beginning, and twentieth-century viewers would have come away with a mostly positive impression of them. That changed drastically in the late 1990s, when both Trek and Wars started portraying their respective bands of detached, disciplined seekers of truth as uptight jerks. It was a jarring transformation, and I’m still wondering what exactly happened.

Star Trek had featured the lovable Mr. Spock, and we mostly saw Vulcan culture through his eyes, as a bewildering-but-noble exercise in pursuing pure logic through a variety of rituals (and occasionally, hand-to-hand combat with big pointy shovels.) True, we occasionally heard rumblings that Spock had been judged harshly for being too human and for wanting to join Starfleet, but Spock’s dad, Sarek, usually turned out to have a heart of gold. Voyager gave us Tuvok, a full Vulcan who was still noble, self-abnegating, and frequently wise.

Turning to Star Wars—now, I know what you’re going to say: Yes, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a congenital liar. But I would argue Obi-Wan’s habit of bending the truth plays into a long tradition of unreliable mentors, who hide key facts from their protégés for reasons. And Obi-Wan does a wonderful job of making the Jedi Knights sound awesome—heroic, epic, refined. He’s generally a good mentor who encourages Luke to believe in himself, and who sacrifices himself for others. And Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back is a prankster monk in hiding, a delightful source of wisdom wrapped in playfulness. Back in the twentieth century, everyone wanted to be a Jedi Knight.

I’d argue that Vulcans and Jedi occupy a pretty similar space in both Star Trek and Star Wars. They are the wise counselors, who advise the hero(es) on how to navigate frustrating situations. They are the other—but a friendly other, something to which we can all aspire. And they both borrow heavily from Eastern traditions, including Zen Buddhism and Daoism. They come out of a time when Alan Watts and other European people were repackaging, reinventing, and commodifying Asian beliefs for white people. Above all, both groups wear cool robes and spout cryptic wisdom.

And then? Everything changed.

The Vulcans first start morphing into jerks with that baseball episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which a group of Vulcans challenge Sisko and his crew to a not-so-friendly game. But it’s really with Star Trek: Enterprise that the Vulcans begin to seem like judgmental assholes, who try to hold humanity back and harbor severe doubts that we belong out there in the galaxy. Captain Archer regularly butts heads with the Vulcan command, though he grows to have a decent rapport with his one Vulcan officer, T’Pol. The J.J. Abrams movies take this idea further, showing Spock being bullied and mistreated as a child on Vulcan—something the Animated Series had hinted at, but hadn’t delved into. In Abrams’s Star Trek, it’s pretty much taken for granted that the Vulcans have sticks up their butts. Star Trek: Discovery takes this even further, introducing the idea that Vulcan has a faction of logic extremists, who are willing to resort to violence in the service of pure logic. (This doesn’t feel very logical to me, but the needs of the plot outweigh, yadda yadda.) Finally, on Star Trek: Lower Decks, we see how T’Lyn is bullied by her crewmates on a Vulcan ship for displaying curiosity and taking initiative, in ways that actually appear quite logical, and which contribute to saving a lot of lives.

And then there are the Star Wars prequels, which show us a functioning Jedi order for the first time—and it’s terrible. Where are the noble sages that Obi-Wan and Yoda had led us to expect in the original trilogy? Not only that, but Jedi teachings seem a lot worse than what we saw in A New Hope.

Obi-Wan to Luke: Trust your feelings!

Obi-Wan to Anakin: Under no circumstances should you ever trust your feelings.

The plot of the prequels also requires the Jedi to be hopelessly naive and ridiculously hawkish, not to mention utterly lacking in humility. The Jedi come off even worse in the animated Clone Wars series, where they rush to judgment after Ahsoka is framed for bombing a Jedi Temple. When the Jedi aren’t being reckless warmongers, they behave like mindless bureaucrats.

So what happened? I have some half-baked theories.

For starters, we can’t ignore the increasing cynicism of pop culture in the late twentieth century. In comics, creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller made huge waves, mostly by turning the simplistic good-versus-evil fantasies of superhero comics into something more morally gray and disturbing. You see this across all of pop culture—geeks who grew up loving colorful stories set in worlds of Manichean ethics got older, and they wanted those worlds to reflect their adult disillusionment, instead of letting them appeal to the next generation of young fans. The 1990s saw the rise of grimdark fantasy, for example.

But I also think there’s just a lot more cynicism going into the late 20th century. Polls showed a decreasing level of trust in institutions among Americans. One of the most influential political films of the late 1990s was Wag the Dog, in which a U.S. president starts a war to distract from a sex scandal. (Also, early readers of this essay pointed out that there was an increasing distrust of experts around this time, along with a general suspicion of rationality and restraint. Going with your gut was cool; pausing to reflect was not.)

But also, I think we have to go back to the thing I mentioned earlier: the popularity of heavily sanitized and commodified versions of Asian spiritual and religious traditions in the West, which probably peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. The late twentieth century saw increasing paranoia about Asia, first directed at Japan and then at China.

Then there’s also just the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. Mostly benevolent, aloof icons are only really palatable in small doses. The more we saw of the Vulcans and the Jedi, the likelier we were to start noticing all of their negative qualities. The Time Lords on Doctor Who were never as lovable as either the Vulcans or the Jedi, but they went through a similar process of demystification, going from powerful and mysterious gods to venal, petty creeps in the space of just seven years.

To be honest, I don’t really have a single compelling explanation for the jerkification of both Jedi and Vulcans about 25 years ago. But I do think it’s kind of sad: We lost two aspirational symbols around the same time.

The thing that unites the Vulcans and the Jedi is their extreme capacity for negative emotions like hatred, and their determination not to succumb. Vulcans, as every Star Trek fan knows, have stronger and more extreme emotions than humans, but they learned to control those emotions through severe mental discipline and a devotion to reason. The Jedi, meanwhile, seem constantly tempted to fall to the Dark Side of the Force, which happens when passion and in particular rage overtake you. The Jedi only achieve benevolence thanks to training and constant self-awareness. These are two rare examples in pop culture of people choosing mindfulness over mindless rage.

There’s a stock scene in 21^st-century pop culture: a hero who has been pushed too far defeats a sneering bad guy and winds up crouching over their defeated opponent, beating them across the face and shoulders over and over again with mind-numbing savagery. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this sequence in the past twenty years. Generally, we’re supposed to understand that the hero has snapped, and this is not a good thing—but it’s understandable, and cathartic, and maybe beating your enemies to a pulp is sometimes the only way. I can’t help fearing this is what we get when we stop believing in Space Buddhists.

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult trilogy Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She co-created Escapade, a trans superhero, for Marvel Comics, and featured her in New Mutants Vol. 4 and the miniseries New Mutants: Lethal Legion. She reviews science fiction and fantasy books for The Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

The post Jedi Knights and Vulcans Both Suck Now — What Happened? appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the ninth chapter, “How to Tell a Thrilling Story Without Breaking Your Own Heart.” You can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Section II
What’s A Story, and How Do You Find One?

Chapter 5
How to Tell a Thrilling Story Without Breaking Your Own Heart

“Things get worse.”

That’s the closest there is to a formula for generating excitement in a story. It’s also a pretty good description of the world we’ve all been living in for the past few years.

Once you’ve got a plot that you’re feeling good about, with plot devices and some interesting turning points and all that good stuff, most writing advice will tell you to keep turning up the heat on your protagonist(s). Some shocking events, or some major setbacks, need to make the characters miserable. And yeah, it’s important to have a sense of “rising action” so that your story can reach some kind of peak before the conflict is resolved—but when you’re writing during a time when every solid object is melting (which is what this series is about, after all), then you might need to be a little more careful.

Somewhere in the middle, you might get to a point where you’re like, “Okay, at this point something really bad has to happen to the main character, to move the story forward.” That’s definitely not true—there are plenty of other ways to add urgency or momentum. Life can become more challenging for these figments of your imagination without you having to traumatize yourself (or your eventual reader) in the process.

I’m pretty sure this is one reason why so many of us have been having so much trouble with spinning our usual bullshit lately. Not only is it hard to escape from bad news, but everything bad that happens in fiction reminds us of the real world. Everyone is ridiculously traumatized—including you—so a lot of stuff is liable to cut close to home. Of course, writing scary stuff could be cathartic, the same way that eating spicy food cools you off during hot weather. But if you find it too upsetting to write atrocities, then…don’t.

Especially in a first draft, it’s pretty normal to feel like you’re pulling your punches, at the best of times. I often get to the middle of a draft and realize that things are too easy for the characters, or certain incidents could stand to be more hair-raising. It’s all good: in a first draft everything is still up for grabs, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time doubling down on a sequence that I might end up cutting. You can always go back in revisions and ramp up the body-count or intensity of a particular event—or add a whole new horrible event, if you decide that this part of the story needs an extra scare.

So if you find yourself in a rut, or writing is making you too sad or upset, then pull back and think about the characters, and what choices they have at this point in the story. Because you can get just as good a sense of rising action and increased stakes by having your characters make some questionable decisions, or try to do something that crashes and burns. Thinking about your characters’ options, and why they might do something to make matters worse, can be downright therapeutic. And paradoxically, even though this might be less scary to write, it’s a better gut-punch in the end.

You can put your characters through adversity without having to remind yourself of the high-pressure shitstorm we’re all living through, if you just look for more and better sources of misfortune.

Meanwhile, when you do write about horrific events, it’s important to think about trauma—both the causes and the consequences of it. Instead of just inflicting misery to add to the tension in the story, this is an opportunity to look at the reasons why abusive systems exist, and also the lasting ways that they affect people.

Raising the stakes without undercutting your characters

Pain and cruelty are just like any other story element: they’re tools. You use them to get the effect you want, and if they’re not helping then cast them aside, without a second thought.

In a few drafts of my novel The City in the Middle of the Night, Bianca visits the bandit city of Argelo and parties way too hard, until she passes out from booze, drugs, and sleep-deprivation—and then someone tries to rape her. Sophie rescues Bianca while this man is still taking her clothes off, and knocks him out cold. But Bianca soon realizes that this unconscious man is a leader of one of the city’s ruling families, and as soon as he wakes up, Sophie and Bianca will be put to death for hitting him in the head (however justified that might have been.) So the two women have no choice but to make sure this dude never wakes up again, and then they have to find a way to dispose of the body—by dragging him into the night.

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This sequence raised the stakes and created a greater sense of menace, but I started to have 3 AM arguments with myself about using an attempted rape as a plot device. I didn’t want to trivialize rape, and I definitely didn’t want to include sexual assault if I wasn’t going to be able to deal thoughtfully with the aftermath. But just as important, I didn’t want to create the impression that the bad choices Bianca makes later in the story are a result of sexual assault, rather than her own personal shortcomings.

I struggled with this for a long time—longer than I should have, in retrospect. As soon as the assault was gone from the story, I could see clearly that the City in the Middle was better without it.

As traumas go, sexual assault is massively overused, and it’s too often used lazily, to give characters a reason for going off the rails. Its use as a plot device can re-traumatize survivors who are reading, throwing it into a story without paying attention to the ways it affects someone’s life afterward is also a toxic blunder. Fiction often presents sexual assault according to a single received narrative, in which it’s hyper-violent and only happens to cis women—though in real life, it happens in a million different ways, and to all sorts of people.

But I’m not just bringing up the example of Bianca because it’s about me narrowly avoiding a shitty trope. Bianca became more interesting to me, and her arc was clearer, when she was allowed to make mistakes without being pushed into them by outside forces.

Even when horrible things come down out of the sky and ruin a character’s life out of nowhere, we need to see them coming from a long way off. Even if the characters themselves ignore the signs of a growing crisis, we need to be aware of them before the nightmare arrives.

In general, before I unleash hell on a character, I ask myself: What am I hoping to get out of this? How is this going to advance the story, or this character’s arc? Is there a better way to get there, that can come out of the character’s own motivations?

When something good happens to a character, we all demand a high level of plausibility and believability. Happy events must be “earned.” Meanwhile, we require much less reason, or explanation, when the world goes pear-shaped. Because when bad things happen, that’s “realism.”

If we don’t feel it, it didn’t happen

Remember how I said that suspension of disbelief is just as important for the writer as for the reader? That goes double when you’re writing about unthinkable ordeals.

When something happens, we need to feel it as well as see it, and we need to believe in the consequences. In particular, we need to see how it affects the characters—since the whole point is to move the characters and their story forward, right?

My least favorite thing is when a character goes through something unspeakable, and seems totally fine afterward. This reduces my ability to believe in both the character and the event. (And sure, sometimes people repress their trauma, but there are ways to show that’s what’s happening.)

Plus, I’ve found over and over again that when I write about atrocities and then I don’t devote enough time and energy to showing how these things stay with people afterwards, this sometimes means that I didn’t need those atrocities in the first place. Though sometimes, it just means that I need to dig deeper and really capture the emotional and psychological aftershocks of a terrible experience.

When something truly unendurable happens, you have to find a way to integrate it into your overall story, as painful as that sounds. You have to do the work of constructing what was happening before, and how it unfolded, and putting the event in some kind of context. And then you have to do the work of understanding that you’re safe now, which is an ongoing process.

Different people deal with trauma in different ways, and it’s important not to present a one-size-fits-all healing process. In The City in the Middle of the Night, I was pretty careful to show Sophie, Mouth, and other characters having very different responses to the things they had gone through. I read Trauma and Recovery by Judith L. Herman, and a psychologist friend also recommended The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which I found an invaluable resource for understanding how we carry trauma in our bodies as well as our minds. I tried to pay attention to the small physiological cues that show that someone is re-feeling a terrible event.

Traumatized people tend to be more hyper-vigilant, and sometimes engage in more risk-taking behavior. (I learned a lot about this from talking to Sarah Gailey, while working on City.) A character could feel depressed and unable to concentrate, or could throw themselves into work and push everything else to the side. How the character reacts to shitty experiences says something about who they are, and who they’re going to become.

And during a time of extreme viciousness in the real world, we need more than ever to understand the systems that turn people into predators. The institutions that enable and encourage widespread brutality. If you’re going to show us the worst things that can happen to people, then we need to see the reasons why they happen. We need fiction that interrogates the layers of privilege and dehumanization that make some people fair game for abuse.

But again, self-care is good writing practice. And you’re under no obligation to make yourself sick writing about horrors while living through a horror movie.

At some point, we all started to think of violence and misery as the point of storytelling, rather than as a means to an end. Many writers (myself very much included) gloated endlessly about how much we love to “torture” our characters. We all talked about Game of Thrones as if the Red Wedding was what made it great—rather than our love for the characters. Comics creators spent decades trying to steer long-running titles towards a “grim ‘n’ gritty” aesthetic, while fantasy had to be “grimdark.” Prestige TV has pushed things to be weirder and more psychologically complex, and the failure mode has sometimes been gratuitous darkness. And so on.

We started to treat ugliness as a key signifier of quality, rather than just one totally valid creative choice among many.

Final thought: I increasingly find it helpful to think in terms of “options become constrained,” rather than “things get worse.” It’s not so much that the situation deteriorates—it’s more like, doors are slamming shut, and the protagonists have fewer and fewer courses of action open to them. The rising sense of desperation is the most important thing, and there are a million different ways to get there that don’t risk making you more upset during an upsetting time.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novel. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her short fiction has won Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus awards. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Tell a Thrilling Story Without Breaking Your Own Heart appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the eighth chapter, “A Good Plot Is Made Out of Two Things.” You can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Section II
What’s A Story, and How Do You Find One?

Chapter 4
A Good Plot Is Made Out of Two Things

Every plot can be boiled down to two basic elements: plot devices, and turning points. This is just as true if the plot is “buying a hat,” or “saving the world.”

Like every other aspect of writing, plots tend to get pretty mystified, because when they actually work, they seem bigger and more magical. But plots are just mechanisms, made up of levers and cranks and pulleys, which give the characters a reason to move through the story. Plots are interesting if they’re clever, or if they help the characters grow and change (like we talked about last week), or if they set up interesting situations.

But when a plot really clicks, the plot devices take on a whole other meaning and life of their own. It’s like that stuffed animal that you got on a trip to the seaside arcade with your family: it’s just a lump of stuffing and fake fur, with a crude cartoon face. But the longer it sits on your bedside table, the more it feels like an extension of the people you love, and the more emotions you put onto it.

So what are these two elements?

A plot device is a thing, or an idea, or a contrivance, that creates conflict and forces the characters to take action. The characters have to achieve some goal, or they want to prevent something from happening, or they want to escape from a bad situation. A lot of plots boil down to, “I want this sandwich, but someone else doesn’t want me to have this sandwich.”

Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “McGuffin,” meaning an object that everybody is searching for—like the Maltese Falcon. Creators like Quentin Tarantino and J.J. Abrams have taken this concept to its ultimate extreme, building complex plots around McGuffins that we never learn much about. There’s a mysterious briefcase, or a Sith dagger, and they’re important mostly because they give the characters a reason to act, rather than because of anything intrinsically interesting.

But a plot device can also be something like “we’re locked up in a space prison that’s about to self-destruct, and the last escape pod launches in an hour,” or “two bitter enemies must work together to solve a mystery.” Plot devices frequently shade over into being tropes, something we’ll talk about later.

And a turning point is just what it sounds like: a moment where everything changes, and the plot veers off on another trajectory. You can only follow one thread for so long before you need to switch things up. It can be useful to diagram your favorite movie or book and spot these inflection points—often, they come when a secret is revealed, a quest comes to an unfortunate end, a character dies, heroes suffer an unfortunate setback, or shit otherwise gets real.

Basically, if a given plot device starts wearing out its welcome, you can swap it out for another one (or a whole cluster of them). If the characters have spent 100 pages trying to escape from a dungeon or pull off a heist, then the turning point comes when they pull off their plan, and either fail or succeed. And there are unforeseen consequences either way, which turn things sideways.

Did you ever find yourself standing in your kitchen, but you couldn’t remember what you went in there to get? That’s the way a lot of first drafts are, and it’s actually fine. Your characters go to a place, for reasons, but you kept changing your mind about what those reasons were, or you actually forgot to give them a reason to go there. It’s really fine.

Plot devices are the easiest thing to add, or change, in revision. We get overly attached to them—because again, when they work, they seem magical. But in real life, we generally have five different reasons for every single thing we do. You might go to Pittsburgh to visit your uncle, but also there’s a bookstore you’ve been dying to visit, and you’d like to be out of town when your ex is having a wedding. And it’s shockingly easy to change “we had to sneak into the fortress to steal the secret plans” to “we had to sneak into the fortress to rescue somebody.” Frequently, making such a seemingly major change means rewriting one exposition-filled scene plus a line of dialogue here and there.

What people do is usually more interesting than why they do it—unless the “why” is really personal, and has to do with their character arcs. But if their actions are just about a widget, then the widget is pretty interchangeable. Until it isn’t.

How, and when, to commit to plot devices

At a certain point, a plot device gets embedded in the foundation of your story. The characters start having emotional attachments to the McGuffin, and the themes and ideas of the narrative connect deeply to a thing, or a particular situation. And maybe the ending of the story really only works with one particular configuration of gears and turbines. You get enough connective tissue and these plot wingdings will start to feel significant.

At that point, you can no longer just change the reason for a major sequence of events, without tearing out lots and lots of stuff.

I try to hold off committing to plot devices until I get to the revision stage, because I’m always worried about the cart driving the horse. I’ve had plenty of occasions where my characters got twisted into knots trying to make a plot thing work, when I only put the plot thing there in the first place to help the characters advance.

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Sometimes, I’ll throw in a dozen plot devices and see which one sticks—and by “sticks,” I mean “generates some good moments and causes the characters to come alive.” I will write a scene where the characters talk about some mysterious secret weapon or whatnot, and then I’ll just find myself forgetting to mention the secret weapon again, for another 20 or 30 pages, because the characters lost interest in it. Or really, I lost interest in it. My first drafts are littered with plot levers that seem super important, and then are never spoken of again.

All the Birds in the Sky, in particular, was crammed full of plot things that I had to lose. Laurence didn’t just build a two-second time machine, but also a host of other random gadgets that were good for a joke but ended up being too much. There were aliens, as I mentioned before. The middle school where Laurence and Patricia study had a weird curriculum that turned to be a strange experiment created by an evil cult (who were connected to the aliens.) There were a lot of magical objects and complications, stemming from the old rivalry between two factions of magicians. And so on, and so on.

And in my upcoming young-adult novel Victories Greater Than Death—minor spoiler alert—there’s a plot device called the Talgan stone. Early drafts of the book had everybody searching for the long-lost Talgan stone, and it felt like too basic of a McGuffin. I was leery of writing scene after scene where people talked about the search for this doohickey, and I couldn’t make up my mind about what this thing even was. So I dropped the Talgan stone like a hot rock and wrote three or four drafts without it.

Then, late in the revision process, I had to go back and find something to add a sense of momentum to the first half of the book. I needed something that would help the characters get to where I needed them to be in the midpoint of the book, and give them the information they needed to find the stuff I needed them to find. I racked my brains…and ended up finding the Talgan stone, right where I’d dropped it. And it ended up being exactly what I needed, because now I was clear on what I needed it to do.

And that’s the crux: sometimes you have a plot device just to have a plot device, and it just ends up generating more clutter. And then sometimes, you have a yawning chasm in your story, or something to raise the stakes and tension early on, and a good plot device can be just the thing. And again, plot devices aren’t just objects—they can be stuff like “we got locked in a cage” or “my evil brother-in-law just showed up.”

It’s hard to generalize about plot devices, because different types of stories have different needs. Try to imagine if Douglas Adams was forced to include fewer random incidents and outlandish objects in his writing—it would be tragic. A spy thriller needs gadgets and ticking ticky things and chases, or it’s a total epic fail. And yet in many cases, less is more. Like, say, if you have a Sith dagger, you might not also need a Sith wayfinder, because those are basically the same thing twice. Just sayin’.

Time to blow up some dichotomies, because that’s my brand

If you’ve ever read pretty much any of my fiction, you’ll know that I love to smash false oppositions and binaries into tiny fragments of rhetorical schmutz.

So here are two dichotomies I want to take a sledgehammer to:

“Pantser vs. plotter”: You’ll hear this one a lot in writing things. Sometimes it’s also described as “gardener vs. architect”. The idea is that some writers just make everything up as they go along, without any idea of where the story might be going, and they sort of “discover” the plot as they go. And other writers will meticulously plan out every last bit of the story beforehand, and maybe even just expand that outline little by little, until it becomes a full draft.

The truth is, most writers do some of both. Even if you plan everything carefully, some stuff inevitably doesn’t work and has to be rethought, and character stuff will often land differently than you expected. And even the most spontaneous writer will have some idea of where things are going, and will maybe make notes on what ought to be coming.

I’ve found every way there is to screw up writing a story. To take the two examples above, All the Birds in the Sky was definitely a lot of fumbling ahead and walking into walls without a real plan, while the young-adult trilogy has been painstakingly outlined. I’ve also had the privilege of working in a couple of television writers’ rooms, where a season of television gets outlined first at the season level, then the episode level, then the scene-by-scene breakdown, then all the tiny beats in each scene. And I’ve always found that because I’m a person writing about people, it’s impossible to plan everything—but it’s also impossible to get anywhere unless you’re making some plans and thinking ahead.

It’s not an either/or, it’s a spectrum. And the most successful approach tends to be a mix of the two. You never want to close yourself off to happy accidents, but you want to have some stuff up your sleeve no matter what. And you’ll always have to rethink things in revision—which is why I always outline a story after I’ve written one or two drafts.

“Character-based vs. plot-based”: This is a distinction I used to hear endlessly when I was starting out as a fiction-writer, though I don’t hear it as much lately. Basically, the idea is that some stories are based more on characters and their emotional journeys, while others are purely about chases and fights and puzzles and ticking ticky things. The former sort includes romances as well as literary works, while the latter category refers to spy stories, action-adventures, political thrillers, and romps.

And once again, I’d say this is a spectrum rather than an on-off switch. Almost every story is some mix of character stuff and plot stuff, and the mix often varies from page to page and chapter to chapter. Character is action: people aren’t just a collection of feelings and opinions and habits, but rather the sum total of all the choices they take. Meanwhile, even the plottiest plotfest needs to have characters who we root for, or else none of the secret codes and countdowns will matter worth a damn.

Both of these binaries are worth questioning, because creating a good plot might require you to be able to change modes again and again. Sometimes you need to take a step back and do more planning, while at other times you might need to blow up everything and just make things up as you go along. Sometimes a plot device isn’t working because the characters aren’t invested enough in it, which in turn is because you’re not invested enough in the characters.

And sometimes your characters are lifeless because the plot isn’t generating enough urgency. It’s a freaking ecosystem, people.

The danger of describing a plot in mechanistic terms, as I’ve done above, is that you might start to think of a steady-state machine, which just chugs along at a constant pace until it finally shuts down. Plots, meanwhile, need to pick up their pace and urgency and intensity as they go along, so they can reach some kind of crescendo toward the end. To raise the stakes, you have to earn the reader’s (and your own) trust and suspension of disbelief—if we’re not fully convinced that one giant rock-tunneling spider is bad, then we won’t be scared when there’s suddenly an army of giant rock-tunneling spiders.

That sense of rising action depends on how much we feel the menace or vitality of a particular event or situation, which in turn depends on the characters. We care about the crystal goblet of the Troll Overlord because the characters care about it, not because we love crystal goblets. When something happens, we need to see the characters reacting and mourning and coping and/or celebrating. And vivid and memorable details matter, including sensory stuff like smells and sounds, for helping us to believe in what’s going on.

So if your plot is a machine, it’s a rocket: it needs to keep accelerating in order to achieve escape velocity. And it needs to keep the people inside it alive—rather than letting that acceleration smush them to death.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novel. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her short fiction has won Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus awards. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: A Good Plot Is Made Out of Two Things appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the seventh chapter, “The Most Powerful Thing a Story Can Do Is Show How People Change.” You can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Section II
What’s A Story, and How Do You Find One?

Chapter 3
The Most Powerful Thing a Story Can Do Is Show How People Change

Fiction is superior to real life in one important respect: a story can show change happening in real time.

Over the course of a novel or short story, people open their hearts, or close them. Rulers fall, or ascend. People fall in love, and/or fall out of love. Parents and children reconcile. Empires are overthrown, oppressors are defeated, and mysteries are solved. Friendships are tested, and sometimes broken. Enemies become friends, and then lovers. Evil people realize the error of their ways, and good people realize that doing good isn’t as simple as they believed.

In a made-up story, you can see justice taking shape—or being thwarted. You can show how the human heart struggles with huge questions, and sometimes even finds an answer.

If there’s one thing that recent events have taught us, it’s that people do change, though it takes too long and progress is always fragile. Just look at opinion surveys on anti-racism, police brutality, same-sex marriage, trans rights, immigration, and a host of other issues to see how people’s views have changed in a very short time. But it can still be frustrating to fight and struggle and argue and wait for the battleship of public opinion to turn.

We’re all at the mercy of Dornbusch’s law: A crisis always takes much longer to arrive than you think it will, and then it always happens much more quickly than you expected.

So fiction allows us to skip over the excruciating, boring part where people are digging in their heels and the status quo appears unshakable. To distill those moments of transformation that are way too rare in real life down into a cocktail of pure, intoxicating flux. We don’t just crave fiction because we want to escape reality—but because fiction contains the best and worst parts of reality, without all the garbage that pads it out.

We talked before about how to find the characters that you want to follow around for a while—but once you’ve found a character, you need to keep investing in them. And as I said in that earlier essay, a character who doesn’t evolve is just a pet rock: fun to look at, but not really very immersive or compelling. There are two major ways a character can change: their opinions and feelings can shift, or their circumstances can. Or both.

You’ll often hear people talk a lot about a character having an “arc,” which brings to mind the image of an arrow shot in the air, curving upward and then downward again. But another useful image is a piece of coal coming under immense pressure and becoming a diamond. People don’t change when life is easy and straightforward—they change when life is a bloody confusing nightmare.

The hard part is making people believe in change

Because we all crave narratives of transformation, we actively root for characters to level up, or to come to their senses, or sometimes to take the plunge into doing cathartically terrible things. Reading the Song of Ice and Fire books, I can’t tell you how many times I shouted at the page, because I was ready for Sansa to stop letting Petyr Baelish wrap her around his little finger. (And I’ve definitely heard from readers who felt frustrated at how long it took some of my own characters to wise up to something.)

And yet, a story still has to meet the reader halfway. When a character makes a huge change that seems to come out of nowhere, this is frustrating precisely because we’ve been rooting so much for that character to change. We can all think of stories where huge character moments felt unearned and unsupported by everything that came before. When you watch classic Doctor Who, you can always tell a companion is about to leave the TARDIS when she conveniently falls in love with someone she’s barely spoken to until five minutes ago (*cough*Leela*cough*).

I spent a ton of time looking at how character growth works in various books, TV shows, comics and other media, and realized that often, it comes down to one of the following:

1. A character couldn’t do a thing before, and now they can.
2. Or they were not willing to do a thing before, but now they’re willing.
3. They’ve been wrestling with a choice, or a difficult relationship, and now they have clarity.
4. Also on the relationship tip, two characters work out (some of) their issues with each other.
5. An identity crisis, or a crisis of faith or ideology, has reached some resolution.

Any of those things can also happen in reverse: characters can become less able to do something they could do before, and they can lose clarity as well as gain it. Also, the above categories are very broad-brush by design, and definitely not intended to be exhaustive.

But if you think of your characters as gaining XP over the course of your story, then you’re gonna want to make them work for it. Cheap epiphanies are worthless, and any problem or conflict that gets solved too easily probably wasn’t that big a deal to begin with. Not that we need to see people struggle or suffer, but they at least need to wrestle with the dilemma they’re facing.

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The more major the characters, the more we need to see them earn any change of heart. For minor and/or supporting characters, we can assume they’ve done a lot of soul searching while we weren’t paying attention to them. It can actually be kind of cool to catch up with a character we haven’t seen for a hundred pages, and they’ve had some personality upgrades in the meantime.

One failure mode I see constantly in pop culture is the thing where a character has an emotional breakthrough that, in turn, allows them to solve some plot problem. (“I realized that I’m not properly hearing my girlfriend when she expresses her emotional needs, and that lesson about active listening also helped me to realize I need to use a lower frequency to communicate with these mashed-potato aliens.”) This makes for efficient storytelling, but also can lead to rushed emotional beats.

Trauma is also one important element of a lot of character developments—as I touched on in the earlier chapter about finding imaginary friends, people who deal with scary, intense events are going to be left with some damage. I had to spend a lot of time thinking about my own experience of trauma as well as talking to my friends about theirs, before I could get better at writing fictional trauma. I also highly recommend the books Trauma and Recovery and The Body Keeps the Score for a detailed, nuanced exploration of how we carry trauma in our bodies as well as our minds.

An unconvincing arc could also be down to a lack of clarity at some point in the process. In order to follow an arc, we have to have a clear sense of where a character starts out, what the character is struggling with, what exactly they’re aware of, what their goals are, and the ways in which their struggle gets more complicated or more painful as the story goes on. One of my unpublished novels, a portal fantasy, suffered from some of this: I kept wavering on stuff like how much power my protagonist starts out with, and how much she already knows about magic, and what exactly her unresolved issues are. And the result was a messy arc that nobody could follow.

As I’ve said before, you can’t twist the knife until you find the knife.

I often don’t know what the big character turns in a story or novel are going to be until I’ve written a lot of it—even if I outlined a ton in advance, the character stuff is usually the hardest to predict until I get into it. That’s one reason why I try to write a bunch of scenes where things happen: so I can see how the characters are changing, or could change, and write toward that. I’ll inevitably write the beats out of order and skip over important bits, and then I try to create a coherent progression as I revise. But in the first draft, I still try to find the bones of the character arc as I write, because that’s one of the best ways to find a satisfying ending. (We’ll talk about endings later.)

What if your characters just refuse to change?

It’s hard to invest in a character who never changes—though obviously not impossible, judging by the popularity of James Bond and most iconic superheroes. But sometimes you reach the middle of a story and realize that your protagonist is just…stuck. You have a character who’s going through the motions of the plot, but standing still in all the ways that matter.

This can happen for all sorts of reasons:

You might have picked the wrong person as a protagonist. This happens all the damn time. I can’t tell you how many times I started out building a story around someone who seemed, on paper, like the ideal main character—only to find them kind of lifeless. And meanwhile there was this other supposedly minor character who kept popping up here and there, and seemed to have a lot of issues they were anxious to come to terms with.

You’ve written a perfect human being instead of a flawed individual. This is easy to fall into, especially since you want your hero to be “likable,” which can easily translate into “well-adjusted.” But even if your character’s arc isn’t explicitly about learning to get rid of a particular pattern of bad behavior or unfortunate tendency, they’re going to need to have some issues, or they won’t be real enough to change.

Nobody in your story is willing to call the hero on their shit. This is a similar problem. You want everyone else to love your main character as much as you do, so all the other characters in your story treat them as if they can do no wrong. No matter how selfishly or obnoxiously the hero behaves, they get a free pass, and thus they can never grow out of anything.

Your protagonist doesn’t want anything. Every character needs goals or desires—and they don’t have to be related to the plot. In fact, I often find that a character who’s chasing after something unrelated to obtaining the next plot widget is more interesting. It’s the difference between Luke Skywalker, whose main agenda in the original Star Wars is to fulfill his father’s (supposed) legacy by rescuing Princess Leia and stopping the Death Star, and Han Solo, who wants to get paid.

You just need to torture this person a little more. See the “diamond” metaphor above—people don’t change unless they’re under pressure. Sometimes a lifeless character just needs another element to make them uncomfortable. Maybe they need a nemesis whom they loathe (but will learn to love later). Or they’re going to be forced to marry their own evil future self—I hate when that happens. It’s amazing how often a character just needs a foil, or someone to bounce off, to start going through some changes.

Your ostensible protagonist isn’t driving the action. As a general rule, the more a story is focused on plot widgets, or trying to achieve something, the more your hero ought to be making stuff happen, rather than being a bystander. The concept of “agency” is very culturally loaded, and rooted in a lot of Eurocentric cis male notions of “rugged individualism”—but in a story about searching for the magic bidet of the Elf King, the hero should probably at least be helping to find that bidet. Someone who gets dragged along for the ride by other characters might end up having fewer opportunities for personal growth along the way.

I’m a sucker for a story about someone who changes the world, and is changed in the process. In fact, I have a hard time believing in a person who travels through the Valley of Improbable Plumbing (searching for that magic bidet) and doesn’t emerge with a new outlook on life. The more I feel trapped in situations that I seemingly have little or no control over, the more I want to write and read about people who take action, and that helps me to believe I can do those things in real life—but only if I can see how that character is affected by this.

Fiction can work all kinds of magic during horrendous times: inspire us to resist evil, expose the reality of the world, create empathy, and help us to understand complex systems from a vantage-point that could be hard to reach in non-fiction. But the most powerful thing that fiction can do is show that people can change, and that we all have the potential to be different. That’s where I get a lot of my hope when everything around me feels hopeless.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novel. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her short fiction has won Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus awards. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: The Most Powerful Thing a Story Can Do Is Show How People Change appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the sixth chapter, “The Secret to Storytelling? Just One Good Scene, and Then Another, and Another.” You can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Section II
What’s A Story, and How Do You Find One?

Chapter 2
The Secret to Storytelling? Just One Good Scene, and Then Another, and Another.

There’s only one thing more intimidating than a blank first page, and that’s a blank tenth page. At least when you are starting a new piece of writing from scratch, anything is possible. But once you’ve made a bunch of decisions and started weaving a bunch of narrative threads, you have to stay committed—unless you decide to start over from scratch, which is always an option.

So what do you do when you’re struggling to find a way forward, in the middle of a piece of writing? There’s no one answer, and we’ll keep coming back to this question in later chapters. But one solution is just to try and write a good scene. And then write another one, until the scenes start to add up to something. A big part of writing any first draft is just seeing what works: how do these characters fit together, and what can we do with this premise and this setting? If you can get three halfway decent scenes in a row, then you’re cooking: the characters are clicking, and the story is taking shape.

The scene is the basic unit of storytelling, most of the time: one or more people, in a particular location (or set of locations), having some kind of interaction. Sure, there are some exceptions—like you can have a passage where six months go by in a few sentences, or the narrator can go on a rambling digression about noodles. But most of the time, a story will break down into separate scenes.

And each scene is a little story unto itself, in which the characters have a problem or a conflict, and they grapple with it, and then by the end of the scene something has changed. There are twists, and unforeseen developments, and revelations. Things may have gotten worse by the end of the scene—in fact, if this is the middle of the story, often it’s better if things get worse rather than better.

And just like a whole story, as a general rule a good scene is one where something changes. Or at least, something happens. The thing that happens doesn’t have to be huge: some of my favorite scenes are just people hanging out, arguing over lunch, or buying a new hat. But if a scene is good, then usually by the end of the scene, things aren’t the same at the end as they were in the beginning.

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Just to be clear: when I talk about a “good” scene, I don’t mean a well-written one, or a polished one, or even one that you’re sure belongs in this story. In this context, “good” means “interesting.” A good scene leaves you wondering what’s going to happen next, or makes you more interested in the characters and their issues. A good scene should probably feel as if things are cooking, and like the story is going someplace, even if you don’t yet know where.

Also, “good” doesn’t mean “realistic.” In real life, people take forever to get around to saying what’s on their mind, and a lot of interactions are pointless or boring. Even the most literary piece of fiction, with the strongest commitment to realism, will edit stuff out, or streamline, or stylize. Just look at Dave Eggers’ preface to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in which he explains that all the dialogue in his memoir has been rewritten, edited, and then rewritten a second time, to make the author and his friends sound less dorky.

My thoughts about this were somewhat influenced by a  2008 essay by screenwriter and novelist Frank Cottrell-Boyce, in which he argues that sometimes the best storytelling consists of a good bit, followed by another good bit, and then another. Cottrell-Boyce also says “emotions create their own suspense,” which is a piece of advice that’s stuck in my head for years.

And after watching approximately 10,000 hours of The CW, I’ve started to notice just how ruthlessly efficient the scenes in a typical episode of The Vampire Diaries or Arrow are. Each episode is juggling a dozen subplots, so every scene needs to carry its own weight and move at least one subplot forward, if not several. Characters on The CW enter each scene with an axe to grind, or a problem they need to solve, or often a need to kill each other. They interact, and something shifts in their dynamic, often heightening their conflict (if it’s the middle of an episode), and then each scene ends with some kind of knife-twist—or neck-twist, if it’s Vampire Diaries. No lie, I spent a lot of time studying how these CW shows pack so much into each moment, and I decided that a lot of it has to do with stripping everything down to the bones of the scene.

How to find a scene

Often a scene will start out with one of two needs: something needs to happen, or two or more characters need to talk about something.

In the first case, you might know what happens, but not how it happens. For example, Marjorie the dancing witch is supposed to leave home to search for the Lost Clogs of Basingstoke—but she could leave in a sweet tear-soaked farewell, or in a screaming rage. If the point is just to get Marjorie out the door and on the road, then you can accomplish that in a couple sentences. But you want this to be a moment that will stick in people’s minds. And the better the send-off, the more you’ll be able to keep following her on her journey.

So I end up spending a lot of time thinking about the best way to dramatize an incident. The most boring version of the scene is easy to reach, because I’ve already seen it a million times. The more interesting version, the one that makes the characters feel real and compelling, often takes a lot of brainstorming and questioning.

To create a moment that feels coolest to me, I have to really put myself in the scene. And ask myself a million questions:

What is Marjorie thinking/feeling as the scene begins?

Did she already decide to leave home, or does she decide halfway through this interaction?

Does everyone else know she’s going to leave, or is this a surprise to them?

If I know in advance that something needs to happen in a scene, then I try my best to make that action a surprise—or at least introduce some minor wrinkles. If Marjorie goes into the scene knowing she has to go on a clog-quest, then maybe she ought to be confronted with a surprising reason why she should stay at home. The best iteration of a scene is usually—not always—the one that generates the most conflict and suspense.

In the second case, sometimes you know that two characters need to have a conversation about an issue between them, which could be something that’s happened, or something that one of them just learned about. This is my favorite thing in the world to write. I love getting drawn into a character’s obsessions, and exploring a world is terrific too, but I get even more excited when I feel like two characters have something to say to each other.

Any interaction between two or more people is a conversation, really. A fight scene is a conversation, and so is a sex scene. And I just love writing any kind of moment where relationships shift, someone’s baggage gets unpacked and/or repacked, and conflicts are deepened. Perversely, the more action-oriented the scene, the more you might need to be aware of the emotional content and the POV, because the stakes are always at least somewhat personal, even if the fate of the world is at stake.

Sometimes I’ll know that two characters can’t really meet up and talk about their issues with each other for another hundred pages—but that’s the scene I’m most excited to write, so I just go ahead and write it now. In general, I often just write the scenes that I’m most stoked about writing, and worry about putting them together in some kind of order later. (And yes, that does get me into trouble on a regular basis. But I’d rather have a mess than a bunch of false starts.)

Again, I don’t worry about making these scenes perfect, or polished. I know from experience that the first draft of any scene will be clunky as hell. The characters will blurt out their innermost thoughts in a way that’s not realistic, or they’ll speak the subtext out loud. People will be way too easy-going, because I haven’t found the intensity of their feelings yet. Conversations will feel lifeless, and people will make decisions that don’t make sense in the moment.

But at least there’ll be little moments here and there where people say something revealing, or their personalities will shine through. And maybe I’ll notice that Marjorie and her sister don’t really get along, and that’s a thread I can try and pick up again in later scenes.

Psyching yourself up

I don’t always outline a story or a novel before I write—though I definitely will outline something after I’ve already written it, to see if it makes sense or not. But I frequently find myself outlining a scene, beat by beat. Like, does it start in the middle, or do we follow a character into the scene? What are the bits that I need to have happen here, and in what order? What’s the through-line that carries us from the beginning of the scene to the end?

A lot of making a scene work is a matter of psyching yourself up, and trying to figure out at least some idea of what’s going on, even if the action ends up surprising you as you write it.

Here’s a good place to introduce a couple of ideas that I’m going to keep coming back to:

1) Every writer is also an actor.

The process of getting inside the head of a character, figuring out their motivations and shouldering their baggage, is more or less the same for writers as for actors. (Full disclosure: I was a failed actor in high school and spent a fair amount of time learning to get into character before I realized I was just bad at it.) You have to focus on trying to put yourself in the character’s shoes until it becomes second nature and you start to know this person, inside and out. Sometimes, I’ll act a tricky scene out—even doing the voices out loud in the shower. (I know, I know.)

2) Suspension of disbelief is just as important when you’re writing as when you’re reading—or maybe even more so.

A scene only works if you can convince yourself that it’s real to the characters, and that the stakes matter. In his indispensable book About Writing, Samuel R. Delany says that when writers go back and change an event in their fiction, they have to “convince themselves that the story actually did happen… in the new way,” and that the earlier version was hearsay, or a misunderstanding of the events. In other words, you almost have to hypnotize yourself into thinking that the events you’re writing about are real, and they actually took place.

Once I’ve got the basic elements of the scene down, then I go back and think about the details more carefully. Like, where does the scene take place? And what are the characters doing during the scene?

I’ll frequently write a conversation between two or more people, and it just takes place in a blank void at first. Then I’ll try and think, what’s the most interesting location for this to happen? Are they eating lunch at a restaurant? Are they at fencing practice? Are they doing a spacewalk? It’s usually more interesting to have a relationship conversation while flying over an active volcano than while sitting in a Starbucks. And the same way that I often need something to do with my hands when I talk, it’s always better if the characters are doing something instead of just standing still.

I also try to make the scene-setting stuff do actual work, conveying information or setting up stuff that’s going to happen later. Or establishing a location where the characters are going to hang out regularly. Their clubhouse, so to speak.

And speaking of suspense, a relatively quiet and benign conversation can take on an extra charge if the reader knows that a ten-ton kaiju is about to show up and stomp on the characters’ house. These people are sitting there processing their feelings, and you’re like, “Stop being introspective and get out of there before it’s too late, you twerps!” It’s also always fun to do a Henry V-style “little touch of Harry in the night” scene where various people have One Last Talk before the big battle.

And once I know where the scene takes place and what else is happening, I’ll often start a scene with the characters talking, and then do the scene-setting in the third or fourth paragraph, once we’re already in the flow of events.

For my novel All the Birds in the Sky, I wrote tons of scenes, just trying to find the characters and their voices. My hard drive is full of documents with titles like “5000 words of Laurence and Patricia getting closer” and “5000 words of people trying to tear Patricia and Laurence apart,” and “A series of emotional vignettes about Laurence and Patricia.” I wrote scene after scene, and then only used a small fraction of the scenes I wrote.

I also ended up combining lots of scenes—which is a thing that happens to me regularly. I’ll have three scenes where a group of characters talk about something, and I’ll realize that I only need one scene, but it should combine some elements from all three of them.

And all too often, the scenes that make me most excited about the story when I’m writing a first draft are the same ones that I end up having to cut in revision.

Before, we talked about how your characters can be your “imaginary friends.” And to me, part of scenework is just hanging out with these friends I’ve created for myself. (Why yes, I was a social outcast when I was a kid, and frequently wandered alone making up stories in my head while the other kids avoided me. Why do you ask?) The more time I spend taking my characters through different scenarios, the better I know them, and the more I can lose myself in their world.

Every scene is about conflict, one way or another. And as I’ve said before, following characters through their fictional conflicts is a good way to cope with all the conflicts and arguments in the “real” world, which are never as clear-cut or easy to cope with as fictional ones.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: The Secret to Storytelling? Just One Good Scene, and Then Another, and Another appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the fifth chapter, “Don’t Be Afraid to Go on Lots of First Dates With Story Ideas”, which begins section 2, “What’s A Story, and How Do You Find One?”—you can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Section II
What’s A Story, and How Do You Find One?

Chapter 1
Don’t Be Afraid to Go on Lots of First Dates With Story Ideas

One of the biggest sources of shame and anxiety for writers, especially newer writers, is the “failure” to finish a story. What if you start a dozen stories, and never quite find your way to the end of them? This might seem like a lack of follow-through, and even a reason to beat yourself up.

But maybe don’t think of it as “failing” to complete something. Instead, try thinking of it as going on a bunch of blind dates—that don’t happen to lead to second dates. No harm, no foul.

It’s easy to get infatuated with a brand-new story idea. Check out that sexy elevator pitch, and all of those dazzling implications. This story idea is both rich and beautiful, and you want to get to know it a lot better. But then you spend a little more time together, and…the chemistry just isn’t there. Turns out that elevator pitch only lasted a few floors, and all the cool little notions that came with it just aren’t panning out.

So just like with all the attractive singles in your area who are on every dating app ever, you might need to have one glass of merlot at a lot of wine bars before you find the premise you’re ready to hang with.

There’s no shame whatsoever in writing five sentences (or five pages) of a story before deciding that it’s not going to click after all—you’ll know you’ve found “the one” when it keeps popping into your head, and you keep thinking of more places you could go with it. Plus, sometimes you’ll come back to one of those stories you started, and suddenly have a great idea of how to finish it. I’ve put plenty of half-finished stories aside, only to come back years later and find my way to the end of them.

I’m a stubborn cuss, so I have a hard time admitting that something isn’t working and it’s time to try something else. I used to try and force myself to keep going.

But lately, I’ve been realizing that I haven’t actually gotten any better at finishing the stories I start. Instead, I’ve just gotten quicker to realize that something’s not panning out, and it’s time to jump tracks. When I was putting together my upcoming short story collection, I went back and looked through all the stories I wrote when I was starting out—and somehow, I had forgotten that for every story I finished, there were five or six that I didn’t. And I found tons of notes and other evidence of me banging my head against the same wall over and over.

I had to learn to stop thinking of leaving a story unfinished as an admission of defeat, or thinking that it reflected on me as a writer. I had to give myself permission to move on.

Of course, sometimes there’s a story idea that I know in my bones is meant for me, and worth the effort, and I keep getting pulled back to it even though I can’t bring it to life. That definitely happens on a regular basis, and we’ll talk in later chapters about how to deal with getting stuck when a story is both compelling and not working. But most of the time, I’ve found putting a story on the back burner is the right choice—my subconscious can keep poking at it, while I do other stuff. (And if I stop thinking about it at all, there’s a sign that it was not meant to be.)

Another important lesson I had to learn: there’s never any shortage of story ideas. They’re easy to come by, and there’s no need for a mentality of scarcity. If you can start thinking of story ideas as abundant, leaving stories unfinished will feel a lot less wasteful, and more like writing exercises, or good practice.

To return to the dating metaphor, you don’t just want to find a story idea—you want to find the story idea that you’re going to want to commit to. And there really are plenty of fish in the sea.

Why is it so hard to believe that story ideas are easy to come by?

Part of the mystique of writing is that story ideas feel kind of magical and miraculous. We’re all used to falling in love with books based on the two sentences on the back cover, and the right idea, in the right hands, can feel electrifying. It’s easy to believe that ideas are the key ingredient of great storytelling, and hard to accept that ideas are easy to come by.

But once you realize that ideas are an endlessly renewable resource, then you can be more relaxed about trying out lots of them. And maybe this knowledge will also make it easier for you to come up with more of them. Instead of being precious about any one idea, you can just keep brainstorming endlessly until you have a bunch that you like.

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The universe contains a billion layers of miracles, outrages, and strange phenomena, and if everybody on Earth wrote one story per day for the next hundred years, we’d barely tap a tiny fraction of that potential. Every random subgenre and plot device has a limitless number of stories that have never been written—like a playground that goes on and on forever. Every issue of New Scientist contains a ton of science fiction story ideas, and you can get tons of ideas from just taking a walk and people-watching (don’t be creepy). Or just try to imagine one thing in the world changing drastically, or the weirdest thing that could happen to someone. Or get into a fight with a dead author.

Lately I’ve been speaking to high-school classes, and I have an exercise that I like to take the students through. I get people to come up with random items or concepts, like “potato!” or “umbrella!” or “running late!” We pick one of those, like “potato!”, and then we spend a few minutes coming up with twenty things that could happen to a potato. Maybe the potato gets married. Maybe it grows legs and learns to walk. Maybe the potato runs for president.

That’s just the start of the exercise. After that, we try to come up with a protagonist for the story. Is it the potato itself? Or the person who gets married to the potato? Or the potato farmer? We try to come up with a central conflict of the story—like, maybe someone has religious objections to potato marriage. And hopefully, we come up with possible complications, or unexpected turns the story could take. At the end of five to ten minutes, we’ve usually come up with 100 or so story ideas.

Part of the fun of writing science fiction and fantasy is that there are almost no limits. If you’re writing a murder mystery, you pretty much start out with the idea that someone is getting murdered, and the murderer will (probably) get caught. If you’re writing a romance, two or more people are probably going to fall in love. SF and fantasy contain hundreds of subgenres, in which certain things are probably inevitable, like a steampunk story probably needs to have some steam someplace. But still, when you start writing a piece of speculative fiction, that blank page can turn into almost anything you want to do.

Sometimes, a good story can start with a “what if,” like “what if vampires really craved wizard blood?” Or a character who just feels really compelling, whom you want to follow around, as we talked about previously. Or you can start building a world that you want to tell stories in. Or a particular setting that seems rich, like an old church or a generation ship. You could even start out with one particular scene that just needs to happen, and then the story grows around that one scene.

That’s the great thing about stories. Any part of the puzzle can be the first piece. (But just like with any puzzle, you can’t move forward until you find the connections between the different pieces.)

What’s the difference between a premise and a story?

Story ideas aren’t just a never-ending bounty, they’re also free in the sense that nobody can own them. And if a thousand writers all tackled the exact same idea at the same time, you’d end up with a thousand totally different stories—because what really matters, the hard part, is turning a premise into a story.

Like, take our vampires who crave wizard blood. You could tell the story of a wizard who’s on the run from hungry vampires. Or a vampire who’s forced to drink the blood of a wizard who healed her mother. You could tell the story of the last remaining wizards on Earth, and their final desperate stand against the vampire army. Or the reluctant vampire-wizard alliance against their common enemy, the anemia pixies.

The premise can go in any number of directions, and until you pick one of those directions, you don’t really have anything. That process of turning a neato idea into a proper, full-fledged story isn’t just about choosing a path forward—it’s about everything from compelling characters, to lived-in worldbuilding, to the hundreds of tiny details that turn a sterile idea-particle into a living, blooming, pollenating garden.

Put another way, “centaur bounty hunters” is a premise. “Centaur bounty hunters in love” is a story. “Centaur bounty hunters in love, but only one of them wants to capture the naiad alive” is an idea with legs. (No pun intended.)

So how can you tell if a story idea is worth your valuable time and attention? By trying to make it work and seeing what happens. There’s no diagnostic that works as well as just trying to do the thing, and seeing if it’ll happen—and being okay with deciding at some point that it’s not happening with this particular premise.

For me personally, I’ve often found that the more intriguing an idea is on the surface, the less likely it is to work for me. My hard drive is full of neat ideas that would make my ears prick up if I heard that someone else had written them—but they’re just not going anywhere interesting for me. Often, the ideas that seem more basic seem to give me the opportunity to find my own random spin on them, and the cleverest, smartest ideas seem to peter out the fastest for me. (As always, your experience may be different.)

I’ve started to think that something about the process of grappling with a concept, shaking it down until something interesting rolls out, is essential to my creative investment.

Maybe this is because the ideas that are coolest on the surface are also the ones that have the most clear-cut implications. Whereas, if it’s not immediately obvious who should be the protagonist, or how the conflict should play out, then I get more intrigued and want to keep poking at it. Plus if I’m absolutely sure about what’s going on in a story, before I even start writing, then I’m not going to be as fired up—because to me, part of the joy of writing is finding out what’s really happening, and what’s really at stake. (We’ll be talking a lot more about this soon.)

To return to the dating metaphor, you start trying to get to know a potential story from the first moment you “meet.” And just like in dating, it’s impossible to separate those two processes: learning more, and figuring out if this is going to work or not. Your storytelling gears start turning, even as you try to see if this is the right match, and the two things feed on each other. Is this a short story, a novella, a novel—or maybe just a piece of flash fiction? Is this something that’s going to keep surprising and intriguing you, or is it going to feel predictable and like you’re going through the motions?

I don’t want to run that metaphor into the ground—but getting drawn into creating a story really is a lot like falling in love. Frustrating, anxiety-provoking, confusing, a cauldron of pure misery—and also, the best and most fulfilling thing ever. So often, writing advice is all about mastery and “craft,” the idea of imposing your will on a lump of unformed narrative. But my happiest writing times are usually when I’m seducing a story, and being seduced in turn.

And just like love, you’ll know it when you see it. The best story idea isn’t the shiniest or most brilliant-sounding—it’s the one that keeps you obsessing and questioning and rethinking and wondering and excited to keep trying to make sense of all the chaos. Love is patience, but love is also having the courage to ask for everything you need, and not settle for less. You can tell when a story was written with love, versus when someone did their duty.

The only difference between love affairs and story-writing? You probably can’t put a potential romance on ice for a year or twelve and be certain that your date will still be excited to see you whenever you’re ready to come back.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: Don’t Be Afraid to Go on Lots of First Dates With Story Ideas appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the fourth chapter, “Everything Is Broken! What Should I Write About?”—you can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Chapter 4
Everything Is Broken! What Should I Write About?

Back in 2001, I was going through two huge changes. I was starting to transition seriously from male to female—and I was also becoming a novelist, after a few years of writing short stories.

I started out writing a novel based on my own experience of singing in church choirs as a kid. Choir Boy slowly morphed into a gonzo trans coming-of-age story that ruminated on music, the uses of beauty, and how we sometimes discover our true selves by pure accident. I was just finishing up my first draft of this novel in September 2001, when you know what happened. After that, I was convinced that nobody, absolutely nobody, was going to need a surreal weirdfest about gender fluidity and sacred music anymore.

We were being dragged into war, Islamophobia was becoming government policy, and brown people were being denied their civil rights. Everyone was scrambling to figure out how to respond to the USA Patriot Act and everything else. I remember feeling so helpless, sitting in a cafe with a blank notebook and an EZ-Grip pen, wrestling with the ending to my novel while my friends were mobilizing and actually making a difference.

The world was exploding and innocent people were being targeted, and I either needed to put down my pen or find a way to write about what was going on. I was sure, after 9/11, that there was no point in continuing to write about queerness, or transness, or anything related to gender or sexuality or identity. Why focus on my own identity politics at a time like this? Why should I expect anybody to care about a subversive genderqueer odyssey at a time like this? Who the hell did I think I was, writing personal stories about the quest for an authentic self, during a time of war and atrocity?

Obviously I should change gears and start writing war novels. Or stories about fascism. I managed to finish Choir Boy and start the long journey to publication, but meanwhile I also tried to speak to the terrifying moment we were living through. I wrote dozens of not-particularly-good meditations on state-sanctioned violence—most of which were a total waste of words, but one of which morphed, years later, into my novella Rock Manning Goes For Broke.

Eventually, though, a few things became obvious to me: 1) I had a lot of stuff to work out about gender and sexuality in my writing, and this was valid and important. 2) War, paranoia and national meltdown are precisely the times when we need more stories about being true to ourselves, at any cost. 3) I had a choice between writing pretty terrible war fiction and somewhat less terrible queer lit, and only one of those two things was going to make me happy and leave me with the energy to do actual useful work in the world.

And I honestly don’t think I could have made it through the early 2000s without all the brave queer voices I was reading and listening to. I went to a million open mics and book launches, and trans spoken word events, and every show felt like going to church. We were all figuring out this shit together, and we were carving out a space big enough to let us all grow and transform and change our minds.

When Choir Boy finally came out in the mid-2000s, I helped to organize a national tour with a group of trans authors and zinesters. All over the country, I found myself talking to trans and gender-nonconforming people who desperately needed more stories to define what was possible for ourselves. We all needed each other’s stories.

***

When the whole world is on fire and the people you love are at risk, what should you write about?

Whatever you feel able to write. Whatever will make you feel like you can keep living and fighting. Write the thing that you’re ready and excited to write—not the thing that you feel the moment calls for, or the story that you think will fix every broken thing in the world. Your job is to survive, and maybe to help others to survive. That’s it. That’s more than plenty.

The past few years, I’ve had the same conversation a bunch of times, with other authors who couldn’t write what they were “supposed” to be writing. Maybe they were trying to finish a serious, intense military fantasy book, but they kept “cheating” and writing a fluffy rom-com about magical chipmunk princesses in love. Or maybe they were trying to write something light and escapist, to get their mind off current events, but all that came out was a dark reflection of our real-life nightmares.

I want to unpack that idea of the thing you’re “supposed” to write a little more, because it’s super unhelpful. Maybe it comes from feeling obligated to speak to a particular historical moment, the way I did after 9/11, or maybe it comes from imposter syndrome and feeling like your stories aren’t worthy. Or maybe you just really, really want to be “taken seriously,” or break into the “mainstream.” But if you let all these expectations, real or imagined, keep you from writing whatever you feel drawn to, then you’ve already lost something unimaginably precious.

I also want to take the phrase “identity politics” and throw it into the sun. Because you know what? All politics is identity politics, because it’s about who we are and who we want to be and how we want to treat each other. Politics is nothing but the sum of our experiences, which include culture, gender, religion, sexuality, and disability. If we can’t bring all of ourselves to the political sphere, then any struggle we take part in is already compromised.

Of course, there are times when you might need to write a particular thing—like, if you signed a contract in blood, or if it’s an assignment for school, or if you promised your friends you’d finish a particular fanfic. But most of the time, it’s not worth psyching yourself out, just so you can write the thing that you think someone else is expecting.

Just hearing your own thoughts over the shrilling of the atrocity organ can be a major challenge. Especially right now, as a militarized police force rolls across our cities, it’s hard to turn away even for a second. But making up your own stories about the world is a form of self-care and self-care is an important part of resistance. Plus we’re going to need new writing, all kinds of new writing, and you never know which stories will end up being treasured, in ways that you could never predict. Storytelling is an important piece of protective equipment, even “frivolous” storytelling.

It’s become sort of a cliché to say that you should write the book you wish you could read—but it’s really true, and it’s even truer during those times when the walls all start to melt. If there’s a book that would comfort or distract or empower you right now, then you might need to be the one to write it.

***

We’re all trapped inside history and we can’t see the outlines from where we are.

Wars, plagues, disasters, and struggles against tyranny come out of nowhere, and they can change the whole course of your life. This sucks, in part because you’re supposed to be the protagonist of your own damn story, but sometimes you get swept up in a larger arc where you’re at the mercy of decisions made by politicians, civic leaders, and cellophane dictators.

And as we’ve discussed before, writing stories can be one way to try and make sense of the huge events that we’re caught in the middle of. So you might easily assume that the best way to deal with massive situations that are (mostly) beyond your control is to write about them, or to write about stuff like them. And sometimes, that approach does pan out, like in January 2017, when I put all my anxieties as a trans person into a story.

Still, the only good thing about being trapped inside the belly of history is that this situation touches absolutely everything. Sometimes the easiest way to cope with it is to write about something that seems unrelated—because really, everything is related in the end. You won’t be able to keep reality from seeping in to your work, no matter what you do, and every piece of storytelling is about politics, one way or another.

We’ll talk more about finding story ideas in the next essay, but for now, it’s helpful to just let go of any worries about finding the “right” way to deal with a national (or global) shitshow in your fiction. If everything is messed up, then anything you write will end up touching on the messed-up stuff. Sometimes you can only see a systemic injustice from a great height, where you can look down and see the whole shape of it—but sometimes, you can only see it out of the corner of your eye.

A light-hearted romance between an elk princess and a swamp god might not just be the only thing you feel like writing these days—it might also be the best way for you to deal with the problems we’re all facing.

Also, the stuff you want to write is probably pretty similar to whatever you feel drawn to read right now. If you’re reading nothing but cozy mysteries, maybe you should try writing a cozy mystery. And you can always think about your friends and loved ones, and what you think they might want to read right now—though don’t get psyched out by trying to write something that’s not for you, just to make someone else happy. Most of all, accept that you might need to be okay with changing gears on the regular, because the thing you feel like working on today might not be the same thing that feels good tomorrow.

Almost every story is about change—especially science fiction and fantasy stories, which frequently revolve around some upheaval or transformation caused by a fresh discovery, or a brand-new circumstance. We’ll talk later about using imaginary worlds and futures to talk about problems in today’s world (and how that can go horribly wrong), but there’s something powerful about writing a story in which something changes. Doesn’t even have to change for the better—it just has to show that change happens, and it’s inevitable, and we can try to make the most of it.

***

It’s natural to fantasize when things are messed up, and sometimes those fantasies can turn out to be gold. Just look at those poor immigrant Jewish kids who channeled all their longing to be powerful and safe into creating Superman and Batman on the eve of World War II. It’s amazing how many of our most beloved stories are just the craving of a powerless person for a way to imagine being powerful.

And you’re under no obligation to be virtuous or high-minded—if you want to write a revenge fantasy about getting even with the jerkbags in charge, then go for it. Maybe you’ll find that after a dozen pages, it turns into something else, or develops more layers. But if it just stays a pure revenge fantasy, that’s awesome too. Just make it as gruesome as it needs to be.

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I used to long for a spaceship to swoop down and take me away from this horrendous planet, the way Yondu took Peter Quill away. The more terrified and anxious I get, looking at the state of the world, the more I take refuge in that daydream and mine it, endlessly, for more stories.

That weird thought that keeps lodging in your mind in the shower? Turn it into a plot point.

That one time in your life when you felt really free, accountable to no authority figure or petty judge? Find a narrative thread about what someone could do with that much freedom.

That angry rant that you’ve been biting your tongue to keep from spouting on the sidewalk or the subway? Put a version of it in the mouth of a character, and then see what it spurs them to do next.

Like I said, whatever you can write in the middle of a garbage tornado is a good thing to be writing. But as a general rule, it’s always better to write the story that only you could have written—not a weaksauce imitation of someone else’s book. Write from your own experiences and your passions and your obsessions, and indulge all of your most unruly impulses—you can always dial it back later, in revision.

The best thing to write during a slow-motion tragedy is the thing that strengthens and amplifies your own voice. Your own perspective. Because there’s nothing more badass and defiant than insisting that your stories matter, and that your experiences and concerns are important. In the end, that’s how we make it to the other side: by bringing all of ourselves into our writing.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinksreading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: Everything Is Broken! What Should I Write About? appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the third chapter, “Embrace Uncertainty: The Joy of Making a Giant Mess”—you can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Chapter 3
Embrace Uncertainty: The Joy of Making a Giant Mess

I can still remember the last time I felt like a total confused noob as a writer.

It was a couple weeks ago.

I had just begun writing a brand-new story, and realized that I still know nothing about how to start things. That blank white screen was taunting me with its milky emptiness, and I couldn’t find a way in. I had some neat ideas, a vague sense of an opening scene, a sliver of a main character…but the story wasn’t even getting out of the gate. This happens. Like, all the time.

We talked before about the joy of getting lost in a story—finding a character you want to follow around, creating a world that you want to live inside—but the flipside of that pleasure is the discomfort that can come from total confusion. Especially when you’re starting a new piece of writing, it can be intimidating: you’re making the map at the exact same time as you’re venturing into the territory.

Even people who’ve been writing for decades still have trouble finding their way into a new story, and getting over that initial angst about getting started. After a few drinks, most writers will confess that they never really learn how to write in general—they just figure out how to write this particular piece of writing, mostly by trial and painful error.

We’ll talk later about what to do if you get stuck in the middle of a piece of writing, but this feels like a different issue. When you’re at the beginning, everything is up for grabs—and that means that ground is likely to shift under your feet as you make (and unmake) decisions. You’re bound to keep changing your mind about your story’s characters and premise and setting, and the whole thing is going to feel rickety AF.

Especially during a time like right now—when nothing in the real world makes any damn sense, and the facts keep shifting every day—it can be really frustrating to work on a story that also doesn’t make sense and contains unstable information.

As far as I know, there’s no way to avoid that sense of confusion and doubt—but it’s possible to get used to it, and even comfortable with it. And even though this feeling isn’t as pleasant as falling in love with your characters and worlds, I really believe that being okay with some creative unsteadiness can help you to cope with being alive right now.

Mental gymnastics

In the intro to this essay collection, I talked about how when you write your own story, you get to control every aspect—and that’s true. But the truth is, writing is slippery, and control is often illusory. Your mind is a machine for rendering reality, but it’s full of bugs and glitches, and they tend to jank everything up.

When you try to create a story that makes sense (in a way that reality often doesn’t), you’re going to end up doing a lot of mental gymnastics—and like real gymnastics, they will help you become more flexible in general. Plus you might just get to glimpse the ways that your particular brain is a little wonky at turning blobs of information and sensory detail into a smooth narrative, which in turn can help you troubleshoot when the real world gets glitchy. (Is it your brain? Is it the outside world? Probably both. But it’s helpful to have some sense of the exact ratio of each.)

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You can figure out the ways you’re likely to screw up as a writer, and maybe screw up a little better.

Or to put it another way, when you write a story, you have to deal with a lot of uncertainty, which might just make you a little more able to deal with uncertainty in the real world. The hero of your story rides a flying motorcycle—no wait, the motorcycle can’t fly, because then she could just zoom over the top of that barricade. Also, maybe she doesn’t ride the motorcycle—maybe it’s her friend’s bike and she sits in a little sidecar. Or maybe the motorcycle is a unicycle? Also, what if she has a giant head and they don’t make a helmet that size? And so on.

Even when the facts of your story are set in stone and you have a detailed outline, there’s always the question of what to include and what to leave out, and how you’re going to launch this story into motion. It can be fun to screw around with different scenarios, but it can also be incredibly demoralizing to feel as though you can’t get any traction.

I often find the process of starting a new piece of creative writing goes like this:

1. Whee a whole new world—let’s find some cool image or idea to throw out there and see where it goes! So exciting much potential yayyyyy

2. Aaaaa what happened??? I’m stuck—why is everything going backward instead of forward? Where’s my laudanum I must retire to my daybed bring my fainting couch I hate this

3. Oh wait, what if I…This could work! This could…Ugh. No. This didn’t work.

4. These characters have been sitting and drinking tea for five pages and I’ve run out of ways to describe the flavor of lapsang souchong and nothing is happening send help!!!

When I was starting out and wrote dozens of short stories, I would try to get around this problem by introducing a conflict or central idea right in the opening sentence. Like, “The phoenix egg finally started to hatch, but my space cruiser was only three minutes away from blowing up.” Like doing a cannonball into the freezing water, sort of.

I found that the more of a situation I could cram into those opening words, the greater the sense of momentum I could create, that could carry me through the rest of the story. (And then I had to go and backfill motivation, backstory, worldbuilding, etc., as the intrepid hero was rushing to get the baby phoenix into an incubator, and off the exploding starship.) I still use that approach sometimes; it’s how my story “Six Months, Three Days” begins, for example.

But that’s just one workaround, and over time I found that it created some problems—like, sometimes the situation needs to build up more slowly, or be less clear-cut. And you might not want all of your stories to begin the exact same way. Plus of course, this doesn’t at all solve the problem of “oh, actually, the motorcycle doesn’t fly after all.”

And like I said, the long-term solution is to just get used to the assembling-an-IKEA-bookshelf wobbliness when you start something.

And I usually feel like that pain is worth it, because you end up with something that’s realer, or at least more interesting, than what you started out with.

You can never really control what your story is about, and that’s exciting as well as scary. You can keep getting deeper into your mythos or finding a better conflict than the one you thought you had. Like, that exploding-spaceship story could just be about saving the baby phoenix—or it could be about not feeling ready to become a parent to a magical space bird. Or maybe you realize that the baby phoenix actually wants to get blown up, so it can come back more powerful. Maybe the phoenix is carnivorous and wants to eat the main character. There are more ways this story could go than your bird has feathers.

This can be exhilarating as well as upsetting, if you can learn to revel in the mercurial wildness of your own storytelling.

Promises you make to the reader are also promises to yourself

So your brain is a faulty machine for rendering reality—but then you’re also creating something that might end up being loaded on other people’s faulty brains.

I find it really helpful to have an imaginary reader in my head as I write. This is not the same person as your “inner critic”—that voice that tells you everything you’re writing is garbage and you should quit now. Your inner critic is a manifestation of imposter syndrome, like we talked about last week. But your imaginary reader is picking up what you’re putting down. Sometimes literally.

Basically, your inner critic is a jerk whose negativity gets in the way of your process, but your inner reader is curious and delighted, and wants to know what’s coming next. You should tell your inner critic to go screw themself, but your inner reader can pull up a chair.

You can imagine surprising and delighting this non-existent other person with all the funny dialogue and startling turns of events you’re throwing into your story. Sometimes, it’s easier and more fun to tell a story, when you have a sense of who you’re telling the story to. Especially if you’re from a marginalized community, thinking of yourself as writing a story to, and for, other members of your community can keep you from worrying non-stop about what so-called “mainstream” readers will think.

Keeping an ideal reader in your mind helps you think about the promises you’re making in the text, in the form of hints, clues, dangling plot threads, foreshadowing, and so on. Like, if I mention in the third sentence of a story that the main character has a nemesis with a chainsaw neck, who tends to turn up at the worst possible moments, then it’s like a little post-it note reminding me a chainsaw-necked fiend ought to show up later in the story. (And they’re going to be in a really bad mood, because having a chainsaw for a neck tends to give you a nasty headache.)

And any promises you make to your reader are also promises that you’re making to yourself. Knowing that you left a shoe hovering in mid-air can motivate you to keep writing, because you have to get to the place where it drops.

Of course, you don’t have to share your writing with any real-life humans, unless you want to. But even if you’re the only person who ever reads your work, you can still have an imaginary reader in your head.

I only made it through writing All the Birds in the Sky by having a constant running dialogue with the reader in my head, who wanted to know what all this magic-and-science fuss was about. That weird question Patricia gets asked in the first chapter? Can’t forget about that. The supercomputer in Laurence’s bedroom closet? Probably gonna be something. In earlier drafts of the book, Laurence starts out by meeting some aliens who are operating out of a store called Jodhpurs & Jodhpurs, which only sells lentils and riding pants. And these aliens hint at huge secrets, which I figured I would pay off later. The riddle and the supercomputer stayed, but the alien shopkeepers had to go.

Even when my fiction was appearing in smaller markets and I wasn’t getting much feedback from real-life readers, I still kept an ideal reader in my head. I felt like I was in dialogue with this fake person. And as much as your characters can be your imaginary friends, I feel like the reader in your head can be one, too. And they can be a huge help when you’re in the trudging-through-squelchy-mud period of starting a new story.

The whole time I was working on All the Birds in the Sky, I felt like I was making a bargain with that inner reader—please hang with me while I throw in a bunch of witchy stuff and gadgets and assassins and other weird ideas, and in return I will keep this story focused tightly on these two characters and their relationship. For every wacky plot device, there will be a couple pages of emotional, personal, grounded stuff. I felt like that awareness of a potential reader helped keep me on track, because I felt like I was holding someone’s hand.

My own personal inner reader is kind of a cranky obnoxious weirdo who asks too many inappropriate questions, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to while I write.

So when I’m scrabbling for purchase on the edge of a brand-new piece of fiction, and I have no idea what I’m doing, I try to focus on the little details about the characters and the world, for clues about where things should go next. I pretend I’m the reader as well as the writer, and focus on what the text thus far is telling me. And sometimes I will throw out way too many promissory notes, like a drunken prospector at closing time, in the hope that some of them will spark something. Like the late, lamented Jodhpurs & Jodhpurs.

I feel like most of us have no idea what we’re doing most of the time, in life as well as in writing, but we’re supposed to pretend we do. That’s one reason for imposter syndrome, in fact. And for various reasons, it’s sometimes easier to keep up that pretense when you’re in the middle, or better yet the home stretch, of a story that’s holding together somewhat. Starting a new work of fiction is scary precisely because you’re at your most exposed—but you also have nothing to lose, in terms of this particular work at least.

Basically, writing is one of the few areas where getting lost and confused can be liberating as well as terrifying. “No clue” can also mean “no fucks given.”

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: Embrace Uncertainty: The Joy of Making a Giant Mess appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the second chapter, “Imposter Syndrome Is Just Part of Being a Writer”—you can read the introduction and Chapter 1 here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

 Chapter 2
Imposter Syndrome Is Just Part of Being a Writer

You can never know what your stories are worth.

When you put a story out in the world, you will never know who’s read it, or how many people, or what it’s meant to them. A single copy of a book can get passed around and shared and picked up, over and over again.

Nobody is ever going to come along with a magic wand and say “You’re a real writer now.” There are a million different definitions of writing success out there, and almost everyone feels like a failure sometimes. (Constantly, in my case.)

And we’re not really competing with other writers. The first thing people do when they finish reading a book they enjoyed is search for more books like that one. Your biggest competition is always the dreaded “reading slump,” when people just fall out of the habit of reading because they haven’t found the right book for them lately. Anything, or anyone, who gets people reading more is good for all of us.

Nevertheless, imposter syndrome is everywhere, and everyone has their own supposedly ironclad rules for writing—and if you let this stuff get you down, you’ll find it harder to write. And you definitely won’t be able to use writing to find liberation, or to see a better future, if you’re worrying about whether you’re “allowed” to do this, or whether your work matters.

But we can banish imposter syndrome, and the insecurity that lies behind it, by finding the communities of people who want to give each other props and encourage each other to make better dreams. And to take pleasure in whatever aspects of writing (and publishing) you can enjoy right now, even if that’s just knowing that you crafted one really kick-ass sentence today.

Imposter syndrome is forever

The bad news is, imposter syndrome never really goes away. But that’s also the good news. Apart from a handful of exceptions, everybody who’s writing and publishing and doing appearances is plagued by imposter syndrome.

As I’ve written before, imposter syndrome can be a sign that you’re doing well, because you always feel more insecure when you’re starting to get more recognition. It’s also a chance to stretch your imagination because you’re sort of playing make-believe until you actually believe you’re a writer, and to build empathy for other struggling writers. Being honest about imposter syndrome is a great way to connect with other people in the same boat.

But also, imposter syndrome is fundamentally a fear of not living up to the role of “author”—which is sort of a one-size-fits-all garment that doesn’t fit anybody perfectly. It’s bound to pinch in some areas, and poof out in others. It’s like any other professional identity. If you were a seismologist, you’d have people judging you on whether you wear the right kind of quake-proof shoes, and how well you know your subduction zones by heart. (I’m guessing.)

The main difference is, there’s a lot of mystique built up around writers, especially the notion of who gets to be a “real writer.” A lot of writers are overly invested in keeping the mystique alive—like, people are shy about talking about the financial and other support they received, that allowed them to do this. (Full disclosure: my parents supported me through college and gave me some help when I was starting out—so while I did have a full-time day job until recently, I did not have to pay off a mountain of student loans.)

Speaking of money… if you don’t get paid (or paid enough) for your writing, you might also get force-fed the idea that you’re not a real author. Whereas in fact, two seemingly opposite things are true:

1. Writers should get paid for their work.
2. Writers who don’t get paid are still real writers.

During my painful first decade of trying to be a writer, I mostly published my work in small-press publications, which paid a small amount (or, in some cases, paid in copies.) And for a while, I was just posting my stories on message boards, or taking part in group story-writing projects, where nobody got paid. Truth is, even if you achieve more financial success, a lot of the work that writers do is emotional labor, which never gets compensated.

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We all know that some of the most valuable work you can do is unpaid, and a lot of the work that you get paid for is worthless. I found that out firsthand when I temped in my early twenties, and was literally paid to “look busy” for days at a time. In one case, I was told to get my work done more slowly, and in another case I was paid to be a “receptionist” with a disconnected phone and a dead computer, because these finance workers wanted a receptionist but also wanted to answer their own phones.

So getting paid is essential—but it’s not what makes you a real writer.

When you peel back the layers of insecurity behind imposter syndrome, you start to find a lot of preconceptions about what an author should act like, sound like, or look like, which come out of all the class, race, gender and other stratifications in our society. I’ve literally had people tell me you can’t be a real author unless you have the right kind of expensive haircut. (And nah, my pink bob isn’t what they had in mind.)

There are plenty of social situations where you might feel like a fraud—but imposter syndrome is especially a problem if it keeps you from being able to write. Or keeps you from tackling the projects you really want to create, because you doubt your own capabilities. We’ll talk later about what to do when you hate your own writing in another essay, but for now just know that if there’s one thing that absolutely makes you a “real writer,” it’s having a bad writing day.

Seriously. I interviewed George R.R. Martin, and he bemoaned the days when he hates his writing and feels like his talent has deserted him.

If you ever string words together at all, you’re a real writer. I promise.

Screw the rules

Seriously. People will try to tell you “the rules” of writing, and it’s all nonsense. (And if you ever catch me saying anything that looks like a “rule” in these essays, you are cordially encouraged to smack me upside the head.)

You mustn’t write second-person narrators. You can’t include prologues, or maybe prologues are mandatory. No omniscient POV. You must write every single day—preferably at both dawn and dusk, while perched on top of the carcass of a freshly butchered Norwegian snow lynx. No adverbs! Every time you introduce a new character, you must give them a comical nickname, like “Batwing-Pants McDougal.” Only mention eyebrows when they are raised, or you will ruin foreheads for everyone.

And so on.

I get why people want to share their own writing rules—as I just mentioned, we’re all super insecure, and you never really know if anyone’s going to like a particular piece of writing. None of us have that much control over the things we care most about, so we cling to the illusion that we know some universal laws of authordom. Plus, when you find something that works for you, it’s natural to want to share it with everyone else, and to overcompensate by presenting it as more than just a suggestion.

But this is still another way that we internalize our anxieties, and then put them onto everyone else. And you shouldn’t ever feel like a fraud because you’re not following someone else’s rules.

Nobody ever wants to admit how confused we all are. To make matters worse, there’s a lot of intentional mystification around writing, to make a messy, clunky, trial-and-error process feel more like some kind of secret ritual that ensures success. When really, we’re all just stumbling around, and walking into walls over and over again.

Status nonsense

Imposter syndrome doesn’t come out of nowhere—it comes from real experiences of people trying to tell us that we don’t belong. Recently I asked people on Twitter about their worst experiences of imposter syndrome and feeling like they’re not “real writers”—and I was startled by all the stories I got back, of microaggressions and other weird behavior.

Unfortunately, speculative fiction is full of people trying to remind you of your place in some imaginary pecking order. Many years ago, I was overjoyed to get one of my stories into a small-press anthology, which also featured a few “big name” authors. At the launch party, I read my story, and one well-known author read his. Afterwards, that author, whom I’d met a few times before, came up to me and said, “Your story was much better than I expected it to be.” Then he paused and, as if wanting to make sure his message had gotten through, he leaned forward and said, “No, really. I didn’t expect it to be that good.”

Everyone has had experiences like that. And a certain amount of this weirdness can be ascribed to social awkwardness, but some of it is also due to an overinvestment in some idea of a star system, when really we’re all in one slightly leaky boat together.

The world is full of famous authors that you’ve never heard of. I’ve been running my own reading series for nearly two decades, and I’ve found over and over that someone who’s a “big name” in one genre or scene is a total unknown to readers and writers in an adjacent scene. And often, authors who have a strong community behind them are better off, in the long run, than ones who achieve some “mainstream” success.

We need to stop putting a handful of authors on pedestals, because it’s not healthy for anybody. Where there’s one author doing a cool new spin on post-modern ghost stories, there’s always a whole group of people doing that same thing and getting less attention.

This is all so much harder for science fiction and fantasy writers, because the outside world still views SF as an inferior, cheesetastic genre. That’s changing, but not quite fast enough. But then we turn around and impose genre snobbery on each other—like, some science fiction is “harder” than others, often for reasons unrelated to the science content of the story. Or science fiction is better than fantasy, for reasons. Or SF romance is less worthy of appreciation.

This is especially shitty when it leads to self-censorship—or worse, people getting creatively blocked because they don’t feel like they’re allowed to write the book they want to write.

Again, you never really know what a story is worth, or who will discover it and fall in love with it. Every writer is just throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks to the wall, and we all have hits and misses. Everyone remembers Frank Herbert’s Dune, but nobody is reading Destination: Void.

Find the people who support you

I came up with a hack years ago, for when I find myself talking to someone who wants to geek out about status, and who’s up and who’s down.

At the soonest polite moment, I try to interrupt and ask, “Hey, what book have you been enjoying lately?” And it never fails: the conversation turns to this incredible book that this person discovered, and how cool it is, and how it reminds them of five other awesome books.

Because we all love to geek out about books, even more than we love to try and treat this endless struggle to create and publish like some kind of March Madness bracket. (And as an aside, I really do think some of this obsession with status comes out of the fact that it’s fun to nerd out about stats and points, because we all love gaming.)

Even people who sometimes behave obnoxiously share that same love of speculative fiction, and that awareness that we’re a community of book-lovers—or really, a set of countless intersecting communities. And none of us can do our best work unless we’re all supporting and encouraging each other. So it’s important to find the people who appreciate you, and who want to pull you up with them when they’re doing well.

During that aforementioned decade of struggling in obscurity, I found out the hard way that having friends and colleagues and chosen family around was essential to my sanity as a writer. But also, that those people made writing more fun and helped me to dream bigger and weirder. Writing groups, online forums, open mics, and con-buddies weren’t just a lifeline, they were a source of inspiration and happiness.

Here’s the definition of “success” I came up with years ago, which I try to hold fast to: I consider myself successful if:

1. I get to work with people I like and admire, on projects that I am excited about, and
2. I get to keep writing and having people read my stuff.

I strongly encourage you to find a definition of success that actually makes you happy, rather than encouraging you to be miserable. And then stick to it, no matter what.

As I go on, the first half of that definition gets more important, not less. When I want to know if I’m doing well, I look around at the people around me, and see that they’re badass weirdos whose work keeps surprising and thrilling me. It sounds sappy, but we’re there for each other. And whatever you’re writing and however you do it, there are other people out there who will share your ideas, and your ideals. They will be a lifeline when imposter syndrome starts to get in the way of your creative flow.

I spent some time in L.A. recently, where there are actual famous people wandering around all over the place and it’s easy to get reminded that we’re all just book people. And there was a big tequila ad soaring over Hollywood that said “FAME IS FLEETING.” For a month or so the “E” was burned out, so it only said “FAM IS FLEETING”.

I remember looking up at it and saying, “Nah. Fam is forever.”

New installments will appear every Tuesday at noon EST.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: Imposter Syndrome Is Just Part of Being a Writer appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the first chapter, “How To Make Your Own Imaginary Friends”, which begins section 1, “Being a Writer Just Means You Know How To Get Lost.” New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Part I: Being a Writer Just Means You Know How To Get Lost

Chapter 1: How To Make Your Own Imaginary Friends

A huge part of the pleasure of creating stories is having another consciousness inside your head. As soon as you invent a fictional character (or even a story that represents a real person), you’re getting lost in that other perspective.

There’s something both weird and tyrannical about being a person and being stuck in just one point of view all the time. Everyone has that experience sometimes where you wake up from a vivid dream and for a moment you don’t remember where you are and what’s been going on. Everything from your skin outwards feels like a blank slate, with infinite possibilities, until reality comes smashing back down onto you.

But when you have other people living inside your head, it’s a way to have that same feeling when you’re fully awake.

I sort of think of it as being like when you have a hard drive, and you partition it—so instead of one drive, you have two, occupying the same piece of hardware. That’s kind of what it can be like, when you create a character and they come to life. They take over their own separate space inside your head.

Sometimes it’s just a relief to be someone else for a while. And whether your story takes place in another place and time, or in the here and now, you’re still cooking up a whole imaginary location that you can get lost in. And then there are plots, and themes, and backstories, and so on.

One time, when I was recovering from surgery, I binged an entire season of The Flash to distract myself, and it was a huge relief to obsess about Cisco and Iris and Wally instead of my own nasty bandages. I’ve definitely gotten lost in reading other people’s books, too. But getting immersed in my own writing project is the best way I’ve found to get out of my own reality.

Think of it as “hanging out with your imaginary friends.”

Get curious

So how do you find your way into that headspace of living vicariously through the fake people you’ve created?

To me, it often starts with becoming curious. I try to find a person, a place, or a set of events that I want to know more about—and the only way to find out more is to keep pulling on the threads and coming up with the answers myself, out of my own imagination. This is a process that reinforces itself, because the harder you pull at the loose threads, the more threads there are to pull at.

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The thing that makes you want to keep writing is the exact same thing that makes you want to keep reading—you want to see where this goes. You want to spend more time with these people and you want to understand what’s really going on behind the curtain. Even if you’ve planned out your story meticulously, you need to see how these events actually play out. (And as I mentioned previously, part of the joy of writing is being surprised.)

Often, when I’m creating a character, I try to find that loose thread. It could be a contradiction at the heart of their personality, which I want to resolve or understand. It could be one random detail about the character that I fixate on. Often, it’s the situation that the character finds themself in, or the conflict that they’re trying to resolve. And finding a way to root for this character (they’re the underdog! they want to right some wrong! they’re treated unfairly!) goes hand in hand with becoming curious about them.

As with all writing advice, your mileage may vary—but for me, it’s not about knowing every little thing about a character at the start. I don’t need to know their favorite brand of toothpaste, or what kind of socks they wear. I often layer in those little details as I write, or more likely as I revise. When I’m starting out, boring details make me bored, but I cling fervently to the aspects of a character that “pop” and bring up more questions. Like, if a character carries around a watch chain with no watch, or spits every time you mention Winston Churchill, or can’t resist getting drawn into magical duels, I want to know more.

Embrace change

In the meantime, I get more curious and engaged with a character who isn’t static. The sooner I can see this character going through changes, the better—because often, your characters are only as compelling as the changes they go through. There’s a reason why so many novels begin on the day when their protagonist’s life is altered forever, rather than starting out with everything on an even keel. When you’ve seen a character evolve once, you know they can do it again. And again.

I’m a big believer in superhero-style origin stories, even if they never appear in the final manuscript. What was the thing that made this character decide to do what they’re doing? Where does their power come from, and what challenges have they faced before?

When I was writing All the Birds in the Sky, I came up with origin stories for every single character in the story—even minor ones, like Kanot or Dorothea—and tried to see how they were different people in the past than they are now. (And I was inspired by the flashbacks in the TV show Lost, which always showed drastically different versions of the characters than their present-day selves.)

Here’s a writing exercise: Write down just one paragraph about something intense that happened to you in the past. Pretend you’re telling a friend about a situation that tested you, and upset you, and maybe also brought out some valor in you. And then think about the fact that you’re no longer the person who went through that mess—you’re almost writing about a different person. And by retelling that story, you’re both reliving and recontextualizing those events. And maybe try to fictionalize some of the details, and see how it becomes more and more about a different person.

The next thing you know, you’re turning yourself into a story. And you’re also spending a moment with the two different parts of yourself that come into play when you’re tormenting your characters.

There’s the you that’s standing outside the story and thinking of ways to make life miserable for these people, and then there’s the you that’s inhabiting them and going through their desperate struggle with them. These two parts of yourself aren’t really at odds, they’re both weaving a story together—and this actually makes you feel bigger, because you can contain them both. Bigger, and more alive, in a world that wants you to be small and half-dead.

And speaking of change and origin stories, there’s something incredibly compelling about a character who has major regrets. And when we watch someone do something unforgivable, we’re primed to root for them as they search desperately for an impossible forgiveness. I also live for a character who has unfinished business, something from their past that nags at them.

A good character usually has as much story behind them as ahead of them. We might only need to glimpse their past, but we should know that they’ve already been on the journey before the story even begins.

Think about what your character isn’t seeing

I love self-aware characters, and characters who comprehend a situation in ways that nobody else does. There’s something very satisfying about identifying with the only person who’s aware of a problem that everyone else ignores.

And yet, often the easiest characters to invest in are the ones who are blissfully (or excruciatingly) unaware of what’s going on around them. People who are in denial, or selectively oblivious. People who have been kept in the dark about some basic facts of their own lives. Especially when we can glimpse things out of the corner of our eyes that these characters fail to notice, it can create a kind of suspense—like in a horror movie, when you want to shout look behind you!—and fill you with a desperate urge to see this person wake up to reality.

When I was writing The City in the Middle of the Night, one of the ways that I got into Mouth’s POV was by putting her self-image at odds with her reality. Right off the bat, you learn that she thinks of herself as someone who loves constant travel—but the road gives her headaches and makes her miserable. She describes herself as a remorseless killer—but she agonizes non-stop about whether she should have killed Justin, the fence who betrayed her. She’s not the person she keeps telling herself she is, and that made me want to know more about her.

On a similar note, I’ve got all the time in the world for someone who’s having an identity crisis.

Pretty much every protagonist I’ve ever created has been struggling with the question of “Who am I?” Or, to put it another way, “What does this make me?” When a character is struggling with a huge choice, they’re really trying to figure out who they’ll become if they do this, versus that. How can they use whatever power they have wisely? How can they rise above the terrible circumstances that threaten to break them?

Meanwhile, to turn it around, I often find that when a character isn’t clicking, it’s because I’m avoiding the biggest pain points, because nobody likes to dwell on unpleasant things.

Why isn’t this character upset by the death of their mother? Why did this character never have a real reaction to their friend’s betrayal? Why isn’t anyone calling this person on their bad behavior? I sometimes instinctively flinch away from the most intense parts of a character’s story—and I’ve seen this in plenty of books I’ve read, too. When I realize my mind is sliding away from some aspect of a character, that’s usually where the really good stuff is.

Some more ideas for finding the perfect imaginary friend

1. Give your character a strong point of view. Make them funny, give them ironic observations about their situation, let them vent a healthy dose of snark. You’re going to want to spend time with whoever has the funniest lines and darkest insights, whether that person is the first-person narrator, third-person POV, or just someone we hear from. Master storyteller Eileen Gunn says that when a character isn’t clicking, she usually gets them to rant about something. Basically, do whatever you have to do to get this character’s voice in your head: write a fiery monologue, talk to yourself in the shower, have them livetweet their favorite TV show. Whatever. Doesn’t hurt if your character is a little bit of an obnoxious asshole. Or a lot of one.

2. Put your character at odds with their world. Similarly, there’s something immediately compelling about a character who disagrees with everyone else. In a world where everyone wears psychic snakes as belts, it’s more interesting to follow the one person who loathes snakes. Maybe your character is part of a whole community of outcasts, or maybe they’re a lone rebel—but it’s always easier to invest in someone who doesn’t entirely fit in, and who might see the injustices everyone else chooses to ignore.

3. Start with a type and then mess them up. Often, a good character starts off as an archetype that you’ve seen before in fiction (or in real life). But the more time you spend with them and the more different situations you put them in, the more they start to open up and show different layers that you might not have expected from the broad-brush characterization you originally gave them. This is really no different than how you get to know living, breathing people. You start with a label—”gamer,” “yuppie,” “crusty punk”—and then gradually you find out that there’s more to this person than their broad-brush category. The good thing about meeting characters as types first is that you can start them off loud and exaggerated—like a dashing rogue, or a cowardly spy—and let them make a strong impression. And then you can find the subtlety inside them later. (Sometimes they get deeper and more layered in revision, too. But we’ll talk about revision later.)

4. Start with an intense situation and then figure out who’s in it. Someone stole your shoes. Your mother got trapped in a collapsed railway tunnel. You finally got a shot at your dream job, but the interview was a disaster. If the situation is intense enough, you can be swept along by it, and then you can find your character by how they react to this mess they’re in.

5. Give your protagonist a goal they can never have. Make your characters sweat, right off the bat. We can all think of compelling fictional characters who don’t seem to want anything much—but as a general rule, we care about people who have strong goals. And there’s nothing better than a character who wants something that’s actually impossible, like staying young forever or winning the love of someone who’s totally unavailable. (Or see above, re: impossible forgiveness.)

6. Imagine an extreme action and then try to picture the person doing it. This sort of goes hand in hand with characters being at odds with their society, and also the thing about launching the story on the day that everything changes. Sometimes the best way to get into a character is to see them do something completely outrageous, something that nobody else would choose to do—and then find out why, and what the consequences are. What do you mean, you fed your psychic snake-belt to the great mongoose who lives in the forbidden zone? What kind of maniac are you?

We all contain multitudes

When I was in college, I took a year off and lived in China and Australia. I supported myself by teaching English in Beijing, and by working in warehouses in Sydney, and I found out that I was a very different person when I was standing in front of a classroom than when I was hauling boxes around. (And don’t get me started on that time that I nearly got stabbed by my tweaker roommate, who then sicced a biker gang on me. Long story.)

The point is, I got a really good sense of how different I could be, depending on where I was and what I was doing. And since then, I’ve had a few different careers and transitioned from male to female. At the same time, there’s a part of me that never changes, my core or whatever.

We all contain many wildly divergent versions of ourselves, which is part of why creating characters and making up stories is so exciting and fulfilling. It’s a way to discover new aspects of your own mind, and create personas that you get to inhabit for a period of time. And these figments of your imagination won’t just keep you company in the midst of an atrocity, they’ll also help you to strengthen your mind. You can gain courage from these made-up struggles against adversity, and also find out that there’s more to you than anyone ever realized.

When your characters take on a life of their own, they can help give you life. And maybe, in turn, you can put them out into the world, so they can give some life to everyone else. We all need an imaginary posse every now and then.

Part 1: Chapter 1 was previously published May 12, 2020. New installments will appear every Tuesday at noon EST.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

The post Never Say You Can’t Survive: How To Make Your Own Imaginary Friends appeared first on Reactor.

Below is the Introduction, followed by the first chapter, “How To Make Your Own Imaginary Friends”, which begins section 1, “Being a Writer Just Means You Know How To Get Lost.” New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

Introduction

Back in January 2017, I was scared out of my mind. I was having trouble sleeping and having panic attacks about the impending inauguration of our current president. I couldn’t concentrate on finishing the City in the Middle of the Night, my most recent novel, until I finally decided to channel all of my anxiety into a story about my fears as a trans person living through this “flaming walls of shit” era.

The resulting story, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” is a dystopian nightmare about a trans woman who gets captured by an evil NGO and forced to undergo a surreal, exaggerated “cure” for her transness. It’s horrifying and intense—and I’ve only read it aloud once, because I find it too painful to read out loud, and a number of other trans people have told me that they had to lie down after reading it.

But putting my fears into a story really helped me to deal with them, and I’ve heard from some cis people that this story helped them understand what trans people are dealing with, and then I could go back to working on City in the Middle of the Night, which also has a lot of themes around trauma and facing up to actual darkness.

It’s a few years later, but I’m still low-key terrified—even though I’ve kind of gotten used to it and found ways to compensate for it, like a chronic illness.

I know a lot of people who haven’t been able to keep writing these past few years. It’s hard to know what the point is of making up random stories when everything is messed up. Families are still being destroyed every day by institutionalized racism, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule on whether trans people deserve to have any rights at all, and women’s healthcare is slipping backwards. Many of us feel like our personhood is up for debate. It’s just hard to motivate yourself, or tear yourself away from the flood of awful news coming every day.

But for me, and for a lot of people I know, writing can be an act of survival. It gives us heart and purpose and clarity and the ability to keep going. Making up stories can be a healing process.

So I’m writing a series of essays called Never Say You Can’t Survive, all about how writing and making up stories can help you to survive a terrifying moment in history. (These essays came out of a talk that I gave at the Willamette Writers Conference and elsewhere. And their title is borrowed from the 1977 album of the same name by Curtis Mayfield, which is a piece of music that has given me so much strength and inspiration over the years.)

Stories of Darkness and Escapism

When I wrote “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue,” I was going to the darkest possible place I could go in a story, and putting my protagonist through the most dehumanizing treatment I could imagine. I needed to face up to the absolute worst that could happen, so I felt like I understood it a little better. I also needed to write about someone facing up to the most nightmarish scenario and still emerging in one piece, surviving, even though it’s a dark ending.

Writing a horrifying story on your own terms means that you can show how someone can survive, or even triumph. And meanwhile, you can cast a light on the injustice of oppressive systems. You can also choose the frame and eliminate some of the ambiguity in some situations, to make things more stark and more clear, or to make juxtapositions that illuminate how the problem started, and how it’ll be in the future.

When you’re telling the story, you get to draw all the lines.

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But you don’t have to put your darkest fears on paper to be able to use creative writing to survive. Just putting any kind of story together makes you a god in your own private universe and gives you control over a whole world inside your own mind, even when the outside world feels like it’s just a constant torrent of awfulness.

Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping myself together, these past few years, by writing a young adult trilogy full of action and space battles, and people talking about their feelings, and everyone being there for each other and supporting each other. This has been making me happy while the world has been burning down.

And escapism is resistance. People sometimes talk about escapist storytelling as a kind of dereliction of duty, as if we’re just running away from the fight. That’s some bullshit right there. In her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien thusly: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? …. If we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.”

So yeah, escapist fiction is about liberation, and imagining a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart. As Le Guin says, the most powerful thing you can do is imagine what if things could be different…What if?

It’s no accident that some of the most enduring and positive communities in the real world have come out of people sharing an escapist narrative. Star Trek, Harry Potter, Steven Universe, and countless other series have created great real-life fellowships. Happier, kinder worlds in fiction naturally lead people to want to band together to try and create pockets of that experience in our world. And there’s plenty of evidence that these fan communities feed directly into political organizing.

But that’s about how escapist fiction can be helpful for readers. Let’s get back to how it can be good for you, the writer.

People will always try to control you by constraining your sense of what’s possible in the world. They want to tell you that reality consists of only the things that they are willing to recognize, and anything else is foolishness.

But you can reject their false limitations in the act of conjuring your own world—and you can carve out a pocket of your mind that they cannot touch, in the act of worldbuilding. The more details you add to the backstory of your world, the realer it feels in your mind. And thus, the better refuge it can become, during hard times.

How getting better at writing can help you survive the worst

You never stop learning how to do better as a writer—even if you’ve published a bunch of books and “arrived” as an author, you’re still on a steep learning curve, for as long as you’re stringing words together. And this is excellent, because it means there’s always more to discover. Put another way, if writing was a house, there would always be new rooms to explore.

The essays in this series will be a mixture of encouragement, ideas for how to use writing to feel okay in a world that is not okay, and actual technical writing advice on stuff like characters, plotting, and worldbuilding. Creating your own world can give you a way to be somewhere else for a while, and your characters can provide you with a whole alternate consciousness. When you create a fictional person, you’re really making a whole other persona, or even an alternate self, and it’s like you get to live a whole other life.

And then there’s the fact that stories have a way of surprising you, which can be both delightful and freeing. For me, a good writing day is often one where something happens in my story that I never saw coming and didn’t plan on. When my characters take on a life of their own, or when I find pockets of my world that I never knew were there, it’s magical. Even as I’m learning new things about how to tell a story, I love to feel like I’m also learning more about my characters and world as I go. And speaking of which, research can also be an underrated fun part of writing, because you learn the weirdest facts—that you can then inflict on all your loved ones.

And sometimes the tiniest moments of personal connection can feel huge, as you’re writing them. I try to remember to luxuriate in the little personal moments, like when two characters haven’t seen each other in ages and they’re together again, and I have a chance to write a quiet emotional scene between them.

The act of finding a story that you want to tell can also be ridiculously fun, when it’s not making you want to tear your hair out. The moment when you get excited about a premise, and then start building out the world and the characters and getting excited to delve further, can be incredibly powerful.

A lot of fancy writing techniques are really, at their basis, ways for you to gain more control over this imaginary realm you’ve created with your mind. You get to control who’s telling the story, how close we are to your characters’ points of view, whether the story is past tense or present tense, and what details the reader pays attention to. Playing with the passage of time, speeding it up and slowing it down, can be a way to show the arc of history, and demonstrate that things that appear permanent really aren’t. Or to reveal the wealth of experience and sustenance that can exist within a single profound moment. All of these things make you more powerful as a storyteller, and in turn make the act of storytelling more healing for you.

Because you control every aspect of a story, you can use perspective and irony to expose the true awfulness of a situation—or to provide hope for another way. You can pull back and show the big picture, the long view, through narrative choices that reveal all the stuff that the main character isn’t seeing. You can provide context, through expansive narration.

And irony is amazingly powerful, because it works against groupthink and paranoia. Fear is about tunnel vision—and you don’t have to limit your perspective that way, when you’re the one controlling the focus.

That voice inside you that stands back and analyzes everything from a distance? It’s so often key to surviving in the midst of scary and depressing moments. You can give that voice its own place at the center of the narrative. I love a chatty, sarcastic first-person narrator—or, for that matter, a chatty, sarcastic third-person narrator.

There’s a reason so much of the most powerful writing from survivors of horrifying events contains surreal or unreal elements. People who have been through unthinkable ordeals often instinctively take refuge in weird, reality-warping scenarios, and you can totally make this work for you. Normality is bullshit, and surrealist weirdness is a direct assault on the bullshit fortress.

And then there’s just the power of telling stories about people who haven’t gotten to be the heroes of our stories in the past. If you’re a member of a marginalized or overlooked group, putting someone like yourself into a story can be incredibly powerful. Especially when you make them the hero, or a character who gets celebrated or understood. The past few years have shown us how powerful representation is, even as we all drown in hatred and bigotry.

The issue of representation in fiction is not just some academic question of fairness, it is a matter of survival. When the full diversity of people is represented in stories, it expands people’s sense of possibility. It’s wonderful how direct a line there is from representation in fiction to empowerment in the real world. And celebrating cultures that have been historically suppressed or downgraded is powerful act.

Writing is a solitary act—but it’s also a way to feel connected to the world, in a different way than spending 10 hours a day on social media. When you write, you always have an imaginary reader in your head, but you also get to be part of a community of writers, each reading each other’s work and building on each other’s ideas, and supporting each other through all the frustrations and setbacks.

And your stories, too, can be full of communities coming together and supporting each other (and occasionally being obnoxious as hell). Lately, whenever I talk about worldbuilding, I focus on how a good fictional world has strong communities—and I’m honestly tired of stories where there’s the protagonist and then there’s just a painted backdrop behind them, that’s just there for them to react against. We are shaped by our communities, for good and bad, and our communities define the worlds we belong to.

Community is going to save us in real life—and in fiction, stories about communities joining together are going to be a lifeline.

Honor what you’re feeling right now

Don’t let anybody tell you that your feelings aren’t valid or that you’re dealing with them the wrong way. If you’re depressed, don’t try to force yourself out of it—and don’t try to make yourself write something that you’re not feeling up to. Whether you feel like writing light and fluffy escapist stories, or dark and intense tales of suffering and angst, it’s all good. Whatever you are able to write in this tough time is self-evidently the right project for you.

If you’re angry, stay angry. Hold onto that anger. Anger is the best fuel for writing, emotion, plot, comedy, and everything else. Channel that energy into stories. Use your anger to create something so beautiful, people will cry all over the page.

And if you feel like writing erotica, write erotica. Make it dirty and obnoxious and queer and sweet and righteous, and build a fortress of horniness to protect you from this cold, ugly world.

Dive into endless worldbuilding, and create more and more elaborate systems and histories, if that makes you feel excited.

Don’t be afraid to be political in your writing, but don’t feel any obligation to champion any particular ideal or point of view. Politics is bound to show up, one way or another, and it’s important to be mindful about the politics of your story—but you don’t have to be political in the way that anyone else expects.

You don’t have to think of yourself as an activist—but anyone who imagines a different reality is helping everyone else to see our power to act, and to make changes. Imagination is always a form of resistance to domination and oppression, and we’ve all been saved by other people’s stories, one time or another. There’s a reason why politicians and organizers try to tell stories, to put a human face on their policies, and obsess about “controlling the narrative”—it’s because our world is built out of stories.

You might set out to write a story just to save yourself, which is a noble and worthwhile goal—but in the process, you might just end up helping to save other people, too. Your characters’ struggles can remind other people that no struggle is ever futile, and your “found family” of supporting characters can help readers to feel less alone. You can tell stories that span days or centuries, that travel vast distances or explore the secrets of a single location—and most of all, that contain startling discoveries and acts of generosity.

You have the power to shape worlds, and the monsters are scared of you.

Chapter 1
How To Make Your Own Imaginary Friends

A huge part of the pleasure of creating stories is having another consciousness inside your head. As soon as you invent a fictional character (or even a story that represents a real person), you’re getting lost in that other perspective.

There’s something both weird and tyrannical about being a person and being stuck in just one point of view all the time. Everyone has that experience sometimes where you wake up from a vivid dream and for a moment you don’t remember where you are and what’s been going on. Everything from your skin outwards feels like a blank slate, with infinite possibilities, until reality comes smashing back down onto you.

But when you have other people living inside your head, it’s a way to have that same feeling when you’re fully awake.

I sort of think of it as being like when you have a hard drive, and you partition it—so instead of one drive, you have two, occupying the same piece of hardware. That’s kind of what it can be like, when you create a character and they come to life. They take over their own separate space inside your head.

Sometimes it’s just a relief to be someone else for a while. And whether your story takes place in another place and time, or in the here and now, you’re still cooking up a whole imaginary location that you can get lost in. And then there are plots, and themes, and backstories, and so on.

One time, when I was recovering from surgery, I binged an entire season of The Flash to distract myself, and it was a huge relief to obsess about Cisco and Iris and Wally instead of my own nasty bandages. I’ve definitely gotten lost in reading other people’s books, too. But getting immersed in my own writing project is the best way I’ve found to get out of my own reality.

Think of it as “hanging out with your imaginary friends.”

Get curious

So how do you find your way into that headspace of living vicariously through the fake people you’ve created?

To me, it often starts with becoming curious. I try to find a person, a place, or a set of events that I want to know more about—and the only way to find out more is to keep pulling on the threads and coming up with the answers myself, out of my own imagination. This is a process that reinforces itself, because the harder you pull at the loose threads, the more threads there are to pull at.

The thing that makes you want to keep writing is the exact same thing that makes you want to keep reading—you want to see where this goes. You want to spend more time with these people and you want to understand what’s really going on behind the curtain. Even if you’ve planned out your story meticulously, you need to see how these events actually play out. (And as I mentioned previously, part of the joy of writing is being surprised.)

Often, when I’m creating a character, I try to find that loose thread. It could be a contradiction at the heart of their personality, which I want to resolve or understand. It could be one random detail about the character that I fixate on. Often, it’s the situation that the character finds themself in, or the conflict that they’re trying to resolve. And finding a way to root for this character (they’re the underdog! they want to right some wrong! they’re treated unfairly!) goes hand in hand with becoming curious about them.

As with all writing advice, your mileage may vary—but for me, it’s not about knowing every little thing about a character at the start. I don’t need to know their favorite brand of toothpaste, or what kind of socks they wear. I often layer in those little details as I write, or more likely as I revise. When I’m starting out, boring details make me bored, but I cling fervently to the aspects of a character that “pop” and bring up more questions. Like, if a character carries around a watch chain with no watch, or spits every time you mention Winston Churchill, or can’t resist getting drawn into magical duels, I want to know more.

Embrace change

In the meantime, I get more curious and engaged with a character who isn’t static. The sooner I can see this character going through changes, the better—because often, your characters are only as compelling as the changes they go through. There’s a reason why so many novels begin on the day when their protagonist’s life is altered forever, rather than starting out with everything on an even keel. When you’ve seen a character evolve once, you know they can do it again. And again.

I’m a big believer in superhero-style origin stories, even if they never appear in the final manuscript. What was the thing that made this character decide to do what they’re doing? Where does their power come from, and what challenges have they faced before?

When I was writing All the Birds in the Sky, I came up with origin stories for every single character in the story—even minor ones, like Kanot or Dorothea—and tried to see how they were different people in the past than they are now. (And I was inspired by the flashbacks in the TV show Lost, which always showed drastically different versions of the characters than their present-day selves.)

Here’s a writing exercise: Write down just one paragraph about something intense that happened to you in the past. Pretend you’re telling a friend about a situation that tested you, and upset you, and maybe also brought out some valor in you. And then think about the fact that you’re no longer the person who went through that mess—you’re almost writing about a different person. And by retelling that story, you’re both reliving and recontextualizing those events. And maybe try to fictionalize some of the details, and see how it becomes more and more about a different person.

The next thing you know, you’re turning yourself into a story. And you’re also spending a moment with the two different parts of yourself that come into play when you’re tormenting your characters.

There’s the you that’s standing outside the story and thinking of ways to make life miserable for these people, and then there’s the you that’s inhabiting them and going through their desperate struggle with them. These two parts of yourself aren’t really at odds, they’re both weaving a story together—and this actually makes you feel bigger, because you can contain them both. Bigger, and more alive, in a world that wants you to be small and half-dead.

And speaking of change and origin stories, there’s something incredibly compelling about a character who has major regrets. And when we watch someone do something unforgivable, we’re primed to root for them as they search desperately for an impossible forgiveness. I also live for a character who has unfinished business, something from their past that nags at them.

A good character usually has as much story behind them as ahead of them. We might only need to glimpse their past, but we should know that they’ve already been on the journey before the story even begins.

Think about what your character isn’t seeing

I love self-aware characters, and characters who comprehend a situation in ways that nobody else does. There’s something very satisfying about identifying with the only person who’s aware of a problem that everyone else ignores.

And yet, often the easiest characters to invest in are the ones who are blissfully (or excruciatingly) unaware of what’s going on around them. People who are in denial, or selectively oblivious. People who have been kept in the dark about some basic facts of their own lives. Especially when we can glimpse things out of the corner of our eyes that these characters fail to notice, it can create a kind of suspense—like in a horror movie, when you want to shout look behind you!—and fill you with a desperate urge to see this person wake up to reality.

When I was writing The City in the Middle of the Night, one of the ways that I got into Mouth’s POV was by putting her self-image at odds with her reality. Right off the bat, you learn that she thinks of herself as someone who loves constant travel—but the road gives her headaches and makes her miserable. She describes herself as a remorseless killer—but she agonizes non-stop about whether she should have killed Justin, the fence who betrayed her. She’s not the person she keeps telling herself she is, and that made me want to know more about her.

On a similar note, I’ve got all the time in the world for someone who’s having an identity crisis.

Pretty much every protagonist I’ve ever created has been struggling with the question of “Who am I?” Or, to put it another way, “What does this make me?” When a character is struggling with a huge choice, they’re really trying to figure out who they’ll become if they do this, versus that. How can they use whatever power they have wisely? How can they rise above the terrible circumstances that threaten to break them?

Meanwhile, to turn it around, I often find that when a character isn’t clicking, it’s because I’m avoiding the biggest pain points, because nobody likes to dwell on unpleasant things.

Why isn’t this character upset by the death of their mother? Why did this character never have a real reaction to their friend’s betrayal? Why isn’t anyone calling this person on their bad behavior? I sometimes instinctively flinch away from the most intense parts of a character’s story—and I’ve seen this in plenty of books I’ve read, too. When I realize my mind is sliding away from some aspect of a character, that’s usually where the really good stuff is.

Some more ideas for finding the perfect imaginary friend

1. Give your character a strong point of view. Make them funny, give them ironic observations about their situation, let them vent a healthy dose of snark. You’re going to want to spend time with whoever has the funniest lines and darkest insights, whether that person is the first-person narrator, third-person POV, or just someone we hear from. Master storyteller Eileen Gunn says that when a character isn’t clicking, she usually gets them to rant about something. Basically, do whatever you have to do to get this character’s voice in your head: write a fiery monologue, talk to yourself in the shower, have them livetweet their favorite TV show. Whatever. Doesn’t hurt if your character is a little bit of an obnoxious asshole. Or a lot of one.

2. Put your character at odds with their world. Similarly, there’s something immediately compelling about a character who disagrees with everyone else. In a world where everyone wears psychic snakes as belts, it’s more interesting to follow the one person who loathes snakes. Maybe your character is part of a whole community of outcasts, or maybe they’re a lone rebel—but it’s always easier to invest in someone who doesn’t entirely fit in, and who might see the injustices everyone else chooses to ignore.

3. Start with a type and then mess them up. Often, a good character starts off as an archetype that you’ve seen before in fiction (or in real life). But the more time you spend with them and the more different situations you put them in, the more they start to open up and show different layers that you might not have expected from the broad-brush characterization you originally gave them. This is really no different than how you get to know living, breathing people. You start with a label—”gamer,” “yuppie,” “crusty punk”—and then gradually you find out that there’s more to this person than their broad-brush category. The good thing about meeting characters as types first is that you can start them off loud and exaggerated—like a dashing rogue, or a cowardly spy—and let them make a strong impression. And then you can find the subtlety inside them later. (Sometimes they get deeper and more layered in revision, too. But we’ll talk about revision later.)

4. Start with an intense situation and then figure out who’s in it. Someone stole your shoes. Your mother got trapped in a collapsed railway tunnel. You finally got a shot at your dream job, but the interview was a disaster. If the situation is intense enough, you can be swept along by it, and then you can find your character by how they react to this mess they’re in.

5. Give your protagonist a goal they can never have. Make your characters sweat, right off the bat. We can all think of compelling fictional characters who don’t seem to want anything much—but as a general rule, we care about people who have strong goals. And there’s nothing better than a character who wants something that’s actually impossible, like staying young forever or winning the love of someone who’s totally unavailable. (Or see above, re: impossible forgiveness.)

6. Imagine an extreme action and then try to picture the person doing it. This sort of goes hand in hand with characters being at odds with their society, and also the thing about launching the story on the day that everything changes. Sometimes the best way to get into a character is to see them do something completely outrageous, something that nobody else would choose to do—and then find out why, and what the consequences are. What do you mean, you fed your psychic snake-belt to the great mongoose who lives in the forbidden zone? What kind of maniac are you?

We all contain multitudes

When I was in college, I took a year off and lived in China and Australia. I supported myself by teaching English in Beijing, and by working in warehouses in Sydney, and I found out that I was a very different person when I was standing in front of a classroom than when I was hauling boxes around. (And don’t get me started on that time that I nearly got stabbed by my tweaker roommate, who then sicced a biker gang on me. Long story.)

The point is, I got a really good sense of how different I could be, depending on where I was and what I was doing. And since then, I’ve had a few different careers and transitioned from male to female. At the same time, there’s a part of me that never changes, my core or whatever.

We all contain many wildly divergent versions of ourselves, which is part of why creating characters and making up stories is so exciting and fulfilling. It’s a way to discover new aspects of your own mind, and create personas that you get to inhabit for a period of time. And these figments of your imagination won’t just keep you company in the midst of an atrocity, they’ll also help you to strengthen your mind. You can gain courage from these made-up struggles against adversity, and also find out that there’s more to you than anyone ever realized.

When your characters take on a life of their own, they can help give you life. And maybe, in turn, you can put them out into the world, so they can give some life to everyone else. We all need an imaginary posse every now and then.

New installments will appear every Tuesday at noon EST.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

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But lately, I’ve been feeling like a lot of my science-fiction writing about the future is actually about the past. The past and the future are reflections of each other, after all. And what kind of future we build depends on what we learn from our past.

Take The City in the Middle of the Night, my novel that just came out in paperback. It takes place in the year 3209, on another planet that humans colonized centuries earlier. Yet, a lot of what’s going on in that book is actually a meditation on our history of settler colonialism, here on our own world. And also, one of the main themes of that book ended up being our relationship with history, and how we process (or fail to process) the collective traumas of the past.

***

The City in the Middle of the Night is about a shy girl named Sophie, who lives in a city where there’s permanent, unending darkness on one side of town, and blazing hot, unseeable sunlight on the other.

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The City in the Middle of the Night

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The City in the Middle of the Night

Buy this book from:

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Sophie is forced to venture into the frozen darkness, where she learns how to communicate with the creatures who live there. Because these creatures, the Gelet, have no eyes or ears, they don’t communicate using sounds or symbols. Instead, you can touch them and share their thoughts, including their memories of the past. And over the course of the book, Sophie comes to realize that humans are an invasive species on someone else’s world, and she learns to make sense of a culture that has a radically different relationship with history.

The colonialism strand in my story ended up being very important to me, because stories about first contact with extraterrestrials have always been a way for us to talk about encounters between peoples here on Earth, as long ago as War of the Worlds and as recently as Avatar. So I wanted to tell a story about colonization that dealt honestly with the toxic nature of invading other people’s homes, looting their heritage, and trying to erase their cultures. One theme that comes up a lot in this book is the question of who gets to be considered people? How do we decide whom to treat as an equal, and whom to make less-than?

I also came up with a complicated future history, in which seven powerful city-states on Earth have pooled their resources to send a mothership to a new world, including Calgary, Zagreb, Ulaanbaatar, and Khartoum. And there’s a whole complex backstory involving betrayal and attempted genocide during their journey through space.

And then there’s the fact that The City in the Middle of the Night takes place in a world where the sun never rises and sets, so people can’t track the passage of time just by looking up at the sky. This, in turn, makes it harder for people to know how long ago something happened, and messes with our very sense of history.

So, that book ended up being peppered with little meditations on our relationship with history. Like, “The only thing that never goes away is the past.” Or, “Humans are experts at remembering information but forgetting facts.” Sophie, my main character, is struggling to process her personal trauma, while also working to uncover the historical truth about what happened to her own ancestors on the long journey from Earth.

Those two kinds of trauma, personal and collective, are intertwined. And reconciling them is the only way that Sophie is able to find a way forward, for herself and for humanity.

I worked really hard to depict the different ways that people cope with trauma—and conversely, to avoid making it seem as if there’s one standard manner of processing traumatic memories. I talked to a lot of friends who were dealing with long-term trauma, and also read a stack of books, including The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which I highly recommend.

Sophie, my hero, starts referring to her episodes of re-experiencing her vicious mistreatment at the hands of the police as “memory panic.” While I was listening to various pundits sneer about people getting “triggered,” I was also having really tough conversations with my brave friends who were finding ways to keep going in the face of endlessly self-renewing post-traumatic stress and anxiety.

Thus The City in the Middle of the Night ended up being a book full of obnoxious ghosts. And the fact that the alien Gelet can share second-hand memories of long-distant memories just added to the theme of remembering and reconciling.

***

I’m not alone in using the future to talk about the past.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is a riff on Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Frank Herbert’s Dune is arguably about the impact of European interference in the Middle East. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars stories are really about the American frontier. There have been a host of books about people who are enslaved on board starships, including Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, and they’re always somewhat about our actual history of chattel slavery. Star Wars has a lot of World War II in it. Star Trek is Wagon Train crossed with Horatio Hornblower. And so on.

The trouble is, science fiction has always had a nasty tendency to idealize the past, and gloss over the worst aspects of our ugly history. A lot of science fiction authors who pride themselves on having a clear-eyed and unstinting view of future pitfalls and troubles are also the first people to romanticize the glories of bygone days. As I was revising The City in the Middle of the Night throughout 2017 and early 2018, during the endless battles involving Confederate statues and thugs in Nazi regalia, I couldn’t help thinking about our dysfunctional relationship with our own ancestors.

Science fiction has a lot of power when it comes to helping us cope with the future. SF can help us adjust to mind-blowing changes, like brand-new technologies but also social upheaval. Authors like Octavia Butler, Malka Older, and Doris Lessing have given us a road map for dealing with new and confusing circumstances. But I increasingly feel that one of the most valuable things science fiction can do is to help us come to terms with the past.

Because lately, it feels like our refusal to reckon with our own history is killing us.

For example, the reaction to The New York Times‘ 1619 Project was a mixture of bracing and horrifying, because many people absolutely do not want to reckon with the origins of our nation, and all the ways that slavery is woven into the fabric of all our institutions. So many people remain ignorant of the truth about the Civil War, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, and countless other stains on our legacy.

But I’ve also been noticing, here on Earth, that people often have a hard time knowing how long ago things happened. There are people in Europe who are still mad about something that happened in the twelfth century, and they talk about this incident as if it was just yesterday. And then there are people who like to pretend that certain recent events (like Jim Crow) are ancient history that happened in another geological era.

I don’t believe history literally repeats itself, but I do believe that history contains a set of things that tend to recur with greater or lesser frequency, like wars, economic crises, social failures, and so on. So being aware of history can help us to see when those common occurrences are re-occurring—and maybe even find ways to make the worst outcomes less likely.

Everyone I know is freaked out right now. The world is literally on fire, governments are veering towards authoritarianism, our ruling elites are looking more and more like organized crime bosses. I can’t titrate my anger—I either let out all of it or none of it—and that leaves me feeling exhausted and filtered to death. But our current nightmare only makes it more helpful to remember all the struggles we’ve already been through, and all the heroes who came before us. We have a fighting chance now because heroic activists refused to stop fighting back then. We need to be reminded of this fact, over and over again.

The great strength of science fiction is that it lets us take real-life stuff out of its context, to allow us to see it more clearly. For all its flaws, Avatar was an environmentalist parable that played to massive audiences who never would have gone to see An Inconvenient Truth. By setting a story on another planet, or in another era, we can make it safe for people to face up to some of the things that we’re in denial about. And you can ask big questions about human nature by eliminating some of the variables and sticking people inside a thought experiment that’s purer and bigger than any real-life psychology experiment.

But I think it’s especially valuable for SF authors to be aware of two slightly contradictory things.

First, even if you think you’re writing about the future, you’re probably really writing about the past, to some extent.

And second, humans are masters of denial, repression and rewriting the historical record to make ourselves look good, at any cost.

The second of those two things makes the first that much more important.

The failure mode of using the future to talk about the past, of course, is that you get something clumsy and preachy. The Roman Empire on another planet! Space Nazis! The Spanish Civil War, except now it’s the Spinach Civil War, fought between two different kinds of leafy greens… Just like anything else, historical commentary can be done well or badly. But as much as we don’t need butterfingered attempts to address our painful legacies, a thoughtful approach to conjuring the past in a story about the future is more useful than ever before.

And the best visions of the future don’t just hold up a mirror to the past and show how we got here. Instead, they help us to think about our heritage, good and bad, in a new way, and illuminate the choices that our ancestors made that still resonate now. Transposing the past into the present also allows you to take enough liberties to throw events into relief. But most of all, a story about the past, transposed into the future, can help us see the patterns of oppression that we’re constantly at risk of perpetuating and amplifying.

Poet and philosopher George Santayana famously insisted that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But I think we can shorten that sentiment for today’s short-attention-span era: “Those who forget history are doomed.”

Originally published in February 2019.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post To Write About the Future Is to Represent the Past appeared first on Reactor.

They woke up stuck together again, still halfway in a shared dream, as the city blared to life around them. The warm air tasted of yeast, from their bodies, and from the bakery downstairs.

Mouth lay on one side of Sophie, with Alyssa on the other, sprawled on top of a pile of blankets and quilted pads. Alyssa couldn’t get used to sleeping in a bedpile out in the open, after spending half her life in a nook—but Sophie insisted that’s how everybody did things here. Sophie herself hadn’t slept in a bedpile for ages, since she went away to school, but it was how she’d been raised.

“I guess it’s almost time to go,” Sophie whispered, with a reluctance that Alyssa could feel in her own core.

“Yeah,” Alyssa muttered. “Can’t keep putting it off.”

Sophie peeled her tendrils off Mouth and Alyssa carefully, so Alyssa felt as if she was waking up a second time. One moment, Alyssa had a second heart inside her heart, an extra stream of chatter running under the surface of her thoughts. And then it was gone, and Alyssa was just one person again. Like the room got colder, even though the shutters were opening to let in the half-light.

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Alyssa let out a low involuntary groan. Her bones creaked, and her right arm had gone half-numb from being slept on.

“You don’t have to,” Sophie whispered. “If you don’t…if you’d rather hold off.”

Alyssa didn’t answer, because she didn’t know what to say.

Mouth laughed. “You know Alyssa. Her mind don’t change.” Mouth’s voice was light, but with a faint growl, like she wished Alyssa would change her mind, and stay.

The tendrils grew out of the flat of Sophie’s ribcage, above her breasts, and they were surrounded by an oval of slightly darker skin, with a reddish tint, like a burn that hadn’t healed all the way (just a few inches upward and to the left, Sophie’s shoulder had an actual burn-scar). Someone might mistake the tendrils for strange ornaments, or a family of separate creatures nesting on Sophie’s flesh, until you saw how they grew out of her, and the way she controlled their motion.

Whenever Alyssa’s bare skin made contact with that part of Sophie’s body, she could experience Sophie’s thoughts, or her memories. Whatever Sophie wanted to lay open to her. But when the three of them slept in this pile, Sophie didn’t share anything in particular. Just dream slices, or half-thoughts. Mouth still couldn’t open herself up to the full communication with Sophie most of the time, but she’d taken to the sleep-sharing.

All three of them had their own brand of terrifying dreams, but they’d gotten better at soothing each other through the worst.

“So that’s it.” Mouth was already pulling on her linen shift and coarse muslin pants, and groping for her poncho. “You’re going up that mountain, and the next time we see you, you’ll…you’ll be like Sophie. The two of you will be able to carry on whole conversations, without once making a sound.”

Mouth looked away, but not before Alyssa caught sight of the anxiety on her face. Alyssa could remember when she used to have to guess at what the fuck Mouth was thinking, but that was a long time ago.

Sophie noticed, too, and she sat up, still in her nightclothes. “You don’t ever have to worry about a thing.” Sophie’s voice was so quiet, Alyssa had to lean closer to hear. “No matter what happens, after all we’ve been through, the three of us are in this together.”

“Yeah,” Alyssa said, punching Mouth’s arm with only a couple knuckles. “No amount of alien grafts are going to mess up our situation.”

“Yeah, I know, I know, it’s just…” Mouth laughed and shook her head, like this was a silly thing to worry about. “It’s just, the two of you will have this whole other language. I’ll be able to listen, but not talk. I wish I could go through that whole transformation, but that’s not me. I need to keep what’s in my head inside my head. I just…I want you both to fulfill your potential. I don’t want to be holding the two of you back.”

Alyssa leaned her head on Mouth’s left shoulder, and Sophie’s head rested on the right. “You speak to us in all the ways that matter,” Sophie said.

“It’s true,” Alyssa said. “You already tell us everything we ever need to know.”

Alyssa had grown up with romances, all about princes, duels, secret meetings, courtships, first kisses, and last trysts. She’d have said that real life could never be half as romantic as all those doomed lovers and secret vows…except now, those stories seemed cheap and flimsy, compared to the love she’d found, here in this tiny room.

For a moment, Alyssa wanted to call the whole thing off. Climb the Old Mother later, maybe just go back to bed. But then she shook it off.

She pulled on her boots.

“It’s time.”

Alyssa had handled all kinds of rough terrain in her smuggler days. She’d even gone into the night without any protective gear one time. So she figured the Old Mother would be nothing. But by the time she got halfway up, her hamstrings started to throb and her thighs were spasming. Next to her, Mouth spat out little grunts of exhaustion. Only Sophie seemed to be enjoying pulling herself up from handhold to handhold.

“Shit shit shit. How the fuck did you ever get used to climbing this beast?” Alyssa wheezed.

Sophie just rolled her shoulders. And mumbled, “It wasn’t a choice at first.”

Behind them, Xiosphant had gone dark and still, just a valley of craggy shapes without highlights. Except for one light blaring from the top of the Palace, where the Vice Regent could never bring herself to obey the same shutters-up rule that all of her people lived by. Alyssa didn’t want to risk falling, so she only half-turned for an instant, to see the storm damage, still unrepaired. And the piles of debris, where the fighting between the Vice Regent’s forces and the new Uprising had briefly escalated to heavy cannon fire.

Everyone knew Bianca couldn’t last as Vice Regent, but they had no notion whether she would hold on for a few more sleeps, or half a lifetime. Alyssa tried to avoid mentioning her name, even though her face was impossible to avoid, because Sophie still nursed some complicated regrets, and Mouth still felt guilty for helping to lead Bianca down a thorny path. Alyssa was the only one in their little family with clear-cut feelings about the Vice Regent: pure, invigorating hatred.

Alyssa wanted to stop and rest mid-climb, but the cruel slope of the Old Mother included no convenient resting places, especially for three people. And it would be a shitty irony if they almost reached the top, but slipped and fell to their deaths because they wanted to take a breather. The air felt colder and thinner, and Alyssa’s hard-won aplomb was being severely tested.

“My fingers are bleeding,” Mouth groaned. “Why didn’t you mention our fingers would bleed?”

Sophie didn’t answer.

They reached the top, which also formed the outer boundary of nothing. Ahead of Alyssa were no sights, no smells (because her nose got numb) and no sensations (because her skin was wrapped in every warm thing she could find). No sound but a crashing wind, which turned into subtle terrible music after a while.

Alyssa’s mother and uncles had sent her off to the Absolutists’ grammar school back home in Argelo, when she was old enough to walk and read. That was her earliest distinct memory: her mom holding one of her hands and her uncle Grant holding the other, marching her down around the bend in the gravel back road to the front gate where the school convened at regular intervals. That moment rushed back into her head now, as Sophie and Mouth fussed over her and prepared to send her away to another kind of school.

Mouth was pressing a satchel into Alyssa’s hands. “I got as many of those parallelogram cakes as I could fit into a bag. Plus these salt buns, that taste kind of like cactus-pork crisps. And there are a few of your favorite romances tucked in, too.”

“Thank you.” Alyssa wrapped her arms around Mouth’s neck. She couldn’t tell if her eyes stung due to tears or the wind, or both. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t let Sophie take any more foolish risks.”

“I’ll do my best,” Mouth said. “Say hi to the Gelet from me. And tell them…” She paused. “You know what? Just ‘hi’ is plenty.”

Then Sophie was hugging Alyssa. “I can’t get over how brave you are. You’re the first person ever to visit this city, knowing exactly what’s going to happen.”

“Oh shut up.” Alyssa was definitely starting to cry.

“I mean it. Your example is going to inspire a lot more people to go there. I think Mustache Bob is close to being ready.” Sophie choked on the mountain air. “Come back safe. We need you. I love you.”

“I love you too. Both of you.” Alyssa started to say something else, but a massive, dark shell was rising out of the darkness on the far side of the mountain. “Shit. I need to go.”

Alyssa let go of Sophie, clutching the satchel, and gave Mouth one last smile, then turned to face the writhing tentacles of the nearest Gelet. These two slippery ropes of flesh groped the air, reaching out to her.

As soon as they swathed Alyssa in woven moss and lifted her in their tentacles, she freaked out. She couldn’t move, couldn’t escape, couldn’t even breathe. Her inner ear could not truck with this rapid descent down a sheer cliff, and somehow she wasn’t ready for this disorientation, even though she’d talked through it with Sophie over and over. Alyssa wanted to yell that she’d changed her mind, this was a mistake, she wanted to go back to her family. But the Gelet would never understand, even if she could make herself heard.

She kept going down and down. Alyssa tried to tell herself this was just like being inside the Resourceful Couriers’ sleep nook next to Mouth, except that she was alone, and she couldn’t just pop out if she wanted to pee or stretch or anything. She held herself rigid as long as she could, and then she snapped—she thrashed and screamed, twisting her body until her spine wrenched.

A random memory popped up in Alyssa’s head: huddling with the other Chancers in the hot gloom of a low-ceilinged basement on the day side of Argelo, after the Widehome job had gone flipside. (Because they’d burned down the wrong part of the building.) Lucas had squatted next to Alyssa, listing chemical formulas in a low voice, his usual anxiety strategy, and Wendy had fidgeted without making any sound. Every bump and croak above their heads instantly became, in Alyssa’s mind, the Jamersons coming to murder them for what they’d done. This was the most terrified Alyssa had ever been, or probably ever would be, but also the closest she’d ever felt to anybody. These people were her indivisible comrades, any of them would die for the others, they were safe together in horrible danger.

Alyssa would always look back on that time in her life as the ideal, the best, the moment when she had a hope-to-die crew by her side, even though she could see all the flaws and the tiny betrayals. Honestly, she’d had way better friend groups since then, including the Resourceful Couriers, but that didn’t change how she felt.

Alyssa did not do well with helplessness, or chains, or trusting random strangers. But wasn’t that the whole point of this leap into darkness? Alyssa would get this mostly untested surgery, and then she would be able to share unfalsifiable information, and have massively expanded threat awareness thanks to the alien sensory organs. Sometimes you have to be more vulnerable in the short term, so that you can become more formidable later.

They must’ve reached the foot of the Old Mother without Alyssa noticing, what with all the turbulence. She had a sensation of moving forward, rather than downward, and her position in the web of tentacles shifted somewhat as well, and then at last they came to a stop and the Gelet unwrapped her tenderly. She landed on her feet inside a dark tunnel that sloped downward. This was almost scarier than the aftermath of the Widehome job, or at least it was scary in a different way.

They led her down the tunnel, patient with all her stumbles. She couldn’t see shit, but at least she was moving under her own power.

Alyssa kept reminding herself of what Sophie had said: she was the first human ever to visit the Gelet city, knowing what awaited her there. She was a pioneer.

The air grew warm enough for Alyssa to remove some of the layers of moss, and there were faint glimmers of light up ahead, so she must be entering the Gelet city proper. They needed to find a better name for it than “the midnight city.” Something catchy and alluring, something to make this place a destination.

“I’m the first human to come down here with my eyes open, knowing what awaits,” Alyssa said, loud enough to echo through the tunnel.

“Actually,” a voice replied from the darkness ahead of her. “You’re not. You’re the second, which is almost as good. Right?”

His name was Jeremy, and he had worked with Sophie at that fancy coffee place, the Illyrian Parlour. Ginger hair, fair skin, nervous hands, soft voice. He’d been in the Gelet city a while already, maybe a few turns of the Xiosphanti shutters, but they hadn’t done anything to alter him yet. “I can show you around, though I don’t know the city very well, because large areas of it are totally dark.” He sounded as though he must be smiling.

“Thanks,” Alyssa said. “Appreciate any and all local knowledge.”

Jeremy kept dropping information about himself, as if he didn’t care at all about covering his tracks. He’d been part of the ruling elite in Xiosphant, studying at one of those fancy schools, until he’d fallen in love with a person of the wrong gender. Fucking homophobic Xiosphanti.

So he’d gone underground, slinging coffee to stressed-out working people, and that had been his first real encounter with anyone whose feet actually touched the ground, instead of walking on a fluffy cloud of privilege.

The Gelet had cleared a room, somewhere in the bowels of their unseeable city, for human visitors, with meager lighting, and some packs of food that had come straight from the Mothership. Alyssa and Jeremy opened three food packs and traded back and forth, sharing the weird foods of their distant ancestors: candies, jerky, sandwiches, some kind of sweet viscous liquid.

They bonded over sharing ancient foods, saying things like: “Try this one, it’s kind of amazing.”

Or: “I’m not sure this stuff has any nutritional value, but at least the aftertaste is better than the taste.”

Alyssa chewed in silence and half-darkness for a while, then the pieces fell into place. “Oh,” she said to Jeremy. “I just figured out who you are. You’re the guy who tried to get Sophie to use her new abilities as a propaganda tool against the Vice Regent. She told us about you.”

“I know who you are, too.” Jeremy leaned forward, so his face took on more substance. “You’re one of the foreign interlopers who helped the Vice Regent to take power in Xiosphant. You stood at Bianca’s right hand, until she had one of her paranoid episodes. We have you to thank for our latest misery.”

Alyssa couldn’t believe she’d shared food with this man, just a short time ago.

“I’m going to go for a walk.” Once she’d said this out loud, Alyssa was committed, even though it meant getting to her feet and walking out into a dark maze that included the occasional nearly bottomless ravine. At least the Gelet would keep an eye on her.

Probably.

Alyssa tried to walk as if she knew where she was going, as if she felt totally confident that the next step wouldn’t take her into a wall or off the edge. She swung her arms and strode forward and tried not to revisit the whole ugly history of regime change in Xiosphant, and her part in it. She had trusted the wrong person, that was all.

What was Alyssa even doing here? All she wanted was to bury her past deeper than the lowest level of this city, but soon she would have the ability to share all her memories with random strangers. And she knew from talking to Sophie that it was easy to share way more than you bargained for—especially at first.

Alyssa might just reach out to someone for an innocent conversation, and end up unloading the pristine memory of the moment when she’d pledged her loyalty to a sociopath. The moment when Alyssa had believed that she’d found the thing she’d searched for since the Chancers fell apart, and that she would never feel hopeless again. Or Alyssa might share an image of the aftermath: herself wading through fresh blood, inside the glitzy walls of the Xiosphanti Palace.

“This was a mistake,” Alyssa said to the darkness. “I need to go home. Sophie will understand. Mouth will be relieved. I should never have come here. When they offer to change me, I’ll just say no, I’ll make them understand. And then they’ll have to send me home.”

She almost expected Jeremy to answer, but he was nowhere near. She’d wandered a long way from their quarters, and there was no sound but the grumbling of old machines, and the scritching of the Gelet’s forelegs as they moved around her.

“I’m not sure I can go through with this,” Alyssa told Jeremy, when she’d somehow groped her way back to the living quarters. “I can’t stand the idea of inflicting my past on anyone else.”

“I’m definitely going ahead with it,” Jeremy replied after a while. “When Sophie showed me what she could do, I couldn’t even believe what a great organizing tool this could be. This is going to transform the new Uprising, because people will be able to see the truth for themselves, without any doubt or distortion.”

Alyssa had wanted to avoid Jeremy, or shut out his self-righteous nattering. But they were the only two humans for thousands of kilometers, and she couldn’t go too long without another human voice, as it turned out.

“So you’re about to become one of the first members of a whole new species,” Alyssa said, “and you’re just going to use it as a recruiting tool for another regime change? So you can take power, and then someone else can turn around and overthrow you in turn? Seems like kind of a waste.”

“At least I’m not—” Jeremy barked. Then he took a slow breath and shifted. His silhouette looked as if he was hugging himself. “It’s not just about unseating your friend Bianca. It’s not. It’s about building a movement. I spent so much time in that coffeehouse, listening to people who could barely even give voice to all the ways they were struggling. We need a new kind of politics.”

“Bianca’s not my friend. I hate her too, in ways that you could never understand.” Alyssa found more of the rectangular flat candy and ate a chunk. “But if enough people become hybrids, and learn to share the way Sophie shares, we could have something better than just more politics. We could have a new community. We could share resources as well as thoughts. We could work with the Gelet.”

“Sure, sure,” Jeremy said. “Maybe eventually.”

“Not eventually,” Alyssa said. “Soon.”

“What makes you think a lot of people will buy into that vision, if you’re not even willing to go through with it yourself?”

Alyssa groaned. “Look. I’m just saying…You have to be doing this for the right reasons, or it’ll end really badly. You’ll lose yourself. I saw it again and again, back in Argelo, people burning up everything they were just for the sake of allegiances or ideology or whatever.”

They didn’t talk for a while, but then they went back to arguing. There wasn’t anything else to do, and besides, by the sound of it, Jeremy had been a good friend to Sophie, back when she’d really needed someone. So Alyssa didn’t want him to wreck his psyche, or his heart, or whatever, by turning his memories into propaganda.

“I can be careful.” Jeremy sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. “I can share only the memories and thoughts that will make people want to mobilize. I can keep everything else to myself.”

“Maybe,” was all Alyssa said.

These Xiosphanti believed in the power of repression, way more than was healthy. Or realistic.

“I wish we could ask the Gelet.” Jeremy was doing some kind of stretches in the darkness. “It’s a terrible paradox: you can only have a conversation with them about the pros and cons of becoming a hybrid, after you’ve already become a hybrid.”

Alyssa went for another walk in the chittering dark—she shrieked with terror, but only inside her own head—and when she got back, Jeremy said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m going to regret this. Maybe I should stick to organizing people the old-fashioned way, winning their trust slowly. I don’t know. I’m out of options.”

Alyssa was startled to realize that while she’d been trying to talk Jeremy out of becoming a hybrid, she’d talked herself back into it. She needed to believe: in Sophie, in this higher communion. Alyssa kept dwelling on that memory of cowering in a hot basement with the other Chancers, and pictured herself sharing it with Sophie, or Mouth, or anyone. What would happen to that moment when it was no longer hers alone? She wanted to find out.

The Gelet surrounded Alyssa with their chitinous bodies and opened their twin-bladed pincers, until she leaned forward and nuzzled the slick tubes, the slightly larger cousins of the tendrils growing out of Sophie’s chest.

An oily, pungent aroma overwhelmed Alyssa for a moment, and then she was experiencing the world as the Gelet saw it. This Gelet showed her a sense-impression of a human, being torn open to make room for a mass of alien flesh that latched onto her heart, her lungs, her bowels. Alyssa couldn’t keep from flinching so hard that she broke the connection.

But when they offered her a choice between the operating room and safe passage home, Alyssa didn’t even hesitate before peeling off her clothes.

Alyssa had always said that pain was no big thing—like the worst part of pain was just the monotony of a single sensation that overstayed its welcome. But she’d never felt agony like this, not even on all the occasions when she’d been shot or stabbed or shackled inside a dungeon. Sophie had made this operation sound unpleasant, pretty awful, a nasty shock. But Alyssa started screaming cursewords in two languages before she was even half-awake, after surgery.

The pain didn’t get any better, and the Gelet were super-cautious with their hoarded sedatives, and Alyssa was sure something had gone wrong, perhaps fatally. All she could do was try her best to shut out the world. But…she couldn’t.

Because, even with her eyes closed and her ears covered, she could sense the walls of the chamber where the Gelet had brought her to rest, and she could “feel” the Gelet creeping around her, and in the passageways nearby. Her brand new tentacles insisted on bombarding her with sensations that her mind didn’t know how to process. Alyssa had thought of Sophie’s small tentacles as providing her with “enhanced threat awareness,” but this was just too much world to deal with.

Alyssa screamed until her throat got sore. Even her teeth hurt from gnashing.

She looked down at herself. The top part of her chest was covered with all of these dark wriggling growths coated with fresh slime, like parasites. Like a mutilation. Before Alyssa even knew what she was doing, she had grabbed two handfuls of tendrils, and she was trying to yank them out of her body with all her strength.

Alyssa might as well have tried to cut off her own hand—the pain flared, more than she could endure. Searing, wrenching. Like being on fire and gutshot, at the same time. And even though her eyes told her that there were foreign objects attached to her chest, her skin (her mind?) told her these were part of her body, and she was attacking herself. She nearly passed out again from the pain of her own self-assault.

The Gelet rushed over, three of them, and now Alyssa could sense their panic even without any physical contact. Her new tentacles could pick up their emotional states, with more accuracy than being able to see facial expressions or body language, and these Gelet were very extremely freaked out. Two of them set about trying to stabilize Alyssa and undo the damage she’d just caused to her delicate grafts, while the third leaned over her.

Alyssa looked up with both her old and her new senses. A big blunt head descended toward her, with a huge claw opening to reveal more of those slimy strips of flesh, and Alyssa felt a mixture of disgust and warmth. She didn’t know what she felt anymore, because her reactions were tainted by the sensory input from her tentacles. The Gelet leaning toward her gave off waves of tenderness and concern—but also annoyance and fear—and this was all too much to process.

“I would very much like not to feel any of what I’m feeling,” Alyssa said.

Then the Gelet closest to her made contact with her tendrils, and Alyssa had the familiar sensation of falling out of herself, that she’d gotten from Sophie so many times now. And then—

—Sophie was standing right in front of Alyssa, close enough for Alyssa to look into her eyes.

“What are you doing? How are you here?” Alyssa asked Sophie, before she bit her tongue. Because of course, Sophie wasn’t present at all. This was a memory or something.

Sophie was looking at herself, with her tendrils as fresh as the ones Alyssa had just tried to rip out of herself, and she was reaching out with her tentacles to “feel” the space around her, and Alyssa was doubly aware of Sophie’s happiness, thanks to her facial expression and all the chemicals she was giving off. At last, Sophie seemed to be saying. Thank you, at long last my head can be an estuary instead of just this reservoir.

Alyssa wanted to reach out for Sophie, but Alyssa wasn’t even herself in this memory. Alyssa was a Gelet, with a huge lumbering body under a thick shell and woolly fur, with a heart full of relief that this operation might be working better than anyone dared hope—

—Alyssa came back to herself, and looked at the Gelet leaning over her. The disgust was gone, and she “saw” every flex of the segmented legs and every twitch of the big shapeless head, as if they were the tiny habits of a distant family member.

“I’m sorry,” Alyssa said, hoping they understood somehow. “I didn’t mean to do that, it was just instinct. I hope I didn’t ruin everything. I do want to understand all of you, and go home to Sophie as her equal. I really didn’t want to, I’m sorry—I didn’t want to, it just happened. I’m sorry.”

Maybe if her tendrils weren’t damaged beyond repair, she’d be able to tell them in a way they understood. As it was, they seemed satisfied that she wasn’t going to try and tear herself apart again, and that they’d done everything they could to stabilize her.

Alyssa lay there cursing herself and hoping and worrying and freaking out, until she heard shrieks echoing from the next room. Jeremy. He’d gotten the procedure too, and he’d just woken up, with the same agony and loathing that had struck Alyssa. She wished she could think of something to say to talk him down. Or at least they could be miserable together, if she could talk to him.

This operation was supposed to help Alyssa to form connections, but she was more alone than ever.

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The pain ground on and on. Alyssa would never get used to these stabbing, burning, throbbing sensations. Alyssa couldn’t tell how much of this discomfort was from the operation, and how much was because she’d attacked herself when she was still healing.

Alyssa rested on a hammock of moss and roots until she got bored and the pain had lessened enough for her to move around, and then she started exploring the city again. This time, she could sense the walkways and all the galleries, all the way down into the depths of the city, and she was aware of the Gelet moving all around her. She started to be able to tell them apart, and read their moods, and all their little gestures and twitches and flexing tentacles began to seem more like mannerisms.

One Gelet, in particular, seemed to have been given the task of watching over Alyssa, and she had a loping stride and a friendly, nurturing “scent.” (Alyssa couldn’t think of the right word to describe the way she could tell the Gelet’s emotions from the chemicals they gave off, but “scent” would do for now.) This Gelet stayed close enough to Alyssa to provide any help she needed, and Alyssa found her presence reassuring, rather than spooky.

Alyssa’s new friend had survived the noxious blight that had killed a lot of her siblings in the weave where all the Gelet babies grew. (But she was still a little smaller than all the older Gelet.) When she was brand new, the other Gelet had made a wish for her that boiled down to “Find reasons for hope, even in the midst of death.”

That thought reminded Alyssa of a nagging regret: she and Sophie still hadn’t succeeded in helping Mouth to figure out a new name, mostly because Mouth was impossible to please.

And this Gelet, whom Alyssa started calling Hope, had devoted most of her life so far to studying the high wind currents, the jetstreams that moved air from day to night and back again. Hope’s mind was full of designs for flying machines, to let people examine the upper atmosphere up close, and find a way to keep the toxic clouds away from the Gelet city. But Alyssa’s communication with Hope still only went one way. Her new grafts, the tendrils she’d tried to rip out, still hurt worse than daylight. She tried to shield them with her entire body, as if exposure to air would ruin them further.

What if they never worked right?

What if she could never use them to communicate, without feeling as if hot needles were poking in between her first few ribs?

That moment when she’d grabbed with both hands, tearing at her new skin, kept replaying in Alyssa’s head, and she wanted to curse herself. Weak, untrustworthy, doomed—she cringed each time.

Hope kept offering her own open pincer and warm tendrils, which always contained some soothing memory of playing a friendly game with some other Gelet, or receiving a blessing from the Gelet’s long-dead leader, in some dream-gathering. Alyssa kept wishing she could talk back, explain, maybe learn to become more than just a raw mass of anxiety with nothing to say.

At last, Alyssa decided to take the risk.

She raised her still-sore tendrils to meet Hope’s, and tried to figure out how to send, instead of receive. Alyssa brought the awful memory to the front of her mind: her hands, grasping and pulling, so vivid, it was almost happening once again. She felt it flood out of her, but then she wasn’t sure if Hope had received it. Until Hope recoiled, and sent back an impression of what Alyssa had looked like to everyone else, thrashing around, and the Gelet rushing in to try and fix the damage.

Alyssa “saw” them touching her body, in the same places that still hurt now, and felt their anxiety, their horror, but also their…determination? Bloody-mindedness, maybe. She had the weird sensation of “watching” the Gelet surgeons repairing the adhesions on her chest, while she could still feel the ache inside those torn places. And the strangest part: as she watched the Gelet restore her grafts in the past, Alyssa found the wounds hurt less fiercely in the present.

The pain didn’t magically fade to bliss or anything like that, but Alyssa found she could bear it, maybe because she could convince herself that they’d repaired the damage. She started thinking of it more like just another stab wound.

And once Alyssa decided she could use her new organs (antennae?) without wrecking something that was barely strung together, she started opening up more. She shared the memory of this caustic rain that had fallen on her in Argelo, which had seemed to come from the same alkali clouds that had doomed some of Hope’s siblings. And the moment when Sophie had first given Alyssa a glimpse of this city and the Gelet living here, suffused with all of Sophie’s love for this place. And finally, the first time Mouth, Sophie and Alyssa climbed onto the flat shale rooftops of the Warrens while everyone else slept, the three of them holding hands and looking across the whole city, from shadow to flame.

In return, Hope shared her earliest memories as a separate person, which was also the moment she realized that she was surrounded by the dead flesh of her hatchmates, hanging inside this sticky weave. Tiny lifeless bodies nestled against her, all of them connected to the same flow of nutrients that were keeping her alive. The crumbling skin touching hers, the overwhelming chemical stench of decay—with no way to escape, nothing to do but keep sending out distress pheromones until someone arrived to take away the dead. And then later, when Hope had left the web, and all the other Gelet had treated her like a fragile ice blossom.

Alyssa felt sickened in a deep cavity of herself, somewhere underneath her new grafts.

She tried to send back random scraps of her own upbringing, like when her mom and all her uncles died on her, or when she got in her first serious knife fight. But also, cakes, cactus crisps, and dancing. And kissing girls and boys and others, in the crook of this alleyway that curled around the hilt of the Knife in Argelo, where you felt the music more than you heard it, and you could get trashed off the fumes from other people’s drinks. Always knowing that she could lose herself in this city, and there were more sweet secrets than Alyssa would ever have enough time to find.

Soon, Alyssa and Hope were just sharing back and forth, every furtive joy and every weird moment of being a kid and trying to make sense of the adults around you—and then growing up but still not understanding, most of the time. The intricacies of the Gelet culture still screwed Alyssa’s head ten ways at once, but she could understand feeling like a weird kid, looking in.

Alyssa started to feel more comfortable with Hope than with 99 percent of human beings —until a few sleeps later, Hope showed Alyssa something that sent a spike of ice all the way through her. They were sitting together in one of those rooty-webby hammocks, and Alyssa was drowsing, finally no longer in so much pain that she couldn’t rest, and Hope let something slip out. A memory of the past?

No—a possible future.

In Hope’s vision, hybrid humans were moving in packs through this city, deep under the midnight chill. Dozens of people, all chattering with their human voices, but also reaching out to each other with their Gelet tendrils. This throng seemed joyful, but there was this undercurrent of dread to the whole thing, which made no sense to Alyssa.

Until she realized what was missing. Hope could see a future where the midnight city was filled with human-Gelet hybrids—but the Gelet themselves were gone.

“I have something I need to show you,” Alyssa said to Jeremy.

He jerked his head up and gaped at her, with his new tendrils entwined with those of two Gelet that Alyssa hadn’t met yet. He blinked, as if he’d forgotten the sound of language, then unthreaded himself from the two Gelet slowly and stumbled to his feet.

“Okay,” Jeremy said. “What did you want to show me? Where is it?”

“Right here.” Alyssa gestured at her tendrils.

Jeremy pulled away, just a couple centimeters, but enough so Alyssa noticed.

“Oh,” he said. “I hadn’t…I didn’t.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Alyssa said. “I know you bear a grudge, you blame me, I get it. You don’t want to let me in.”

“It’s not even that,” Jeremy stammered. “I don’t even know. This is all so new, and even just sharing with the Gelet is unfamiliar enough. Being connected to another human being, or another hybrid I mean, would be…plus I heard that you…I heard you did something. You tried to damage yourself. They won’t show me the details.”

Fucking gossip. Alyssa shouldn’t be surprised that the Gelet would be even worse than regular humans about telling everyone her business. The look in Jeremy’s eyes made her feel even worse than ever, and her scars felt like they were flaring up.

“This isn’t anything to do with me,” Alyssa said. “I promise, I won’t even share anything about myself, if you’re so worried about mental contamination.”

“I don’t mean to be…” Jeremy sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. Sure. Go ahead.”

Among the thousand things that the hybrids were going to need, some kind of etiquette would be one of the most important. A way to use their words to negotiate whether, and how, to communicate with each other non-verbally.

Jeremy leaned forward with his tunic open, and Alyssa concentrated, desperate to keep her promise and avoid sharing anything of her own. But of course, the more she worried about sharing the wrong thing, the more her mind filled with the image of herself inside the Xiosphanti Palace, tracking bloody footprints all over the most exquisite marble floor she’d ever seen.

No no no. Not that. Please.

“Wait a moment.” Alyssa paused, when they were just a few centimeters apart. “Just. Need to clear. My head.”

Curating your thoughts, weeding out the ugly, was a literal headache. If only Sophie was here…but Alyssa didn’t want to open that cask of swamp vodka, or she’d never conjure a clean memory.

Breathe. Focus. Alyssa imagined Hope’s scary vision, as if it was a clear liquid inside a little ball of glass, cupped in her palms. Separated from all her own thoughts, clean and delicate. She gave that glass ball to Jeremy in her mind as their tendrils made contact, and felt Hope’s dream flow out of her.

A few strands of thought, or memory, leaked out of Jeremy in return: a slender boy with pale Calgary features and wiry brown hair, pulling his pants on with a sidelong glance at his forbidden lover. Bianca and her consort Dash, smiling down from a balcony as if the crowd beneath them was shouting tributes, instead of curses. A woman holding a tiny bloody bundle on a cobbled side street, wailing.

“Ugh, sorry,” Jeremy said. And then Hope’s vision of a possible future sunk in, and he gasped.

“That’s…” Jeremy disconnected from her and staggered like a drunk, leaning into the nearest wall. “That’s…”

“I know,” Alyssa said. “I don’t think…I don’t think I was supposed to see that.”

“We can’t let that happen.” Jeremy turned away from the wall and sobbed, wiping his eyes and nose with his tunic sleeve.

“Our ancestors already invaded their whole planet. This would be worse.” Alyssa looked at her knuckles. “Way worse than when I helped those foreigners to invade your city. I’d rather…I’d rather die than be a part of another injustice.”

The two of them walked around the Gelet city for a while. Watching small groups of children all connected to one teacher, puppeteers putting on a show, musicians filling the tunnels with vibrations, a team of engineers repairing a turbine. A million human-Gelet hybrids would need centuries just to understand all of this culture. Sophie had barely witnessed a tiny sliver of this city’s life, and she’d spent way more time here than either Alyssa or Jeremy had so far.

“We can help, though.” Alyssa broke a silence that seemed near-endless. “They didn’t turn us into hybrids for our own sake. Right? They need us to help repair the damage that our own people did. Hope showed me some designs for new flying machines that could help them figure out how to keep the toxic rainclouds away, but they can’t stand even partial sunlight.”

Jeremy covered his face with one hand and his tendrils with the other. His new tentacles retreated behind his back, wrapping around like a pair of arms crossed in judgment. He shivered and let out low gasps. Alyssa wasn’t sure if he was still crying, or what she ought to do about it. She just stood there and watched him, until he pulled himself together and they went and got some stewed roots together.

“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Jeremy said to his hand. “We can’t do this. We won’t change enough people in time to help them. I know you did something terrible, right after they changed you, and I…” He couldn’t bring himself to say what came next. “What I did was much worse. I can’t. I can’t even stand to think about it.”

Between her new tentacles and all her ingrained old skills of reading people, Alyssa felt overwhelmed by sympathy for Jeremy. She could feel his emotions, maybe more clearly than her own, almost as if she could get head-spinning drunk on them. That sour intersection between fellowship and nausea. At least now she knew that she wasn’t the only one who’d had a nasty reaction after the Gelet surgery.

Jeremy was waiting for Alyssa to say something. She wasn’t going to.

After a long time, he said again, “We’re not going to make it.” Then walked away, still covering his mouth and tendrils, shrouding himself with all of his limbs.

Alyssa didn’t see Jeremy for a few sleeps.

Meanwhile, she was busy gleaning everything she could from the Gelet, even though her brain hurt from taking in so many foreign memories, and concepts that couldn’t be turned into words. She learned way more than she would ever understand. She kept pushing herself, even when all she wanted to do was to be alone.

Hope kept turning up, but Alyssa also got to know a bunch of other Gelet, most of them older but not all. Some of them had come from other settlements originally, and she caught some notions of what life was like in a town of just a few hundred or few thousand Gelet, where everybody really knew everyone else by heart. She got to witness just the merest part of what a debate among the Gelet would feel like.

In her coldest moments, Alyssa caught herself thinking, I need to learn everything I can, in case one day these people are all gone and my descendants are the only ones who can preserve these memories. That thought never failed to send her into a rage at herself, even angrier than when she thought she had ruined her own tendrils.

She thought of what Mouth had said to her once, about cultural survival. People died, even nations flamed out, but you need somebody left behind to carry the important stuff forward.

“You were right.”

Jeremy had caught Alyssa by surprise when she was dozing in a big web with a dozen Gelet, waiting for their dead Magistrate to show up. Jeremy seemed way older than the last time Alyssa had seen him, his shoulders squared against some new weight that was never going to be lifted away. He faced her eye to eye, not trying to cover any part of himself or turn aside.

“Wait. What was I right about?” Alyssa said. “The last time I won an argument, it involved handfuls of blood and a punctured lung. I’ve stopped craving vindication.”

“There’s so much more at stake than who sits inside that ugly Palace back home in Xiosphant.” Jeremy shook his head. “I came here hoping to find a new way to organize people against the Vice Regent, but we have more important work to do. You were right about all of it: being a hybrid isn’t just a means to an end, it’s way more important than that.”

“Oh.”

Alyssa looked at Jeremy’s shy, unflinching expression, and a wave of affection caught her off guard. They’d gone through this thing together, that almost nobody else alive could understand. She couldn’t help thinking of him almost as a sleepmate—even though they’d only slept near each other, not next to each other.

“We can’t just send people here and expect them to handle this change on their own. Anyone who comes here is going to need someone to talk them through every step of the process, someone who understands how to be patient,” Jeremy said. “So…I’ve made a decision. I think it would be easier to show than to tell.”

Alyssa understood what he meant after a moment, and she let her tendrils relax, slacken, so his own could brush against them.

She was terrified that she would show him the moment when she tried to rip these things out of her body—so of course that’s what she did show him. The screaming panic, the feeling of her fingers grasping and tearing, trying to rip out your own heart.

Jeremy stumbled, flinched, and let out a moan…and then he accepted Alyssa’s memory. And he gave back a brief glimpse of his own worst moment: Alyssa was Jeremy, lashing out, with a snarl in his throat, the heel of his hand colliding with the nearest terrified Gelet, a blood-red haze over everything. I’ll kill you all repeating in his head, I’ll tear you apart, kill you kill you. The new alien senses flooding into Jeremy’s brain, bringing back all the times when he’d needed to look over his shoulder with every step he took.

“It’s okay,” Alyssa said, wrapping her arms around Jeremy under the roots of his tentacles. “It’s really okay.”

“It’s not okay.” Jeremy trembled. “I’m a monster. At least nobody was badly hurt.”

“You’re not a monster. You were just scared. We both were.” Alyssa clutched him tighter, until he clung to her as well. “We prepared ourselves, but we weren’t ready. We need to make sure it goes better next time.”

“That’s what I was going to tell you about.” Jeremy relaxed a little. “This is what I decided.” He sent Alyssa another vision, this time of a future he’d envisioned.

Jeremy was here, still inside the midnight city, studying everything the Gelet could teach him. And then, when more humans arrived from Xiosphant, Alyssa saw Jeremy greeting them. Guiding them around the city, preparing them, talking them through every step of the way. The Jeremy in the vision grew old, but never went back to the light.

Alyssa had to say it aloud: “You want to stay here? Forever?”

“I…I think it’s the right thing to do,” Jeremy whispered. “I can organize, I can be a leader, all of that. Just down here, rather than back in Xiosphant. Humans are going to keep coming here, and there needs to be someone here to help. Otherwise, more people will…”

“More people will react the way you and I did.” Alyssa shuddered.

“Yeah.”

Alyssa found herself sharing a plan of her own with Jeremy. She imagined herself going back to Xiosphant, back to Sophie and Mouth—but not just helping them to convince more people to come here and become hybrids. She pictured herself carrying on Jeremy’s work: finding the people who were being crushed by all the wrong certainties, helping them to form a movement. Maybe opening someplace like that coffee shop where Sophie and Jeremy used to work. Giving people a safe place to escape from all that Xiosphanti shit.

“You were right too,” Alyssa told Jeremy. “People in Xiosphant need to come together. If they had someplace to go in that city, maybe more of them might be open to thinking about coming here.”

“Can you take care of Cyrus, though?” Jeremy sent a brief impression of the biggest marmot Alyssa had ever seen, purring and extending blue pseudopods in every direction. “I left him with a friend, but he needs someone reliable to look after him. Sophie already knows him.”

“Sure,” Alyssa said, hugging Jeremy with their tendrils still intertwined.

Alyssa stayed a while longer in the midnight city, healing up but also keeping Jeremy company. After she left, he might not hear another voice for a while—and weirdly, the longer Alyssa had these tendrils, the more important verbal communication seemed to her, because words had a different kind of precision, and there were truths that could only be shared in word-form. Alyssa introduced Jeremy to Hope, and explained in a whisper about everything she’d been through, and Jeremy introduced Alyssa to some of his own Gelet friends, too.

Her surgical scars settled down to a dull ache, and then slowly stopped hurting at all, except for when she strained her muscles or slept weird. The new body parts and what remained of the pain both felt like they were just part of Alyssa, the same way the Chancers and the Resourceful Couriers would always be. “I guess it’s time,” Alyssa said to herself. She walked up towards the exit to the Gelet city with Hope on one side, and Jeremy on the other, though Jeremy planned to turn back before they reached the exit.

Almost without thinking, Alyssa extended her tendrils so she was connected to both Jeremy and Hope, and the three of them shared nothing in particular as they walked. Just a swirl of emotions, fragments of memory, and most of all, a set of wishes for the future that were just vague enough to be of comfort. They stayed in this three-way link, until the first gusts of freezing air began to filter down from the surface of the night.

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“If You Take My Meaning” copyright © 2020 by Charlie Jane Anders
Art copyright © 2020 by Robert Hunt

The post If You Take My Meaning appeared first on Reactor.

Some vague and/or minor spoilers ahead…

The Hainish Cycle spans decades of Le Guin’s career, starting with Rocannon’s World (1966) and ending with The Telling (2000). In between are award-winning masterworks like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, and Four Ways to Forgiveness. And the Library of America has put out a gorgeous two-volume set collecting every single piece of narrative Le Guin published involving Hain and the Ekumen. As with her other famous setting, Earthsea, this is a world to which Le Guin returned in the 1990s after a long hiatus, and it’s a much richer and more complex world in the later tales.

(And it’s also very clear, that as Le Guin herself has admitted, there is zero continuity between these books and stories. Anyone who tried to assemble a coherent timeline of the Ekumen or Hain might as well give up and go try to explain how all the X-Men movies take place in the same universe, instead.)

In the three early novels (Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions), Le Guin’s star-spanning advanced society isn’t even called the Ekumen—instead, it’s the League of All Worlds, and it’s at war with some mysterious enemy that’s equally advanced. (We only really glimpse this enemy when we meet the nefarious Shing in City of Illusions, who have taken over a post-apocalyptic Earth and are somehow involved in the war against the League.

At first, the League or Ekumen simply appears as a backdrop, barely glimpsed off in the distance, which sends an advanced observer to a more primitive planet. In one of the later stories, Le Guin has someone remark that Ekumen observers “often go native” on primitive worlds, and this is a huge concern in the early Hainish novels.

Rocannon, the hero of Rocannon’s World, is alone on a planet of barbarians and flying cats, and he wears a full-body protective garment called an Impermasuit that literally protects him from touching anyone or being too affected by his surroundings. Meanwhile, Jakob Agat, the hero of Planet of Exile, hooks up with a young native girl, Rolery, whom his comrades view as a primitive native, and the question of whether they can really interbreed becomes crucial to the novel’s story. In City of Illusions, Falk actually has gone native, until something too spoilery to reveal happens.

When you read those three novels right before The Left Hand of Darkness, the story of Genly Ai alone among the mostly genderless Gethenians (whom he fails spectacularly to understand) takes on a different feel. Where previously I always saw Genly as the ultimate outsider, visiting a world where his gender and sexuality are alien to everyone else, I now saw him as just another in a long line of advanced visitors who are struggling against the temptation of assimilation with less-advanced people.

Another recurring concern becomes very apparent when you read all of the Hainish stories together: modernity, and its discontents. The barbarians in Planet of Exile are under threat by a northern group called the Gaal, which had previously wandered south for the winter in disorganized, relatively harmless groups. But now a new leader has organized the Gaal into one nation—much like the King-Beyond-the-Wall Mance Rayder in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—and they’re marching south as an organized army. This is a world that has never known armies, or nation-states, and nobody except the handful of alien visitors knows what to do about it. (And it’s hinted the Gaal may have gotten the idea, in part, from watching the alien exiles from the League of Worlds.)

Similarly, in The Left Hand of Darkness, the planet Gethen has never had a war, and though it has nations, the modern nation-state is a relatively new innovation. Orgoreyn is marching into a future of patriotism and becoming a state with territorial ambitions, and in their neighboring country, Karhide, only Estraven is astute enough to see where this is going to lead. And then, in The Telling, the planet of Aka has become a modern nation-state almost overnight, under the rule of a blandly sinister Corporation, and this is explicitly the fault of some Terrans who came and meddled.

The worldbuilding in these books also becomes much more complex and layered starting with Left Hand of Darkness. Where we get hints and glimpses of strange customs and odd worldviews in the first three books, like the natives in Planet of Exile having a taboo on making eye contact, we suddenly get a much fuller understanding of the fabrics of the societies Le Guin creates. And I found my reading slowing down, because almost every paragraph contained some nugget of wisdom or some beautifully observed emotional moment that I had to pause and appreciate more fully. The first few books are corking adventures, but everything after that is a mind-expanding journey.

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Another interesting thing: the famously intense winter crossing that Genly and Estraven take in The Left Hand of Darkness also shows up in Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile, though in neither book is it as well-drawn or epic. (And of course, Rocannon has his Impermasuit to keep him from getting too chilly.) There’s also another long slog through a frozen landscape in The Telling, but it’s much gentler and more well-planned, as if Le Guin finally decided to allow her characters to enjoy a winter trek instead of suffering through one.

And notably, there are few women in the earlier stories, and the ones that do show up are hard done by. (This time around, I found myself wishing more than ever that we’d gotten to see more of Takver and her journey in The Dispossessed.)

Le Guin changed her mind about some aspects of the Hainish universe as she went. For example, in the early novels, including Left Hand, some people have a telepathic ability known as Mindspeech, but following Left Hand, she decided to get rid of it, and it’s never mentioned again. (Mindspeech would have come in very handy in Five Ways to Forgiveness and The Telling.) Also, it’s a major plot point in the early novels that uncrewed ships can travel at faster-than-light speeds, but crewed ones cannot…so people are able to fire missiles from across the galaxy and have them hit their targets almost instantly. This stops being true sometime in the mid-1970s.

But more importantly, the Ekumen stops being quite so hands-off. In the early Hainish novels, Le Guin makes much of the Law of Cultural Embargo, which is basically the same as Star Trek‘s Prime Directive. (Except she got there first.) The travelers who visit primitive worlds are very careful to avoid sharing too much technology, or even much knowledge of the rest of the universe. But by the time The Telling rolls around, we’re told that the Ekumen has an explicit rule, or ethos, that its people will share information with anyone who wants it.

It’s no coincidence that the Ekumen becomes much more explicitly a force for good, and an interventionist one at that. We first see the Ekumen making a real difference in The Word for World is Forest, where its representatives show up and basically make the Terrans stop exploiting the native “Creechers” on the planet Athshe as slave labor. (And the Ansible, which we see Shevek invent in The Dispossessed, makes a huge difference. The Terran colonizers haven’t been able to communicate in real time with home, until they’re given an Ansible.)

And then, in Five Ways and The Telling, the Ekumen’s representatives are suddenly willing to make all kinds of trouble. In Five Ways, the ambassador known as Old Music helps slaves escape from the oppressive planet Werel to the neighboring Yeowe, where slaves have led a successful uprising. And in one story included in Forgiveness, “A Man of the People,” Havzhiva uses his influence in various subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways to push the ex-slaves on Yeowe to abandon their patriarchal mindset and grant women equal rights. In The Telling, Sutty and her boss, Tong Ov, conspire quietly to preserve the native culture of Aka, which is in danger of being destroyed altogether by the Terran-influenced ruling Corporation.

I mentioned that humans can’t travel faster than light in these stories…except that in a cluster of stories that were mostly collected in the book A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, there’s an experimental technology called Churtening. It’s more or less the same as “tessering” in A Wrinkle in Time, except that there’s a spiritual dimension to it, and you can’t really Churten unless your entire group is in harmony with each other. And when you arrive instantaneously at your far-off destination, reality is liable to be a bit wobbly and unmoored, and different people may experience the visit very differently.

The Left Hand of Darkness is Le Guin’s most famous experiment with destabilizing gender: a whole world of people who are gender-neutral most of the time, except when they go into “kemmer,” a kind of estrus in which they become either male or female for a while. But in these later stories, there are more gender experiments, which are just as provocative and perhaps more subtle. In “The Matter of Seggri,” there’s a world where women massively outnumber men, who are kept locked up in castles and forced to compete for the honor of serving in brothels where the women pay them for sex.

Likewise, there’s “Solitude,” which takes place on a planet where women live alone but together, in communities called Auntrings, and the men live outside the community, though some “settled men” also live together—and as on Seggri, the women initiate sex. And “In a Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” there’s the four-way marital institution of Sedoteru, in which a couple of Morning people marries a couple of Evening people, and homosexuality is strongly encouraged—but love among two Morning people or two Evening people is a huge taboo.

Another interesting motif in these books is unresolved sexual tension; plus sexual agency, and who has it, and why it matters. In the early books, Le Guin matter-of-factly has teenage girls shacking up with much older men, and nobody seems to find this unusual. But then in Left Hand of Darkness, there are multiple situations where choosing not to give in to sexual temptation is clearly the right (but difficult) choice. Estraven is tempted while in kemmer, first by a sleazy government operative in Orgoreyn, and then by Genly Ai. And Genly, meanwhile, gets trapped with another person in kemmer. (And when you read the short story “Coming of Age in Karhide,” the intensity of desire in kemmer, and the danger of giving in to the wrong person, is underscored.)

Then in the later stories, we find out that people from Hain can control their fertility, and this gives them a whole other layer of sexual agency that nobody possessed in the earlier books. In “Seggri” and “Solitude,” as mentioned earlier, women have all the sexual power. In “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” Le Guin finds the one way to write a forbidden sexual attraction in her society. It takes until Five Ways to Forgiveness that Le Guin actually starts writing straight-up romances, which follow the normal trajectory of most romance novels, in which people learn to understand each other and form romantic and sexual partnerships based on respect—and it’s delightful, even against this horrendous backdrop of slavery and exploitation.

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Later Le Guin is also much dirtier and queerer than earlier Le Guin—and more frank when discussing sexuality compared with all those offhand references to “coupling” in The Dispossessed. Also, her older women characters are suddenly allowed to have a healthy sexuality (and even to hook up with much younger partners, though not actual teenagers this time.)

Two of my favorite moments in these stories come when someone holds a baby. In The Dispossessed, Bedap holds Shevek and Takver’s newborn child and suddenly has an epiphany about why people can be cruel to vulnerable people—but also, conversely, about the nature of parental feelings (like protectiveness). And then in “Old Music and the Slave Women,” Old Music holds a child born to slaves, who is slowly dying of a totally curable disease, and there’s so much tenderness and rage and wonder and sadness in that moment.

The Word for World is Forest is the first time we start to get a glimpse of the Ekumen as a functioning society, rather than just someplace that people come from. But starting in the 1990s, Le Guin really starts to develop the Ekumen as a mixing of cultures: a bustling, noisy, vibrant society. We actually get to visit Hain, the place where all of humanity, all over the galaxy, came from originally. And all of a sudden, the Gethenians from Left Hand of Darkness and the Annaresti from The Dispossessed are just hanging out with everyone else (though I’m not sure if it’s explained how the Gethenians deal with going into kemmer, so far from home.)

The Ekumen has its own political divisions and debates, as it tries to figure out how to engage with the slave-owning culture of Werel, an Earth overrun by religious fundamentalists, and the corporate dystopia of Aka. And even though the Ekumen always seems wiser and more patient than other societies, its representatives are allowed to have differences of opinion, and to argue among themselves and make things up as they go along.

The Telling feels like a fitting climax to the Hainish cycle, in many ways. The running themes of spirituality and community get their fullest explanation in this book, where a Terran named Sutty strives to explore a quasi-monastic storytelling culture that is in danger of extinction. In City of Exile, just reading the opening lines of the Dao De Jing has miraculous mind-rescuing powers, and Genly and Estraven discuss the yin/yang symbol, but the Eastern-influenced spirituality feels both subtler and richer in The Telling. Moreover, Le Guin’s interstellar society feels fully to have come into its own, both as a polity and as a force for good.

I haven’t said as much about The Dispossessed, partly because it feels very different than all the other Hainish stories, with its story of a physicist from a world of anarchists visiting a capitalist planet. The Ekumen feels less like a crucial presence in The Dispossessed than in all the other stories—but The Dispossessed remains my favorite Le Guin novel, and I continue to get more out of it every time I re-read it.

When read and considered as a whole, Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle feels like an even more impressive accomplishment than its stellar individual works. Not because of any internal consistency, or an over-arching storyline—you’ll have to look elsewhere for those things—but because of how far she takes the notion of an alliance of worlds interacting with baffling, layered, deeply complex cultures and trying to forge further connections with them. I’m barely scratching the surface here when it comes to all the wealth that’s contained in these books, gathered together.

These individual journeys will leave you different than you were before you embarked on them, and fully immersing yourself in the overarching journey might just leave you feeling like the Ekumen is a real entity—one to which we would all desperately like to apply for membership right about now.

Originally published February 2019.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed,ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post Exploring the Genius of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle appeared first on Reactor.

When I was working on my new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, I was inspired by a bunch of great books featuring humans colonizing other planets. Here are five recent colonization books that are especially fantastic.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

A missionary named Peter goes to an alien planet where humans have just begun to colonize, leaving behind an Earth that is going through huge, potentially civilization-ending problems. And what Peter finds on the planet Oasis is most unexpected: the indigenous life forms are already converted to Christianity, and in fact are obsessed with the Bible. But it’s not clear if their understanding of religion is the same as ours. Faber does a great job depicting the weirdness of living on another planet, and the homesickness of someone who’s just come from Earth. This book was made into a TV pilot that was available on Amazon.com, but never became a series.

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Planetfall by Emma Newman

This book blew my mind when I read it back in 2015. Newman follows a group of colonists who are living on another planet at the base of a mysterious living structure called God’s City. She creates a wonderfully vivid portrayal of living on another planet, and all of the politics and complications that ensue. Newman’s colonists use an advanced 3D printer to create everything they need, and her protagonist Ren is in charge of operating it. But Ren has a hoarding problem, and her issues run much deeper than we first suspect—leading to an amazing psychological thriller.

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The Stars Change by Mary Anne Mohanraj

Mohanraj’s novel-in-stories follows a group of people living on Pyroxina Major, a “university planet” settled by South Asians, as a war is breaking out between “pure” humans on the one side and modified humans and aliens on the other. In a series of vignettes focused on sexual encounters, Mohanraj shows how people’s complex relationships and pasts are affected by this conflict. We’re also immersed in the day-to-day strangeness of living on another world, facing questions about diversity and inclusion that are even more fractious than ones faced on Earth.

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The Stars Change

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Windswept by Adam Rakunas

Like Planetfall, this is the first book of a series, but it can easily be read on its own. And like a lot of the other books on this list, Windswept is all about complicated politics on an extrasolar colony world. Padma Mehta is a labor organizer who needs to recruit enough people to join her Union in order to buy her own freedom, but she keeps running into snags. And then she discovers a conspiracy that could threaten the livelihood of everyone on her planet. Rakunas includes tons of great touches that illuminate the complex, noir-ish politics of his world, which is entirely devoted to growing sugarcane for industrial uses…and for rum.

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The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey

Even before it became a beloved TV show, this series set in a future where humans are living all over the solar system had become iconic for its portrayal of the complex webs of exploitation and prejudice that govern the lives of “Inners” and “Belters.” Corey (a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) comes up with a vision of human colonization that’s both plausibly uncomfortable and politically volatile—the way real-life settlement of our solar system, and beyond, would almost certainly be.

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Leviathan Wakes

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Originally published in February 2019.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed,ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post 5 Fantastic Recent Books about Humans Colonizing Other Planets appeared first on Reactor.

And that’s when I really discovered comics, and got lost in their four-color worlds. I started going to some local comic-book stores and just buying up tons of back issues, especially the ones in the quarter bins. I didn’t even care what they were: I bought armfuls of indie experimental comics alongside complete runs of Batman and the Avengers. I read about the Infinity Gauntlet in the same session as Love and Rockets. And that’s when I discovered Vertigo Comics, which was DC Comics’ weird, experimental imprint.

DC just announced they’re pulling the plug on Vertigo after a quarter century, so this is a really good moment to remember just how fantastic this line of comics really was. Vertigo was like the intersection of mainstream superhero comics and weird experimental surrealism, built on a foundation of comics like Alan Moore and John Totleben’s Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Sandman. I can’t believe Vertigo is coming to an end—there’ll still be weird-as-fuck comics and bleeding-edge experiments in future, but there won’t be anything quite like Vertigo, from one of the Big Two publishers, anytime soon.

And one of the weirdest comics to come out of Vertigo was Enigma, an eight-issue series by writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo. I found a battered trade paperback of Enigma at the back of a used book store during that godawful winter, and it blew my mind. I still have that collected edition on my shelf, and it’s still one of my favorite comics.

You can read an incredibly detailed, thoughtful analysis of Enigma from Greg Burgas at Comic Book Resources, but basically it’s a story of a dude named Michael who has a boring, overly-regimented life with his girlfriend Sandra. The first hint of Michael and Sandra’s dysfunctional, dead-on-the-vine relationship is when we learn that they always have sex on Tuesdays, like it’s a notch on some chore wheel. But then a comic-book, superhero reality starts invading Michael’s world, starting with a fantastical supervillain/serial killer named the Head, who eats people’s brains.

And then Michael actually meets a comic-book superhero come to life: the opera-masked all-powerful savior named Enigma. And long story short, Michael and Enigma hook up, and Michael realizes that he is gay. (There’s a hint, late in the series, that Michael’s contact with the Enigma mask “turned” him gay, but when Enigma offers to make Michael straight again, Michael declines the offer of heterosexuality.)

This is a story about falling in love with a heroic ideal, and about being transformed as a result, and Michael’s embrace of his own queerness resonated with me on so many levels. Especially since Michael’s discovery of his “new” sexuality goes along with a greater transformation, in which he becomes a stronger, better, more realized person, and it’s hinted that he evolves beyond the limitations of humanity. Michael’s encounters with Enigma help him to become a truer version of himself, and it’s a glorious metaphor for the whole process of realizing that you’re not just the role that society smushed onto you from above.

In retrospect, it is super weird and kind of problematic that Michael doesn’t just discover he’s really queer, but that his sexuality is changed by a magic superhero mask—but when I read this comic, it made perfect sense to me. It felt like this book was speaking directly to me, to the escapist part of my brain that was seeking a way out of a yucky constrained existence through stories about heroes and weirdos.

Enigma told me that the part of me that was struggling to understand my queerness and the part of me that wanted to get lost in colorful strange stories were linked at some deep level, and maybe those two parts should be talking to each other more.

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And it’s hard to believe now, but in the early 1990s when Enigma was published, pointing out the inherent queerness of superhero narratives was still a huge taboo. The X-Men were doing metaphors for homophobia, but we had only just gotten one actual gay member of the X-Men (Northstar, who at at the time was part of the Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight). Green Lantern had a spin-off title called New Guardians, featuring a gay character who was a huge stereotype (whom the supervillain Sinestro tries to seduce, and who later gets AIDS). There was actually a novel, What They Did to Princess Paragon by Robert Rodi, all about the terrifying backlash that would ensue among comic-book nerds if a major superheroine was revealed to be a lesbian.

So this was a long ways before the era of Midnighter and Apollo, or Batwoman, or Nia Nal. Engima came out during an era when superheroes were supposed to liberate us from death traps and evil supervillain lairs, not so much from heteronormativity and restrictive gender norms.

And it doesn’t hurt that Enigma is gorgeous. Duncan Fegredo’s artwork is lush and beautiful, and he famously changes his art style over the course of the story, going from messy and full of lines to clean and strong. So you can actually see Michael becoming a different person, and his whole world transforming, through his contact with Enigma.

When you see the two men in bed together, immediately after sex, it’s a beautiful splash page that’s full of tenderness and sexuality. The narration says, “It wasn’t a smooth operation. A lot of fumbling, dead ends, false starts, but what they lacked in technique they made up for in feeling… These are two men redrawing the maps of themselves.” The sweetness and tenderness in these scenes of same-sex romance left a huge impression on me, especially against the backdrop of the reflexive cynical weirdness of so many other experimental comics at the time.

You can see why Grant Morrison says Enigma is better than Watchmen, DC’s much more famous superhero deconstruction.

Vertigo published a lot of comics that dealt with queer themes, in often-flawed but exciting ways. Morrison’s The Invisibles includes a gender non-conforming character, Milligan and Chris Bachalo’s Shade the Changing Man has a character who can change genders at a whim, and Hellblazer established John Constantine as one of the first openly bisexual characters in mainstream comics. But Enigma still deserves a unique place in Vertigo’s history, because of how beautifully it depicts a same-sex relationship, and a journey of discovery and transformation.

Enigma came along just at the right time to open some doors for me, and nearly 25 years later, it remains potent and transformative. The collected edition is well worth hunting down.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed,ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post Queer Transformations in Enigma by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo appeared first on Reactor.

Some vague and/or minor spoilers ahead…

The Hainish Cycle spans decades of Le Guin’s career, starting with Rocannon’s World (1966) and ending with The Telling (2000). In between are award-winning masterworks like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, and Four Ways to Forgiveness. And the Library of America has put out a gorgeous two-volume set collecting every single piece of narrative Le Guin published involving Hain and the Ekumen. As with her other famous setting, Earthsea, this is a world to which Le Guin returned in the 1990s after a long hiatus, and it’s a much richer and more complex world in the later tales.

(And it’s also very clear, that as Le Guin herself has admitted, there is zero continuity between these books and stories. Anyone who tried to assemble a coherent timeline of the Ekumen or Hain might as well give up and go try to explain how all the X-Men movies take place in the same universe, instead.)

In the three early novels (Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions), Le Guin’s star-spanning advanced society isn’t even called the Ekumen—instead, it’s the League of All Worlds, and it’s at war with some mysterious enemy that’s equally advanced. (We only really glimpse this enemy when we meet the nefarious Shing in City of Illusions, who have taken over a post-apocalyptic Earth and are somehow involved in the war against the League.

At first, the League or Ekumen simply appears as a backdrop, barely glimpsed off in the distance, which sends an advanced observer to a more primitive planet. In one of the later stories, Le Guin has someone remark that Ekumen observers “often go native” on primitive worlds, and this is a huge concern in the early Hainish novels.

Rocannon, the hero of Rocannon’s World, is alone on a planet of barbarians and flying cats, and he wears a full-body protective garment called an Impermasuit that literally protects him from touching anyone or being too affected by his surroundings. Meanwhile, Jakob Agat, the hero of Planet of Exile, hooks up with a young native girl, Rolery, whom his comrades view as a primitive native, and the question of whether they can really interbreed becomes crucial to the novel’s story. In City of Illusions, Falk actually has gone native, until something too spoilery to reveal happens.

When you read those three novels right before The Left Hand of Darkness, the story of Genly Ai alone among the mostly genderless Gethenians (whom he fails spectacularly to understand) takes on a different feel. Where previously I always saw Genly as the ultimate outsider, visiting a world where his gender and sexuality are alien to everyone else, I now saw him as just another in a long line of advanced visitors who are struggling against the temptation of assimilation with less-advanced people.

Another recurring concern becomes very apparent when you read all of the Hainish stories together: modernity, and its discontents. The barbarians in Planet of Exile are under threat by a northern group called the Gaal, which had previously wandered south for the winter in disorganized, relatively harmless groups. But now a new leader has organized the Gaal into one nation—much like the King-Beyond-the-Wall Mance Rayder in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—and they’re marching south as an organized army. This is a world that has never known armies, or nation-states, and nobody except the handful of alien visitors knows what to do about it. (And it’s hinted the Gaal may have gotten the idea, in part, from watching the alien exiles from the League of Worlds.)

Similarly, in The Left Hand of Darkness, the planet Gethen has never had a war, and though it has nations, the modern nation-state is a relatively new innovation. Orgoreyn is marching into a future of patriotism and becoming a state with territorial ambitions, and in their neighboring country, Karhide, only Estraven is astute enough to see where this is going to lead. And then, in The Telling, the planet of Aka has become a modern nation-state almost overnight, under the rule of a blandly sinister Corporation, and this is explicitly the fault of some Terrans who came and meddled.

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The worldbuilding in these books also becomes much more complex and layered starting with Left Hand of Darkness. Where we get hints and glimpses of strange customs and odd worldviews in the first three books, like the natives in Planet of Exile having a taboo on making eye contact, we suddenly get a much fuller understanding of the fabrics of the societies Le Guin creates. And I found my reading slowing down, because almost every paragraph contained some nugget of wisdom or some beautifully observed emotional moment that I had to pause and appreciate more fully. The first few books are corking adventures, but everything after that is a mind-expanding journey.

Another interesting thing: the famously intense winter crossing that Genly and Estraven take in The Left Hand of Darkness also shows up in Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile, though in neither book is it as well-drawn or epic. (And of course, Rocannon has his Impermasuit to keep him from getting too chilly.) There’s also another long slog through a frozen landscape in The Telling, but it’s much gentler and more well-planned, as if Le Guin finally decided to allow her characters to enjoy a winter trek instead of suffering through one.

And notably, there are few women in the earlier stories, and the ones that do show up are hard done by. (This time around, I found myself wishing more than ever that we’d gotten to see more of Takver and her journey in The Dispossessed.)

Le Guin changed her mind about some aspects of the Hainish universe as she went. For example, in the early novels, including Left Hand, some people have a telepathic ability known as Mindspeech, but following Left Hand, she decided to get rid of it, and it’s never mentioned again. (Mindspeech would have come in very handy in Five Ways to Forgiveness and The Telling.) Also, it’s a major plot point in the early novels that uncrewed ships can travel at faster-than-light speeds, but crewed ones cannot…so people are able to fire missiles from across the galaxy and have them hit their targets almost instantly. This stops being true sometime in the mid-1970s.

But more importantly, the Ekumen stops being quite so hands-off. In the early Hainish novels, Le Guin makes much of the Law of Cultural Embargo, which is basically the same as Star Trek‘s Prime Directive. (Except she got there first.) The travelers who visit primitive worlds are very careful to avoid sharing too much technology, or even much knowledge of the rest of the universe. But by the time The Telling rolls around, we’re told that the Ekumen has an explicit rule, or ethos, that its people will share information with anyone who wants it.

It’s no coincidence that the Ekumen becomes much more explicitly a force for good, and an interventionist one at that. We first see the Ekumen making a real difference in The Word for World is Forest, where its representatives show up and basically make the Terrans stop exploiting the native “Creechers” on the planet Athshe as slave labor. (And the Ansible, which we see Shevek invent in The Dispossessed, makes a huge difference. The Terran colonizers haven’t been able to communicate in real time with home, until they’re given an Ansible.)

And then, in Five Ways and The Telling, the Ekumen’s representatives are suddenly willing to make all kinds of trouble. In Five Ways, the ambassador known as Old Music helps slaves escape from the oppressive planet Werel to the neighboring Yeowe, where slaves have led a successful uprising. And in one story included in Forgiveness, “A Man of the People,” Havzhiva uses his influence in various subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways to push the ex-slaves on Yeowe to abandon their patriarchal mindset and grant women equal rights. In The Telling, Sutty and her boss, Tong Ov, conspire quietly to preserve the native culture of Aka, which is in danger of being destroyed altogether by the Terran-influenced ruling Corporation.

I mentioned that humans can’t travel faster than light in these stories…except that in a cluster of stories that were mostly collected in the book A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, there’s an experimental technology called Churtening. It’s more or less the same as “tessering” in A Wrinkle in Time, except that there’s a spiritual dimension to it, and you can’t really Churten unless your entire group is in harmony with each other. And when you arrive instantaneously at your far-off destination, reality is liable to be a bit wobbly and unmoored, and different people may experience the visit very differently.

The Left Hand of Darkness is Le Guin’s most famous experiment with destabilizing gender: a whole world of people who are gender-neutral most of the time, except when they go into “kemmer,” a kind of estrus in which they become either male or female for a while. But in these later stories, there are more gender experiments, which are just as provocative and perhaps more subtle. In “The Matter of Seggri,” there’s a world where women massively outnumber men, who are kept locked up in castles and forced to compete for the honor of serving in brothels where the women pay them for sex.

Likewise, there’s “Solitude,” which takes place on a planet where women live alone but together, in communities called Auntrings, and the men live outside the community, though some “settled men” also live together—and as on Seggri, the women initiate sex. And “In a Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” there’s the four-way marital institution of Sedoteru, in which a couple of Morning people marries a couple of Evening people, and homosexuality is strongly encouraged—but love among two Morning people or two Evening people is a huge taboo.

Another interesting motif in these books is unresolved sexual tension; plus sexual agency, and who has it, and why it matters. In the early books, Le Guin matter-of-factly has teenage girls shacking up with much older men, and nobody seems to find this unusual. But then in Left Hand of Darkness, there are multiple situations where choosing not to give in to sexual temptation is clearly the right (but difficult) choice. Estraven is tempted while in kemmer, first by a sleazy government operative in Orgoreyn, and then by Genly Ai. And Genly, meanwhile, gets trapped with another person in kemmer. (And when you read the short story “Coming of Age in Karhide,” the intensity of desire in kemmer, and the danger of giving in to the wrong person, is underscored.)

Then in the later stories, we find out that people from Hain can control their fertility, and this gives them a whole other layer of sexual agency that nobody possessed in the earlier books. In “Seggri” and “Solitude,” as mentioned earlier, women have all the sexual power. In “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” Le Guin finds the one way to write a forbidden sexual attraction in her society. It takes until Five Ways to Forgiveness that Le Guin actually starts writing straight-up romances, which follow the normal trajectory of most romance novels, in which people learn to understand each other and form romantic and sexual partnerships based on respect—and it’s delightful, even against this horrendous backdrop of slavery and exploitation.

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Ursula K. Le Guin: Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One

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Later Le Guin is also much dirtier and queerer than earlier Le Guin—and more frank when discussing sexuality compared with all those offhand references to “coupling” in The Dispossessed. Also, her older women characters are suddenly allowed to have a healthy sexuality (and even to hook up with much younger partners, though not actual teenagers this time.)

Two of my favorite moments in these stories come when someone holds a baby. In The Dispossessed, Bedap holds Shevek and Takver’s newborn child and suddenly has an epiphany about why people can be cruel to vulnerable people—but also, conversely, about the nature of parental feelings (like protectiveness). And then in “Old Music and the Slave Women,” Old Music holds a child born to slaves, who is slowly dying of a totally curable disease, and there’s so much tenderness and rage and wonder and sadness in that moment.

The Word for World is Forest is the first time we start to get a glimpse of the Ekumen as a functioning society, rather than just someplace that people come from. But starting in the 1990s, Le Guin really starts to develop the Ekumen as a mixing of cultures: a bustling, noisy, vibrant society. We actually get to visit Hain, the place where all of humanity, all over the galaxy, came from originally. And all of a sudden, the Gethenians from Left Hand of Darkness and the Annaresti from The Dispossessed are just hanging out with everyone else (though I’m not sure if it’s explained how the Gethenians deal with going into kemmer, so far from home.)

The Ekumen has its own political divisions and debates, as it tries to figure out how to engage with the slave-owning culture of Werel, an Earth overrun by religious fundamentalists, and the corporate dystopia of Aka. And even though the Ekumen always seems wiser and more patient than other societies, its representatives are allowed to have differences of opinion, and to argue among themselves and make things up as they go along.

The Telling feels like a fitting climax to the Hainish cycle, in many ways. The running themes of spirituality and community get their fullest explanation in this book, where a Terran named Sutty strives to explore a quasi-monastic storytelling culture that is in danger of extinction. In City of Exile, just reading the opening lines of the Dao De Jing has miraculous mind-rescuing powers, and Genly and Estraven discuss the yin/yang symbol, but the Eastern-influenced spirituality feels both subtler and richer in The Telling. Moreover, Le Guin’s interstellar society feels fully to have come into its own, both as a polity and as a force for good.

I haven’t said as much about The Dispossessed, partly because it feels very different than all the other Hainish stories, with its story of a physicist from a world of anarchists visiting a capitalist planet. The Ekumen feels less like a crucial presence in The Dispossessed than in all the other stories—but The Dispossessed remains my favorite Le Guin novel, and I continue to get more out of it every time I re-read it.

When read and considered as a whole, Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle feels like an even more impressive accomplishment than its stellar individual works. Not because of any internal consistency, or an over-arching storyline—you’ll have to look elsewhere for those things—but because of how far she takes the notion of an alliance of worlds interacting with baffling, layered, deeply complex cultures and trying to forge further connections with them. I’m barely scratching the surface here when it comes to all the wealth that’s contained in these books, gathered together.

These individual journeys will leave you different than you were before you embarked on them, and fully immersing yourself in the overarching journey might just leave you feeling like the Ekumen is a real entity—one to which we would all desperately like to apply for membership right about now.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed,ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post Unlocking the Full Brilliance of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle appeared first on Reactor.

When I was working on my new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, I was inspired by a bunch of great books featuring humans colonizing other planets. Here are five recent colonization books that are especially fantastic.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

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The Book of Strange New Things

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A missionary named Peter goes to an alien planet where humans have just begun to colonize, leaving behind an Earth that is going through huge, potentially civilization-ending problems. And what Peter finds on the planet Oasis is most unexpected: the indigenous life forms are already converted to Christianity, and in fact are obsessed with the Bible. But it’s not clear if their understanding of religion is the same as ours. Faber does a great job depicting the weirdness of living on another planet, and the homesickness of someone who’s just come from Earth. This book was made into a TV pilot that was available on Amazon.com, but never became a series.

Planetfall by Emma Newman

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Planetfall

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Planetfall

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This book blew my mind when I read it back in 2015. Newman follows a group of colonists who are living on another planet at the base of a mysterious living structure called God’s City. She creates a wonderfully vivid portrayal of living on another planet, and all of the politics and complications that ensue. Newman’s colonists use an advanced 3D printer to create everything they need, and her protagonist Ren is in charge of operating it. But Ren has a hoarding problem, and her issues run much deeper than we first suspect—leading to an amazing psychological thriller.

The Stars Change by Mary Anne Mohanraj

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The Stars Change

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The Stars Change

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Mohanraj’s novel-in-stories follows a group of people living on Pyroxina Major, a “university planet” settled by South Asians, as a war is breaking out between “pure” humans on the one side and modified humans and aliens on the other. In a series of vignettes focused on sexual encounters, Mohanraj shows how people’s complex relationships and pasts are affected by this conflict. We’re also immersed in the day-to-day strangeness of living on another world, facing questions about diversity and inclusion that are even more fractious than ones faced on Earth.

Windswept by Adam Rakunas

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Windswept

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Windswept

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Like Planetfall, this is the first book of a series, but it can easily be read on its own. And like a lot of the other books on this list, Windswept is all about complicated politics on an extrasolar colony world. Padma Mehta is a labor organizer who needs to recruit enough people to join her Union in order to buy her own freedom, but she keeps running into snags. And then she discovers a conspiracy that could threaten the livelihood of everyone on her planet. Rakunas includes tons of great touches that illuminate the complex, noir-ish politics of his world, which is entirely devoted to growing sugarcane for industrial uses…and for rum.

The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey

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Leviathan Wakes

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Leviathan Wakes

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Even before it became a beloved TV show, this series set in a future where humans are living all over the solar system had become iconic for its portrayal of the complex webs of exploitation and prejudice that govern the lives of “Inners” and “Belters.” Corey (a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) comes up with a vision of human colonization that’s both plausibly uncomfortable and politically volatile—the way real-life settlement of our solar system, and beyond, would almost certainly be.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed,ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post Five Fantastic Recent Books about Humans Colonizing Other Planets appeared first on Reactor.

The good news? A growing number of SF authors are talking about climate change overtly, imagining futures full of flooded cities, droughts, melting icecaps, and other disasters. Amazon.com lists 382 SF books with the keyword “climate” from 2018, versus 147 in 2013 and just 22 in 2008. Some great recent books dealing with the effects of environmental disasters include Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, Edan Lepucki’s California, Cindy Pon’s Want, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. It’s simply not true, as Amitav Ghosh has suggested, that contemporary fiction hasn’t dealt with climate issues to any meaningful degree.

But we need to do more, because speculative fiction is uniquely suited to help us imagine what’s coming, and to motivate us to mitigate the effects before it’s too late.

Climate change “no longer seems like science fiction,” Robinson recently wrote. And in many ways, this seemingly futuristic nightmare is already upon us. The rate of melting in Antarctica’s ice sheet has gone up by 280 percent in the past 40 years, and the oceans are warming faster than predicted. Already, there are wildfires and abnormally destructive storms in the United States—but also, widespread famine in East Africa and the Sahel region, as rains become erratic and crucial bodies of water like Lake Chad shrink. Millions of lives are already threatened, and even the current federal government predicts it’s going to get scarier.

“I live in New York City, and I’m scared shitless about how climate change is already impacting us here, and how much worse it will get,” says Blackfish City author Miller. “We still haven’t recovered from the damage Hurricane Sandy did to our subway tunnels in 2012. And I’m infuriated at the failure of governments and corporations to take the threat seriously.”

Jemisin says that she didn’t set out to create a metaphor for climate change in the Broken Earth trilogy, but she understands why so many people have viewed it as one. “I get that it works as a metaphor for same, especially given the revelations of the third book, but that just wasn’t the goal,” she says. Even so, Jemisin says that she believes “anyone who’s writing about the present or future of *this* world needs to include climate change, simply because otherwise it’s not going to be plausible, and even fantasy needs plausibility.”

It’s become a cliché to say that science fiction doesn’t predict the future, but instead just describes the present. At the same time, because SF deals in thought experiments and scientific speculation, the genre can do more than any other to help us understand the scope of a problem that’s been caused by human technology, with far-ranging and complicated effects.

Science fiction “provides a remarkable set of tools” for exploring intricate systems such as the atmosphere, ecosystems, and human-created systems, says James Holland Jones, an associate professor for Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. “These are all complex, coupled systems. Tweak something in one of those systems and there will be cascading, often surprising, consequences.” A science fiction novel provides a perfect space to explore these possible consequences, and what it might be like to live through them, Jones says.

“I think that this modeling framework is just as powerful as the mathematical models that we tend to associate with the field” of environmental science, Jones adds. “SF allows the author—and the reader—to play with counterfactuals and this allows us to make inferences and draw conclusions that we otherwise couldn’t.”

We need to imagine the future in order to survive it

And any real-life solution to climate change is going to depend on imagination as much as technical ingenuity, which is one reason why imaginative storytelling is so vitally important. Imagination gives rise to ingenuity and experimentation, which we’re going to need if humans are going to survive the highly localized effects of a global problem. Plus imagination makes us more flexible and adaptable, allowing us to cope with massive changes more quickly.

Jones cites a 2016 interview with Mohsin Hamid in The New Yorker in which Hamid says that our political crisis is caused, in part, by “violently nostalgic visions” that keep us from imagining a better future.

Says Jones, “I think it’s hard to overstate how important this is. We are actively engaged in a struggle with violently nostalgic visions that, like most nostalgia, turn out to be dangerous bullshit.” Science fiction, says Jones, can show “how people work, how they fight back, how they engage in [the] prosaic heroism of adapting to a changed world. This is powerful. It gives us hope for a better future.”

And that’s the most important thing—solving the problem of climate change is going to require greater political willpower in order to overcome all the bullshit nostalgia and all of the entrenched interests that profit from fossil fuels. And empathizing with people who are trying to cope with the effects of climate change is an important step toward having the will to act in real life.

“To me, it’s the job of a science fiction writer—as it’s the job of all sentient beings—to not only stand unflinchingly in the truth of who we are and what we’re doing and what the consequences of our actions will be, but also to imagine all the ways we can be better,” Miller says.

And it’s true that there’s no version of Earth’s future that doesn’t include climate change as a factor. Even if we switch to entirely clean energy in the next few decades, the warming trend is expected to peak between 2200 and 2300—but if we insist on burning every bit of fossil fuel on the planet, the trend could last much longer (and get much hotter.) That’s not even factoring in the geopolitical chaos that’s likely to result, as whole populations are displaced and/or become food-insecure.

So any vision of a future (or present) world where climate change is not an issue is doomed to feel not just escapist, but Pollyannaish. Even if you decide that in your future, we’ve somehow avoided or reversed the worst effects of climate change, this can’t just be a hand-wavy thing—we need to understand how this solution happened.

Heroes, and reason for hope

Science fiction, according to Jones, provides an important forum for “humanizing science and even politics/policy.” Pop culture and the popular imagination tend to depict scientists as evil or horribly misguided, and civil servants as “contemptible, petty, power-hungry bureaucrats.” But SF can show science in a more positive light, and even show how government is capable of implementing policies that “will get us out of the mess we’re currently in,” says Jones.

“With Blackfish City, I wanted to paint a realistically terrifying picture about how the world will change in the next hundred years, according to scientists,” says Miller—a picture which includes the evacuation of coastal cities, wars over resources, famines, plague, and infrastructure collapse. “But I also wanted to have hope, and imagine the magnificent stuff we’ll continue to create. The technology we’ll develop. The solutions we’ll find. The music we’ll make.”

“The Road/Walking Dead-style abject hopelessness is not entertaining or stimulating to me,” adds Miller. “Humans are the fucking worst, yes, but they’re also the fucking best.”

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Robinson has been called the “master of disaster” because of how often he depicts a world ravaged by climate change, in books ranging from the Science in the Capitol trilogy to the more recent New York 2140. But Jones says Robinson’s novels “are generally incredibly hopeful. People adapt. They fight back. They go on being human. They work to build just societies. And the heroes are just regular people: scientists, public servants, working people.”

Jones also gains a lot of hope from reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, with its “visceral exploration of human adaptation.” He also cites the novels of Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi, along with Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, and Hamid’s Exit West. (I’ve also done my best to address climate change, in novels like All the Birds in the Sky and the forthcoming The City in the Middle of the Night, plus some of my short fiction.)

Speculative fiction has done a pretty good job of preparing us for things like social media influencers (see James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”) or biotech enhancements. But when it comes to the greatest challenge of our era, SF needs to do much more. We’re not going to get through this without powerful stories that inspire us to bring all of our inventiveness, far-sightedness, and empathy to this moment, when the choices we make will shape the world for generations.

So if you’re writing a near-future story, or even a story set in the present, you have an amazing opportunity to help transform the future. Even if you don’t want to write a story that’s explicitly about climate change, simply including it in your worldbuilding and making it a part of the backdrop for your story is an important step towards helping us see where we’re headed, and what we can do about it. In fact, in some ways, a fun, entertaining story that just happens to take place in a post-climate change world can do just as much good as a heavier, more serious piece that dwells on this crisis. And really, we need as many different kinds of approaches to climate issues as possible, from hard-science wonkery to flights of fancy.

Few authors, in any genre, have ever had the power and relevance that SF authors can have in 2019—if we choose to claim this moment.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post Why Science Fiction Authors Need to be Writing About Climate Change Right Now appeared first on Reactor.

That’s why, at least sometimes, it’s better to lean on your weaknesses as a writer. Your strengths will still be there when you need them, but often the only way to get better at writing is to develop the skills that you lack. This can be scary and frustrating—after all, part of what makes writing fun is that sense of mastery that you get when you know what you’re doing—but vulnerability and insecurity are often where the greatest rewards come from, as a writer.

I started out my career in science fiction as an author of zippy gonzo comedy stories, most of which appeared in small-press zines and tiny, now-defunct websites. (One of my best early stories is “Not to Mention Jack,” which appeared at Strange Horizons in early 2002, and it’s only that good because the Strange Horizons editors worked incredibly hard to help me improve it.) I took a few years just to master the basics of plotting and character arcs, and then I had a type of story that I was good at: fast-paced, silly, full of quippy dialogue. I wrote dozens of those stories, most of them pretty terrible.

I had a blast writing in a style that was long on humor and clever ideas, and short on almost everything else, but I couldn’t level up as an author until I learned to develop the areas where I was deficient. I did this partly by dialing back the humor in some of my fiction and leaning instead on character and emotion, and partly by exploring other genres, including literary fiction, erotica and romance. Experimenting in other genres made old habits harder to stick to, and forced me to approach how I tell a story differently.

Double consciousness

Writing is one of the few areas where the better you get at it, the harder it becomes.

This is partly because “getting good at writing” requires you to have more awareness of the weaknesses in your own work. But also, you can’t get better after a certain point without going outside your comfort zone. And there are questions you don’t even think to ask about your own work, until you’ve been forced to think about them.

Plus, writing imaginative fiction requires a weird form of double consciousness. On the one hand, you have to be arrogant enough to believe that you can create a whole new world out of nothing, and that your story is so brilliant that it deserves to be told and that people ought to pay money to read it. You have to be a little bit of an egomaniac to think your imaginary friends are worth sharing with random strangers.

On the other hand, you need to be humble enough to recognize that your writing has flaws and that you probably screwed up all over the place. And you have to be able to hear criticism of your work, and accept all the ways you may have fallen short, without retreating into the shiny fortress of “but you don’t understaaaand, I’m a geeeeniusss.”

Still, once you’ve been doing this for a while, you get better at holding both ideas in your head at once. And you get used to feeling like a screw-up, but also understanding that doesn’t mean you have nothing to offer.

So, assuming you know what your strengths are as a writer, you can value them and appreciate their awesome power, but also understand that you need more devices in your utility belt. The good news is, strengthening your weakest abilities will probably make your strongest skills work better as well—like, if you already had a gift for worldbuilding but you put a lot of work into your plotting, your worldbuilding will shine even brighter once you have some cool plots to unspool inside it.

The reward for abandoning your comfort zone is often even more insecurity and anxiety—because once you’re no longer writing the kinds of stories that “come naturally” to you, you’ll only get more aware of all the ways your writing still has to improve. But eventually, you may look back and be shocked at how much better your writing is now, compared to before.

How to court discomfort

Luckily, there are degrees of “abandoning your comfort zone,” and you don’t necessarily have to leap into a whole other genre, or style of writing.

At one end of the spectrum, you could just focus more intently on whatever aspect of your writing needs the most work. More often than not, this means being aware of when you’re skipping over things or sweeping stuff under the rug—or taking the moments that you rush past, and stopping to focus on them. Like, say you’re really bad at describing people physically (which is one of my many, many issues as a writer)—you could make more of a conscious effort to include a really vivid description of every character as you introduce them.

A lot depends on what kind of strategies you’ve developed (conscious or unconscious) to cover for your weaknesses as an author. Like, if you’ve been using lightning-fast pacing or abrupt scene transitions to avoid having to deal with intense emotional moments, then you might have to slow the pace down, or spend more time in an important scene. Or if you use pages of worldbuilding detail to compensate for holes in your plotting, you might need to trim the details about the world to make the plot more central.

Even beyond just de-emphasizing your strengths in order to focus on your weaknesses, sometimes you need to dismantle a whole slew of coping mechanisms.

But let’s say that just focusing more intently on your weakest skills isn’t enough to develop them. That’s when you might want to think about trying to write different kinds of stories for a while. (This is always a good idea anyway, because trying something very different is both fun and a great way to challenge yourself.) If you have a hard time writing relationships, try writing romance stories for a while. Or just a story that’s all about a friendship between two people.

And here’s where trying a totally different genre entirely could come in handy. Often, the moment you switch from urban fantasy to epic fantasy, or from steampunk to queer lit, the flaws in your writing immediately become easier to spot, and to fix. You have to reinvent your writing from the ground up,when you start writing detective stories instead of post-apocalyptic survival tales. So it’s not that much more daunting to put your worst foot forward in a brand new genre that has its own steep learning curve.

You can also experiment with writing a story that’s nothing BUT the thing you suck at. If you struggle with dialogue, try writing a story that’s just a scene of dialogue and nothing else. If you can’t do worldbuilding to save your life, try writing a worldbuilding sketch. As a bonus, these experiments probably won’t be something you’re going to try and publish, so you don’t have to put as much pressure on yourself to do anything but have fun with it.

And finally, if you come from the dominant group in mainstream culture, then one of your weaknesses as a writer is probably going to be including the perspectives of people from marginalized groups. For example, if you’re white, you probably struggle with including characters of color who feel like fully realized people. This is obviously kind of a special case, because no amount of “playing to your weakness” will fix this issue—instead, the only solution is to talk to lots of people, take some seminars, and hire a sensitivity reader. But the process has to start with being willing to work on having more inclusion in your stories.

This process never ends

I still have areas of my writing that come more naturally than others, and I suspect that’ll always be the case. I worked hard to get away from those quick-hit, funny, idea-based stories I started with, and develop more well-rounded characters, more fleshed-out worlds, plots that actually make sense, and emotional relationships. (That’s not an exhaustive list of the things that I have worked hard to get better at.)

But I still feel like I use glibness and cute ideas to skate over all the many patches of thin ice in my storytelling. Any time I have a choice between really digging into the emotional truth of a moment versus just distracting the reader with a whimsical comedy bit, I will go for the whimsical comedy bit every time. And oftentimes, I’ll go for a joke that undermines the characters or comes at their expense, rather than one that actually shores them up.

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I still often don’t notice when I’ve cheated on the characters or the story, because I’m so good at tricking myself into thinking I’ve nailed it—which is why I’m lucky to know some amazing beta readers, and to work with some truly gifted editors.

But that’s also why I decided to try writing a novel without much in the way of humor. When I started working on The City in the Middle of the Night five years ago, I wanted to challenge myself to write about damaged, complicated characters without a lot of whimsical comedy to provide a distraction. I also tried to write it in a different style than All the Birds in the Sky or other books: more stripped down, less fancy. Of course, being me, I ended up still adding in a fair bit of humor and lightness and even silliness, in the course of revising—but starting out without madcap goonery was a neat challenge, one that forced me to stretch muscles that I hadn’t relied on as much before.

The lack of humor in my early drafts also made the worldbuilding very different in The City in the Middle of the Night, too—I wasn’t self-consciously creating an absurd or satirical world, but instead trying to create someplace that felt somewhat real. (But again, being me, I ended up with some absurdity here and there.)

I’m now back to cracking as many jokes as I can, but I think I gained something more or less permanent from the experience of writing that book. My utility belt is just a tiny bit more pouchy than before. And it’s good to know that I can do something really different without imploding.

And in general, being a more versatile writer could also come in very handy down the road, if the kind of stuff you normally write isn’t selling and you want to try and break into a new market. And it’ll also help you stave off burnout and boredom, when you’re writing your 200th short story or your ninth novel, and you know you have the flexibility to keep changing things up.

The more you get used to reinventing yourself, the more staying power you’ll probably have as a writer—because unless you’re George R.R. Martin, you’re going to have to keep proving yourself over and over. (And one of the people you’ll have to keep proving yourself to is you.)

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

The post Putting Your Worst Foot Forward: Why You Should Play to Your Weaknesses as an Author appeared first on Reactor.

January is a dying planet—divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk. And living inside the cities, one flush with anarchy and the other buckling under the stricture of the ruling body, is increasingly just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans—and Sophie’s ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

From author Charlie Jane Anders, The City in The Middle of the Night is a haunting, futuristic tale of a young girl who just might save humanity—if she can stay alive. Available February 12th from Tor Books.

SOPHIE
{before}

I

Bianca walks toward me, under too much sky. The white-hot twilight makes a halo out of loose strands of her fine black hair. She looks down and fidgets, as though she’s trying to settle an argument with herself, but then she looks up and sees me and a smile starts in her eyes, then spreads to her mouth. This moment of recognition, the alchemy of being seen, feels so vivid, that everything else is an afterimage. By the time she reaches the Boulevard, where I’m standing, Bianca is laughing at some joke, that she’s about to share with me.

As the two of us walk back towards campus, a brace of dark quince leaves, hung on doorways in some recent celebration, waft past our feet. Their nine dried stems scuttle like tiny legs.

* * *

I lie awake in our dark dorm room, listening to Bianca breathe on the shelf across from mine. And then, I hear her voice.
“Sophie?”

I’m so startled, hearing her speak after curfew, I tip over, and land in a bundle on the floor.

Bianca giggles from her bunk, as I massage my sore tailbone. I keep expecting some authority figure, like one of the Proctors, to burst in and glare at us for disturbing the quiet time. If you can’t sleep when everyone else does, you’re not even human.

“Sophie! It’s okay,” Bianca says. “I just wanted to ask you a question. I don’t even remember what it was, now.” Then she stops laughing, because she understands this isn’t funny to me. “You’re not going to get in trouble. I promise. You know, we can’t even learn anything here, unless we think for ourselves occasionally, right? Some rule we learned as little kids doesn’t have to keep us in a chokehold forever.”

When Bianca first showed up as my roommate, I hid from her as much as I could. I crawled into the tiny space above the slatted hamper in the side washroom, next to the wide sluicing cisterns that people use as toilets here. Bianca was this whirl of hand-gestures and laughter, who filled every room with color. When she started trying to talk to me, I assumed she was only taking pity on this painfully shy girl from the dark side of town, and I’d just have to ignore her until she gave up.

She didn’t give up.

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Now I look up at Bianca’s shape, as I pull myself out of my huddle on the floor. “But, you follow the rules too,” I say. “Like, you would never actually go outdoors right now. You probably could. You could sneak out of here, wander onto the streets, and the Curfew Patrols might not ever catch you. But you don’t do that, because you do care about rules.”

“Yeah, I’m not running down the street naked during the Span of Reflection, either,” Bianca laughs. “But a little talking after curfew has to be okay, right?”

Bianca makes me feel as though she and I just stepped off the first shuttle from the Mothership, and this world is brand new for us to make into whatever we want.

* * *

Since I was little, I couldn’t sleep at the right time, along with everyone else. I tried whispering to my brother Thom sometimes, if I thought he was awake. Or else, I busied myself trying to do tiny good deeds for my sleeping family, fixing a broken eyepiece or putting my brother’s slippers where his feet would find them most easily on waking. Except my father’s hand would come out of the darkness and seize my arm, tight enough to cut off the blood to my hand, until I whined through my teeth. Later, after the shutters came down and the dull almost-light filled our home once more, my father would roar at me, his bright red face blocking out the entire world.

Everything is a different shape in the dark. Sharp edges are sharper, walls further away, fragile items more prone to topple. I used to wake next to my family, all of us in a heap on the same bedpile, and imagine that maybe in the darkness, I could change shape, too.

* * *

Bianca has found another book, way at the back of the school library, on one of those musty shelves that you have to excavate from a layer of broken settler tech and shreds of ancient clothing. This particular book is a spyhole into the past, the real past, when the Founding Settlers arrived on a planet where one side always faces the sun, and had no clue how to cope. “That’s what history is, really,” Bianca says, “the process for turning idiots into visionaries.”

The two of us stroll together into the heart of the city’s temperate zone, past the blunt golden buttresses of the Palace, breathing the scents of the fancy market where she always tries to buy me better shoes.

Bianca reads all the time, and she tears through each book, as though she’s scared her eyes will just fall out of her head before she finishes them all. But she never does the assigned reading for any of our classes. “I’m here to learn, not study.” Her mouth pinches, in a way that only makes her narrow, angular face look more classically perfect.

Even after being her roommate for a while, this kind of talk makes me nervous. I’m still desperate to prove that I deserve to be here, though I’ve passed all the tests and gotten the scholarship. I sit and read every single assigned text three times, until the crystalline surface blurs in front of me. But everyone can tell I’m an interloper just by glancing—at my clothes, my hair, my face—if they even notice me.

“You’re the only one of us who had to work so hard for it,” Bianca tells me. “Nobody belongs here half as much as you.” Then she goes back to telling me that the Founders were bumblers, right as we pass by the giant bronze statue of Jonas, posing in his environment suit, one arm raised in triumph. Jonas’ shoulder-pads catch the dawn rays, as though still aglow from the righteous furnace of decontamination.


II

Every so often, Bianca puts on a dress made of iridescent petals, or violet satin, and disappears, along with a few others from our dorm. There’s always some party, or banquet, that she needs to go to, to nurture her status among the city’s elite. She stands in the doorway, the silhouette of an upward-pointing knife, and smiles back at me. “I’ll be back before you know.” Until one time, when the shutters close and the curfew bells ring but I’m still alone in our room. I crouch in the gloom, unable to think about sleeping, and wonder if Bianca’s okay.

After the shutters open again, Bianca comes into our dorm room and sits on her own bed-shelf. “The party went too late for me to make it back before curfew,” she says. “I had to stay with one of the hosts.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay, I was so worried—” I start to say, but then I realize Bianca’s slumped forward, hands clasped in front of her face. Her latest dress, made of silver filaments that ripple in waves of light, bunches around her hips.

“I’m just… all I ever do is play the part that’s expected of me. I’m just a fake.” She ratchets her shoulders. “Sometimes I’m afraid everybody can see through me, but maybe it’s worse if they can’t.”

Seeing Bianca depressed makes me feel soft inside, like my bones are chalk. I sit down next to her, careful not to mess up her dress. Her curved neck looks so slender.

Neither of us talks. I’m not good at breaking silences.

“I don’t even know why you would want to be friends with me,” she says.

I get up and fetch the teapot from down the hall, and a few moments later I’m pouring hot tea into a mug, which I press into Bianca’s hands. “Warm yourself up,” I say in a soft voice. Bianca nods and takes a big swallow of the acrid brew, then lets out a long sigh, as though she realizes she’s back where she belongs. We keep stealing the teapot for our own dorm room, because hardly anyone else uses it, but some busybody always sneaks into our room when we’re out, and reclaims the flowery globe for the common room, where it technically belongs. “Warm yourself up,” I say a second time.

By the time the tea is gone, Bianca’s bouncing up and down and cracking jokes again, and I’ve almost forgotten that I never answered her question, about why I want to be her friend.

* * *

The two of us sit in the Zone House, in our usual spot in the gloomy nook under the stairs, which smells of fermented mushrooms. Upstairs, a ragtime band draws long, discordant notes out of a zither and a bugle, and people discuss the latest football match at that new pitch in the Northern Wastes. Bianca asks what made me want to be the first person in my family—my neighborhood, even—to go to the Gymnasium. Why didn’t I just finish grammar school, settle down, and get an apprenticeship, like everyone else?

Her wide brown eyes gaze at me, as though there’s more than one Sophie in front of her, and she’s having fun trying to reconcile them.

I’ve always dreaded when people ask me personal questions, but when Bianca asks, I feel a flush of pleasure, that goes from my skin all the way inside. She’s not asking just to be polite, or using her question as a slender knife to cut me down.

“I always thought I would just go find a trade, like my classmates,” I say at last. “But then they wanted me to marry. There was this boy I was friends with at Grammar School, named Mark. He and I just stood around, watching everybody, not even speaking except for a word here and there. People saw us together, and they all decided Mark would be my husband. They made jokes, or winked at us, or sang this gross song. The thought of his hands just owning me, made me sick to my stomach. After that, I ran away whenever I saw Mark, but I was told I had to go to matchmaking sessions, to find a different husband. They said, ‘There’s a time to marry and have children, just like there’s a time to sleep, and a time to work.'”

Bianca pours more dark water into a tin goblet. “Yeah, they always say things like that. Or like, ‘Heed the chimes, know your way.’ This town! Everybody has to do everything at the exact same time as everybody else.” She laughs.

“I wasn’t ready.” My voice is a sore growl. “I’d gotten my visitor less than two dozen times, when they started with all this marriage talk.”

“Your ‘visitor,'” Bianca says. “You mean your period?”

I feel myself blush so hard, my scalp itches.

“Yes. Okay. My period. But I found out that if I could get accepted to one of the top colleges, like the Gymnasium, I could get a deferral on the marriage requirement. So, I became the best student ever. I memorized all the textbooks. I found this place to hide, with a tiny light, so I could just keep studying right up until curfew.”

Bianca’s staring at me now, a notch between her eyes and an uptick around her thin lips. I shrink into my chair, bracing for her to say something sarcastic. Instead, she shakes her head. “You took control over your life. You outsmarted the system. That’s just amazing.”

I take a swig from my goblet and search for the slightest sign of condescension or mockery. “You really think so?”

“Everyone else at the Gymnasium is like me,” Bianca says, meaning a child of the temperate zone—or really, of comfort. Her parents died when she was very young, and she went to live at a high-powered creche that groomed her for a leadership role. “We all came to the Gymnasium because were expected to. So we could graduate and claim our places in government or industry, and help keep this bloody stasis machine whirring. But you? You are something special.”

I don’t think of myself as special. I think of myself as invisible.

Bianca orders some of the salty, crispy steamed cakes that you have to eat with a special hook, left side first. The first time I tried to eat one, I made a sprawling, wet mess on my table at the Gymnasium canteen, in front of a dozen other students, and then Bianca slid next to me on the bench, and coached me in a hushed voice. I still can’t look at one of these without reliving my humiliation.

As we eat, Bianca asks what it was like to grow up on the dark side of town, on that steep cobbled street that climbs into deeper shadow, with the acrid fumes from the tannery and the chill wind coming in from the night. Where you woke up as the shutters lowered, to let in the same gray light as before, and you lost a heartbeat, remembering all over again that you’d be working or studying under that pall of gray. But I don’t talk about any of that stuff. Instead, I offer her comforting stories about my tight-knit neighborhood: all our street parties, all the people who offered a hand when you were in need.

She looks at me in the weakly dappled half-light, under the stairs. “I wish I could be more like you. I want to demolish everyone’s expectations. I want to keep surprising them all, until they die of surprise.” She’s not laughing, but her eyes have the same brightness as when she makes a joke. There’s more light in her eyes than in the whole wide sky that I grew up underneath.

III

The Progressive Students Union meets under basements and behind larders. Usually between five and fifteen of us, talking about systems of oppression. Bianca’s long black hair hides her face as she leans forward to listen, but her hand brushes mine. A mop-headed boy named Matthew is talking about the ordinary people whose every waking moment is spent at the farmwheels, the factories, the sewage plant, or the power station, until they die.

Then Bianca stands up and her voice rings out, like we’re all inside her heart and we can hear it beat. She wears streaks of purple and silver paint, to frame her eyes, and I never want to look away.

“If you control our sleep, then you own our dreams,” she says. “And from there, it’s easy to master our whole lives.”

Everything in Xiosphant is designed to make us aware of the passage of time, from the calendars, to the rising and falling of the shutters, to the bells that ring all over town. Everyone always talks about Timefulness, which could be simple—like, making it home for dinner before they ring the final chime before shutters-up, and the end of another cycle. Or it could be profound: like, one day you spy a mirror and realize your face has changed shape, and all at once you look like a woman, instead of a child.

But nothing in this city is ever supposed to change.

Time should make you angry, not complacent, Bianca says. Back on Earth, our ancestors could follow the progress of the sun from horizon to horizon. They saw change roll right over their heads. Enough of these journeys and even the weather would change, from colder to warmer to colder. This awareness made them fight with all their strength. They were always using violent metaphors, like, “Seize the day,” or “Strike while the iron is hot.”

“Time isn’t our prison,” Bianca says, “but our liberator.” We cheer and snap our fingers, until we all remember the reason we’re meeting in a stuffy basement behind barrels of cake batter: We’re committing deadly sedition down here.

After the meeting, Bianca gossips to me in our room about Matthew, the guy who spoke before she did. “He took forever just to say that we should have solidarity with other activist groups. He’s one of those people who likes to hear himself speak. Nice legs, though.”

“Matthew’s just nervous,” I say. “I’ve seen how he fidgets right before he’s going to try and speak. I think he’s in awe of you. And you don’t know how scary talking to people can be.”

Bianca leans over and touches my wrist. “You’d be a great leader, if you just got out of your shell.” She takes a stiff drink, and then says, “You always try to see the worth of everyone. Maybe you’re right about Matthew. I’ll try to put him at ease next time.”

* * *

How long have Bianca and I been roommates? Sometimes it feels like forever, sometimes just an interlude. Long enough that I know her habits, what each look or gesture probably signifies, but recent enough that she still surprises me all the time. According to the calendar, it’s 7 Marian after Red, which means the first term is half over. When I’m not talking to Bianca in person, I’m thinking of what I’ll say to her the next time we’re together and imagining what she’ll say back.

Lately, when Bianca talks to me illegally after curfew, I crawl onto her shelf so I can hear her whisper. Her breath warms my cheek as she murmurs about school and art and what would it even mean to be free. Our skins, hers cloud-pale and mine the same shade as wild strawflowers, almost touch. I almost forget not to tremble.

Everybody says it’s normal for girls my age to have intense friendships with other girls, which might even feel like something else. Some childish echo of real adult love and courtship. But you’ll know when it’s time to abandon this foolishness, the same way you know when to eat and sleep. I close my eyes and imagine that when I open them again, I will have outgrown all of my feelings. Sometimes I clasp my eyelids until I almost see sparks.

I still haven’t gotten used to those times when Bianca has to go to some fancy ball or dinner near the Palace. She’ll break out some shimmering dress, made of vinesilk, hanging at the back of her closet, which sways with her body. And she’ll hug me and promise to think of me while she’s doing her duty at the Citadel. Sometimes lately, I don’t even see her for a couple of shutter-cycles, but she always comes back in a strange mood, with sagging shoulders.

One time, I don’t see Bianca for a while. Then, I come back to our dorm room, and she’s sitting on her bed next to Matthew, the Progressive Student organizer with the nice legs. They’re holding hands, a couple buttons of her tunic are unbuttoned, her ankle skirt is undone, and her lipstick smears. His hand has a thatch of hair across the knuckles.

Bianca doesn’t startle when I walk in on them, she just laughs and gestures for me to sit on my own bed. “Matthew’s leaving soon anyway. We’ve been talking about solidarity, and how to make it more, uh, solid.” She laughs, and so does Matthew. I try not to stare, but there’s noplace to put my eyes.

After Matthew leaves, Bianca flops backwards onto her bunk and says, “You were right about him. He’s a sweet guy. And he cares about making a difference. I think he could be fun.” I feel like my tongue has dissolved in my mouth, and I’m swallowing the remains. I slump onto my own bunk.

Bianca notices my face. “He’s not that bad. I promise! And it’s been too long since I had someone. It’s not good to be single too long. I feel like you helped set the two of us up, so maybe we can help you find a boyfriend next.”

I shake my head. “No boyfriend.”

“Right.” She raises her hands. “You told me about Mark. That sounded ghastly. But I’m sure you’ll get over it, once you meet the right guy. You’ll see.”

Bianca’s eyes are the most awake I’ve ever seen them, her cheeks suffused with color. She’s so transported that she’s wriggling on her bunk and humming to herself. I wonder if that’s how I looked, when I finally let Bianca take an interest in me. I’ve been so stupid.

Every time I think I know what’s wrong with me, I find something else.

* * *

The five leaders of the Progressive Student Union sit in the cellar of the Zone House, emptying a jug of gin-and-milk, and swapping personal stories. The jug and cups wobble on a low table with unlevel legs. This isn’t an official meeting, so we’re not hiding deeper underground, and people only mutter about politics in oblique half-references. You can still tell from all the olive-green pipe-worker jackets and rough-spun scarves that we’re a group of free-thinkers. Upstairs, the ragtime band thumps out a slow, dirgelike rendition of “The Man Who Climbed Into the Day.”

Bianca is holding hands with Matthew, right in front of the group, and the two of them exchange little glances. I’m convinced everyone can sense my jealousy, hanging like a cloud in this mouldy basement. She throws me a quick smile, which packs a million snarky in-jokes into its contours.

I look away, and see one shaft of light, coming through a tiny window over our heads, and striking the wall opposite. They don’t cover that window, even when all the shutters close, so this faint sunbeam never lets up, and over time, it’s stripped away the paint and torn off the plaster, just in that one spot. Even the exposed bricks have deep ugly fissures that meet in the middle like the impact site from an ancient meteor. I wonder how long before the entire wall comes down.

Maybe if I can speak in front of the group for once, Bianca will pay attention to me again. She’ll realize Matthew has nothing interesting to say, and she was right about him the first time.

I open my mouth to make some joke that I know won’t be funny, and I ignore the hot prickle that I always get under my skin when I try to talk to strangers, or to more than one person at a time. This shouldn’t be so hard, I tell myself. You can tell one joke.

Just as I say the first syllable, the police cascade down the rickety stairs, in a blur of dark padded suits, corrugated sleeves, and shining faceplates. They’re carrying guns—high-powered fast-repeaters, which I’ve never seen up close before—and they stand over our little group.

Their leader, a short man with a sergeant’s insignia and no helmet on his square head, comes in last, and addresses our tiny gang, using the polite verb forms, but with a rough edge to them. “Sorry to disturb your evening. We’ve had some information that one of you student radicals stole some food dollars from the Gymnasium. Those notes are marked. Whoever took them, ought to speak up now.”

He keeps talking, but I can barely hear what he’s saying.

A memory comes to me: on our way here, I saw Bianca slip inside the Bursary, on the ground floor of our dorm building, and emerge a moment later stuffing something in her pocket. She made some joke about being able to buy a round of drinks for the leaders of the revolution.

“You people. You ‘revolutionaries,'” the Sergeant is saying in a growl. “You always act as though the rules don’t apply to you, same as everyone else.”

I look at Bianca, next to me, and she’s frozen, hands gripping the sides of her chair. Her face closes in on itself, nostrils flared and mouth pinched. If they find the food dollars in her pocket, this could be the end of her bright future. She could do so much for this city, for all the struggling people. This could crush out the light in her eyes forever.

And me? I’m invisible.

I slip my hand into Bianca’s pocket, and close my fingers around three cool strips. I pull back and slide them into my own jeans, just as the cops start searching everyone.

“We’re not any kind of ‘group,'” Bianca is hectoring the cops. “We’re just a few friends having a drink. You are invading our privacy with this unwarranted—” She chokes in mid-sentence as they start patting her down, her whole body rigid as she stands, swaying, over her chair.

When they don’t find the stolen cash, Bianca goes limp. She almost topples into her chair, and then she recovers. Her eyes dart around the room. Husky rasping grunts come out of her mouth.

Then the police come to me, and I have just enough time to brace my hips before one of them finds the pocket where I stashed the money. “What did I say?” he laughs. In the cop’s gleaming visor, I see a distorted reflection of a girl with a wide-eyed expression.

Bianca looks at me, and her face changes shape, her mouth slackening, as she realizes what I’ve done. She tries to speak, and nothing comes. Tears cluster around the inner rims of her eyes, as they turn red. Matthew reaches for her and tries to offer comfort, and she shakes him off.

She tries to step forward, to put her body between the police and me, but she hesitates a moment too long, and two of them are already grabbing me. I’m aware of nothing now but my own loud breathing, and the tightness of their grip on my arms.

When I can hear the world around me again, Bianca has gotten her composure back, and is talking to the Sergeant in her best talking-to-stupid-authority-figures voice. “Fine. You found the money. Congratulations. I’m sure none of us have any idea how it got there, including Sophie. But this is an internal Gymnasium matter, in any case. You can take us to the Provost, and we’ll just sort this—”

“Not this time,” the Sergeant says. “Time you ‘student radicals’ learned a lesson. You want to just sit down here and natter about how you’re going to ruin everything we’ve built, to take the bread out of my mouth. Out of everyone’s mouths, with your anarchist nonsense. You don’t get to do whatever you want just because you’re clever.”

The cops grab me by the armpits, two of them, and drag me to the rickety staircase that Bianca and I normally sit under. My legs scrape the floor as I try to plant my feet.

“It’s just a few stupid food dollars!” Bianca is screaming now, her voice already hoarse. The other Progressive Students are still frozen in their seats. “Bring her back! This is wrong. She’s done nothing, she’s a good person, maybe the only good person, and I… Stop! Please!” Bianca’s face turns crimson, shiny with tears, and she’s grabbing the Sergeant’s sleeve in her fists until he throws her away.

The men with opaque faceplates pull me up the stairs, still gripping my armpits so hard I get friction burns. All my kicking and squirming just leave me bruised.

“You can’t take her!” Bianca’s shriek comes from her whole body. My last glimpse of her is a crying, shaking, furious blur of black hair and clenched fists. “She doesn’t belong with you, she belongs with me. She’s done nothing. Bring her back!”

Then I’m yanked up the rest of the stairs, and into the street.

Excerpted from The City in the Middle of the Night, copyright © 2018 by Charlie Jane Anders

The post Read an Excerpt from Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in the Middle of the Night appeared first on Reactor.

I read that book until the covers fell apart, and then read it some more. I have a super vivid memory of being in bed sick, with a sore throat, and reading a scene where Wonder Woman gets captured. I thought to myself, “How is Wonder Woman going to escape from these bad guys when she has a sore throat?” And then I remembered that I was the one with the sore throat, not Wonder Woman.

I loved Doctor Who, growing up. I obsessed over Star Trek and Star Wars, and Tintin and Asterix. But the hero I identified with, deep down, was Wonder Woman.

Looking at those comics nowadays, I’m struck by things that went over my head when I read them as a kid. Like the the horrifying racism towards Japanese people and others. And the celebration of bondage pin-up art, which is a somewhat… let’s say, odd choice, for an empowering kids’ comic. These BDSM elements were mandated by Wonder Woman’s kink-loving creator, William Moulton Marston (and his uncredited co-creators, his wife Betty Holloway Marston, and their live-in spouse, Olive Byrne, who was Margaret Sanger’s niece).

What I saw, back then, was a hero who always laughed in the face of danger, in a good-hearted way rather than with a smirk. And a powerful woman who spent a lot of her time encouraging other women and girls to be heroes, to fight at her side. She came from a people who remembered being in chains, and she refused to be chained again. For all their kinky eroticism, the original Wonder Woman comics are also a story about slavery, and what comes after you win your freedom.

But most of all, the thing that made Wonder Woman irresistible to me, back then, was the way she felt like a fairytale hero and a conventional action hero, rolled into one brightly colored package.

In fact, there are a lot of fairytale elements in the early Wonder Woman comics, says Jess Nevins, author of The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero. (I was lucky enough to hang out with Nevins at Wiscon, while I was working on this article.) Wonder Woman frequently meets talking animals, rides around on a kangaroo, and runs along the rings of Saturn. Many Golden Age or Silver Age comics are gleefully weird or silly, but Golden Age Wonder Woman really embraces its fabulist roots.

As part of this fairytale essence, Harry Peter’s artwork in the first Wonder Woman stories is a beautiful mixture of bright colors, grotesqueness, and glamour art. It’s strikingly bold, and not quite like any other comics art I’ve seen, either from the same era or later on. Even some of the most bizarre, over-the-top stuff in these comics feels like it’s of a piece with the extremes of classic fables.

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is unique among superheroes, for a number of other reasons. She’s one of the earliest female comics heroes, and she’s not a distaff version of a male hero (like Batgirl or Supergirl). She’s based on ancient mythology, not science fiction or pulp adventure (in a different way than her contemporary Captain Marvel, aka Shazam). Most of all, while the early Superman and Batman are both angry vigilantes who constantly teach war profiteers and criminal syndicates a lesson, Wonder Woman is a joyful liberator and role model.

According to Nevins, while Batman and Superman come from the pulps, Wonder Woman is an entirely new character. She has her roots in stories from 400 years earlier, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, but there’s nothing like her in the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s.

And for all their problems and dated elements, those early Wonder Woman comics have a poetry that sticks in my mind all these years later. In Marston’s telling, the Amazons were tricked by Hercules and his men, who enslaved them until they were saved by the goddess Aphrodite. The bracelets that all the Amazons wear, including Wonder Woman, are a reminder that they have been subjugated before, and that this must never happen again. So when Wonder Woman does her famous trick of deflecting bullets with her bracelets, she’s using the symbol of remembrance of slavery to defend herself. But meanwhile, if any man chains her bracelets together, she loses her superpowers.

Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, says this obsession with chains wasn’t just an excuse for Marston to feature lots of bondage fantasies (though that was a factor). Marston was heavily involved in the women’s suffrage movement of the 1910s, in which chains, and the breaking thereof, were a hugely important symbol.

But it’s also kind of awesome that one of Wonder Woman’s main superpowers comes from remembering her mothers’ legacy of enslavement. And she only gets to keep those powers if she bears the lessons of an enslaved people in mind. I don’t remember if Marston ever makes this clear, but it seems as though Wonder Woman is the only Amazon who doesn’t have firsthand memories of being a slave. She was raised by an army of badasses who had never let go of that memory, and yet she still has this boundless optimism and curiosity about the outside world. Like many fairytale heroes, Diana doesn’t always listen to the warnings of people who’ve already made their own mistakes.

(According to Lepore’s book, Wonder Woman’s bracelets are also based on heavy silver bracelets that Byrne used to wear, one of which was African and the other Mexican.)

Wonder Woman’s power being used against her is a motif in the Golden Age comics in other ways. Her lasso of truth, which has ill-defined mind-control powers in these early stories, works just as well on Diana as it does on anyone else. In one storyline, Dr. Psycho’s ex-wife uses Wonder Woman’s own lasso to force her to switch places and take the other woman’s place. Nobody could steal Superman’s strength or Batman’s skills (Kryptonite didn’t exist until later), but Wonder Woman’s powers are worthless unless she uses the full potency of her cleverness to outsmart her foes.

Speaking of Dr. Psycho, he’s a brilliantly creepy villain: a misogynistic genius who uses “ectoplasm” to create propaganda, in which the ghost of George Washington speaks against equal rights for women. (This all begins when Mars, the God of War, is upset that women are participating in the war effort, and his lackey, the Duke of Deception, recruits Dr. Psycho to stop it.) In one of the fable-inspired twists that fill these comics, Dr. Psycho’s power turns out to come from his wife, a “medium” whose psychic powers he’s harnessed and manipulated. This woman, too, Wonder Woman has to free from slavery, so she in turn can help to stop the enslavement of others.

As Marston’s health failed, his ideas got weirder and weirder. By the end of his run, the Amazons are constantly using mind-controlling “Venus girdles” to convert evil women to “submission to loving authority.” The themes of bondage and matriarchy get taken to an extreme, and the wings are falling off the invisible plane. But these weren’t the stories I read in that Ms. Magazine volume, and they’re not what I think of when I remember the early Wonder Woman comics.

I’ve never quite found another portrayal of the Amazon princess that captures everything I loved about those Golden Age stories. I caught reruns of the Lynda Carter-starring TV show, which consciously pays homage to the early stories (even taking place in World War II at first) but with a campy disco-era twist and that kind of genial blandness that a lot of 1970s TV has. Writer-artist George Perez’s 1980s reinvention of Wonder Woman gave her a decent supporting cast of mostly female characters, along with a stronger mythological focus. I’ve also really loved a lot of the Gail Simone/Aaron Lopresti comics, and Greg Rucka’s collaborations with various artists.

Best of all, though, Trina Robbins and Kurt Busiek collaborated on a four-issue tribute to the Marston-Peter era, called The Legend of Wonder Woman. It’s got Queen Atomia, loopy storylines, and all of the tropes of the Marston-Peter comics. (It’s never been reprinted since its first publication in 1986, but I found all the issues for a quarter each, and it looks like eBay has tons of copies.)

To some extent, Wonder Woman has changed with the times, the same as Batman and Superman. Sometimes, she’s more of a warrior, sometimes more of a diplomat. Her origin has been rewritten and the nature of her powers reshaped, until a lot of the original underpinnings of her character are harder to find. Of all the comics being published today, the one that most captures the innocence and exuberance of the very early Wonder Woman issues is probably Squirrel Girl, by writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson.

Last week, when a group of us were buying tickets for the new Wonder Woman movie, we asked my mother if she wanted to come along. She said yes, adding that Wonder Woman had been her “childhood hero”—something that I had never known about her. I asked my mom about this, and she explained that she read Wonder Woman comics constantly in the late 1940s. And, she added, “I used to fantasize a lot about being her.”

Wonder Woman isn’t just another superhero. She’s the woman my mother and I both grew up wanting to be. And I’m glad she’s getting her own movie, 100 years after the suffragette movement that inspired her.

Originally published May 2017.

Before writing fiction full-time, Charlie Jane Anders was for many years an editor of the extraordinarily popular science fiction and fantasy site io9.com. Her debut novel, the mainstream Choir Boy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award and was optioned for television. Her debut SFF novel All the Birds in the Sky won the 2016 Nebula Award in the Novel category and earned praise from, among others, Michael Chabon, Lev Grossman, and Karen Joy Fowler. Her new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, publishes February 12th with Tor Books. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.

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