Escape Pod 301: Stone Wall Truth

Originally appeared in Asimov’s

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for adult imagery.

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Nebula Award for Novelette, 2011

Stone Wall Truth

By Caroline M. Yoachim

Njeri sewed the woman together with hairs from a zebra tail. Her deer-bone needle dipped under the woman’s skin and bobbed back out. The contrast of the white seams against her dark skin was striking.

“The center seam makes a straight line,” Njeri told her apprentice, “but the others flow with the natural curves of the body, just as the Enshai River follows the curve of the landscape.”

Odion leaned in to examine her work, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Foolish boy, wasting his attention on her. Njeri set her needle on the table and stood up to stretch. The job was nearly done — she’d repositioned the woman’s organs, reconstructed her muscles, sewn her body back together. Only the face was still open, facial muscles splayed out in all directions from the woman’s skull like an exotic flower in full bloom.

“Why sew them back together, after the wall?” Odion asked. “Why not let them die?”

(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 300: We Go Back

Escape Pod 300: We Go Back is an Escape Pod original.

Rated appropriate for younger teens and up – occasional adult language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:29 — 40.8MB)

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Show Notes

Episode 300! Wow!

We Go Back

By Tim Pratt

My best friend Jenny Kay climbed in through my window and nearly stepped on my head. If I’d been sleeping a foot closer to the wall, I would’ve gotten a face full of her boot, but instead I just snapped awake and said “What who what now?” and blinked a lot.

“Oh damn,” Jenny said in a loudish whisper. “When did you move your bed under the window?”

“Last week,” I said, sitting up in bed. “I wanted a change.” If you can’t rearrange your life, you can at least rearrange yourself, and if your mom won’t let you dye your hair blue, you can make do with rearranging your rooms.

Jenny Kay dropped from standing to sitting in one motion, making my mattress bounce, and landed cross-legged and totally comfortable. “Hey,” she said. “So I need to borrow your ring.” I couldn’t read her expression in the dim moonlight from the window.

I looked at my right hand, where a thin silver ring looped my index finger, catching what light there was in the room and giving back twinkles. The metal grew cold against my skin and tightened a fraction, almost a friendly little squeeze. The ring — which wasn’t really a ring — could tell when I was thinking about it. “Uh,” I said.

Jenny nodded vigorously, a motion I felt in the jostling of the mattress more than I saw. “I know! I know. But I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I mean, you’ve had the thing for more than a year, and I’ve never asked once if I could use it, right?”

I glanced at my closed door — no glow under the crack at the bottom, which meant my parents had gone to their separate beds and turned out the hall light — and switched on my bedside lamp. Jenny was dressed in jeans and a sweater, all in dark grays and blacks, not her usual aggressively flamboyant colorful mishmash style at all. Good for sneaking into people’s windows, I guessed.

I sat up against the headboard, because when you’re about to annoy your best friend, it’s better not to be flat on your back at the time. “I wish I could,” I said — not one hundred percent true, but Jenny was a fourteen-year-old genius, not a human lie detector. “But it’s, like… part of me. You know? I’m part of the mechanism. I can’t just take it off. It’s linked into my, what’s it called, socratic nervous system?”

“Somatic,” Jenny said gloomily. She was almost as good at biology as she was at math. “The part of your nervous system that controls movement, which sort of halfway makes sense, I guess.”

I shrugged. “So, there you go. The ring’s not something I wear. It’s something that wears me. Or we wear each other. What did you want it for?”

(Continue Reading…)

Book Review: “Pirates” by Nobilis Reed

For the first few seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine*, many critics said it was boring because they had no starship and couldn’t go anywhere. Though there were glimmers of greatness, the show didn’t get really good until after Worf and the Defiant arrived.

That’s kind of how I felt about Pirates, Nobilis Reed’s follow-up to Scouts.

WARNING: Pirates is a novel for adults, and as a result the review contains discussions of explicit sex. Reader discretion is advised. Also, this review contains spoilers for Scouts.

(Continue Reading…)

The Soundproof Escape Pod #9

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Click here to download the ePub version.

This month we’re bringing you short story and novella nominees for the Hugo awards, one of the two big Science Fiction and Fantasy awards alongside the Nebula. The Nebulas are awarded by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the Hugos by the attendees of Worldcon. The Nebula’s were awarded in May, and we’ll find out who wins the Hugos next month at Renovation in Reno, Nevada.

It’s always been more than a bit amusing to me to see the inevitable ‘That got nominated? The [insert award name] is losing it’ comments cropping up on our forums and elsewhere. As if the Nebulas and Hugos are awarded by some wise men up on the crags, parsing the year’s crop of stories against the award’s prior canon. The nominations and awards come from a large swath of fandom or one’s fellow writers, and there’s always going to be elements of friendship, politics, fervent loyalty, and emotion in these endeavors.

And yet, the nominating crowds for both pick stories that are good, and worth reading. You won’t like all of them, but you’ll like a lot of them, and that is really the best you can hope for. Fiction is not nearly so varied as fiction readers, and the point of these things is to make sure good stories get the biggest audience then can.

Which is also the point of Soundproof. People write into us about having friends that can’t stand hearing stories, or who have a deaf spouse, or they just prefer to read.

The point of Escape Pod is getting as many good stories out to as many ears and eyes (or fingers, if anyone’s feeding this into one of those Braille boxes) as possible, which is why we’ve worked hard to keep things free, taking advertising when we like the advertiser, and being ever thankful to those of you who donate. We couldn’t do it without you. (Which is why Dave Thompson and Wilson Fowlie have been working hard to bring those who donate the Alphabet Quartet as a thank you.)

Hopefully one of the Hugo nominees in this issue will get the shiny, shiny rocket ship next month. They’re all worthy of it, even if they are [insert ghastly sub-genre].

–Bill

Book Review: “Geist” by Philippa Ballantine

The term “doorstop novel” applies to any book that is so large you could use it as a doorstop as well as reading material. They’re enormous, take forever to read, and often leave readers with more a sense of accomplishment (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) than satisfaction*. In books like that, the author feels the need to explain every single detail, every relationship, every physical feature, every magic spell… everything.

Of course, you can go in the other direction, and explain too little. Books like that have their own problems.

But in Geist, by Philippa Ballantine, I think there’s just the right balance of explanation and action. Think late-90s genre novels — Mercedes Lackey, Melissa Scott, and their ilk. That’s the feeling I got while reading, at any rate, and for me, that’s a good thing.

In Geist, Deacons Sorcha Faris and Merrick Chambers — field agents of a religious order dedicated to protecting people from geists (creatures from the Otherside) — are sent to a faraway outpost to find out what’s causing geist attacks on the townspeople. When they get there, they find there’s — naturally — more to it than meets the eye, and their unexpectedly-strong Bond leads them to reveal a conspiracy that could destroy the home of the Order itself.

Geist is the first book I’ve read in dead-tree form in a while, and it was refreshing to actually turn pages for once. And the book is definitely a page-turner — after a slow beginning, the story moves along at a fair clip. It really heats up at the end, with a lot happening in a relatively-small number of pages. In that way, it really does follow the slow-build-to-frenetic-climax of many of the “early” fantasy novels I read. I definitely enjoyed the reading.

But that’s not to say the book is without its… well, I don’t want to call them flaws, because they’re really not, so I’m going to call them points of discussion instead.

Let’s start with the main characters — though they are unique in their own way, I felt as though they were a little too slavish to the Big Book of Fantasy Tropes. Sorcha, the main character, is a cross between Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, Hannibal Smith from The A-Team, and Anita Blake from the novels by Laurell K. Hamilton. She kicks ass, takes crap from no one, smokes cigars, and has a nagging internal voice that, sometimes, needs to shut up and let the story progress.

Now, before you worry that Sorcha’s going to start sleeping with everything that moves (and changes shape), or gaining a new power every week, I will clarify my Anita Blake comment and say that what I saw in Sorcha was more “early Anita”. But I also think that the author is so connected to her audience via social networks and conventions that, if she started doing power-of-the-week books or making Sorcha into a Mary Sue, the audience would be able to talk her down. Although if Sorcha starts saying “alright” or “me, either” (both sic), you might want to start to worry**.

The rest of the cast includes Sorcha’s partner, a young, just-minted deacon named Merrick Chambers, and he is powerful, humble, unafraid of Sorcha’s prickliness, and prone to a white knight complex. And then there’s Raed Rossin, Pretender to the throne of Vermillion, who is everything a prince-turned-pirate-captain should be… and a werelion.

Oh, and if anyone reading the book didn’t look at Nynnia and say “well, now, her appearance certainly is significant and convenient,” then they weren’t reading very carefully. Another thing right out of the 90s, right there with the long journey, the remote outpost, the three-good-guys-against-the-other-good-guys, the secret passageways, and the evil plot that felt a little too “stock” to me.

There’s also sex — because, hey, it’s Philippa Ballantine, and if you don’t know she runs a very successful erotica podcast, you’ll find out when you get to that chapter that she’s great at writing sex. That too felt like the sex scenes of 90s genre novels — and given that I was in my late teens and early 20s around that time, you can imagine that I enjoyed the nostalgia it brought on.

Without spoiling the ending, I will say that I felt like too much happened too quickly, and I had issues with the Boss Fight. But outside of that, the rest of the issues I mentioned above, I can pretty much ignore. See, I’m not reading this book because I want it to be the next great Kiwi*** novel. I’m reading it because I think it’ll be an enjoyable book. And it is. It has action, humor, sex, and intrigue; the characters are fully-developed and well-rounded****, and they change as the book progresses. The world is built enough for me to know what’s going on and to understand the story without being overwritten, and the same with the magic system.

In short, Geist combines the best of what I like in 1990s fantasy fiction with the scope of a doorstop novel… and then pares out all the extraneous crap that makes a fantasy novel into a doorstop. What’s left is 300 pages that make up an enjoyable book to read, even if it’s got a few too many tropes that we’ve all read before.

And if you really, really need to keep a door open, I guess you could wedge it in there. But then Sorcha might call up pyet and burn your door to ash, so… you know… your choice.

#

Special thanks to Ace, the novel’s publisher, for providing a review copy.

Note to Parents: With the exception of one scene of semi-explicit sex, nothing in the novel should be unpalatable to anyone who can watch a PG-13 action film and not have nightmares. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

#

* Neal Stephenson excepted. And I know some people really like Wheel of Time but I never got into it.

** As you can see, I have issues with the Anita Blake novels. I’m reading Hit List right now, and when I do the review of that, you’ll see exactly why I’ve made some of these points.

*** Though she now lives in the U.S., Ballantine is from New Zealand.

**** Seriously, Sorcha’s hair being red/copper is mentioned so often that, if this was a movie, it would get a mention in the ending credits.

Escape Pod 299: Plus or Minus

Originally appeared in Asimov’s

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for sexual situations and violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:20:10 — 55.1MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Novelette, 2011.

Plus Or Minus

By James Patrick Kelly

Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska’s mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova.   Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful.  Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket.  Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner.  She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova, who had never been much of a mother to her, but Beep wouldn’t hear it.  He didn’t care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.

Somehow that hadn’t worked out quite the way she had planned.

For example, there was crud duty.  With a twisting push Mariska sailed into the command module, caught herself on a handrail, and launched toward the starboard wall.  The racks of  instrument screens chirped and beeped and buzzed; command was one of the loudest mods on the ship.  She stuck her landing in front of navigation rack and her slippers caught on the deck burrs, anchoring her in the ship’s  .0006 gravity.   Sure enough, she could see new smears of mold growing from the crack where the nav screen fit into the wall.  This was Beep’s fault, although he would never admit it.  He kept the humidity jacked up in Command, said that dry air gave him nosebleeds.  Richard FiveFord claimed they came from all the drugs Beep sniffed but Mariska didn’t want to believe that.  Also Beep liked to sip his coffee from a cup instead sucking it out of a bag, even though he slopped all the time.  Fungi loved the sugary spatters.  She sniffed one particularly vile looking smear of mold.  It smelled faintly like the worms she used to grow back home on the Moon.  She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jersey and reached to the holster on her belt for her sponge. As she scrubbed, the bitter vinegar tang of disinfectant gel filled the mod.  Not for the first time, she told herself that this job stunk.

She felt the tingle of Richard FiveFord offering a mindfeed and opened her head.  =What?=

His feed made a pleasant fizz behind her eyes, distracting her. =You done any time soon?=  Distraction was Richard’s specialty

=No.=

=Didit is making a dream for us.=

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 296: For Want of a Nail

Originally appearing in Asimov’s

Rated appropriate for teens and up for language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:25 — 35.4MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Short Story, 2011

For Want of a Nail

By Mary Robinette Kowal

With one hand, Rava adjusted the VR interface glasses where they bit into the bridge of her nose, while she kept her other hand buried in Cordelia’s innards. There was scant room to get the flexible shaft of a mono-lens and her hand through the access hatch in the AI’s chassis. From the next compartment, drums and laughter bled through the plastic walls of the ship, indicating her sister’s conception party was still in full swing.

With only a single camera attached, the interface glasses didn’t give Rava depth perception as she struggled to replug the transmitter cable. The chassis had not been designed to need repair. At all. It had been designed to last hundreds of years without an upgrade.

If Rava couldn’t get the cable plugged in and working, Cordelia wouldn’t be able to download backups of herself to her long-term memory. She couldn’t store more than a week at a time in active memory. It would be the same as a slow death sentence.

The square head of the cable slipped out of Rava’s fingers. Again. “Dammit!” She slammed her heel against the ship’s floor in frustration.

“If you can’t do it, let someone else try.” Her older brother, Ludoviko, had insisted on following her out of the party as if he could help.

“You know, this would go a lot faster if you weren’t breathing down my neck.”

“You know, you wouldn’t be doing this at all if you hadn’t dropped her.”

(Continue Reading…)

Book Review: “Hit List” by Laurell K. Hamilton

This review contains minor-to-moderate spoilers for the previous 19 Anita Blake novels.

#

Toward the end of Smallville‘s eighth season, I told myself, “this is it, it’s getting silly, and I can’t deal with it anymore.” Then General Zod showed up. And I absolutely had to watch. And when it was announced that season 10 would be the last one, I figured, “okay, I might as well stick it out.”

I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the way it all ended, but I was invested in the characters and the story.

And that’s exactly how I feel about the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. When I first started reading it, back in 1996, I thought it was great; it had action, fantasy and horror elements, good characters that I could care about, cool villains, and a fast-paced storytelling style. But sometime around the tenth book, Anita started gaining “power-of-the-week” abilities and having sex with lots… and lots… and lots… of people.

And then the books stopped being about the story and started being about tiny details, nit-picky arguments, and Anita somehow having the perfect power to stop any bad guy. I thought when the Mother of All Darkness was introduced, we’d finally have someone we could respect, who could actually defeat Anita.

I should’ve known better.

So, Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton. The reader is thrown into this book running, with Anita and Edward (Anita’s sociopath best friend) in their roles as Federal Marshals, trying to figure out who’s killing weretigers across the country. After some infodump disguised as a police procedural — with some cool stuff about the preternatural branch of the Marshals Service — Anita goes back to the hotel. There the Harlequin show up and severely injure another Marshal, and now we get more info about exactly who is hunting the weretigers and why. (For those who don’t know, the Harlequin are basically the Vampire Council’s Secret Service. Anita defeated them a couple of books ago.)

But the problem is that Edward and Anita need more than just the two of them, plus a few unproven Marshals that neither one really trusts in a fight. So they bring in crowd favorite Bernardo and serial killer Olaf (and a bunch of were-creatures from St. Louis, Anita’s hometown) to back them up. Before the help arrives, though, Anita tries to confront the local weretigers, to get information, and there she discovers the man who may be the key to stopping the Mother of All Darkness once and for all.

Here’s my major problem with Hit List: it feels like Hamilton wanted to write another book where Anita and Edward take on a lot of really tough bad guys, but she had to advance the overarching story. So there’s a lot of background shoehorned into this novel — which, by the way, is only 320 pages (according to my Kindle). Despite the infodumps and the rather-predictable “let’s stop the pace of the book to have a three-page discussion over some point of conversational/personal protocol”, it moves at a very quick pace. The writing has been tightened a bit after — I’m guessing — reviews of past books have discussed how wordy Hamilton can be. Her action sequences are (except for the discussions) well-written and well-paced, but the rest of the book is a lot of talking, driving around, and going to the hospital. If you’ve read the previous Anita novels, you can compare this one to Obsidian Butterfly.

Which is funny, because that gets referenced too.

Anyway, regardless of my somewhat-backhanded praise above, I had several problems with this book, and while there have been improvements on my general issues with Anita Blake novels (including the last one, Bullet, which I reviewed on my old blog), the problems still exist. Let’s start with the talking. And oh, how there is talking. Everyone talks. A lot. About everything. Even when Anita is about to have sex, she’s still talking. It’s really tough to pace a novel when you have so much talking. At least, I think so.

There was only one sex scene in this book — a record, I think, if you include only the past ten books — and Anita only had one partner in it. Of course he’s never been seen before this book, and of course he’s good-looking, and of course Hamilton spends many sentences describing him, and of course he is exceptionally well-endowed*, and of course they have amazing sex, because I don’t think Anita is capable of having bad sex. I mean, come on — if you’ve had sex, you know that even with someone you love, or even someone you’re really attracted to, it can be bad on occasion. I’m just saying.

Because we were in another city, there weren’t a ton of new preternaturals in this book — and, now that I think on it, very few vampires — but we did get several new humans, including Marshals, doctors, nurses and cops. There’s a few scenes with the Marshals that are creaky and painful, one where a character was (in my opinion) written in specifically to allow Hamilton to write herself out of a corner, and the word Marshal started to look weird after a while anyway. But we definitely knew every character’s eye and hair color, height, build, and what part of him Anita liked the best. Pretty standard fare for the series at this point.

Strangely, there was extremely little contact with our friends back in St. Louis, and that’s what I missed the most. With the exception of exposition and a quick scene near the end, there was no Jean-Claude, no Micah, no Nathaniel, no Jason, and no Asher. I missed them. They’re the reason I read the books — although recently Jean-Claude has been very whiny, and I’m pretty much over him. Also, Anita did slip in a couple of anti-Richard barbs.

Without the Missouri contingent, though, the ending of the book really falls down. I’ve read the same basic story before — in The Laughing Corpse, Hamilton’s second novel, the climax is relatively similar, except that now Anita is more willing to kick ass than to run away (a welcome change). But when the Final Boss shows up, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the hero of the book is going to win that fight, and I also don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that she does it using what she describes as the “worst” power she holds. Which, of course, works perfectly. Makes me wonder why, if there’s a Vampire Council, they let the vampire who gave Anita that power live for as long as she did (and, of course, it was Anita who killed her to gain said power). There are references in the Boss Fight, though, that directly point to characters that haven’t even been glimpsed in this novel.

Which is one of my problems with it. Hit List is not a novel that a casual reader can just pick up and hope to understand. You really have to have read at least the last three novels to know what’s going on — by then you’ll have at least enough exposition to know why Anita is so powerful.

And believe me, after this (rather disappointing) Boss Fight, not only will she still be powerful but you’ll be wondering what the point is of writing any more Anita books (Hamilton, on Twitter, said she is already working on the next one).

To summarize: I don’t think Hit List is a really good book, especially when held up to others in the Anita Blake series such as Blue Moon, Lunatic Cafe, or my personal favorite, The Killing Dance. While the writing is definitely better and tighter than the past couple of Anita Blake novels, this one doesn’t really stand on its own as a piece of fiction in its own right — it feels more to me like a bridge book, like the author has a story she wants to tell but had to tell this one first to get to that point (the pacing of the Boss Fight is a big clue). I maintain that, in order to bring the series back to what it was during its good days, Hamilton will have to kill off a lot of her characters**. Unfortunately, she’s built the world in such a way that killing one of them would kill (or at least seriously damage) Anita, and we can’t have that.

One thing I will say is that Hamilton loves her characters — even the evil ones — and in Hit List, I see a lot of that, especially with Edward. However, every writer will tell you that one of the first thing s/he learns in seminars and from editors is that you have to cut, and cut, and cut, and when you think there’s nothing to cut, you cut again. And, hey, I love her characters too — they’re the reason I read the books, to keep up with the characters I care about. But the cast list is getting enormous; it’s time to pare it down.

I’m waiting for your next book, Ms Hamilton. Let’s see some cutting.

#

* I wonder what Hamilton’s husband thinks about all of Anita’s lovers — and Anita is definitely a Mary Sue in many regards — being so well-endowed. Of course, since we write what we know…

** Maybe she should call in David Mack. He’s really good at killing off huge swaths of characters in a way that works well in the story and gives them honorable deaths when deserved.

“Deathless” by Catherynne M. Valente

Deathless cover
Deathless cover

“This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”

The retold fairytale is an old and well-worn road in the fantasy genre. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, still manages to arrive with something new. Valente hasn’t just taken “The Death of Koschei the Deathless” into modern Russia. She has also made a fairytale — a dark, and brutal, and frightening tale — out of the Russian revolution and the siege of Leningrad.

Marya Morevna is not the hero of “The Death of Koschei the Deathless.” Deathless is her story. She begins as a young girl in Saint Petersburg, watching as birds arrive, one by one, transform into men, and marry her sisters. By the time Koschei comes for her, she is a young woman in Leningrad.

Koschei is a perennial villain from Russian mythology. In Deathless he is cast as the Tsar of Life, fighting an endless war with the Tsar of Death that is always going badly. Marya steps into this mess and, right from the beginning, refuses to be what the fairytale demands that she be. She refuses to betray Koschei, her husband. She refuses to be helpless. And she swears that she will not go with Ivan when he arrives.

Because the hero of the story is Ivan — the hero of the story must always be an Ivan, who rescues the beautiful bride from Koschei’s withered hands. One of the central themes of Deathless is that everyone in the book knows how the story is supposed to end. They can choose to fight it, if they want. Marya does.

That sort of self-awareness will probably put some people off of Deathless. Like a lot of her writing, this book is aware that it is a book. Valente is not afraid to let her narrator turn and address the audience directly. I think this works in the context of a story whose roots lie in an oral tradition.

The fairytale style also helped give me some much-needed emotional distance from the worst of the brutality in Leningrad. Valente juxtaposes terrifying myths, such as the witch Baba Yaga who grinds the bones of disobedient girls in her flying mortar, with real tragedies — like people putting the bodies of their loved ones on sleds to take to the graveyard, only to die on the way, nameless and alone in the Russian winter.

The writing in Deathless is beautiful. I adore Valente’s writing style, and this book did not let me down. Readers who enjoyed her short story collection, Ventriloquism, will certainly find something to love in Deathless. They may recognize a character who first appeared in one of Valente’s short stories, and who has a minor role to play here.

Deathless is a subtle book. I was charmed by Naganya the rifle imp, and I’m sure there are many similar puns to be found elsewhere. The more the reader knows about Russia, its language, history, and mythology, the more they will get out of this book. Fans of Valente should definitely pick this one up, as should anyone who enjoys a dark fairytale well told.

Genres:

Escape Pod 298: The Things

Originally appearing in Clarkesworld

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for language and disturbing imagery.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:11 — 38.7MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Short Story, 2011

Thanks to Kate Baker and Clarkesworld for the audio!

The Things

By Peter Watts

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.  MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke ; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase.  I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

(Continue Reading…)