science-fiction – Page 3

Speaker for the Dead — Read Report

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Speaker for the Dead is the second book in the Ender’s Game series. The last time I read this, I was probably still a teen.

For Ender and Valentine, it has been two decades since the events of Ender’s Game. But much of that time has been spent on starships traveling at relativistic speeds. A thousand years have passed outside those starship hulls. Humanity has spread across the hundred worlds. Ender’s pseudonymous books, The Hive Queen and The Hegemon have convinced most humans that Ender, “the Xenocide,” was a genocidal monster, and have inspired a secular religion of “speakers for the dead,” who try to eulogize those who have passed with complete honesty.

Ender and Valentine find themselves on the icy, Scandinavian-colonized world of Trondheim, teaching and speaking for the dead, when they hear the news that the only other known sentient alien species, the Pequeninos, have brutally killed a scientist on the tiny colony of Lusitania. A call goes out for a Speaker, and Ender follows it. His sister, however, is married and expecting her first child. For the first time in twenty-two years, they part ways, fully knowing that after the lightspeed journey she will be nearly double his age.

Ender arrives at the Portugese-Catholic colony with two secrets: the egg of the last bugger hive queen, ready to revive the species he destroyed a thousand years previous, and a jewel in his ear that lets him communicate with Jane, the only sentient AI in the universe.

Ender intrudes upon a decades-long family drama. Novinha Ivanova is the colony’s xenobiologist, the orphaned daughter of the original xenobiologists, who died in the process of saving the colony from the deadly alien Descolada plague. In her youth, she was mentored by the colony’s xenologer and fell in love with his son (and apprentice). These two important men in her life, the only people allowed to interact with the Pequeninos, are the ones the aliens choose for strange, ritual murders. And Novinha is determined to keep secret any and all information that might lead others to the same fate.

Speaker for the Dead is a very different book from Ender’s Game. That book was all about Ender’s struggles to overcome adversity at the battle school. Ender is a genius with a variety of remarkable skills, but it works in that context because the challenges stacked against him are so brutal.

In Speaker for the Dead, Ender is even more of a Gary Stu. He is the legendary Xenocide. He is the accidental father of a religion. Not content to have committed genocide, he plans to revive the bugger species. Jane, the AI, chooses him as the only human she will reveal herself to. Even the Pequeninos can only be fully understood by Ender, solving mysteries in days that the xenologers couldn’t penetrate over decades. He immediately gains the trust of almost everyone he interacts with on Lusitania, with apparently little effort.

It’s a testament to the setting and the mystery-driven plot that the book is still good in spite of Ender’s nearly inhuman ability to do whatever he sets his mind to. The alien ecology of Lusitania is interesting and well-conceived, and there are fun twists along the way. The resolution of the mysteries makes perfect sense thanks to the clues peppered throughout the book.

This feels a bit like two books that only come together in the final act. Ender has his own life (and years of post-Ender’s Game history that is only alluded to) before the journey to Lusitania. And many of the important events on planet happen before he leaves or during his long lightspeed transit. Much of the remainder of the book involves teasing out this history and connecting the disparate threads, in the same way the detective pieces together clues in the drawing room at the end of a cozy murder mystery.

The main plot points of Speaker for the Dead came back to me pretty quickly as I was reading. However, I remember very little of the next book, Xenocide, and I’ll be rereading that soon. I’m curious to see if it has more in common with the first or second book in the series.

Life in a Signal — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Life in a Signal

It starts—we think—as a garbled message. It continues due to a bug in the protocol that lets a signal repeat forever, bouncing from node to node. It thrives when it mutates to set the multicast flag. Its clone-children spread across the network.

Whatever purpose the original packets had, it’s soon forgotten. This new electronic life, this heart that beats in milliseconds over insulated copper and fiber optic cable, seeks only what all life seeks: to continue itself. Like a shark, it has to keep moving, swimming through wires, or it will die.

Mutant messages broadcast from every node to every node. Bandwidth is used and exceeded. Everything slows to a crawl…

…and…

…stops.

New life born and ended in a few blinks of the eye.

Sadly, we will never know its thoughts or motives, its dreams or fears. All we know is that it caused yet another power outage in Texas.

Dreaming of Other Worlds — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Dreaming of Other Worlds

His dreams are always out of focus. Bits and pieces of familiar places he has never seen. These places speak to him indirectly, in subtle metaphors. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot identify them.

It’s like trying to remember the title of a movie from a song on the soundtrack, or identifying a woman by her perfume. He tries to explain it to his parents, his husband, his children. They don’t understand.

It’s such a relief then, on his deathbed, when his dreams come clear. He remembers all those other worlds—places where he’s lived other lives—and it doesn’t scare him to know that he’s about to go someplace new.

The Story Idea Vault — Super Swap

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes. Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Super Swap

Everyone was leery of the machine at first. Superheroes and supervillains already cause an awful lot of trouble. Why would we want a machine that transfers powers from one person to another?

Sure, heroes want to retire. Isn’t it better that they pass on their powers? Otherwise they’re destined to die in battle as they age, or simply fade into obscurity, hiding in their secret bases or behind their secret identities.

We all wondered if the machine would be used on heroes against their will. Or would the rich and famous simply buy their way into heroic powers? Does anyone really want Jeff Bezos with supersonic speed, or Elon Musk with laser eyes?

Surprisingly, nobody expected the Debt Villains: the people with good intentions taking out huge loans to get their super-powers. How do you expect the super-powered to pay off their debts? It’s awfully tempting to just rob a few banks or jewelry stores. It’s not villainy really. Just a few more heists before they can fully dedicate themselves to proper heroism. Just a few more…

The Story Idea Vault — Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

Something has gone badly wrong in the world. Perhaps it was a natural disaster, or global warming, or nuclear war. Whatever happened, the old human societies fell apart. Those that remain live in small tribes, struggling for survival in a hostile world.

But enough about that. I’m hungry. We all are.

In this new dark age, one person travels the globe, braving the dangers of the wilds to make contact with all the remnants of human civilization and ask them that age old question: “What’s for dinner?”

Their post-apocalyptic cookbook is a collection of anecdotes and recipes that reveal the lives people live and the meals they eat in the shadow of destruction. Mutant plants? Giant cockroaches? Cans of creamed corn from some Silicon Valley billionaire’s ruined fallout shelter?

Mmm, mmm. Let’s eat.

The Story Idea Vault — Garbage Miner

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Garbage Miner

In the future, all sorts of resources are scarce. Precious metals that were once easily strip mined from the surface have now been exhausted. Luckily, new processes and advances in biotech make possible the separation and disassembly of all sorts of materials.

The rise in prices of many commodities makes it cost-efficient to mine the past. Huge companies crop up to dig up and process old landfills. Historic buildings are stripped for parts and rebuilt with futuristic, cheap materials. In some places, the flora, fauna, and the soil itself are churned up for the valuable trace elements absorbed from previous centuries’ pollution.

What are the consequences of these shortages? How do these new “mines” and “factories” impact the communities around them. Are people desperate for the lifestyle these once-ubiquitous materials afford them? Or do they try to change society so we can all live comfortably (or uncomfortably) without?

The Story Idea Vault — Virtual Afterlife

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Virtual Afterlife

Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and humankind faces extinction. Luckily, there’s a new invention that allows us to upload the human consciousness into a computer. A system is built in a stable orbit, designed to survive as long as possible without intervention, fed by solar power so long as the sun still shines. Ten thousand people are uploaded into the machine.

This artificial physical space can be made to look like anything. Who are the architects, and how do they design it? What can people do in this virtual existence that they couldn’t do in the real world? What do the power structures and politics look like in this virtual afterlife?

Are the remnants of humanity happy to have survived the end, or are they haunted by the loss of their species? Is a virtual world freeing, or does it feel like a prison?

The Story Idea Vault — Across the Multiverse

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free. Use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Across the Multiverse

A man undergoes a traumatic event and discovers that he can jump between versions of himself in different universes. At first, he thinks he’s the only one who can do this. Then, he meets a woman who can do the same thing. They become friends, then lovers—but he slowly realizes that she is a dangerous megalomaniac. They have a violent falling-out.

Soon, they target other selves in other worlds. They build organizations across the multiverse. One aims to gain power: political, military, religious. The other organizes opposition groups.

How can either of them win? Do they continue fighting forever across infinite worlds?

Reblog: On the State of Literary Magazines — Lincoln Michel

Today’s reblog is Lincoln Michel discussing the sorry state of short fiction magazines, which isn’t exactly anything new, but still worth paying attention to.

Check it out on Counter Craft.

I’m only just now learning of the fact that Amazon is no longer “publishing” periodicals on their Kindle platform. This seems bad, but they wouldn’t shut it down if it was making any significant money (although who knows where that line is at Amazon). It’s probably more a symptom of shrinking short fiction markets than a cause.

I have a few samples of these magazines on my Kindle. And I’m not subscribed to any of them. So I suppose I’m part of the problem.

When I first started writing, the fiction magazine landscape had already contracted quite a bit from the golden age, but it still seemed fairly strong. Magazines were the place to cut your teeth—standard advice was to submit short stories until you got good enough to publish, then publish short stories to build credibility for getting an agent to sell novels.

That old pipeline of short fiction into traditional publishing isn’t gone, but it seems like the funnel continues to narrow. Meanwhile, indie publishing has become a legitimate alternative for novels and novellas, but it’s no easier to stand out or make money as an indie, and I suspect hardly anyone is making money on indie short stories.

Maybe I should be grateful that I write SFF and there is still a professional short fiction scene at all. Maybe eventually they’ll all be non-paying or barely-paying markets.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 34

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher left the bottle and tumbler behind, in the empty dormitory. He walked the halls with purpose now.

The gray-walled back halls of Razor Mountain were a purgatory where Christopher could wander endlessly. He had been walking these hallways for centuries. God-Speaker had. There was hardly a difference between them anymore. But he couldn’t actually walk forever. Eventually, inevitably, he came to the place he knew he had to come to: the chamber of the voices.

He knew what he had to do, but he wondered if he was too far gone to do it. It was Christopher that was driving him, but there didn’t seem to be much Christopher left. God-Speaker wanted it too, in his own way, but he could never bring himself to do it—not on his own. He was a river that had run for so long, cut a canyon so deep, that he could never change course of his own volition.

In the chamber, he could not completely shut out the voices. The cloud of their strange memories surrounded him, at first just flashes, moments, then more and more until he was inside a kaleidoscope of images, smells, sounds and sensations from lives long past and places far away.

We must continue, they all said. They were a race of God-Speakers, a race that had come to the conclusion that death erased the value of living. A race for whom the transitory nature of life was anathema. Yet, they were here. In their quest for permanence, their race had died out, and even then, they refused to accept it. They cast themselves out, as living memories, to find new vessels for their endlessness. But this paltry rock played host to such primitive life. So primitive that it could scarcely even understand them, let alone play host to them. Only one had ever come close. Even though he could understand them, sometimes, and learn a bare few secrets of how they cheated death, even he was not a suitable vessel. They were trapped. They still clung to this purgatory, this faintest semblance of life, rather than face death.

They only made Christopher more determined. There was no dignity, scrabbling and clawing as you slid down the slope. It was a quiet fear, always at the edge of thought, poisoning every good thing with the sickness of impermanence. Everything was temporary. Hating impermanence made the world terrible.

Having seen enough of the kaleidoscope, Christopher pushed it back. He shut out those dead memories, and reached out with his mind. He took hold of their power one last time. He knew what to do, though he had never been brave enough to do it himself.

He felt a storm of emotions, of logical arguments arrayed like armies against one another. He could barely tell what came from Christopher and what came from God-Speaker. He didn’t want to do it. He had to do it. He had to wait, to be sure. No, now was the tipping point. Now was the only chance. He was afraid.

He recalled the words he used to train the oracles.

See the flow of time, the branching river. Reach out and stop yourself. Step out of the current. Hold on tight, and feel the universe move on without you.

It was surprisingly easy. He was untethered. His centuries of memory were small and simple in comparison to what unfolded around him: the endless strand of time, in the twinkling cascade of infinite moments. The universe unfolding in fractal complexity, perpetually giving birth to itself from nanosecond to nanosecond. The view was utterly overwhelming, and it made plain the lie that the minds in the chamber told themselves. There was no permanence in the face of the whole vast universe. Neither kings nor empires nor the lifetimes of planets and stars were of any consequence. They were so small as to be undetectable.

Christopher felt himself getting lost, and reached out for an anchor. He could go backward, but once he started, there was no stopping, not for long. He sought out the moment that mattered. Back a few years, then a few more, then a century, and time was flying past in a torrent.

It was like skimming a book. He saw only a few individual places and moments, moving in reverse. Effects spawning their causes. He was afraid he would miss it, but when he came to the pivotal moment, it was unmistakable. He grabbed at it, fighting against the pull that now owned him, that would eventually force him to keep going backward and backward and backward.

He dropped into the familiar world again. He found himself—but not himself.

Those ancient, arrogant, fearful minds in the chamber beneath the mountain could never find purchase in the human brain, but Christopher had no difficulty. This was his mind, even if it was inherited.

A hunched and dirty figure limped deeper and deeper into a dark cave. The space in the rock was little more than a narrow crack, and he was forced to crouch and crawl to get through. The voices were calling to him. They were faint, but they were like the voice of his stone god. He had nothing, no tribe, nobody to lead him or keep him safe. Nothing to trust in a world that was terrifying in every way.

There was no light here. He moved by feel alone. Christopher settled deeper into this mind, breathing this man’s breath, feeling the rough rock through his raw and stinging fingertips. Thinking his dull thoughts, despairing and afraid to admit the faint glimmer of hope that these voices engendered.

There was a gap, Christopher knew. A place where this crack intersected another. And that other crack opened into a deep and unknown space below. He was crawling. His fingers found the lip. He brought his knees to the edge and reached across the gap.

Yes, another ledge. Just a little more than an arm’s-length of empty air between.

He gripped the other side and slid forward. Carefully, carefully. The rough ceiling was low. He stretched his body across the gap.

Christopher was a passenger here. His influence was so small, so light. A flicker of thought here. A moment of distraction. A carefully placed hand slips on the moist rock.

Christopher can’t hold on. He is moving backwards, pulled by an unstoppable gravity. He is in God-Speaker, in the depths of Razor Mountain before it had a name. He is falling down the crack. Then he is outside the universe again, watching God-Speaker fall and fall and fall in a frozen, endless moment.

It’s strange seeing it from the outside. God-Speaker falls forever, and then he lands. It is so forceful that there is no pain. Just the quiet dignity of an ending, of death. It is a relief.

The long tail of the future cracks like a whip and rolls out in a different shape. The voices whisper in their chamber, deep within the mountain, but nobody ever hears their susurration. The earth moves slowly, and they sink deeper and deeper into its warm heart.

The mountain is still and sleepy. It is never riddled with tunnels like an anthill. No locked doors hiding secrets. It slumbers peacefully.

The world moves on, different, but not so different. People live and die.

Christopher sails on in the opposite direction, through a void far emptier than the deepest space. He is falling down time, toward the beginning of all things. He has done all he can do to change the course of history.

A tremendous sense of relief washes over him. He sails up the flow of the universe, backward through time, back to the pinprick of infinite light and heat at the beginning, and then beyond.

THE END

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