Interzone #266 - September-October 2016
Author: Andy Cox [Ed.]
Date: 2016-09-11 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction Magazine
Description: The September–October issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new long and short stories by Tade Thompson, Georgina Bruce, Ray Cluley, Aliya Whiteley, and Malcolm Devlin. The 2016 cover artist is Vincent Sammy, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, and Vince Haig. Features: Guest Editorial by Stephen Theaker; Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Laser Fodder by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); Book Zone (book reviews); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comme
Publisher: TTA Press

ISSUE #266

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2016

Publisher

TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
w: ttapress.com
e: interzone@ttapress.com
f: TTAPress
t: @TTApress

Editor

Andy Cox
andy@ttapress.com

Book Reviews Editor

Jim Steel

Story Proofreader

Peter Tennant

Events

Roy Gray
roy@ttapress.com

© 2016 Interzone & contributors

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system, but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.

CONTENTS

COVER ART: HEAVEN SPOTS by VINCENT SAMMY
karbonk.deviantart.com

INTERFACE

EDITORIAL: LOVE AND SPREADSHEETS

STEPHEN THEAKER

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

THE APOLOGISTS

TADE THOMPSON
novelette illustrated by Martin Hanford
martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

EXTRATERRESTRIAL FOLK METAL FUSION

GEORGINA BRUCE
story illustrated by Vince Haig
www.barquing.com

SIDEWAYS

RAY CLULEY
novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner
rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

THREE LOVE LETTERS FROM AN UNREPEATABLE GARDEN

ALIYA WHITELEY
story

THE END OF HOPE STREET

MALCOLM DEVLIN
novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

REVIEWS

BOOK ZONE
books

LASER FODDER

TONY LEE

DVDs & Blu-rays

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE
films

EDITORIAL: LOVE AND SPREADSHEETS

STEPHEN THEAKER

Interzone is nominated for best magazine in this year’s British Fantasy Awards, as it has been every year save one since the category was introduced. TTA Press stablemate
Black Static goes one better: it has been a nominee every single year. That remarkable run reflects the esteem in which these magazines are held by British fans of fantasy, science fiction and horror. I’ve organised those awards for the last four years, and the chance to help fans thus express their appreciation was a big part of why I got involved.

There are fourteen British Fantasy Awards, which means we’re putting a lot of love out into the world, but it also means a lot of work, and it’s work done under constant scrutiny, with the internet ready to stamp on your toes for the slightest misstep. So while I envy my successor the pleasure they’ll have running the awards in 2017, I’ll worry a bit for them too, because these things have a tendency to go quite publicly awry, as they have with the Hugo nominations process lately.

When an awards system produces such peculiar, obscure or even ridiculous results, you’ll hear people say the system is broken, but when voters are determined to vote in peculiar, obscure or even ridiculous ways, an awards system is generally going to reflect that in the results. Put a brick in a microwave and the results won’t be edible – that doesn’t mean the microwave is broken. Or at least it wasn’t till you tried to cook a brick.

What’s admirable about the response to the Hugo award’s well-publicised puppy problems has been the insistence on sticking to the established procedures for changing the rules, even though that meant at least another year or two of slightly embarrassing nominees. That sort of rigour can only be good for the long-term health of an award. Changes brought in quickly and thoughtlessly in response to this year’s problems just lead to brand new problems next year.

And whether it’s the BFAs, the Hugos, the Brits or the Oscars, the odd results are often the ones I find most interesting and revealing. The BFA winners of the last few years have been unusually well received, but still, having supervised fifty or so juries, I’ve been fascinated by how often a group of intelligent, diligent readers can surprise me by not rating a nominee I adored, or loving a nominee I didn’t, and have perfectly good reasons either way.

Literary awards are inherently rather silly. There’s no ideal form for them. Each potential system is blinkered in its own way, each has its quirks, strengths and shortcomings. But they can be a great conduit for our affection, a boost to creators, a flashpoint for discussion, an arena for fighting over the issues of the day, and a record of the changing tides. Let’s try to enjoy them, for all their faults. Even in disaster, the Hugos gave us Chuck Tingle. Love is real.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

The Animal-Narcotic Complex

Few films have influenced my thinking as much as Werner Herzog’s 2011 documentary
Into the Abyss. The film begins with the story of two young men who broke into a gated community at gunpoint and murdered a 51-year-old woman in order to take her car for a joyride. Rather than obsessing over the facts of the case, Herzog explores both the emotional consequences of the crime and the psychological conditions that inspired it. What he finds is that the survivors of the crime wind up living in a world very similar to that of the murderers, a world where trauma passes from parent to child and stranger to stranger in a never-ending torrent of cruelty and sadness. In Herzog’s view, to be human is not just to suffer but to pass the consequences of that suffering on to those we claim to love. Sure…we try to re-invent ourselves and to draw a line under the past but no shop-bought persona or social media gang colours can separate us from the histories that shaped our thoughts and emotional reactions.

A similar vision of the human experience bubbles up through the pages of Emma Geen’s lusciously angular debut novel
The Many Selves of Katherine North. Set a few years into the future of Bristol, the book tells of a young woman who works for a corporation that projects human consciousness into animal bodies for research purposes. The novel tells Katherine’s story out of chronological order, meaning that every chapter reads like a moment stolen from the life of a completely different person. Grounding this evocatively asynchronous narrative is a series of sensational set-pieces in which Katherine finds herself ‘being’ a variety of different animals including foxes, octopi, bats, and spiders. Each of these vignettes has been extensively researched and is rendered with considerable style and clarity given the technical challenges inherent in getting readers to imagine what it feels like to be an entirely different kind of animal. The novel glides effortlessly between the character’s different selves and invites us to piece the different vignettes together into something resembling the linear cause and effect of conventional character development. A clear picture does start to emerge once the novel reaches its climax and Geen begins weaving together the various threads of Katherine’s life but the uncertainty and dislocation that hovers over much of the novel is never anything less than magnificent.

One of the most interesting things about the projection process is that even the co-called ‘phenomenauts’ themselves seem unsure as to where they end and their borrowed selves begin. For example, the characters speak at length about “Sperlman’s Shock” and the existential horror of squeezing a human mind into an inhuman body but they are reluctant to acknowledge (let alone discuss) the hardships involved in abandoning the addictive complexities of their animal selves and returning to the crushing domesticity that attaches itself to their human bodies. At first, Geen downplays the unpleasantness of homecoming but Katherine’s lapses into animalistic behaviour and fondness for abstracted animal analogies point us towards a deeper yearning.

The novel takes place at a time when the ambitions of Katherine’s employers are beginning to expand beyond the admittedly limited horizons of academic zoology. With plans to create a market for animal ‘tourism’ already in place, the chief executive of the corporation approaches Katherine to serve as corporate poster-girl for the new initiative. Despite Katherine’s extensive experience and love for her work, the promotion turns out to be nothing short of disastrous as Katherine’s blossoming paranoia encounters the corporation’s lack of principle and unleashes a rapidly-escalating cycle of exploitation and disruption that reveals the true costs of psychological projection. However, while this thriller-type plot is never anything less than engaging, the real meat of the novel lays not so much in the story it tells but in the character it develops in Katherine.

As Geen shuffles us back and forth inside the life of Katherine North, we discover an array of different selves. Aside from the animal selves she borrows as part of her job, there is also a raving derelict, a sexually immature teenager, and a daughter whose father leaves her on her own to cope with a terminally-ill mother. Piecing these selves together we detect echoes of Herzog’s
Into the Abyss in the way that Katherine is contorted by trauma and deformed by the sadness of others. We watch as an optimistic and animal-obsessed little girl is broken by the world to the point where she desperately wants to be someone or something other than herself. The corporation wants to sell its animal tourism as the ultimate escapist experience but nobody stops to consider why people might be so desperate to escape their own lives.

Another interesting thing about the book’s projection process is the way that it comes to symbolise the capitalist exploitation of our need to exist in a world that makes some form of sense. The challenge faced by Katherine in each of her animal projections is not only to make the animals’ bodies function as evolution decreed but also to find a way for her human thought processes to co-exist with the sometimes overwhelming instincts that accompany her animal selves. While these instincts make it difficult for humans to fully integrate human bodies, full integration provides a sense of self far clearer than anything a human might ever hope to experience. Spiders spin webs in order to catch food and spin more webs just as tigers hunt in order to remain strong and defend the territory that will allow them to hunt tomorrow. Animal selves provide no room for the doubt and self-loathing that characterises so many human lives and this simplicity provides the ultimate in existential intoxication.

Capitalism is an economic system that has proved itself incompatible not just with human flourishing but also the long-term survival of the human race. In order to exist under capitalism, people must learn to subordinate their needs and wishes to those of the social classes and institutions that make up the capitalist system. While capitalism serves to alienate people from each other, from the work they do, and from the things they produce, it also alienates us from the activities that promote not just our survival but also our psychological wellbeing. Marx referred to these activities as human species-essence and the reason that Katherine keeps returning to her animal selves is that while her human life is disconnected from all possible sources of happiness, her animal selves are firmly rooted in the unending quest for life and happiness. She yearns for that sense of rootedness in the world because capitalism has made it impossible for humans to survive and flourish. By offering to provide humans with access to the essence of other species, Katherine’s employers are effectively selling painkillers for wounds they themselves are helping to inflict on people like Katherine.

Though perhaps a little over-tidy in the conclusion, Emma Geen’s
The Many Selves of Katherine North is one of the most exciting debut novels I have read in years. Full of scientific and philosophical speculation and yet grounded in a world of material conditions and psychological consequences, the novel provides exactly what I want to see from 21st Century science fiction and does so from outside of the creative vacuum that used to be the genre publishing business.

Earlier this year,
Interzone’s own Nina Allan wrote an excellent piece about the current state of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and raised a number of vital questions about not only the award’s relationship with genre culture but also about the books that jurors have tended to select in recent years. Like Nina, I became aware of the award in the early 2000s and so think of it as the place where genre culture reaches beyond its own professional hierarchies and connects with the speculative writing being published outside of genre. As Nina explains, the Clarke has never really lived up to that reputation and were that potential ever to be realised I believe it would be through the selection of books like
The Many Selves of Katherine North. Despite what genre culture tells us, the future of science fiction lies not in familiar names deconstructing outdated tropes with one eye on the young adult market but in young writers looking at the world and confronting whichever horrors lie in wait around the next corner.

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

Wired in the Weird

In July I was in Cambridge for the fifty-second annual folk festival. Crowds make me uncomfortable normally, but being a part of the gathering in the grounds of Cherry Hinton Hall was an experience of another order. I came away inspired, not just by what I’d seen and heard but by the sense of inclusivity and tolerance the festival seemed to encapsulate. Never have fourteen thousand people seemed so like members of a single family. The weather was great, too – not a green wellie in sight…

Turning to the music itself, I couldn’t help noticing how strong the women artists seemed, singing and making music together. Bands such as Songs of Separation, Sound of the Sirens (a duo who, I later learned, first came together when they were working at the Exeter nightclub Timepiece, the venue for many a personal memory and scurrilous anecdote) and Stick in the Wheel demonstrate a no-holds-barred, no-compromise attitude, a pride in the power of the female voice – both words and music – that has been too often overlooked, shoved aside or controlled by men. If we consider the struggles endured by artists such as Beverley Martyn, Vashti Bunyan, Anne Briggs and Sandy Denny simply to gain equal billing with their male folk counterparts, we will feel all the more uplifted by the growing confidence of today’s women musicians in claiming their autonomy and their audience.

It was no less inspirational and reassuring to find that folk music has lost none of its radicalism. Many of the artists I saw perform did not hesitate in getting their Billy Bragg on, making open reference on stage to the shocking surrealism of the European referendum result, the current power struggles within the Labour party, the lunatic ignorance of Donald Trump, the increasing momentum of environmental activism and the destructive influence of the globalised financial sector upon ordinary jobs and working people. They weren’t just paying fashionable lip-service either. The desire to communicate cause and effect, to speak up and speak out – this impulse is what drives folk music and what has always driven it. For anyone who still has the idea that folk is just a bunch of Morris men in embroidered smocks, I’d suggest they go and listen to what Le Vent du Nord has to say about Quebecois independence.

Set against our common interest in weird fiction and speculative storytelling, it is important for us to remember that much of the power of folk music resides not only in its close and continuing association with the landscapes and political realities in which people live and work, but equally with the occult, underground nature of pagan spirituality. Folk music has always been determined on bypassing the authority-based structures of the organised church, drawing its energy from something deeper and more basic, more tied to the beliefs and rituals entwined within the very vegetation of the land we live on. Folk is weird, in other words. I think that as readers, writers and listeners this is something we recognise intuitively, whether we are steeped in folk history or not. Even a song as simple and as universally known as ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ contains within its schoolyard lyric a sinister rhythm, an atmosphere of darkness and of warning, a circle of dancing ghosts.

When we look back towards the renaissance in British classical music that began to gather pace in the years immediately before the First World War and that continues to this day, it is interesting to note just how many of its early proponents drew their inspiration from the twinned wells of traditional folk melody and its occult dimension. Arnold Bax, probably best known for his tone poem ‘Tintagel’, was obsessed with both Arthurian legend and with the land of faerie, a parallel dimension in which the fair folk held sway over the occult, Anglian kingdom that has always been theirs. We see these ideas brought to captivating musical fruition in another of Bax’s tone poems, ‘In the Faery Hills’. The critic and composer Philip Heseltine was for some time a practising magician of the Aleister Crowley persuasion, a member of the infamous occult society the Golden Dawn and whose strongly folk-influenced music was written under the telling pseudonym Peter Warlock. The composer John Ireland, who also had connections with the Golden Dawn, was powerfully affected by the supernatural tales of Arthur Machen, with whom he corresponded. Ireland claimed to have been haunted by a vision of Machen’s ‘White People’, a defining experience he later set to music in his Legend for piano and orchestra.

If ghosts, fairies, occult spirits and creatures of the night are plentiful in twentieth-century British classical music, when it comes to the folk revival and the psych-folk movements of the sixties and seventies, they become too numerous to mention. Some of folk’s most era-defining, revolutionary works – I’m thinking of songs such as the Incredible String Band’s ‘Witches Hat’, Lal and Mike Waterson’s ‘The Scarecrow’, Fairport Convention’s revolutionary iteration of ‘Tam Lin’, Trees’s ‘The Great Silkie’, Sandy Denny’s ‘The North Star Grassman and the Ravens’, Nick Drake’s ‘River Man’ (as I say, there are so many) – are intimately bound up with themes that would have to be called uncanny if not actively supernatural. In the new era of twenty-first century alt-folk, bands such as Tunng, Trembling Bells, The Unthanks, Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby have picked up this tradition and run with it. Their music – colourfully innovative and entirely of now – wears its weird credentials with knowledge and pride.

For me, the rhythms and iconography of folk music are intimately bound up with the literature of strangeness that haunted my childhood and that laid much of the groundwork for my own rapidly growing obsession with magical landscapes and the blurred, often invisible line between the real and the closely imagined. Writers such as Peter Dickinson, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and Penelope Farmer frequently described scenarios in which the modern world, with its monstrous machines, accelerated communications strategies and commercial imperatives was stripped away, leaving their protagonists to explore a deeper, science fictional reality that was often dangerous yet spine-tinglingly attractive. I later discovered the fictions of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, chimeras born of dreams and landscape, the literary music of an alternative England, steeped in an arcane symbolism that finds strength in witchy mutability as well as tradition. As the stories and lyrics of our own time amply demonstrate, this is a music with an uncanny ability to go underground and then burst forth again as the occasion demands.

When I first encountered the novels of Alan Garner and Peter Dickinson as a young teenager, I found them mesmerising: their strange and heightened visions of external disaster and inner turmoil frighteningly real, their portrayal of landscapes I had not yet visited yet recognised instinctively so compelling they seemed a pre-existing part of me, twisted into my DNA like a strand of barbed wire or toad spawn, a kind of binary code for who I was and where I came from. I didn’t properly understand what I was responding to but I responded anyway.

When I started listening to the music of Sandy Denny almost two decades later, the effect was similar. I somehow grasped what she was talking about and why her work was important without having to be told. Her songs, which startle and delight us with their odd, semi-magical, radiant imagery, their disjointed syntax, their determined delivery, are a road map to a nation and to an era. They are wired in the weird, a witch’s brew. Without ever being entirely specific, they are nonetheless Everysummer: a dusty lane, fringed with nettles and yarrow, a white sun overhead, a journey to be undertaken, a song to be sung of rebels, of phantoms, of a fox who is really a woman, of the endurance of hope in the face of oppression, of our own strange dreams, both tragically lost and – if we listen carefully – eventually to be stumbled upon again when we least expect it.

ANSIBLE®
LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

Ansible®!
My application to register
Ansible as a UK trademark was approved on 8 July, so watch it.

Hugo Awards.
Novel: N.K. Jemisin,
The Fifth Season. Novella: Nnedi Okorafor,
Binti. Novelette: Hao Jingfang trans Ken Liu, ‘Folding Beijing’ (1/15
Uncanny). Short: Naomi Kritzer, ‘Cat Pictures Please’ (1/15
Clarkesworld). Related Work: No Award. Graphic: Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III,
The Sandman: Overture. Dramatic, Long:
The Martian. Dramatic, Short:
Jessica Jones: ‘AKA Smile’. Editor, Short: Ellen Datlow. Editor, Long: Sheila E. Gilbert. Pro Artist: Abigail Larson. Semiprozine:
Uncanny Magazine. Fanzine:
File 770. Fancast: No Award. Fan Writer: Mike Glyer. Fan Artist: Steve Stiles. •
Retro Hugos for 1940 work were also presented: the Best Novel winner was the magazine version of A.E. van Vogt’s
Slan.

Futurology.
‘At last, in 2010, social unrest and climate collapse forced Britain out of the European Union, and the United Kingdom fell apart, Scotland going its own separate way. […] Then in 2019, England, with Wales, ceded Northern Ireland to Eire, packed off the Royals to Australia – where they were still welcome – and had become the fifty-second state of the United States of America.’ (Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter,
The Light of Other Days, 2000)

Neil Gaiman wasn’t at the Worldcon, but his Hugo acceptance speech (for a graphic novel placed against his wishes on the ‘Rabid Puppies’ bloc-voting slate) was read out: ‘It meant a lot to see
Sandman: Overture nominated for a Hugo Award, and was disappointing to see that it had been dragged into the unfortunate mess that the pitiable people who call themselves Puppy had attempted to inflict on Worldcon and its awards. I would have withdrawn it from consideration, but even that seemed like it would have been giving these sad losers too much acknowledgement.’

More Awards.
Arthur C. Clarke:
Adrian Tchaikovsky,
Children of Time. Ebooks and self-published novels are to be eligible for future Clarke awards. •
John W. Campbell
(new writer): Andy Weir. •
John W. Campbell Memorial:
Eleanor Lerman,
Radiomen. •
Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery:
Judith Merril. •
Locus novel categories. SF: Ann Leckie,
Ancillary Mercy. Fantasy: Naomi Novik,
Uprooted. YA: Terry Pratchett,
The Shepherd’s Crown. Debut: Ken Liu,
The Grace of Kings. •
Munsey
(pulp community): Laurie Powers. •
Man Booker Prize:
the 13-book longlist includes one sf novel, David Means’s alternate-1970s
Hystopia. •
Mythopoeic.
Adult Fantasy: Naomi Novik,
Uprooted. Children’s: Ursula Vernon,
Castle Hangnail. Scholarship/Inklings: Grevel Lindop,
Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Scholarship/Other: Jamie Williamson,
The Evolution of Modern Fantasy. •
Prometheus
(libertarian). Novel: Neal Stephenson,
Seveneves. Life Achievement: L. Neil Smith. •
Scribe
(tie-in) genre novel winners. Original/Speculative: Dayton Ward,
Star Trek The Next Generation: Armageddon’s Arrow. Adapted: Stephen D. Sullivan,
Manos – The Hands of Fate. •
Seiun for Japanese translation. Novel: Ann Leckie,
Ancillary Justice trans Hideko Akao. Short: Ken Liu, ‘Good Hunting’ trans Yoshimichi Furusawa. •
Shirley Jackson Award
(suspense etc) novel winner: Gemma Files,
Experimental Film. •
Sidewise
(alt-history). Short: Bill Crider, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ (Tales from the Otherverse). Long: Julie Mayhew,
The Big Lie. •
Sturgeon
(short story): Kelly Link, ‘The Game of Smash and Recovery’ (10/15
Strange Horizons) •
World Fantasy Award for life achievement: David G. Hartwell and Andrzej Sapkowski.

As Others See Us.
Here’s the latest future-fiction category that’s untainted by sf. ‘This future is only 13 years away, as Lionel Shriver depicts it in “The Mandibles: A Family 2029–2047,” her searing exemplar of a disquieting new genre – call it dystopian finance fiction.’ (NY Times)

George Lucas’s plan for a vast Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on the Chicago lake front was abandoned after the ‘Friends of the Parks’ group – very unreasonably, the city mayor conveyed – defended the 1836 regulation that forbids such lakeside development. A federal judge agreed; the
Chicago Tribune coverage began ‘Lucas reaps bitter fruits of arrogance…’; the museum is now to be in California.

The Weakest Link.
Q:
‘What is the name given to the series of conflicts fought in mediaeval England between the houses of Lancaster and York?’
A:
‘Game of Thrones.’ (Channel 4,
The Question Jury)

Luc Besson was found guilty by an appeals court of plagiarising John Carpenter’s
Escape from New York
(1981) in his film
Lockout
(2012), and ordered to pay €450,000 damages. (IndieWire)

Publishers and Sinners.
Ian Whates’s NewCon Press celebrated ten years of publishing at a July pub party. Books were released; birthday cake was eaten; toasts and certain of the guests were drunk. In August, alas, Alex Davis announced the closure of his small UK press Boo Books.

Barry N. Malzberg remembered Judith Merril’s 1960s sf New Wave promotion: ‘She had been on an increasingly evident, now unapologetic campaign to destroy science fiction.’ (Galaxy’s Edge)

Robert J. Sawyer was ‘Absolutely thrilled today [30 June] to be named a member of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour bestowed by the Government of Canada.’ – for his sf and futurology.

Odd Volumes.
Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns from Outer Space, trying a little too hard as a genre contender for the 2016 Diagram Prize for oddest book title, was beaten into third place by
Too Naked for the Nazis
(the winner) and
Reading from Behind: A Cultural History of the Anus.

We Are Everywhere.
The company that makes the uninvitingly sf-titled drink Soylent has followed up with a coffee-like derivative called Coffiest – which in Frederik Pohl’s and C.M. Kornbluth’s
The Space Merchants was laced with an addictive alkaloid. Expect Can-D, Chew-Z and thionite products any day now. (Arstechnica.com)

A.B. Yehoshua, eminent Israeli novelist, explains: ‘I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.’ (NY Times)

Stephen King is to be honoured by the US Library of Congress for ‘his lifelong work promoting literacy.’

Show Me the Money.
Forbes magazine guessed at the earnings of 14 top authors, most with genre links: James Patterson $95 million, Jeff Kinney $19.5m, J.K. Rowling $19m, John Grisham $18m, Stephen King $15m, Danielle Steel $15m, Nora Roberts $15m, E.L. James $14m, Veronica Roth $10m, John Green $10m, Paula Hawkins $10m, George R.R. Martin $9.5m, Rick Riordan $9.5m and Dan Brown $9.5m.

Jim Butcher is being honoured by Hull City Council! A new street on Alexandra Dock will be named Jim Butcher Way; sadly for Dresden Files fans, this
Jim Butcher was a pioneering trade unionist.

Thog’s Masterclass.
Neat Tricks Dept.
‘One of the sailors, who must have been about forty, had only one hand and a star tattooed on the back of the other.’ (Patrick Leigh Fermor,
The Broken Road, 2013) •
À la Recherche des Eyeballs Perdus.
‘The letter, of whose provenance he knew absolutely nothing, fascinated him and at any moment I expected his glittering eyeballs to detach themselves from their sockets and fly to the letter, insignificant in itself, which his curiosity had magnetised.’ (Marcel Proust,
Sodom et Gomorrhe, trans C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 1989) JFH •
Hitler Was a Martian Dept.
‘…Robot Army…From a million metal throats burst a terrifying roar – the Martian Cry of Victory: / “Zhig Gheil! Zhig Gheil!”’ (Errol Collins,
Mariners of Space, 1949) •
Dept of Future Business English.
Context: Van is annoyed with his stockbroker, who failed to sell some shares. ‘“No buyers? Hop down, father, and jest me not! I’m in no mood for—” “Bible stuff, Van, s’help me. I’ve been shagging since yesterday. The market’s dim.” “Then you haven’t been shagging hard enough.”’ (Evan Hunter, ‘Malice in Wonderland’, 1954)

R.I.P.

Maurice G. Dantec
(1959–2016), French writer (in Quebec from 1999) whose sf includes
Babylon Babies
(1999; trans 2005; filmed as
Babylon A.D.
2008) and
Cosmos Incorporated
(2005; trans 2008), died on 25 June; he was 56.

Robin Hardy
(1929–2016), UK film director and writer best known for
The Wicker Man
(1973), died on 1 July aged 86.

Tim LaHaye
(1926–2016), US evangelist and author who with Jerry Jenkins wrote the 13-book ‘Left Behind’ sequence of near-future Bible-thumping apocalyptic fantasies, died on 25 July aged 90.

Norman Longmate
(1925–2016), UK novelist and military historian whose
If Britain Had Fallen
(1972, based on the BBC TV series of that name) is an alternate-nonfiction study of the Hitler Wins scenario, died on 4 June; he was 90.

Michael McCurdy
(1942–2016), US illustrator whose artwork appeared in over 200 books – his first for children being Asimov’s
Please Explain
(1973), while another was the Centennial Edition of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
– died on 28 May aged 74.

Gordon Murray
(1921–2016), UK creator of the well-loved BBC children’s puppet series
Camberwick Green,
Trumpton and
Chigley, whose earlier
A Rubovian Legend
(1955–1961) is fantasy, died on 30 June aged 95.

Robert Nye
(1939–2016), UK poet and historical novelist whose stylistically rich works include some fantasy –
Merlin
(1978) and
Faust
(1980) for adults plus many more for younger readers – died on 2 July; he was 77.

Sandy Pearlman
(1943–2016), producer, manager and lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult, whose sf-themed album
Imaginos draws on his unpublished alien-conspiracy verse cycle ‘The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos’, died on 26 July aged 72.

Carolyn See
(1934–2016), US author whose sf novels were
Golden Days
(1986) and
There Will Never Be Another You
(2006), died on 13 July; she was 82.

April Rose Selley, US academic who published at least one genre story and whose writings on popular culture often dealt with
Star Trek, died on 13 July aged 61.

The Shawshank Tree, a white oak in Ohio featured in the Stephen King-based film
The Shawshank Redemption, blew down in July; it was 180 to 200 years old.

Ruth Stuart, Canadian author who published some stories in genre anthologies from 2004, died on 12 August.

Alvin Toffler
(1928–2016), US writer whose futurological works – especially
Future Shock
(1970) – influenced much contemporary sf, died on 27 June aged 87.

Carolyn Whitaker, UK literary agent who founded her London Independent Books agency in 1971 and represented Alex Bell, Joe Delaney, Elizabeth Kay, Richard Morgan and Chris Wooding, died on 17 June; she was 79.

BLACK STATIC #54 OUT NOW

novelettes

STEVEN J. DINES

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

JULIE C. DAY

MALCOLM DEVLIN

interviewed

DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS

comment

LYNDA E. RUCKER

STEPHEN VOLK

book & film reviews

PETER TENNANT

GARY COUZENS

art

JOACHIM LUETKE

RICHARD WAGNER

BEN BALDWIN

“Long-lived short fiction magazines are a rarity today. And ones that have had a real impact on the wider landscape of storytelling are even rarer”
The Guardian

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THE APOLOGISTS

TADE THOMPSON

illustrated by Martin Hanford

Today, I decide to go to a bar. I’m not dressed for it. My clothes are torn in places and although the darkness of my jeans hides grime, my shirt should be negotiating a spin cycle rather than warming my skin. Nobody notices, though. They haven’t bothered to name this establishment but there’s a neon sign with weird symbols that don’t, as far as I can tell, mean anything. Though there is a ribbon and stanchion arrangement, bouncer, and queue, I walk right up to the door and walk in. The bouncer is a stocky sort, fat-over-muscle build with a skin-colour approximating black. He smiles at me like I’m a celebrity. None of the punters in the twelve-person queue yells expletives. New world.

Inside, they’re playing nineties hip hop. ‘Ambitionz Az A Ridah’. I had that song on repeat when I was in university. There is the usual hum of conversation. Men and women talking to each other, flirting, drinking. I nod to myself, first at random, but later to the bass line of the song. There’s an empty stool and I aim for it before someone claims it. Reflex. I shouldn’t have bothered; nobody tries. When I squeeze into the space my shoulders bump the adjacent punters, but they just smile and continue their conversations.

The bartender is on me in seconds.

“Cider,” I say. “Whatever’s on tap.”

He nods, gets it for me, walks away like it’s an open bar.

It’s warm, stuffy even. I’m sweating, but nobody else is. That pisses me off. I hate that they don’t sweat, that they all look neat and smell good. I sip the cider. Tastes like urine. I know this because I have tasted my own urine before. I blame myself, my lack of skill in providing the right adjectives to describe taste to the strangers. All I could muster were words from the advertisements.
Unique! Cutting! Sharp! Perfect blend!
None of which mean anything.

The woman to my left is wearing a red dress with thin straps that make me wonder how the whole ensemble holds together. She has freckles on her back. I study them, wonder if each one is identical. To my delight they are not. She has hair cascading down in brunette waves and large, circular platinum earrings that dangle as she speaks. She’s talking to a Tiger Woods-type and drinking Chablis. The Tiger Woods-type glances at me, perhaps registering my behaviour as an anomaly. Fuck it. I tap the woman on the shoulder.

She turns on the stool and looks at me. She does not seem surprised, and that annoys me. She doesn’t say anything. She’s a big-titted Lorna Blackmore-type. Lorna was this girl I knew who taught Sunday School. Out of reach in every possible way.

I say, in the loudest voice I can muster, “Let’s you and me go and have sex.”

“Yes,” she says and places her drink on the bar. Tiger, who has heard, does not even react.

“No, no, no. This won’t do,” I say.

“Do you not find me sexually attractive?” Her face is still expressionless.

I do, but that’s not the point. I’m so angry, I just leave.

***

I walk two blocks, then Nico intercepts me.

“Hello, Storm,” says Nico.

“Nico.”

“Nice evening.” On cue, he looks to the sky.

I nod. It’s warm, dry and visibility is good, but that’s not why he mentions it. He mentions it because it is customary to comment on the weather. I taught him that.

“You should go back,” says Nico. His lip movements don’t match his speech. Neither does his body language. He’s a hologram of a famous person that the strangers play in order to calm me when they talk to me. I think Nico is an individual, but it’s difficult to tell. His image is usually, but not always, Tom Jones circa 1984. As a result, conversations can be surreal. He could be telling me something sober while his image would be dancing and clearly singing into a microphone. Talking to Nico is always like watching a bad lip-synch.

“I’m not sleepy,” I say.

“You know that’s irrelevant. You should go back and get some rest. Tomorrow is a working day.”

“I was working just now. That bar was hilarious. It’s supposed to be called The Cock and Bull, by the way.”

“I’ll be happy to take notes on the matter tomorrow. Go back to base, Storm.”

Even though Nico’s voice is never inflected, the repetition of an instruction is usually a prelude to forceful measures and I am not in the mood, so I change direction.

I go across Vauxhall Bridge. The water isn’t finished, but a homogenous blue acts as a placeholder river and the sound of water lapping at the banks seems incongruous. They seem to have trouble with water. I turn right on the south bank of the Thames and head towards Wandsworth Road. Wandsworth has perfect rows of terraced houses. The paint jobs are perfect with no mould or weathering. The glass is all clean, the hedges are surgical and the pavements look like fresh cement. The street lights shine with biblical vigour. There are no undulations to the asphalt.

This is Katrina’s work.

There are things Katrina and I do not agree on.

I arrive at the Complex well before midnight. I pass through the gate and I’m checked by monitor drones, small spherical bastards with heathen propulsion methods and power supplies. I flip the bird. The Complex is a small estate, four houses for the five remaining humans. The rules are that the strangers don’t come in here and we respect the curfew. I don’t remember Nico ever coming in here. Outside the Complex is the Rebuild. This is where we work to produce a model of the world as it was before the strangers. Officially the Rebuild is open to us from nine to five but I often work late. Fuck them and their curfew. They won’t kill me, I’m one of the final five.

I stand at the roundabout in the courtyard we all share. My boots crunch on the gravel and the sound carries and bounces back to me, confirming I am alive. There are Ash and Birch reaching into the sky at intervals in the inner side of the barrier, and a dense but well tended hedge blocking the view of the fence. No breeze moves the leaves and no night fauna cry. The buildings are identical two-storey Victorian-looking. They are not Victorian because every brick, every beam, every nail is new. The blueprints came out of the Kellys’ memories and the strangers constructed them, just like we do with the Rebuild. It doesn’t bother me, I can live anywhere, and I like the Kellys even though they do not contribute anything. Katrina’s house is dark, no lights anywhere. I will discuss Wandsworth Road with her tomorrow, but she is not the most flexible of people and I don’t have much hope of a compromise. There is a glow at Terry’s bedroom and I suspect he is reading.

“Good night, Terry!” I bow even though he has not come to the window. He is sure to be cursing me.

I walk up the short flight of stairs into my own house.

***

At night, while we sleep, the strangers watch us. They do not physically come, but the spherical and ovoid observer drones enter our houses and hover. They do not make a sound, but that is somehow creepier. I feel my body hairs rise whenever they are in my bedroom. They always wake me and I do not pretend to sleep. I shower them with invective and swipe at them, always missing, for they are agile, manoeuvrable fuckers.

When they see that I am awake, they drift away. The romance is gone.
I watched you while you slept, my love.
I cannot get back to sleep after this, so I think about Bea and Chelsea.

In the world before this one, I come home to find a silent house, folded note on the dining table. It is a single sheet and folded once, standing like a placard. My name is written in black on one side. The table is clean. It is never clean. When I see the card I do not need to read it to know what’s in it. I feel afraid for the first time. My wife takes shit from me all the time, until the day she doesn’t.

It takes me ninety-nine days to win her back. I grovel and beg and confess to what Bea and I both know is the cause of the break-up: I am not a good person. I miss Chelsea, but I miss Bea more. I love her. I cannot afford to fuck it up. Bea is about the only evidence that I have any humanity in me because she sees it. Somewhere. Fuck knows where, because I can’t see it.

When she returns, I live again. The world holds colour for me. I am forgiven, Bea forgives me. Chelsea gurgles at me.

One month after this people start to get sick.

The Apocalypse takes one year. The strangers wipe out humanity in three hundred and seventy days. Just when I start to live, they kill me.

***

Next day.

I deliberately interrupt Katrina’s morning routine. She goes to the gym at six oh five every day, and she likes to start with the cross-trainer. I do not let her on this day. I stand on the pedals back to front, and I sing ‘The Boys are Back in Town’ at the top of my voice. Katrina sees me and freezes.

“I would like you to leave,” she says.

“I know, and I will, but I have to tell you something first.”

“What do you want, Storm? Make it quick. You smell, and you’re holding up my workout.”

“I do not smell,” I say.

I do smell. I only wear one set of clothes despite the cellulose-based fabrics that the strangers supply. I’m still wearing the clothes I had on when they found me in the debris. I do not honestly know how long ago that was. Either the clothes will fall off me by being worn out from washing, or these are the clothes I’ll wear till I die.

I tell Katrina about the streets of Wandsworth.

“So what? They’re neater this way.” She doesn’t quite pout, but it’s in her voice.

“But it’s not realistic, Katrina. The tarmac can’t be perfect. Streets pitch and yaw as you drive along them. This is not what streets look like.”

“This is how they should look. I’ve had no complaints about my work.”

“From them? What the fuck do they know about how London was? From the Kellys? The Kellys don’t care.”

“Thank you for the constructive criticism, Storm. Now get off the cross-trainer.”

“Will you add some cracks? Some fungus to the walls?”

“No. Why does it bother you? You do the people, anyway.”

“Not people. Simulants. They aren’t people.”

“They seem perfectly like people to me.”

“They would, and therein lies the problem. My problem. They cannot be human because they are perfect replicas. Humanity is defined by imperfections.”

Katrina trembles and I get off the trainer before she has an anxiety attack. She gets them when things are not going according to whatever her plan of the moment is, and I’m pretty sure her plan did not include an altercation with me first thing in the morning. I sometimes think there’s a part of her that is happy with the demise of the previous world.

“How about some refuse?”

“What do you mean?”

“Chocolate wrappers, dead leaves, cigarette ends, the normal detritus of human occupation.”

“The new trees do not shed leaves, simulants don’t smoke, and nobody has eaten chocolate since…well, since.”

“Can you at least pray for the strangers to add an algorithm that makes the trees shed leaves after an interval?”

“What’s the point of that? Someone’ll have to pick up the leaves.”

I leave her in the gym. There was no point starting an argy-bargy this early in the morning.

***

I use the prayer point on Shaftesbury Avenue where it intersects with Charing Cross Road, right near the steakhouse. The point is where a phone box used to be. I’ve never seen a stranger and Nico doesn’t count. The refinement of our constructs needs to be done at a prayer point, which is a kind of pod, like a phone box, but without angles or discernible equipment. There is a field of some kind in there. It crackles lightly and there is always a hint of ozone.

“On simulants in bar, doorman or bouncer far too accommodating. Must be polite, but physically intimidating and not altogether helpful except if bribed. Must learn psychological intimidation too, but this can wait until later. Service at bar too quick. There should be a delay, however brief, between arrival at bar and receipt of beverage. Beverages unsatisfactory. I still think it would be best to actually use fermentation to produce beer. Needs more flavour, more body. Bubbles and head satisfactory. Punters far too accommodating. For discussion: jealousy. For discussion: mating rituals among heterosexual humans.”

***

I bump into a simulant while walking down Monmouth Street, just coming up to the obelisk. I shove him away with irritation. He doesn’t even stop to look at me. I turn and pull at his shirt.

“Hello,” he says. Pleasant, placid.

“No. Wrong. Say ‘arsehole’.”

“Excuse me?”

“Call me an arsehole for bumping into you without apologising.”

“I don’t think that is appropriate—”

“Oh, fuck off.”

There are no students or tourists sitting at the base of the Seven Dials obelisk.

Jealousy is easy once there is desire. I walk down Mercer Street then turn left on to Long Acre and stop at the facsimile of Covent Garden Station. I do not go in. There is nothing beyond the door except some
3D sketches of trains. None of us remember trains or the details of how they work well enough to replicate them. The train, tube and bus stations have significance to all of us, and are landmarks of sorts. There is a prayer point and I go in.

“Jealousy is easy once there is desire, and everything human starts with desire. God desired that there be light. Satan desired to be more than he was. Rama desired Sita. To want something is to want it completely, to own a thing or a person is to own it exclusively. This is why we marry. I mean, the real reason we marry is economic, but let’s put that aside. We marry and put a ring on it…heh, sorry, pop song allusion…we use a ring to denote ownership. This is my person. This is my car. I call dibs because even if a thing does not belong to me yet, it is conceptually mine because I have seen it.
The lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh.
That’s from the Bible. Or Shakespeare.”

I ramble on, because Nico has encouraged me to free-associate, and that the more I say, the more the strangers can understand the nuances and apply them to the simulants. I keep talking until I hear a foghorn.

Shit.

I sit on the pavement, close my eyes, and cover my ears tightly. These motherfuckers never, ever learn.

WE ARE SORRY FOR OUR PART IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. IT WAS UNINTENTIONAL, BUT THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE OUR ACTIONS. WE WILL MAKE AMENDS AND RESTITUTION WITH ALL OF OUR RESOURCES. PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGY AND HELP US REBUILD YOUR DELICIOUS WORLD.

This high decibel message is repeated, vibrating through the Rebuild and the Complex, over a period of an hour, and in several languages. Well, not real languages. I only speak English, for example, but I recognise German, French, Spanish and Italian. The strangers have done a linguistic reconstruction using my memories. Is it Spanish if I think it’s Spanish? Does it matter?

And don’t get me started on ‘delicious’. Nico asks the final five for synonyms of good, but doesn’t give us context. Then he asks a number of questions about atonement for wrongdoing, and I tell him apology and restitution is pretty much universal. Little did I know.

The strangers broadcast this message every day at about midday. I try to tell Nico about the volume, and the inappropriateness of the word ‘delicious’, but he tells me there is no editing of the message. It has been approved by the homeworld and cannot be changed, either in content or in auditory qualities.

So they apologise, daily and loudly, and in languages that are probably made up.

***

Here’s what happened.

The first incursions of their scout drones bring exotic bacteria into the atmosphere. Nico tells me they are not even aware Earth is inhabited. Our communication is too simplistic for their minds, and our radio signals are apparently indistinguishable from background stellar noise. The bacteria kill humans in their thousands every day. Even the two-point-five standard deviations of the population that is immune succumbs to native pestilence. Society collapses pretty quickly.

When the gargantuan mother ships arrive, they cause so much disruption of the atmosphere that they accidentally kill off the survivors with extreme weather and noxious gases. It takes three months for them to realise that humans are sentient life, almost a year for them to figure out how to communicate with us.

Our consciousness is primitive to them.

My house in West Ealing crumbles under the force of an unholy hurricane. When the roof is blown away I see a sky of fluorescent green. I have the baby strapped to my chest because she couldn’t sleep. I never see what happens to Bea, but there is some kind of vacuum sucking the air out and I can’t breathe and I black out. I come to in darkness, the weight of the baby still on me, but cold, unbreathing.

Oh, Chelsea.

I black out again, and I see machines digging, retrieving, scanning. My neighbour is torn apart because the fuckers do not understand pain.

Chelsea is dead on my chest and I cannot find Bea.

By the time they understand how to keep humans alive, Me, Mr and Mrs Kelly, Katrina and Terry are all that’s left.

FOR A time there is this silly notion to repopulate the Earth.

No can do. Terry is gay. The Kellys are elderly, beyond menopause. Katrina is repulsive. Not physically. She’s fantastic-looking, physically fit and of the right age. It’s just that she and I hate each other on sight.

There is some suggestion that Terry ‘go straight for humanity’, but he dismisses that with a sniff. He will not even let his sperm be harvested. Neither will I, and Mr Kelly refuses on the grounds that he is married.

Nico cannot understand why we will not act in our own self-interest. I tell him humanity is defined by two opposing instincts, survival and self-destruction. Sex and suicide. Libido and thanatos.

“It’s very rock and roll,” I say.

Hence, simulants.

***

We sometimes sift through the detritus of the old world to see what can be salvaged for the Rebuild. In hazard suits we find old records, useless plasma TVs, books, religious icons, wheelie bins. Terry only looks for books, and even then he only picks the ones he would like to read.

Katrina does not select. She picks up everything she lays her eyes on, starting from the nearest. The Kellys see an object and enter this kind of Proustian fugue where they can only talk about the memories the object holds for them.

I just watch them all. I have never found anything I want and I see the exercise as futile, busywork to keep us survivors occupied, so the Apologists can feel good with themselves. I don’t even know why we’re wearing these suits. It’s not like any of this is irradiated.

I pick up a revolver and dry fire it at the ovoid observer drones.

Click, click, click.

***

“Pay attention,” I say. “What I say next is to be memorised, okay? Just store the words. I’ll teach you when to use them, but for now, just remember the words. Ready?”

“Yes,” says the simulant. We are seated on the faux-grass in Green Park.

“Shit. Bollocks. Fuck. Cunt. Bitch. Bastard. Arsehole. Toerag. Wanker. Ass-hat. Bullshit. Clitface. Cocknugget. Cumbubble. Cuntrag. Bomboclad. Dickhead. Dildo. Dickwad. Fuckface. Fuckwad. Jizzsniffer. And…and…”

“Is ‘and’ one of the words you want me to—”

“No, you gigantic asswipe. There’s your first lesson.”

***

We try it again. I approach a group of simulants on Tottenham Court Road, and while they try their best to avoid me, I bump into two of them hard.

“Asswipe!”

“Cumbubble!”

“Jizzsniffer!”

Their delivery is perfect. They even stop to glare after me.

I walk away pleased.

***

When Bea is thirteen weeks pregnant we see Chelsea for the first time on ultrasound. We are in the darkened scanning room, staring at the screen like it’s a movie theatre. Bea is supine with her belly exposed and wet from the ultrasound gel, but her neck is also twisted towards the representation of the moving nascent human in her uterus. I’m on an uncomfortable plastic chair holding her hand. Chelsea is moving. She moves her hands in a wave, she twitches her legs, she turns. The operator does not like the motion because they are trying to date the pregnancy and they need her still so they can measure the crown-rump length.

At one point they get a good profile shot and we can see Chelsea’s brain, eye sockets, mouth, skull, heart, and other organs all at once. I see her open her mouth and swallow amniotic fluid. I see it go down her throat. It is amazing, and at that point, with that supremely human action, I consider her alive.

That’s when I become a parent.

***

I go to a prayer point and I say, “I need thirty simulants to follow me.”

I don’t wait to see what happens, I just go to watch Katrina work on Waterloo Bridge. I watch from the North Bank of what is meant to be the Thames. She does not understand architecture or civil engineering and works like an artist. With grand sweeping gestures she creates a line going from one bank to another, then fills in the detail. She creates concrete slabs using short vertical strokes with both hands. Whatever technology the Apologists use monitors her movements and replicates with whatever material they use for this simulacrum. Katrina is completely absorbed by her labours and I cannot see from here, but I imagine her sweating. She takes this shit seriously.

Nico is beside me.

“What’s up, pussycat?” I ask.

“I am curious as to why you are watching Katrina work, rather than doing work of your own.” He smiles at me as 1990s Tom Jones. “Not that you must work. You are all volunteers.”

“I am working,” I say, and I point to the thirty bland simulants behind me. “This is the Waterloo Bridge, man. Monet painted it. It was a suicide spot in the 1800s, before anybody had heard of the Golden Gate Bridge. It celebrates our victory over a short, French military genius. The construction of any such thing would attract crowds.”

Nico seems puzzled.

“Humans like to stare at changes in landscape. I am teaching your simulants to stare at things.”

“I see. What is the object of such activity?”

“To have stories to tell. To make life less monotonous. To distract us from the entropy that slowly degrades our bodies. ‘Hey, Fred, I came in over Waterloo Bridge this morning. Fantastic structure. I was there when it was built.’ That kind of thing.”

Nico now looks like Tom Jones in
Mars Attacks!. Blue suit, dark shirt, clean shaven, moderate side burns. I prefer him with the goatee of later years, but who am I to judge.

***

For the first time I see the innards of a simulant.

I am walking past what should be Wembley Stadium, but is instead a homogenous blob of transparent concept art. There is no traffic, so I am walking in the centre of the road. There are vehicle ghosts, placeholder cars that are holograms and lack mass. We have an understanding. They pass through me and I disregard them.

I see a body lying on the side of the road, a male, some movement, but clearly incapacitated. I go over. There is a crush wound on the right shoulder. The clothing torn and the skin broken in an irregular pattern.

I don’t know what I expected. The simulants are constructs and I file them as robots. But there is blood. I touch it, and it doesn’t feel like blood, though it is red, and it lacks that metallic taste-smell. There are bones poking out here and there. I touch them, and they are of some kind of reinforced plastic. There is mangled flesh that quivers as the simulant tries to move.

I’m confused. Who or what attacked this thing? My mind instantly goes to the other humans, Katrina especially. The simulants are nonviolent and Katrina may hold a grudge for my interference in her morning work-out. Maybe because I criticise her work, she decides to destroy mine?

No, I don’t see it.

I stick my hand in the wound to feel the flesh more than anything. It is all soft and pliant, like real meat. Where is the machinery? Where is the technology? What’s the power supply? I push my hand in deeper. The simulant does not react to this, and I try to remember what Nico and I agreed about pain. All the way inside its synthetic spine there is no wire, cable, or anything that isn’t ersatz human. The simulant has blue green eyes. They are locked with mine. I pull my hand out of his wound and poke the left eye. It blinks. I shove my thumb into the eye socket and I keep pushing until I feel something give.

Then I feel shame, so I rise and I run away.

***

How humans learn speech is a mystery. There is some mimesis where the child copies sounds. Chelsea had begun the transition from cooing and crying to meaningful words thrown almost at random. Meaning is developed from context and repetition. How exactly grammar and syntax are learnt is still poorly understood.

“The simulants are not developing socially. They are still where they were the last time I spoke. They do not surprise me. There is nothing new in their interactions with each other. If this is to work, if they are to be your substitute humans, you have to tweak your algorithms or they will be nothing more than manikins. Teaching a child speech is different. The learning is not passive. The child learns even when not observed, outside ‘teaching’ periods. Children experiment. Your simulants do not. They leave the burden of acquisition to me.”

***

I see fourteen more wounded simulants before I understand the problem. It comes to me during apology time.

Each time one group of simulants passes the other on the streets they bump aggressively and exchange profanities. Every single time.

To make matters worse, some simulants are stronger than others, and they do not modulate the force of the physical contact. Some hit with all their strength, leading to injuries.

WE ARE SORRY FOR OUR PART IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. IT WAS UNINTENTIONAL, BUT THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE OUR ACTIONS. WE WILL MAKE AMENDS AND RESTITUTION WITH ALL OF OUR RESOURCES. PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGY AND HELP US REBUILD YOUR DELICIOUS WORLD.

I have a pounding headache and just when I think my eyes will start bleeding the apologies stop.

Nico appears. He has like a curly Afro with a white shirt open to the waist. His chest is hairy, black curls of 1970s Tom Jones chest foliage.

“I will never get used to this shit,” I say, pointing to the sky as if the sound comes from there.

“Good. We do not want the apologies to seem perfunctory.”

“Listen, you have to reprogram the simulants.”

“Go to the prayer points,” he says. “Your requests will reach the appropriate quarters.”

“So why are you here?”

“There have been…complaints about you.”

“What? I’m not moving fast enough with the simulants?”

“No, the simulants are fine. It’s your fellow Earthers.”

“By which you mean Katrina. She’s always hated me—”

“Storm, it’s all of them.”

“What do you mean? Even the Kellys?”

“The others unanimously think you are a disruptive influence. Yes, even the Kellys.”

That hurts a bit. The Kellys are never angry with anybody.

“They’re lying.”

“Our own surveillance confirms what they say. You irritate all of them. You disrupt Katrina’s rhythms when you know she likes predictability. You sing at the top of your voice when the others are resting. You deliberately needle Terry, who thinks you’re homophobic by the way.”

“I’m not homophobic. I just don’t like Terry, that’s all.”

“I’m the messenger here, Storm. I may have to separate you from the others if you continue this way. Get along, or move along.”

***

“Pain and disgust. The simulants must be allowed to feel pain. That way they will care about their bodies, about harm coming to their bodies. If they are to be alive by any definition they have to avoid harm. Even an amoeba avoids noxious stimuli. If they feel pain, the confrontation will not invariably lead to physical harm. You can’t punch someone without feeling pain on your knuckle. They must see altercations as options in a menu. Altercations can lead to damage, therefore they need to think carefully before getting into fights.” I take a breath.

“Disgust. Simulant bodies don’t decay. That’s odd, and it’s definitely not human. Either way, when a simulant sees another simulant injured, they must react, they must try to help, and they must feel alarm. The spilling of blood causes humans alarm because it may mean that there is a danger close by that can kill the observer. This may be the origin of empathy. We know instinctively that the red is meant to be on the inside. It’s protection. But we also feel disgust when presented with decay. Remove the fucking bodies of the injured simulants, please, thank you.”

***

I am going to start a fight.

I did not return to the Complex yesterday. I am lurking in an alcove with a length of piping and malicious intent. I got the pipe from our excursions into the old world. Finally found something I actually want.

Two simulants walk past, holding hands, simulating a couple. They smile at each other, and it churns my belly. There is no variation. A human couple would show variation, even in the throes of puppy love. They’d gaze into each other’s eyes, but then face forward to check for obstacles, and maybe show some self-consciousness at some point. These guys are just stuck on an on switch.

I leap from my hiding place, landing on the street about a foot behind them. Humans would have startled. Not these machines. The first stroke hits their hands where they hold each other, deforming a few digits. Since they are facing each other I see them wincing in pain. My second stroke hits the one on the left, right on the crown of the head. I feel the shock of it in my shoulder joint. Whatever material the Apologists use for the skull gives way. He does not fall, though. His lover does not help him. She cradles her mangled hand and shies away from me, but otherwise seems to watch with curiosity.

That red sap that the simulants have streams down the male’s skull, although he still seems to be functioning well. I curl a leg behind his knee and push him down, then I hit him repeatedly until he stops moving.

I am covered in red and breathing heavy.

His lover sees the mess and her lips curl, then she walks away. There’s my disgust. I throw the pipe at her, but it misses. I am too winded to run after her, but I am angry at the unnaturalness of the scene.

I drag myself to a prayer point.

“They need emergency services,” I say. “At least rudimentary police, ambulance and fire. Otherwise they have no recourse when they experience violence or injury. Probably need a proto-judiciary system too.” I sigh. It will take weeks to explain this. I speak to Nico about courts and he wonders if a loud, daily apology will not be enough for all offences. I shake my head.

“The police keep the Queen’s Peace,” I say. But then I realise there is no Queen, no Royal Family, no Buckingham Palace, no government at all. But fuck it, this is England. “The Queen’s Peace is civil order…”

***

The next day I cannot move from the aches and pains. Bludgeoning a machine to death is apparently hard work. I may have overdone it. I didn’t need that much fury to investigate simulant response. Maybe I was still a little peeved that four out of the five remaining humans do not like me.

I daydream. Bea is heavily pregnant, seven and a half months, sitting on the sofa. I pass her a glass of iced water and she places it on her gigantic belly. The baby immediately begins to kick the cold area. Bea giggles. I move the glass to a different position, and the baby kicks the new location.

“Looks like she doesn’t like the cold,” says Bea.

“Yeah, she’s going to have to get used to it. It’s London.”

“We could always move to warmer climes.”

“Good luck with that,” I say.

This is a running joke. We are both Londoners, born, bred; she north of the Thames, me south. Bea is the one exception to my rule that once you cross the bridge you’re in wankerland. Warmer Climes is our code for anywhere outside the
M25 area.

I am thinking of the day I met Bea. It is a Gay Pride march and I initially peg her for a lesbian. She is not in the march, just on the sidelines like me. She points out that I have food on my chin, and, because I don’t think of her as prey, I relax, and we start to chat.

Next, I am thinking about me striking her. I do not even remember why, but what sticks, what will not go away, is the death of something in her eyes. There is a fascination in her eyes, an interest in me, a heat that draws me. It has been there since the Gay Pride march. I see it leach out in that moment, and I know fear. I did not expect the emptiness behind that curtain, that frightening lack of love or loathing.

Even when I win her forgiveness, her eyes are at best lukewarm. Whatever it was is gone, replaced by a tepid facsimile of adoration interspersed with sham bonhomie. I suspect that was in place to ward off further violence.

While I may spend time fantasising and in reverie, I never actually dream of Bea and Chelsea. I never have a dream where they are alive and this alien invasion business is just a dream, like bad science fiction.

I often wonder if my whole life before the strangers was real, and maybe I have always been here.

***

One day a week, I work on variability. When I started, all the simulants looked the same, with features like mine. Every week I take time to give them a new design which is pushed out into circulation like a new stamp or coin.

The current population of London is maybe five thousand simulants. All of them look like people from my life. The first woman I design is built off the template of my primary school teacher, Miss Cadogan. She had large eyes, dark curly hair and a perpetual smile. Gangly, energetic, of constant good cheer. I wish I knew what happened to her. There are two hundred Miss Cadogans in London. They are poor copies and lack her personality, but when I see any of them I feel comforted.

I make a few Renaissance Jesus-type simulants just because. I make a Tony Blair. There are at least five Obamas.

I make a Leonard, a guy who lived down the road from us, bearded, about fifty-five, plump, rumoured to have been on the sex-offenders register because he groped a co-worker or something. He helped me change a flat tyre once. I feel sorry for the guy, so I give him a smaller waistline in his new incarnation.

I do not make a Bea. I can’t. The idea of running into her in the Rebuild is just…I can’t.

I make an Ahmed, my only Pakistani friend. I can’t remember his surname, but I render his unibrow carefully, the strands of grey in his otherwise black hair, the hollows of his cheeks, the dark and prominent lower eyelids. Ahmed’s an artist and he always has the smell of some solvent or the other about him. I have no artistic inclination whatsoever, yet I know there is such a thing as odourless solvents. According to Bea, Ahmed wants to be known as a working artist, hence the smell.

I make my father, render him with words.

“Brutish, muscular, work-hardened palms, gigantic Popeye-type forearms. Popeye’s a cartoon character. His eyes are perpetually narrow, like he’s about to hit you or someone else. He is not bearded, but there is always patchy hair on his chin. There is a slight lurch to his gait, legacy of a love affair with alcohol.” After a while I feel like giving him a horn, bang in the centre of his head. The Apologists won’t know the difference, and it would amuse me.

I don’t. But I could have.

***

I attack a few more simulants. In truth, I cannot say I am conducting experiments in response to violence. Beating them is somehow…cathartic. I feel anxious all day until I have hit them, after which I feel calm. I am perturbed by this, but I don’t tell anybody, even Nico.

I’m cleaning the simulants’ fluid off myself, when I notice a couple about a hundred yards away. I draw closer and it’s Katrina talking to a male simulant.

She is smiling.

Is that bitch auditing my work?

“What the fuck are you doing?” I yell.

She is calm, and meets my gaze. The simulant wanders off before I reach them.

“Hello, Storm,” she says.

“Hello yourself. What are you doing?”

“Chatting.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, I confess, I was curious about your efforts and decided to see for myself.”

“It’s no concern of yours.”

“Ahh, but it is. You complained about the symmetry of my streets. I think that makes your work my concern. Since we’re all helping each other out.”

I feel myself tense up at the smug tone in her voice, the challenging thrust to her chin. What surprises me is that the urge to hit her is so intense that I force myself to walk away.

“Touché,” I mutter.

***

At a prayer point in St John’s Wood I say, “There are things that children of drunks know that other children do not. I don’t mean that modern ‘addiction’ crap. That’s some bleeding-heart bullshit. I mean drunks. For one thing, we know how to take a beating. Two, we are experts at observing other people. Three, we know how to strategically deploy alcohol. Too little, and you get withdrawal symptoms, which can make the drunk irritable. Too much, and you become a punching bag. You have to find the sweet spot, the optimum amount of alcohol to maintain tranquillity. Four, we know the borders of sobriety well. The drunk-not drunk threshold tells us when to disappear.

“People who talk about ‘a mean drunk’ don’t know anything. Children of drunks recognise no other kind. We are weaned on violence and know nothing else.”

***

I have been following Katrina for weeks now. She sees her simulant every day. He’s an Elliot Wells type. I went to secondary school with Elliot Wells and he was a bit of a wanker. I forget why. I think he is one of those people who knows everything and reminds everybody of it all the time. The kind who answers a question in class before anybody else, or who declares a wrong answer before the teacher does. That kind of wanker. Maybe.

He pronounces consonants, for fuck’s sake. The rest of us drop them, like the good old faux cockneys we aspire to be. He has to enunciate. I am not exactly sure why I designed some simulants after him.

I see them kissing next to a waterway in Little Venice. Kissing. It irritates the hell out of me. I don’t know how many Elliots there are in London, but I try an experiment. I wait until he has walked her to the edge of our Complex, then I pounce on him as he walks back. I obliterate his head with dozens of strikes from my pipe.

When he falls, I hear the drum beat of multiple feet. There are simulants running towards me. Just two of them at first. They don’t know how to fight, and they approach me one at a time, so I simply whack them in the faces with my pipe. But then there are more. When the two fall, three more appear, and when they fall a team of four runs towards me. They still attack one at a time, but I’m getting tired, my arm is weak, and it’s hard to keep my footing in the pool of faux-blood at my feet. The silence is disconcerting. They don’t get out of breath, and when I punch them in the belly, there is no forced exhalation. I try to run into the Complex, but now there is a group of five and they appear to have learned to attack all at once. My pipe, slick with their fluids, slips from my fingers. I take punches to the body and head. I’m dazed, and still taking hits. I know that if I black out, they will kill me. Through the confusion of limbs, I see a team of six approaching. I am about five feet from the gate of the Complex.

I unleash a final burst of savagery, and am able to escape into the barrier. My hunch is correct. The simulants cannot enter. I fall to all-fours, catch my breath. I see a light come on in Terry’s house, but then it goes out again.

The surviving simulants stand at the barrier and I give them the finger before I stagger home. When I look out of the window, both the incapacitated and active simulants are gone.

***

Three hours later I wake up to scores of observation orbs in my room, more than I have ever seen in one place at the same time. And Nico. He appears in greyscale, as Tom Jones when he was in the band Tommy Scott and the Senators. White shoes, white trousers, open neck cardigan. The Senators was back in the sixties. I’m staring at his outfit and I miss what he’s saying.

“What?” I ask.

“You’re under arrest,” he says.

“What?”

“Is your hearing malfunctioning?” He moves closer to my bed. “You are under arrest for the murder of Elliot Wells.”

***

It turns out the strangers move fast in setting up a rudimentary judicial system, a police force and a prison of sorts. I am the first person to be arrested or placed in detention.

“This is ridiculous,” I say to Nico.

“You were the one who prayed for law enforcement,” he says.

“For them. I’m not subject to their laws.”

“You can argue that in court. Murder is a universal—”

“It’s not murder. The simulants are not alive.”

“Well—”

“At most it’s cruelty to machines, and even you know how ridiculous that sounds.”

“I suggest you work on your defence, Storm.”

***

I don’t know what’s funnier, a Soviet show trial or this farce.

The judge is a Miss Cadogan. The jury is full of Elliot Wells duplicates, which is annoying because it should be a jury of my peers. Observation orbs are everywhere. All this malarkey because I deactivated the equivalent of a household appliance.

There are no other humans in court, and that should make me suspicious right away, but I am overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all. What are they going to do, execute me? It’s not as straightforward as I think, though. Since this circus began my feelings on the matter have become complicated. I make glib statements about simulants not being alive, but deep down, where I won’t admit anything, I feel a cold weightiness in my heart. It makes my words ring false when I use them. Is that guilt I’m feeling? Have I convinced myself these simulants are alive?

When I see the first prosecution witness the other shoe finally drops. The humans are going to testify against me. Katrina’s in the stand.

***

“I appeal, Nico. I want to speak to them,” I say.

He is silent for a while. I’ve never seen him like this. I get the sense that he is thinking, which is odd. I thought he was a mouthpiece.

“You can’t,” he says, finally.

“Prisoners and convicts have a right of appeal, since we’re pretending to be human. Take me to the fucking Apologists.”

“You can’t speak to them, Storm, because they are not here.”

“I’m sorry, what? What are you saying?”

Tom fucking Jones is still dancing while delivering this news. Unbelievable.

“We’re not on Earth,” says Nico. “After your planet was destroyed you all were brought here, to the homeworld. That’s why you have to wear the suits when scavenging. This is not Earth.”

I sputter, but I feel the ground falling away from me. “So what is this place?”

“A kind of reserve, a place for you to thrive, build a new world, live.”

“A wildlife reserve? A fucking zoo? Are you kidding me?”

“The people you call Apologists don’t live here, haven’t done for centuries. They have left to explore—”

“Show me.”

He does.

Beyond the placeholder for what is to be the
M25 London orbital motorway, he takes me though what seems like nothingness, but is a doorway. It is suddenly dark, with spotlights from above. All around me, and extending as far as the eye can see are hundreds, thousands of proto-simulants. They stand there with their bland features and absent secondary sexual characteristics. They twitch occasionally, the way babies do, the way Chelsea did in her sleep.

I look up, and the ceiling appears to be so far away it must have clouds forming within. It’s like a cathedral, but no cathedral I know of is miles wide. No matter what direction I look in, I cannot see a wall. The heads of the simulants just keep going forever. The ceiling is transparent and shows a night sky, with constellations I do not recognise.

“I want to go outside,” I say.

“No. There is no atmosphere. You’ll die. Besides, there is nothing to see. This is all there is,” says Nico.

“Give me the suits we go scavenging in,” I say.

He humours me, but he is right. There is nothing to see outside but rock and dust and dead machinery. Overhead, a number of large celestial bodies in the sky, moons and satellites, no doubt.

“Is there no way to get a message to—”

“Storm, they live in Dyson Clouds over multiple solar systems. They have countless worlds like this where they keep species like yours. They do not wish to hear your opinion. You are wasting your time.”

I take the suit off. “There has to be retrial, Nico. I must be judged by my peers, not these…things. Let the Final Five judge their own.”

In the end they elect to exile me, which is just like imprisonment, only with no walls, bars or daily routine. They agree it wasn’t murder to kill a simulant, but I had displayed ‘murderous behaviour’ which may well spill into their lives. They see me as dangerous. I do not tell them we are not on Earth because fuck them.

They seal me in a cul-de-sac in Shoreditch. The simulants avoid the area and not even the ghost cars drive on the roads. It is hard, and I am lonely. I write down everything I can remember about Bea and Chelsea. If I am not to create simulant personalities then I will re-create others. I write about the lives of people I have known on Earth. I write furiously, so as not to go mad.

I write about what happened here in this new London. The first version I write is a bit of whinging horsedung. I cast myself as a misunderstood martyr and gloss over the things I did wrong. I don’t know what I was thinking. Redemption after death? Much later, when I have achieved distance and some objectivity, I destroy the first account and write a more honest one. I am even able to interrogate myself, to ask myself why I really killed Elliot Wells and those other simulants. I use the word ‘killed’. I speculate on whether I was jealous, on whether I am perhaps attracted to Katrina. I delete that version too, and finally settle on one that just states the facts.

I attend to every little thing. When the printer makes food I watch every minute process. Maybe I do go mad a little, because I speak to the drone sentries, even though they do not speak back.

After about a year, a simulant escorts me to the funeral for one of the Kellys, then the other within a month. I pay my respects. Katrina is there, eyes swollen from crying. Terry’s there too, in sunglasses and staring at me. I want to explain to them that I have some insight into myself now, that I’m not a threat, and that I want to come back, but it reminds me of when I begged Bea to return home, and I end up saying nothing.

***

We are the pandas who won’t mate. Endangered, in captivity, eating food printed from basic amino acids, glucose and triglyceride molecules, remaking our world from memory and language, a world both old and new.

In this new London I am the first mass murderer. I serve my time, and when I come out of Shoreditch I do not recognise the proto-city. They give me new clothes, and ignore my protests. They have improved the water, there are cars, and the people are more like the grim arseholes you would normally see in the London tube crowds every day. Maybe this is not so bad. If I squint, this can pass for Earth.

The Complex is empty, and I have no idea where Katrina or Terry are. I see Nico one more time, but he does not tell me about the other humans.

I go into a pub called The Cock and Bull to wait for the midday apology.

The service is shit, but the cider tastes better.

***

Tade Thompson lives and works in the south of England. His first novel
Making Wolf won the 2016 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award for best debut novel. His second novel
Rosewater will be released in November from Apex Books. We’ll be interviewing him next issue.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL FOLK METAL FUSION

GEORGINA BRUCE

illustrated by Vince Haig

Professor Jane Lovage imagined that she might walk into the Astrophysics building, free her hair from its neat bun, and shake it loose in gingerish waves over her shoulders. She might slip off her corduroy business jacket and twirl it around her head a few times before slinging it into a corner (missing any vital pieces of lab equipment in its path, of course) then she might stride – yes, stride – through a throng of mesmerised spectators, stride right up to Mariel Hewitt – and kiss her. In Jane’s imagination, Mariel would be dazzled by this unexpected display of sexual glamour.
Professor Jane! But…but you’re beautiful!
And of course, Mariel would swoon into her kiss. The much-hyped kissing with tongues that was all the rage these days.

What a daft idea, really. And not the sort of thing that would impress Mariel Hewitt at all. These naive romantic scenarios might be popular amongst Jane’s colleagues in Astrophysics, but Mariel Hewitt was Media Studies. She probably wrote papers that deconstructed the trope of ‘sexy/professor’ and analysed its place in the context of feminist critiques of academia. Mariel was a woman of the modern world. And Jane was from outer space. Not literally. Well yes, literally, in one sense: in the sense that everyone is, sort of. But she wasn’t an alien. She was emphatic about that.

So the fact that the media had dubbed her Alien Jane bothered her a lot. Especially this morning, when it had appeared on the front page of the Guardian:
ALIEN JANE’S “TRANSMISSION” IS EVIDENCE OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. Everyone Jane knew read the Guardian.
Everyone.
There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Mariel Hewitt read the Guardian. The tabloids were less of a worry, though their headlines were even more ridiculous:
ALIEN JANE’S TEXT MESSAGES FROM OUTER SPACE.
Or her students’ favourite:
REVEALED: ALIEN JANE’S TORRID NIGHTS WITH SPACE LOTHARIO!
There was a lot of dumbing things down and making things up – the real story was a lot less…sexy. Yes, the Transmission had been picked up by Jane; and yes, it had clearly been broadcast from another, long dead, planet; and yes again, it looked like pretty impressive proof of intelligent life in the universe. But as stunning as that story should have been without embellishment, the Transmission was, at heart, just a line of code. It wasn’t even an especially good looking line of code. Jane herself wasn’t that photogenic, either, and the papers had already got bored of taking her picture. The nickname had stuck, though. She was Alien Jane now, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She managed to walk through the lobby of the Astrophysics building without stripping, and made it to her office with all her buttons fastened and hair in place. That day’s Guardian went straight into the wastepaper bin next to her desk. She sighed. Maybe the emptiness she felt was hunger. In the tiny office refrigerator was an apricot yoghurt that didn’t do anything too alarming when she peeled back the foil lid, so she decided to call it breakfast. She was about to eat it when Mariel Hewitt barged into the room and plonked herself on the chair opposite Jane’s desk. Jane instantly felt dishevelled, and mortified to be caught with a spoonful of yoghurt gripped in her hand. Of all things to eat in front of Mariel, yoghurt seemed the most pedestrian, the least punk. It marked Jane out as a woman of little substance. She threw the pot into the wastepaper bin. Slimy yellow streaks splattered over the Guardian headline.

“Those arseholes in Modern Languages,” Mariel said. “They’ve only gone and found an exolinguist. I mean, what bollocks.”

Jane nodded, and hoped that was enough to make it look as though she knew what Mariel was talking about.

Mariel grimaced. “Bloody linguists. What are you doing for lunch? Would you like to brave the canteen with me? I’ll tell you what Baudrillard said about extraterrestrial intelligent life forms. If you’re lucky, I’ll tell you in French.” She laughed, and tucked her hair behind her very shapely ears. “If you can possibly stand it. You’ve probably had enough of non-scientists hanging around here.”

“I’m free at twelve o’clock,” said Jane. “It’s a date.”

Only of course it wasn’t a date. Well, not in that sense. Not in the sense of two people with bodies trying to work out if the bodies should interact in intimate proximity to one another. Not in that sense, at all.

***

Dear Alien Jane,

I’ll be honest. My longing for you can only be described as sexually transgressive. My biology urges me to perform certain acts which would perhaps be considered morally questionable by your species’ standards, and I can’t deny that this is part of the excitement. Our sexual union is all I can think about, although I have no way of knowing if we are sexually compatible or even physically capable of achieving congress. All I know is that the more I think about it, the more my tentacles unfurl and ooze with slime. If you feel the same way, please, please let me know.

Your own

Space Lothario x

***

According to the Guardian, the Transmission consisted of music, poetry, and rules for trigonometry.

“The works of the greatest alien poets and musicians, comparable to Shakespeare, Mozart, and the Beatles, are being beamed at the Earth in a sequence of code. The code repeats every two minutes, and so far there has been no variation. Astrophysics professor Jane Lovage, popularly known as Alien Jane, says that the transmission is evidence of intelligent life in the cosmos. ‘It wants to communicate with us. It has something important to say,’ Professor Lovage stated.”

Mariel wondered if Alien Jane really had stated that. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing she’d state. Not that Mariel knew anything about Alien Jane, or the Transmission, or science in general. What Mariel knew about was Media Studies. Since the news had broken about the Transmission, she’d been hanging around the Astrophysics building, hoping for some inside scoop. She’d been spending some time with Alien Jane, but all she could glean so far was that the Transmission was some kind of temporal-geometric pattern, which was almost certainly not an accident, and which was being beamed at the Earth from a distant planet that was so far away in space and time that it no longer actually existed. Alien Jane reminded Mariel of Jodie Foster in
Contact, only not quite as good looking.

Mariel thought a lot about how the planet beaming this message no longer existed, long since burned up by the death of its sun. The author of the Transmission was dead, as were the author’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and their descendants, not to mention everyone they had ever loved, or whatever their equivalent of love was, along with everywhere they had ever lived and every place they had ever seen with whatever their equivalent of eyes were. Maybe they saw with the backs of their knees, or whatever their equivalent of knees were. You couldn’t get an author more dead than the author of the Transmission. The Transmission was therefore of great and compelling interest to the Media Studies department in general, and to Mariel Hewitt in particular.

Mariel cancelled her afternoon lecture and spent the next two hours in her office making notes for an article about the Transmission which she planned to flog to a major cultural studies journal. Damn it, maybe it could even be a book. Documentary television series? Maybe this was the breakthrough she needed to launch her career on a global scale.

The message, which has no point of origin, no discernible content, and which cannot be decoded, can therefore be thought of as the ultimate fiction: it is entirely open to the reader’s interpretation. It demands a level of engagement which is so extreme that the reader must in fact literally become the writer of the message. However, in order to become the writer of this particular message, the reader must be utterly annihilated. Not only must she attempt to inhabit the extinguished alien psychology, but she must do so in the knowledge that, should her attempt be successful, she would logically exterminate herself as writer. This is a text which, by its very nature, creates an infinite and intellectually fatal paradox.

It needed some editing, obviously. Luckily, the journal wouldn’t require it to make actual sense. Mariel chewed the end of her biro and stared out of the window. A gaggle of undergraduates went by, wearing T-shirts printed with children’s cartoon characters. Students were so annoying. They would be made to talk about those T-shirts in class. They would be asked to write two thousand words on the meaning of their T-shirts. Or they could just bloody well stop wearing them.

***

My Alien Jane,

Your silence is unbearable. What can I do to convey the infinitude of my longing? When I picture your limbs and digits, my fronds dilate and ripple with gaseous eruptions. Forgive me for being crude. I do not know what cultural taboos your people have regarding sexual matters. I only know that I can barely control my suppurating glands.

If only there were some way we could be together. Please, find a way to let me know you feel the same.

Your

Space Lothario x

***

The same song Jane had heard on the radio on her way to work that morning was playing in the canteen at lunchtime. To call it a song was probably overstating matters. It was more like a xylophone having an epileptic fit. The only comprehensible part of it was the piano playing in the chorus, which was jaunty and commercial and no doubt explained the song’s popularity.

“What is this hideous music?” she asked Mariel.

“Are you kidding? Get with the program, AJ,” Mariel drawled. “Everyone on the planet has a copy of this. Don’t tell me you’re not grokking the digital music of today.”

It seemed to Jane that Mariel was doing an impression of the kind of person who said the kind of things that Mariel herself said all the time. Jane wondered what it would be like to be someone who could have a conversation with Mariel without straining some kind of cultural muscle. In a small way, Mariel’s convoluted personality detracted from her sexual appeal – but then she would give out one of her wide easy smiles which redeemed her and made everything better. Even so, Jane still had no idea about the music. Mariel smiled kindly at her, explained that Lang Lang (“At least you’ve heard of him!”) had teamed up with an exomusician to interpret the Transmission patterns as music.

“And that’s what everyone’s listening to?” Jane was appalled.

Mariel laughed. “He’s an unashamed populist, but you have to admire him. The man has chutzpah. He can even make alien music sound twinkly.”

“But what’s an exomusician?”

“Let’s ask the exolinguist. She’s coming over.”

The exolinguist was a tall woman with eyes set quite far apart, not as far apart as a bird’s, but quite far. It was hard to look in both her eyes at the same time. Jane noticed that Mariel was giving it a good try. She was staring at the woman, and it was a bit too personal. It was rude, actually.

“Susan Lorimer,” said the exolinguist, holding out her hand for Jane to shake. It was rather a limp handshake on both sides, Jane thought: the sort of handshake that made people like Mariel think you were a bit pathetic. Had she ever shaken hands with Mariel? Surely she would remember. No doubt Mariel had a very firm grip.

“Is it safe to eat here?” Susan asked.

Mariel laughed as though Susan had said something terribly funny. “Oh, you’ll probably live. Avoid anything that looks like it once had a face. Anything in a sealed container is probably fine. Although the yoghurt looks like it’s just about ready to declare itself an intelligent life form and start running faculty meetings.”

Jane smiled nervously. So Mariel had noticed her eating yoghurt this morning. Damn.

“I’m looking forward to our meeting,” Susan said to Jane. “I have so many questions to ask about the Transmission. It’s a great opportunity.”

“I see,” said Jane, staring fixedly into her bowl of cheese salad. It had just occurred to her that a lot of people were interested in the Transmission who didn’t have much reason to be. People who saw it as an ‘opportunity’. Were there people cynical enough to actually try to make money out of this awesome, unique moment in human history? She felt a little bit sick, and suddenly wished that no one knew anything about the Transmission at all, that she had kept it entirely to herself. She looked up from her cheese salad. Susan was watching her, and Mariel was watching Susan, and Jane was suddenly overtaken by a desire to be alone in her office, with the Transmission and a lot of silence.

“Oh,” said Mariel, turning briefly towards Jane. “If you’re going, could you take these journals with you? I borrowed them from your office, but to be honest I can’t make head or tail of them.”

Jane didn’t sigh, not outwardly anyway. She picked up the journals. How had this turned from a lunch sort-of-date into her fetching and carrying whilst Mariel wooed the wide-eyed (literally) exolinguist? What the hell was an exolinguist anyway? God, life was confusing. And depressing. And just – really annoying. She left the canteen without looking back.

***

Dear Sirs,

Re: Extraterrestrial folk metal fusion

In your article in Issue 546, “Space Music”, your writer overlooks the fact that Lang Lang has taken very many unauthorised liberties with the Transmission data. As I’m sure you’re aware, there is simply no basis for his ‘translation’ and in fact there is no evidence for this approach whatsoever. Whilst I have no objection to creative interpretations, no matter how whimsical, it should be noted that nothing suggests the Transmission is musical in nature. We don’t know what it is. Unscientific interpretations only hinder our ongoing research.

Professor Jane Lovage

***

Darling AJ,

How you torment me with your silence! My desire for our incongruous congress rises like the seven moons of Lorimer, from where I write this letter. Just looking at the moons whilst thinking of you makes my vestibular coracles swell and my lugubrious jellies tremble. How can you deny that what’s between us is real? Though separated by space and time and language and thought and biology and physics and some other things, I know that we can overcome all the barriers to our love. Or whatever our equivalent of love is.

Just thinking that you will one day receive this message makes my membranes quiver.

Your ever-faithful,

Space Lothario x

***

Every conversation with an exolinguist turned into a conversation about exolanguage, Mariel discovered. How could it not? It was fascinating watching Susan’s mouth move, forming the alien words.
Szuzcs. Iliam. Qupxxo.
These offerings mouthed with face twisted, brow narrowed in concentration.

“Of course, there’s no way of knowing if the aliens had a spoken language at all. They may have communicated by pheromones, or touch. Or by the release of differently textured slime. But the fact that the transmission is geometrical and mathematical shows us that they had an advanced language system that was capable of being represented in abstraction. Unless it isn’t an abstraction. Their language system may not be abstract or arbitrary whatsoever.”

Susan’s face was animated in conversation. Her eyes, slightly too far apart, were also different shades of green. Mariel found it very difficult not to stare at her. Not only was Susan quite odd looking from the neck upwards, but her conversation was exceptionally unusual. Mariel was charmed.

“What’s your best guess, Sue?”

“About the content?” Susan tilted her head and looked up in thought. “Adverts, I’d say. Probably a load of adverts. You know how we’re constantly beaming stuff up into space – telephone calls, film trailers, advertisements? This might end up being the only evidence that we ever existed, that our planet was alive and supported intelligent life. So, yeah. Adverts.”

“I thought we were beaming up Shakespeare and Bach? And pi and all that.”

“Well, mostly it’s going to be two for one on all sofas until January, and ‘every little helps’. Future alien exolinguists haven’t got a hope in hell of working us out.”

“Let me just get a pen,” Mariel said. She wanted to write some of this down. Surely there would be a way of working this theory into her book. It was just the sort of thing that media studies academics got famous for saying. She might even get onto
The Late Review.

Mariel leaned forward and touched Susan’s knee. “If you want to discuss this further, I’d love to buy you a drink.”

***

Jane focussed on not imagining what Mariel and Susan might be doing in Mariel’s office with the door closed, and instead returned to her own office in Astrophysics, with the comforting bank of computers and printouts and the gurgle of the coffee machine in the corner. She slung Mariel’s pile of borrowed journals on the end of the desk, and noted it was hiding a page of handwritten notes. The writing was neat but the content was almost indecipherable: something about the Transmission being a text without a writer or a reader. It made no sense. Jane screwed it up and chucked it into the wastepaper bin. She turned her attention back to the screen.

She had already mapped the pattern in three dimensions. That was Jodie Foster’s breakthrough in
Contact, and how stupid would she have been not to have tried it. It was the first thing people suggested. But of course it didn’t lead to a major breakthrough. It led to a simple model that Jane could build out of plastic straws from the canteen and bounce from hand to hand whilst she wondered what else might be going on.

Maybe the mistake had been to call it a Transmission in the first place. That implied that there was someone doing the transmitting – but the area of space where this message had been picked up was so distant, it was certain that the origin was extinct. The pattern was apparently deliberate, but there was no key to its meaning, so that suggested it was never meant to be received by another civilisation. There was something accidental in the quality of it – as though it should never have been picked up at all. Yet at the same time, Jane felt very warmly towards the Transmission. Its familiar bumps and waves scrolling across the computer screen were a kind of comfort. The essential pointlessness of existence was somewhat alleviated by the fact of the Transmission – the idea that something could live on beyond death, beyond extinction. That was why everyone wanted a piece of it, even if they had to buy it in the form of a Lang Lang record. The truth of it, the real meaning of the Transmission, was actually quite bleak, Jane thought. It was an untranslatable message from a long dead planet, and there was quite probably no way of ever finding out what was intended by it. Jane foresaw a long and mildly boring career ahead of her, staring at this same computer image, playing with the same model. She sighed and threw the model into the wastepaper bin, where it sank amongst the yoghurt-smeared notes and that morning’s Guardian.

Maybe she should write an email to Mariel. She could express how she felt towards her, the terrible, embarrassing longing that was causing her such distraction. No, better to write it on paper, easier to destroy paper. It wasn’t as if she was going to send it, after all. What would be the point? There was too much that separated them – background, age, culture. Mariel was Media Studies and Jane was Science. Jane was the endless void of space and time, whereas Mariel was Taylor Swift’s feminist credentials and a Twitter storm. They were barely living on the same planet at all.

Dear Mariel, in the course of our recent conversations I have had certain physical reactions to your presence which I think I should describe to you … I … there is a chemical reaction that occurs when you smile at me. I ... no. Your physical being causes a series of neurological impulses to occur in my brain. This is not very romantic. Sometimes I imagine striding over to you and just kissing you. I like your ears. And other things about you. I know there is so much that separates us and what am I doing, this is stupid—

She screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper bin, on top of Mariel’s notes and the geometrical model made of straws, which balanced on top of the screwed up newspaper cutting, and the morning’s embarrassing yoghurt, which was rapidly – very rapidly – beginning to fizz and turn into gaseous slime. It was better to give up now, Jane thought, and save herself a broken heart. This was never going to work.

***

Susan Lorimer was nervous about knocking on Professor Lovage’s door. She was fairly sure that Lovage thought of her as an opportunist of the worst kind. It would be difficult to explain exactly what value she was adding to the Transmission project, with her notions of alien language systems that Mariel Hewitt was already picking apart to turn into post-modern cultural theory. It had been tricky to get away from Mariel, and as a result she was a few minutes late for this meeting, which she was fairly sure that Professor Lovage had completely forgotten about anyway.

When she entered the office, the Professor was sitting with her head in her hands, watching the pattern on the screen in front of her. She was very beautiful. The way her long neck arched gently as she sighed was quite delightful. Susan took a deep breath and was about to speak when she noticed something glowing in the corner of the room. The metal wastepaper bin was gleaming white and as Susan watched, it glowed even brighter. The metal edges were so hot they had begun to melt, and a small fire had broken out in the heart of the bin.

“Professor Lovage!”

Jane Lovage jumped up from her seat. She glanced down, saw the wastepaper bin that looked about to set the whole lab on fire, and held a hand up to Susan. “Stay calm,” she said. “Go to the nearest fire exit, alerting others on your way. Once at the designated safe area, call 999.” She stepped across to the door, reached around Susan and grabbed a fire extinguisher.

“No, look,” said Susan. Impressed as she was with Professor Lovage’s meticulous approach to fire hazard, there was something even more impressive happening inside the wastepaper bin. She peered over, close enough to feel heat on her face, and then a strange pulling at her flesh. She felt her breath escaping her, spiralling down into the centre of the bin. The bin was throbbing with light and heat, and at its heart, a deep black void had formed, sucking the contents of the bin and Susan’s breath down into its maw. It was the blackest black Susan had ever seen, a hole through space into more space: deeper space, deeper time.

Professor Lovage roughly pushed Susan aside, and sprayed white foam over the bin for several long seconds. Somehow she had found time to put on a pair of lab goggles over her glasses.

Susan struggled to catch her breath. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

Professor Lovage shot her a quizzical look from under the thick plastic lenses. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Susan. “Perhaps…perhaps I didn’t see it either.”

Professor Lovage shook her head. “I’d appreciate it if you’d come back another time. I’d like to get on with some work, and there’ll be a lot of paperwork to complete about this small but worrying fire incident, and I’m already rather overwhelmed.” She smiled at Susan, a smile that wasn’t a smile, was more the face someone makes when she’s on the verge of tears. And Susan, sensing that she had somehow got this very wrong and missed her moment by a wide mark, tried to speak but could not speak. When Professor Lovage turned away, she whispered goodbye and made a reluctant retreat.

***

My darling Alien Jane,

Our love may be impossible but it is the only thing I am living for. I dream of you (or whatever my equivalent of dreaming is) all the time. Time itself is nothing compared to the tentacular desire I feel for you. One day we’ll meet and you’ll dry all my disgorged sebum.

Until that day, I will dream of taking you in my arms and kissing you, or whatever my equivalent of kissing is.

Eternally yours,

Space Lothario x

***

Georgina Bruce is a writer and teacher based in Edinburgh. This is the third story she has had published in
Interzone. She recently contributed the extremely well-received ‘White Rabbit’ to
Black Static, and she has a story – ‘The Art Lovers’ – forthcoming in
Crimewave 13: Bad Light. She is currently writing a novel.

SIDEWAYS

RAY CLULEY

illustrated by Richard Wagner

Captain Sam Harding was a great pilot, a patriot, and a very close friend, so when I tell you I’m glad he died, know that I don’t say it lightly. He augered in on November 4th, 1951, leaving behind a beautiful wife plus one. Sandra eventually remarried, and the child Sam never met grew up to be a good man, like his father. Tom was just a few months in Sandra’s belly the day Sam came staggering out of that wreck like some flaming scarecrow in a field of fire. Sandy named the boy Tom because of how I was always there for her but says it was something she and Sam had already discussed. I don’t know. I’m still not sure how Sam would feel about it now. When he made me promise to take care of his family if ever anything happened, I don’t think he meant for me to marry his wife and raise his kid like my own.

Sam was a great husband, by all accounts. I believe it, and as his usual drinking partner I can testify to some of that assessment. He had an appreciation for the opposite sex, sure, but he never strayed. And he could have, very easily. He was a pilot, for Christ’s sake, and I haven’t met a lady yet who doesn’t go for a man in uniform. Never failed for me. And Sam was no ordinary pilot, either. Captain Harding was a test pilot for the United States Air Force, risking his life – and ultimately giving it – for the good of his country.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t he. Well, that’s how he was. Maybe God snatched him back when he realised. Maybe Sam flew too close to Heaven and caught the big man’s attention. That’s what I used to tell Junior when he asked about his real daddy.

Better that than the truth.

***

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

“Unless you’ve seen an arrow.”

“Okay, but as far as jets go—”

“Should you even be talking about this?”

I shrugged.

“So what’s so special about it?” Sam asked, humouring me.

He and Sandy were having a barbeque. Throwing a bit of a party, really. They had the same sort of house as the rest of us, same dry yard, but for some reason theirs was usually where we ended up for barbeques. Everybody was there, the whole bunch, kids and all, adults standing around on the patchy lawn, sitting at the picnic table, milling around the kitchen, kids screaming and running and falling down and laughing. Nobody was listening to Sam and me discuss ‘military secrets’. Hell, we all worked at the same base; everybody would know eventually.

“Well I was talking to Jonesy,” I said, “and he reckons it’s more like a rocket than a plane. You know, long. Tubular. And it has four wings, like this.” I made a cross of my arms. “But set right back.
Too far back, in my opinion. Like on the end of an arrow.”

Sam leaned close and said quietly, “You know what I reckon it is?”

“What?”

“I bet… You say it looks like a rocket?”

I nodded.

“I bet, what it is…” He looked around, exaggerating caution. “It’s a rocket.”

I flapped my hands as if to brush him away and he laughed. There was no malice in it. I laughed with him.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, as if the question had just occurred to him. “Why do they call it the Arrow?”

“Because it has four wings like— Oh. Funny.”

As if in agreement, a burst of laughter erupted from where Bull was playing with the kids. He was holding one of them upside down by her ankles, shaking giggles from her as other laughing children clambered over him like a climbing frame. Kennedy was stood at the grill, apron on, beer in one hand and tongs the other. “You need a hand there?” he called to Bull. Ernst Kennedy would one day become ‘Pres’ as in president, but until then he was just Kennedy. “Nah,” was Bull’s answer, to which Kennedy replied, “I was talking to the kids.” He put down his beer and tongs and began rolling his sleeves as if to join them. “Honey, no,” Claire protested, but she was laughing. The very idea of her husband going against Bull was hilarious. Bull didn’t so much fly planes as wear them. Even Doc joined in, taking on that official voice we’ve all hated at some point – “For the sake of your health, I strongly advise against it” – and that got a laugh, too. Doc was our natural enemy, the only man on base who could stop any of us flying, but not today. Today was a good day, a happy day, and I remember it fondly as one of the last good times we were all together.

“Seriously,” Sam said, drawing himself away from the kids at play and the sight of his wife in a crowd of his friends, “I have heard something about it that sits odd with me.” I didn’t ask where he’d heard it, or why. If there really was an Arrow, it would be Sam who flew it. Anybody could have told you that.

“What? It uses rocket fuel? Because it’s a rocket?”

Sam didn’t humour me this time. He just said, “It goes sideways.”

I frowned at him but all he did was drink more beer. “Sideways?”

Sam shrugged, though I think he already knew a bit about it, even then.

“Maybe it rolls,” I said, making a twisting motion with my beer bottle. It wouldn’t be able to go sideways, but maybe it could alter its course in diagonal. Dangerous, though. Stability and control at supersonic speed were the two main concerns of most of our FTTs, each flight test technique measuring and evaluating these capabilities. Another problem at high speed was the damn thermal thicket, severe heating caused by aerodynamic friction causing all sorts of merry hell. But the Arrow wasn’t focussing on any of these things. Not as a main priority, anyway. The Arrow was something very different.

“I’ve heard it’s a spy plane,” I told him. “Hard to detect.”

Sam neither confirmed or denied the suggestion.

“You flying it?”

Sam smiled and said, “Can’t tell you.” It was the way he said yes.

“Sandra know?”

Sam looked at where she stood with the wives and girlfriends by the kitchen door. The other women were laughing but Sandy only smiled, one hand on the swell of her stomach.

“She knows.”

“She give you hell for it?”

She looked over as if sensing she was our topic of conversation instead of planes for a change. Sandy knew the job, and she knew the risks, but she liked to remind Sam from time to time that she didn’t like it. Sam raised his beer to her and she turned her smile up for him, blew him a kiss.

“Just a little bit,” Sam said as he smiled at her.

Sam flew the Arrow twice, the first time less than two weeks after that barbeque. You can believe Sandra gave him hell for it before the second time.

“I heard they brought some scientists in from New Mexico.”

Sam’s smile was suddenly gone and he said, “Not just scientists.” Before I could ask what he meant, Fliss came out of the kitchen with a huge bowl of salad and a plate full of bread rolls and announced that Jenny was here, giving us a chance to tone down the humour before she stepped out into the yard.

Unofficially, this little shindig was her farewell party. It was the last time she’d be part of one of our get-togethers. We did it all the time, us pilots and wives. We barely associated with anyone else, actually. Drinks at someone’s place, dinners, group nights out at Ratty’s. But Jenny was taking the kids ‘back home’ to live with her mother for a while and we all knew she’d never be back. Kimble had augered in last month, a miscalculation in fuel consumption leaving him deadstick and spinning before plummeting in a fall he didn’t or couldn’t try to eject from. He’d crunched about fifty yards from the runway. That one was bad. They were all bad, but that one was ugly. I remember watching the duty officer on the phone trying to explain to someone what had happened and he couldn’t do it. He just kept swallowing the words, choking on them, voice breaking with the effort to get them out. In the end I took the phone from him but I couldn’t do it either. I’d put the phone down, then took it off the hook.

“I didn’t know if she’d make it,” Sam said.

For a moment, Jennifer stood framed by the doorway, her two girls looking around from behind her legs. A picture missing its husband and daddy. Then Sam called, “Hey Jenny!” and there was a chorus of “Hi!” and “Hello!” from everybody else, jokes called at the kids, and they were all welcomed back into the crowd.

We forgot all about the Arrow.

***

We all had to sign additional confidentiality contracts after the crash, documents swearing us to secrecy above and beyond standard military practice. There was no expiration date to those agreements, no disclosure after sixty years, exemption from the freedom of information, et cetera, et cetera. But there is an expiration date to this old sack of a body I’m trapped in, and I’m pretty close to it now. I’ll go with a few regrets, like everybody else I reckon, but I don’t want to go with any secrets because they eat you up worse than this cancer I got and I’m not sure they’ll stop eating me even when I’m gone. I never used to be one for believing in anything after but I’ve seen things since then that changed my perspective. Knocked me sideways, you could say. Last thing I want is to go to wherever we go after this still being devoured by secrets. I’ve enough to worry about without adding that.

I saw the Arrow but I never flew it. Nobody flew it, as far as I’m aware, except Sam. I did get to see it up close though because I flew the modified B50 that carried it into the sky. Only for its first drop launch. The second time I saw it I stayed on the ground and shortly after that I saw it again coming in fast, dipping down and flipping and hitting sideways, rolling and breaking open into a fiery ball that opened up like a curtain to spit out the black charred pieces.

I loved the B50. She was a mighty bird. Nintey-nine feet long, one hundred and forty across the wings, decent cruise speed. Trustworthy. Reliable. Bessie, ours was called, with a long-legged redhead stretched out across her in vivid colours, head turned to smile at you as if she couldn’t care less where she was flying as long as she was flying with you. First time I saw my precious B50 with the Arrow strapped to its belly, though, was the first time I didn’t want to fly. There was something wrong about that thing. This isn’t hindsight here. I felt a genuine sense of foreboding, looking at the Arrow, like the curdling you get in the stomach when you think you hear a rattlesnake. It was longer than I’d imagined. The B50 is nearly a hundred feet long and the Arrow was nearly half that, not including the length of what Sam called ‘the lightning stick’ pointing out from the nose. The wings stuck out like the flights of an arrow or dart and they looked flimsy, like thin sheets of aluminium. Must have been about as thick as a sandwich, at most. Far too short as well, I thought. Looking at it, I couldn’t believe it even flew. It shouldn’t have.

Sam was already inside. Normally he’d have climbed into it at 7000 feet but he needed to be fixed in this time. I knocked hello on the canopy, heard him knock back. The glass was reflective. In fact, the metal of the entire thing was so highly polished it shone like a sliver mirror. I didn’t like the way it distorted our reflections either, bending our features around into strange shapes that seemed wrong not just as representations of ourselves but because the Arrow didn’t seem to reflect light right. I hated carrying it and felt the whole time like my precious Bessie was pregnant with some monstrous malignant parasite. It was a pleasure to drop the damn thing into the clouds.

“Twenty-five thousand and climbing.”

Roger that. How’s she feel up there?

“Feels fine,” I reported. “Bessie’s always a smooth fine ride.”

Roger that.

My co-pilot that trip was Kennedy. He looked at me and said, “Except she ain’t.” He had his hand over the mike, his words only for me. “She ain’t right, is she Finn?”

Finn as in Huckleberry. I’m named after
Tom Sawyer which was the only book my father ever read so of course everybody called me Huck, or Finn, or Huckleberry.

“Just a bubble in the pipes or something,” I said. “She’s fine.”

She felt heavy, though. Whatever the Arrow weighed, Bessie was flying like she felt more than every pound of it, dragging her down. Her turns were sluggish and shaky even when there wasn’t any chop.

“You okay back there Sam?”

“He can’t hear you,” Kennedy reminded me. Again.

I didn’t like that, either. I didn’t like Sam without a radio. No test pilot should be without a radio, and yet the Arrow didn’t have one. Part of the stealth thing, maybe, but I got the impression Sam didn’t think so. He said it didn’t bother him. He’d always had a great memory and I’d seen the truth of that, seen him relay every change and movement after landing a test where the radio failed. He’d be doing that again now, this time on purpose, remembering everything his control panel told him as well as when. “But I don’t think they’re so interested in all that at this stage,” he told me. “I think they just want to know if it works.” And maybe that was a good thing. Too many pilots have crunched because they were paying too much attention to the controls, diligently relaying information when they should’ve been pulling up or pulling out of whatever envelope-pushing power drive they were in. When I think of how he came in on that second landing, though, I wonder if he forgot he didn’t have one and I wonder what he would have said before the screams. I’m glad I’ll never know.

“Hey Kennedy? What do you know about this thing?”

He checked the instruments more than he needed to when he answered, his eyes everywhere but on me.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “I know that.”

I was both glad and worried that someone else felt it too.

“Nosing over at twenty-six thousand feet,” I told control.

Roger that. Twenty-six thousand.

“Let’s dump it,” I said to Kennedy. “About time Sam did some of the work around here.”

He smiled. “Amen to that.”

I could tell Kennedy was thinking the same thing I was, better him than me or there but for the grace of God go I. Not that we’d have ever been assigned the Arrow. Something else it didn’t have was the option to punch out, and there was really only one of us you could count on to never do that. I reckon about fifty percent of pilots have had to eject at some point in their career, but Sam wasn’t one of them. I’d seen him land deadstick, twice, when his fuel ran out, rather than eject. He joked it was too dangerous, that punching out was just killing yourself before the ground could do it for you, but maybe he wasn’t really joking. When you eject, you’re fired from the jet by a blast of nitroglycerine like a human bullet and a lot of men got hurt hitting the edge of the cockpit on the way out. Some even died. One guy I heard of, caught in a spin, ejected sideways and was torn apart. The air you’re fired into is like a wall at the speeds we flew. Which was why so many tried to bring the plane down no matter what problems they were having. And, of course, for many it was an issue of pride. Not me. I’ve ejected three times. First and second time bust up my knee, and the third time broke both ankles but luckily there was never any permanent mobility damage. I was hurt badly each time but I survived. Maybe I could’ve wrestled the plane down and escaped injury altogether, but maybe not. Maybe I’d have died.

For the Arrow, Sam had no choice. He was bolted in. The only parachutes the Arrow had were drogues, chutes to slow it down for landing. Not that a parachute would necessarily help you much anyway. We’d seen plenty of chutes fail to open, too, pilots – friends – hitting the ground and becoming puddles or long smears on the sand. No, when Sam landed, a ground crew had to get him out. He had the means to do it himself if he had to, but it was pretty cramped in there and not an easy thing to do, Sam said.

He managed it that second time, though. Even after all that rolling, with fire filling the tube, he managed to pop that top off and clamber out, but by then it was far too late.

***

One of the first things Sandra asked me was if there was any pain and so of course I lied. I told her Sam died on impact. That it was all very quick. I don’t know if she asked anybody else. I don’t think so. You wouldn’t, would you, once you had the answer you wanted, even if you suspected it was a lie. Especially then, I think. I told her that her husband died a hero and a patriot and she slapped me. She told me, reminded me, that he died a husband and a father, and then she beat at my chest and then she clung to me, handfuls of my uniform bunched in her fists as she sobbed. I could feel her bump between us, and I’m sure something thumped there, too. A kick or throb as Sandy cried. It broke my heart. She kept blaming the machine. A lot of wives did when it happened. It’s understandable. Speak to any surviving pilot, though, and he’ll tell you they’d have done it differently, somehow. Whatever was wrong with the damn plane, however good a friend the dead pilot might have been, the rest of us would be convinced we could have landed it safely, and in kidding ourselves we placed blame on the dead. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, but we did it so we could keep flying. But Sam was the best pilot I’d ever known, and I’d seen the Arrow, and so when Sandy cried, “It was the plane, it was the damn plane,” I was inclined to agree. None of us thought we could have handled it better. After a moment I held her, and a while after that I stroked her hair and said the things people say when it’s the tone of voice that matters more than the words. Awful things, like everything was going to be okay. You’ll be okay. They’ll look after you.

I held her like that a few times. She said seeing the uniform reminded her, so whenever I visited after work she had to go through it all again. I stopped visiting after that but one day she phoned and told me to wear my civvies. She reminded me of my promise to Sam, my obligation to her and their unborn child, and though she had her girlfriends she worried that her grief was beginning to bore them, or wear them down, remind them that their own husbands faced the same risk every day. Back then, in the 50s, test pilots died with alarming frequency. Jets were new, experimental, and fighter pilots were keen to test themselves as well as the planes. Some reports put the deaths at one each week across the country and I can easily believe that. We knew it, and we faced it, even enjoyed it most of the time like it was an enemy to be beaten. Flying at those speeds, being in control of that kind of thrust, you felt the power of the machine all the way through you and you were free, so long as you could control it. Nothing held you down, nothing held you back, when you were up there, and as well as free you felt kind of…separate. From everything. Special, I suppose. The world was below you and you just…were. You existed, and you pushed that existence to its limits.

The money was good, too. $5000 a year, in those days? I know it motivated Sam. He wanted his kid to go to the best college they could afford. It was never just about the money though, not even for Sam, and however attractive it seemed financially, it was always hard on the families. I didn’t have one myself, but I saw it. Saw it all the time. Deborah Pattern, she had a full nervous breakdown after Tailor crunched. Inflight explosion, no chance of survival. When Kimble ploughed a new ditch into the airfield, Jennifer took the kids back home. Same with Lenny, Hamilton, Lee, all of them friends. All of them leaving wives behind, leaving children. I used to say this was why I stayed single. Then, all of a sudden it seemed, though really it had been a long time coming, I had a ready-made family of my own to worry about.

I can’t tell you the first time I kissed Sandra, but I remember it was as she broke away from one of those comforting embraces and I know she kissed me back at first. After that, I went back to not visiting for a while until she asked. I don’t think she ever really loved me, not in the way a woman should love her husband, and certainly not the way she loved Sam, but we made it work for a while. I do think she saw me as a good man. Someone who would take care of her. And she knew how much I loved her, knows how much I love her still, which is an awful lot even if she can’t give it back the same way. But sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t the only one who saw our relationship as a way of staying close to Sam. It was a complicated and sometimes painful marriage but I took care of her and Tom as best I could.

I tell this to Sam sometimes but I don’t know if he hears me.

***

I couldn’t fly the B50 the second time Sam went up. I was still drunk from the night before and I made sure Hobday knew it so he wouldn’t let me fly when usually I’d have just flushed my system with an oxygen mask. He gave me an earful but nothing I wasn’t expecting and it was a far better option than carrying my friend into a dark he dreaded but wouldn’t resist. By then Sam had told me all about the first flight. He shouldn’t have, but we’d been drinking then as well. Seems the Arrow brings that out in people. The night before that second flight I’d gone round to talk to him but he and Sandy were having a bad one. He phoned later but only said a few words. He was drunk, and by then I’d emptied most of a good bottle I had at home as well. Neither of us made much sense.

So, Pres and Cramshaw took Bessie up and I was ordered to drink coffee because they’d use me on the ground instead.

Last I saw of Sam, the Sam I knew and hoped to see again, he was pulling on the strange flight suit he had to wear. He was doing it in the coffee room.

“Tom—” he said.

“Don’t.”

“I have to.”

“You don’t.”

“Not for them. For me. I have to see. I need to know if any of what I saw up there was real. You understand that?”

I held a cup to him, offering coffee, but he shook his head and pointed to the crotch of his suit. “You see a bag to piss in?”

It was the standard suit in much of its design, but it crinkled and shone like silver paper and there was piping coiled up and down his limbs. Narrow tributary wires sprouted from this to wrap his arms and legs. It was like his veins were visible on the outside. Over his chest he wore a mesh of golden filaments.

“Hurts my eyes to look at you,” I said, shielding my face in an awkward salute against each flash and dazzle of his suit as he moved. I’d meant it as a joke because of how shiny he was, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realised it was the same as something he’d said the week before. He realised it, too.

“You get a good breakfast in you?” I asked him, just to change the subject.

Sam smiled and nodded.

“Because you need to keep those blood sugars up.”

“Yes, mom.”

I tried to smile back at him but I couldn’t do it. “Don’t,” I said again.

He kind of growled at that and left me holding coffee while he went to do a man’s duty for his country.

He’d left the helmet on the counter. We didn’t fly with helmets back then, not crash helmets anyway. Just the leather ones like those used in the war. Not that this looked much like what you’d call a crash helmet either. In fact, it looked dangerously fragile. It was a sphere but flat on one end, like an upside down fishbowl if you could make such a thing out of mirrors. I’d seen it before but Sam had been wearing it then. This time I could touch it. I picked it up and peered through it without putting it on but saw only the kitchen. Outside, through the window, I saw the rest of the base and some of the runway. Everything looked normal. Of course it did, what did I expect? I set the helmet back down, carefully, when I should have smashed it to pieces.

I could’ve waited for Sam to come back for it but there was no need to speak to him again. I had nothing to say he hadn’t heard or would listen to. I stirred milk and sugar into my coffee and left.

I had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling, and I should have tried harder. I should have said something better than don’t. Something like goodbye. Who knows, maybe that would have done it. I did wave, but by then he was underneath a canopy I couldn’t see through, the men around it twisting bolts tight and slapping the fuselage for luck when they were done. I raised my hand without knowing if he saw me, and then the Arrow was getting towed to where Bessie waited for her unwanted passenger.

Cramshaw was leaning against the landing gear. He looked around him, didn’t see Hobday, and said, “Hey Berry, you wanna take her up?” Cramshaw was a good kid. Youngest we had, with a mop of red hair and freckles that made him look more like a farm boy than a pilot. Standing next to Bessie he looked like her kid brother. He died in ’53 testing the X-2 but right then, standing in the sun beside the B50 and the Arrow, he probably thought he was going to fly forever. “I know you two go way back,” he said. He meant the B50 but I thought of Sam.

“No, that’s all right. I don’t much want to fly today.”

He gave a broad smile as if I’d made a joke, shrugged, and asked if I’d be going to Ratty’s later. It was a pointless question, we always went to Ratty’s later, especially after a test, but I answered yes anyway and tried to massage the hangover from my head. Tried not to think of my last conversation with Sam.

***

Ratty’s was the best beer joint off base. It’s gone now, sort of, turned into a restaurant called The Grill, but back then it was just a bar with good music and plenty of girls to look at. Sam used to tell me to find one worth sticking with and whenever I saw him and Sandra together I thought he had a good point, but in the meantime… Well, Maisie and her friends were in, distracting everyone with the way their skirts moved around their legs as they danced. Sam didn’t even glance at them. He had other things on his mind.

“It was dark,” he said. “I mean, pitch. And that messes with your mind, let me tell you, soaring through blue sky one minute and the next minute black. And not like night time, either. Black like your eyes are closed. No stars. Nothing.”

That was what Sam told me about going sideways. I wish he’d left it at that. He’d talked about the Arrow once already – the speed, the way it handled, all of that – but now the boys were embarrassing themselves over by the jukebox and the empty glasses had mounted up so Sam started talking about it all over again, only differently.

“You remember I said it went sideways? At the barbeque?”

Kennedy seemed to be having some luck with a pretty brunette. Meanwhile, her pretty friends were listening to everything Bull had to say. One of them touched his arm a lot. There was a pretty blonde who kept glancing over at me and Sam. They were all so pretty.

“Tom?”

“Yeah, I remember.” I let the girl go. “Was I right? Does it roll?”

“It spins, but it never changes direction while it’s doing that. In fact, it’s slow making any kind of turn. But that’s not what it means, the sideways stuff.”

“Well, what does it mean then?”

He leant in close. “It’s got this fixture on its nose, right? Remember that? The metal rod?”

“I remember.”

“It makes lightning.”

I smiled, brought my glass up only to see it was empty, and set it down again. “Lightning.”

“Yeah. It fires these pulses of light—” he opened and closed a fist at me “—kind of like a flashlight only a hundred times more powerful. Perfectly straight bursts of light.” He performed a fast sequence of those hand-flashes and then sort of danced his fingers back at himself. “And then the Arrow is washed with lightning. Bright white lines crackling all over, and then they shoot forward from the nose, from the…the lightning stick, let’s call it that, because the other name won’t make any sense—”

“Because so far all of this is just—”

“—and this electrical discharge, it creates a tunnel of low-density air for the Arrow to fly through. To reduce drag. It tears the electrons out of the air molecules to make an ionised channel for the Arrow.”

I didn’t know if it was the beer, but this bit was beginning to make a sort of sense to me.

“Mach three, Finn.
Three”

I stared at him a moment, then repeated, “Three.”

“Yeah.”

You have to remember, this was 1951. The Bell X-2 wouldn’t break Mach 3 for another five years. It wasn’t so long ago people thought the sound barrier was exactly that, a barrier, and that even Mach 1 couldn’t be done.

“But you told the boys—”

“Three, Finn.
At least.”

“At least?”

“Hard to tell for sure because after that the readings went a bit…strange.”

“Well that’s it, then. Dodgy data.”

He batted that away with his hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway because after that it went sideways and speed wasn’t important anymore.”

Saying speed wasn’t important, a test pilot saying speed wasn’t important, was like the navy saying they didn’t care if their ships floated or not.

“Mach three, and then those bursts of light became one long beam of it and then…”

“And then?”

He was quiet for a moment. Bar noise filled the gap; music, conversation, laughter. I wondered if this was all building up to some sort of joke but Sam wasn’t the joking kind. So I waited until he finally spoke.

“And then sideways,” he said.

I don’t think he meant it to be dramatic. ‘Sideways’ didn’t follow some metaphorical drum roll, we’d been talking about it the whole time. It’s just that he had been remembering, gone from Ratty’s to sit in the Arrow once more, and then part of him remembered he was meant to be talking so he said, ‘and then sideways’, before returning to his moments in the dark. I waited for him to come back again until somewhere a glass smashed and a woman shrieked and that noise, or its combination, brought Sam back with a shudder.

“Except it’s not really sideways,” he said. “It’s still forwards. Sideways was just how they explained it to me, like overtaking when the traffic ahead is slow.”

“You changed lanes.”

“I don’t know that I did anything,” he said. “And I don’t know where I went.”

He had vanished from radar for a while – the big boys were very happy with their new toy – but he returned when he was near the base, bringing the Arrow down without incident.

“The way they explained it, the simple way, they took two pieces of paper and put one across the other like an x. On the bottom piece, at one end, they wrote ‘base’ and at the other end, on the same piece, ‘base’ and then they drew a line connecting them. My route, right? The line went right across the top piece of paper, which they took away to show me that a long line had become two short ones with a big gap in the middle. A start and an end, with nothing in between. That piece of paper, the removed piece, that was the sideways. It was like I ducked out of the sky for a while, then came back.”

“Okay, where did you go? You stray off course?”

“I don’t know where, I told you. But it was dark. Instantly dark.”

“Have you told them this? You passed out, buddy. Hypoxia. Pulling more gees than—”

“I didn’t pass out, Tom. There was light, and then lightning, and then I was somewhere else. It was so still. She moved so easy. Not that I moved much – couldn’t deviate from the flight path – but I tried it some and there was no struggle. I had full control. No thermal barrier to worry about, no aerodynamic friction, best I could tell. No pitching, no buffeting. She was gliding.”

At high speed the centre of pressure shifts, you’ve got aeroelasticity factors with the fins, you’re not stable, and you struggle with control. Sam was telling me something that shouldn’t be true, not at Mach 3. If that’s what it was.

He looked at me and I swear his eyes had that wet look of tears in them.

“What is it?”

He held my hand. It felt strange, that kind of contact, but there was no getting away from it, especially when he put his other hand on top of both of ours. He kept his eyes on me. I’d never noticed until then how blue those eyes could be. Sandra must have loved them. I’d seen intensity in them before, but not like this. Not shining. “You have to take care of them for me if anything ever—”

Here I pulled my hand away. Snatched it back, in fact.

“No,” I said. “I’m not saying it.”

“Finn—”

“Don’t you say it, neither. You’re just drunk.”

“Tom—”

“Of course I will, okay, you don’t even need to ask so don’t, and you don’t need to ask because it’ll never happen that way anyway. You’re the luckiest son of a bitch I know.”

He nodded. Just once, quick, accepting what I said. My agreement, I think. Probably not the lucky SOB bit, considering what came next.

“I have to tell you more.”

I rubbed my face as if I could wipe away the cloud of alcohol I was stuck in. “All right.”

“It was dark,” he said. “I mean pitch. And that messes with your mind…”

Shortly after that, he messed with mine by telling me what he saw there.

***

Sandy used to have terrible anxiety dreams. Nightmares. Long before anything ever happened to Sam she’d dream of looking out the window to see one of us, usually me, in full dress uniform coming up the path to deliver bad news, only in the dream they, me, whoever it was, never made it to the end of the path. They just seemed to keep walking and never reaching her, so she never knew what had happened, only that something had. First she felt fear and then frustration, all tinged with a sadness so deep she seemed to fill up with it, ready to burst, “Like I’m waiting to become that expression, ‘burst into tears’,” she explained to me once. “I’m entirely water waiting to be released, and as the dream goes on the pressure builds and I never know what’s happened to him, what’s happened to my Sam.”

In another dream she’s hanging the washing out and hears a thunderclap, “Like the zoom and boom, only I feel it under my feet.” When she looks up in this dream she sees a plume of black smoke rising from the horizon, angled with the wind. In the dream she always thinks
Sam’s back, and then gathers in his washing again, leaving the rest on the line. She’s always so calm. She says that one scares her the most.

She still has them occasionally, these dreams. Still tells me about them from time to time. If it’s a really bad one, she’ll call me in the middle of the night. Sometimes it’s not Sam in the dream but me. Sometimes it’s both of us, or we blur together so that sometimes we’re one and sometimes the other yet somehow both at the same time. She told me once, during one of these phone calls, about how Sam looked at her differently after the first time he flew the Arrow. How he used to look at her, and her pregnant belly, and seem suddenly frightened. He never talked about it, not to her, but she knew there’d been something wrong with that flight. Something that scared him.

I used to have a few bad dreams when I still flew. Mostly they were about being in a cockpit I couldn’t eject from and the plane would spin and spin and all the time fall towards the ground and I’d wake just as I crunched. Since giving up my wings, I’ve had worse. Sometimes Sam’s in them. Sometimes, those things he told me about are with him. Or on him. Part of him. I don’t tell Sandy about those ones.

Just lately I’ve been having the cockpit dream again. It’s not about flying anymore, though. It’s about this cancer. Not that it was ever about flying anyway, I suppose. Occasionally Sam will be a co-pilot, even when there’s no room for one. Dreams are like that, aren’t they. He’ll be there, by my side, telling me what to do, only I can’t hear him. There’s no voice. His mouth just opens and closes, blinking at me.

***

“He’s still coming in too fast.”

Hobday looked at me as if I could do something about it. “Sir,” I said.

A line of us watched, me the only one using binoculars, waiting for one of the drogues to deploy, but it never happened. And then the angle changed. There was a sudden and severe drop as the Arrow nosed over.

“He’s coming in too steep.”

I was reminded of last year, Hendry passing out at high altitude. A connection problem with a hose in his oxygen system and hypoxia took care of the rest: Hendry crunched nose-first and left only pieces to bury.

Hobday turned to issue orders but the fire truck was already starting up. He yelled anyway to hurry them along. Medics followed, speeding down the runway behind it, but if Sam continued on the trajectory he was on he was going to hit the runway early and wrong and so fast he’d only need the fire truck.

“Pull up, Sam,” I said. “Come on. Get it back.”

Had there been radio contact, this would have been where Sam declared emergency. No pilot liked to do it, and some would rather crash – some did
– but with Sam it would have been different. If he couldn’t handle it then it couldn’t be handled. A lot of pilots thought that way, but with Sam it was true and he knew it in a modest way we all admired. But there was no radio contact, and a cynical part of me now wonders if they anticipated problems they’d rather not hear about, whereas any problem reported after the plane had come down wasn’t really a serious problem at all.

This was. Anybody could see that. And with the binoculars, I knew it better than anyone. It made me glad Sam didn’t have a radio.

“Oh no. Oh Christ, no.”

“Captain,” Hobday warned.

I brought the binoculars down. I didn’t want to see. I even started to back away from the crowd gathered around the welcome wagons, as if I might turn and flee into the desert. Everybody was looking up but they did it with the naked eye. I wanted to tell them what I could see but although my mouth was open I couldn’t get it to do anything else.

“Come on,” said Hobday. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me towards his jeep. Shoved me at the passenger side. I managed, “No,” but by then I was already sitting down and buckling in, a couple of the others jumping in behind me. “No,” I said again anyway, watching as the Arrow came in at the ground. Then it lifted, more suddenly than I’d have thought possible. An overcompensation that set it spinning, a tossed silver stick flashing sunlight back at us in a Morse code of distress anyone could read. Inertia coupling, I thought – the X-3 Stilleto had shown us how bad that could be, and later it would nearly kill Yeager – but really, I knew different. It seemed to disappear and reappear, showing us long side then rear, so narrow it was barely there except for the cross of its four wings. The kind of tumble that only got worse as you tried to correct it, all aerodynamics gone. When it struck the ground it did it sideways. The flimsy wings broke away as it rolled but first they steered the Arrow like it was a rolled skittle pin, digging chunks out of the runway before it was thrown back up into the air, cartwheeling across the ground in clouds of dirt and dust before finally breaking apart into fiery pieces that screamed flames.

We sped towards a blazing ruin, feeling its heat in the air that washed over us and smelling the smoke that rose like a blooming dark flower before the wind took it away.

***

‘Burnt beyond recognition’ was the euphemism we used. He looked like meat forgotten on a barbeque, blackened and blistered and parts of him greasy. Smelled like it, too, beneath the putrid chemical stench of fuel and plastic and cloth and metal. Everything burns in a jet fuel fire. Everything. He was only a small lump with smaller lumps protruding, legs stiff and feetless, arms angled out like wings of his own but not much left below the elbows. His head was half its usual size, a shrunken seed, shrivelled and crisp and without any facial features. He was checked carefully, not by Doc but by some guy they brought in specially who prodded and cut and finally burnt Sam all over again. Cremated him, whatever his wishes might have been. Nobody ever told Sandy why. We scattered him on the airfield. Sandy said he would have wanted that, though it was clear she felt some final resentment, like she was being put second one final time.

Sam dying put my life on a different course. Or Sandra did, but Sam had to die for that to happen. With Sandy I became a different man, a better man. For a while, anyway, and a long while at that. Had Sam’s shoes to fill, didn’t I. His memory to live up to. I never managed it, of course, though Sandra helped me cut down on the drinking when other women had failed and I stopped chasing other girls, now that I understood why Sam barely even noticed them. There’d only ever been one for me, and I think she knew it long before Sam was gone. I took a sidestep at work, still flying but only the transports and after a while not even those. I suffered conversion symptoms more and more frequently and even knowing that’s what it was didn’t help. Blurred vision. Tremors. All in my mind, but real as well.

The sidestep at work was a sidestep out of the fraternity as well. I still flew, but I wasn’t one of the jocks anymore, and though we remained friends there was always something missing. Maybe it was Sam. I was safer, though, which was what Sandy wanted. She managed to stay in the loop because she was still one of the wives, though she was always ‘Sam’s wife’ first and it got so that I began to feel it. I became a father to Tom Junior and though I never had any of my own I don’t regret that often. Tom was enough. He asked about his real dad a lot as a child, but as he grew older he asked less and less. He could have resented me, I suppose, as the new man stepping in to take his father’s place, but he never did, even as a teenager. Maybe he would have, if he’d had the chance to love and admire Sam as we did.

He visits me occasionally, even now. I think he’s sorry for how things turned out. I think we both are. Of course, neither of us has ever actually said it, just as we never talk about Sam anymore. There are things men say, and things they don’t, and sometimes we get it wrong.

***

“If I don’t fly it again, someone else will,” Sam had said. “You want to?”

It was a pretty mean way to make his point, especially for Sam, and I sensed in his question a judgement of my courage. Like finally he was admitting what he felt of me as a pilot. That I would never quite have the right stuff, or at least not as much of it as he did. But he was drunk. I was drunk.

He’d told me, again, about the lightning. He’d told me, again, about the sudden dark and how it felt like it wasn’t quite sky but a tunnel through it. Or a tunnel of it, like the sky was bent around him, a tube to pass through where no stars shone. And yet…

“I could see things. Out on the wings. On the nose. The canopy.”

“Things?”

He was seeing them again now, I thought. We were in Ratty’s of course, and his eyes were on the table in front of him but he was looking out of the Arrow. The jukebox was playing, people were yelling and laughing and dancing, but he was probably only hearing jet thrust and maybe the bubbling of fuel. Later he’d tell me he heard none of that, that the whole time in the dark was silent, like he wasn’t moving at all. Trapped in a long blink, he said, just himself and the Arrow. And yet, in that dark blink, there were things he could see. I don’t know what he put in his report. Part of me suspects he told them everything and they let him fly anyway.

“They were all over me. At first I thought the plane was falling apart, that I was seeing pieces of the Arrow lift up to tear free. But they were only flat at first. As they peeled from wherever they were on the fuselage they took on other shapes. Filled out. And it didn’t seem to matter none how fast we were going, they held right on and made shapes of themselves that shouldn’t have stayed at that speed. Fleshy clumps that spread whenever the lightning flashed, in sudden bursts just like the lightning that zigzagged over me. You seen creeper vines, Huckleberry? They were like that, like the fastest growing creeper vines you ever saw, only with these…these…masses, like…you know when you’ve got a bad cold, and you blow your nose or hawk something up and the stuff, it’s really thick? Like that. But they had other shapes, too. In the lightning. In the dark. They had arms and legs, I’m sure, and maybe even wings too, and they had too many of everything, and they could bend them into…into these angles like nothing I ever saw. Stuck all over the Arrow, like those things on a ship. Like limpets or barnacles. Only without the shells.”

“Sam—”

“And they were filled with holes.”

He took a drink then, but I’m not sure he knew he was doing it because he kept the glass tipped and still worked his mouth even when there was no more beer coming. Finally he put it down again and said, “I don’t know if they were holes. They might have been mouths. They might have been eyes.”

“Sam?”

“They might have been both. I think maybe they were both.”

I could only look at Sam as he stared at the table top. “Holes in holes in holes,” he said. “Holes filled with mouths. Filled with eyes. Eyes with holes in them.”

He glanced up then, pulled back into Ratty’s through what looked like his own force of will, and he said to me, “It hurt to look at them, Tom.” He massaged his head, fingers at his temples.

I took him home. It wasn’t far to drive but I took it slow, partly because I’d been drinking (though not much, not once Sam had started talking) and partly because Sam might have had more left to say. I thought it better he said it to me than to Sandy. She’d already called me once to talk about the things Sam said. In his sleep, mostly, but sometimes at odd moments. “He’s not here, Tom,” she said, “not all the time. He is, but he’s somewhere else, too, and when he’s there it’s not me he’s talking to. And what he says scares me.”

He didn’t say much on the drive home. He mostly sat swaying beside me, happy to be a passenger for a change, leaning forward in his seat with his arms on his thighs like he was back in the Arrow, nodding a little forwards, lurching back to overcompensate, and keeping his eyes on the dark road ahead of us.

“Hey, you remember the truck?”

I smiled and said, “I remember,” knowing he’d bring it up. He always did on this stretch of road. All pilots think they’re great drivers and we used to race each other out here. Sam won, more often than not, and when he didn’t I strongly suspect it was his choice not to. But one time we were so busy looking at each other, parallel, that we didn’t see the military truck coming right at us, bedded down with parts. Death, heading right our way. I saw it first and dropped back so Sam could nip in front. He almost nudged me, and the truck nearly crunched us both, but we survived, suffering only a scare neither of us admitted to, only laughed about.

Sam was looking sideways out of the window and I thought he was remembering. Which he was, only not what I thought.

“I think there were more of them I couldn’t see,” he said. “In the black. I think there was something bigger and I think the black might have been it, too big or too close or just everywhere all at once.”

“You’re kind of all over the place yourself,” I said.

It made him suddenly rigid, suddenly straight. Sitting to attention. “I’m a damn good pilot,” he said. A statement of fact that was as close as he came to bragging, and only when he’d been drinking.

“You are.”

“Straight as an arrow,” he said. He made a zooming motion with one hand, a thrust forward like a jab to an unseen opponent, and laughed. The spluttering laugh of a drunk being childish. “Arrow,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re straight as they come.”

But soon he was rocking again with however the car moved, back and forth and side to side. He’d made a pillow of his jacket and kept trying to rest his head against the window.

“I think they were just babies,” he said.

“Right.”

“Or pieces of something bigger. Full of holes.”

“Full of holes, Sam. Okay.”

“They could see everything, Huckleberry. I think those eyes… I think…”

As he fell asleep or passed out he said, “I think they wanted to eat me.”

***

When they told me I had liver cancer the first thing I thought of was what Sam said back then. It wants to eat me, I thought. Hepatocellular carcinoma. At first I thought it was just stomach ache, but eventually I listened to Sandy who told me to get it checked out. We’d been separated a while by that point, but we were still friends. Well, we were friendly. Phone calls, Christmas cards. Anyway, I went through the surgery and treatment but it had spread to my gastrointestinal tract, or had originated there and spread to my liver. It doesn’t really matter which way around. I’m okay with it now because it feels like I’ve lived too much of my life from the outside. I remember the early days pretty well, and I can see the end coming, but everything in between is on a separate piece of paper somebody took away. There’s a big gap where I lived for a while, where my life went sideways. We always think there’s something else going on around us we’re not quite part of, friends having babies, friends dying, and before you know it your own beginning has an end and that’s it, it all happened when you weren’t paying attention. Twice now I’ve been told I have six months left, and there was a kind of relief the first time, seeing the truck coming at you instead of being surprised by it, and I lived those months well, fully aware for what felt like the first time. But it’s like my body doesn’t know when to quit. Maybe I’ve bailed out on too many things already and this time I’m not allowed. The crunch is coming, though.

Until then I’ve got plenty to think about.

When they rolled out the X-15 in ’58 I thought of the Arrow and its lightning stick and its sideways roll into black. The X-15 looked nothing like the Arrow but it could reach 280,000 feet, taking a pilot out of the atmosphere right to the edge of space. Not sideways, but up. Still, I wondered what they might see there. And for every ‘Spam in a can’ rocket project after that, Sputnik, the Apollo missions, I thought of those holes in the dark Sam said he saw looking at him. I remember speeding towards that fiery ruin of his crash and feeling its heat wash over us, smelling the smoke. A thick black plume of it leaned in the angle of his descent, a trail of fumes like a dark tunnel from the sky. And maybe that’s what it was because those things, the ones Sam talked about? They flew in it. They followed its path up and away and fell, spiralling down to earth as if struck. Some were spread across every available surface of the Arrow, coils of flesh wrapped around it, bodies flattened into thick fluids that held them in place, clutching underneath the fuselage at whatever they could find of the landing gear until it flipped, rolled, exploded and they were cast aside with the fiery wreckage. Limp rags of meat, hanging limbs, wings torn or flapping in flames.

This was what we sped towards in the jeep. There was a heavy thump, the smash of a headlamp, then something folded up onto the hood and rolled at the windshield. A loud crack from that and whatever had hit us was finally tossed away. Not before we’d seen the things that dangled from its segmented body, though. The loose sheets of skin. The ropey lengths of flesh.

Sam was right, there was something about what you saw that made your mind hurt, like you were looking at pain that could travel through your eyes to your brain. Looking at them, you felt yourself…going. I don’t know where. There was less of you, somehow. I saw them first when the Arrow began its spin, long angled limbs like fleshy lightning running across the aircraft seeking grip or suction. I had the binoculars, remember. But close up they were even worse.

Hobday brought the jeep around in a sudden squealing stop but none of us got out. Even when we saw Sam, a staggering man of fire, miraculously emerge from the smoke, we remained seated. We could only stare. Sam slapped at his body, but not at the flames, twisting and turning. Part of his helmet was gone, the front smashed away, and he was screaming and yelling in pain and panic. A lot of his words were lost to the chaos around him but I pieced a few together, then and later, often in dreams and drunken half-dozes where I remember better. “They’re coming after me!” is what I thought he screamed, but I don’t think so now.

When Sam came out, they were attached to him as they had been the jet. I’ve come to believe they were the reason he survived as long as he did. That they shielded him from the impact and the flames somehow. He slapped and pulled to get them off, and one of them, the one settled over his face, spread a single membrane wing. A raised flag that Sam tore away before falling to his knees. One of the medics got close to him but came to such an abrupt stop when he saw the things on Sam that he fell on his ass, kicking his feet to scramble backwards from where Sam struggled with something at his head. I like to think it was what remained of the helmet, I try to think that, but I don’t suppose that’s really how it was. Then he collapsed forwards, arms and legs spread. A fallen star.

For long moments he still moved – parts of him writhed and fluttered, pulled and stretched – and then blasts of foam obscured everything as the fire crew tackled the blaze, washing away what they could from where Sam lay. He was already dead by then. I could tell. Not because of the limp way his body moved beneath their hoses, or because the things leeched onto him began to withdraw, but because I felt it. Like a change in pressure. And I was glad. Seeing him ricochet on his feet, pulling at his body, hearing him scream, hearing what he said… I’m glad he died.

The things that spread away from him began to pop and pool. Some of them seemed to inflate, bubbling with air like isolated lung-sacs. Others spewed these long ropes that lay like the wet lengths of a mop head. A few of them burst. I saw one of the medics stamping on them, jumping on the bodies, crazy-dancing on the things, twisting, grinding the empty skins into the ground. He slipped at one point, landing hard, but he got right back up again to mash what was left under his boots.

I’ve wondered many times since that day if Sam didn’t put the Arrow in a spin himself. That he nosed down deliberately to kill the things coming out from the black space with him. If so, it worked.

Sam? It worked.

None of us there that day ever spoke about what we saw, and it wasn’t because of anything we signed. A bad psych evaluation got you kicked off the programme quicker than failing eyesight, but it wasn’t that either. In time, I think a lot of the others came to doubt what they’d seen anyway, and you can’t blame them for that. The brain has a wonderful coping mechanism like that. A sort of mental ejector seat. But me, I think of Sam’s last days all the time now that I’m living mine.

Sam tells me the dark is coming, and every day it seems I see some truth of it. I see him, too, sometimes. In my peripheral vision. He’ll be right there beside me until I turn to look, a fluke moment that lets me see him out of the corner of my eye, and then he’s just the smell of chemicals and cooked meat.

Corner of my eye. I’d never thought how odd that was until just now. An eye with angles to look from.

Anyway, sometimes Sam’s here for me to see, and it hurts to look at him. His face is full of holes, all of them watching. Porous judgement waiting to be filled with what’s left of me. Sometimes he’s wearing the helmet but that’s no better. It reflects my face back, distorted, and I hear what he said that day in the fire. Not “They’re coming after me,” I don’t think he said that anymore. “They’re coming out of me.” That’s what I think he said.

They’re coming out of me.

What if looking at them put them inside? I don’t want to go like that.

When Tommy Junior used to ask about his daddy, I told him he flew too close to heaven and God saw him. Maybe it was something like that, only I don’t think it was God who saw. I think it was something else. Something made of holes.

So now I’ll go back. I’ll return to base. Somewhere in the desert, anyway. Some wide open place where there can be nothing either side of me. Where I can take care of things under a vast blue sky which I’ll make black, but only briefly. A plume of smoke headstone for the wind to take as I burn the holes that might be mouths, might be eyes. Holes within holes.

Eating me up, and seeing me from the inside.

***

This is Ray’s fourth appearance in
Interzone
(his usual haunt is our sister magazine
Black Static) and he has another story due soon in
Crimewave 13: Bad Light. His work has been published in various other magazines and anthologies, and most recently republished in Ellen Datlow’s
Best Horror of the Year Volume 8 and
Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror. His collection –
Probably Monsters
– is available now from ChiZine Publications, and by the time you read this, a novella – ‘Within the Wind, Beneath the Snow’ – will be available from Snowbooks. Ray lives in Wales with his partner Jess.

THREE LOVE LETTERS FROM AN UNREPEATABLE GARDEN

ALIYA WHITELEY

You asked me in your last letter, my darling, to name my favourite bloom in the Garden. I think perhaps it is the only flower that produces a scent I am not permitted to smell.

It is kept in a glass house, specially built for the purpose, you see. Those lucky few of us who tend it daily must wear masks. There is a very good reason for this precaution, but it does mean that we all imagine the wondrous and famous perfume it exudes. And we take turns, late at night in the communal sitting room for the gardeners employed here, offering opinions as to whether it would be more like a rose or a lily, or perhaps unlike any flower yet created.

Sometimes the urge to assuage my curiosity on this matter is strong. Even to think of the flower, growing alone in that arched construction of glass, brings on my desire. But never fear, darling; my mind is stronger than my heart in this respect. No, not my heart – the demands of my body. It is akin to the need to taste strawberries simply because I am near them. These animalistic impulses of self-gratification must be mastered. We are not creatures of the garden, but its guardians. We must stand above it, and for it, at all times.

Imagine if the hordes descended. If the fence was battered down by the sheer weight of numbers, and they screamed and stamped across the perfect lawns, churning them to mud, and picked clean the fruit trees in the orchard, and ripped up the roses, all in the name of their own pleasure. They would pluck the flowers to make posies in the name of something good.
For love, they might claim. For higher emotions.

Except there are so many of them, of us all, and there is only one Garden. Humanity is worth less than it. Every emotion we feel has been replicated so many times in so many ways, that they have become meaningless.

But fear not. The fence holds them at bay, and we maintain the fences, and the flowers within, and it is good.

My darling, I read back what I have written and must stress that I do not think our love (yours and mine) is cheap, or less than unique; I can imagine your face reading my foolish lines, your trusting little face falling as you think I do not care. Let me explain. I am the mind and the man; I am both, but that does not mean the two get along together. I can despise love as the swamp of sensation it has become, en masse, and the way many claim to be mired within it.
For love: it means, because I am unable to rise above its sticky, fetid depths.
Or do not wish to, more like.

But our love is not sticky, and it does not drag me down, it elevates me. It gives me wings to rise above the slime. How can this be? I do not know. I only know that just as there are many kinds of flowers in this garden so there are many kinds of love. And our love resembles that wondrous flower under glass. I will forever keep it safe. I protect it, because some things are beyond precious. I cannot explain further, and do not think I have to. I have your understanding about my complexities, just as you have my devotion.

***

My darling,

In your reply you asked me to elucidate further on the flower kept in the glass house, and so I will tell you the story of how it came to be, because although I am weary I cannot sleep, and the night is long and dark with only the snores of the other gardeners in the dormitory for company. But writing to you by soft candlelight makes me feel that you are close, and listening, and so I might do such a story justice with the time and care I lavish upon it as I imagine your enjoyment of the result.

This is only a story, of course. A story of origins, which are always filled with lies. But I like to think all stories either spring from truth or lead us to truth at their end. I leave you to decide which is the case with this particular tale, and after I have written it down I will tell you the very sad news that is keeping me from sleep tonight.

Here is the story:

There was a great sportsman. He was a boxer, and he had won many belts, knocking each opponent down. He was fast on his feet and with his tongue, and he would taunt those he fought, for he said battles were won with words long before fighting began. He knew this because he had survived a long and vicious war of words with the one person who should have said only kindnesses – his mother. She had repeatedly played the trick, throughout his childhood, of making herself bigger by reminding him of how small he was, and how she could make him even smaller.

But he had overcome her words to grow large, and strong. He was a warrior, and a survivor – rich and whole and beloved around the world. But after each victorious fight he felt a wave of shame for the things he had said and the blows he had landed, and he sent every defeated opponent generous gifts and heartfelt apologies to try to salve his smarting conscience.

A conscience is no easy thing to placate. It would not be quiet. Eventually the thought came to the boxer that he must be enjoying the act of destruction in some way, and that he was turning into his mother. He caught glimpses of her small hands when he examined his own meaty paws as he forced them into his thick padded gloves. It seemed to him that when he struck out at his opponents it was her hands that connected with their flesh. The fear began to grow in him that he would, one day, wake as his mother, shrivelled in hate, and all the experts in the world could not persuade him otherwise.

He stopped fighting. He sat in the grand mansion he had paid for with his winnings, and he walked through his vast garden. People came to his gate, hoping to see him, to cheer him, because he was much loved by the public. But nobody entered apart from the staff who were loyal to him, and who refused to speak to anyone about his sadness for they loved him too.

In fact, their loyalty was such that they had a meeting, in which many ideas were mooted in their goal to make the boxer happy again. The gardening staff persuaded the others that their best hope lay in the mysterious and vaunted Mrs Tea, and so they all agreed to pool their generous wages in order to employ her, and bring her to the garden.

Mrs Tea was talked about reverently by gardeners for her gifts with flora. She could breed such beautiful flowers, strange wonders, that could lighten a despondent mood or gladden a sad heart, but her flowers could not propagate. Each one was a unique yet doomed experiment. For this reason her gift was not celebrated in a world where resources were running out; duplication was demanded by big business in an age of profit and production. But gardeners know that the sweetest moment is the unrepeatable moment. Gardeners live for each bloom and grieve each winter, never taking the rebirth of spring for granted.

So they paid for Mrs Tea to come to the boxer’s garden and create the most wondrous flower of all.

It was pretty to look at – rather like a daisy with blueish petals and a scarlet heart – but it was the scent that made it so special, and spectacular. The scent was perfection. Each person who sniffed it described it differently, but nevertheless each one found a peace they had never known before, and that peace lingered for days, months, even years. Some talked of toffee apples at the fair and others thought of exotic breezes from far-off islands. Another might remember the newly-washed hair of their baby children.

The boxer did not describe what he smelled. He took a deep breath in, and then smiled at Mrs Tea and his gardeners, who had formed a line in front of him and the wondrous flower. They were all hoping, hoping, that he would feel succour in his soul.

And he did.

He realised instantly that he was not his mother, and he was not not his mother, but either way his life was a distinct and separate organism, and we are all enclosed within our own thoughts; thoughts that others can touch, but never penetrate. Our mistakes are always our own, and we can either punish or cherish ourselves with them as we see fit. All this was, for him, a revelation wrapped in something like lavender.

He thanked Mrs Tea, and offered her a full time position to transform his entire garden. She accepted, and created many transient wonders, but none that equalled that first flower, which the boxer surrounded with a small arched glass pavilion in its honour.

The Garden became as famous as the boxer, and he returned to the ring and pulverised many more opponents with his words and deeds. Each defeated enemy received an invitation to sniff the healing flower, and all wrongs were righted.

The boxer was happy.

But then he noticed how each sniff of the wondrous flower took its toll upon its petals. Was it his imagination? No – after a particularly nasty match his beaten opponent breathed in the scent deeply, gratefully, and the boxer watched the flower quiver, and droop. A lone petal came free, and floated gently down to the ground.

The boxer panicked.

Now, gardeners know that flowers cannot last forever. Boxers do not. He was not ready to let that flower go. So he gave up fighting once more, and passed an order that nobody would ever sniff that flower again. He scoured the world for experts who could prolong its life, and under their care the flower survived for years, as did the garden. But it was thought that one sniff more would kill that wondrous flower; just one sniff, and its beauty would be lost from the world forever.

This is where I come in, my darling, as you know, bringing my green fingers to bear upon this marvellous place. To work here, to tend upon that flower, was not an invitation I could refuse even though it has parted us.

I have been here for – well, how long is it? I ask you as I consider you to be the keeper of the time that has passed between us, and the holder of our mutual memories, while I fill my minutes and my mind with floral thoughts. Anyhow, in that time the boxer sickened for the scent of the flower. But even as he withered he refused to take one more sniff. I asked him why, once, and he replied:
I would rather die before I was responsible for removing its beauty from the world.

And that is what he did. He died.

But now to my sad news.

Our talents have been exhausted. The most wondrous flower is also near death.

It has one petal left, and that petal droops so low. We are all agreed that it is beyond our care. Outside the fence the sick and desperate clamour to be admitted in the hope of healing. What will they do when they find out it is lost? Will they break down the gates and rampage through this place I have protected and nurtured? We are all afraid for our lives, and sick at the thought of the death of the flower.

What should I do? I wish I did not have to wait for you to reply. If only I could see that dear face, and hear your wisdom. You would know what to say. Write back instantly, my darling, and impart your thoughts.

Should I come home and abandon the flower in its last moments? Should I leave the other gardeners in danger as I sneak away in the name of the love I feel for you? Or shall I die here, too, in defence of the failing flower?

***

Time is short; I will be brief.

In the absence of your guidance I made a decision, my darling. Why could you not write back with good speed? Well, perhaps the letter is en route. If so, I will never read it because I am leaving here tonight, before my actions are discovered.

The mind and the man are not the same. I told you that once. My love for you wished to defend the flower to the last, to make you proud of me. My mind spoke, in the long nights spent awake, of other things.

There are so many people outside the fence, all in need. One final petal on the flower. Only one person could ever benefit from its miraculous scent again.

Let me tell you of that scent. I can elucidate now.

It is the faint salty tang of the calm sea at sunrise, and it is caramel cooking to be poured on chocolate cake, and so many more smells mixed up together into one. It is not a single thought, or memory, or even an individual hope. It is the understanding of the complexity that makes up the simplest of beings. When we celebrate one being alone, we celebrate them all, because there is no way to encompass or elucidate more than the smallest moment of life. It is beyond us, as a species.

It does not matter that the wondrous flower is now dead, or that the hordes behind the fence will break it down and trample the garden and the gardeners to destruction. And love! I was right about love. That is also meaningless, and commonplace. There are too many of us for love to be celebrated, or even taken into account when making decisions.

And so, my darling, goodbye. I am happy, if that means anything. Well, it means something to me, and that is all that can matter. I can picture your face, your plain and trusting countenance projecting pain as you read these words. So let me put it simply. I do not resemble that famous boxer in any way at all. I do not shy away from causing pain if I must. In fact, I find I can almost enjoy the act. As an example, I have left you twice now, haven’t I?

The boxer said he would rather die than kill the flower, and he did. I would rather live, for what good is the most beautiful scent in the world if nobody can smell it?

I go. I steal away before the others wake, and I venture forth with the sole purpose of maintaining my personal contentment. I will be the one person on this earth who manages that difficult feat. But this is my new mantra: the happiness of one is better than the happiness of none. And if there can be just one happy man, why should it not be me?

***

Aliya Whiteley’s latest novella, ‘The Arrival of Missives’, is currently available from Unsung Stories. Her 2014 novella ‘The Beauty’ was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award and made the James Tiptree Jr Recommended Reading list. She lives in West Sussex.

THE END OF HOPE STREET

MALCOLM DEVLIN

illustrated by Richard Wagner

Number 5

The Potterton house became unliveable at a quarter past three on Saturday afternoon. Lewis Potterton had been sitting in the lounge reading the business section of the Daily Telegraph when he first recognised the symptoms, but when he got to the hallway to call his wife and daughter, he saw they were already hurrying downstairs, his wife Lydia fresh from the shower and still wrapped in a towel.

They hesitated for a moment, surprised at how, in a moment of bemused concordance, everyone else’s actions had mirrored their own. No-one spoke, but then no-one needed to. It was true that there had been frictions between them over the past few months – Lewis’ work had demanded long hours of him, Lydia appeared helpless under threat of redundancy and Monica had felt ignored by the both of them – but standing there together in the hallway, there was an unshakable sense that the connection between them ran deeper and stronger than any of them had previously anticipated. In that one precious moment they were still and hyper aware, listening to the sounds of the house settling, sounds that only the previous day had been normal and reassuring.

There was no verbal cue and instead, as one, they made for the front door and let themselves out, hiding their haste from one another until they were safely together on the front lawn where they stopped and looked back at the house that Lydia and Lewis had lived in since they had married fifteen years earlier, the house that Monica had known all of her life.

It was a bright sunny afternoon, and Lewis was struck by all the times he had woken in the night, fretting about what he should rescue in the event of a fire. The laptop, the accounts, the family photographs. He’d had a plan for them once, but that afternoon, he knew the most important parts of his life were there with him. His wife, his twelve-year-old daughter, his health so he could take care of them. Everything else was as good as gone now, locked and lost inside the house they would never enter again, and at that moment he really didn’t care anymore.

***

It was the Feltons who took the family in. They lived two doors down at number seven, and on that particular afternoon Una Felton had been putting the recycling out early as she did every weekend. She saw the Pottertons standing together on their front lawn. She saw how the father (Louis? Larry?) stood with his arms around his wife and daughter and she saw how all three of them stared at the house they had lived in and she recognised the look of sadness and pride in their expressions.

She’d been unhappy when the couple had first moved to Hope Street. How long had that been now? She remembered them driving up to view the property in that ridiculous red sports car. He had a pony tail then and she tottered on heels across the lawn. Hidden behind the net curtain in the lounge at number 7, Una had listened to their unguarded enthusiasm and assumed the worst. They were young, she’d thought. They were loud and vulgar. Maybe they’d come armed with the means to lower the tone and the price of the neighbourhood.

With hindsight, it had been a rather unChristian assessment but when she saw them looking so lost in their front garden, her heart went out to them completely.

She unpeeled her gardening gloves and joined them on the lawn, looking up at the new veneer of darkness their house wore.

“Oh good heavens,” she said, her sincerity genuine. “Come with me, let’s keep you warm. Let’s see what we can do.”

They exchanged glances with each other before they followed her, and they each saw the same feeling of being utterly lost reflected back in each others’ eyes. They joined hands and followed Una, back up the path to the pavement and along the road, past the untidy lawn of number six to the pristine one at number seven.

In the lounge, sitting in his favourite armchair, Alasdair Felton looked up from his newspaper, surprised to see his wife bringing guests back into the house without having organised a concerted campaign to make it look a fraction tidier than it already was. Una ignored him – she often did when she had something more pressing on her mind – so he watched and smiled as she fussed around, her frown of concern masking an irrepressible enthusiasm for her newfound purpose.

“Let me see if I can find you something to wear,” Una Felton said to Lydia, looking her up and down. “My daughter Suzie still has clothes here. They’re old, she hasn’t been home in so long. But she’s a big girl, too. Healthy.” She disappeared upstairs, leaving the family looking slightly shellshocked.

Lewis Potterton noticed Alasdair sitting, watching them, and nodded to him in wordless acknowledgement. He still held his wife by one hand, his daughter by the other, but by his expression Alasdair saw a man who was being held. A look of weightless panic behind his eyes, grounded only by those around him.

Alasdair nodded back. His smile, he hoped, was an encouraging one. He pushed himself to his feet. “I was going to make some tea,” he said. “I’ll use the large teapot.”

He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, still oblivious of the purpose behind the Pottertons’ visit; he knew his part was to simply act as host for as long as it took.

The Pottertons stayed the night. They squeezed into the Feltons’ spare room, the neat little loft conversion Una had thought to use as an art room, had she ever found the time. There were other rooms, bigger ones, but the closeness of the space under the eaves felt more important to them. They unfolded the futon and spread out an inflatable mattress so they could all stay together.

In the master bedroom on the floor below, Alasdair Felton sat down beside his wife, who looked tired but flushed with the day’s charity. She had reclothed them all and put the washing machine on. She had fed them and kept them warm, and now, although tired, she seemed to hum with a bristling energy he remembered from Suzie’s childhood. He took her hand and he smiled at her like he hadn’t done for years.

“What a beautiful thing you are,” he said.

***

Number 8

The second house to become unliveable was number eight. Milton Bream had not been home since his divorce from Jemima had finally reached its conclusion at the magistrates’ court earlier in the week. When he pulled up in front of number eight in his rented Audi, he knew it was the only thing he had left in the world, and for a precious fleeting moment he felt as though all the screaming and shouting and tears and grief had been worth it after all.

His lawyers had spoken to Jemima’s lawyers and, after much back and forth, they had agreed that, despite everything, she should be free to go home “one last time” and pick up her belongings. Brimbley, his solicitor, had advised Milton he should go home first and put away anything of value, but Milton wasn’t interested. He just wanted the whole thing over and done with and he wasn’t sure he would want to keep anything that Jemima had set her sights on anyway. He knew from experience how her glassy-eyed desire had the power to corrupt anything foolish enough to stumble into her path.

Standing outside the front door for the first time in just under a year, Milton was under no illusion that there would be anything of value left behind. Certainly not his collection of first edition Harry Potter books he had diligently shrink-wrapped for posterity. Certainly not the binders of first-day covers his uncle had left him in his will. Certainly not those gold and ivory cufflinks his grandfather had worn when he got married.

Jemima knew full well where all the treasure was in the house. He imagined her with pirate maps, digging through the attic detritus in her quest to exhume it all. He imagined too how that dipshit Welsh oaf Barri-with-an-i would have been waiting with his van in the drive, rubbing his fat steak-like hands in drooling anticipation of a wealth beyond his meagre, stunted dreams.

It was something of a surprise, therefore, to see the curtains still hung in the margins of the lounge windows, and when Milton squinted through the glass he could make out the obsidian slab of the plasma TV still mounted on the wall above the fireplace and the glittering stack of his precious HiFi neatly embedded on the shelves.

Maybe they didn’t have the tools to take them down? He wouldn’t have put it past them to act on spite alone and break everything instead.

With a sigh, he set his key to the lock and only then did he stop, sensing a thick pressure on his chest, a heat behind the ears. He had been so preoccupied with Jemima he almost hadn’t noticed the house had become unliveable in his absence. The irony of this was not lost on him. Thinking of Jemima at the wrong time had led to his first divorce after all; thinking of Jemima had been what had driven him to go home that lunchtime to find her in bed with Barri-with-an-i, who she hadn’t seen since they’d been at school together in Swansea and for whom she’d always harboured feelings – even though his middle aged form was somewhat less athletic than the one she’d lost her virginity to all those years before.

And now, thinking of Jemima had almost made him walk blindly into an unliveable house. He barked a laugh, an ugly sound even to him, and backed away down the path, staring up at the dead facade in front of him. So hard fought for, so arbitrarily lost. He sat on the edge of the rockery and cried for the first time since he’d been eight.

***

Milton Bream was rescued from his doorstep by Penny Moon from number nine. Like Una Felton, she took him home and took care of him, and like the Potterton family, Milton accepted her charity with a grace and humility that was new to him, but which he found fitted him well.

Penny Moon was nearly ten years Milton’s junior but knew exactly what it was like to lose someone you loved to another. She had moved into Hope Street six years earlier to care for her father after a stroke had rendered him housebound. She had set up a bedroom downstairs where the lounge used to be, opening the curtains wide each morning so her father could see the birds feeding in his beloved garden.

While he slept during the day, Penny had worked hard, making the upstairs rooms of number nine into the imaginary apartment she had once thought to have bought with Gary when Gary had been a reason, when her future seemed set. She pictured a lounge, a bedroom and spaces for all her books and the paintings she imagined she might one day buy. She made the upstairs rooms into a little box for herself, a nest with four walls and a door she could use to shut herself in. It was a long way away from her friends in London, but they had been Gary’s friends too and she simply didn’t trust them anymore. All their concern and advice seemed more for his benefit than hers, so she stopped replying to their messages, she stopped answering their calls. Another door left to shut on its own.

After her father died, she inherited the house but remained upstairs. The rooms downstairs felt both too dark and too bright at the same time. The barbed smell of her father’s final, humiliating hours lingered in the dark patches on the ceiling, in the gaps in the wallpaper, the scuff marks on the floor. She sat upstairs alone in the bedroom she had made a lounge, the curtains closed so she couldn’t see the garden her father had spent his life tending, the garden that had kept pace with him as they had both grown wild and unkempt.

When Milton moved in, he knew nothing of her history and, in those early days, he didn’t think to ask. When she showed him her father’s room, he didn’t see the history of it, scribbled into the walls and the furniture. He just saw a sanctuary, illuminated by the sort of diligent love he had no experience of himself.

He followed Penny, docile and silent as she led him to the kitchen and made him a bowl of soup and still-warm soda bread, the same meal her father used to make her when she had been a child.

***

Number 11

Less than a week after Milton Bream’s house became unliveable, the same happened to the house at number eleven.

This house was owned by Marlon Swick, and he lived there with his partner of eight years, Julia Prin. It was another Saturday and they had spent the afternoon at his mother’s house in Barnstaple. She spent the whole time they were there talking about children. She’d always wanted grandchildren she’d said, and she’d said it with one of those pointed expressions which was probably supposed to be subtle, but really wasn’t.

She’d given up on the two of them getting married by that point, and while both Marlon and Julia had tried to explain to her how they both very much wanted children too, their own subtlety was missed entirely.

And so, while Julia patiently washed the dishes after lunch, Marlon’s mother stood close behind her.

“Tick tock,” she said, a benign twinkle in her voice. “Tick tock.”

They excused themselves from the evening meal which Marlon’s mother had lovingly prepared. Marlon lied to her, faking a phone call and explaining something had happened back home which they absolutely had to get back to attend to and he had looked away while his mother had cried. He would call her later on, he always did find it easier to deal with her over the phone.

She shouted at them a little, she screamed a little more. It wasn’t a real scream, it was a fracture not a break, but everyone was miserable by the time they had finally left.

On the way home, they stopped at a country pub and ordered the most enormous meal they could afford. Three courses, artisan bread, a jug of wine which Julia was too upset to enjoy.

Marlon ran a small office cleaning company from a pair of stacked portakabins on the south side of Midholme. Business had been slowing since he’d lost out on a few contracts over the last few years, but his mother’s influence had left him well versed in the tactic of allaying sadness with food, no matter what the cost.

Back in the car, he turned to Julia and smiled at her in the most encouraging way he knew how. “When we get home,” he said, “we should go to the Oak and get drunk like teenagers. We should absolutely make fools of ourselves.”

Julia laughed, but Marlon knew she would probably rather just go to bed and forget the afternoon happened at all.

Unlike Milton Bream’s experience, Marlon knew something was wrong with Hope Street as soon as they turned off the Brenthwaite Road. The whole street felt darker than it should have been, and for a brief moment of intense clarity, Marlon saw how there were three nodes along its length where the night was most clenched and dangerous. One was the Potterton house, one was the Bream house and one was their own.

“Oh, baby,” he said.

Julia was asleep on the passenger seat beside him. He parked on the kerb and arranged a coat over her to keep her warm, then sat beside her, watching the house through until dawn.

***

Daniel Dormer lived in number twelve with his wife Kelly and their six-year-old son who, to Kelly’s consternation, Daniel had insisted be named after his father, Hilary.

On the morning after Marlon and Julia’s house became unliveable, Daniel walked out his front door to greet the morning as had become his custom of late, and saw his neighbours asleep in their car by the kerb.

Daniel Dormer had very strong views regarding neighbourhood aesthetics. The cars on Hope Street should, he believed, be parked in the driveways provided, or better still, in the garages provided. He’d heard somewhere that Julia was an artist of some sort and that she and Marlon had converted their garage into a studio. To Daniel, this seemed like a terrible waste of time, more so given that his neighbours’ ageing and tatty Volvo estate was just the sort of vehicle that suburban garages had been invented to conceal.

He tapped on the driver’s side window, clearing his throat as he mentally prepared himself to make a speech, a speech that would be both reasonable, concise and fair.
Churchillian, if you will.

Marlon rolled down the window and nodded at him. Before Daniel could utter a word, Marlon pointed past him to number eleven, which still looked dark in the early morning sun.

“The house has gone wrong,” he said. “We can’t go home.”

Daniel had heard about the Potterton house, of course. He’d also heard about Milton Bream. But his own house at number twelve was the closest to the junction with the Brenthwaite Road, and Daniel had little reason to traverse Hope Street to its far end, so he’d never actually seen how the houses could change so utterly.

Seeing the shadows that overcast number eleven, he was stuck with a stark and inexplicable sense of horror. Objectively, the house looked little different: its window frames were still in need of repainting and the lawn was rough and overgrown. But there was something else about the building that felt wrong to him, a deep almost imperceptible vibration that made his blood worry, and the bones scrape inside of him.

Daniel Dormer did not intend to take Marlon and Julia into his family’s home. It was a decision he made too soon and with too little thought. Even as they stepped over his threshold, looking and acting as humble and docile as the others in the street who had been taken in by their neighbours, Daniel felt a sudden panic that he was doing the wrong thing, a nagging sense that the young couple were infected by the same careless toxicity which had made their home unliveable, an infection they might carry with them, an infection they might spread to the military orderliness of number twelve. The others in the street had been hosting the homeless for weeks now, months. He wondered how he would ever get rid of the couple now they had moved in.

Despite the fact that Kelly Dormer was delighted by her husband’s decision to invite the couple into their home, despite the fact that Hilary was excited to have visitors he could show off his toys to, Marlon Swick and Julia Prin only stayed one night at number twelve Hope Street.

As they lay awake in the spare bedroom – a pristinely ordered room that had been barely used – Julia stared at the shadows of the thin curtains which streaked the ceiling and made it marble. “Perhaps our luck is a limited resource,” she said. “And so far, we’ve invested it all in one part of our lives and not another. We’ve been so lucky living here on Hope Street, but that’s gone now. So perhaps the luck will work on something else now? Maybe we’ll be lucky where we’ve been unlucky before?”

And she turned to him and traced her hand over his chest and down his abdomen.

They made love in a stranger’s house that night. They were slow and careful and as silent as they could be, surrounded by floral wallpaper, lace and perfume. Every feeling was bitten back, friction dulled, movement muted.

And on the other side of the wall, while his wife slept beside him with an eye mask over her face, Daniel Dormer listened hard, hearing every movement from the spare room, every hidden gasp, every distended breath. He smiled to himself because, good neighbours that they were, Marlon and Julia had given him an excuse to become himself again.

***

The following morning, Marlon and Julia were asked to leave number twelve and find their own accommodation elsewhere. Daniel told them this without malice, acting simply as though his offer to host them had only ever been for one night and due to other, unforeseeable, circumstances, he couldn’t possibly extend the invitation, you know how it is, etcetera, etcetera.

Marlon didn’t want to make a scene, Julia looked as though she was preoccupied by other concerns. Outside, they stood by the car, listening to Kelly Dormer raising her voice for the first time in her marriage, saying things she would later regret, because regret was easier to manage, easier to accommodate.

Julia took Marlon’s hand.

“I want to go home,” she said. And Marlon nodded, as though deep down, part of him wanted the very same thing.

They ignored the darkness of number eleven, seeing only the sunlight in each other. Marlon unlocked the door and they kissed on the threshold, a long, deep and beautiful kiss. Julia took Marlon’s hand and guided it down to her abdomen.

“Lucky,” she said.

“Lucky,” he agreed and opened the door.

Together, they stepped inside. Together, they fell. Together, they died in the unliveable house, their feet splayed across the doorstep, like a couple who loved each other very much, holding each other until the end.

***

Some Valuable Context

Hope Street was a line of neat detached houses situated nearly half way between the town of Midholme to the south and the village of Brenthwaite to the north. It lay with its back to the outer seam of St Crispin Woods, and faced fifty-six acres of farmland, sloping downhill before it, separating the line of houses from the Brenton Road Estate on the northern edge of Midholme.

Geographically and psychologically, Hope Street was neither part of the town to the south (except for administrative purposes) nor part of the village to the north (except for the church, for those who partook in such things). It was its own little world, a hollow way between the wood and the field, between the town and the countryside.

There were twelve detached houses built side by side with neat apex roofs and ruddy red tiles. Each had originally been constructed to an identical design in the late sixties, imagined with the expectation that the farmland would ultimately be sold to developers and the road, cheaply procured at the time, would find itself at the vanguard of the town. Nearly fifty years later, the farmland, still mired in complex negotiations, continued to cycle wheat and rape seed, while Hope Street had gone from cheap and isolated to exclusive and private, the individual houses evolving independently to reflect the change. Each now diverged from its original schema in its own particular and distinct manner. No longer a matching group, the houses were now individuals: number three had a new front porch, numbers six, eight and twelve had loft conversions, most now had conservatories of various sizes and designs, and number four had a new double garage and a swimming pool.

From midway across the field, the line of twelve pointed roofs looked like a row of filed teeth bordering the woodland. From the top floor of the number 16 bus as it swooped up the hill every twenty minutes towards Brenthwaite, they looked like a large picket fence that had been subsumed by the surrounding farmland.

From ground level, the street was quiet and pleasant, curving gently to the west and out of sight from the Brenthwaite road. The tarmac had seen better days, but the pot holes were easy to avoid if you knew where they were and many an estate agent had mistaken them for character. And while the low stone wall that separated the road from the fields had collapsed in a number of places, there was something about it which connected deeply to the middle class investor. It was neither completely urban nor completely rural. It was both, and it was neither, and when a gentle wind picked at the trees of St Crispin Wood and made them roar, it sounded as though it could have been the sea.

***

The Residents Committee

The community of Hope Street prided themselves in their strength and their support. Together, they considered themselves a textbook example of how people could work together, even if individually they were less idealistic and certainly less confident in the motives of their neighbours.

The residents committee met on the first Thursday of every month, cycling through the houses from number one to number twelve, from January through to December. It was a neat system and a consistent one. Every January, Bryn Purbrick hosted the meeting in his open plan lounge, which his partner Graham would redecorate each year to an agreed theme. Every December, Daniel Dormer would use the opportunity to host his annual Christmas tree party, in which the residents would be invited to help decorate the family tree, while drinking sherry and eating Kelly’s mince pies.

Attendance at the meeting was certainly not compulsory, but several years earlier Carla Bretton had taken it upon herself to record non-attendance in her little Moleskine notebook, arguing that those who paid more attention to local affairs should rightfully have more say. On the morning Marlon and Julia died, she pored over her findings to try and determine a correlation between the houses which had become unliveable and the residents who had the poorest attendance record at the monthly meetings. She was disappointed to find there was none at all.

Over the past few years there had been only few major incidents that the committee had been required to address. There had been a handful of planning applications, but few were contentious and most were modest in scope, each being passed with the minimum of attention. A council proposal to build a new recycling depot opposite the Hope Street turn off was successfully petitioned against, as was the council’s tentative decision to remove the Hope Street bus stop, even though none of the residents of Hope Street used the bus which sped past twelve times a day.

Crime was also low. There had been a brief spate of burglaries some six years earlier, but nothing since the neighbourhood watch initiative had been instigated. There was a half-way house on the Brenton Road Estate, and one of its residents occasionally found their way into the cul-de-sac, but on the whole it was a quiet and peaceful little street, one the authorities rarely needed to venture into, let alone trouble.

Perhaps this was why nobody moved the bodies of Marlon and Julia when they died. A vague sense of unreality made the incident look perversely gauche in the neatly trimmed street. It was something people struggled to engage with, it felt too unlikely to be genuinely tragic. The other reason was easier to explain: nobody dared. The house was unliveable after all, and the bodies proved it to anyone who would look.

Milton Bream got the closest. He was frustrated that no-one thought to try and move the bodies. It was disrespectful, it was unkind. Marlon’s foot had fallen across the threshold, so he imagined it might be possible to reach it and pull them both free from the house that had ended them. A small crowd gathered to watch him edge up the driveway of number eleven as though it were a steepening hill, his arm outstretched as though he might draw the couple towards him with some telekinetic will, saving himself from having to make contact with them at all.

Later, he told Penny Moon how he’d felt a dense pressure growing heavy in his chest the closer he got to the house. It felt as though he was pushing himself through successive curtains of something viscous and suffocating. He said he saw how Marlon’s body had landed. Not on Julia’s, but beside it, his arm draped around her waist as though he was still holding her to him and would continue to do so.

It felt like desecration, he said, justifying his retreat without admitting to the fear which had driven him away; and Penny reached across to him in the bed they now shared and slid her own arm over his. He took it and held it too tight. Over the past few nights, he’d been subjected to the same nightmare. That he’d looked through the window of number eight and seen Jemima inside, lying across the sofa in the same way that she used to when she watched that dancing programme on Saturday nights, but also very much not in the same way at all. In his dream, her head lolled too far to the side, her mouth hung rudely agape, and her legs were splayed and awkward. He’d rapped on the glass until his knuckles had split and the glass had smeared red so he couldn’t see her at all.

On this occasion, the authorities did arrive but they didn’t stay long. They’d seen this sort of thing before, they said, and they milled around the garden of number eleven from a safe distance then went on their way again, leaving only a stern admonishment that no-one else go near the affected houses. They promised that they’d come back to build a barrier of some sort, but they never did.

“It’s probably happening all over,” someone said, but no-one really thought to find out.

A week later, Una Felton planted a small Anne Harkness rose in the front garden of number eleven. Years before she had planted the same variety in her back garden at number seven. Susie had chosen it from the display at Hawsham’s Nurseries like she was picking her favourite colour from a paint catalogue. They had planted it together, a pleasant afternoon, made more-so with hindsight, and to Una it represented a connection lost, the promise of potential left cruelly unexplored. She hoped its beautiful apricot colours would have pleased Julia, and how that in turn would have pleased Marlon. Despite Alasdair’s concern, she planted it as close to the house as she dared. It didn’t block the view. Its scent was too subtle to mask the smell of the bodies as they turned, but it was a gesture, and sometimes that was all that was possible, sometimes that was enough.

When she got home and washed the dirt off her hands in the utility room sink and she turned to Alasdair who was standing watching her in the doorway, and to Lewis and Linda who were waiting behind him.

“I think someone needs to do something,” she said, her tone underlining how she didn’t trust anyone else to do so on her behalf.

The first emergency meeting of the Hope Street residents committee was called for the following weekend. The Feltons had hosted the meeting only the previous month, but Milton’s house was now unliveable and so they volunteered, given the strangeness of the circumstances, to host it again. The feeling that circumstance had changed irrevocably was impossible to ignore, but there was still a sense amongst some that in calling the meeting without consultation, and by calling a second meeting at her own house, Una had done something vulgar.

As such, the faces that greeted her in the living room at number seven were not, she judged, entirely receptive to what she had to say. She centred herself and began.

“People are losing their homes,” she said. “People are dying. We have a responsibility to act. We have a duty to help.”

She outlined her hypothesis that other houses in the street would become unliveable, that other families would become homeless, that others might die.

“We have to watch out for one another,” she said. “The only way we can get through this is to do what we do best. To watch our neighbours, to notice when something looks wrong. To open our doors when their own becomes closed to them.”

The faces that looked back at her were blank, denting her confidence enough to make her falter.

“We can’t stand by,” she said. “We simply can’t.”

Her neighbours, those who had lost their homes and those who had not, looked at her impassively. There was no agreement, no argument. No-one had anything to say in reply to her.

She wanted to tell them how she and Alasdair had started to work on the house so more people could stay. They’d cleared out the dining room, they’d emptied Suzie’s room, even the lounge could accommodate a family should the need arise. She wanted to tell them how Alasdair had been working in the shed at the bottom of the garden, making box-bed frames and futons to a design Una had found on the internet. But she didn’t tell them that. The faces that looked up at her reminded her of the children she used to teach before she’d retired, the same looks of insolent defiance she remembered when she took the whole class to task for whatever minor infraction.

She sighed.

“Also, I made biscuits,” she said instead.

To this at least, there was a murmur of appreciation.

“Oh, thank god for that,” Daniel Dormer said. Una Felton’s biscuits were legendary, after all.

***

Number 2

The next few months passed by without further incident and it felt for a time as though the crisis may have passed by entirely. Certainly it didn’t look as though the houses already affected might revert to normal again, but there didn’t seem to be any signs that the problem would continue. Over the course of the next three committee meetings, Una’s passionate concern seemed increasingly hyperbolic. The consensus of the other residents of the street was that what occurred already had been tragic, but it was time to move on, to look forward.

Despite this, the November meeting of the Hope Street Residents Committee took place at number two Hope Street, and the jarring disorder of this was more than enough to make the residents feel uncomfortable, a stark reminder that there were fewer houses in the street than there used to be.

But Daniel Dormer was adamant.

“It was like a storm,” he said, sitting back in the high wing-backed armchair Carla Bretton’s husband used to favour. “It passed over us, it took its toll. It’s gone now.”

He smiled at Kelly, sitting beside him on one of the folding dining chairs.

“It certainly seems that way,” she said.

Carla Bretton leaned across Kelly to top up Daniel’s cup of tea from her Portmeirion teapot. She nodded in vigorous agreement.

“I made up a chart for the whole street during the last week,” she said. “And it says we’re home free. The stars never lie. They say the weather will be good for the next few months too.”

Una didn’t say anything. She’d humoured Carla’s ‘gifts’ in the past, allowing her to make one of her star charts for Suzie after she had moved out. It was all nonsense of course: Carla didn’t foresee how Suzie would drop out of her economics degree. She didn’t foresee the pregnancy or the termination, and she certainly didn’t predict how she would chase some square-jawed surfer half way across the world to move in with him in some beach hut in Sydney. Of course she didn’t. And of course, Una hadn’t believed a word of it at the time either. She’d invited Carla over as a courtesy. She was being neighbourly, she was being nice. Considering her argument with the committee, perhaps it was ironic that she could now see how niceness was a weakness that could be perceived as a trap. How typical that by being accommodating more than twenty years ago she should risk exposing herself as a hypocrite in the present.

She cleared her throat.

“This isn’t about how things are now,” she said. “This is about what might happen in the future. It’s household insurance. If you had a power cut and spent the night in darkness, then even when the power is restored, you would buy candles the next day so you won’t be caught out a second time. All I’m arguing is that we offer the same compassion to others as we might hope to receive ourselves. We each put a candle in reserve for each other should we need it.”

She looked around the room sternly.

“Because you can never tell when it will happen again,” she said.

Carla cleared her throat to say something. Her expression was one Una had seen before: part persecuted, part condescending. The expression she wore when someone quoted science at her, the expression she wore before she launched into a defence of the gift she claimed to have inherited from her mother, from her grandmother.

On this occasion, Linda Potterton got there first. “I think we should all leave,” she said. “I think we should all leave right now.”

She was staring up at the corner of the room where Carla’s fuchsia-striped wallpaper met the moulded coving which ran the circumference of the ceiling. There was nothing there to see, but there was an unshakeable sense that there would be, the sense that under scrutiny, the paint would darken and peel and the wallpaper would bubble and blacken.

Milton Bream was on his feet first.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bundling for the door, Penny Moon close on his heels. The remaining residents heard the front door open and slam shut before they thought to do anything themselves, they heard footsteps diminish on the garden path.

It was like something out of a cartoon, Una thought. Wile E. Coyote running out over the edge of a cliff. And he’s doing fine until he notices how casually he’s breaking the laws of physics. He only falls when he realises that he should. The safety of ignorance before understanding, the precious calm before the fall.

The calm in number two Hope Street lasted all of fifteen seconds before the panic muscled in and took its place. In the very same moment everyone was on their feet, and a moment later everyone was at the lounge door. The houses in Hope Street were built during a time when smaller doorways were preferable because it meant the rooms they opened would be easier to keep warm, and so the crowd quickly bottle-necked, frustration and fear flaring like wildfire.

Una and Alasdair were near the back of the crowd. Seated by the window, Una had found herself unable to overcome her habit of stepping aside to let others go before her. She glanced up at the corner of the room and while it had not changed in any visible manner, she felt the threat of it had intensified, like a magnifying glass focussing the late autumn sunlight.

“If everyone just goes one at a time,” someone said. It sounded like Bryn, his voice far too reedy to carry any weight or credence, no matter how good the advice was. Everyone was pushing towards the door. Whenever they relaxed just a moment to consider the logic of the situation, someone else pushed from behind and that only made them redouble their efforts.

The fear was animal. The smell of it seeped into the room, made it dense and primal.

One by one, Una heard the door clatter open as the neighbourhood fought to free themselves, popping into the hallway like champagne corks, one by one there were footsteps on the path outside.

She felt Alasdair’s hand in hers and felt his own unseen impatience coiled up tight within it.

“We’re going to be too late,” he said. He looked behind him at the window. Then kissed Una on the cheek and stepped across the room to examine it closer.

The window was locked. Alasdair recognised the Residents Committee approved window fasteners bolted to the levers on both opening panes. They were the same model he had himself and he had a key for them somewhere, probably at home in the glass jar where he and Una kept such domestic ephemera. Instead he picked up the dining chair that Kelly Dormer had been sitting on and thrust it legs first towards the glass. It took a few attempts before the glass gave way, more with a creak and crack than with a satisfying shatter.

“That’s my window!” Carla Bretton squeaked from the front garden, apparently having been one of the first to escape from the house. Alasdair ignored her. He hammered away the remaining shards of glass with a broken chair leg, and tore down the curtain to cushion the jagged teeth they left behind in the frames.

“You can’t break my window!” Carla said. “When this is all over I’ll have to fix it. You’re paying for it, Alasdair Felton. I tell you right now, you’re paying for it all. Otherwise my lawyers will hear of this, you mark my words.”

She hovered on the other side, her hands flapping. Behind her, the crowd of residents watched from a safe distance.

“And those are my best curtains,” Carla said. “You have no respect for other people’s property. Those were my mother’s curtains. She had them made after she got married and I kept them as a reminder of her. Those are precious things. You can’t treat them like that.”

“Carla,” Alasdair said, “please step out of the way so my wife can get out of your house.”

But a polite request was not enough to move Carla. “This is an outrage,” she said, and she started pulling the curtain away, her little fists grasping the fabric and ripping it over the remains of the broken glass.

Alasdair shot a glance to his wife, then to the door which remained blocked by a dwindling jumble of the remaining residents.

“One moment, dear,” he said. He vaulted out of the window with a deftness that belied his years, then took Carla by the shoulder and gently guided her away from the window. She was still arguing, still flapping her arms as Penny Moon stepped in with an apologetic smile to lead her away.

Una approached the window and smiled. She set her hands on the ledge, made soft by the curtain fabric, and watched as Alasdair hurried back across the garden to help her.

“What a wonderful thing you are,” she said.

And then the house became unliveable and she died.

***

After the Meeting

Five people were left in number two Hope Street when it became unliveable after November’s residents meeting. Alasdair had seen Una fall at the window as though she was taken by a swoon like one of the characters from the Regency romances she had been embarrassed to have a weakness for. Elsewhere, Geoff Styx, the large gentleman from number three, had got stuck in the living room door and his wife Brenda had been tugging at his arm from the other side until he spent more time complaining that she was hurting him than appreciating how she was trying to help. Both died where they stood, both had tears in their eyes. Bryn’s partner Graham had been on the toilet upstairs when everything went wrong. He had eaten something the day before which had disagreed with him and as a result he missed most of the stampede because when he realised what was happening, he was determined to make himself presentable and avoid showing either himself or Bryn up. The final resident to die was Lewis Potterton, who had been waiting behind to help Geoff Styx through the door or Una through the window, whichever opportunity had come first.

Alasdair had stared at the empty window where Una had fallen. He could hear Linda Potterton screaming behind him, but he felt numb and disconnected because there was nothing else he could do other than find a way to navigate the hole which had opened up in his world. If he had pushed Cara out the way, he could have helped Una immediately. If only he hadn’t been so patient and polite, his wife would have been standing there with him. He shook the thought out of his head. There was no time for such speculation, the street wasn’t done with them yet. It occurred to him that he’d left his watch on the small table beside the sofa in Carla Bretton’s front room. It had started to worry at him of late, his wrist coming out in a rash where the leather of the strap rubbed against the softening folds of his skin. But Una had given it to him the Christmas after they married and in some ways it was reassuring that she was there looking after it for him.

He retreated back up the path and put his hand on Linda Potterton’s shoulder.

“Let’s go home,” he said, emphasising the word home in a way that made it sound as inclusive as Una would have wanted. Linda nodded. She would be strong for her daughter, but there would be time for that later. For the moment, she was unashamed to be led.

They walked a few steps up the path before Alasdair turned back. “Carla,” he said. “There’s room at ours should you need it.”

Carla was standing on her lawn, staring at her broken house. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to do, or what to say.

***

Number 4 and Number 6

Three more weeks passed before any more houses on the street became unliveable, and when they turned, two did so within hours of each other. At number four, Judy Khamen woke in the night, untroubled by dreams. Lying alone in her dark bedroom with only the memory of the woman she had once loved keeping the bed warm beside her, she felt a knot of cold panic ripen inside of her, and for a moment she wondered if Francesca had come back while she’d been asleep. If she turned her head just a little, taking her eyes off the ceiling and looking at the pillow beside her, she imagined she would see Francesca there, her hair a comb of richer shadows spilling down the back of her neck to pool on the silk sheets.

Judy was a personal injury lawyer and only the previous week she had been delivering a series of presentations to a handful of financial companies in Midholme, detailing her company’s position on the merits of liabilities insurance. Francesca had been a liability and Judy had known that when she first met her. She’d heard people describe how someone’s smile could be wicked, but she’d never seen such a thing until she’d met Francesca. And there it was: a shard of something mischievous in her eye that widened into something beautiful and dangerous when she smiled.

Judy was already in a relationship at the time. Marjorie was an older woman and they’d fallen in together by one of those happy accidents where people who fit together find themselves in the right place at the right time. She was a pleasant soul.
Homely. They’d been together for the best part of three years, and while their definition of ‘best part’ didn’t quite align (for Judy it was duration, for Marjorie it was quality), Judy had found herself content.

Francesca really didn’t give a fuck.

Weeks later when they met again, Judy recounted how her world had since fallen apart now that Francesca was in its orbit. She told how Marjorie had fled. She told Francesca the things Marjorie had said to her, how her face had looked ruined, painted bright with anger and tears. She told Francesca how everything now felt hollow and empty.

Francesca looked at her pointedly.

“I will break your heart,” she had said.

Judy weighed up the risks then bet everything she had, starting with a kiss.

Lying alone in her bed at number four Hope Street, watching the darkness clot around her, she considered staying where she was and letting the dying house take her with it. It had been months since she’d last seen Francesca and everything she owned now felt brittle and grey, whether the house was liveable or otherwise. Why should she save herself? What was left to be saved?

But she pushed herself up and out of bed anyway. Sitting on the edge for a moment, her toes arched down to the bare floorboards. She allowed herself the luxury of time to wake up. If the house took her, then so be it. She was in no rush. She took her time finding some clothes to wear, a warm coat, a few paperbacks, some boots. Her hand passed over a locket that Marjorie had given her one Christmas, but she left it where it lay on the dresser. She found her phone and her wallet instead, she found the phone charger and put everything into a canvas bag, one of the ones she had picked up at a conference a few years earlier. She trudged down the stairs, imagining the wallpaper rotting and blackening behind her as she laid her hand on the door handle and turned.

***

Just over an hour after Judy Khamen locked the door of number four behind her for the very last time, Brandon Vine, who was renting the house at number six, woke briefly in his bed in a similar state of distress.

In his barely awake state, it didn’t occur to him that his panic was anything to do with the house at all. He attributed his fear to the usual things that woke him up in the night. The upcoming round of redundancies at the consultancy firm he’d been working at for the past seven years, the fact that he was ill-prepared to complete his tax assessment this year, the sheer volume of grey in his beard, the nagging sense that there might be a lump on one of his balls even though he wasn’t sure what to look for, the sinking pit of knowing that he had now been single for four years, seven months, three days.

These were familiar fears, each of which had woken him periodically in the past. On this occasion, as on any other when they had troubled him, he stomped out of his bedroom and crossed the hall to the bathroom where he dosed himself with the homeopathic anxiety medication his mother had sworn by.

Back in bed, he fretted briefly that his failure to believe in homeopathy would render the tablets redundant, but this worry didn’t stop him from falling back asleep again, and for the first time since he’d been a child, he snored.

The expression of sheer contentment on his face when he died might have been read as evidence that he knew his concerns would never bother him again.

***

An Invitation

As Christmas approached, there were only three houses left in Hope Street that had not yet become unliveable, they stood out like pools of bright sunlight punctuating an otherwise unpromising day. The residents who had outlived their homes’ decline remained in the street, clustered together, their shared survival granting them a collective experience more profound than any number of residents committees or contrived community events. For the first time they recognised how they were all alive, how they were all human, how they were all still there. For the first time, they recognised how important the simple commonalities were between them. Simple but vital, they were precious hand and footholds in each other that they each clung to desperately.

Alasdair Felton was still at number seven and he had taken it upon himself to continue Una’s charity as she would have done herself were she still there. If this was her legacy, he was grateful for it. The house would have been empty if he were there on his own without her, it would have become unliveable in its own very particular and equally dangerous way. Instead, he busied himself with the needs of his guests, considering ways to break the house further into tiny domestic polities which could accommodate more refugees should the need arise.

Linda Potterton and Monica still lived in the small spare room in the attic, and they filled the space Lewis had left with a memory of him which gave him a greater stature than he could have ever occupied in life. Downstairs, Carla Bretton had claimed a curtained off section of the lounge, and made herself a nest of scatter cushions and blankets in one of the box-beds Alasdair had constructed. The result had the appearance of part Bedouin tent, part Scottish bothy and part child’s den. There was something transitory about it which appealed to her, and in a peculiar way she felt as though she had become the eccentric gypsy seer she had always imagined herself as being.

Bryn Purbrick had moved into Suzie’s old room, which hadn’t been redecorated properly since the mid-nineties because Una had desperately hoped she would come home one day and because she was terrified she would leave again if the room hadn’t been exactly as she’d left it. One wall was still covered with a collage of curling clippings from the NME and Melody Maker and Rolling Stone and Select. The Khol-rimmed eyes of minor starlets peeked out between demo reviews and interviews with musicians, heavy on supercilious snark and wretched word play. When Bryn woke in panic during the night, when his simple dreams would be invaded by the more nightmarish truth that Graham had died, he would calm himself by picking his way through the clippings with a torch. He didn’t really know what any of it meant, he didn’t know who any of these people were, but in a curious way, it grounded him, it kept him whole.

At number nine, Penny Moon now hosted Milton Bream in her own room, and Judy Khamen in her father’s. Stephen and Deirdre Spiller and their three kids had also moved in from number ten. They had missed much of the previous activity on the street, they’d been in Portland for the past six months where Deirdre had been working on a project and Stephen had been failing to write a novel. They returned to find their home had become unliveable while they were away. Only two days before they got there, they were told. Penny Moon had already left a note in their driveway, wrapped in plastic and set in place with a hefty pebble.

There’s a room for you all at ours, it said.

You’re not alone, it said.

And so the Spillers had moved into Penny Moon’s upstairs lounge, and being of similar dimensions to the condo they had shared for the past six months, it curiously felt more like home to them than the house they would never enter again.

Throughout all of this, the Dormer family at number twelve remained on their own.

“We simply haven’t got the room,” Daniel said when Alasdair brought up the subject one afternoon.

He’d come round to invite the family to a Christmas meal with the other residents. It had been Monica’s idea. She’d raised it over breakfast one morning the previous week, idly trying to imagine how Christmas might work now that everyone was in different places. She worded things delicately so as not to upset her mother.

“This place is too small for us really,” Daniel said. He spread his arms to encompass the lounge. “And Hilary suffers from terrible claustrophobia. It’s a family thing. My father was exactly the same.”

Hilary ducked behind his mother’s legs, his eyes downcast.

Alasdair nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I really do.”

He didn’t mention that all the houses in the street were built to the same design, and that while many had subsequently acquired alterations of some description, none were quite so large as the extension which stretched out into what had once been the Dormers’ back garden. Thirty square metres of additional lounge space on the downstairs, two more bedrooms up top.

Alasdair inclined his head. He had said his piece, he wasn’t going to force the issue.

At the door, Daniel watched his neighbour walk down the path.

“I don’t know why they stay,” he said.

Alasdair stopped and turned back. He looked at Daniel a moment, trying to see the same hand and footholds on him which were so clear and apparent in everyone else on the street. But the man was smooth and soft, like a curl of butter on a warm day.

“It’s their home,” Alasdair said. “Why should they leave?”

“It’s not their home anymore.” Daniel looked imperious in the doorway. Part sentry, part bouncer. “Circumstance might be unkind, but there’s nothing anyone can do when it gets in your way. It’s a message. We should listen. We all should listen. It started with the Pottertons. Maybe because they stayed, it’s still happening.”

Alasdair shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe that at all.”

Daniel remained unmoved. “Well, it’s something to consider.” He plunged his hands deep into his pockets and looked up at the threads of cloud crawling across the grey of the sky. “And if it’s true,” he said, “perhaps your wife’s compassion has put everyone at risk. If the Pottertons had been sent packing when their house went wrong, who knows how many people would still be alive?”

When he looked down again, his smile was stiff and straight.

“Christmas dinner will be at two,” Alasdair said. “You’re all welcome. Bring a bottle if you can spare one.”

***

Number 9

Late on Christmas Eve, Penny Moon’s house at number nine became unliveable. Judy Khamen noticed the signs first. It was nearly nine o’clock and she was in the back garden with a cigarette. She found herself strangely content with her new life. She had always liked Penny, but even Milton was less of a dick than she had assumed. She liked the closeness of the situation. The warmth, the tolerance, the fact you had to lean into the wall to let people past in the morning. If it was not the companionship she had wept for, perhaps it was the companionship she had needed.

With her back to the house, she felt a growing heat at the nape of her neck which had no business being there so late in the year.

The others were still in the house, watching a DVD in the front room. A stand-up comedy routine that Judy had seen before. The volume was turned up high, and she could hear the din of distant laughter, echoed by intermittent barks of amusement from Milton and Stephen, yaps from the kids. When she tried the back door she realised it had locked behind her. Penny didn’t have enough keys to go round, so the doors were kept on latches and sometimes they slipped. Sometimes they locked themselves when they were closed too forcefully. Sometimes.

Judy hammered on the glass but no-one came. She knocked louder and shouted herself hoarse, but the tinny roar of laughter from the television turned mocking and cruel. She searched the garden for something to wield at one of the windows, perhaps even to break it if she could, but Penny’s garden was wild and untended, filled only with limp knotty grasses and soft muddy boles.

There was no footpath through to the front of the house, so Judy took a different approach. She jogged up the garden as far as it went and clambered over the wall to the garden next door. Milton Bream’s house glowered at her with black and empty windows, but its toxicity had yet to consume the garden as well and Judy passed through it unharmed.

Over the next wall, in the garden of number seven, Judy found Bryn Purbrick playing swing ball with Monica Potterton. Both were wearing head torches, making the ball flit in and out of the skittering light as though it was a planet ducking in and out of eclipse. She hurried past them into the kitchen where Alasdair and Carla were dressing the turkey.

“Penny’s house is going,” she said breathless. “Penny’s house is near as gone.”

What happened next happened briskly and without discussion. Just as all those months earlier, the Potterton family knew to leave their house as one, so too did the new and expanded Felton household understand how they needed to act. The meal was abandoned, the house was emptied and everyone fled up the street to Penny Moon’s house.

Nobody on Hope Street died on Christmas Eve. The Felton household ran shouting and waving and the Moon household didn’t need any other cue to understand their situation. This was a matter beyond language. This was a matter beyond explanation. They fled the house at number nine without further hesitation or thought. They ran down the path into the arms of their waiting neighbours, looking back only to see how the house they had lived in had dimmed and diminished, retreating into a darkness considerably deeper than the one the evening had painted for it.

Alasdair looked down the road to see there were lights on in the Dormer house, but no-one came out to see what the commotion was, no curtain twitched to suggest they were watching, no figures lingered in the doorway. He turned away, his inexplicable sadness moderated only a little by the adrenaline-laced energy of the crowd.

“What do we do now?” someone said, and someone else laughed darkly.

“It’s Christmas,” Alasdair said. There was something miraculous in the air after all.

“That’s tomorrow,” Monica said, but as she spoke the first flakes of the season’s snow began to fall.

Alasdair shook his head. “Why wait?” he said.

***

An Early Christmas Party

The Christmas party at number seven Hope Street lasted from the evening of Christmas Eve to the afternoon of Boxing Day.

There were now twelve guests staying in the house at number seven and with a little imagination, Alasdair found room for them all. Packing them into the corners of his house as though he was capable of tucking them away safely, as though he was strategising some inexplicable game of hide and seek with whatever darkness it was that pursued them from door-to-door.

Instinctively, his guests understood all too well that if time was not on their side, they should – for the first time in their lives – do the things they wanted to do, when they wanted to. There was an inescapable sense that their lives had shifted into a higher gear. They could see their future written in the shadows of the empty houses on the street and they knew there was little sense in sitting back and waiting for it to catch up with them.

There would be a Christmas that year in Hope Street, no matter what happened, no matter what it represented. It would be both spiritual and secular, and in its own peculiar way it would be an act of rebellion. Because even joy and companionship could be subversive under the right conditions.

Without fuss or argument, on the night of Christmas Eve, they broke into work details and set about preparing their ultimate celebration.

Alasdair and Linda worked in the kitchen, finishing what they had started with the turkey, and deciding they would serve it when it was ready to be eaten, not when it was traditionally acceptable to eat.

Stephen Spiller took Milton Bream and Carla Breton, and the three drove out to a late opening garage in his four-wheel drive Mitsubishi, where they bought as much wine, beer, whisky and fruit juice as they could afford.

The young man behind the counter, the peak on his company baseball cap skewed to four-o’clock, whistled as he packed the bags.

“Must be a hell of a party,” he said, glancing with deadpan bemusement to the clock above the door.

On any other day, Milton would have said something in response. Something like “You have no idea”, or “More likely, heaven”. But that evening, it didn’t feel right. Small talk was words wasted, and at that moment they felt like such a precious resource the thought of wasting them on someone else – on someone who wasn’t Penny Moon – frightened him. He paid up, and smiled a thank-you, then the three of them left in silence.

Judy and Penny took the head torches and followed the directions they’d been given to Bryn and Graham’s allotment. The snow continued to fall around them, but it was too heavy and damp to settle in a satisfactory way. But the way the night speckled ahead of them reminded Penny of a documentary she had seen about a village somewhere in North America that had been destroyed by a volcano. There, it had been ashes which had fallen, settling into a blue-grey snowscape that painted the abandoned streets and houses with a melancholic palette that was beautiful in its way: the once bustling streets and squares condemned to a gentle, empty peace.

The two women emptied the allotment of everything they could find. They ignored the cold and the damp, digging briskly, without discussion. They carried the goods back across the field in bulging carrier bags, their faces flushed with a pride so warm it kept the winter well at bay.

Deirdre Spiller had a friend who worked as part of the tech crew for a local theatre. She harried him over the telephone until he arrived with a sound system and lighting in the back of his van.

“This will cost you a fortune,” he said, having been talked into accepting her bank card with her PIN number written on a slip of paper.

“What other time will I have to spend it?” she said.

Monica and the three Spiller kids searched the attic for decorations and found, amongst other things, a crate of spray cans including festive reds and greens and golds. To begin with they were cautious with them, spraying the boughs of oak and pine and the chains of ivy Bryn had cut for them, but Alasdair saw what they were doing and squatted beside them.

“Think bigger,” he said. He took one of the cans of gold and across the kitchen wall, drew a lopsided festive star that glittered brightly as it dripped and dried. The look the children exchanged when he handed the can back to them was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

Dinner was served at five in the morning and there was more of it than most of those who attended the party had ever seen. It kept coming, on plates and pans and tupperware boxes. Everyone had seconds. Most had thirds. It seemed perversely rude to leave anything behind.

There was music too. There was light and movement, spilling from the windows of the house all through the night. There were no immediate neighbours to worry about. Almost all the neighbours were there after all.

The Spillers danced in the front garden, their children chased around them with brightly coloured torches. The snow turned to rain but nobody cared.

There was singing, dancing, stories and jokes. As the morning subsided into afternoon, everyone clustered together in the lounge because no-one wanted to be alone.

Carla Bretton presented the new chart she had been working on for the street. It was a large piece of blank paper, taped together from a dozen sheets. She spread it out over the floor of the lounge and passed pens around the group so that everyone could write or draw the future they chose.

They slept where they sat.

They woke, they ate.

They slept again.

Two o’clock came and went, but the Dormers didn’t appear.

The evening fell again, the day had moved so swiftly, the sun racing through the sky as though it was in a hurry to be done. The second night was more subdued, but the residents of number seven remained together throughout.

***

Boxing Day

On the morning of Boxing Day, Alasdair was the first to leave the musty nest of the house in more than twenty-four hours. There had been more snow during the night, not much, but enough to dust the tarmac of Hope Street, coating the fields opposite in a way which glittered as though they had been painted with precious stones. He crossed the road to get a closer look, and for the first time in years, he was struck by the modest beauty of the place where he lived.

He had a smile on his face as he walked down the road to the Dormers’ house and slotted a card through the letterbox. The Spiller kids had made it themselves. It had been signed by everyone.

When he got back to number seven, he saw at once how the house had become silent and dark in his brief absence, as though the Christmas celebrations had reached their apex point and plunged downwards into an irreversible night. The stereo was still playing. That party album of Suzie’s one of the kids had found. It was jolly and insistent and – at that moment – inescapably sad.

Alasdair Felton steeled himself, suddenly feeling the morning’s cold he had brusquely dismissed only moments earlier. Then he took the path towards the door.

He was surprised to find himself feeling betrayed, and he was disappointed he should imagine such a thing. He was disappointed too, when he stopped well short of the front door, his hand outstretched and impotent. He could feel the weight of the darkness that occupied the house and he remembered how Una had planted the rose bush outside Marlon Swick’s house. How had she got so much closer to the house than he could now?

If everyone else had gone, why should he be the one to be left behind? It was a problem with a very simple solution, he just needed to go home and join everyone. But at that moment, he knew he wasn’t brave enough to follow them so baldly. A fear gripped him, compounding both his isolation and the weight of the darkness. He stepped back and back and back under its influence. Cursing himself as a coward, cursing the street for leaving him so alone.

***

From the upstairs window of number twelve Hope Street, Kelly Dormer saw Alasdair approach up the front path, and she saw her husband step out of the door to intercept him before he reached the house. She didn’t hear what they said to each other. The double glazing installed throughout number twelve had been expensive for a reason. All she heard was the hum of the boiler, the soft breathing of Hilary as he clung to her knees. He seemed so frightened of everything these days, and her hand reached down to touch his hair, a simple act of communion that comforted them both.

When she had first met Daniel, she had thought him to be a quiet, gentle little man. The fourth child of five, he had the look of someone who had been left behind. Back then, the friends they knew had thought of her as the confident one. Back then, she would lead him by the hand, and he would follow after her, a smile on his face as she taught him the way. They had rented a little flat together in Midholme in the early days. A little one-bed place above the chemists on Aston Street; stained carpets, threadbare curtains, but warm and welcome and theirs. Good fortune got in the way as good fortune sometimes does. Unexpectedly, they had come into some money when his father had died – complications and conditions in the will gave Daniel unexpected favour, even as his brothers and sisters disowned him. They bought the house at number twelve. It wasn’t so far from the town, but as the years passed it felt as though it was drifting further and further away. Daniel didn’t mind. It had never occurred to Kelly how her husband might have considered ownership to be a kind of victory.

Outside, she saw he was doing all the talking, while Alasdair Felton simply watched him. Alasdair’s posture was slouched in resignation and his expression was a sad one. He shook his head at something, then nodded at something else. Finally, he glanced up at the window where Kelly was standing and smiled briefly to acknowledge her before he turned away.

She watched him walk across the road, not looking one way or the other. When he reached the low brick wall, he climbed over it, bouncing to his feet in the mud beyond as though his agility had surprised them both. She saw him brush the dusting of snow off his jeans and jacket and she stayed watching as he set off across the field, painted white, a diminishing figure, a scarecrow, a stick man.

Downstairs, the front door slammed, and she felt the heat of her husband’s fury rising, theatrical, to fill the hall.

“The cheek of it,” he was saying to an audience he could only imagine hung on every word. “The absolute cheek of it.” Then he stopped, his abrupt silence an angry void that left room for the dunk-dunk-dunk of an insistent bass line delivered by distant speakers, its vibration pushing through the double glazing after all.

“And they’ve left the music on!” he said, the pitch of his voice rising to a point. “Can you believe this? They’ve left the fucking music on.”

Kelly closed her eyes. It helped, in a way.

***

Number 12

Three days later, Daniel Dormer woke to find his wife and son had left during the night. They’d taken the Saab, his mother-in-law’s jewellery box and the first edition of
Brave New World which they’d found in a second-hand bookshop in Frome during their honeymoon. Kelly had left a note on the kitchen table. Four pages, double sided, in which she laid out exactly why she was not coming back. He read only the first page before consigning the rest to the fire in the living room.

It didn’t make any sense to him. Number twelve was the only house left on Hope Street. He had been right all along. He had done the right thing. He had acted in an exemplary manner and he had absolutely nothing to be ashamed about.

So why was there now this void in his house where his family had once been? It felt inexplicable. It felt unfair.

It was too early to open a beer but he did so anyway, sitting in his armchair in the lounge, the thin sound of the sound system from number seven tapping into focus whenever he allowed himself silence. It seemed to him that the same ten or twelve tracks were cycling over and over. Awful music. Cheap.
Poppy. How the power hadn’t been cut off yet he didn’t know. He’d made enough phone calls. Left enough messages.
Good god, it was grating.

He stared up at the corner of the ceiling.

This was how it started, he thought. In corners. In clefts. In alcoves where the shadows conspired and bred like spiderwebs. As he stared into the corner of the room, he imagined how the darkness might creep across the contours of the ceiling tiles, snaking across the room like tangles of long black hair.

The thought alarmed him. He leapt to his feet and edged closer, searching for evidence that his home had been compromised. He pulled the foot stool across the floor and climbed onto it so he could peer closer, but he felt nothing. There was nothing there at all.

As the days passed, his paranoia grew. He moved restlessly from room to room, searching for signs. Brushing his fingers across the walls and floors, inspecting his home’s infrastructure, looking for anything that might demonstrate to him how it was destined to fail.

There was a picture in the dining room that Kelly had loved, but which he had never warmed to. In it, a woman sat alone in a cluttered country kitchen, her head turned slightly to look out of the painting, her expression a little arch as though she had only just realised she had been seen, caught in the act of something impossible to prove. He didn’t know the artist, he’d never asked. But on that particular afternoon, he was struck with the idea that the kitchen in the painting was starting to become unliveable in the same ways as the houses on Hope Street.

There was nothing to support this hypothesis. The painting hadn’t changed in any meaningful way. The colours were still vivid and bright. But Daniel’s fear was irrational and untamed, he only needed to see the picture from a slightly different perspective to assume it had become the breach he had been looking for. He took it with both hands and tore it from the wall, throwing it to the floor.

Staring at the discoloured rectangle it left behind, his fear was compounded as it dawned on him just how little of his house he could actually see, and the realisation made him stagger backwards, inadvertently stamping on the glass frame and making it splinter under his heel.

Over the next few days, he worked his way through every room, clearing each of furniture, pictures, carpets, light fittings, as though the corruption could breed in the spaces they had occupied. Out went the computers, the accounts, the family photographs. Out went the flat-screen television, the hi-fi, his wife’s paperbacks, his son’s toys. Out went everything with gaps and nooks and spaces where shadows could be smuggled in.

He stacked everything in the front garden, the pile teetering dangerously until it spilled into the road. He didn’t care. He had too much work to do. He emptied cupboards in the kitchen, tipped out the drawers. He retrieved his Makita drill from the shed and pulled down the internal doors. He tore up the carpets and fought them through the doorway. He hacked away at the laminate, exposing the real wooden floorboards beneath. They looked bald and dusty, unused to being seen.

He bought paint, white paint, and worked through every room, every wall, leaving them as bright and blinding as he could. He surprised himself when he started to sing along to the hum of the music from number seven. He’d heard the songs so often now, he knew all the words.

They would see. His wife, his son. When they came back, they would see. Layer after layer after layer, he painted, as though he might ward off the darkness by making the whole house shine.

***

This is Malcolm Devlin’s fifth story for
Interzone. He also has a novelette in the current
Black Static, with other stories recently published in
Nightscript 2 and the anthology
Aickman’s Heirs. His first collection,
You Will Grow Into Them, is due to be published by Unsung Stories in June 2017. Current house status: liveable.

BOOK ZONE

STRANGE MONSTERS: A MUSIC & WORDS COLLABORATION

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam & Peter Brewer

THE WOLF IN THE ATTIC

Paul Kearney

BODIES OF WATER

V.H. Leslie

REVENGER

Alastair Reynolds

SUMMERLONG

Peter S. Beagle

SPARROW FALLING

Gaie Sebold

THE RISE OF IO

Wesley Chu

THE ROOT

Na’amen Gobert Tilahun

DECADE 1: THE BEST OF ALBEDO ONE
edited by John Kenny

STRANGE MONSTERS: A MUSIC & WORDS COLLABORATION

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam & Peter Brewer

Easy Brew Studio, 56 minutes, download $7.99/CD $9.99 (cdbaby.com)

Ian Hunter

It seems apt to me that the day after I caught poet Ryan Van Winkle read in Glasgow that I should settle down and listen to
Strange Monsters. Apt because Van Winkle has performed around the world inside his portable poetry room, a room filled with ephemera that the listener can pick up, flick through, read, while Van Winkle reads his poems almost in the background and lets the words wash over you, hoping that some might stick in your mind. If you haven’t guessed by my mention that I listened to
Strange Monsters and that it’s available from places like CD Baby…yes,
Strange Monsters isn’t a book, it’s a collaboration between short story writer and poet Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and Peter Brewer, and is available on CD, or some of that download stuff that I don’t understand. Stufflebeam provides the words, and occasionally she reads them too, although there are times when that is left to some actors to bring her stories and poems to life. Likewise, composer Brewer has written the music and seven other musicians join him to provide the contemporary jazz soundtrack to five stories and a selection of poems from Stufflebeam’s back catalogue.

Readers of
Interzone and
Black Static will know Stufflebeam from her appearances in those pages where ‘Sleepers’ and ‘The Devil’s Hands’ were published, and her stories have also appeared in magazines like
Lightspeed and
Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She’s perfected that useful trick of having a story published and then reprinted, and possibly appearing again in audio form. Thus, one of the stories in this audiobook, ‘Skeletons’, was published elsewhere, reprinted, and had an audio outing before appearing here – but not like this, I’ll bet, not with actors speaking the words and some jazz scratching in the background or lulling you into a false sense of security. If you know Stufflebeam from her poems, there are six collected, all read by the poet herself, and it is interesting to note that practically all her published poems are here, and some of those like ‘The Ferryman’ and ‘Strange Monster’ received favourable mentions from Ellen Datlow in her
Best Horror of the Year anthologies.

The audio collection starts with ‘The Stink of Horses’, a four-hander as Stufflebeam and three actors perform the piece, giving voice to their encounters with the mysterious Marina Golovina, a cursed Russian ballerina who hopefully didn’t stink like a horse after dancing, a remark and observation attributed to Chekhov. Mind you, given the jealous and obsessive attentions of others, body odours are the least of Marina’s worries. Brewer maintains the classical connection, drawing on Tchaikovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty for his jazz accompaniment.

Next up is the story ‘Mrs. Stiltskin’, a prize-winning story which also appeared on
Podcastle, and which eavesdrops into the questioning of a wife by a police officer about the disappearance of a little boy who wants to know where all her children came from, but this wife and mother can stand up for herself. In ‘Skeletons’, skeletons of extinct animals have a life of sorts, and can be kept as pets, but there are other skeletons out in the wild as a group of friends are about to discover when they go camping. Skeletons in the grass, skeletons in the cupboards of your heart, if you can squeeze past the love you hide there. ‘No Eyes’ appeared last year in
PsychoPomp and is a disturbing story about a widow and a skeleton that appears at her door, wanting in. Should she?

Following this we have selected poems, and given that a couple were honourable mention nods by Ellen Datlow you can expect some creepiness, particularly in the poem ‘Dining with Echoes’. The poems like the stories themselves are inspired by May Sarton’s poem called ‘My Sisters, Oh My Sisters’ where the “ordinary” or expected lives of women as wife, lover, mother were seen to suffer in the eyes of those around them as the women pursued an artistic path and were regarded as “strange monsters” by their families and friends.

Finally we have ‘Where You Came From’, a story of a werewolf in love – or is it? You decide, but it’s creepy, graphic, Southern Gothic perhaps. I was thinking of Joyce Carol Oates when I listened to it.

Strange Monsters is something you need to listen to more than once in order to fully appreciate the words and the spaces in between them, not always filled by music. Sometimes the delivery of the words is the percussion, the engine room of the piece.

Praise has to be given to Brewer’s jazz compositions: eerie and scratching in places, minimalist in others, or simply smoky and seductive when the words are not. The guitar work reminded me of the sonic textures of David Torn in his post-Everyman Band days when he was collaborating with the likes of Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. Good stuff, although I’m sure the CD contains lots of photos of the performers, something my Dropbox version lacked.

As a fan of Neil Gaiman, I have several CDs of his early work where he reads stories and prose poems with a musical accompaniment, sometimes in the background, sometimes to set the scene or to finish off a piece. Stufflebeam and Brewer don’t have that sort of clout and used Kickstarter to bring this endeavour to fruition. More power to them, and here’s to more cross-media projects from them and anyone else who dares give it a try.

THE WOLF IN THE ATTIC

Paul Kearney

Solaris pb, 294pp, £7.99

Lawrence Osborn

Paul Kearney is probably best known as a writer of epic fantasies. His series The Monarchies of God, The Sea Beggars, and The Macht are all excellent examples of that genre. So this new book from his pen will be something of a surprise to readers who come to it expecting more of the same. Instead of another epic fantasy, he offers us a lyrical coming of age story set in Oxford at the end of the 1920s.

The heroine is one Anna Francis (or Sphrantzes), a twelve-year-old Greek refugee who survived the 1922 sack of Smyrna by the Turks. She is now living in Oxford with her father and is desperately unhappy. She has no friends of her own age and she misses her mother who was killed by the Turks. To make matters worse, in his despair over the loss of his home and family her father has turned to alcohol and become obsessed with campaigning for the repatriation of Greek refugees. Their life is increasingly impoverished, though he somehow finds the money to keep paying for her private education.

Anna’s story begins in fragmentary manner, reflecting her tutor’s complaints about her dragonfly mind. Snatches of narrative give us her impressions of Oxford and memories of their evacuation from Smyrna. The story is written largely in the first person and in the present tense, giving it a slow, dreamlike quality.

Anna takes refuge from her loneliness in books and daydreams and long walks around Oxford. One winter’s evening she slips out of their house in Jericho to escape yet another of her father’s interminable committee meetings. She finds her way to Port Meadow where she witnesses a killing, which marks the beginning of her descent into a living nightmare.

Her life has become linked with that of the killer, a young Romani boy named Luca. A few weeks later near midwinter, she encounters Luca and his family in Wytham Wood. Shortly afterwards, she helps Luca hide from the Roadmen, the ancient enemies of his people. And the next morning her father is found dead – apparently murdered by one or more individuals he had invited into the house.

Anna, now orphaned and disowned by the Greek exile community, is destined for the workhouse. Instead she runs away, intent on finding her way to Luca’s people. Her quest leads her into an ever stranger world – the Old World, of Romani and Roadmen, of skinchangers and an Oxfordshire farmer, Gabriel, who may also be some kind of native deity; a world in which she faces down the devil and avenges her father’s death. And at the end of it all she discovers what she thought she had lost forever: home, the home of her heart – no longer in Smyrna but in rural Oxfordshire.

Strangely, though, the novel does not feel as if this is the end of the story. She has come of age and she has attained her heart’s desire (albeit through great loss), but we have been given glimpses of her importance (and that of her relationship with Luca) to the Old World. And these glimpses point to another story beyond this one.

Also pointing beyond this story are her tantalising encounters with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They are portrayed sympathetically and both (but particularly Lewis) help her at crucial points early in the story. But that help could have been provided by others, so why drag them into it at all? And why play with the history of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity if his is no more than a walk-on part?

Then there is the farmer Gabriel. He feels too large a character to be limited to the supporting role he has here. Is this simple countryman in fact some kind of genius loci or tutelary deity? He reminded me of the kind of being Ransome becomes in C.S. Lewis’s
That Hideous Strength. What is his place in the age old struggle between the Romani and the Roadmen? And what does Anna’s coming mean for him and for that ancient tension?

At the end of
The Wolf in the Attic, I was left with a slew of questions and a sense that Kearney had teased me glimpses of a mythical England about which I’d like to know a good deal more. But this should not be taken as criticism. I thought it was a superbly written book. His previous books have been enjoyable, action-packed fantastical romps. But this is quieter, deeper, more evocative – the kind of book that demands you re-read it as soon as you have reached the end.
The Wolf in the Attic is a book to savour. I just hope there is a sequel to answer some of my questions!

BODIES OF WATER

V.H. Leslie

Salt pb, 160pp, £8.99

Maureen Kincaid Speller

When we open a horror novel, we expect to be unsettled by what we read; we anticipate some sort of ‘wrongness’ from which the story must inevitably flow. It turns out, however, that horror is not simply created by the introduction of wrongness. It needs to be the right kind of wrongness. The problem with V.H. Leslie’s
Bodies of Water is that the wrongness is itself off-kilter.

We find ourselves in familiarly uncanny territory as the novel opens: a large, forbidding building, with an obscure history. Wakewater House was once an institution where hydropathy – the water cure – was practised. Having fallen on hard times, it is being converted into apartments, one of which has been bought by Kirsten, looking for a new beginning after her relationship breaks up. We can probably make a good guess as to how this story is likely to turn out, more so when we realise that it is a paired narrative, telling the story of two women in the same building, some hundred years apart. It’s not difficult to surmise some sort of connection between their respective situations, nor to suspect that we might be heading into ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ territory, as Evelyn’s cure is distinctly reminiscent of that prescribed for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist.

The plot points continue to pile up. The strange attraction Kirsten feels for the river flowing yards from the house, the shadowy figures she sees at the water’s edge, strange occurrences in her flat, the neighbour researching the history of drowned women – all of these suggest a classic ‘woman in psychic jeopardy’ scenario. Absolutely nothing is missed. And that, I fear, is a major problem with
Bodies of Water. It works so diligently to set up the narrative structure, it never quite gets around to telling the story. Or rather, the story is outlined in some detail – and it is fine if entirely predictable to anyone who has read this kind of thing before – but Leslie seems curiously reluctant to further explore the various possibilities she’s established.

Given the comparative familiarity of the plot devices already assembled here I was very much hoping she would test the boundaries of these narrative conventions rather more thoroughly than actually happened. Indeed, it is almost as though she is overwhelmed by the story she has come up with, as a result of which she hides behind a barricade of even more ideas rather than engaging more fully with the complex emotional currents she’s already hinting at. Frustratingly, to discuss the one creative decision that did surprise me would be to give away the novel’s ending, but the author makes a very puzzling choice when the United Kingdom’s rivers have their own extremely rich folklore. It’s especially odd when there seems to be such an emphasis on the specificity of place throughout the novel.

This is a novel filled with potential, in the characters and in the telling, but while the story may be about wasted potential, bogged down in social mores, the story’s potential remains untapped. In the same way, this is also a novel of high passion, yet told in a way that seems to dodge engaging with those passions, even though one strand of the narrative is self-evidently about social conventions insisting on the concealment of passion while the other hints at the existence of a previous abusive relationship. I have seen other commentators praise the novel’s emotional impact but I just don’t find that in the narrative. Even the moments of high emotional tension seem oddly flat. The title does heavily signal what we are supposed to understand about the story but there nonetheless remains a significant gap between intent and achievement.

Where
Bodies of Water really does succeed is in its evocation of atmosphere – the edge of the Thames was never gloomier, the figures lurking at its edge are genuinely creepy, and Wakewater House is everything you’d expect of a semi-derelict building site in the throes of conversion. Here at last the wrongness is absolutely spot on; it is in moments such as these that Leslie displays her craft to good effect, but it is not enough. The narrative lacks sufficient connective tissue to fill the gaps between these acutely observed miniatures in the way that a novel requires. As a result the necessary wrongness of the plot is let down by the fumbled wrongness of the narrative technique. The novel struggles to breathe but never quite comes to life.

REVENGER

Alastair Reynolds

Gollancz hb, 380pp, £18.99

Jack Deighton

The first thing that strikes the reader about this novel is that (barring two very small encyclopaedia extracts laid out in a dark green) it is printed in brown ink. This turns out to be no mere presentational quirk but is instead symbolic. Our narrator, Arafura Ness, tells us fairly early on that she has scratched her story in blood onto rough paper. (Just how rough we find out in the last chapter.) This foreshadowing of things to come belies the book’s initial brightness which has some of the tonal qualities of a Victorian Boy’s Own Adventure – except for the female lead. Throughout the book individuals are denoted by the word “cove”, spaceship crew argot abounds and there are quests for hidden treasure. In that sense it might have been a YA title and in accord with that there is first the necessity to be rid of the parents.

Fura is sixteen, well educated, but her mother is dead and her father has fallen on hard times. Her elder sister, Ardana, leads her astray, into the shady environs of Neural Alley where she is tested for the ability to read Bones. These are only one of many types of artefact left over from before the Sundering and allow Bone Readers to communicate instantly if sometimes unreliably across the reaches of space. Both sisters are of course adept. To gain quoins to help their father’s plight they sign up for six months service on the
Monetta’s Mourn under Captain Rackamore.

Like all the other spaceships in the novel
Monetta is a sunjammer with auxiliary ion engines. Rackamore uses her to seek out baubles, closed environments which contain valuable items of ancient tech but which only open at irregular intervals and for irregular times. Along with the Bone Readers the ship’s crew contains an augurer to divine those times, an assessor to determine what any finds are worth, integrators to unseal internal locks plus other specialists. Each bauble (and most of the large habitable environments in the book) has a mini black hole called a swallower at its core.

The science fictional aspects of this – a degenerate humanity seemingly restricted to a relatively small area of space surrounding the habitats of the Congregation, in an era called the Thirteenth Occupation; cut adrift from its origins in the Old Sun, a history with many gaps, with only barely recalled legends for memories, relying on tech it can use but not understand, tech more or less indistinguishable from magic – mostly lie in the background and lend the whole the feel of steampunk in reverse, while bone reading verges on fantasy. There are also aliens, especially those nicknamed Crawlies who fortuitously turned up just before a banking crash and now oversee the financial system despite claiming to have no interest in money themselves, a question as to just what exactly quoins might really be and hints of shadowy others beyond human knowledge.

Of course things do not go smoothly. While plundering a bauble the
Monetta is attacked by the shadowy ship
Nightjammer, captained by the notorious Bosa Sennen. Most of the crew are killed, Ardana is captured and Fura only saved by the selfless action of the previous Bone Reader, Garval. In hiding, Fura is forced to eat lightvine to survive. As a consequence she contracts the glowy, which makes her skin emit light and may affect her brain function. She and the only other survivor, Prozor, eventually gain rescue and form an alliance, which is soon interrupted by what at first seems an authorial misstep as Fura is legally forced to return to her original home. But this becomes a means to underline how much her experience has changed her. Desires for both revenge and to free Ardana have made any thought of returning to her old life intolerable. With the help of Paladin, the family robot (another remnant of ancient tech, a battle robot no less, but with much diminished competence) she escapes – a process which requires the hasty surgical removal of a lower arm to get rid of her restraint bracelet with Fura acquiring an artificial hand in its place, the partial destruction of Paladin and the devastation of her father. She again teams up with Prozor, taking ship on the
Queen Crimson and working towards inveigling Bosa into a trap.

Reynolds tackles it all with brio. Yet he doesn’t ignore deeper concerns. Bosa has a rationale for her depredations. Fura regrets the hardness which has entered her soul, the deceptions she has had to undertake, the decisions made.
Revenger asks the question: is the search for revenge worth the price of turning you into what you detested?

I doubt I’ll read a more engaging work of SF this year.

SUMMERLONG

Peter S. Beagle

Tachyon tpb, 238pp, $15.95

Maureen Kincaid Speller

My relationship with Peter S. Beagle’s writing is a long one, and enduring. I read
The Last Unicorn in the early 1970s, and was enchanted by it. A year or so later I found a copy of his astonishingly accomplished first novel,
A Fine and Private Place, which similarly delighted me. It must be galling for any writer to be remembered best for their earliest work, but there it is. Beagle has written some excellent fantasy novels since, and some wonderful short stories, but somehow nothing has ever quite hit the spot, for me at least, in the same way as those two early novels. Until now.

Which is not to say that
Summerlong is a faithful replica of either novel. It is quite definitely its own thing but while clearly showing its relationship to
A
Fine and Private Place in terms of atmosphere, and
The Last Unicorn in terms of plot, the latter noted by other reviewers. Abe and Joanna are a long-established couple, she a flight attendant, he a retired professor of history. It’s a comfortable relationship, full of routines that accommodate the fact that they don’t, even now, live together, but one feels that underneath it all they are beginning to ask themselves just how long they can keep going before a change comes about. Joanna is asking herself how much longer she wants to keep flying back and forth between Chicago and Seattle, while Abe is wondering if there is any point in finishing his book on John Ball and the Peasants’ Rebellion [sic]. In the meantime, they stay over at each other’s houses, go out for dinner, bicker amiably, laugh and joke together. It might almost be cloying except that Beagle knows just how far such dialogue can go before it becomes impossibly twee.

And then, one night, at their favourite diner, they encounter Lioness Lazos, a young woman who looks like Botticelli’s Primavera and who seems to have an extraordinary effect on everyone she meets. Almost before they know what they’re doing, they’ve invited her to set up home in Abe’s garage, although they can’t explain why they’ve done this. Other things seem to be happening, too. Gardner Island, where Abe lives, begins to enjoy the most remarkably lovely weather. Abe, who has long nursed a secret ambition to play blues harmonica unexpectedly finds himself drafted into a band, and Joanna suddenly realises she needs to learn sea canoeing. And Lily, Joanna’s daughter, falls head over heels in love with Lioness.

As the novel unfolds, what we might have taken as longstanding contentment within a comfortable relationship is shown to be at best a compromise, a compromise which is now rendered unstable by the arrival of Lioness. And if by this point we have realised who this young woman is, her mother a nurserywoman, her father a “powerful, mysterious, even dangerous” Greek businessman, and herself on the run from an unhappy marriage, we might begin to comprehend the mythic forces that threaten to entangle Abe and Joanna, forces that themselves are shaped by a compromise. And if we look back to those early novels, we probably know already that while there will be resolution of a sort, there is no guarantee of a happy ending.

And thank goodness for that. For me, one of the attractions of Beagle’s early work was that he really didn’t make it easy for the reader. The real world doesn’t work like fairy tales, and while Beagle offered hope, he did not make promises his fictions wouldn’t keep. Michael and Laura and Schmendrick and Molly Grue stepped beyond their novels’ endings into hopeful uncertainty. In
Summerlong we see that hopeful uncertainty maturing while that happy ending is still proving elusive. And that, perhaps, is the point.

The question I have asked myself all along is whether
Summerlong is a retreat to an old and reliable formula. However, I don’t think this is the case. While
Summerlong undeniably revisits earlier themes, there is much about it that is fresh and new, not least the portrayal of a tender long-term relationship between two older people (a genuine rarity in modern literature, and certainly in modern fantasy writing). The fantastical elements are undoubtedly more evanescent than in the earlier novels but that is perhaps unsurprising given the worldy-wise natures of our protagonists. If, as we are often told, change is the only constant, then
Summerlong seems to suggest that while change may be slower to come as one grows older, it will nonetheless arrive, and in the most shocking and inconvenient ways possible.
Summerlong reminds us that we can never taken anything for granted, and that includes our assumptions about a much-loved and familiar writer.

SPARROW FALLING

Gaie Sebold

Solaris pb, 384pp, £7.99

Elaine Gallagher

Sparrow Falling is the second of Gaie Sebold’s books about Eveline Duchen, also known as Evvie Sparrow. Following the events of the first book,
Shanghai Sparrow, Evvie has started the Sparrow School for young ladies, which houses a secret school in which Evvie and her mentor Ma Pether teach such useful skills as thieving, burglary, con artistry and spycraft. Evvie’s aim is to go legitimate and sell the skills of her girls as security consultants to people who want to prevent their premises and businesses from being robbed, but Ma, a Fagin-like master of thieves, would likely see this as snitching and refuse to help. Evvie’s friend Liu, a fox spirit, is bound up in intrigues between the Dragon King, the Queen of the Folk and the Baba Yaga, and is not around to be of any help to her. The school is not making enough money and the bills are piling up and Evvie is on her own.

The world of the Sparrow stories is steampunk Victorian, with an empire, airships, steam cars and a technical kind of magic known as Etheric science, which Evvie’s mother is adept in. It also has fairies, who live in an otherworld and play vicious games with humans. The machinations of the fairy courts and the schemes of the book’s main antagonist, Joshua Stug, are the major theme of the book where
Shanghai Sparrow was more of a steampunk romp. The Queen and her court abduct children as playthings, abetted by Stug, and leave changelings behind. The Dragon court have ornate rituals of honour and obligation and Liu’s father, as whimsical as any fox spirit, expects Liu to pay the consequences of his father’s offence.

I find many of these kinds of books unreadable because the author doesn’t have a feel for the language of the period. Gaie Sebold gets the language of these books spot on. Evvie slips between the ‘drawing-room’ language of her polite upbringing and the argot that she learned when her family were impoverished and she was on the street and under Ma’s tutelage. Evvie’s mother is polite and a little bit unworldly, the language of the Courts is formal without slipping into Chinoiserie or being too mannered but the whimsical nature of the other world comes across in names like Stug and Thripp, which remind me of
Lud-in-the-Mist and
Lyonesse.

And then there’s Ma Pether. A garrulous, opinionated old biddy who butts heads with Evvie’s mother, and in a wonderful sequence near the end bamboozles an embassy guard with such nonstop chatter that he gives up and lets everyone past.

The book is light and fun but underneath that are serious concerns of character and the world in which it is set, and family is a major theme throughout. Evvie and Liu are struggling to deal with parents or mentors who see them as children and who don’t know how to let them grow up and take charge of their own affairs, or see them as appendages to do as their parents order. Stug is so obsessed with having a son of his own that he enters an unsavoury deal with the Queen.Unlike a lot of steampunk stories the underside of the world is in view; some of the families that rent Stug’ slums are so impoverished and beaten that they will give away their own children.

There are other interesting characters who I feel don’t have as much space as they might have done, while the story concentrated on Evvie’s and Liu’s problems.

Beth, Evvie’s friend and a talented engineer, spends the beginning of the book on the sidelines, and while she comes into her own and learns confidence enough to help save the day, I hope to see more of her in the next book. The School also is in the background of the story for the first two-thirds of the book, and comes out to be led by Ma and Beth in the conclusion. Thripp, an inventor who is fascinated by Evvie’s mother’s etherics work, is the kind of jovial but unsettling character who in a Jack Vance story would turn out to be a villain.

Where
Shanghai Sparrow was a self-contained story and tied up its conclusions neatly,
Sparrow Falling expects to continue into another book. I see this as an
Empire Strikes Back ending; while the main plots involving Evvie and Liu are concluded, they end on a dramatic low and there are major plot threads set up in the book that don’t have a conclusion. Thripp, Beth, the School, and the situation that Liu leaves behind, are all crying out to be continued. I look forward to the next instalment, whether this is a trilogy or an ongoing series.

THE RISE OF IO

Wesley Chu

Angry Robot pb, 424pp, £8.99

Stephen Theaker

This cyberpunk action thriller takes place four years after the end of the Alien World War. Twenty-odd years before that, humans discovered that they had been sharing the planet all along with a secret race of body-hopping aliens, the Quasing, who arrived in a spaceship crash eons ago. Unable to survive unprotected in Earth’s environment, they had lived inside the dinosaurs, then inside the cavemen, and for the last few thousand years – an eyeblink to them – they have lived among us. Despite the Quasing pulling the strings, history played out pretty much how it did in our world.

When the invention of Penetra scanners revealed their foggy existence, things changed forever. At first they were hunted. This particular book, which follows a previous trilogy (The Lives of Tao,
The Deaths of Tao and
The Rebirths of Tao) doesn’t say how that went, but given the Quasing’s immense political influence one imagines it went quite badly for the hunters. The war then saw the countries of the world taking sides between two Quasing factions: the Genjix, a nasty bunch who think progress comes from conflict, and hence encourage it at all times, and the Prophus, who began to feel guilty about the misery they had caused.

Our brave young hero is Ella Patel, who doesn’t know much about any of that. She knows the war lasted a decade, that it left India shattered, that it took her from Singapore and left her an illiterate orphan in Surat. Unsurprisingly, this has left her rather cantankerous, though not so much that it’d put anyone off reading about her: the way she irritates and needles everyone she meets is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book. Whether it’s the other inhabitants of Crate Town, a desperate slum built out of shipping containers, or deadly Genjix super-assassins, she’ll do their heads in something rotten; it’s always amusing.

She annoys no one so much as the title character, Io, one of the least impressive of the Prophus Quasings. Long after the others left the Yucatán crash site and swam into the ocean in search of life to glom on to, Io was still trying to get communications working. She’s been catching up ever since, and it doesn’t help that her host humans have a habit of getting themselves killed, from the first sailor she possessed, to General Custer, through to secret agent Emily Curran, leaving Io in need of yet another new host: Ella, who doesn’t even pretend to respect her uninvited new passenger. She thinks Io is boring, full of dumb talk, but if they don’t learn to work together, neither will survive.

It’s a good set-up for a novel. Right next to the shipping containers of Crate Town a secret facility is in development, and, as Ella and Io work to investigate it, the narrative benefits of the protagonist having an onboard frenemy become clear. They can have lots of little arguments, debate the best course of action, and get at each other all they want without any need to explain why no one else acts during the conversation. Ella’s impoverished background means there’s a lot she needs to know, and we can learn it along with her. It also means she’s extremely scrappy and determined, a con artist and thief who leaps at the chance to join the good guys because it pays better.

The other side of it is that she’s not ready to fight. She’s underweight, unhealthy, and still carrying the physical and emotional scars of living a very hard and lonely life. So although there are action scenes, the book has to keep Ella away from the main mission at first. It takes five months of training and over half the book before she goes on her first solo job as an operative: this is very much the first book of a series. It works fine as a jumping-on point for those who haven’t read the previous trilogy, but less so as a standalone novel.
Star Wars wouldn’t be the same film if the Death Star was still in one piece at the end of it, and while that isn’t exactly what happens here, the book may leave readers with a similar sense of anticlimax.

However, there is plenty to enjoy before that. The action is well done, Ella is a fine character, and there are signs that after this book’s tight focus on Crate Town and its surroundings the next one may open out a bit more. It sets up plenty of future conflict, and fans planning already to read the entire series will probably be very happy with it.

THE ROOT

Na’amen Gobert Tilahun

Night Shade Books pb, 420pp, $14.99

Wendy Bradley

There’s a lot to like about
The Root, Na’amen Gobert Tilahun’s debut novel, the first in the urban fantasy Wrath & Athenaeum trilogy.

Erik is a former child star who has just beaten up the school bullies and is awaiting collection by his mother and her partner. Instead of telling him off, his mother tells him he’s been awakened, because he has berserker powers and is part of a hereditary line of superhero types, the “blooded”, descended from what may well be ancient gods. And that’s just for starters: there are beings leaking through from another reality onto the streets of San Francisco, and they’re carrying off fledgling blooded either with the connivance or not of two different secret organisations.

There are also chapters from the point of view of characters in the alternate reality, such as Lil, a female apprentice in a world that seems to be falling apart under attack from what is essentially a tangible darkness. It’s a rich and strange alien landscape that reminds me a lot of the new weird worlds of, say, a China Miéville novel.

I like the way Lil’s power is, basically, the power of saying magic words: the physicality of this, the necessity of speaking up, speaking out, using your voice and all its opposites – swallowing your rage, holding your tongue – is a subtle and pointed piece of sensitive feminist writing.

Essentially it’s a cake of a novel: Erik’s back story as a child star fallen from grace in a sex scandal is the thick icing-and-marzipan layer that I’d have been happy to pick off and consume on its own. But it’s only the superficial topping on a rich mixture of ingredients that go on and on and on through this world, the secret underbelly of the blood and their organisations and opponents, and then the utter unfamiliarity of Lil’s world… If the rest of the series lives up to the concepts, someone should make the TV series.

What works less well for me…

Well,
The Root could have done with another pass by the editor, and, with multiple alien worlds in one fast-paced romp, it seems to me the book would have benefited from a cast list at the back specifying who was who, what powers they had, and which world they came from.

Also, Lil’s world has little patches of darkness that cluster around her in the far reaches of the library where she works, and I was very surprised by the fact that no-one makes any connection between them and the darkness menacing the universe.

And yet there’s something here, clearly. If the Wrath & Athenaeum series has legs, maybe this is its
Shards of Honor.

DECADE 1

Edited by John Kenny

Aeon Press pb, 194pp, £9.95

Andy Hedgecock

Decade 1 is a varied and entertaining anthology containing stories on the themes of class, the abuse of power, psycho-sexual development, loss, identity and the creative process. Some of the settings are urban, some rural: most take place in strange but recognisable versions of our own world. The cover art is massively misleading.

Editor John Kenney’s introduction describes the birth of
Albedo One in a Dublin pub in the 1990s, and describes the challenges of selecting a set of stories that capture the character and quality of his magazine in its first decade. He mentions setting out the stories in order of publication: I will discuss them in the same sequence.

There are faint echoes of the
Fast Show’s Mr Dead sketch in ‘Decline’, but John Hanamy’s satire of corporate manners is sharper and more unsettling. For the narrator, death at the age of twenty is no barrier to succeeding his father as company CEO. A decayed corpse in a deep freeze, his every need is met by servants. I read his decline – and growing awareness of his own uselessness – as symbolic of the slow collapse of late-period capitalism, but other readings of this absurd and oddly affecting fable are available. There’s also a satirical element to Peadar Ó Guilin’s compelling ‘Charly’s Ark’, a weirdly entertaining story which explores notions of class war and decadence. Ó Guilin creates a world ruled by effete, indolent and flabby thugs. His restrained but assured style prevents the whole thing tilting too far towards comedic absurdity.

For me, ‘Antique Flesh’ by Gill Alderman is one of the anthology’s less successful stories. At the heart of this slice of high fantasy are some interesting ideas about the power of creativity, but the narrative is all but stifled by the weight of Alderman’s florid prose.

Robert Neilson’s ‘Lost in an Amber Moment’ posits a whole new tourist industry based on the conceit that experiences and feelings can be captured and exhibited. Neilson’s keen and specific observations create a poignant and enigmatic tale. I wasn’t convinced by Sean MacRoibin’s ‘Anatomy of Resistentialist Induced Matricide’. At first the narrative had a charming energy, but it soon hit a level of ebullient wackiness that left me weary and baffled.

At this stage the anthology seemed a bit of a rollercoaster ride in terms of quality and appeal, but then came a sequence of stories of impressive range, originality and imaginative power.

‘Overload’, by David Murphy, is set in a very near future Dublin plagued by poverty and police brutality. Young barman Ash subjugates his personality and sexuality as a means of survival. Aspects of this disquieting and, ultimately, heart breaking story are open to a range of interpretations. I read it as an elegy for the tolerant and complex nature of urban life and identity. The quiet and contemplative ambience of the pub chain that employs Ash seems aligned to a form of life negating neo-fascism. Murphy portrays a dystopia that is paradoxically fresh and familiar.

Tais Teng’s ‘Crowned by Lightning’ reimagines the later years of mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary as he sets out to climb the Tower of Babel as an act of expiation for sins of colonialism and cultural hegemony. Accompanied by Tenzing, his companion from the Everest expedition, Hillary sets out on a physical and spiritual journey from an alternative version of contemporary Iraq. An original and vivid story of guilt and transcendence.

Regular readers of
Interzone will not be surprised that Neil Williamson’s contribution ‘The Bone Farmer’ is one of the most powerful stories here. Eerie, touching and crammed with cortex-searing imagery, this post-apocalyptic tale of plague, beleaguered communities and grim struggles for survival gave an early indication that Williamson would develop into one of our finest short story writers.

‘Isolating an Element’ by Dermot Ryan returns to the theme of subjugated sexuality explored in ‘Overload’. Benjamin, a middle-aged music teacher, lives with his mother and leads the life of an early adolescent with sexual fixations to match. His overwhelming obsession with an undergraduate music tutee triggers an event that remixes
The Day of the Triffids as a sexual psychodrama. Oedipus wrecks, so to speak. This may sound like a well-trodden thematic path, but Ryan’s take on thwarted eroticism is unique. Ryan’s story is grotesque, disturbing and witty.

My heart sinks when authors ‘repurpose’ titles of favourite books and films, but Mike O’Driscoll’s ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ is a gripping satire on the importance of art and the absurdities of the art market. The narrator, who begins the story by producing AI-based variations on the work of the figurative cubist Fernand Léger, is a pretentious, grasping wanker, but O’Driscoll somehow enables him to elicit our sympathy. A dark and entertaining rumination on the nature of creativity and the eternally vexed issue of authenticity.

Religious iconography piles into road traffic accident in John W. Sexton’s ‘On a Planet Similar to Ours, the Virgin Mary Says No’. The piece works well in its own terms, hatching feelings rather than thoughts. There’s no plot, no ethical dilemma, just dense prose-poetry and powerfully condensed flashes of consciousness.

‘The Olivia Reunion Party’ by Philip Raines and Harvey Welles is another story mixing depth psychology and social satire. The late Olivia’s sisters meet to celebrate her life and are soon knocking emotional lumps out of each other. Eventually, the true nature of the siblings is revealed as the authors carry out a quasi-Freudian, post-cubist examination of the vicissitudes of a short life in the glare of the media.

The final story is yet another dealing with issues of class and status. ‘Cinderella the Dirt Queen’, by H. Turnip Smith, takes liberties with the tales of Cinderella and Stephen King’s
Carrie. A flawed but essentially decent white trash teen struggles to cope with the local rich-bitch prom queen, parental abuse and the elements. This dark tale, in which dirty realism collides with myth, is thoroughly true to its subject matter. Grim lives are set out in sharp detail, but we are left with the sense that even an apparently hopeless struggle can yield a future of possibility and hope.

Decade 1 is an anthology put together by an editor with a genuine relish for the short story and a faith in the scope of fantastic fiction to tackle a vast range of human experience, behaviour and emotion. Recommended.

LASER FODDER

TONY LEE

THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT

SOLARIS

STALKER

11.22.63

IDENTICALS

TERRAHAWKS

A century and half after Huxley claimed that Darwin killed God (as recently depicted in Jon Amiel’s uneven
Creation, 2009) the supreme being still exists, and according to Jaco Van Dormael’s comic fantasy
THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT
(DVD, 8 August) is a reclusive sadist living in Brussels. After making the world he prompted generations of begats, but then focused on ‘universal annoyance’ so that – along with thousands of other laws – “there’s never just one hassle at a time”. Gifted with ESP and a telekinetic ability, God’s young daughter Ea sends time-of-death notes warning everyone of how much life they have left, and then she departs her family’s residence for the mortal world, to find six new apostles (including a sex maniac and a hitman!) and write a book of new gospels.

Belgium’s offering for this year’s Oscars,
The Brand New Testament is packed with whimsical humour (like a singing ghost fish) that jostles with poetic imagery and acutely observed melancholy. Introspective characters talking to the camera provide a host of narrative links but breaking the fourth wall contrasts with more unique satire, as when the angry God pursues his daughter into the world – via launderette washing-machine portal that gives ‘birth’ to him. Farcical episodes present the daredevil antics of suicidal Kevin, who is using his ‘guaranteed’ 62 years of life for immortality stunts, entirely dependent upon lucky escapes or divine intervention. Shades of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam are evident when Ea searches for proof of love, even if it’s between Catherine Deneuve and a circus gorilla.

When the magical uber-computer is finally restarted, sysadmin changes by the Almighty’s abandoned wife results in an absurdist utopia under flowery skies. Fans of
Amelie will love this…or “God damn it!”

Perhaps it’s just me but I always thought Kris Kelvin sounded like a superhero’s name – a typically alliterative secret identity, so there’s a vaguely comic book influence in the otherwise sombre adaptation of Lem’s novel that makes Tarkovsky’s dramatisation of
SOLARIS
(DVD/Blu-ray, 8 August) somehow more palatable to fans of western SF.

There can be little doubt that
Solaris is the best Russian SF film ever made. Sent from Earth to study a mysterious alien world, newly conscripted Kelvin arrives at an orbital station to discover that the existing crew are an oddly withdrawn and wholly secretive bunch. When Kelvin wakes up one day and finds his wife Hari beside him, it seems, at first, a normal enough situation, except for the fact that Kelvin remembers Hari killed herself back on Earth.

Is she an impostor? Hari’s ghost? A figment of his perturbed imagination, or a carbon-copy of the woman Kelvin knew, recreated by a cosmic intelligence inhabiting the apparently ‘living’ planet below – perhaps as a strange effort to communicate with the humans?
Solaris is very long, and very slow moving, even by the Anglo-American standard of Kubrick’s
2001. But it remains a sublime picture that tackles the complex philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, any criteria for sentience, and identity adrift in spacetime that formed major themes in New Wave SF.

Ray Bradbury’s fix-up novel
The Martian Chronicles
(1950, adapted for TV in 1980) featured stories also about an alien response to human visitors. Mars conjures a ghostly but reassuring fantasy, drawn from astronauts’ memories of familiar small-town USA, populated with lost loved ones. Both SF works inevitably shift from a kind of seduction to a confrontation with an uncanny otherness where tragedy looms close in their respective finales. Tarkovsky’s powerfully surrealistic vision and lack of good humour succeeds where the later TV version of
Martian Chronicles ultimately failed. Sentimentalism was arguably its downfall, while the Tarkovsky and Lem combination proves to be just as magnificently imaginative as it is quietly brooding. In part, this is what ensures
Solaris is greatly rewarding cinema that haunts viewers forever. Steven Soderbergh’s 2003 remake abandons the emotional poignancy and intellectual satire of Tarkovsky’s classic and settles for a romantic fantasy in a stylish milieu, with some cutting-edge visual effects.

Made in 1979, just seven years after
Solaris, Tarkovsky’s
STALKER
(DVD/Blu-ray, 22 August) is an equally enigmatic and quite bizarre nightmare movie based on
Roadside Picnic
(first English edition, 1977) by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I read this book when it was first published by Gollancz, and I have just read a newer translation (SF Masterworks edition, 2012). It’s a superbly concise novel of actionable ideas and it continues to impress half a lifetime later. As Le Guin’s foreword states, “it is a first contact story with a difference”. The aliens’ brief presence on Earth results in environmental damage, psychological contagion, and genetic mutation so the mystery is closer to the loony aesthetics of
Quatermass than standard UFOlogy like
CE3K. It’s the visitors’ apparent indifference to humankind that breaks away from traditional SF – as there’s no communication, no meeting of the minds whether hive, hyper- or over-mind. These aliens are unknowable and, perhaps, even less comprehensible to a lowly man than the purpose or meaning of the monolith in
2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the zone of the aliens’ landing site, thunder causes blindness, ‘happy ghosts’ flitter about, prospecting ‘stalkers’ find perpetual batteries are valuable swag, ‘rattling napkins’ are simply inexplicable, and “virtue is no good”. I must admit, ‘the Zone’ left such an impression on me that I named a genre magazine and its subsequent website after it. The grim determination of
Picnic’s roughneck antihero, Red Schuhart, recalls the survival traits of vengeful Gully Foyle in Bester’s
The Stars My Destination.

With such a compelling story, it’s baffling that so little of the
Picnic’s main plot survives in Tarkovsky’s version, although the Strugatskys wrote a screenplay draft. Of course,
Stalker emerges from filmmaking traditions of a picture that is inspired by its source material rather than being a faithful adaptation. Here, the protagonist is not a smuggler but more like a guide, and
Stalker makes telling references to the Stalker as a Chingachgook figure – from James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leather-stocking series (that includes
The Last of the Mohicans). Leading a scientist and a writer from drab sepia normality into the full colour of Zone wastelands (like Dorothy’s trip into Oz world!), the pathfinder is often philosophical and yet a pitiable saint, just as prone to sensitive monologue and soul-wracked soliloquy as his secretive clients. The writer bemoans a constant torment from his “painful, shameful occupation”, while the professor seems more concerned with destruction. Unlike the novel, there are no ‘empties’, no Golden Sphere, and the supposed prevalence of lethal traps in the Zone lack any gravitational effects. At the end, there’s a mythical room that grants wishes but obvious sci-fi demo remains strictly limited to an epilogue with telekinetic acts by the Stalker’s daughter.

There are sinister noises and creepy silences in this morbid atmosphere, while Tarkovsky ensures that scattered junk and haunted ruins are mesmerising even when confined to background scenery. Exquisite images of decay – whether natural or post-industrial – are similar to the uncanny beauty as presented in Lynch’s more profoundly surreal
Eraserhead. So it’s quite tempting to wonder if, somewhere in the realms of the Zone’s weird possibilities, Henry and Mary and their mutant baby live nearby. A ‘trilogy’ of first-person shooter and survival horror videogames (2007–10) appears to have more to do with post-Chernobyl mutant hunts than the content or themes of the novel or the film, but
Stalker games exploit an artisticult reputation. The Finnish micro-budget movie remake
Zone
(2012) has yet to get a UK release on DVD.

A year before Oliver Stone’s “through the looking-glass” swot job
JFK
(1991), there was a season of cult films on TV in retro showcase Moviedrome. Alex Cox’s intro to
The Parallax View
(1974) noted that, although US cinema was making “a plethora” of pictures that dealt with the issues of the Vietnam War, there were very few efforts to address unsolved mysteries/unanswered questions about political assassination. Cox mentions agitprop docudrama
Executive Action
(1973) and superb conspiracy satire
Winter Kills
(1979), and drops hints at the curious fact that such rare movies are also rarely seen. It is tempting to read a tinfoil-hat plan into that alone as, unlike the extensive (to the saturation point of media overdose!) list of speculative and very successful pictures about UFOs, there are apparently some dark secrets that America prefers to keep, even from itself.

Shouldering aside Moviedrome, TV movie
Running Against Time
(1990) sees Robert Hays playing a time-travelling schoolteacher inadvertently blamed for killing Kennedy, while John Mackenzie’s crime thriller
Ruby
(1992) digs into JFK plots from Dallas club-owner Jack Ruby’s perspective as “the man who killed the man who killed the President”. Since then of course, POTUS assassination references have become so commonplace and increasingly throwaway that, in superhero movies, the Comedian (of
Watchmen) is shown shooting from the grassy knoll while Magneto (from
X-Men: Days of Future Past) claims he tried to save JFK, hence the apparently ‘magic’ bullet.

Tales about preventing JFK’s assassination are hardly new to SF.
The Twilight Zone’s time-travel episode
Profile in Silver
(1986) has a 22nd century professor sent to 1963 to observe historical detail, but he intervenes and saves his famous ancestor – with unforeseeable consequences. Jumping to this century, Robert Dyke’s
TimeQuest
(2002) has an inventor create a divergent history. Here, JFK is not assassinated and ‘Camelot’ prospers in the 1960s, avoiding the Vietnam War and promoting peace with the USSR for joint American-Soviet missions to the Moon, establishing a lunar colony before the millennium, so that when Kennedy eventually dies in his eighties he can be buried off-world. Bruce Campbell appears in a satirical role as a renowned filmmaker (like the investigative Oliver Stone) who plans a documentary called ‘November 22nd 1963’.

Stephen King arrives very late to this cross-genre party of time-travel and JFK death-plots. His book
11/22/63 is adapted for TV as
11.22.63
(DVD, 15 August), and unfortunately overburdened with too many small-town, typical redneck, clichés from King’s oeuvre, comprising often-grossly sentimental baggage, and guff about all-too-familiar supernatural destiny. As we might expect, the primary focus, at first, is upon meticulously recreating details of the period setting, while exploring the 21st century everyman’s unease while adjusting to sociopolitical differences. James Franco is great value as lone hero Jake, confronting bizarre accidents that suggest a darkling force of time itself is working against his seemingly laudable aims. Long-winded as a mystery, lacking much atmosphere, and generally too slow in its development, the tired rehash of conspiracy plots we have already seen before means this short TV series offers very little interest as drama, genre or otherwise. A numbingly inevitable romance does not even bother with any
Time Traveller’s Wife style disruption to a routinely soapy affair between Sadie (um, ‘say die’, eh?) and Jake.

In the grey areas between homage and rip-off there is a lot of clearly derivative stuff. Jake is an English teacher while David (in
Running Against Time) was a history professor. Jake’s new 1963 love Sadie is endangered, just like David’s 1990s girlfriend Laura (Catherine Hicks, who was previously in two ‘time-travel’ movies in 1986!). But what else is news? “Everything you say is a lie!” Changing what has already happened becomes especially problematic when a time-traveller’s growing emotionally attached to what he knows is true about the past that he’s living through for the first time. Can Jake save JFK without having to kill Lee Harvey Oswald? Well, suffering a beating, a coma, and then waking up with amnesia about his mission does not help, for starters.

“There’s no stopping it!” After recent subgenre movies like the stylised
Looper and the nightmarishly convoluted
Predestination this wholesome tele-drama simply has nothing fresh to add to the existing catalogue of time-paradox tropes. Despite its few sympathetic characters, the flimsy romantic subplots (including one for Oswald!) just drag things out for eight episodes. With its rather pointless historical distortions and easily foreseeable twists – all for the sake of ‘creative licence’ – this version of JFK: RIP changes, but never quite confronts, the modern mythic motorcade of unreality in Dealey Plaza, and the damned evidence of Zapruder’s infamous amateur snuff movie. As always in such comfort-zone tales whatever happens “the country needs a hero” but will settle for “a good man”, while shovelling on the patented King schmaltz for a dreary (although supposedly feminist!) epilogue.

Nadia is kidnapped from the house she shares with boyfriend Slater, who finds one of the left-for-dead masked baddies is Nadia’s twin.
IDENTICALS
(DVD, 22 August) is a low-budget British effort about look-alike finders Brand New U, a lifestyle company that claims to be a socially focused co-op venture, though it quite reeks of exploitative corporate start-up. What begins as a variation of
Seconds
(Interzone
#261) becomes a replay of
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, before its one-sided storyline of personal uncertainty is further devalued into
Rear Window voyeurism with a tiredly predictable love triangle.

Thugs all dressed up as Santas attempts to add a surreal twist, but it fails to be chilling and it seems pointless as a rent-a-mob disguise. Gimmicky computer-graphic overlays look outdated and are overused. Plotting just trundles along from revelations to crisis management, and from slap-happy solution back into grey self-doubt. With a fussy approach to editing that undermines too many potentially interesting sequences this movie is guilty of style over content. Derivative writing and blundering direction by feature debutant Simon Pummell results in zero intrigue that’s most noticeable in a couple of scenes where long takes and a static camera produce inert drama, perhaps meant to suggest emotional turmoil. Are we supposed to think “oh, what a clever boy the filmmaker is?” Yawn… Obsession in the movies has rarely felt so dull, as
Identicals showcases a spartan futurism that succeeds only in convincing us its designer vacuity is all this largely unoriginal production could afford.

Gerry Anderson’s
TERRAHAWKS
(Volume 1, Blu-ray, 25 July) was a very belated return to puppetry (but with muppets!) and marked the lowest point of his TV career. With no imaginative ambition beyond its
Thunderbirds makeover, and zero creativity for the zeroid drones, this proved to be a dreadful disappointment to all except four-year-olds. Can we have a UK Blu-ray box-set of the complete
Space Precinct instead?

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

CELL

THE LEGEND OF TARZAN

STAR TREK BEYOND

ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE

SUICIDE SQUAD

GHOSTBUSTERS

PETE’S DRAGON

THE BFG

NINE LIVES

An adaptation only in the Charlie Kaufman sense,
THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is a symbiotic version of Mike Carey’s novel – which, though closely parallel, isn’t in fact credited – written in parallel with the book version out of the original short ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’ (covering what is now the film’s first act), following subsequent pitch meetings with director Colm McCarthy and his producers. Child prodigy Melanie is part of a class of Midwich ten-year-olds raised in a closed military facility where they are abused, feared, and from time to time disappeared, for reasons that emerge by degrees ahead of a shocking encounter with the world outside, and the start of an apocalyptic roadtrip in the uneasy company of Gemma Arterton as her adored teacher, Paddy Considine as the pragmatic base commander, and serial vivisectionist Glenn Close, who can’t wait to dissect Melanie’s brain in search of an antigen to the species-jumping Cordyceps symbiote that only children infected in the womb can control, and which is in the process of doing something scary and irreversible to what’s left of the human race. With the help of a precious volume of Roger Lancelyn Green, Arterton has primed her charges with the tales of the creation and transgression of Pandora, and Melanie’s journey brings her to the realisation that her own Epimethean heritage has put her in charge of the box with a bomb in which humanity’s future is both alive and dead. But is the thing that knows itself as Melanie even human at all as Arterton persists in believing, or (as Close suspects) merely mimicking what it’s learned of humanity for alien and sinister reasons of its own?

To see the BFI throwing lottery money into a film about a zombie brain fungus is satisfying enough in itself, though the film uses its genre tropes – specifically, the twin icons of modern English apocalypse in
28 Days Later and
Children of Men
– primarily as the tap for a well of home-counties horror that reaches back through Wyndham to the Blitz and the preceding half-century of invasion literature, with a modernist twist of PKD identity paranoia for added flavour and mouth feel. Child leads have become so identified with YA and family film that it’s refreshing to see a properly adult, violent genre film reappropriating what have become familiar as YA tropes and arcs – the movement outwards from an enclosed, controlled, adult-managed and classroom-like world into a much bigger secret, and the kids reclaiming the world from the manipulative and morally compromised adults – as a launchpad into something very unPG-13 indeed. Melanie is a compelling creation not easy to bring to life, but very beautifully played by newcomer Sennia Nanua – one of a rather effective set of group transformations of the original characters’ ethnicities, at times at odds with their unchanged names – while the score, by
Humans composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, is one of the year’s boldest and best.

If you haven’t read the novel I’d suggest starting with the film, which is more gradual with the initial reveals and more ambivalent about the characters’ inner lives, maintaining a tighter focus on Melanie’s view of the action despite never going novelistically inside her head (as the book does in turn with all five of the uneasy allies, to the comparative dilution of Melanie’s own unsettling power and presence as the centre of the story). The film has also tidied up its storylines by sensibly ditching the human survivalist third force from the other versions, and though some of the plot points in the streamlined final act (where book and film temporarily diverge) are left a little wobbly in motivation, the ending comes through with the best-ever use of the BT tower on film and a closing scene that, even more than in the novel, ties a perfect bow around the survivors’ story and its twists. I’m sorry to lose the scene from the book where my daughter’s school for her A level Chemistry gets trashed; but the lesson of adulthood is that you can’t have all your gifts in one box.

Some of the same tropology has travelled a more conventional authorial path from page to screen in
CELL, the troubled and long-delayed film of Stephen King’s minor 2006 novel about a mass zombification by mobile phone signal. King himself still has a screenplay credit, and the new ending sting is clearly his, but it’s otherwise unclear how much the film resembles the one he wrote in 2009 when Eli Roth was still attached to direct. The book’s twentysomething leads have turned into John Cusack and Sam Jackson, which isn’t a great fit for the audience, particularly as the whole concept of cellphones as instruments of doom feels already a bit too much like an old people’s idea. In the film version Cusack gets a pass on the apocalypse because he’s careless enough to let his phone run out of charge, just as the flag goes up and half the budget with it as the mother of all cross-platform zero-day exploits turns an airport full of everyday zombies into the throatchewing real thing, before he escapes with Jackson and Isabella Fuhrmann for the obligatory road trip through zombieland in search of his family. This being a horror rather than (as with
Girl) an sf take on the theme, the presumably alien force behind the signal isn’t itself an object of plot attention or interest, which is more concerned with the delivery of gruesome shocks and set pieces out of the zombocalypse playbook; King’s novel was dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, which gives a fair sense of where it’s coming from. But in an already saturated genre, it’s risky to go old school without something more for the kids.

Jackson is miscast again in David Yates’
THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, which makes a bit of a hyena’s breakfast of what is easily the best idea for a Tarzan film in the history of the property: pushing Tarzan’s career back thirty years from its canonical ERB epoch, and setting its story in an alternate 1889 whose divergence from our own is that the legend of Tarzan is historical, with world-changing consequences for the colonial history of central Africa. The film’s uncredited (and unremunerated) source is Adam Hochschild’s
King Leopold’s Ghost, the veteran historian’s classic pageturner about the exposure of the Belgian ruler’s secret slave-state in the Congo by the political and humanitarian sherlockry of the British shipping agent Edmund Morel. Hochschild has written amusingly of his surprise at discovering from the cheap seats that his book is now someone else’s film, though surprisingly missing from the film is the young Polish riverboatman who crossed paths with the film’s real-life characters in Leopoldville and Boma at precisely this date and ten years later would turn his experiences into
Heart of Darkness
– whose Kurtz was rather unconvincingly argued by Hochschild to have been partly based on the king’s thuggish agent Léon Rom, reimagined here as a Blofeldish figure of suave supervillainy who could be only played by Christoph Waltz. (Hochschild was keen to imagine a meeting between Rom and Conrad in Leopoldville in August 1890, but if it happened it never left traces.) In the film, Morel’s role and Conrad’s narrative are both folded into the activities ten years earlier of the remarkable if problematic African-American cavalry veteran turned activist George Washington Williams and his famous
Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II of 1890, who in this timeline enlists the Greystokes in his humanitarian crusade to expose the secret horrors of Leopold’s monstrous private dystopia. But Rom has his own nefarious plans for the Claytons, and soon enough Jane is in feisty jeopardy and in need of IMAX-scale 3D vinework and a Tarzan-led last alliance of apes, lions, and wildebeest for her own and Africa’s liberation.

All this should be a stunning update of the Tarzan legend, neutralising the colonial and racial toxins of earlier versions by bringing Burroughs’ pulp fantasy for the first time into the historical reality it sanitised and overwrote, casting Tarzan as a figure not of romantic appropriation but of liberation from the darkest heart of African colonial history, and making him part of America’s own attempt to make amends for its own history of slavery and genocide. (“The Civil War was dark fighting. I was proud to be part of it, though,” says Jackson’s version of Williams. “Mexico was bad, but what we did to the Indians… I’m no better than those Belgians. I was young, but there’s no excuse.”) But the late Jerry Weintraub’s final passion project has been nibbled away at during its decade of immersion in the development tanks by schools of executives who couldn’t give a flying monkey’s about the Congo Free State but know that their jobs will be safe if they can just get Margot Robbie into a loincloth. To Yates’ credit, that isn’t happening, and the film sticks firmly to its weapon of choice in bypassing the origin story to pick up the Claytons in
Mummy Returns mode at Greystoke Manor and catch us up on the backstory in intrusive sepia reshoots, though these eventually have become so extensive that it would have been easier just to fold the historical narrative around the initial courtship instead. Alexander Skarsgård is a fit, gangly Tarzan whose knuckle-acting is going for gold while the rest of his body settles for bronze, while Jackson battles some of the worst dialogue of his life, as well as being thirty years too old for his historical character. In our timeline, Williams contracted tuberculosis in Africa and died in Blackpool soon after the publication of his
Letter, while Rom lived on to die of natural causes a few months before Conrad in 1924, with ample leisure to enjoy the French translations of the Tarzan novels from the desk job he retired to in Belgium. Thank goodness Tarzan is real and none of that ever happened.

Elsewhere beyond the final frontier of canonical time, intrepid pioneers push back the darkness in
STAR TREK BEYOND, which boldly goes with mild violence and threat into the third year of the alternate version of the five-year mission and offers, among less interesting things, some of the most ravishing images of interstellar travel and cities in space ever committed to film. Justin Lin, easily the most gifted director of spectacle to tackle the property since Robert Wise worked with Douglas Trumbull on the original
Motion Picture, not only delivers as expected on the action sequences but proves surprisingly sensitive to the brand’s flagship status among space franchises for old-school widescreen wonders. After a slightly uncomfortable defenestration of J.J. Abrams’ designated successor Roberto Orci from the command deck, a modest but effective new script by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung scales down the thematic ambition of Abrams’ episodes to a long and largely planetbound middle act involving a rather baffling villain with Idris Elba somewhere inside, and a final Kirkian punchout in space Dubai over a genocidal McGuffin that feels a little too much like the previous film’s climactic Cumberbatchfight. Fifty years on, it’s been a struggle to find new stories to tell about these shopworn characters, new life-problems that they haven’t already faced, and the solution here has had to ransack the canon Trekverse to go with Kirk’s misgivings about promotion and Spock’s conflicted long-term Vulcan loyalties, though with an extra and somewhat underspun twist built around the loss of Leonard Nimoy. But the interstellar acts that bookend the TV-episode midsection are thrillingly beautiful, and Sofia Boutella gives one of the finest unrecognisable performances in the history of ice cream-themed special makeup. Audiences seem to have remained earthbound for this one, and it’s a shame that Anton Yelchin wasn’t given more to do for this sad swansong, but there’s plenty of life in this iteration of the franchise and it would be a shame if Paramount were to put it back in space dock. Even the end-credit starfields are worth watching all the way through.

Pegg’s other underperforming space movie is, rather unexpectedly,
ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE, fifth in Fox’s seemingly extinction-proof catastrophist toon series that peaked in episode three (Dawn of the Dinosaurs) and nadired in the
Mammoth Christmas
TV special. The
Ice Age films are an odd collision of cartoon genres, the golden-age Looney Tunes madness of the Scrat sequences feeding intermittent consequences into the fairly boilerplate family-feature main plots, built from standard character-driven situation and relationship arcs and thematised around family and coming-of-age life lessons. But
Collision Course at least ramps up the crazy, with a plot that now exports the laws of cartoon physics to planetary bodies, as Scrat pilots a buried alien ship into a chain of Velikovskian cosmic mishaps that threaten the planet with bolidic doom, which must be averted through the leadership of Pegg’s mad weasel character from two films back – while new mammoth in-laws Manny and Ellie have to learn to let go of their little girl, and hopeless sloth Sid finally finds a mate in a bonkers pastel Seusstopian lost realm ruled over by a llama lama known, inevitably, as the Shangri-Llama. (I heard that.) It’s actually the most amusing and certainly the loopiest instalment since the third, its two clades of cartoon action as proudly incompatible as the wildly different strata of prehistory it collapses together, which have gradually dug down from the Pleistocene through the Cretaceous to the formation of the solar system and forgotten alien civilisations before it. It’s a little hard to see where, if anywhere, the franchise goes from here, though it does rather look as if the only way is down.

SUICIDE SQUAD has become the late-summer poster pic for the things that have defined blockbuster cinema in 2016: the widening gulf between critical and audience taste; the birth struggles of universe-based cinema franchises, and particularly of Warners’ attempt to grow their DC cinematic universe aggressively; jittery studio control-panic, chaotically compressed writing and production schedules, and unwarranted sighs of relief and told-you-sos when things go right for reasons nobody intended. In this case, the surprise result is a film that captures better than anything yet seen the texture and feel of a comics universe in all its teeming, thrilling incoherence and stupidity. A vastly overpopulated cast of D-list characters, each with their own ridiculous origin story and utterly rubbish powers, are overplayed to the hilt by a deliciously mixed-ability cast, in a plot that barely exists, and in which only two of the team (plus the sword of a third) are even slightly metahuman or, as silver-age DC more charmingly preferred it, super. So Will Smith as Deadshot is so charming, quippy, soft-hearted, and redemptible that you scarcely hold his execution-style serial murders against him. Jai Courtney throws boomerangs and banters in Australian, which is somehow nearly enough. Cara Delevingne, at times quite an effective presence in more naturalistic roles, is saddled with the triply impossible part of a female Indiana Jones, a 6373-year-old spirit (actually not bad), and the former possessed by the latter for one of those long third acts where you stand twirling fingers in a column of fx while people do action and occasionally remember that you’re there.

The undoubted star is Margot Robbie’s insanely full-blooded take on Harley Quinn, a medals contender for stupidest character in the DC universe, but here played at metahuman level of intensity that turns Robbie’s gigantic Jack Nicholson grin on everything that’s traditionally awful about women and their bodies in comics, delivering a masterclass in vivifying a character whose only discernible powers are self-objectification and psychotically inflected ultraviolence. So powerful and threatening is her presence and what it embodies that her character has to be contained by a human shield of less interesting performances, including Jared Leto’s completely upstaged Joker – who also has to measure against the apogee of Mark Hamill’s animated version in the simultaneously-released
Killing Joke, which screened briefly in cinemas as a promo for the home release, despite the film as a whole being a bit of a carcrash whose multiple offences include a 27-minute Batgirl prologue so horrifically ill-judged as to make what notoriously follows seem almost acceptable. In contrast,
Suicide Squad may be the dregs of the universe trying to be the Guardians of the Galaxy, but it’s a teamup that if anything has benefited from an involuntary reenactment of the too-fast writing and banged-together creative anarchy that made that universe in the first place.

Over at Sony, studio panic has delivered something unexpectedly new and interesting out of superannuated IP in Paul Feig’s
GHOSTBUSTERS reboot, where the simple-sounding agenda of gender-bending the original quartet has turned into a sustained and surprisingly thoughtful exercise in creating a new kind of film that normalises middle-aged women in narratives previously occupied exclusively by men, and in Melissa McCarthy’s case with for once a salary to match. Lazy options have been staunchly refused; there are no romances, no familial baggage, just four outstandingly capable veterans offering up four different kinds of female comic performance in an ensemble that outclasses at least three-quarters of the original team, with Kristen Wiig’s character serving here as the audience’s entry point into the wilder world of McCarthy and her more out-there teammates. Elements of the brand – the logo, wheels, costumes, gear, base, catchphrases – are given their own origin stories within the new world, with dropins and shoutouts from the surviving cast, and Slimer (and Ms Slimer), Stay-Puft, and their spooky apocalypse friends digitally summoned from the other side to terrorise Times Square in Gener8 View-D Stereo. Like Jason Statham’s character in
Spy, Chris Hemsworth’s dopey receptionist is a bottomless bucket of stupid jokes; but the real payload is the presentation of a professional and personal dynamic between female scientists (plus one NYC street historian, which apparently is a black lady job) who are all smart, capable, committed, resilient, and effective in a team, despite all in their different ways being victims of a professional career environment that marginalises, underfunds, and underpromotes them, and eventually forces them out on the pretext that what they’re doing isn’t proper science. (“You must have been afforded the basic respect that is the dignity of a human being?” “Not really. People pretty much dump on us all the time.”) It’s still stuck, obviously, with being a
Ghostbusters film and has to go through a lot of quantum-flimflam ectoplasmatological motions that have long since become the preserve of
Doctor Who; but if it’s not a film that its writer-director or anyone in it particularly needed to make, it hasn’t been quite the anticipated catastrophe for the studio and brand, though hopes for a plasma-energy creative defibrillation seem not to have achieved the requisite crossing of profit streams.

The one studio that isn’t in full-on panic mode in 2016 is Disney, whose remake of
PETE’S DRAGON is the kind of film you can only afford to take a punt on if you’re holding a Grosvenor-sized portfolio of intellectual property that won’t even notice when you toss an expensive seventies fixer-upper at an indie upcomer to test his fitness for the big time. David Lowery, the
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints writer-director whose editing on
Upstream Color saved Shane Carruth from a breakdown, has been given a startlingly free hand with Disney’s expensive but irrecuperably dated 1977 musical, of which little is left here beyond the premise of a live-action orphan with a cartoon (now cg) monster friend whose power of invisibility leads adults to think him imaginary. Lowery has transplanted the action from Florida to a 1980s Pacific Northwest lushly impersonated by New Zealand, where the plot is now
My Neighbour Totoro meets
King Kong as Karl Urban’s boorish logger seeks to capture and exploit the giant furry forest spirit that only the child can see, while Bryce Dallas Howard’s
Fargo-lady forest ranger makes her own journey from hardnosed investigator to invested surrogate mom.

Though every beat of the plot is machine-made, the execution is anything but cartoonish. Even the genteel opening carsmash, filtered for violence and injury detail, which takes out Pete’s parents is part of the forest’s stand against human encroachment on its American
Jungle Book, enacting Bambi’s revenge on the Disney human family. In the original 1957 treatment (devised as a TV anthology-series episode, and only much later repurposed as a
Poppins-style feature under Don Chaffey for the live action and Don Bluth for the animation), Elliott was more equivocally real, and some of that remains in the delicate treatment of Pete’s processing of the adults’ incredulity: “Are you my imaginary friend too?” But Lowery’s cryptozoological Elliott is massively physical – furry, doggish, mediaeval-looking, and even less aerodynamically plausible than Bluth’s version – and even Urban comes round in the end, in an American exchange of manly nods that says all that needs to be said.

The Chaffey-Bluth
Pete’s Dragon is one of the reference points for
THE BFG, in which another eighties orphan develops a Spielbergian relationship with a lonely, victimised monster friend adults can’t see, and whose own problems find a solution through the bond between introverts of different species. Roald Dahl probably wasn’t conscious of Disney’s film as a source for his story, but the parallels are striking enough to have evidently struck chords with Spielberg and his late screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who had just made
E.T.
together when the book came out. The Mathison/Spielberg film version has delicately Spielberged the plot up a bit, giving the BFG a haunted Schindlerian backstory with an earlier human bean he couldn’t save from the jaws of his fellow monsters (“It says look at what you’s done and there be no forgiveness”), and introducing a touch of
1941 to the Daisy Ashford scenes in Buckingham Palace with a round of frobscottle and jet-farting corgis. But at the heart of it is the quintessentially Spielbergian figure of a misfit catcher and mixer of dreams who hears the secret whisperings of the world and faraway music from the stars, and whose bond with human children allows him to help them stand against the darkness and brutality of those who want to consume them. The plot doesn’t quite stretch, and set pieces go on and on with only the most relaxed sense of urgency or destination, but Mark Rylance’s gigantically captured performance is huge with nuance and pathos, and executes Dahl’s language with a Shakespearean sensitivity to the feel and power of words. In box office terms it’s been a bit of a wet whizzpopper, but Spielberg has engaged strongly with the material and its tricky Dahlian switches between silliness, darkness, wonder and warmth.

It’s been a profitable summer for talking-pet family comedies, with the very middling
Finding Dory and
Secret Life of Pets cleaning up surprisingly well after depositing rather a lot of mess. Not so Barry Sonnenfeld’s
NINE LIVES, a bizarre post-postmodern Euroflop for Luc Besson’s production company: a deadpan body-swap kidcom that leans so hard into its own stupidity that three writing teams (the maximum allowed by WGA credits, but it’s a cert there were more) and even its own producers seem to have lost sight of the joke. Kevin Spacey is the latest and most prescient version of post-ironic icon Donald Trump, a narcissistic workaholic property mogul obsessed with a tower with his name on it, and whose daughter has to spend time with him by playing back his appearances on TV. When he tries to do the right thing for her birthday by buying her a kitty from Christopher Walken’s wonder emporium of extremely dubious mogs, he gets trapped in the body of her birthday fluffball Mr Fuzzypants and has to teach himself life lessons in reprioritisation (“Sometimes love means sacrifice. It’s not enough to tell say you love someone; you have to show it”) to avoid being stuck there for the rest of his nine lives.

With Spacey laid up in comatose voiceover (“We’re not seeing any cerebral activity at all”), it’s left to Jennifer Garner and the rest of the family to keep the idiocy afloat, while the film chiefly entertains with a steady stream of lovingly crafted cat-video slapstunts, some of which manage to go viral within the film despite an eerie absence of anyone in the scene actually filming them. But slowly it dawns on you that the film is about itself, and that if you globally replace “cat” with “film” in the dialogue it makes a new and compelling sense where there seemed to be less than none. “A film is not a person … A film doesn’t care if you live and die, just as long as you give it Friskies twice a day … You don’t pick out a film; the film picks you … Films are horrible beasts that would eat you in their sleep for food.” And Spacey is trapped in a ghastly travesty of everything that’s most awful about family films, till he can learn unconditional love for the ghastliness itself: “We’re cold, selfish, and people still love us.” I caught up with it at a Saturday matinee with a birthday outing of a dozen five-to-eight-year-olds, all of whom were in stitches while their mothers sat stonily and tried not to check their phones. Not one of their dads was there, so maybe they were all home wrapping gift kittens in boxes with bombs and probabilistic detonators for a special birthday surprise.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Editorial

Future Interrupted

Time Pieces

Ansible Link

Black Static 54

The Apologists

Extraterrestrial Folk Metal Fusion

Sideways

Three Love Letters From an Unrepeayable Garden

The End of Hope Street

Book Zone

Laser Fodder

Mutant Popcorn

Back Cover