Law School, Magic School

Written by Max Gladstone

In 2008, to an eager young me, fresh from two years of teaching English in rural China—used to afternoon runs past water buffalo, concrete classrooms, basketball-loving students, and swarms of attacking bees—law school looked an awful lot like magic. Stephanie, my girlfriend (now wife), the one actually attending law school at the time, thought I was crazy.

She was right. I was crazy, a bit—a crazy born of contrast, and of unemployment at the dawn of the financial collapse. While I gallivanted around the world, my friends had entered industry or grad school, and, as a result, they could weather the chaos by keeping calm and carrying on. Struggling to make ends meet, I followed their careers with admiration and a little green streak of envy (which I’d never admit in public, but you won’t tell anyone, will you, oh internet?).

As Steph started law school, I watched her life like a movie. I expected The Paper Chase but saw Hogwarts instead. Now, I know that many students compare their schools to Hogwarts, but watching Steph, I thought I could see actual magic at the core.

The class names were the first sign. I’d grown used, as an undergrad, to course names like Hagiography, Eschatology, and Smut: Shakespearean Supporting Characters, Sex, and the Afterlife, or Computer Science 415. Here, I heard courses referred to by single words: the bailiwicks over which they granted power. Mystical names, too. Remedies. Procedure. Contracts. Corps. (“Corpse?! “—said I on first hearing—”Is there a dissection practicum?”) Defense against the Dark Arts. (I kid, but maybe that’s what they actually teach you in Torts?)

Then came those wonderful weird withering one-L classes where professors cut students open with a question and keep careful record of names called to ensure no one escapes—so far from the cheerful group work, seminars, and “let’s sit on the grass outside and discuss symbolism in Japanese utopian literature” of my college life. (“It’s the Socratic method,” Steph said, “not magic.” “But it feels like magic!”)

And on top of that, the language. The formulae, the arcane tests, the careful splitting of hairs as to the meaning of words and the writer’s original intent. The libraries of leather-bound books from which the lawyer draws her power. The speech act. The binding verbal contract. The adversarial nature of the whole thing: words, facts, powers bent one against another by indomitable wills.

I’ve heard people say computer programming works like magic—you type your invocation and the big dumb genie does exactly what you tell it to, no more and no less, omnipotence without omniscience. But that’s not really magic, because magic’s not dumb. Magic isn’t satisfied to lean back and let you destroy yourself. Magic is capricious and cold and swift and glorious and mean. Magic twists beneath you as you struggle to pin it down. Beings bound by magic seek every possible way to use your words against you—they trap you in your errors, and in the world’s. If you’re good at magic, it can raise you up, claim and transform your life. Magic sets you apart from people who aren’t magicians. It gives you a privileged access to, and even some control over, the rules of the world that bind everyone else. And it doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to do with that power, that control.

I badgered Steph with this comparison all through her first semester. She saw the point, but never quite bought it, and slowly I came to understand why. For me, on the outside, her world seemed exciting, glamorous, strange, and special. For her, it was life: late nights studying, endless reading, not going to the movies. A monastic existence, and on top of it all a boyfriend babbling about how cool everything was without having to do any of the work.

And I realized, writing my book about dead gods and dying cities and a woman trying to do her job, that from the perspective of the magician, magic feels like work. So I dialed down the Harry Potter jokes and started to watch Steph and her friends and fellow students care, struggle, and succeed. I watched them grasp at the outlines of something grand. The magic wasn’t in the language, the discipline, or the class names. The magic was in the striving.

Though I do still chuckle whenever I hear someone moan about how much trouble they’re having with Corpse.

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From the Tor/Forge October newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the October Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Big Smart Objects by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
• The Secret World of Hardware Revocation by Cory Doctorow
• The Books in the Book by Tina Connolly
• The Ingredients of a Hero (Not the Sandwich) by Christopher L. Bennett
• Ghost Collection Sweepstakes

The Ingredients of a Hero (Not the Sandwich)

Written by Christopher L. Bennett

In the months since I sold Only Superhuman, I’ve been told more than once that what I set out to do in the novel—approaching the concept of superheroes from a plausible, hard-SF perspective—was a new and unexpected approach. That surprises me. After all, the “super” part is easy. We’ve already got Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius and his prosthetic legs that make him better, stronger, faster. We’ve got prototype robotic exoskeletons to let soldiers exert seventeen times their strength, and adaptive-optics laser surgery to give people better than normal vision. Imagine what we’ll have in 95 years.

And the “hero” part isn’t that implausible either. Look at firefighters. Look at the ordinary people at the Dark Knight Rises theater shooting who held the doors for others to escape. Heroes are just people who set aside their own self-interest to protect others.

This is why the career heroes of Only Superhuman are called Troubleshooters. When I developed the idea over two decades ago, there were two TV personalities who used that label. One was MacGyver; the other was a local-news consumer advocate who helped people get justice or compensation for fraud and incompetence from local businesses. So to me, “troubleshooter” denoted someone whose purpose was to help others solve their problems. That was the side of superheroics I wanted to stress. I see too many superhero tales, especially in movies, that dwell on origin stories or personal vendettas and overlook the coolest part, the rescues and lifesaving and, well, the actual hero stuff. To be sure, the events of Only Superhuman are deeply personal for its heroine Emerald Blair, the Green Blaze. She’s struggling to define herself, wrestling with her past, and frequently fighting for her life. Yet there’s always something more at stake than herself. Every battle Emerald wages is on some level informed by her need to protect others.

Granted, it’s partly the colorful costumes, nicknames, and melodramatic trappings that make superheroes feel like fantasy to most people. But there are real precedents for those as well, in sports and celebrity culture. There’s also the current “real-life superhero” movement—mostly just eccentrics looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, but sometimes there are nobler motives at play. There’s a woman calling herself “Terrifica” who patrols bars in a sexy superhero costume to distract potentially predatory males from targeting women who’ve had too much to drink. It’s risky, perhaps a little irrational, but at least she’s sober and prepared (she carries pepper spray). I also once heard about a Mexican luchador who used his fame and masked anonymity to speak out against government corruption without endangering his loved ones. Maybe not as epic as punching out animal-themed psychopaths or fending off alien hordes, but just as heroic in its way.

These real-world champions also reflect the principle that guided Christopher Nolan’s Batman: the symbolism of the costumed identity as a way to affect hearts and minds, to inspire the innocent or intimidate the wicked. Terrifica shows how even the sexuality of the superhero image can be a source of power and influence if wielded properly—a theme that definitely comes into play in Only Superhuman.

The Troubleshooter Corps embraces the trappings and celebrity of comic-book heroes for the same practical reasons. The transhuman “mods” of the Asteroid Belt, with few historical role models to guide them, have looked to the superheroes of lore—and sometimes the supervillains—as their foundation myths. The Troubleshooters draw on that mythology to win the trust of the Belt’s fiercely independent peoples in a way they never could if they presented themselves as a transhuman paramilitary force.

But that’s the paradox of the Troubleshooters. On the one hand, they’re about personal image and charisma. Emerald Blair certainly has all the trappings of the classic superheroine—the red hair, the curves, the revealing fashion sense, the story of redemption for a checkered past. But the surface image is useless if the Troubleshooters aren’t genuinely effective at solving problems and saving lives.

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From the Tor/Forge October newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the October Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Big Smart Objects by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
• The Secret World of Hardware Revocation by Cory Doctorow
• The Books in the Book by Tina Connolly
• Law School, Magic School by Max Gladstone
• Ghost Collection Sweepstakes

The Books in the Book

Written by Tina Connolly

I’m one of those people who got taken in by The Princess Bride. Sure, I was a teenager when I read it. That’s no excuse for haunting used bookstores and scouring the internet for traces of the real book. You know the one. The one written by S. Morgenstern, from which William Goldman merely excerpted “the good parts?”

I’m not sure why I was so certain that the original book (with the bad parts included, presumably) would be so much better, but there’s something about a book so lovingly described within another book that causes it to take on power. It’s a grimoire – but of story, not of spells. I read Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story as a kid and fell for it so hard. It didn’t hurt that the library book I checked out looked exactly as it should; as “The Neverending Story” book described within the book says it looks. It was heavy and copper-colored and had two snakes biting their tails on the front. My current edition has lovely internal illos and the text is all in red and green, but I continue to be disappointed at the lack of AURYN on the cover.

There’s Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, of course. HP Lovecraft and The Necromicon. “Books in the book” range from books of great importance to the book, like Cornelia Funke’s Inkspell (another German MG fantasy!) all the way down to books with incidental made-up titles in them—I loved that JK Rowling chose to actually write and publish three of the textbooks mentioned in the Harry Potter series—Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

In Ironskin, Jane has a few books she brings with her as a governess. Mr. Rochart has a library. And then dwarves in my world are big readers and writers. I had a grand time coming up with the books mentioned inside, riffing off of sources from our world. There’s Ihlronian History of the 16th Century (a treatise on the best ways to use treachery to hold power). A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses (a classic nursery book—though in addition to rhymes it includes practical tips, like how to avoid the copperhead hydra). And two lurid novels: Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns (a cheap yellow-backed acid-tongued mystery), and the most fun of all, The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud. Maud is a family heirloom of Jane’s, “the one Queen Maud’s son banned, and ordered all copies burned on sight.” Jane tells the butler, Poule, a hint of its story to tantalize her (a story that involves sea dragons, Court Alchemists, and lookalike Queen Mauds), and we see the tattered dustjacket, where “you could still make out the pirate’s grin as he valiantly fought a busty mermaid riding a sea serpent.”

I’m currently having fun coming up with books for the sequel (hey, if the dwarvven are big readers I can’t suddenly go against that in the sequel, can I? It’s practically my duty to dream up trashy novels for them to read), as well as vaguely wondering if I could weave a coherent plot out of sea dragons, Court Alchemists, and busty sea-serpent-riding mermaids. As well, I continue to lust after books mentioned in books, so if you run across that unabridged epic by S. Morgenstern (the one that apparently includes 56.5 pages of someone named Princess Noreena packing her dresses and hats). . .send it my way?

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From the Tor/Forge October newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the October Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Big Smart Objects by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
• The Secret World of Hardware Revocation by Cory Doctorow
• The Ingredients of a Hero (Not the Sandwich) by Christopher L. Bennett
• Law School, Magic School by Max Gladstone
• Ghost Collection Sweepstakes

The Secret World of Hardware Revocation

Written by Cory Doctorow

The entertainment industry has a problem. It wants to sell you products—books, games, music, movies—that you look at on your computer, but it wants to control how you use those products after you buy them. The industry has been sold on the idea that there’s a fortune waiting in selling “rights” for “uses.” If that sounds weird, it’s because it runs totally contrary to the way that we use our media today.

When you bring home a Settlers of Catan game box or a DVD or a CD or a hardcover, you assume that you have the “right” to do anything you want with it. You can use it at home. You can bring it to a tournament, festival or convention. You can use it on vacation overseas.

But! (the entertainment industry digital strategist says), what if you could pay half as much, and get a game or book or movie or song that you can only listen to at home? And later, if you want to do any of those other things, you can pay for them on an a-la-carte basis? Wouldn’t that be great? Why buy the cow when we’ll sell you the milk one glass at a time, exactly as much milk as you want to pay for and no more?

In practice, no one really seems interested in this offer, with the exception of video-on-demand online “rentals,” and that probably has more to do with the fact that most of us only watch the movies we buy once, anyway. A lot of us (myself included) are suspicious of this sort of offer. I don’t want price-tags on every button of my remote control, I don’t want to have to buy the “right” to pause a movie while I get up for a pee, even if it only costs a penny. I don’t want to have to buy the “right” to watch a movie with my friends if my TV detects that there are six people in the living room when I switch it on.

But the industry has bet big on this. Your home entertainment systems—amps, satellite and cable tuners, screens, media appliances like the AppleTV, and laptops—is designed to support it. And therein lies the problem.

Say your amp is designed to allow for full stereo surround-sound, except when a movie copyright holder chooses to limit you to mono sound. (Why would they do this? Believe it or not, the industry has said that it’d like to do this in connection with the distribution of new release movies, to keep “high quality audio track” from leaking online). The receiver receives the movie, checks to see what restrictions go along with it, and passes it on to the receiver, saying “Only play this in monophonic sound.” The receiver, being an obedient beast, obliges.

How does the receiver know that the amp will follow the message? Because the amp and the receiver do a little cryptographic handshake, exchanging keys that are only made available to manufacturers that agree to follow the rules. Inter-industry consortia like the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator, Digital Content Protection LLC, Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, and other dwellers in the smoke-filled rooms of the corporate world, set out and enforce agreements backing technologies like Blu-Ray, HDCP, and DTCP (those mysterious logos on your TV and associated stuff).

These arrangements include ongoing “management” of your devices. If someone on the Internet finds a way to trick your receiver into ignoring the restriction-messages that travel with media, the licensing bodies can force the manufacturer to automatically update it to avoid the hack. But that’s only half the problem.

What a specific device’s key leaks and is used to make “non-compliant” devices or software—that is, a program like VLC that will play DVDs even if they’re coded for a region other than the one your computer is registered in? VLC uses keys that leaked from other players to accomplish this trick. The manufacturer can fix their devices so that they no longer leaks keys, but the keys have been leaked.

Or what if a manufacturer goes out of business and later its products are found to have flaws that allow for “non-compliant” uses? With the company out of business, there’s no one to cajole into issuing a patch to restore the old restrictions.

The answer is “revocation,” a controversial idea that is present in some form in nearly all modern restricted media formats. In a revocation world, the licensing body periodically “revokes” certain keys and devices, either by requiring manufacturers to send out updates with lists of equipment that is no longer considered safe for restricted content, or by embedding the revocation codes in new movies, games, etc, so that the first time you play them, your equipment receives the list and updates its blacklist accordingly.

In the real world, the way that this is supposed to work is this: one day, you wake up and your amplifier, or projector, or DVD burner, or PVR, or laptop video app no longer works with any of the new media you buy. And when you try and play your old media, the parts won’t talk to each other: your computer will play the video back, but when it sends the audio to your home theater over Bluetooth or WiFi, no sound is played. Perhaps you get an onscreen message or an email that explains what’s happened, and perhaps you don’t. But either way, your stuff is broken, until the licensing body and the manufacturer come to terms on what it will take to un-break it.

There’s a flipside to this: the value of blacklisted equipment quickly falls to zero. If you want to have a home theater where you can play legit media, you need to throw out, update, or disconnect any blacklisted gear.

But say you don’t want to play by the rules. Say you want to be able to rip old media that was pressed before the revocation message went out and put it on the Internet. Or say you want to be able to play back the media that has been ripped and uploaded? Well, so long as you don’t care about buying the media you want to play, so long as you’re content to download it all with BitTorrent and its successors, you can happily go on using that “useless” blacklisted equipment—the kind of thing that will show up in e-waste landfills by the megaton. The kind of thing that people might pay *you* to take away.

That’s an idea I explore in Pirate Cinema, my new novel. Kids who want to make their own remix movies need equipment and tools that let them tear apart movies and music and reassemble them to their taste. The best way to get this is to simply step outside of the system altogether. The price is right—free. Not just free downloads, but free/near-free hardware already.

My friend Darren Atkinson supports his family by rescuing high-tech trash from the dumpsters outside of high-tech firms in Toronto’s suburbs. Today’s obsolescence curve already generates a massive surplus of technology that we literally can’t get rid of. Once you mix in deliberate, mandatory obsolescence for gear that pisses off technophobic Hollywood execs, we will move to an era of unparalleled plenty for people who don’t give a damn about playing by Hollywood’s rules.

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From the Tor/Forge October newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the October Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Big Smart Objects by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
• The Books in the Book by Tina Connolly
• The Ingredients of a Hero (Not the Sandwich) by Christopher L. Bennett
• Law School, Magic School by Max Gladstone
• Ghost Collection Sweepstakes

Big Smart Objects

Written by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

Gregory Benford’s take:

In science fiction, a Big Dumb Object is any immense mysterious object that generates an intense sense of wonder just by being there. They don’t have to be inert constructs, and perhaps the dumb aspect also expresses the sensation of being struck dumb by the scale of them. My favorite is the one I’m working on in a two-volume novel I’m writing with Larry Niven.

Larry said to me at a party, “Big dumb objects are so much easier. Collapsed civilizations are so much easier. Yeah, bring them up to speed.”

So we wrote Bowl of Heaven, first of two novels about a Big Smart Object. The Bowl has to be controlled, because it’s not neutrally stable. His Ringworld is a Big Dumb Object since it’s passively stable, as we are when we stand still. (Or the ringworld would be except for nudges that can make it fall into the sun. Those are fairly easy to catch in time. Larry put the stabilizers into the second Ringworld novel.)

A Smart Object is dynamically stable, as we are when we walk. We fall forward on one leg, then catch ourselves with the other. That takes a lot of fast signal processing and coordination. (We’re the only large animal without a tail that’s mastered this. Two legs are dangerous without a big brain.) There’ve been several Big Dumb Objects in sf, but as far as I know, no smart ones. Our Big Smart Object is larger than Ringworld and is going somewhere, using an entire star as its engine.

Our Bowl is a shell several hundred millions of miles across, held to a star by gravity and some electrodynamic forces. The star produces a long jet of hot gas, which is magnetically confined so well it spears through a hole at the crown of the cup-shaped shell. This jet propels the entire system forward — literally, a star turned into the engine of a “ship” that is the shell, the Bowl. On the shell’s inner face, a sprawling civilization dwells. The novel’s structure resembles Larry’s Ringworld, based on the physics I worked out.

The virtue of any Big Object, whether Dumb or Smart, is energy and space. The collected solar energy is immense, and the living space lies beyond comprehension except in numerical terms. But… this smart Bowl craft is also going somewhere, not just sitting around, waiting for visitors — and its builders live aboard.

Where are they going, and why? That’s the fun of smart objects – they don’t just awe, they intrigue.

My grandfather used to say, as we headed out into the Gulf of Mexico on a shrimping run, A boat is just looking for a place to sink.

So heading out to design a new, shiny Big Smart Object, I say, An artificial world is just looking for a seam to pop.

You’re living meters or maybe just a kilometer away from a high vacuum that’s moving fast, because of the spin. That makes it easy to launch ships, since they have the rotational velocity with respect to the Bowl or Ringworld… but that also means high seam-popping stresses have to be compensated. Living creatures on the sunny side will want to tinker, try new things…

“Y’know Fred, I think I can fix this plumbing problem with just a drill-through right here. Uh—oops!”

The vacuum can suck you right through… To live on a Big Smart Object, you’d better be pretty smart yourself.

Larry Niven’s take:

“The Enormous Big Thing” was my friend David Gerrold’s description of a plot line that flowered after the publication of Ringworld. Stories like Orbitsville and Rendezvous with Rama depend on the sense of wonder espoused by huge, ambitious endeavors. Ringworld wasn’t the first; there had been stories that built, and destroyed, whole universes. They had fallen out of favor.

And I wasn’t the first to notice that a fallen civilization is easier to describe than a working one. Your characters can sort through the artifacts without hindrance until they’ve built a picture of the whole vast structure. Conan the Barbarian, and countless barbarians to follow, found fallen civilizations everywhere. I took this route quite deliberately with Ringworld. I was young and untrained and I knew it.

A fully working civilization, doomed if they ever lose their grasp on their tools, is quite another thing. I wouldn’t have tried it alone. Jerry Pournelle and I have described working civilizations several times, in Footfall and Lucifer’s Hammer and The Burning City.

With Greg Benford I was willing to take a whack at a Dyson-level civilization.

Greg shaped the Bowl in its first design. It had a gaudy simplicity that grabbed me from the start. It was easy to work with: essentially a Ringworld with a lid, and a star for a motor. We got Don Davis involved in working some dynamite paintings.

Greg kept seeing implications. The Bowl’s history grew more and more elaborate. Ultimately I knew we’d need at least two volumes to cover everything we’d need to show.

Here’s the first, Bowl of Heaven. We’re hard at work wrapping up story lines on the sequel, Shipstar.

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From the Tor/Forge October newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the October Tor/Forge newsletter:

• The Secret World of Hardware Revocation by Cory Doctorow
• The Books in the Book by Tina Connolly
• The Ingredients of a Hero (Not the Sandwich) by Christopher L. Bennett
• Law School, Magic School by Max Gladstone
• Ghost Collection Sweepstakes

The Clockwork Sky Sneak Peek

By Madeleine Rosca

The Clockwork Sky—a gear-filled nightmare of steampunk London!

Madeleine Rosca is perhaps best known as the creator of Hollow Fields, a manga trilogy that won Japan’s first International Manga Award. For The Clockwork Sky, this talented Australian writer-artist created a steampunk version of Victorian London that is undergoing class warfare. A mysterious factory produces amazing clockwork mechanicals that have replaced humans in manufacturing, service, and most other kinds of labor. This is the brainchild of Erasmus Croach, who grows ever wealthier and more important . . . but who has no control over the infuriating and outrageous activities of his irrepressible niece, Sally Peppers.

Sally chafes at the limitations placed on young women in Victorian society and would like nothing more than to invent her own wonders. But her uncle keeps her literally chained to her desk in the schoolroom, instructed—and guarded—by one of his robots. One day Sally slips those chains and flees on a stolen velocipede, only to discover that London is on the brink of full-blown riots. The unemployed have taken to the streets, demanding not only jobs but an investigation into the disappearances of hundreds of children from the crowded slums of London and other British cities.

Click through to read an excerpt of The Clockwork Sky!

Erasmus Croach demands that his missing niece be found. The Metropolitan Police deploy Croach’s latest and most complex mechanical, the police-bot called Sky, to find her.

And that’s when things begin to get really interesting . . . .

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From the Tor/Forge September newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the September Tor/Forge newsletter:

• A Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
• Me Jane by Robin Maxwell
• Blood Sucking Lawyers (For Real) by Phillipa Bornikova
• Books, the Universe, and Cosmic Oddities by Linda Grimes
• Graphic Novel Sweepstakes

Books, the Universe, and Cosmic Oddities

Written by Linda Grimes

Sometimes the stars and planets align, and you find out something you’ve written isn’t as batshi—er, batpoop crazy as you originally feared it might be.

I love it when that happens. It’s validating. And when you can email your agent and editor about it, and crack them up long-distance, it can downright warm the cockles of your heart. (Whatever the heck “cockles” are. All I know is, warming them is apparently a good thing.)

A few months ago, shortly after my sister-in-law read a bound galley of In a Fix, she heard something that made her laugh out loud while she was listening to the radio in her car. Came close to making her run off the road, actually. Though, she admitted later, that part could have been caused by an unexpected thrill when her cell phone started vibrating in her pocket. But still. The point is, it was funny.

A little background info about a certain plot point in my book might be useful at this juncture: the bad guys are members of a neo-Viking group promoting an uber-macho ideal in Sweden. They’re tired of being told by society to “pee sitting down.” Metaphorically speaking. Or so I thought.

(I know! Wacky, huh? I was kind of going for the laugh there. But trust me, it all makes sense in the context of the book.)

Anyway, when my sister-in-law got home, she Googled the reference that cracked her up, and found an article from The Local: Sweden’s News in English.

The gist of the article is that the Left Party in Sörmland, Sweden, wants to force … um, I mean, strongly encourage… men to sit down to empty their bladders in the county council’s restrooms. Not only for hygiene reasons, they stress, but because it’s good for their prostates.

Um, yeah. Being able to pee standing up is about the only thing that makes me envy men. No offense to men. I love men—just ask my husband. He’ll tell you flat out, other than chocolate and a good martini, there’s nothing Linda loves more than men.

But I don’t want to be one.

Okay, when I was a kid, I also used to envy men their ability to grow facial hair, but I’ve since evolved beyond thinking it would be cool to do it myself. Not that I don’t still appreciate a good set of sideburns or a fine mustache. Only I don’t particularly want to see it in the mirror. (Ironic that I lose the desire as I approach the age when, according to ads for female facial hair removal products, I might finally be able to achieve it. My timing sucks.)

But back to the point. The article about Sörmland’s fastidious city council, and their truly touching concern for Swedish prostates, was of course published long after I wrote In a Fix. And yet, silly as the subject matter seems, it applies. It relates. It connects.

It’s the kind of coincidence I suspect happens a lot with writers. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? (Well, it makes me wonder. You might not give two toots on a penny whistle.)

Not that I’m implying there’s any New Age stuff going on. I don’t light incense before a writing session, calling on my muse to bring real-world relevance to my fiction or anything. But a little cosmic oddity here and there? Yeah, I can enjoy the wonder of it.

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From the Tor/Forge September newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the September Tor/Forge newsletter:

• A Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
• Me Jane by Robin Maxwell
• Blood Sucking Lawyers (For Real) by Phillipa Bornikova
• The Clockwork Sky Sneak Peek by Madeleine Rosca
• Graphic Novel Sweepstakes

Blood Sucking Lawyers (For Real)

Written by Phillipa Bornikova

This month the first volume in my urban fantasy series, This Case is Gonna Kill Me, is going to land. Because of my training and background as a lawyer, I chose to set the action in an up-scale vampire-run law firm in New York. It’s an ideal setting to use to begin exploring questions about how the levers of power would be affected if vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures were actually in the world.

To further complicate power dynamics, I decided that there would be no female supernaturals. For reasons that go to the main plot—and I won’t get into here—it’s punishable by death for a vampire or a werewolf to turn a woman into one of their kind.

While the idea started as a plot device, I quickly realized that it allowed me to also explore issues of gender politics in workplaces, and differences in how men and women access power. I practiced law for about three years, and I was considered an oddity. Male lawyers literally came in from other firms to look at me, but that was some time ago, and I hope things have changed. There are a lot more women lawyers now.

After I walked away from the practice of law I began writing books, and then Hollywood called. I have written for both television and feature films. Despite Hollywood’s so-called liberal slant the town is not that open to allowing women access to positions of power. Female writers tended to end up on “soft” shows like Dr. Quinn or Touched By An Angel.

During my time in L.A., both when I was being tagged as a potential creator of television shows, and when I was a show runner, I learned that many of the decisions that affect what ends up on TV were being made at a very famous Tuesday night poker game. Players included some of the top network executives and show runners in the industry. Needless to say, there were no girls invited into that exclusive club.

Deals also got made and information exchanged in exclusive foursomes on golf courses scattered around the town. When I asked about getting into one of these I was told by a writer/producer friend— “Hey, that would be great, you can hook up with the girls,” suggesting that I play a round with the wives of the executives and producers. I’m sure these were lovely and talented women, but I needed to be where conversations about the industry were taking place.

While I was certainly literalizing the metaphor when it came to blood-sucking lawyers, I was also using a dramatic device to highlight how women can be subtly closed out of the top tiers of power. It’s no longer as bald and naked as hearing it openly said, “But women can’t be doctors, lawyers, astronauts, and so on,” but an air of “no girls in the club house” still permeates the workplace. It’s more insidious and harder to combat, but it still exists. By personifying these tendencies in mythological creatures, I could bring them to the fore in a more graceful way. And of course my heroine has the power to kick down the doors and upset the status quo. Not just because she has a plot device power but because she’s a very smart, very savvy attorney who can hold her own against the big boys.

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From the Tor/Forge September newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the September Tor/Forge newsletter:

• A Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
• Me Jane by Robin Maxwell
• Books, the Universe, and Cosmic Oddities by Linda Grimes
• The Clockwork Sky Sneak Peek by Madeleine Rosca
• Graphic Novel Sweepstakes

Me Jane

Written by Robin Maxwell

When Tor’s art department presented me with Mark Summers’s amazing cover art, I was a bit thrown. All earlier concepts had included Tarzan, and here he was nowhere to be found except in the subtitle. Yet my gut reaction to the image was overwhelmingly positive. “Yes!” I thought, this was the Jane I’d written—at least as she’d evolved during the course of the book, from a dignified, if tomboyish, Edwardian young lady into a woman who could survive in an African jungle, hunting, fighting, and brachiating through the liana. In short, a “fit mate” for Tarzan.

Here, staring out at me from my book cover, was a powerful, feline female who looked as though if anyone messed with her ape man she would snatch him bald. I liked that. In the next months, when things got hairy, as they always do in the run-up to publishing a book, I’d find myself gazing at the cover, and it would always cheer me up. I was proud that this was the image that would introduce the world to my novel. I started taking strenth from this rendition of Jane Porter. I was slowly being moved by her fierceness and fearlessness.

And it was a good thing, too, because 2012 is Tarzan’s 100th anniversary year, and through my close association with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, I was invited to be a panelist at San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve been a public speaker for fifteen years, but nothing I’d experienced could prepare me for what I knew this convention would be.

In prepping for it, I was suddenly using the cover image in myriad ways—postcards, book plates, and a large poster—to support my panel and a book signing at the Tor Books booth. Everywhere I looked, there was Jane staring back at me, compelling me to “woman-up” and face the mobs and strange creatures of the high-tech jungle in San Diego.

The sight of her everywhere buoyed me, excited me, made me consider crazy things. On a shopping expedition for my Comic-Con wardrobe I found myself eying a little tee-shirt dress in a quite beautiful leopard pattern. With Jane whispering in my ear, I grabbed it off the rack and took it home. My husband, Max, watched that night as I took the scissors to it, cutting out one arm and giving it a jagged, pelt-like hem. When I put it on with black pants and a stone necklace it looked kind of cool. But all my friends warned me – “Do not wear that thing to Comic-Con. You’ll look like an idiot!” They drowned out Jane’s voice…and I chickened out. However, I packed it up and brought it with me anyway.

I spent my first morning at SDCC2012 handing out postcards and signing book plates. A pretty young woman who’d taken a card from me strongly evoked the spirit of Jane and with a sudden burst of courage, I blurted out, “Would you put on a Jane outfit and help me promote my book?!”

My jungle instincts had proven true. Heidi Hilliker was not in costume when we met, but on Saturday she was going to transform herself into her favorite heroine, Wonder Woman. She was game to be Jane for an hour. In the ladies’ room, I whipped out the dress. She looked sensational in it! At the book signing she held up my poster proudly, attracting many admiring stares. I cursed myself for not being brave enough to wear the tog myself.

Once Comic-Con was behind us, the Fates provided me with one more chance to prove my strength and daring. Steve Brown, the publisher of a wonderful Southern California arts and entertainment magazine, The Sun Runner, was intrigued by Jane and the story of how—with the help of Max, a 35-year veteran yoga teacher, and much-beloved figure in our community—I had come to write it. Steve, a pretty out-there guy himself, suggested we pose as Tarzan and Jane for the cover of the “Desert Writers Issue” of his magazine.

Again, friends cautioned us against it. But this time the spirits of Jane and the ape man punched through and cried, “Go for it!” I fashioned Max a nifty little loincloth for his still incredible seventy-year-old body, and put on my outfit. At the 29 Palm Inn oasis, hiding the unfortunate parts of my anatomy with a giant palm frond, we took deep breaths and went native. Here’s the result.

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From the Tor/Forge September newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the September Tor/Forge newsletter:

• A Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
• Blood Sucking Lawyers (For Real) by Phillipa Bornikova
• Books, the Universe, and Cosmic Oddities by Linda Grimes
• The Clockwork Sky Sneak Peek by Madeleine Rosca
• Graphic Novel Sweepstakes

A Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross recall the nine year writing process that resulted in The Rapture of the Nerds.

Cory Doctorow: Charlie, do you remember what you had in mind when you wrote the opening passage to Jury Service? Were you explicitly thinking of Ken Macleod’s idea that the Singularity was like a rapturous, transcendant end-time for nerds?

Charlie Stross: Actually, no! I just had this stub of a story—only a couple of thousand words, if that—about this ordinary Joe, waking up in the bathtub after a raucous party, and finding a biohazard tattoo on his anatomy. It was one of a bunch of story-stubs I’d started and didn’t know what to do with. The “rapture of the nerds” idea was in my head at the time, but I was still working over the Accelerando stories when I wrote it. So it languished in development hell for a year or two, before we got talking about a collaboration. And I emailed it to you to see if you could do something with it. Which led to…

CD: I was in the same place. I was half-captivated by the notion of accelerating change taking us to someplace where we have a break with all the dreary miseries of the world, but still self-aware enough to imagine that this all sounded too good to be true, or at least too *convenient*. Why should a “rational” apocalypse deliberately brought about by sober-sided engineers lead to any sort of utopia?

CS: Yes, this. I was also busy writing a series of novelettes—or a novel—about a family of techno-utopian Panglossian optimists. It seemed like a really good idea to look at the flip side of the coin; at what the Singularity would mean to a curmudgeonly deep green who distrusts any technology more sophisticated than his bicycle (and for good reasons).

So we began emailing the story back and forth, adding around 1000 words each time, building on each others’ work (and, I think, trying to provoke each other by periodically adding preposterous elements—“here, write your way out of *this*!”). And at the end of the day we wound up with a novella, which Ellen Datlow bought for SciFi.com. And there matters rested in 2003 or 2004 or thereabouts, until…

CD:“Appeals Court”—I can’t remember whether we wrote this on spec and then sold it to Lou Anders for Argosy, or whether he’d bought it in advance. This installment tapped into my obsession with uplifting other species, in particular what an uplifted colony organism might do (I go into this in my story “I, Row-Boat,” too). This was partly fuelled by my interest in Eric Bonabeau’s interest in Ant Colony Optimization (which also made an appearance in my story “Human Readable”)—and how that related to things like Wolfram’s notion of the universe being a series of iterated cellular automata.

CS: No, Lou approached us. He’d read Jury Service and thought that, with a sequel, it’d make a great chapbook to bundle with Argosy.

Which is why we ended up doing it that way. I vaguely recall talking something of a back seat on plot development to you during the process of writing “Appeals Court;” which we did in the same back-and-forth way as the earlier novella.

Argosy published it in issue #3 and then, well, let’s not talk about that. And there the matter rested for a couple more years—I thought we were done, frankly—until Tom Doherty (CEO of Tor) learned that we’d collaborated on two novellas and some short stories. “Buy the Doctorow/Stross novel!” he thundered at his editors from on high, some time in 2006. But it was not to be, for we both had piles of pre-existing work commitments. About once a year I’d email you asking, “you got time to cram in an extra half-book this year?” To which the response was generally “no, I’m busy,” at which point I had to admit, “me too.”

Until 2011. When Locus ran a joke April Fool’s Day news article headlined “Stross and Doctorow signed to write authorized sequel to ‘Atlas Shrugged.’”

CD: And we more or less committed to writing that sucker. A bunch of people took the joke seriously, and though the final installment isn’t technically a sequel to Rand’s book, Parole Board is the most sharply political of the lot.

I found it really interesting to revisit the original material, spanning so many years—when I started working on Jury Service, I hadn’t even started working at EFF! Taken as a single work, RotN (a fine acronym!) is the longest project I’ve ever participated in.

CS: Me too. I think we wrote it over a period of about 9 years, didn’t we? I know that my ideas and attitudes changes considerably during that period—an inevitable correlate of growing older—and I think yours changed somewhat as well.

We came at the novel from the angle of completing an existing project by turning it into a three act narrative, and examining some of the implications of the whole singularity idea. Not to mention the power imbalances and questions of privilege and viewpoint and actual existence it raises, and tracing it back to its origins in Russian Orthodox mysticism and the writings of Sergei Federov. Insofar as the singularity is an emergent construct of Christian eschatology (as is the revisionist ”rapture” anticipated by the fundamentalists) the roots of the ostensibly rationalist, materialist, scientific world-view of transhumanism is rooted in some remarkably odd soil; digging into it was great fun.

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From the Tor/Forge September newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

…………………………

More from the September Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Me Jane by Robin Maxwell
• Blood Sucking Lawyers (For Real) by Phillipa Bornikova
• Books, the Universe, and Cosmic Oddities by Linda Grimes
• The Clockwork Sky Sneak Peek by Madeleine Rosca
• Graphic Novel Sweepstakes