This is the opening scene of a story I’m shopping around, “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box).” Next time someone asks “what is solarpunk?” I’m showing them this, because these dozen paragraphs are pure, distilled solarpulp.
Credit to Kim Schmidt, as always
“I wonder what they hold over you, Doña Ana Lucía.” Said Anni Talavalakar. “Did you ‘retrieve’ a relic from your own museum? Seduce a Senator’s lover? I like to think you killed a man, it’s the romantic in me.”
“It is a little of all three.” Doña Ana Lucía smiled — a feral smile on her imperious, cultivated features.
The two Syndicate goons juddered her a little.
“And you still won’t tell me where my venuswood box is…? A pity.” Anni looked up, out toward her stars, gears ticking beneath her silver streak. “But since you have done me the honor of revealing your unspoken truth, I can freely give you this…with your consent.”
“F-freely given.” Confirmed the stunned archaeologist.
She leaned up, and pressed naked lip to blood-red. Her mouth was rich and full, with the confidence of age and the playfulness of youth. Anni even marked the end with a little flick of her tongue that hit Doña Ana Lucía like the sting at the end of a melody.
Anni lingered there, her dark hand caressing Doña Ana Lucía’s morena cheek, her gaze taking in as much of the archaeologist as she could. The Syndicate goons filling the train car looked on respectfully, without a sound.
Finally, Anni drew back and took a deep, regret-filled sigh.
“Toss her.”
The taste of her goodbye kiss lingered on Doña Ana Lucía’s lips as they threw her over the drumhead.
She knew the fall was not far: two meters, if that. But it went on forever, long enough that Ana Lucía could see the stars overhead all wink out in the harsh, cold light of day before she hit the ground.
By the look on her face, I figure she’s stoned, and by her odd clothing, I guess she’s a hipster, so I have to show her something daring. I point to the Morbier. Illustrating the structure with my hands, I tell her, “It’s got two layers: the end of the day’s curds on the bottom and the beginning of the next day’s curds on top, separated by a layer of ash.
It starts with the introduction of Mara, the woman without a past, who until last year had no social security number, no birth certificate, no fingerprints or DNA on file. Trish introduces her, Trish, the smoker sous-chef with some extra pudge around the middle and an eye for the beauty of women like Mara.
In the double-space to a new scene, a new moment, we cross the ash, from today’s curds to yesterday’s, when they met at the farmer’s market, and where Trish pointed out the Morbier. We cross, back and forth, across the ash, from yesterday to today, over the course of the story – and twice across into tomorrow’s curds, once in the middle of the story and at the very end. Today is in the depths of winter, and yet
I’m at the farmer’s market again. It’s springtime, all puddles and pollen. The girl is gone and she’s not coming back.
But our next double-space across the ash, to today, is to describe the other great food metaphor of the story: the chocolate fountain.
A chocolate fountain is a biological weapon disguised as a dessert. Once deployed, the fountain burbles out an invitation to every guest who has just scratched a rash or picked a nose to stick their germy fingers into the brown downpour. For fear of injury lawsuits, the chocolate (which is always of low quality) is not hot enough to kill bacteria – instead, it is diluted with a generic vegetable oil to maintain its runny consistency. By the end of the night, it becomes a sweet, gushing petri dish.
I’ve never eaten of a chocolate fountain, and I never will. Not after these fruits of Benedict’s exhaustive research.
Mara and Trish work at an exclusive Connecticut country club, Trish in the kitchen (but she smokes with the waitstaff) and Mara on the waitstaff. They set up and tear down the chocolate fountain, feed their blue-blooded and well-heeled guests on Costco stuffed grape leaves, steal bottles from the cellar when they can get away with it. It’s all they, and their colleagues, Ivan, Jake, and Peggy, can do. Those well-heeled bastards and blue-blooded heiresses treat them as subhuman. Mara is notable for being the only waitress or waiter who hasn’t barricaded herself in the closet to cry, even after the short litany of personal abuses and degradations Trish off-handedly relates.
Mara saves that for home at the apartment, with Trish, where she checks the fridge five times a night to make sure her leftover spaghetti is still there, where she curls into a ball in the bed for Trish to wrap herself around and hope, where she trembles when two friends of theirs, James and Geoffrey, announce their engagement. “Oh God,” Mara trembles, “the government has you on a list now. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
No one’s sure what to make of Mara, the girl without a past. Her therapist assures her that her memories of time travel, of a terrible future somewhere beyond the ash, are confabulations, but teams of doctors can only wring their hands and wonder if she’s not from some Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt bunker instead. She has a scar on her temple where she says they put in an implant (now, thankfully, finally dead). Once, while high, Trish asks Mara why they would have sent her. Mara just shrugs, “experiments need guinea pigs.”
And, slowly, we piece together where Mara is going, if not where she comes from.
One of the worst of the guests is a tech-lord named Helmut Geier, and his son, Hal. The father cannot meet any eye, speaks in a low monotone mumble, and communicates entirely through his assistant. All he ever communicates is “fire that waiter.” Some, like Jake, have made a game of it, getting fired and showing up again the next day. Helmut does not see the waitstaff as distinct enough people to bother differentiating. All except Mara, who performs with preternatural knowledge of his tastes and preferences.
This time, the assistant’s message is: “he wants you to wait his table from now on.”
And so, when Helmut stays over a week at the club with his son in tow, for his son’s birthday, Mara works breakfast, lunch, and dinner, serving the billionaire’s peculiar needs. Usually before he voices them. Of the son, Hal…well…he’s eleven years old, speaks in grunts instead of his father’s mumbles, spends his every waking hour either on bloodthirsty video games or oversexed anime. Mara serves him as well, at his birthday party:
“Hal Geier has a taste for fried foods, but he doesn’t like to get grease on his device. So every item of food on his plate must have a toothpick in it to keep his fingers clean. He wants chicken tenders and those little French fries shaped like smiley faces. Put broccoli on his plate, too, but only to satisfy his father – the boy will not eat it. And he’ll want a big squeezy bottle of ketchup to go with it.”
“How did you figure all this out?” I ask.
“Research,” she says.
The chocolate fountain burbles on.
And something funny happens at Hal Geier’s birthday party.
It starts with the hypochondriac grandmother, the one who communicates entirely in racist slurs and fatphobic comments, complaining of stomach cramps, whisked away by her personal physician. Then an uncle, the heavy drinker and heavy eater, so no worries. Than a blonde boy who loves to steal food and let his mother emerge from her vodka long enough to laugh at the waitstaff who was too slow for him. Then a little girl named Gertrude – and that’s when it stops being funny, when the kitchen stops making side bets on the next guest to fall.
Now we cross the ash, to the weekend before Christmas, to the loading dock, where Trish is smoking with the waitstaff. Peggy the shift manager pops a question, a hack question for a hack amateur sociologist: “Would you kill baby Hitler?” Only Trish thinks to question the givens, asking if Hitler is predestined, if her attempt was predestined, whether she was doomed to fail. And then Mara answers, pointing to the long history of European anti-Semitism, to the brutality of WWI and the inadequacy of the peace, all the people who willingly participated in the Third Reich. If you killed Hitler, someone else could step into his shoes.
Peggy happily writes up “whether great men make history or history makes great men.” And Mara takes a last pull on her smoke, and gives her real answer, Benedict’s real answer, the heart of the story and the question she set out to ask:
[To prevent the Holocaust,] “You have to kill a lot more people.”
When Trish finally emerges from the kitchen, back across the ash in the present, the bodies have been moved out the back door, the party guests gone, the teardown crews “unaware they’re interfering with a crime scene.” The buffet is cooling in one corner, the stuffed animals deathly still in the centers of the tables, the party streamers hanging limp. The guests who aren’t dead, will be.
And Mara is standing next to the putrid petri dish of wealthy excess: the chocolate fountain, with the red juice of a strawberry and a speck of chocolate at the corner of her mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come,” are her last words. Along with “I’m sorry.”
We cross the ash one last time. Into the future, where Trish wakes up every morning in “the wrong life,” hounded by police and reporters, wondering if her girlfriend really was from the future, really had to kill all those people to prevent it, if she was just crazy, if Trish herself is crazy.
It’s a life cut in half by disaster, and the past lies buried beneath a layer of ash.
(If you’re racking your brains trying to remember where you heard of R. S. Benedict before, she was the Main Character of Twitter for about 36 hours, because of a dumbass opinion on fanfic. You may also notice that nowhere in this summary does fanfic come up. Her opinion of fanfic has no bearing whatsoever on this story. A person can have a shitty opinion and still be a good writer, published in F&SF. No matter what Twitter tells you.)
Many reviewers, then and now, compared “Morbier” to 12 Monkeys. The crazed time traveler, the sympathetic love interest here in the present, the unfathomable disaster to come, the brutal things to be done “in the present.”
It is not.
It is La Jetée.
I love that this cover is composed like a slice of Morbier.
Both 12 Monkeys and “Morbier” derive from La Jetée, but “Morbier” hones closer to the disjointed, nightmarish effect of the original. It was only on the third reread that I caught the calls-forward, the rhythm of the temporal displacements, the creeping hints that Mara is not crazy – the hints Trish doesn’t quite pick up on, even as she relates them.
This story creeps. It creeps up your spine and down your gorge, and then stays there.
“You’d have to kill a lot more people” is Benedict’s answer to the hoary old question, and Mara unflinchingly acts on that answer. She tries to save the waitstaff, the class innocents, from her bacteriological guillotine (since no staff member is dumb enough to eat from the fountain) but she can’t save them from the disjoint, from the horror of waking up in the wrong life ever after. She truly loves Trish, but has to keep her at arm’s distance. If you truly believed in killing baby Hitler, and killing a lot more people besides, to prevent a Holocaust, you would have to be Mara.
Ask yourself if you could do it. I still don’t have an answer myself.
Ladli dabbed at her brow with the hem of her sari. It was not Proper, but then, neither was she. A proper auntie would not have wasted what few rupees they had on electricity from the neighbourhood’s jugaar solar install, not have wasted yet more on roadside dhaba meals so she’d have time to work, not have sent Maandhar diving into the deep on mad bright dreams instead of honest cons like the rest of the diver-boys.
The thought had occurred to her, in the shadows of the multinationals, as she queued for water. The ubiquitous cloud of diver-boys swarmed any out-of-towners or people who looked rich.
“Many diamonds, uncle, from the old days!”
“Only two hundred rupees investment!”
“Prizes from the deep!”
Ladli and her family live on the shores of sunken Surat, seeking sustenance from the waters that were once the downtown Diamond District. Her promising nephew Maandhar dives for treasures and tricks gullible tourists, her brother-in-law Guarav from the fish that gather fewer and fewer every year. Ladli looks down into the dirty deep and the bones of the city that once was, and dreams of a garden, a garden of beauty and wealth, that might rise from the waters again…
In Québec, there’s a long tradition of telling scary stories on the darkest nights of the year. As “mon pays, ceci n’est pas un pays, c’est hiver”* fills with endless snow and the days grow short, people gathered together around the campfires and told tales of werewolves, demons, devils, and wendigos. Some of the most famous stories in Québécois folklore, like Rose LaTulippe or the Chasse-Galerie, arise from these long-ago campfire tails in the dead of subarctic night. And none are more scary, none more hair-raising, than the tales told on New Year’s Night, when the stars are bright and cold and clear and the dim fire throws shadows that could be loup-garou with cold breath, and the chill is always hovering too close to the tiny circle of warmth.
So here, free, two days only, is mon conte de Nouvel’An.
In 2109, there is no more space program.
No more Discovery.
No more Final Frontiers.
I wrote “No More Final Frontiers” after they announced the Space Shuttle program was ending, with no clear hope forward other than hitching a ride with the Russians. SpaceX remained unclaimed. Since it’s been claimed, since the Dragon roars through the sky…I still see this as a possible future, one to warn against. The more Elon Musk tries to gobble up outer space as his personal demesne, muscling out competition while deriding nonprofit or governmental space exploration, crowning himself King of Mars with wannabe serfs lining up for the pleasure, the more I wonder if one hundred years from now, anyone will remember or care after he inevitably burns out.
I dedicated it to two men who died that year – Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Kyle Bruner, a shipmate of mine on the Lady Washington who died trying to save a woman from getting robbed in the Bahamas. The deaths of these two men are what inspired this particular horror story, this story of time forgot.
For the next forty-eight hours, “No More Final Frontiers” is available for free on Amazon. It’s the story of “Space Dennis,” one of the last crews of a historical reenactment space program, and one of the last to get the news that it’s been shut down. He and his shipmates hatch a plot to steal the space shuttle, but even abandoned property is harder to steal than it looks, and they’ll be faced with the question whether it’s even worth it…
I only read four-star reviews on Amazon. Let me tell you why.
The five-star reviews are all glowing praise that makes a J. J. Abrahms joint look dim, and in their worst cases, are bought and paid for. The one- and two-star reviews are just unrelentingly negative, often miss the point, and though sometimes entertaining on their own for the reviewer’s semi-coherent tangents, are rarely actually informative. If I clicked on the book’s page, I’m generally interested. I want to buy, but I want an honest look at what I’m getting first, and the four-star reviews actually tell you what they like, and a few things they didn’t.
Some of the stories in here are real gems. I’ve highlighted the ones I loved over thepastfewweeks – but when you read it, you might fall in love with “The Salvage at the Selvage” or “The Repairwoman” or maybe even “Scars of Satyagraha” instead. You might find “The Comforting” leaves you cold and you got no love for “Lady Jane.” But it’s the kind of anthology where there’s a favorite for everyone in here somewhere.
And as for the rest? Hell, it’s in the title. Even the mediocre stories (and there are mediocre stories and a few out-and-out duds) are trying to do something new, trying to imagine a future so bright, you gotta wear shades. No tacked-on sad ending, no cheap cynicism, no sudden twist that they were actually all terrible people the whole time. In a world of, as I called the possible future of “Lady Jade,” rising tides, rearing storms, and political intrigues, sometimes you want the comfort of knowing the author’s either optimistic, or tryin’ real hard to be. And, intellectually, there really are new ideas here, new ways of looking at old problems. Even the worst duds in here have a one weird idea or two.
There’s a couple of typos, a few spots where the italics clearly got away from the proofreader and never came back, and I hope they’ll be fixed for the second edition. But they don’t much interfere with the reading, they’re just irritating.
And, to address the delicate question a few of you have raised in my DMs and emails, here’s my mini-review-in-a-review of “Scars of Satyagraha”.
“Scars of Satyagraha” is the most Quaker story I’ve ever told. Originally intended for an anthology on gender, the prompt made me think of the often opposing genders of Gentleman and Real Man, and Sam caught between them. The rest, the meditation on violence, ahimsa, gender, bodysurfing, and Mafia movies, happened quite naturally. I’m particularly proud of Babuji’s nails, they are splendid.
Sami Chaturvedy is a young woman we would recognize as trans, on an Indian-Nigerian independent Mars where switching bodies is as easy as getting a tattoo, torn between the nonviolent Martian values of her Babuji and the tarnished, violent honor she imagines of her deceased mother’s Yankee heritage. But her childish wishes to connect to her heritage through mafia movies and the Yankee Militia underworld of Mars lands her in hot water faster than you can say Colt .45, and she finds herself forced to choose where she stands in the worst way.
In a lot of ways, this story feels like a trial run for Doña Ana Lucía and …To The Future!. Sam’s Mars feels like an earlier age of the Six Worlds, more open, less dense, but just as eerie. Sami herself is grappling with the same issues of ethnic identity, otherness, and integration that underlie Doña Ana Lucía’s psychology, and, for that matter, mine as a franco-americain, even if she isn’t literally grappling with actual bad guys all that much. But it’s also very much a story unto itself. Sami’s inner conflict is front-and-center, and she an unwilling participant in the action after her youthful disillusionment. Her world is less a spicier Star Trek utopia than it is an alien, weird thing unto itself – a Mars that separated nonviolently but with great vigorousness, inspired by the postcolonial liberations of its two founding cultures.
I hope you like it.
I hope you like the other stories, too. Typos and the occasional dud (but what anthology doesn’t have the occasional dud? Even Dangerous Visions had “Lord Randy, My Son”) aside, The Future’s So Bright is an anthology I’ll be thumbing through again in the future. However bright it turns out to be.
DOCTOR LADY and her FLYBOY EX have JUST TWELVE HOURS to get THE ANTIDOTE to THE PRESIDENT or what remains of South America will fall to THE WARLORDS.
Of course they are. You knew that just reading the slugline.
In less than a page, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.
“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden, is solarpulp. Such pure, undiluted solarpulp that I absolutely know she watched Only Angels Have Wings the night before she started this story. And, much like knowing that of course they make it in time, that’s no bad thing. Bowden has the breathless pace and suddenly-exotic climate changed environs I want from my pulps, breathing new life into old twists (La Paz is an island, the big storm is really big).
Cressida Jade, one of formerly-North-America’s foremost experts on snake venom, is the only one who can save President Ricarda, whose life is the only thing holding South America together by a thread, from the mysterious snakebite that may have been deliberately set on her by regional warlords. But she can’t possibly make it in time, until Jack Lacy
Whadda guy!
steps in with his trusty flying rig the Lady Jade. But Jack and Cressida have a history behind them, and the mother of all storms ahead. Though the mission to save the president is never in doubt, will Jack and Cressida be able to save themselves? Rounding out the cast are Cressida’s beau Luke Araba and Vice President Waru Dangati.
My only complaint about this story is that there’s too little of it! Having made just these kinds of cuts myself in the past, this story cries out that it was a fantastic ten or fifteen thousand words, full of derring do and strange adventures, but had to get cut down to size to submit to this anthology. I’d love to see whatever original version might be floating around on Ms. Bowden’s hard drive, or more adventures in this universe or one just next door. The world could certainly use mere derring-do and strange adventure in the wake of rising tides, rearing storms, and political intrigues.
But that’s, hopefully, a nice problem to have. At any rate, I was thoroughly surprised and delighted to find two-fisted solarpunk escapades between the pages of The Future So Bright. It’s kind of future that, if there were enough like Cressida Jade and Jack Lacy in it, it would be safe to live in, yet not too dull to be worth living in.
Last week, I mentioned the no-nonsense prose most of the other stories had, in contrast to Regina Clarke’s lyrical dream-voice. Here, just as Clarke’s dreamlike language works for “Night Circus,” that no-nonsense, hard-boiled prose works for Kevin David Anderson’s “The Comforting.” Both are featured in The Future’s So Bright, now available wherever better books are sold.
Detective Lentil sits in his faded office, a gruff cop of the old schools, who knows better how to get information out of people than computers, and prefers it that way. This time, though, it’s not the leggy blonde who walks in and breathlessly asks after her dear, disappeared husband (though I’m sure Lentil would have preferred it that way), but a beardless boy name of Jasper Casper, who’d like to report an assault by his plaid comforter.
Yes, the blanket.
“Just the facts, man.”
And as Lentil tries his damnedest Joe Friday to get this kook’s report so he can go home to his empty apartment, more reports start coming in (and walking in) of a crazed plaid comforter, loose on the town, who’s finally snapped his last thread and taking it out on an indifferent world. Soon, instead of going home, Lentil, Jasper, and Ms. Peaches are racing across town, where the rogue blanket is atop the towering Skyrell Corporation building, and everyone but Lentil are taking selfies. What follows is a hilarious, Adamsian-but-not-quite-as-dense satire of misapplied high technology, misanthropic blankets, and one very misguided corporate turtleneck.
Which makes sense, Anderson specifically mentions “a scene by the late great Terry Pratchett” as his inspiration for the piece. While his voice is unmistakably American, in that New York minute sort of way, he does have something of both Pratchett’s and Adams’ absolute poker-faced voice going for him. Although he affirms his distrust of technology (like Detective Lentil, he still exclusively plays the vinyl he bought in the eighties, and refuses to own a cell phone), Anderson’s criticism of technology and the culture it breeds lacks the cruelty and mean-spiritedness of a lot of similar “satires.” I work in a tech company, own an iPhone, and handle tech support for a living, and I was laughing my ass off at the dialogue even when it wasn’t silly, because I know these people. For someone who despises tech, Anderson seems to spend a lot of time with tech heads.
It makes me wonder exactly which Pratchett scene it was, the one that has nothing to do with technology, that he read.
Next week, the wild, unexpected ride of “Lady Jade.”
Those were the first words out of my mouth when I finished this story.
…that’s a good thing.
I still haven’t figured out if Regina Clarke‘s “Night Circus” is magical fantasy, wondertech sci-fi, or something like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, where the distinction long ago grew moot. It starts with the short paragraph:
It was said the girl-child dreamed worlds into being. Arain ran to me with news of her arrival from Rengal.
And the entire story is very dreamlike. The narrator, Silla, wanders past flamevines and figs, under the psychic eye of the never-sleeping Preceptor, meets his weirding red-and-green eyes, follows in her father’s otherworldly footsteps, and encounters the golden couple of a disappearing mound beyond dreams out in the wastes of desert quadrant Forty-Two.
That’s not even a third of the way through the story.
Silla must confront the Night Circus, the realm that binds her father, Arain’s mother, and the Preceptor, be offered a choice, and make it freely. That is the way of things, and only her and Arain’s choices will make things different again (possibly by dreaming a new universe into being).
And what of the girl-child?
This Night Circus is second cousin to Bradbury’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the way his Mechanical Hound is to the Hound of the Baskervilles. There are nightshades of Jim and of Will Halloway in Arain and Silla, though who is Halloween’s child is rather less clear here. There’s a lot that’s unclear here, lost in shadows of poetry, give or take a simile, gain or lose a metaphor, disappearing in the smooth sands of Forty-Two like Rea and Tamis’ mound and its Builders. And the thing is – it works. It helps make the story what it is, to create a peculiar taste on the tongue that lingers but never quite settles. Whether I liked them or not, the other stories I’d read had a certain no-nonsense air to them. “The Night Circus” very much does not, and it still had me thinking on it days later.
“Night Circus” is available in The Future’s So Bright, and Regina Clarke’s page can be found here. When I finish the anthology, I’m thinking of picking up “Out of Time,” and see what dreams may come…
This is a perfect little exemplar of science fiction. It is a precisely-cut, perfect cameo of how modern literary science fiction works, breathes, and executes. If any of your friends ask “what is science fiction?” or, more precisely, “what is short science fiction?” then show them this story. Like it or don’t, they will understand.
The story is about Mary, last resident of Dusty Creek, AZ. Dusty Creek has been slowly clearing out because while cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque can buy weather machines, giving them tourist weather and perfect crop-growing seasons, the pent-up weather dumps on little places who can’t afford their own weather machines. Places like Dusty Creek.
Mary refuses to leave, either in the face of the common sense (which is neither) of the townspeople or the appeals of her Aunt Bea. Mary keeps thinking of her grandmother, the “tornado in size five boots,” what Gran would have done, how Gran would have responded, how Gran would have had the personality and the will to bring the town back from the dead. Gran had helped build this town.
Until Aunt Bea silently reminds her that Gran had come from somewhere else. Mary looks up from her furious, stubborn knitting to look on the photo of Gran and Aunt Bea in the refugee camp, over across the sea, from whence the two women had come to Dusty Creek. She looks down in her hands, at the ugly, too-tight stitches on the sock she’d started, and goes to join Aunt Bea on the road to Flagstaff and a new life.
What I love about this story is twofold. First is that it is a true science fiction story – the story would not work without the super-science of the weather machines wreaking havoc on the American Southwest. Second is that it is a true character story – the turning point of the story isn’t the flipping of a switch or the punching of the one Big Bad, it’s looking at a photograph and realizing the world was bigger than she thought it was. It’s the main character seeing the world differently.
The fact that the details of the photograph require us, the reader, to reevaluate Gran and Mary in the light of the new revelation of Gran’s refugee status is just icing on the cake.
I gave “Knitting Weather” seven rocket dragons when I read it, a rating I dole out maybe once a year. I’m keeping an eye out for Wendy Nikel both in Daily Science Fiction and elsewhere. I can’t wait to see her next story.
You’ve all been wondering what I’ve been working on? Here it is, in glorious brights.
Out of the darkness of the present comes the light of the days ahead …
From all the good things provided by advanced AI to the innocence of discovering new worlds, join our authors as they present uplifting stories of science fiction and fantasy.
The list of names is pretty interesting, too:
Kevin David Anderson, Maureen Bowden, Steven D. Brewer, Nels Challinor, Regina Clarke, Stephen C. Curro, Jetse de Vries, Nestor Delfino, Gail Ann Gibbs, Henry Herz, Gwen C. Katz, Brandon Ketchum, Julia LaFond, R. Jean Mathieu, Cynthia McDonald, Christopher Muscato, Alfred Smith, A.M. Weald, David Wright
I’ve seen some of these names in the magazines, under titles of stories that snuck up on me six months later to remind me.
I hope my story, “Scars of Satyagraha,” will be one of those when you read it.
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