Recently I picked up Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977), which I kept hearing about but had never actually read. I had had the impression it was a portal fantasy about a couple of children, but that isn’t correct: it’s about a couple of children with vivid imaginations who play at fantasy.
The edition I read had an introduction that tipped me off that something terrible was going to happen in the story. (Since this book is almost fifty years old, I’m going to forgo a spoiler alert.) So I was prepared when a tragedy did occur. But I found the ending uplifting nonetheless, because of how the author describes the change this tragedy works in the main character, Jess. Which may be the point of tragedy, on the whole.
The denouement did get me thinking about something I’d never quite been able to articulate, having to do with the Narnia stories. Narnia keeps coming up in Bridge to Terabithia; it largely inspires the characters’ imagined world. So the connection was out in the open. It isn’t mentioned specifically in the Terabithia quote that sparked my reflection:
It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn’t king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on. For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.)
Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength. (ch. 13, p. 161)
The aphorism that kept coming to mind was “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. 17). But that’s not quite it. That line is about continuing to be a king or queen. But what I kept thinking about was becoming a king or queen in the first place.
See, the Pevensie children, who become kings and queens in Narnia, don’t start out as heroes of mythic stature. They’re a pretty normal bunch of kids. There’s no suggestion that they are of extraordinary strength, courage, intelligence, or virtue. They certainly rise to the occasion: we see them becoming heroes as the story develops. But their only qualification for royalty, in the first book, seems to be simply the fact that they are “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”—that is, human beings. (ch. 2 and 8)
The notion that a human being as such has a royal destiny isn’t far from Jess’s thought in the Terabithia quote above. The other world is where you’re knighted, where your true self is recognized; but you’ve already got the potential. The other world simply calls you to realize it and carry it out (“pay back to the world in beauty and caring”).
The underlying thought that my reading of Terabithia teased out is that simply being a human being (or, more broadly, a person), a child of God, is enough to qualify one for the kind of dignity and respect that we associate with royalty. And that’s something worth remembering.
Here’s the appropriate song—unrelated to either book, but matching very closely in theme: “Kings and Queens” by Audio Adrenaline (lyrics).
Can one have too many books? I want to say no. (See the illustration, which hangs on our front hall next to the library.) On the other hand, it’s become difficult to fit my accumulated collection comfortably into any reasonable home—and doubly so when you add in my wife’s lifelong collection as well—even without the eight or ten boxes of books I sold off to the fabulous Wonder Books in Frederick in an attempt to thin out the collection. And nonfiction is another story. (Well, the stories are in the fiction section; but you see what I mean.)
This is so even though I’ve tried to exercise restraint by buying only those books I’ll want to read over again. I prefer to try out a new book by getting it from the library, and, after reading, to decide whether this is a “keeper” that I always want to have available. The rare exceptions are new books that I already know I’ll want to own, generally in a series. While Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga was still coming out, for instance, I’d grab those off the bookstore shelves at once, sight unseen. (Though I admit I do have only an electronic copy of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen—but that’s another discussion.)
Aside from considerations of space, it occurred to me some years ago that the “read again” rationale necessarily diminishes over time. Given my likely lifespan, how many times am I likely to reread any given volume? That number is constantly decreasing. This makes me a little cautious about buying new books—as opposed to using the library. One of the great perks of my current job is that there’s a county library branch right on the first floor of our building. I can put a book on hold and nip down while at the office to pick it up. Same thing to return it. A wonderful arrangement . . . at least until I retire . . .
The other motivation I’ve had for accumulating books has been a vague notion that they serve as a kind of reference library. In writing posts like these, it’s convenient to be able to grab a favorite book to check on some point or to make a citation precise. For years, I kept around an old paperback copy of Neil Jones’s The Planet of the Double Sun (1931, paperback edition 1967), merely as an example of a really crummy old-time SF yarn. It finally occurred to me that there was no particular purpose in having it—rereading it would be too boring to be worth any use I might make of the mention—and I ditched, er, released my copy to find a new home with some historian of SF. Haven’t missed it since.
The Great Reread
In the process of going over my packed-and-unpacked-and-reshelved books (two moves in the last two and a half years!), I’ve sometimes found it hard to recall what some of the stories were actually like. Or I feel as if I’d like to read a book once more before I consign it to the outermost depths. So I find myself rereading a lot of old material. Some of it holds up pretty well. Others, I wonder what I saw in the tale in the first place. The rereads end up being a combination of final trial—do I want to keep this book?—and fond farewell.
Of course I continue to read new stories too: new good books are coming out all the time. But it’s rather enjoyable to revisit some old friends as part of a balanced bookish diet.
And sometimes the old stuff may be worthy of comment. So I’m going to include the occasional post here from the Great Reread. The inspiration comes from Jo Walton’s brilliant series of essays, “What Makes This Book So Great,” originally hosted, I believe, at Tor and published in a 2014 collection. (There seems to be a list of links here; Walton’s own comments on rereading are here.) I’m not spotlighting what are necessarily the greatest books—but there may be interesting things to say even about the non-great or non-classic tomes I find cluttering my shelves.
Since these books tend to be fairly well aged, I don’t think it’s necessary to issue spoiler alerts in each case. The comments all have spoilers.
Brian Daley’s Peripatetic Heroes
I first ran across Brian Daley (1947-1996) in his 1977 novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde, which has the irresistible premise that a sorcerer in a fantasy land summons magical assistance from another world—and it turns out to be an armored personnel carrier, with crew, from the war in Vietnam. The fish-out-of-water contrast was delightful and the action first-rate. I was primed to look for more good fun a few years later when Daley published Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (1985), the first in a trilogy of adventures featuring the mismatched buddies Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh.
They’re still good fun. The heroes are both likable and relatable—dashing and mercurial Alacrity, a knockabout itinerant spacer with “friends in low places” across the starlanes, and staid Hobart, a minor bureaucrat from a congested backwater Earth. Alacrity has some personal issues to get over, mostly in the third volume, but Hobart develops most, rising to the occasion as he travels into space to obtain a bequest inexplicably left to him by an interstellar magnate. The worldbuilding is brilliant: planet after exotic planet, oddball character after still odder character. The sheer variety and colorfulness of Daley’s cosmos is pleasing.
The Floyt-Fitzhugh saga falls into the category of the “picaresque” tale. Originally I misunderstood that term to mean the same thing as simply “picturesque,” and the story certainly is that. When I actually looked up the word, many years ago, I realized it had a more specific meaning: “Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero,” as Wiktionary puts it. That fits our heroes pretty well—Alacrity from the start, Hobart learning fast. They’re lovable rogues, often on the wrong side of the law (or at least local customs), with hearts of about 12-carat gold. Even in the last scene of the series, they’re off again to who knows where, one jump ahead of pursuit.
And thereby hang my possibly idiosyncratic reservations about the story. The plot of the first book is very good; there’s a clear goal and climax. In the second and third books, not quite so much. Alacrity and Hobart achieve some interesting results, but they themselves don’t actually stop to absorb or enjoy them. Our Heroes are always on to the next thing. Daley gives each of them a pretty good romance subplot, but these never quite resolve, since the MCs are always leaving their girlfriends behind—even at the end of the third book, Fall of the White Ship Avatar. I was left wondering, do these two ever get to settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labors?
This is a standard issue with wandering, picaresque heroes, particularly those who star in open-ended series. Daley even lampshades this aspect by including a whimsical journalist in the story who features Floyt and Fitzhugh in a series of utterly melodramatic “penny dreadfuls,” to Our Heroes’ perpetual embarrassment and annoyance. Daley seems to want to place them in the company of series heroes whose adventures never really end. James Bond is never going to stop secret-agenting; he just gets re-cast with increasingly younger actors. At the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just when we might expect Indy to retire and be replaced by his son, Indy snatches back his rolling fedora at the last moment. The ending of The Incredibles or Spider-Man 2 show the characters resolving their personal character arcs, but nonetheless leaping into the next adventure.
One wonders if these perpetual adventurers ever retire, even as they inevitably age. We’ve pondered this previously in considering the “professional hero.” There has been the occasional hero who explicitly retires and passes on the mantle to a successor. There’s a neat little story in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City showing how superhero Jack-in-the-Box is training his successor. And Captain America eventually retires in the MCU, though the ‘line of succession’ is rather fraught.
Personally, I like to see the main characters settle down at some point, if only to enjoy a well-earned respite from perpetual danger and damage. They can continue to have interesting adventures later on; “happily ever after” need not be a static condition. Consider, for example, the somewhat atypical honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan in Diplomatic Immunity. But it’s satisfying to see beloved characters enjoying some degree of stability.
On the other hand, there’s also a certain appeal to the hero who’s eternally “out there,” a legendary figure, always at their peak and unabatedly themselves. In a way I don’t want to see Nero Wolfe or James Bond retire. So I do rather appreciate the perpetual motion of Floyt and Fitzhugh, despite the lack of resolution. To resolve, or not to resolve? That is the question—but either answer may be acceptable. I’ll be keeping the Daley books on my overstuffed shelves.
I recently read an excellent cautionary tale (and with a romance to boot), David Walton’s Three Laws Lethal (2019). The subject of “artificial intelligence” or AI (it isn’t really intelligence, but that’s another story) is hot. To take only one rather specialized example, the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee last year carried out a brief survey of the roles of AI, both harmful and helpful, in dealing with robocalls and robotexts. So it seems like an appropriate moment to take a look at Walton’s insights.
Frankenstein and the Three Laws
It’s well known that the early history of SF—starting with what’s considered by some to be the first modern SF story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—is replete with tales of constructed creatures that turn on their creators and destroy them. Almost as well known is how Isaac Asimov, as he explains in the introduction to his anthology The Rest of the Robots (1964), “quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale.” Like other tools, Asimov suggested, robots would be made with built-in safeguards. Knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electric wiring is insulated. The safeguards Asimov devised, around 1942, gradually and through conversations with SF editor John W. Campbell, were his celebrated Three Laws of Robotics:
1—A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2—A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The “positronic” or “Asenion” robots in many of Asimov’s stories were thus unable to attack their human creators (First Law). They could not run wild and disobey orders (Second Law). Asimov’s robot could not become yet another Frankenstein’s monster.
That still left plenty of room for fascinating stories—many of them logic puzzles built around the Three Laws themselves. A number of the loopholes and ramifications of the Three Laws are described in the Wikipedia article linked above. It even turned out to be possible to use robots to commit murder, albeit unwittingly, as in Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun (1956). When he eventually integrated his robot stories with his Foundation series, he expanded the Three Laws construct considerably—but that’s beyond our scope here.
Autonomous Vehicles
To discuss Three Laws Lethal, I must of course issue a
Walton’s book does cite Asimov’s laws just before Chapter One, but his characters don’t start out by trying to create Asenion-type humanoid robots. They’re just trying to start a company to design and sell self-driving cars.
The book starts with a vignette in which a family riding in a “fully automated Mercedes” runs into an accident. To save the passengers from a falling tree, the car swerves out of the way, in the process hitting a motorcyclist in the next lane. The motorcyclist is killed. The resulting lawsuit by the cyclist’s wife turns up at various points in the story that follows.
Tyler Daniels and Brandon Kincannon are friends, contemporary Silicon Valley types trying to get funding for a startup. Computer genius Naomi Sumner comes up with a unique way to make their automated taxi service a success: she sets up a machine learning process by creating a virtual world with independent AIs that compete for resources to “live” on (ch. 2 and 5). She names them “Mikes” after a famous science-fictional self-aware computer. The Mikes win resources by driving real-world cars successfully. In a kind of natural selection, the Mikes that succeed in driving get more resources and live longer: the desired behavior is “reinforced.”
Things start to go wrong almost at once, though. The learning or reinforcement methods programmed into the AIs don’t include anything like the Three Laws. A human being who’s been testing the first set of autonomous (Mike-guided) vehicles by trying to crash into them is killed by the cars themselves—since they perceive that human being as a threat. Two competing fleets of self-guided vehicles see each other as adversaries and can be turned against their controllers’ enemies. The story is both convincing—the AI development method sounds quite plausible and up-to-the-minute (at least to this layman)—and unnerving.
But the hypothetical AI system in the novel, it seems to me, casts some light on an aspect of AI that is not highlighted in Three Laws-type stories.
Having a Goal
The Mikes in Three Laws Lethal are implicitly given a purpose by being set up to fight for survival. That purpose is survival itself. We recall that a robot’s survival is also included as the third of the Three Laws—but in that context survival is subordinated to protecting humans and obeying orders. Asimov’s robots are conceived as basically passive. They would resist being destroyed (unless given orders to the contrary), but they don’t take positive action to seek the preservation or extension of their own existence. The Mikes, however, like living beings, are motivated to affirmatively seek and maintain themselves.
If an AI population is given a goal of survival or expansion, then we’re all set up for Frankensteinian violations of the First Law. That’s what the book depicts, although in a far more sophisticated and thoughtful way than the old-style SF potboilers Asimov so disliked.
At one point in Walton’s story, Naomi decides to “change the objective. She didn’t want them to learn to drive anymore. She wanted them to learn to speak” (ch. 23, p. 248)—in order to show they are sapient. Changing the goal would change the behavior. As another character puts it later on, “[i]t’s not a matter of preventing them from doing that they want” (as if a Law of Robotics were constraining them from pursuing a purpose, like a commandment telling humans what not to do). Rather, “[w]e teach them what to want in the first place.” (ch. 27, p. 288)
Goals and Ethics
Immanuel Kant
The Three Laws approach assumes that the robot or AI has been given a purpose—in Asimov’s conception, by being given orders—and the Laws set limits to the actions it can take in pursuing that purpose. If the Laws can be considered a set of ethical principles, then they correspond to what’s called “deontological” ethics, a set of rules that constrain how a being is allowed to act. What defines right action is based on these rules, rather than on consequences or outcomes. In the terms used by philosopher Immanuel Kant, the categorical imperative, the basic moral law, determines whether we can lawfully act in accordance with our inclinations. The inclinations, which are impulses directing us toward some goal or desired end, are taken for granted; restraining them is the job of ethics.
Some other forms of ethics focus primarily on the end to be achieved, rather than on the guardrails to be observed in getting there. The classic formulation is that of Aristotle: “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good.” (Nicomachean Ethics, I.i, 1094a1) Some forms of good-based or axiological ethics focus mostly on the results, as in utilitarianism; others focus more on the actions of the good or virtuous person. When Naomi, in Walton’s story, talks about changing the objective of the AI(s), she’s implicitly dealing with an axiological or good-based ethic.
As we’ve seen above, Asimov’s robots are essentially servants; they don’t have purposes of their own. There is a possible exception: the proviso in the First Law that a robot may not through inaction allow harm to come to humans does suggest an implicit purpose of protecting humans. In the original Three Laws stories, however, that proviso did not tend to stimulate the robots to affirmative action to protect or promote humans. Later on, Asimov did use something like this pro-human interest to expand the robot storyline and connect it with the Foundation stories. So my description of Three Laws robots as non-purposive is not absolutely precise. But it does, I think, capture something significant about the Asenion conception of AI.
Selecting a Purpose
There has been some discussion, factual and fictional, about an AI’s possible purposes. I see, for example, that there’s a Wikipedia page on “instrumental convergence,” which talks about the kinds of goals that might be given to an AI—and how an oversimplified goal might go wrong. A classic example is that of the “paperclip maximizer.” An AI whose only goal was to make as many paper clips as possible might end by turning the entire universe into paper clips, consistent with its sole purpose. In the process, it might decide, as the Wikipedia article notes, “that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off,” which would diminish the number of paper clips. (Apparently there’s actually a game built on this thought-experiment. Available at office-supply stores near you, no doubt . . .)
A widget-producing machine like the paperclip maximizer has a simple and concrete purpose. But the purpose need not be so mundane. Three Laws Lethal has one character instilling the goal of learning to speak, as noted above. A recent article by Lydia Denworth describes a real-life robot named Torso that’s being programmed to “pursue curiosity.” (Scientific American, Dec. 2024, at 64, 68)
It should be possible in principle to program multiple purposes into an AI. A robot might have the goal of producing paper clips, but also the goal of protecting human life, say. But it would then also be necessary to include in the program some way of balancing or prioritizing the goals, since they would often conflict or compete with each other. There’s precedent for this, too, in ethical theory, such as the traditional “principle of double effect” to evaluate actions that have both good and bad results.
Note that we’ve been speaking of goals give to or programmed into the AI by a human designer. Could an AI choose its own goals? The question that immediately arises is, how or by what criteria would the AI make that choice? That methodological or procedural question arises even before the more interesting and disturbing question of whether an AI might choose bad goals or good ones. There’s an analogy here to the uncertainty faced by parents in raising children: how does one (try to) ensure that the child will embrace the right ethics or value system? I seem to recall that David Brin has suggested somewhere that the best way to develop beneficent AIs is actually to give them a childhood of a sort, though I can’t recall the reference at the moment.
Conclusions, Highly Tentative
The above ruminations suggest that if we want AIs that behave ethically, it may be necessary to give them both purposes and rules. We want an autonomous vehicle that gets us to our destination speedily, but we want it to respect Asimov’s First Law about protecting humans in the process. The more we consider the problem, the more it seems that what we want for our AI offspring is something like a full-blown ethical system, more complex and nuanced than the Three Laws, more qualified and guarded than Naomi’s survival-seeking Mikes.
This is one of those cases where contemporary science is actually beginning to implement something science fiction has long discussed. (Just the other day, I read an article by Geoffrey Fowler (11/30/2024) about how Waymo robotaxis don’t always stop for a human at a crosswalk.) Clearly, it’s time to get serious about how we grapple with the problem Walton so admirably sets up in his book.
My science fiction romantic comedy novella Time Signature debuts tomorrow, May 10, available wherever fine ebooks are sold. In honor of the occasion, I’m going to say a few words about one of the interesting aspects of writing this piece—the challenge of building a story in a world someone else has created.
Origin Story
The Wild Rose Press likes to develop series of books based on a common setting or theme. The common element is announced, and authors are invited to submit stories to fit. The stories may be of different kinds: contemporary romance, historical romance, romantic suspense, paranormal romance, and so forth. But the common thread ties them together.
A couple of years ago, TWRP announced the Deerbourne Inn series. The creators placed a charming old inn in a small town in Vermont. They described the layout of the inn and the town, the surrounding landscape, a set of inhabitants, noteworthy events, and the like. Then they turned the writers loose. At this point, I count no fewer than twenty-six books set in the Deerbourne Inn locale. This small town, in other words, is crawling with lovers seeking their happy endings.
In a Wild Rose chat, I asked whether, among all these varieties, a science fiction (rather than fantasy) story might also fit. Sure, why not, was the response. And, having raised the question, I thought of an angle: a chance to play around with the classic time travel romance tropes and, perhaps, turn them around in unexpected ways. I ran the concept by Nikki Andrews, who was at that time my TWRP editor. She thought it might be fun. And thus Time Signature was born.
The Shared World
The idea of a shared world has a long history, especially in science fiction. Back in the 1980s, Harlan Ellison recruited a band of noted SF writers to place stories in a setting referred to as “Harlan’s World.” Later in the ’80s, Jerry Pournelle opened up a planet in his CoDominium future history to other authors under the series title “War World.” Larry Niven, a frequent collaborator with Pournelle, performed a similar evolution based on an event in his Known Space future history, the “Man-Kzin Wars.” More recently, Eric Flint’s 2000 novel 1632 has spawned an extensive cottage industry of alternate-history stories in the “Ring of Fire series.”
A storyline inhabited by different authors can also develop almost accidentally. I’ve remarked on the roles of different writers in stories about the “Fuzzies” created by H. Beam Piper. A set of follow-up books to James Schmitz’s classic The Witches of Karres brought three additional authors into play.
The advantage of spreading out the efforts of exotic worldbuilding make science fiction a natural venue for shared worlds. But even in more mundane settings, there are advantages to be gained. A standalone non-fantastic contemporary novel must still stand up a set of characters, places, companies, and the like to populate the story. A writer who’s invented such a panoply of features for a set of tales (like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County) has to put a lot of work into developing these details. Bringing in a whole corps of authors to help in that enterprise can create a richness of detail that would be hard for a single writer to achieve. (We can’t all be J.R.R. Tolkien.)
Thus, before I put electrons to screen in Time Signature, I already had a range of details to draw upon. The inn and its staff were “already there.” If my characters wanted to have dinner at a restaurant in town, I had a selection of eateries available. More important, my main character Trina Kellander, a musician, could perform in town at the “Mad River Garden Party,” a summertime event already defined in the Deerbourne Inn corpus.
The Joys and Tribulations of Consistency
The flip side of these advantages is the need for consistency. Nothing throws a reader out of a story faster than some blatant discrepancy in the details. If it takes 39 minutes to get from Willow Springs to Montpelier, it’s unlikely the return trip will take three hours—barring traffic jams, severe weather, or the like. (And if Trina makes the trip in fair weather, we can’t have another character suffering a torrential downpour in the same location at the same time.)
Achieving the consistency needed for a successful suspension of disbelief is hard enough for one author. For a whole herd of authors, it’s a major issue. How do we maintain the coherence that makes the shared world seem real?
Beth Overmyer’s recent guest post on writing a series mentioned the notion of a “bible”—reference notes that record details, from a character’s appearance to the theory of magic. The bible is essential to a shared universe. It’s the only way writers can stay consistent on key details without bogging down in endless inter-author consultations.
Great Eddy Covered Bridge in Waitsfield, VT, on the way from Willow Springs to Montpelier
The Deerbourne Inn bible establishes the location of the fictional town of Willow Springs (which actually coincides with a real small town on the Vermont map—allowing me to use Google Maps to determine the travel time to Montpelier). It lays out the structure of the inn, its history, the owner and staff, a bevy of secondary characters at the inn and in the town, the shops and facilities in Willow Springs (right down to the high school mascot), and special events. Characters introduced in the individual stories, up to the last update to the bible, are also listed. The bible is accompanied by a street map of the town, making it easier to visualize geographical relationships. (We’ve not yet progressed to the level of having a GIS layer for an electronic map. But that innovation’s probably not too far away.)
However, it’s impractical to include all possible details in the bible—especially when 26 different books are involved. This makes it harder to be sure whether a given fact has been established somewhere, or whether one is free to invent it. My ebook copies of the Deerbourne Inn stories I read while writing TS are festooned with blue highlights to indicate facts that I might have to take into account at some point. And still it’s not easy to tell.
Case in point: My characters take a hike up into the nearby hills, and stop to look back down at the inn. What color is the façade? I couldn’t find a reference on that particular point. If I were writing a standalone story, I would simply have made up a color on the spot (and, of course, carefully notated it back into my background notes for later reference). But I was reluctant to do that here; someone else might have made a passing reference to the color in a story I hadn’t read. I dodged the issue by simply not mentioning a color—often the simplest solution to a consistency problem.
At the same time, meshing your story smoothly into an existing framework has a joy of its own. I enjoyed doing my best to meld TS seamlessly into the continuity of the locale and the stories.
Character Camaraderie
The greatest fun, however, came in the opportunity to integrate other authors’ characters and locales into the story as it developed.
My heroine Trina needed a best-friend-forever in town—someone she could talk to as the plot developed. It occurred to me that a secondary character in Amber Daulton’s Lyrical Embrace, the sister of her hero, would make a fine confidante. Like Trina, Ruby Haynes is a musician; that created a natural connection and explained a shared history. And Ruby’s breezy good cheer made her a perfect foil.
I had a great time consulting with Amber and making sure my portrayal of Ruby was consistent with the original. What kind of drinks would they share? What would Ruby name a baby? The circle was completed when the baby I’d named turned up again in Amber’s subsequent Deerbourne novel Harmony’s Embrace. Like a volley in tennis, passing these story elements back and forth is a satisfying experience.
In a similar way, I found a way to make use of a specific location created by Tena Stetler for her novel Mystic Maples. I checked with Tena to make sure my description meshed correctly with her conception of the locale, and wrote it into TS as part of the already-existing background.
The Draw of a Shared World
There’s a unique charm to finding connections and crossovers in the stories we like. As with Easter eggs in a movie or a game, we delight in discovering an unexpected convergence. Over and above the heightened realism of a universe in which consistent features recur, it’s just fun to see the web of connections grow. Time Signature gave me the opportunity to weave a new layer into the tapestry of the Deerbourne Inn world; I hope that will please readers as much as it does me.
We all know that 2020 was not exactly a banner year in most ways. It did, however, afford some time for good reading. Since everyone is doing year’s end compilations, I’m going to offer a selection of the new books I perused last year. They weren’t all newly published in 2020; that just happened to be when I read them.
Science Fiction
Starsight (2019). For some reason, I still haven’t been thrilled by Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy (other than his completion of The Wheel of Time, which was masterful). I must be missing something, given his rep. But I was intrigued to see him venture into science fiction with Skyward (2018). His heroine, one of the young pilots defending an embattled human refuge on a far-off planet, is a near-outcast, fiery and determined. She shone in Skyward; the sequel, Starsight, took her in new directions amid unexpected developments. Her story appears to be complete as a duology, though the Wikipedia page for Starsight says there are two more books in that universe to come.
In the category of “best book about mercenary librarians,” I enjoyed Kit Rocha’s Deal With the Devil (2020). Dystopias aren’t usually my locales of choice, but I couldn’t resist a tale of near-future ninja-like librarians in a collapsed America, with a post-apocalyptic mission somewhat in the vein of A Canticle for Leibowitz or the Encyclopedia Galactica. The strong romance elements didn’t hurt either. There are more books in this series too, but I haven’t read them yet.
I’m still learning how best to appreciate John Scalzi, and his fabulously eccentric sense of humor. I didn’t take to his reworking of H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy stories, but his Collapsing Empire trilogy (2017-2020) was great reading. It kept me eager for more, despite the atmosphere of inevitable disaster (see above re dystopias) and the deadly political infighting. The story has just enough likable characters and just enough victory to keep it from being a downer. It’s also a fascinating study in how to do space opera that’s sufficiently weird to qualify in today’s market—a subject in which I have great interest.
Arabella the Traitor of Mars (2018) completes the trilogy whose first volume I discussed a while back. Still great fun, and a satisfying conclusion. I suppose this counts as science fiction, though the premises—a solar system filled with breathable air in which open-decked ships actually sail between the planets—are so wild that one doesn’t want to examine them too closely: way down toward the soft end of the “Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness,” but succeeding in spades under the “Rule of Cool.”
Kevin Wade Johnson’s Roads Between Worlds (2013) gives us a different take on the many-worlds theme, with unusual and engaging characters wielding conceptually mysterious talents. I’m pointing to the Amazon page here for reference, but Johnson is moving his books to another platform and I gather there may be a brief hiatus before they’re available again.
Fantasy
Shorefall (2020) is perhaps the winner in the category of “books that seemed like endings but weren’t.” I read Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside (2018) with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Club a couple of years ago, and was fascinated by its exotic magic system, colorful and diverse characters, and steampunkish city setting. As with Starsight, the sequel both doubled down and expanded the universe in new directions—a combination I’m coming to think is crucial for a series. Right up to the end of Shorefall, I had the idea this was a duology; until at nearly the last minute I realized, OMG, it isn’t over. Bennett raises the stakes almost unbearably in this second volume, and now I’m going to be watching the skies to see the “Unknown” listing for the third volume on Goodreads turn to something definite that I can anticipate.
Sorcerer to the Crown (2015) and its sequel The True Queen (2019), by Zen Cho, win the award for best Regency fantasy of the year. (One might suppose that “Regency fantasy” would be a vanishingly small category, but it seems to be a growth industry, from The Enchanted Chocolate Pot to the many series of Gail Carriger.) Dragons, dilettantes, Malaysian mages, and British political intrigue blend in this very entertaining series. There’s a third volume expected here, as well. The pull of the trilogy is hard to resist.
Jo Walton writes not only crackerjack commentary on fantasy and science fiction, but some of the most offbeat and philosophically sophisticated fantasy around. I try to avoid buying hardcopy books these days—I’m running out of bookshelf space—but I sent away for a copy of Among Others (2011) to keep after I read it from the library (and promptly lent my new copy to my daughter). It’s not easy to tell where the story is going—it keeps you guessing; but the end is satisfying and appropriate.
Beth Overmyer’s The Goblets Immortal (2020) is a promising series opener, with plenty of adventure, sympathetic characters, and a unique system of magic. Aidan and Slaíne are an unlikely but engaging pair, on the run from their pasts, seeking to solve the mysteries of the Blest and the curious effects of the Goblets. The next book in the series, Holes in the Veil, comes out February 16. Join us here next time to hear a bit about how Beth developed the series.
Neither
As we wind up the Christmas season, I want to give a nod to the Dash & Lily books by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn (2010-2020), even though (a heavy burden to bear) they’re not science fiction or fantasy. I caught the Netflix series based on the first book, and was motivated to hunt up the books themselves (read two, one to go). Loved these characters; just the right combination of snark and warmth to celebrate the season.
Nonfiction
Uncharacteristic as it may seem, I spent some time this year engrossed in nonfiction works too. Many of them I can claim as research for my next project—or maybe it’s just that when you’re focused on X, everything you read seems to have some relation to X. The nonfiction catch included—
Rick Ellrod's Observatory 