Ursula K. Le Guin left us with a wealth of stories and universes, but my favorite might be her Hainish cycle. I recently read, or re-read, every single novel and short story in the Hainish universe from beginning to end, and the whole of this story-cycle turned out to be much more meaningful than its separate parts.
Some vague and/or minor spoilers ahead…
To celebrate Tor.com’s 15th Anniversary, we’re reposting some gems from the more than 600 stories we’ve published since 2008. Today’s story is “Six Months, Three Days” by Charlie Jane Anders, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and illustrated by Sam Weber. Originally published in 2011, “Six Months, Three Days” was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2012.
This story is included in our special anniversary bundle, Some of the Best from Tor.com: 15th Anniversary Edition, available to newsletter subscribers for a limited time.
Doug and Judy have both had a secret power all their life. Judy can see every possible future, branching out from each moment like infinite trees. Doug can also see the future, but for him, it’s a single, locked-in, inexorable sequence of foreordained events. They can’t both be right, but over and over again, they are.
Obviously, these are the last two people in the world who should date. So, naturally, they do.
“Six Months, Three Days” also appears in the Locus Award-winning collection, Even Greater Mistakes, available now in trade paperback.
Science fiction is full of miraculous technology. You’ve got instantaneous teleportation across great distances, time travel, faster-than-light starships, cryogenic suspension that lasts centuries, and so on. But one of the most fascinating science fiction tropes is the universal translator. (Or, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish.)
On one level, the universal translator seems like no big deal. After all, Google can now translate dozens of different languages into English with reasonable accuracy, though it does struggle sometimes. And of course, most of the stories we love simply wouldn’t work without a universal translator, because characters would have to spend months—or years—learning a new language, every time they traveled someplace new. That would make Star Trek and Doctor Who a lot less fun.
There’s one common term that I was pretty careful not to use in my writing advice book, Never Say You Can’t Survive: “agency.” As in, “characters in a story should have agency.” Because, as I explain the one time I mention this term:
The concept of “agency” is very culturally loaded, and rooted in a lot of Eurocentric cis male notions of “rugged individualism.”
Of course, in the very next sentence, I do go on to say that as a general rule, if it’s a story about searching for the magic bidet of the Elf King, the protagonist might need to spend some time looking for that bidet. (Though, hang on: I would read the heck out of a story about the one person who refuses to join in the collective magic-bidet-hunt. Somebody please write this!)
But anyway, I’ve tried to avoid talking about “agency” as a desirable trait in fictional heroes for a while now, because it does feel very culturally loaded and individualistic. Lately I’ve been thinking about a different term that I like better: “authority.”
The original Star Trek pitted Captain Kirk against fake gods, rogue Starfleet officers, and sadistic computers, but the show was often concerned with a Cold War-style rivalry between the Federation and two warlike powers, the Klingons and the Romulans. The Federation seldom needed to demonstrate its own peace-loving, liberal values—it just needed to appear in contrast with civilizations that were bent on domination and conquest. Similarly, Star Trek: The Next Generation was never so vital as when its ethos of individualism and self-improvement was in contrast with the collectivist, anti-individualist Borg. (An earlier attempt to give the TNG-era Federation an ideological foil, the hyper-capitalist Ferengi, basically fizzled.)
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Federation’s light touch when it came to matters of religion and self-determination (vis-a-vis the Bajorans) stood in contrast to the coercive theocracy of the Dominion. People often try to find a “bad guy” in Trek, like Khan for example—but these shows and movies usually work best when there’s an ideological struggle against another civilization or organization. Count me among those who really enjoyed the struggle against the Emerald Chain in Star Trek: Discovery, and was sad to see them dispatched so easily.
I think one decent litmus test for any story is: is it about what it’s about?
Hard to believe it’s been more than a decade since Game of Thrones’ premiere on April 17, 2011. I can still remember when Thrones reigned over pop culture, and I used to spend my Sunday nights staying up until two in the morning trying to craft the perfect recap of each episode. I kind of agree with the many people who have said Game of Thrones was the last television show to dominate the conversation, before everything became fragmented into a hundred streaming services and countless niche options.
Like a few other pop-culture behemoths, Game of Thrones cast a huge shadow and spawned many would-be imitators. The Marvel Cinematic Universe led to a dozen copycat “cinematic universes”; Lost spawned a ton of TV shows that went down endless cryptic rabbit holes; The Dark Knight cursed us with a decade of “chaotic-evil dude who has magic blow-everything-up powers and gets caught on purpose” movies. The thing is, people always take the wrong lesson from these successes—they focus on the froth rather than the churn, the tip rather than the iceberg, and what a popular thing turned into over time, rather than what made it popular in the first place.
Here are seven of the wrong lessons that everyone learned from the phenomenal success of Game of Thrones—one for each of the Seven Kingdoms. (I miss writing listicles, can you tell?)
I recently rewatched the two pilots for the original Star Trek, in preparation for the beginning of Strange New Worlds, the latest Trek show starring Captain Christopher Pike and the pre-Kirk crew of the USS Enterprise. And wow, I want to talk about Gary Mitchell.
Ever since Ncuti Gatwa was named as the latest star of Doctor Who, I’ve been watching compilation videos of Gatwa’s performance in the Netflix series Sex Education and getting more and more convinced that Gatwa will bring a whole new, much-needed energy to Who.
Gatwa has an immediate star quality, absolutely owning the screen in a way that feels immaculately GIFable. I’ve become enthralled by his manic turn as Sex Education’s Eric, a young queer person dealing with crushes, budding sexuality and friendship, along with homophobia. I can’t help imagining Gatwa bringing the same infectious, twinkling energy to the role of the Doctor. And most of all, I can tell that he’s going to have loads of fun with the part—and we need heroes who are having fun, now more than ever.
Tor.com is thrilled to reprint “The Bookstore at the End of America” by Charlie Jane Anders, as featured in her forthcoming short fiction collection Even Greater Mistakes, out on November 16, 2021.
The story first appeared in the anthology A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.
In the words of the author:
Bookstores are my favorite places to hang out. Browsing through shelves and shelf-talkers never fails to cheer me up, even when the world is bleak AF—everything about a bookshop lets you know that you’re in a place where stories are celebrated, and you can never run out of discoveries. So when Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams asked me to contribute to A People’s Future of the United States, an anthology of stories set in a future USA, I knew I wanted to write about a bookseller struggling to hold things together. “The Bookstore at the End of America” came just a few months after I wrote “Don’t Press Charges,” and it’s another story that grapples with political nightmares—in this case, the slow dissolution of the United States into two countries that despise each other. But this story ended up being a lot less scary, because I can’t write about bookstores without nurturing a spark of hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Heads up: this story contains racism, violence, and implied transphobia.
It’s been nearly 25 years since the first volume of the Bending the Landscape anthology series came out. (My copy says “copyright 1996,” but I guess it actually came out in early 1997.) And it’s hard to remember just how ground-breaking a whole anthology of LGBTQ+ speculative fiction stories felt at the time, now that we’re living with a wealth of queer SFF content. Editors Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel edited three Bending the Landscape volumes, separately devoted to fantasy, science fiction and horror, and along the way they launched authors’ careers and garnered tons of award nominations. Here’s the inside story of how a scrappy anthology series helped to change speculative fiction forever.
When the world gets bleak, that’s when we need the power of story more than ever. But during the really horrendous times, such as a global pandemic, generating all that storytelling goodness can become way more difficult. Bad news can drown out that inner voice that creative people need to listen to, and it’s easy to get demoralized. So to celebrate the upcoming release of my book Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories, I asked a dozen of my favorite writers how they manage to keep creating during the awful times we’ve been living through.
Like many other booksellers, Margaret (not her real name) was forced to shut down her store a year ago. When she reopened, she mostly sold books online, allowing customers to come by and pick them up. But when the number of new covid-19 cases in her area started to decline, she decided to let in one household at a time for in-store browsing—and within two weeks, she had contracted covid-19.
This past year has been an unprecedented challenge for physical bookstores, which have had to find ways to keep their relationship with their communities alive during social distancing and lockdowns. It’s a heartbreaking paradox: more people than ever have been reading, and publishers reported record profits in 2020, but bookstores have struggled to make ends meet. To survive, owners and staff have had to come up with new answers to the old question: What makes a great bookstore? But also: when things that seemed central to the bookselling experience, like browsing and hand-selling, become impossible, what’s left?
Outsmart Your Enemies. Outrun the Galaxy.
Buckle up your seatbelt for a thrilling YA sci-fi adventure set against an intergalactic war—read an excerpt from Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, available now from Tor Teen.
Hard to believe we’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of Game of Thrones’ premiere on April 17, 2011. I can still remember when Thrones reigned over pop culture, and I used to spend my Sunday nights staying up until two in the morning trying to craft the perfect recap of each episode. I kind of agree with the many people who have said Game of Thrones was the last television show to dominate the conversation, before everything became fragmented into a hundred streaming services and countless niche options.
Like a few other pop-culture behemoths, Game of Thrones cast a huge shadow and spawned many would-be imitators. The Marvel Cinematic Universe led to a dozen copycat “cinematic universes”; Lost spawned a ton of TV shows that went down endless cryptic rabbit holes; The Dark Knight cursed us with a decade of “chaotic-evil dude who has magic blow-everything-up powers and gets caught on purpose” movies. The thing is, people always take the wrong lesson from these successes—they focus on the froth rather than the churn, the tip rather than the iceberg, and what a popular thing turned into over time, rather than what made it popular in the first place.
Here are seven of the wrong lessons that everyone learned from the phenomenal success of Game of Thrones—one for each of the Seven Kingdoms. (I miss writing listicles, can you tell?)
