I’m bringing back the “Question of the Week” feature with a vengeance. And to start it off, I’m asking you all a rather large question: Who do you think are the five greatest science fiction writers of all time? I’m putting a lot of emphasis on you think. Whatever your criteria for inclusion, the most important thing is that your list is your list. So — who would you include?
I’m sure a ghost can fall in love with another ghost. They run into each other at the same movies. They haunt the same clubs. A man ghost spots a woman ghost at a Black Keys concert. He’s hanging out right next to Patrick Carney at the drums when the she-ghost climbs up on stage to dance in front of Dan Auerbach. They recognize each other, and after the concert, our twosome strikes up a conversation with the typical icebreakers: How did you die? When? Buried or cremated? And the next thing you know, they’re spending all their time together. But what about sex? I think we can all agree there’s no touching between ghosts. No kissing, no hugging, no fondling. What about eating? Drinking? It’s probably safe to say there won’t be any intimate dinners, or late nights at a bar. What will your new love be wearing that attracted you to them in the first place? Will she be decked out in the tight jeans and halter top she had on when she went through the windshield? Will her clothes be ripped, her face bloody? If he was blown to bits in Afghanistan, will his uniform be in shreds? Will HE be in pieces? I think not. Once they’re ghosts, I like to think our love-birds will be looking hot, and whole, not missing an arm, or wearing a hospital gown. (Although that open back might add a soupcon of excitement to the relationship.) Can they smell after shave or cologne? I doubt it. Although don’t we all assume ghosts can see and hear and speak? So basically, a ghost relationship is all talk? If they can’t do the same things the living do, can they at least travel back and forward in time? That might make a fun date, going back to watch dinosaurs, or catch a space freighter heading for Alderaan. But my gut feeling is they are stuck in the here and now, just like you and me. Oh, they can probably travel faster. They visualize the Eiffel Tower, and bingo – they’re gazing down on romantic Paris. If they’re the outdoor-types, they won’t have to bother with a bunch of gear, they can just look at the top of Mt. Everest and be there. Of course, that takes some of the excitement out of it. They can probably meet awesome people like Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, Anne McCaffrey. (If they know where to look.) It’s not like there will be some kind of directory in the afterworld. ‘Jules Verne usually summers on the Cote d’Azur . . .’ So, I don’t know. With all these limitations, maybe it isn’t practical for a ghost to fall in love. Maybe all these obstacles just make them irritable. And that’s why they mostly hang around creepy places, waiting to scare the bejeezus out of us. M. R. Cornelius is the author of The Ups and Downs of Being Dead, the story of a 57 year-old man who chooses cryonics over death. A complete synopsis, and the book, are available on Amazon. http://amzn.to/LvCEf7
And another recruit! Many more to come, too… The Draekon’s Underling — Vannus Ebromia Strength 3; Intelligence 5 Special Ability: Whisper (In secret, add +3 to strength for one of your Viking Amoebas for one turn; write the target amoeba on a piece of paper and reveal it during combat) (The Secret Empire by Paul Genesse)
I’ve been a bad host about getting these Viking Amoebas up in a timely manner. Expect a whole lot more in the future. But for now, here’s the newest recruit to the Army! The Consumer — Duchaosus Strength 5; Intelligence 1 Special Ability: Absorb (During combat, you may sacrifice one amoeba to permanently increase Duchaosus’ strength by that amoeba’s strength) (Vampire Empire: The Greyfriar by Clay and Susan Griffith)
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve partnered with Audible.com through their podcast affiliates program. And we’re as stoked about it as Voyager 6 at discovering human beings are the creator. In other words, we’re completely straight-faced, without any sense of emotion whatsoever, as if we’ve discovered everything there is to know and have nothing else to do but fulfill basic programming. Maybe that’s not such a great analogy… Anywho. The idea is pretty simple. You sign up for a trial membership with Audible.com, Audible hugs us with giant bear arms (just like in the 2nd Amendment), and everyone comes out on top — we get hugs, you get a free audiobook (and, we hope, a lifelong love of Audible’s services), and Audible realizes that it will only take a few more years before it can take over the world using its self-replicating spider robots… But here’s where things get really fun. To make things interesting, we’ve created a mad lib and want to solicit word suggestions from you, our dear listeners. Every week, we’ll record a new version of the mad lib using words chosen by all of you. Next season, we’ll write a whole new version and repeat the process. This will make it a lot more fun for us, and for you, because our little dialogue will always be filled with wacky nonsense! So, for our second mad lib Audible advertisement, we’d like to solicit word suggestions. Here’s what we need: 9 x Thing 4 x Adjective 3 x Verb 1 x Feeling 1 x Date 1 x Place The rules: 1) Nothing filthy. Mad libs tend to end up suggestive all on their own, but we don’t want to intentionally waltz into dirty territory. 2) Nothing with the obvious potential for offence (racial slurs, etc.). Start suggesting! You can suggest all at once, or just throw in some random things. We’ll pick from the lot.
I would love to say that when I first thought of the premise for Silver Moon (middle-aged woman unexpectedly becomes a werewolf), I was engaged in some sort of deep and thorough analysis of the dearth of female werewolves and of middle-aged female protagonists in genre. In reality, I was watching Ginger Snaps, films 1 and 2, and the prequel. The Ginger Snaps movies, for those who haven’t discovered them yet, are a series of Canadian films that managedto successfully combine horror, feminism, satire and lycanthropy. In the first movie, teenage sisters Ginger and Brigitte are disaffected high school students contemplating either running away from home or dying by sixteen. Then, Ginger is attacked by a werewolf. She has, inevitably, just started her period. The plot escalates from there as Ginger revenges herself against their classmates and begins to lose her humanity while Brigitte tries desperately to cure her. The movies, apart from being entertaining, got me thinking about depictions of female werewolves in sf and f and horror. There aren’t a lot to choose from, particularly as main characters: Ginger Snaps; Suzy McKee Charnas’ protagonist in “Boobs;” Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl; the anthology Women Who Run with Werewolves and a few others. The best-known female werewolves in science fiction and fantasy and horror are young women, often teenagers or in their early twenties. And the women often transition to lycanthropy as the result of the onset of menses, which triggers a werewolf attack. While I was cogitating on this, editor JoSelle Vanderhooft contacted me about writing a story for an anthology of lesbian werewolf novellas that she was working on (now out as Bitten by Moonlight from Zumaya Press). So I started pulling my previous noodlings together into a story idea that went something along the lines of “If it can happen at one change in life, why not another?” Add to that the indisputable fact that there are very few middle-aged female protagonists in sf/f and put the two together, at least in my brain, and ta-da! Menopausal werewolves. I decided that I wanted to write about a middle-aged woman who turns into a werewolf as she entered menopause. And she wouldn’t know that it was going to happen, until it did (not unlike some aspects of going through menopause). This woman would have a community of some sort around her, as well as people who didn’t want her to change, because I wanted to write about those relationships. Once I got that far, I needed a rationale for why there would be more than one werewolf near my protagonist to support the story I wanted to tell. This was, as it turned out, closely connected to the question of how she or they became werewolves in the first place. One of the marvelous things about writing about werewolves is that there is such a wealth of interesting stories about how the change is brought about. My personal favorite, though not the one I used, is the legend that suggests that you can become were by drinking rainwater from a wolf’s paw print. You can also put on a belt made of wolf skin, apply magical ointment, or simply sleep outside under the full moon. Given the options, being bitten by a werewolf or just plain being born that way were pretty prosaic. I had already ruled out the option of her being born a werewolf if I wanted it to be unexpected. So that meant that either she had to get bitten by another werewolf or something else had to happen. I wanted to do something besides transmission by biting, in part because it would start her off with an antagonistic relationship with the other werewolves. I wanted to do something different, something that felt more in line with the tone of the story. But the rainwater from the paw print thing seemed a bit much. What I came up with instead was the idea of using place-based magic. This had to do with my desire to write a story that touched on ideas about community and activism. Why not a place that impacted some of its inhabitants in unusual ways? I bowed to tradition in keeping the lunar-based transformations, though these werewolves can break from that if they have enough control. Otherwise, the magic of the place picks and chooses who changes and when. The place in question is a town called “Wolf’s Point” in a valley in the American West (I opted not to put it in a specific state). Generations of Native Americans from different tribes and immigrants from different parts of the world combined elements of their various magical traditions to create a special place. It was one guarded first by the spirit of the wolves, then actual werewolves. And who better to call as guardians than healthy older women who’ve been written off as too old to be desirable or to bear children? My protagonist, Becca Thornton, is a fairly recent transplant to Wolf’s Point. She’s divorced and working in the local hardware store for Pete and Shelly Peterson. Shelly Peterson has a secret, one shared by several of Becca’s neighbors and some of the other women in the Wolf’s Point Women’s Club. Shortly after her fiftieth birthday, the valley’s magic calls Becca to join them in the local werewolf pack, comprised of women of a “certain age.” And she’s not wildly enthusiastic about it. In fact, Becca is pretty conflicted about a lot of things. She doesn’t want to be menopausal, or a werewolf, or have a crush on her neighbor, Pack Beta Erin Adams. She wants to be normal, at least some of the time. This is what leaves her open to the offer of a “cure” from a group of aspiring werewolf hunters who arrive in Wolf’s Point with an agenda of their own. My werewolf hunters are an odd bunch in and of themselves. Most of them are former military, and several of them are “ex-wolves” (the
