Yoon Ha Lee's Blog, page 8

Sf forthcoming in Meeting Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan, in December 2015. Thanks to Sonya Taaffe, Yune Kyung Lee, and Peter Berman for the beta.

“The Cold Equations” makes me cry every time I read it. It’s embarrassing! But that didn’t stop me from writing this story.

I now have a page up on Patreon. For those who haven’t heard of this before, it’s crowdfunding, but on a monthly basis for continuing support, rather than one-offs like most Kickstarters. In my case, I’m raising additional money for writing and other creative projects. For instance, I’m currently working on an ebook of flash fairy tales, which will include a few new flashfics, and I will also need to raise money for developmental edits to Revenant Gun, the third novel in the hexarchate trilogy. (My agent is shopping around #1, Ninefox Gambit, and #2 is already out to the developmental editor.) Other things I do include art and music.

You can support at any level from $1 on up, and the site will charge you monthly. There are a few backer awards at various levels of support, and I’m definitely open to hearing suggestions for other awards (you can reach me by email at [email protected]).

If you’d like to help out, please take a look, and thank you!

Flash fairy tale. Forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction.

A space opera retake on The Iliad, from Paris’ point of view. Forthcoming from Tor.com. Thanks to Yune Kyung Lee for the beta.

The mermaid sat on the island and sang without words. She had lost her teeth to the last sailor passing by, which made it hard to form words. Words of foam-rush and and storm-sweep, words of coral uprooted, words of clouds spun upended into the sea’s endless churning cauldron. Still, the mermaid was possessed of great determination and creativity. She shaped her words through the tension of her throat, forced them into seduction-verses.

Through all this she combed out her hair. It was beautiful hair and she didn’t see why she should neglect it because of a little bad luck with a sailor. It hung heavy and dark and ripple-sheened. Her lovers had told her that they could see the colors of the sea caught in it, or luminous moon-weave; they had told her about its silk, its salt perfume, the way it tangled them almost as surely as her kisses. The mermaid kept a diary of these compliments, written in the vortices around her island. Only the most ardent and perceptive sailors could navigate those vortices to embrace her.

Ah: here came a sailor. She sang louder, tossing the comb toward him so that the sun flashed against its curve. I wear nothing but the salt spray, she sang. I am cold on my island. Also, as long as it has been for you, I guarantee that it has been longer for me. Come and clasp my cold limbs, come and help me comb out my hair, explore the tide pools of my body.

The sailor heard her, although not his comrades. She only needed one anyway. He was sun-browned and lean, and she liked the quick fire of his movements as he dived to meet her, the way he knifed through the water.

When he reached her, she kissed him all the way from the bottom of her throat, all the way from the empty space where mortals have hearts but mermaids do not, mouth stretching wider and wider, and ripped out the sailor’s teeth to use for her own. They didn’t fit her mouth, but she had a lot of time and the sea was good at grinding down things to fit.

For dormouse_in_tea. Prompt: something not necessarily nice involving mermaids.

Once there lived twin witches, one of sand and one of sea. The witch of sand built towers studded with conch shells and polished fragments of glass, and hung them around with rusted chains and lockets grown over with old coral. The witch of sea danced in the foam with the octopuses and porpoises, and braided kelp-strands into her hair, and the frayed old rope of anchors. In the evenings the towers crumbled away as the waves lapped over them, and the two sisters met to roast fish over driftwood fires.

The witch of sand slept in a cottage above the undulating line of tide-marks, and combed out her hair every morning to the cries of gulls. During the days she sometimes wove tapestries from mer-hair and sail-strands and gold thread picked out from rotting banners. At other times she amused herself with sand-paintings, which were never twice the same, sometimes of whimsical winged snails, sometimes of mournful otters.

The witch of sand slept on the sea itself, amid the cushioning glow of jellyfish, and clothed herself in transitory jewels of brine. During the nights she painted moonlight portraits of ghost ships–some of which were mistaken for the genuine article–and arranged the spume into maps of distant nations. Sometimes she spun temporary mirrors of ice so that she could admire the sea’s shifting faces in it, only to send it shattering across the waves.

The twins’ birthday approached, and they quarreled–albeit in a friendly fashion–over how to celebrate. Should they create a splendid castle of sand for the occasion, or dive down among the anemones? (They could have settled the matter by age–technically, the sea-sister was older–but that would have been too easy.) Gather pebbles from the beach or dive deep for lost jewels? Dance barefoot on the sand or swim among the seals? Since they were both witches, they turned to divination to determine the answer.

The twins shared a cauldron, a gift from their departed mother. Together they cast in powdered baleen and gold coins stamped with the visages of pirate queens, ink of deep-diving squid and tiny exquisite abalone-inlaid boxes, honey that bees had made from the flowers that bloomed along the beach and splinters from the great warships of dead empires. They chanted poems in the language of the sky as it kisses the far horizon, and the moon as it silvers the sands at night.

At last the ritual came to its conclusion, and the brew within the cauldron quieted to an unmoving sheen. The twins peered over the cauldron’s rim, hoping for a vision to resolve their dilemma. (Even small dilemmas require rituals in the world of witches.)

They were not disappointed: within the glimmering depths, each witch saw her sister’s face. They looked up from the cauldron at each other, then burst into laughter. They agreed to spend the next year in each other’s domain. Then, that settled, they prepared their customary dinner of roast fish, well-content with the answer that had already been theirs.

For dormouse_in_tea. Prompt: witches.

A vignette from the hexarchate/heptarchate setting (formerly seen in “The Battle of Candle Arc”): when people go to war over calendars, weapons of assassination are not what they seem at first. Forthcoming in An Alphabet of Embers, ed. Rose Lemberg.

Thanks to Yune Kyung Lee and Sam Kabo Ashwell for the beta.

The Apiarist’s Gun, people of thirst, and non-metaphorical exchanges of love. Forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Thanks to Sonya Taaffe and thistleingrey for the beta.

A short story about a roleplaying game and revolution, forthcoming in Jonathan Oliver’s anthology Dangerous Games.

I am indebted to Liam Liwanag Burke’s superb roleplaying game Dog Eat Dog for providing an example of game design as social commentary, and to Eric Rath’s Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan.

Thanks to Yune Kyung Lee for the beta.

In a quiet land, a great distance from the Lands of the Moon where she had grown up, an alchemist lived in a workshop that she shared with her friend the artificer and a single raven that occasionally condescended to be fed raw eggs and overstrong coffee. (It had yet, however, to produce any theorems.) The alchemist had long ago mastered the inner disciplines that extended her life, although she kept that to herself and her friend on the grounds that being pestered about immortality by importunate princes before breakfast was a nuisance no matter what your age, and in the meantime kept herself well-supplied by trading simpler potions to the local townspeople: glamours to tint your hair the color of peacock feathers, remedies for teething children, the occasional brew-of-inspiration for those who needed to make stirring speeches on short notice.

The alchemist was not precisely discontent with her existence. Her housemate was an excellent cook, and the automata were cheerful companions, whose number included wind-up birds that were always in tune and precise doll-figures that danced elaborate quadrilles. Even the raven was known to offer a word of consolation if bribed with sufficient coffee. (They didn’t do this very often because a caffeinated raven will keep the household up all night with its excitable cawing.)

Nevertheless, the alchemist kept a garden so that she could grow the more subtle of the ingredients required for her research. While the weather was frequently chancy where they lived, necessitating careful attention to weather signs and the yearly almanac, she enjoyed the quiet hours working with spade and trowel, the honest calluses on her hands. The one regret her garden brought her, other than the time with the infestation of jewel-aphids, was that she had no success growing silver maples.

Near the Lands of the Moon, all plants have a silvery tint, bestowed upon them by the moonsorcery that is to be found in the frost, and the shivering air, and the fracturing light. The alchemist’s favorites were the silver maples that grew by her parents’ house. Whenever she woolgathered during her studies—like all children, she had her moments—she liked to gaze out the window and watch the wind stir the maples’ leaves, stroking the trees silver-white and green and back again, like a living torch of moonlight.

The alchemist had attempted to grow silver maples in her own garden, but despite the trees’ usual vigor she had had no success. The artificer attempted to cheer her by fashioning trees of elemental silver with glimmering jade leaves. The alchemist thanked her friend, but it was clear that such an unliving tree could not take the place of a living one.

One day, after keeping them up all night (again) with muttered poetry recitals, the raven flew off. The alchemist was surprised at how much she missed the raven’s presence, for all its cantankerousness. As the days passed, however, she concluded that the raven must have had business of its own, and she put the matter out of her mind.

In the meantime, the alchemist’s continued experiments resulted in maples with glorious sun-colored leaves, if she had any interest in gold. The gold maples also became blinding during the day, but she couldn’t bear to chop down the young trees.

The raven returned one fine spring morning, looking insufferably smug. There was a chart bound to its leg. The alchemist woke to find it perched on the coffee pot. “I went to consult an astromancer,” the raven said.

“Astrologer?” the alchemist said. She knew a little of the celestial disciplines where they intersected her own.

“Astromancer,” the raven said, a little impatiently. “More science than an astrologer, less than an astronomer. I’ll tell you about it later if you care about such distinctions. Did you know that moonlight is the same thing as sunlight, only reflected off the moon?” It held its leg out, indicating that she was to take the chart. “If you can make gold maples, you can make silver maples, because they’re the same thing. From a strictly astromantic point of view, of course.”

The alchemist reckoned that this was not any more absurd than the other tricks of her discipline, so she unbound the chart and studied the formulae. She found that it was, indeed, as the raven said.

The preparations for the alchemical ritual were long and arduous, and involved denuding the workshop of quartzite, mermaid’s tears, platinum ore, and dragon pearl tea. (The tea wasn’t actually part of the ritual; it just happened to be the alchemist’s favorite drink. For once the raven kept its opinion of those who preferred tea to coffee to itself.) And at the end of it, the sunlit gold maples were transmuted into silver maples.

The artificer, who had kept out of the way, ambled out after the ritual was complete and raised an eyebrow at her friends. “Some would say that you just devalued your own creation,” she remarked.

The alchemist had no eyes for anything but the silver-tinged foliage of her young trees. “Gold is not the only way to measure value,” she said, and ran her hand up and down a tree’s trunk, smiling.

For Nancy Sauer. Prompt: silver maple.