Charlie Jane Anders's Blog, page 36
March 21, 2016
Here’s a sketch I did of Kanot, the head teacher in...
Here’s a sketch I did of Kanot, the head teacher in The
Maze, holding his Black & Decker flashlight when he comes to fetch Patricia
to come and study magic at Eltisley Maze. Like all the sketches I’ve been
posting, this is from the notebook where I wrote the novel.
March 20, 2016
torbooks:
Read “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” a sci-fi...
Read “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” a sci-fi story by Charlie Jane Anders.
This story came about after a panel at #Wiscon where we argued about gender for a whole hour, and then I was like, “I’m going to write a story where there multiple genders and each gender is a different category of labor, so there!” And I wrote like half this story at the airport and on the flight home.
March 19, 2016
thehickorystickbookshop:
Featured Staff Pick of the Week: All...
Featured Staff Pick of the Week: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
A
strange, tender, wonderful book that combines the grand scale of
potential apocalypse with more fundamental questions of friendship and
growing up. A witch and scientist bond as teenage outsiders and
reconnect as twenty-somethings in San Francisco. Their journey through
magic, technology, catastrophe, and young adulthood is thrilling and
hope-filled, even when humanity’s future is darkest. If you love
beautifully woven stories, read this book! -Cathy
OMG thank you! I can’t tell you how much this means to me.
March 18, 2016
Deleted Scenes: Isobel and Percival
There was just a ton of stuff in All the Birds in the Sky
that I had to cut, purely for length reasons. One of the things I was saddest
to lose was Isobel’s relationship. Isobel is the rocket scientist who befriends
Laurence when he’s a little kid—and in earlier drafts of the novel, we get to
know Isobel’s husband.
Spoilers ahead!
So later on in the book, the grown-up Laurence is living
with Isobel. But until pretty late in the editing process, it’s not just the
two of them—Percival, Isobel’s partner, is there too. Here’s some of the stuff I cut about the two
of them, just to make this book a little shorter….
Warning: There’s a wee bit of gay sex below, in case that bothers you.
Percival was home by the time they
returned with the burritos. He perched on the tip of the sofa in his stocking
feet, wearing a pinstripe jacket and skinny jeans. He was staring at some
silver-and-green drawings printed on shiny paper, but not like he was really
seeing them. As his curly hair had receded at the corners, Percival’s face had
gotten squarer, which actually suited him.
"Percival’s an architect,“
Laurence told Patricia while Isobel was pulling burritos out of the bag.
"He used to specialize in integrating vegetation into buildings, as a
natural water filtration system or ventilation or whatever. Nowadays, though,
he mostly works as a bio-artist, creating green installations for museums or
public spaces. The money is way better.”
"Don’t tell anyone,“
Percival said from the sofa, "but I don’t consider my work to be art at
all. I’m a traditionalist. I like a good painting or statue. I think art should
have a representational component. But if you pay me enough, I’ll pretend to be
an artist for a few hours.”
Laurence
went grocery shopping with Isobel and Percival. Isobel went into a tchotchke
store by herself, leaving Percival and Laurence on the sidewalk. “Hey,”
Percival said. “Just so you know, I’m moving out in a few days.”
"What?“
Laurence just stared at Isobel’s husband, who’d been around as long as Laurence
could remember, just sort of part of the furniture.
"Yeah,”
Percival put his hands in his tweedy pockets and put his shoulders way up.
“You’ve probably noticed that Isobel and I have been going through a rough
patch for a while now.” Actually, Laurence hadn’t noticed. Compared to
Laurence’s own parents, Isobel and Percival seemed pretty cordial. “We’ve
been trying to work through our shit. We’ve done a lot of couples therapy. And
it’s just not working, we both need a break.”
"So?“
Laurence had to twist himself into a weird shape to make eye contact with
Percival. "Man up, dude. You love her, you should fight for her. You don’t
just give up like this. What the hell? If everybody thought like you, the human
race would be long since extinct. Or we’d still be living in wattle-and-daub
lean-tos. You want life to be easy? It’s not going to be. It’s only going to
get harder and harder. For all of us. You want to survive and make a
difference, you pick a team and you stay on it. You find friends who’ve got
your back, and you stay close. You do not wuss out and go to…”
"Oslo,“
Percival said. "I’m going to Oslo.”
"Oslo.
You don’t do that. I thought you were better than this. I didn’t realize you
were a fucking quitter.“ Laurence was practically spitting. People in
Vegan fetishwear were staring at him, and Isobel was probably hiding inside the
store. "Seriously, I’m just…” Laurence flapped his arms, losing the
thread of his indignation. “I’m just disappointed in you. I thought better
of you, man. That’s all.” Percival walked away.
That
evening, Isobel and Laurence were watching TV, some sitcom. During a
commercial, Laurence told Isobel: “You’re better off without him. And I’m
here for you, you know that. Right?”
"Thanks.“
Isobel smiled, for the first time in ages. "That’s nice of you. Anyway, it
wasn’t Percival’s fault, it was mutual. We just both realized that this was not
going anywhere. And we’re at an age where our window to find the great love of
your life is an inch or two from closing. And just sticking with someone,
because you’ve learned what kind of sandwich they like, isn’t enough.”
"I’m
sorry I made a scene,“ Laurence said.
"I
think you freaked out Percival. He hates conflict.”
"I’ll
send him a card in Oslo,“ Laurence said.
Percival
ran his finger lightly along the dragonflies and mantises on Reginald’s
forearm. "How far up do these go?”
"My whole torso,
actually.“ Reginald realized this was the first time a man had touched him
in an age. "If you come back to my place, you can see for yourself.”
Later, when the two men were
intertwined naked, half under Reginald’s duvet and half on top of it, neither
of them knowing if this was an overnight or if Percival was going to be
leaving, Percival said: “Listen, you really should be prepared for the
worst. My ex-wife is the smartest person
I’ve ever met, and she’s sure there will be a lot more dominos falling. We
built the most complex economic system the world has ever seen, and we
overlooked major vulnerabilities in that complexity. And meanwhile, we were
messing with another complex system, the climate. The result of both of those
systemic failures will be so catastrophic, it makes my teeth ache to think
about.”
"So wait a minute.“
Percival propped himself up on one elbow. "You were married, to a woman?
How recently?”
"I can’t believe I just told
you the end is upon us, and you’re dwelling on the fact that I was in a
straight relationship.“
"My brain is too tiny to
encompass the apocalypse,” Reginald laughed, reaching for his stash of
medical marijuana. “The voyage of a person’s sexuality is just large
enough a mystery for me. Do you smoke?” They traded the one-hitter back
and forth, until the bed grew pungent. “Seriously. I want to hear about
it, if you don’t mind.”
"Isobel had her heart
broken,“ said Percival. "Not by me, but by rocketry. She believed
rockets would save the human race, and when her aerospace company failed, she
slowly became a person I couldn’t love any more, or maybe a person who couldn’t
love me any more. People so often are united by shared goals and ideals, it’s
hard to divide those things from the actual passion for each other.”
Reginald noticed Percival’s cock
ascending again, and thought that Percival’s parable about rockets and lost
love was oddly phallic. Aloud, Reginald said, “Perhaps the purest of all
loves is one that’s free of any ideals or shared philosophies. But that is also
the most boring of all loves.” He kissed Percival’s stubbly neck. Soon
they were groping and making out, and the one-hitter was left to smolder on the
nightstand. In the outside world, it was a wet, gloomy February. But inside
Reginald’s studio, it was the lusty month of May.
Top image: Ngader/Flickr
March 17, 2016
The secret backstory of magic in All the Birds in the Sky
Hey, I posted this video before, but I don’t think anybody
noticed, and it was before All the Birds
in the Sky was even published. This is a talk I gave back in 2013 where I
basically explain all about magic in All
the Birds in the Sky. This video includes HUGE spoilers for the book, but
also explains a TON of stuff that is never explained in the book at all.
Spoilers below…
This includes one of the coolest things I never really got
to spend a lot of time delving into: the backstory of Hortense Walker, who
changed magic forever. She was born a slave in Barbados in the 1820s, and
escaped using magic. She ran away and went to the Maze and studied Trickster
magic, and became one of the most powerful magicians of all time—maybe THE most
powerful.
Then a war happened between two factions of magic, and they
nearly tore the whole world apart. Except that Hortense Walker put a stop to
it, and convinced them that Healer magic and Trickster magic worked better if
you combined them. She helped the witches come up with the rule against
Aggrandizement, which prevents magicians from using their powers to reshape the
world too much.
I picture the Healers trying to appeal to Hortense’s desire
to right wrongs—the Healers were trying to stop the Industrial Revolution in
its tracks, and Hortense, more than anybody, ought to understand why great dehumanizing
institutions need to be brought down. But Hortense probably responded that the
idyllic, nature-oriented farm life that the Healers wanted to protect was the
same hell that she herself had escaped from. And maybe to fight against change
was to side with the old, old oppressors.
But did that mean that Hortense Walker was powerless to help
other people who had been born into slavery, or help to hasten the end of that
unthinkable, intrenched institution? Definitely not. I kind of imagine her outsmarting
absolutely everybody, including slave-owners and her fellow witches, for the
greater good. It’s a story that there was no room for in All the Birds in the Sky, but I hope I get to tell more of it one
day.
(I should add that this backstory, like a lot of stuff that
didn’t make it into the final book, was stuff that I didn’t work out the kinks
of all the way. I’m very aware that the history of slavery is a complex and
highly charged subject, and if I ever chose to write the Hortense Walker story
in an actual published book, I would do my homework and also talk to lots of
people.)
March 16, 2016
There were two books that I read around the same time that made...
There were two books that I read around the same time that made me desperately want to be a writer: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, and Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. Over at KALW, I did a segment about just how amazing Geek Love is—and they made a cool drawing of me. Woot!
"When you decide to write a story set in the near future, or speculating about things that might..."
- When your cool future is obsolete before you’re even finished writing it
March 14, 2016
An Update About My Indecent Proposal Thingy
So a while back I promised that if this book got on a real
bestseller list, I would post the cool, much more clever alternate ending. And
since I made that promise, All the Birds in the Sky has been an Indie national bestseller,
a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and an L.A. Times bestseller. So yes, this is definitely happening.
The only thing is, I was careful to say it would take a
while to post the alternate ending in the incredibly unlikely event that this
bizarre thing might happen. And yeah, this is going to take a while, just
pulling together all the stuff into a form that makes sense. Might even take a
couple months. But it’s totally going to happen, I promise!
In the meantime, I’ll be posting more deleted scenes and the
secret untold origin stories of my characters.
