Charlie Jane Anders's Blog, page 37
March 9, 2016
"I want to close with a plea for reclaiming irony from the realm of “hipster”..."
- Why Nobody Ever Asks if Irony Has Ruined Science Fiction
March 7, 2016
March 5, 2016
I had kind of forgotten this until just now, but I spent SO MUCH...
I had kind of forgotten this until just now, but I spent SO MUCH TIME trying to find missing pieces after I already had a solid draft of All the Birds in the Sky.
Like, I spent months and months and months, just writing different extra sections to try and fit in to what I already had. I had the bones of the story about Patricia the witch and Laurence the mad scientist, but not the muscle and sinew. I just wrote tons of scenes, some of which made it into the book and most of which didn’t, trying to find the moments the two of them needed every step of the way. I remember that I assigned myself to write 3000 words or 5000 words or in one case 10,000 words of something in particular, just so I would have a lot of it to work with. At the same time, some of these files didn’t quite have as much stuff as I had originally “assigned” myself.
March 4, 2016
Deleted Scene: The Instant Whiskey Machine
Here’s another scene I had to cut from All the Birds in the Sky, purely for length reasons. The witch, Patricia, goes to a party that’s being hosted by Laurence’s boss, Milton Dirth, and encounters… the Instant Whiskey Machine. But sabotage is afoot!
Just like with the other deleted scenes, I’m throwing in a caveat that these scenes probably aren’t as good as reading the actual book, and you should really read the book first. Also, there are spoilers here!
The big party happened in the giant UFO-shaped house that
overlooked Diamond Heights. This time around the big curving windows were covered
with holographic screens that showed cutscenes from famous video games, except
that the faces of the party attendees were swapped in. Somewhere a set of
cameras was snapping people’s faces, scanning them, and pasting them into
loading screens from Dead Space V and Art of Mayhem. The technology was
sophisticated enough that the holographic projections tended to show whoever
was looking at them at the time. Patricia was startled to catch a glimpse of
her pixilated face, superimposed over the body of FemShep. You could still just
about see the amazing view of Corona Heights, through the glowy
computer-generated imagery. There was also a weird contraption in the middle of
the room, labeled the Instant Whiskey Machine. People were feeding barley and
rye in at one end, and then through some proprietary chemical process, it was
instantly fermented and aged the equivalent of 20 years, coming out the other
end as single-malt Scotch. (The actual results tasted more like drain cleaner.)
Everywhere Patricia looked, there were guys in leather jackets and stripey
chinos, with biker sideburns. And women wearing 1940s Marilyn Monroe gowns.
Patricia hadn’t gotten the style memo, she was just wearing a long flowy skirt
that was longer in front than back, and a silk corset with little embroidered
flowers on it. This was the outfit she had thrown together in the five minutes
between getting home from Tartine and running out again to do a mission for
Ernesto, before catching a cab to the party. (She’d had to carry out Ernesto’s task,
poisoning an oil executive who was part-way responsible for the Northwest
Passage disaster, while wearing her ridiculous corset, which had just added a
whole extra layer of weirdness to the whole thing. She’d left the oil exec,
whose name was Martin, twitching on the floor of the bar at the Fairmont, a
substance not unlike seafoam spraying out of his mouth, and walked towards the
lobby with her long skirt rustling and her crimson corset catching the
chandelier lights.)
And now that Patricia was at the party, she was caught in a
loop of worrying she’d worn the wrong thing, both too fetishy and too casual,
and replaying in her head the split-second glimpse of Martin’s face turning
pale as his breath rattled to a stop. That image was still going to be stuck in
Patricia’s head.
“I want to stuff a whole cantaloupe into the Instant
Whiskey Machine.” Patricia turned to see Anya, giggling and wearing a
black tunic and black pants. Not a 1940s ballgown, thank goodness. Solidarity.
“I totally dare you to stuff a whole cantaloupe into
the Instant Whiskey Machine,” Patricia said.
“Don’t dare me to do things,” Anya said.
“Unless you really want me to do them.”
“Do it,” Patricia said. “I dare you.”
“You’re on guard duty,” Anya said.
Patricia kept a good watch for Milton, or anyone else who
might freak out. The spout at the top of the Instant Whiskey Machine was sort
of like a brass funnel, and there were some metal teeth inside that were
designed to crush up the grains, not too different from the garbage disposal in
your kitchen sink. Smushing a whole cantaloupe, rind and all, into that spout
was kind of a challenge, especially without attracting attention from all the
other party guests. Anya finally resorted to pulling a big penknife out of the
waistband of her fancy slacks and slicing the bowling ball-sized fruit in half,
then mushing the first half in with both hands, so that she was in serious
danger of losing a finger.
Watching that pulpy flesh and hard rind thrashing around as
Anya forced it mercilessly into the teeth of the Whiskey Machine, the seeds and
juice spurting upwards volcanically, Patricia did not at all think about the
noxious ooze coming out of Martin Churchill’s lips and nostrils as he fought
for life. She was totally focused on the moment and making sure that nobody
came over and saw what Anya was doing.
“Almost there,” Anya cackled.
“What the hell is going on over here?” A tall man
with spiky white hair and crazy eyebrows came over. Patricia recognized Milton
Dirth from the cover of the Wired Magazine that she’d seen in someone’s
bathroom. “Are you kids breaking my new machine?”
“Not breaking,” Anya said, turning away from the
machine just in time with her hands empty and miraculously clean. “Just
innovating.”
“What did you put in there?” Milton Dirth barked,
his ears starting to turn red. “That device is highly calibrated for a
very specific mixture of ingredients, and any impurities will…”
A green liquid started to leak out of the faucet at the
other end of the Instant Whiskey Machine. It dribbled into a nice demitasse
with a metal rim and handle, first just a little bit and then a steady flow.
Soon the glass was full of thick green liqueur, which looked sort of like
Midori. Anya plucked it up, while Milton Dirth looked on in horror. She sipped
it and cocked her head. “That’s really good,” she said. She passed it
to Patricia, who sipped as well. It tasted amazing: fresh and tangy, with a
hint of the first rainfall of summer. “Wow,” Patricia said. They
passed it to Milton, who was still scowling. He sipped it, and then just
shrugged and walked away without saying anything.
“He’ll never admit we found a better use for his fancy
machine than he did,” Anya said. “But you don’t get to be like the
eighth richest person on the planet without understanding that users are going
to want to customize their tech.”
When Laurence finally showed up, he was wearing a fancy
waistcoat with little wheels and cogs all over it, and a bowtie, plus black
tuxedo pants. He looked even skinnier and more gangly than ever, in all these
layers of billowy fabric. He looked kind of freaked out. His housemate Isobel
came in right behind him, wearing her usual business casual outfit and the sort
of smile that says that we are going to get through this evening somehow, whatever
it takes.
“What did I miss?” Laurence asked Patricia and
Anya, who handed him the glass that was still half full of cantaloupe liqueur.
“We’re going to call it ‘cantilever,’” Anya said.
“Or maybe you can mix it with Jack Daniels and make a Jackalope.”
“You broke Milton’s fancy machine,” Laurence said.
“He’s going to shit a brick.”
“If he did, he kept it under wraps,” Patricia
said. “He wrapped that brick up.” She giggled. Seeing Laurence was
helping her get out of the I-just-killed-a-man funk that she was trying not to
have.
“You don’t understand,” Laurence stared at the
which would probably never produce terrible whiskey again. Its inner workings
were fatally contaminated with fruit. “This device was supposed to be a
giant metaphor, for progress or something. You know what I mean. Progress in
science and technology is like making decent whiskey, it takes years and years
of hard work and a controlled process. You don’t revolutionize everything
overnight, no matter how smart you are. But here’s Milton, trying to show us
that there are shortcuts if you’re crazy and clever enough.”
“But it was really bad whiskey,” Anya said.
Top image: Brankomaster/Flickr
March 3, 2016
Deleted Scene: “Nobody Knows Where I Am”
For a long, long time, All the Birds in the Sky was wayyy too long. Then I slashed and burned and cut out huge chunks of it, most of which deserved to be forgotten forever. But there’s also some stuff that I still have a soft spot for.
Here’s a deleted section from the middle of the book, where the witch, Patricia, is out on her own – enjoying finally being her own person after having been in school for so long.
Please be aware that these deleted scenes were deleted for a reason – I encourage you to read the book first, or at least read the actual excerpts from the final book,
because that’s a way better representation of what the book is actually
like. I’m just posting these deleted snippets because they’re fun and
add something if you’ve already read the book. Also, there are spoilers for the book here!
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a
small town in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing on all sides but catkin
willows, rocky hills and swamps, for a week’s walk in any direction, and the
sky was like a permanent dust storm overhead. The people in the village were
kind but narrow-minded, and the girl grew up knowing exactly who and what she
was expected to be. She was the daughter of the town furniture-maker, but when
she was eleven, she was sent to live with the town’s butcher, where she would
learn his trade and eventually marry his son. She was given no choice about
this, even though she was already in love with a different boy, who worked in
the biggest of the town’s garden plots. She cried and complained and threatened
to run away, and her parents were forced to lock her in her bedroom until she
agreed to go along with everybody’s plans. This only made her more determined
to be herself , and one night she broke the lock on her bedroom window and
climbed down. She almost went to the boy she was in love with, but she realized
in that moment that she couldn’t trust him not to turn her over to her parents
– and she couldn’t condemn him to a life as a fugitive orphan. So she crept
out of town and went East, into the thick catkin willows, carrying a few days’
provisions and a single change of clothes.
As she reached the top of a steep
slope, she looked down at her home town, which suddenly looked tiny and yet
more beautiful than ever… and a group of nomads picked that moment to sweep into
town from the North. The nomads killed everybody, including the girl’s parents,
the boy she was supposed to marry, and the boy she loved. Some they raped or
tortured, some they killed right away, but everybody died that night. She was
the only survivor of her town. Now she mourned bitterly, and thought only of
her parents’ uncountable acts of kindness towards her, and all the people in
the town who had taken the time to take care of her and feed her and teach her
everything they could. In her mind, the dead people of her town came to seem
nothing but kind. In some moments, she forgot that she had run away, and in
others she felt as though she had somehow caused the death of her family and
friends by running away.
If you asked the girl if her parents had been tyrants, if
they had tried to turn her into a thing instead of a person, or any of the
other crimes she had accused them of
when they had locked her in her bedroom… she wouldn’t even understand
what you were talking about. Her own words would seem like a foreign language
to her.
Every day Patricia said to herself, “Nobody knows where
I am.” She got up in the morning and went for a walk, and said,
“Nobody knows where I am.” While she was sitting in her latest awful
temp job, people knew where she was, even if they didn’t know who she was. But
after work, she got lost to the world again. “Nobody knows where I
am,” Patricia repeated as she wandered the streets at midnight, doing good
deeds without anybody noticing. Sometimes she went to yuppie bars and fast-talked angel
investors into giving ten percent of their incomes to a local homeless charity.
She could talk almost anyone into anything, once she saw who they were.
Patricia’s roommates barely noticed her comings and goings,
because she was a master of stealth and because they didn’t really give a crap
as long as she paid her rent on time. Patricia had spent eight years training
for this, and now every waking moment she was going to be a shadow, healing and
deceiving. Patricia treated it like a game, counting the number of hours every
day that nobody could account for her whereabouts and trying to increase the
number. She only had to work enough to pay her rent and other expenses – and
it wasn’t necessarily against the rules to trick people into giving her small
sums of money here and there, too. Just not huge sums. She couldn’t get rich
doing this.
“Nobody knows where I am,” Patricia said aloud,
perched on top of a car going 50 miles per hour on the part of Geary Blvd
that’s almost like a freeway, where the road dips into a tunnel and the inner
lanes have no turnoffs or crosswalks. Her shoes were in her handbag. Her toes
gripped the indentations in the car’s roof, so she barely needed one hand on
the side to steady herself. The driver would never know she was there. The
movie theater and the bubble tea place and the Hawaiian bar/restaurant raced
past, the lights streaking and the trees racing. She was glad she lived in a
city with a lot of trees. She was totally free and anonymous, a car stowaway,
whom only the trees saw. The air burned with pollen. Patricia’s eyes were
filled with the head wind.
Sometimes Patricia couldn’t go to sleep at all, she just
wandered the streets all night, looking for lonely people to do
something for. Or sat in bed with her laptop, hitting refresh on a webpage that
had no updating content, as if she would see something different the tenth time
it reloaded, as if the flickering blankness before it reloaded was a space of
infinite possibility, and you didn’t know what you would get.
Patricia knew she should get the next night bus and go home,
everything looked better in bed, with the covers pulled up to your chin. She
felt exhausted, but also like she hadn’t found what she’d gone out looking for
yet. The night hadn’t yet given her everything it owed her, it was like a slot
machine she wanted to keep playing until her plastic cup was empty. She
couldn’t even tell you what she was hoping for, just that she was feeling
cheated.
Top image: Mark Robinson/Flickr
March 2, 2016
"There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices..."
- Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
February 29, 2016
Abandoned Chinese new year parade float
Abandoned Chinese new year parade float
February 26, 2016
Deleted Scene: Theodolphus and Laurence
I had to cut a bunch of stuff out of All the Birds in the Sky, for length reasons or because it just didn’t work in the final version of the book. Like, at various times, there was more of Theodolphus Rose, the psycho assassin. Here’s a scene where Theodolphus tries to psyche out Laurence.
Please be aware that these deleted scenes were deleted for a reason – I encourage you to read the book first, or at least read the actual excerpts from the final book,
because that’s a way better representation of what the book is actually
like. I’m just posting these deleted snippets because they’re fun and
add something if you’ve already read the book. Also, there are spoilers for the book here!
With that out of the way…
This section picks up just after Laurence has been attacked for the umpteenth time by Brad Chomner, the school bully. And he gets sent to the school guidance counselor, who is secretly the evil assassin, Theodolphus. And here’s what happens.
Half an hour
later – Laurence was missing French again – he got dumped in a wooden
chair in Mr. Rose’s office. Laurence felt like a couple of his ribs could be
broken, but they were probably just bruised. His left wrist was sprained or
something, so no typing for a while. He had general bruisey constellations on
his torso and one leg but he would need to disrobe to evaluate, and he wasn’t
doing that at school.
"You should
be glad you’re talking to me instead of Mr. Dibbs,“ Mr. Rose said. He
looked sad, like Laurence had let him down in some very personal way.
"Why am I
talking to anyone?” Laurence said.
"You’re here, Mr. Armstead,
because you are a disruptive influence,“ Mr. Rose said. "We have a
code of conduct at this school.”
"Yeah,“
Laurence said. "I read it. I don’t remember any rule about being on the
receiving end of someone else’s fist.”
Mr. Rose leaned
forward, so his big brow cast a mean shadow over his eyes. “I know you’re
a good student. And you’re going to be leaving us a year early to go focus on
science and math. But you are on the edge of throwing all of that away.”
That
sounded like a threat. What had this guy said to Patricia? Did he threaten her?
Laurence wondered what would happen if he showed some vulnerability. “Just
please,” he said, “tell me what I should do. I don’t want any
trouble.” There. Blood in the water.
Mr. Rose smiled.
“Let me tell you a secret. Children your age are essentially all
psychopaths. You have higher reasoning, but no empathy yet. You don’t see other
human beings as people. Someone as smart as you, you’ve probably spent hours
wondering if you’re actually in a tank somewhere and we’re all just virtual
reality. Like The Matrix.
Right?”
"Well,
yeah.“ Laurence had to admit. This guy was a mind reader. "I mean,
solipsism is hard to dispute.”
"It’s
not your fault that you’re self-centered and amoral. But now I’m telling you
that it’s in your own best interest to think about the well-being of the whole
school.“
"So,
uh, what do you want me to do?”
"I
want you to help me save your friend Patricia. I’m glad you’re friends with
her, because it means there’s someone who can reach her. You may be the only
person who can get through to her, in fact. We need to plan an intervention.
Can I count on you?“
"Yes.
Absolutely. Count on me. 100 percent.” Somehow Laurence had gone from
showing fake vulnerability to draw this guy out, to actually exposing his
underbelly, for real.
February 25, 2016
millebonhyalin:
#56- Is a Tree Red (fanart of...
#56- Is a Tree Red (fanart of @allthebirdsinthesky ´s book)
Oh wow, this is the first fan art I’ve seen. I am so gobsmacked!
