The Art of Projections by S. E. Porter

October 29, 2023July 4, 2024a cat

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S. E. Porter is an artist and author, often together. Today, she’s here with us to talk some about her upcoming novel Projections, and to share artwork tied to pivotal moments from the story. These pieces are currently on display at the Delight Factory in Brooklyn until November 18 as part of her opens in a new windowart show.

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by S. E. Porter

There’s an odd problem that can arise while writing a book, or soon after finishing it. Sometimes the story and the images blazing through it refuse to be contained by the pages. Instead characters or scenes keep floating up like ghosts. They shapeshift, but remain recognizable. It’s like a dream that won’t dissipate with waking, but plays on as a transparent veil across the ordinary world.

The images from Projections stayed with me, twisting and reforming, long after I’d handed in my final draft. My story about the ghost of a murdered girl stuck to her killer, and implacably seeking revenge against him over the course of centuries, pulled the neat trick of haunting its author. My long, strange historical fantasy novel apparently wasn’t enough to satisfy the ghost of Catherine Bildstein. She wanted more from me.

Eventually I tried another strategy for placating her ghost, and began putting some of the book’s imagery into mixed-media artwork. And if it hasn’t been quite enough to send Catherine and her worlds to sleep, it’s at least calmed them down.

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Séance

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Catherine is a young girl in the middle of 19th century western New York: the center of its era’s radical movements, especially Spiritualism. It’s hard to grasp now just how revolutionary Spiritualism was; its passionate history has vanished behind a century of portrayals of the Spiritualists as a pack of vicious frauds, preying on grieving parents. There was certainly plenty of grief to exploit: roughly half the children born then died before their fifth birthdays.

Calvinism had blithely condemned those dead children to hell. Spiritualism came along and upended that idea, creating a cosmology where the kids were just fine. There were frauds involved, especially as the 19th century wore on, but there was also a gigantic fuck you to a cruel and pervasive dogma.

There’s a scene in Projections where Catherine attends a séance, and I did quite a bit of research into what séances were like. The girl in this picture, with her head thronged by ghosts and her hands spread on the séance table, is almost Catherine—Catherine a moment before a strange voice spills over her lips and calls itself by a dead girl’s name.

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The Empty Room

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The popular image of the 19th century as a prim and placid era is wildly mistaken. There was tremendous ferment, as movements for abolition, women’s rights, and new religions sent the old certainties reeling. Where before the spirits of the dead were believed to stay safely in heaven or hell, Spiritualism proposed a haunted world, one whose ghosts were as close and intimate as skin.

My Catherine ultimately rejects both Spiritualism and her father’s Christianity. But like everyone in her era, she confronts this newly haunted world. Like the young Victorian woman in this image, entering a room and finding all the furniture hovering in midair, Catherine faces the intrusion of uncanny forces—long before she becomes a ghost herself.

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Suture

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After her childhood-friend-turned-stalker, Gus, murders Catherine, her ghost loses the ability to speak. Her voice is consumed by an unending scream—but her mind remains intact, even while everyone around her regards her as a senseless ghoul. Gus objectifies her to the point of exploiting her ghost as a kind of magical battery.

The young Victorian woman in this image is another stand-in for Catherine. Her eyes lowered, her body diagrammed like a cow in a butcher’s shop, but with memories of her childhood bleeding through, she, like Catherine, is seeking agency against all odds.

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Niagara

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Shortly before her murder, Catherine travels with two Spiritualist friends to see the Great Blondin cross Niagara Falls on his tightrope. Blondin, balanced in this image above a cataract of faces, was a sensational daredevil who crossed Niagara repeatedly. Unlike modern funambulists, he used no net or line, and any slip would have been fatal.

Catherine, Thomas, and Reverend Skelley go to see Blondin’s first performance, when he sat down on his rope at the midpoint, hauled up a bottle of wine from the boat Maid of the Mist, and toasted the crowd. In his subsequent crossings, Blondin increased the difficulty of the feat in increasingly bizarre ways such as pushing a wheelbarrow, or carrying his terrified manager on his back. He was so surefooted that the crowd eventually grew bored and diminished, even as he kept adding to the spectacle.

This image of him, though, is taken from his first triumphant crossing. Catherine is watching in the crowd, never suspecting that she has only days left to live.

S. E. Porter is the author of Projections, forthcoming from Tor 2/13/24. The images in this piece were taken from her show Séance, on display at the Delight Factory in Brooklyn through 11/18/23 More works from the show can be viewed opens in a new windowhere.

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Tending the Fire, Together: Community & Loneliness in Spec Fic

September 27, 2023September 25, 2023a cat

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Writers spend a lot of time alone in their own heads. David Edison is here to talk about the sometimes loneliness of writing, finding his community, and his new book, opens in a new windowSandymancer.

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There’s a true myth that writers are solitary animals, and that our work takes place in some holy half-light of focus and flow. That’s bupkis.

Pick a writer—any writer! Now imagine them working. Is the scene cozy, or is it a busy one? Is there a cat on a shoulder, a dog in a lap? Tea, coffee, Mommy’s perfume scotch? Is there smoke from cigarettes, incense, or a fireplace? Are they in a room of their own?

Are they alone in that room?

Writing and dreaming can both be lonely work. But unlike writing, there’s no workshop I know of that teaches you how to curate your dreams, or warns of the hungry quicksand that may swallow you whole if, by chance against chance, your dream comes true and you find yourself without a new dream to chase. That’s a lesson I learned after the fact, almost backward.

But almost everything that’s happened to me has happened backward, starting with gastrulation, when I was a 21 day-old embryo, and the cells that would become my organs failed to properly rotate, leaving me with mirror-imaged, inverted organs. The inversion is imperfect—when I was ten, they disemboweled me to find my appendix.

I felt very alone in that cold, yellow-white room with its one blue blanket. Was I?

When, by hook and by crook, I hustled my way into an informational interview with the legendary editor-cum-agent Loretta Barrett, I had no idea that my career would begin as backward as my zygote did. This woman had hired Jackie Onassis to work at Doubleday, and now she wanted to read “the longest thing I had.” That was the first three chapters of opens in a new windowThe Waking Engine, which I had shelved in 2003 because I thought it too baroque and unwieldy.

“Finish the book and I’ll sell it.” Loretta disagreed, and who was I to argue? So I did, and she sold it to my dream publisher, the one whose craggy mount I had looked for on book spines since I was eight.

Hoo doggies, did I feel alone. Electric! Alive! Alone.

I never expected I’d need a new dream. Finishing a book, finding an agent, and selling that book to Tor seemed like a reasonably unattainable dream—I don’t fault myself for failing to plan ahead. I learned abruptly that whether our dream comes true or if it crashes like one of those scary race cars, what follows is exactly the same: something new that’s up to you.

My advice? Don’t just dream big—dream thoroughly. Dream with multiplicity. They’re dreams, so there’s no sense in limiting them. If I had allowed myself to look farther down that dream-road, I might have saved myself many headaches and at least one existential crisis.

More backwardness: It was only after Waking Engine was in revisions that I began to find a community of writers. I feared mere contact with other writers would destroy my confidence. Backward! With community came mentorship, and at the sage advice of Delia Sherman, I applied for the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. Delia aptly pointed out that in my backwardness, I had skipped some basic “boot camp” elements of my writer’s education. I’d been in workshops since I was 15, but never at a professional level. My concept of POV, for instance, was woefully underdeveloped, and it’s only because of Delia’s one-on-one instruction that Waking’s sprawling, multiple POV characters weave together with any sense at all.

For the first time in my writing life, I didn’t feel quite so alone.

Clarion West changed me on a mitochondrial level.I don’t mean that it changed what I write, or even how I write—it’s hard to convey how intense those six weeks can be. It scraped out much stagnant bullshit and poured in distilled, peer-reviewed craftsmanship. I needed a few years afterward, to let that ultra-concentrated experience percolate through my subconscious.

I came out knowing what I needed to learn next. I was proud of Waking‘s complexity, but if I needed to learn anything, it was simplicity. So I set out to write a more simply-plotted story with a single POV character and a single narrative arc. (There is a minor second POV character, because I am a recovering abuser of embedded texts.)

I was not alone. Loretta passed away too early, my editor left Tor, and time passed as I wrestled with the choice to reboot my career—but for the first time, I had found My People.

That first day at Clarion West revealed the true treasure I would find there: community. Here were 18 people who had been the rockstar of every workshop they’d ever taken, and we instantly realized that we were in the company of…ourselves. We were the same Cylon model, under the skin, each of us nervously and beautifully embodying the writer’s core programming, which Octavia E. Butler so perfectly summarized: “an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

Suddenly I could share in Usman T. Malik’s passion, which would win him well-earned awards. I could share in E. Lily Yu’s switchblade-sharp deconstructions, in Neon Yang’s joy and off-the-cuff, from-memory piano recitals. Jen Geisbrecht’s punchy snark and absurdly brilliant sentence structure. Malcom Devlin’s one-liners and haunting horror stories. Alix Solano’s laughter and siblingship. Helena Bell’s three-theme theory of storytelling, and her encyclopedic knowledge of where to submit your stories. Kelly Sandoval’s beautifully sweet soul that she reflects so perfectly in her writing. I’ll stop there, but you get the picture: it was a good time, and I’ve felt like a proud brother, watching my cohort earn and receive their accolades.

The lesson of community reverberates. During the final work on Sandymancer, I reveled in the collaboration between my editor, the cover and map artists, design, marketing: Claire Eddy; Sanaa Ali-Virani; Andreas Rocha, Rhys Davies; Julia Bergen; my local photographer, Blanca Parsiak, and more—all of these people and more were right there with me. They’ve told the story of Sandymancer with their insight, expertise, and artistry.

As for me? My crisis came and went. I wrote the novel that I needed to write, Sandymancer, and I learned the lessons that I set out to learn. Not one to repeat mistakes, I wrote the sequel with new lessons in mind. Will the risk be worth it? Will readers find it?

I’ll find out. When I do, I may be isolated in a room of my own, but I will not be—and never was—alone.

by David Edison

David Edison was born in Saint Louis, Missouri. He currently divides his time between New York City and San Francisco. In other lives, he has worked in many flavors of journalism and is editor of the LGBTQ video game news site GayGamer.net.

…And he sleeps in unicorn corpses, tauntaun style.

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Meow, Baby! Cats in Science Fiction and Fantasy

September 22, 2023April 9, 2024a cat21 Comments

opens in a new windowWe love cats and SFF and John Scalzi, and are thrilled to introduce all three today!

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by John Scalzi

Hello, Tor/Forge blog readers! I have a new novel coming that recently released called opens in a new windowStarter Villain, and if you’ve seen the cover—and what a cover!—then you may surmise that cats may play a significant role in the events of the story. That would be correct, and also, it would not be the first time that cats have been integral to the stories that science fiction and fantasy writers write and share with the world.

To make this point, below please find a curated selection of feline friends who pop up in science fiction and fantasy works across several media. Because, after all, cats are everywhere. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so once I offer up some of my favorites here, please add your own in the comments. Because you can never have too many cats!

**JONESY THE CAT, from Alien (1979)**

The more things change, the more things stay the same—cats were crew members on sailing ships in order to help control the vermin, and Jonesy had a similar role on the Nostromo, the massive cargo-hauling space ship in the film. Now, you might argue that Jonesy fell down on the job when he didn’t hunt down and snap the neck of the alien when it was still small and snake-like, but, look, a smart cat knows when to pick his battles. It’s not for nothing that Jonesy is only one of two survivors of that whole crew.

**THE CAT, from Coraline (novella, 2002; film, 2009)**

In science fiction and fantasy cats are often presumed to be able to walk between the real world and the wilder worlds of imagination, and that’s the case here, as the stray cat Coraline sees lurking about her house follows her through the secret door the leads to the seemingly-nice-but-then-not-at-all Other Mother and her intriguing, ultimately dangerous pocket universe. The cat and the Other Mother do not get along at all, a fact Coraline uses to her advantage at one point.

**GOOSE THE FLERKEN, from Captain Marvel (2019)**

Technically Goose is not a cat at all, but if an alien species looks like a cat, walks like a cat and meows like a cat, you can go ahead and call it a cat… at least until physics-defying tentacles fly out of its mouth and devour all those who threaten it. Which, you have to admit, is not something a cat can do—but absolutely IS something a cat would do, if it could. Go on, look at your cat. Tell me it wouldn’t. In an instant.

**THE STRAY, from Stray (2022)**

Would domesticated cats survive the human apocalypse? In the video game Stray, not only do cats survive, one of them actually manages to unravel the mystery of what happened to those disappeared humans, and why they left behind an entire subterranean city of helper robots. All while simply being a cat (and also, being helped by their very own robot, which is a nice boost if you can get it).

**THE CAT, from Love Death + Robots (2019)**

Speaking of apocalypses and robots, in the “Three Robots” episode of this animated anthology series, a trio of mechanized explorers visit the ruins of a city and see delights from the human era they’ve encountered before, like balls! And very old hamburgers! And rockets! And, of course, a cat, who decides to then accompany them on their adventures, because it’s cute and furry and harmless… or is it? In the third season of the series, the robots appear again, as does the cat, in the most unusual of places. Boy, whoever thought up this particular cat really must consider them evil geniuses or something.

There’s a starter list of cats in science fiction and fantasy. Add your own to the list in the comments! And check out Starter Villain, the novel, when it’s out on September 19. You won’t be disappointed in its cats, I promise you.

JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular SF authors of his generation. His debut Old Man’s War won him the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, and Redshirts (which won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel), and 2020’s The Last Emperox. Material from his blog, Whatever, has also earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

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God-King Troubles & Other Vibes: A Sandymancer Playlist

September 19, 2023May 17, 2024a cat

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World-building is not easy work! A lot of perspiration and imagination goes into the craft of creating a world and communicating it in novel form.

David Edison is one such tune-inspired world-creator, and he’s sharing with us the playlist of songs he’s selected to represent his new fantasy epic opens in a new windowSandymancer!

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by David Edison

Writing is an act of magic, and songs are spells, so it’s natural that they weave themselves together; for some writers—for me—music is an essential component of creativity. I need song-magic to lift me out of the world and into that dreamy liminal state of bliss called flow. Music transforms me from a typist to a pianist.

I do usually write with a one-size-fits all playlist, which is mostly for driving the energy levels, focus, and active joy I need to sit down and work. I also put effort into project-specific playlists, which is a crackerjack way to procrastinate.

I make weird association—I do write Weird Fiction, after all—so there’s always a bit of psychosis apparent in my playlists. Such is the fate of the neurospicy. As I write, I jump around from scene to scene as my attention shifts and splits, and very often it’s a song that sparks a connection between one scene and another. For that reason, I usually shuffle my playlists—and I’d recommend doing so with this one. Arranging the songs just so sounds like a fantastic way to lose lots of time and sanity, and one never wants more than just a bit of insanity. For flavor.

I’ve plucked out some songs to fit with the vibe beats in Sandymancer, and broken them down—somewhat airily—into loose vibe categories. I hope the songs cast their spells and tempt you toward Sandymancer, but if all fails, hit shuffle and enjoy some light psychosis courtesy of an author and his spiciness.

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Vibe I: Sing the World into Being

This is the music that fleshes out the Land of the Vine—its lost hymns, naughty shanties, and somber dirges. Songs out of time. ‘Round these parts, some folk call it world-building.

“Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
“Babylon” by David Carbonara
“The Wasteland” by Elton John
“Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” by Neko Case

Vibe II: Hayseed Longing

A village so decrepit that it has no name, where dreams and boredom wallow together. These are songs of survival, of hardtack dreaming, and of rough beginnings.

“Beg Steal or Borrow” by Ray LaMontagne & the Pariah Dogs
“Daddy Lessons” by Beyonce
“Little Earthquakes” by Tori Amos
“Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” by Lou Rawls

Vibe III: God-King Troubles

Heal the world, break the world—you can’t please everyone. This music swells to tell the history of the Son of the Vine, the hidden sorrows and frustrations he so rarely shares.

“The Melting of the Sun” by St. Vincent
“Fire on Babylon” by Sinead O’Connor
“The Man Who Sold the World” by Nirvana
“Congregation” by Low

Vibe IV: Grit and Teeth

Before a teenager stares down a (wicked?) long-dead god-king, she listens to these songs for courage. Truth is, Caralee could teach music a thing or two about courage herself.

“I Don’t Believe You” by Magnetic Fields
“Battle for the Sun” by Placebo
“No” by Emma Dean
“Teenage Hustling” by Tori Amos

Vibe V: Sass Regina

On the other hand, Caralee is a queen of self-possession. These are the tunes rocking in her heart, the spunk that fuels her as-yet-unearned confidence.

“I’m A Lady (feat. Trouble Andrew)” by – Santigold
“Giddy Up” by Dragonette
“Strange Little Girl” by Tori Amos
“I Feel Lucky” by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Vibe VI: Heads Will Roll

Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned. When two unstoppable objects collide – and also cooperate – there are bound to be consequences both grave and grand. Such is the case for both Caralee and the Son of the Vine. These are songs of the phoenix in the fire, and also its rebirth.

“Heads Will Roll” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“The Girl You Lost to Cocaine” by Sia
“A Favor House Atlantic” by Coheed and Cambria
“Take Me to Church” by Sinead O’Connor

Vibe VII: Magic is Magick is Science

These songs summon Power. They fill the space with mystery, which is sacred. They are the full-throated incantations that connect will to intention: the essence of all Magick.

“Hy-Brasil” by Allison Russel
“Bell, Book and Candle” by Eddi Reader
“Dark Horse” by Katy Perry
“Cantara” by Dead Can Dance
“Don’t Sweat the Technique” by Eric B. & Rakim

Vibe VIII: It’s the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine)

Some theories hold that writers are actually human beings, and what’s more – some seem to enjoy being happy. These are sillier songs that are just as infused with meaning as their more sober counterparts above (Please refrain from drinking and driving until you get to heaven).

“Everybody Drinks and Drives in Heaven” by Leslie Stevens
“Still Alive” by Aperture Science Psychoacoustic Laboratories
“No Rain” by Blind Melon
“Missionary Man” by Eurythmics

…And he sleeps in unicorn corpses, tauntaun style.

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Disco Space Opera Playlist!

September 13, 2023May 17, 2024a cat

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Cat Rambo’s Disco Space Opera series kicked off with 2021’s opens in a new windowYou Sexy Thing, a novel we’d pitch as Farscape meets The Great British Bake Off. It’s got grizzled old soldiers and other vagrants who have grown tired of the campaigns and tumult of central space opera life, and have elected to open a restaurant at the edge of the known universe where they can eke out a more fulfilling existence. This distance from chaos is, of course, an illusion—albeit a comforting one. There’s no accounting for the propensity of sentient spaceships and sadistic pirate kings to just show up!

Anywho, that was the first book, and now we’re talking opens in a new windowDevil’s Gun, the continuation of their adventure. We’re also talking the far future, and disco jams. Cat Rambo has shared with us their grand Disco Space Opera playlist.

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by Cat Rambo

opens in a new window“You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate

Why did I decide to name the ship what I did? I’m not sure, but early on in the writing the password exchange between Arpat Takraven and Niko appeared, and it led to the ship’s name. Like a lot of the songs on this list, it’s a big earworm and I’ve always loved it. Written by Errol Brown and Tony Wilson, this song was released in 1975 and became the group’s most popular single, and was the only song to achieve Top Ten status in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

opens in a new window“Devil’s Gun” by C.J. and Company

In naming the second book, I wanted something that conveyed the nature of the dangerous artifact the crew is seeking in the book. When I listened to the song, it was the perfect mood. The song, written by Barry Green, Ron Roker, and Gerry Shury, was the first song played at Broadway’s Studio 54.

opens in a new window“Rumor Has It” by Donna Summer

In the third book, which has been handed over to the publisher, the power of gossip and rumor becomes important as several aspects of Niko’s past come to confront her. You can’t invoke disco without invoking Donna Summer, in my opinion, and this was my choice to represent her. The song was written by Summer with co-writers Pete Bellotte and Giorgbio Moroder and released in 1978.

I have more adventures of Niko and her crew planned out – seven volumes worth, in fact. The main thread is a particular romantic plotline and by book ten, I’m hoping readers will be on the edge of their seats waiting to find out how it’s resolved. Without saying much more than that and not presenting any spoilers, I hope, here’s the names of the other seven books.

opens in a new window“We Are Family” by Sister Sledge

Dabry’s family history is revealed as the crew is forced to rescue his daughter – against her will. This song has always been one of my favorites, and for a book dealing with family issues, this seemed like a perfect pick. The song came out in 1979 and was written by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers.

opens in a new window“Heart of Glass” by Blondie

What happens when You Sexy Thing turns its attention to the most mystifying emotion of all: love? Another favorite song, this matches what I want to explore in this particular volume. Written by Deborah Harry and Chris Stein, the song appeared on the band’s third album in 1978 and was released as a single the following year.

opens in a new window“Shadow Dancing” by Andy Gibb

Skidoo must return to her home planet. But will both she and her planet survive the visit? I felt this song reflected the complicated personal dynamics of her homecoming. Written by Andy, Barry, Maurice, and Robin Gibb, the song appeared in 1978 and was that year’s Billboard Magazine top single.

opens in a new window“Take Me Home” by Cher

Petalia may have found a way to revive the almost-extinct Florian bloodline – but is Niko willing to pay the price that’s asked of them all? This song, written by Michele Aller and Bob Esty, appeared in 1979.

opens in a new window“You Can’t Lose What You Never Had” by Fantasy

Rebbe strikes off on his own, but You Sexy Thing and its crew must find him before he destroys a world. This song appeared in 1981 and was written by Tony Valor.

opens in a new window“Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” by McFadden and Whitehead

The crew thinks they’ve finally caught a break, until finally the mystery of Atlanta’s past resurfaces and is on a direct collision course with her current role. The song was written by McFadden and Whitehead along with Jerry Cohen and appeared in 1979.

opens in a new window“Never Can Say Goodbye” by Gloria Gaynor

All good things come to an end, but I hope to end the series in a way that will keep the crew in people’s hearts. When the crew finds out what Arpat Takraven truly wants of them, they’ve got a very hard choice to make. Written by Clifton Davs, the song appeared in 1979.

Cat Rambo (they/them) is an American fantasy and science fiction writer whose work has appeared in, among others, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Chiaroscuro, Talebones, and Strange Horizons. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where they studied with John Barth and Steve Dixon, they also attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. They are currently the managing editor of Fantasy Magazine. They published a collection of stories, Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight, and their collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories, appeared in 2007. They live and write in Washington State, and “Cat Rambo” is their real name.

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Programmable Reality and Our Mediated Future

September 6, 2023a cat

opens in a new windowJon Evans thinks a lot about the future and has oodles of experience writing exciting novels full of action and suspense. In his new techno-thriller, opens in a new windowExadelic, Evans blends these two facets into a thoroughly exhilarating portrait of a future where artificial intelligence discovers occult magic and reality is revealed as something frighteningly malleable. Today, Jon is here to talk us through aspects of his ideation for Exadelic.

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In 2021 I finished my novel Exadelic, then set it aside to cool for a few months, as is my way. Upon rereading it, I did not think: ‘Aha, fame and fortune, mine at last!‘ Instead I thought: ‘My God, what have I done?’ It’s an unusual book. Reviewers and early readers call it “really weird” and ”mind-bending” and “absolutely wild” — and those are the raves. But here’s the thing. While the book has not changed … it’s suddenly a lot less weird than it was two years ago.

Exadelic begins in the present day, with a massive AI breakthrough with potentially drastic consequences. Back then, the notion that something vaguely similar might actually happen in our semi-foreseeable future was a laughable idea relegated to Twitter’s wackier fringes. Today the discourse is very different. I give you four recent headlines:

The Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, respectively. Not exactly a list of publications known for starry-eyed science-fiction extrapolation, and/or wild-eyed prophecies of doom! …But here we are.

Exadelic supposes our knee-jerk fears of AI doom are quickly superseded — because the breakthrough AI, when trained on ancient texts of occult magic, discovers that fundamental substrate of our universe is actually an interlocking swarm of cellular automata, more like software than hardware. (A notion not original to me; Stephen Wolfram has long suggested our universe is fundamentally “a vast array of interacting computational elements.”) As such, apparent violations of the laws of physics, sometimes a.k.a. ‘magic,’ are merely side effects of bugs in that substrate. But if the universe is more like software than hardware, it may have some sort of programmer … which, we soon learn, apparently looks with extreme prejudice on any discovery of its secrets.

Is the notion that our entire universe is ultimately made of software, which is full of bugs, which can be hacked and wielded as magic—and therefore a universe in which reality itself is programmable—kinda bonkers? Well, yes. But does a bonkers universe-as-software story work surprisingly well as a metaphor for our uncertain-but-guaranteed-super-weird future in which our perceived realities will be constantly mediated by multiple tiers of software? Reader, I believe it does.

My original elevator pitch for Exadelic was “Imagine Olaf Stapledon wrote a hell-for-leather action thriller.” (Most of my previous books were thrillers.) That’s a deep cut; few people now read Stapledon, who wrote not so much ‘novels’ as ‘philosophical histories of humanity and the universe.’ But SF has always been the home for big ideas, and such ideas—maybe even especially when crazy—can light up our collective space of possibilities in unexpected ways. My hope is that Exadelic may in some small way add to our ongoing conversation about big crazy ideas.

Jon Evans is an author, journalist, travel writer, and software engineer. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, Quartz, The Globe & Mail, The Walrus, and (weekly, for a decade) TechCrunch. He has traveled to more than 100 countries and reported from Iraq, Haiti, Colombia, and the Congo. He the CTO of HappyFunCorp, was the initial technical architect of Bookshop.org, and is the founding director of the GitHub Archive Program, preserving the world’s open-source software in a permafrost vault beneath an Arctic mountain for 1,000 years. Exadelic is his first novel in over a decade.

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Author Features / Dragon Week

Is a Bat a Dragon? We Asked James Rollins

July 13, 2023May 13, 2024a cat

opens in a new windowBy now, Tor is at the forefront of research into what exactly constitutes “dragon.” We’ve entertained many queries throughout the years, determining if the umbrella of dragon extends to opens in a new windowhippos, opens in a new windowsnakes, and opens in a new windowGodzilla. Now, we turn to the expertise of James Rollins to advise on the dragonic status of bats. If you’ve read opens in a new windowThe Starless Crown and its sequel opens in a new windowThe Cradle of Ice, you probably know the answer.

Check it out!

by James Rollins

My love for the natural world and all its myriad creatures was one of my main drives for pursuing a career in veterinary medicine. Even today as a full-time writer, I’ve not fully stepped away from that profession. As I’ve stated many times during book talks—yes, I can still neuter a cat in under thirty seconds.

Still, my greatest fascination about Nature is how it adheres to a dictate stated so succinctly in Jurassic Park: Life will find a way. I’ve always been captivated by the manner in which animals and plants discover innovative survival strategies to fill different environmental niches and how that fight has resulted in all the marvels (and horrors) found in the natural world.

While growing up, I found a new way of exploring this subject matter: in science fiction and fantasy novels set on different worlds. I found myself especially drawn to material that explored life’s resilience across fantastic worlds. Whether it was the sandworms of Herbert’s Dune, the engineered landscape of Niven’s Ringworld, the many species of Card’s Ender’s Game, or a universe of other writers tackling how life finds a way.

Even when it came to those novels that featured dragons, I found myself most interested in the biology and the circumstance of their origins. How did the telepathy and bonding in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books come about? What steps were taken to harness the physicality of dragons to become warriors in Novik’s Temeraire series? In Martin’s books, could dragon eggs truly be encysted for ages and require fire to bring them back to life? If so, how and why?

When it came to crafting my own fantastic world in the Moonfall Saga, I took a similar scientific eye to its construction. The series takes place on a tidally locked planet, a world that circles its sun with one side forever facing the sun, the other locked in eternal darkness. The only truly livable clime is the band between those extremes of ice and fire. Across such a harsh and unforgiving landscape, I wanted to build a biosphere of flora and fauna that made evolutionary sense. How would species survive the extreme cold and lack of sunlight? Could life find a way in the sunblasted hemisphere?

And what about dragons?

In the novel, one of the apex predators is a species of massive bat, with a wingspan of ten meters or more. We first see them in Book One (The Starless Crown). They inhabit the vast swamplands of Mýr—found in that more temperate climate of the world. They are nocturnal, haunting a drowned forest and roosting in a volcanic mountain. I wanted those bats to make biological sense, to have them fit that environmental niche in a natural way. Being arboreal, they would likely have evolved prehensile tails. As nocturnal creatures, they would need bell-shaped ears and still use ultrasonics to navigate. And without giving away any of the surprises in the books, there is a significant aspect to their biology that will allow them to bond to certain people.

In the books, I also wanted to add a level of verisimilitude to the bestiary by adding naturalistic sketches, drawings that you might find in a turn-of-the-century research journal.

Here is the Mýr bat:

Keep in mind, life will find a way, so this species is not limited to those swamplands. A subspecies evolved in the dark, frozen half of the world. It adapted to fit that harsh niche, becoming smaller and stockier, with shaggy fur, and nasal flaps that could seal to conserve body heat. Likewise, in this treeless landscape, that prehensile tail would no longer be needed. They make an appearance in the second book in the series, The Cradle of Ice.

Here is their sketch:

But what about the title of this blog post: Is a bat a dragon?

In the third volume in the series (A Dragon of Black Glass), which will be coming out in 2024, this species has also adapted to the sunblasted half of the world. To survive, they would need to burrow to survive, growing larger claws for digging, and bodies that would be hairless and elongated, with fanned tails for aerial maneuvering when out of their burrows. They would become known as “sanddragons.”

Here is a sneak peek at their preliminary incarnation (with the final version still to come):

I must note that all of these drawings were beautifully executed by graphic artist, opens in a new windowDanea Fidler—as were all the other creature sketches featured in the books. I look forward to sharing the final versions of these “dragons” in 2024 when A Dragon of Black Glass hits bookshelves.

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Author Features / Dragon Week

5 Dragons Daniel M. Ford’s Adept Wizard Could Beat in a Fight

July 12, 2023July 10, 2023a cat

opens in a new windowDragonslayers have been around almost as long as dragons, but what makes a dragonslayer? Truthfully, a dragonslayer can be anyone. Your nephew, that street performer, your mail carrier… But what about a young necromancer, fresh out of school and with a chip on her shoulder? Yes.

For more on that, we bring you Daniel M. Ford to discuss the dragonslaying capabilities of Aelis de Lenti, the main character of his fantasy novel opens in a new windowThe Warden.

Aelis de Lenti, the main character of my book The Warden, is, well, a warden, which is to say a wizard with a specific mandate to protect an area or group of people, as a kind of marshal/investigator/magistrate. And as my readers will know, her magic is not generally of the explosive, openly powerful, full-of-offensive-potential kind. So if Aelis was to go hunting dragons, she’d have to be very careful, select her targets well, prepare, and look for weaknesses other people might not see. Thankfully for her, Aelis is, while not a world class planner, really good at making it up as she goes along, and she has a couple friends—Tun, the half-orc woodsman, and Maurenia, the half-elven adventuress—that can generally be convinced to help her out.

Fáfnir

Reaching way back into the origins of European dragons here, I think it’s reasonable to say that Aelis could come up with the idea of digging a hole and waiting for the wyrm to slither over it so she can stab it in the belly. There’s also the fact that eating the heart of this particular dragon is said to bring knowledge, which combines two things Aelis can’t get enough of; fancy cuisine and knowing things other people don’t.

The Sleeping Dragon from The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg

Right away, the Sleeping part is a giveaway for exactly how Aelis will approach this fight.

Quietly.

But there’s more to it. In Rosneberg’s Guardians of the Flame series[1], dragons have a pretty well known and debilitating weakness. There is an herb known as dragonbane—a little on the nose—that is commonly found and widely known to interfere with a dragon’s magical metabolism. This generally keeps dragons of this world from messing with humans too openly. Once Aelis gets her hands on some of this herb, a few hours in a decently stocked alchemical lab—even the not very well stocked lab in her tower would probably do—and she can definitely refine it into something extra lethal. Then it’s just a matter of getting close enough, quietly enough, with some crossbow bolts or arrows to get the job done.

Or, more likely, convincing Tun and/or Maurenia to get close enough to get the job done. After all, an Abjurer’s job in a fight isn’t necessarily to deliver the killing blow so much as it is to cover those who are better prepared or equipped to do so. At least, that’s what she’d tell her friends while she talked them into it. Can her wards stand up to dragon breath? Of course they can! Probably. But we won’t even need to find out, right?

Verimthrax Pejorative, from Dragonslayer

A classic fantasy film dragon that proves very dangerous to even an experienced wizard, as seen in the film, Vermithrax Pejorative is tough to take via a conventional approach to dragon-slaying.

Aelis de Lenti is anything but conventional.

In the film, Ulrich the wizard is able to discern that Vermithrax is affected by a disease that bothers all dragons as they age, a scale-rot that causes constant pain. Aelis could certainly diagnose this, and after coaxing the dragon to get close by staking out the goat[2]to provide a free meal, and then offering to treat her scale-rot. Once she does start treating that disease, her Necromantic abilities will teach her all about draconic anatomy and weaknesses, giving her something she can surely exploit. Maybe Vermithrax dies quietly in her sleep, maybe her firebreath is suddenly disabled, maybe the next time she flies she finds that the muscles of her wings have mysteriously atrophied and she crashes into a hill. There is no equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath in Aelis’s world.

A Dracolich, any Dracolich

Sure, sure, Dracoliches like Daurgothoth the Creeping Doom are a menace to fantasy worlds. When you marry the magical power and resistances of a lich with the thousands of years of experience, intelligence, and magical abilities of a dragon, you get something fearsome.

And not one of them has ever dealt with something like a Lyceum trained Necrobane. Aelis is at her best and most powerful when fighting the undead. Once she’s got some practical experience against living dragons and is able to put that together with her Necromantic power, she can surely find a way to take down a dracolich.

Rand al’Thor, The Dragon Reborn[3]

Yes, I hear you. Rand is catastrophically powerful. If he’s got any of his angreal or sa’angreal around, like Callandor, he can probably destroy the world, or close enough as makes no difference. Aelis can’t match him with magic. She probably can’t match him blade to blade, either, as Rand is a confirmed blademaster and she is competent. Her friends wold surely know better than to even try. So why do I think Aelis could take him?

Quite simply, (at least in the early books) Rand is terrified of women, especially one that acts even a little bit interested in him. And later books Rand flat out refuses to fight a woman. Is this cheating? Fine! Aelis isn’t above cheating to achieve a goal! She can easily take Rand al’Thor[4]based on these two data points alone.

So, there you have it; the Top 5 Dragons Aelis de Lenti can take in a fight. It requires a little unorthodox thinking, because Aelis doesn’t flash the kind of power you might expect from a fantasy wizard. But she excels at getting the most out of what she does have; her wards, her Necromancy, her friends, and her willingness to cheat[5].

Order The Warden Here:

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[1] A portal fantasy where a group of college students get transported to the world they play a fantasy RPG in and decide to Do the Industrial Revolution in order to end slavery. It shows its age in spots (it began in 1983) but it’s worth a read.

[2] If you’ve read The Warden you know exactly which goat I mean

[3] I do not suggest that Aelis could handle the armies surrounding Rand, the Far Dareis Mai who guard him, or Elayne, Aviendha, and Min. Just Rand.

[4] Provided we ignore all the stuff about his world-shattering power and the massive armies, incredible resources, and similarly powerful people who’d be invested in his victory.

[5] Please understand that I have great respect, even love, for all the dragons mentioned here.

Author Features / Dragon Week / What's New

How to Worship Your Dragon: Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle Advise

July 11, 2023April 15, 2024a cat

opens in a new windowJulia Vee & Ken Bebelle wrote a book that’s like female John Wick with dragon magic and it’s called Ebony Gate and guess what! It’s out TODAY. We actually have Julia & Ken with us as special guests for Dragon Week, so check out their scholarly article on rituals of dragon worship, and then check out their high octane urban fantasy full of magic and assassins!

Check it out!

A Brief Description of Rituals to Worship Chinese Dragons by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

Make Your Annual Pilgrimage to a Local Dragon King and Dragon Mother Temple For Blessings

Dragon King and Dragon Mother temples dot the Asian countryside. If you are in the northern reaches of China, get yourself to the Heilongdawang Temple (literally “Black Dragon Great King”) located in Longwanggou (“Dragon King Valley”) in Shaanxi province where you can njoy six days of festivities.

Modern Chinese scholars note that folkloric traditions and religions are having a revival.¹ And why not? Festivities for the Great Black Dragon King include opera, dancers, circus performers, games, fireworks, and of course, gambling. This particular dragon king is more highly regarded than other local dragon kings because of his imperially conferred official title–the Marquis of Efficacious Response (Lingyinghou, 灵应侯).²

The Heilongdawang festival draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, all ready to donate generously to the temple coffers, burn incense, and otherwise eat copious quantities at the food stalls.

Or you can participate in a rain-summoning ceremony. In the drought-prone north, one ritual to summon rain included “casting tiger bones into a pool of water in order to scare dragons into flight, thereby creating rainclouds.”³

If you are in southern China, on the eighth day of the fifth month on the lunar calendar, you can join in with over a hundred thousand pilgrims to visit the Dragon Mother Temple in Guangdong. This temple sits along the Xijiang River and leans against Wulong (Five Dragons) Mountain. The area is known as the Pearl River Delta, and Dragon Mother devotees are spread widely across the West river and into Hong Kong and Macau. The Lung Mo temple on Pengchau island (Hong Kong) is situated on the beach.

The origins of the Dragon Mother reach back longer than the established official story, which goes something like this:

There was a young woman named Wen from Wuzhou. One day while washing clothes in the West River, she found a giant stone. From the stone sprung five lizards, who grew into dragons. She raised them tenderly and when her village had drought, the dragons brought rain. When the river threatened to flood, the dragons were there to divert the floodwaters. When she was quite elderly, the Emperor summoned her to the capital. Her dragon sons prevented the arduous journey (which was by river of course). When she passed away in 211 B.C. her dragon sons were devastated and transformed into five human scholars who held her funeral rites and buried her in Jiangwan.

Later, she was elevated in status to a deity, rising to the heavens as an immortal.

Pilgrims consider this eighth day of the fifth lunar month the Dragon Mother’s birthday and observe time-honored rituals. First, they wash their hands in the Dragon Spring to clean off the worldly dirt. The pilgrims then burn incense and present gifts at the temple. They bow, then kneel on the floor, and pray to the goddess. After this devotion, they light off firecrackers to respectfully invite the Dragon Mother to receive their gifts and fulfill their wishes.⁴

As one scholar notes, “It is not a coincidence that the pilgrimage to the Dragon Mother Temple falls on the eighth day of the fifth lunar month, as the fifth lunar month was the time when the danger of seasonal flooding of the West River (which is commonly known as “xiliao 西潦,” literally “west flood”) was the most imminent. The West River therefore was both a lifeline and a constant threat to the local people, who felt a real need to appease the river as well as to express their gratitude to the river goddess on this annual festive occasion.”⁵

The Dragon Mother and other water goddess (“Shuimu”) traditions go back millennia and it’s not hard to see why. The specter of drought, famine, or flooding was constant. Seafaring populations too, had multiple goddesses they sought blessings from for their safe voyage (Dragon Mother, Sea Goddess Mazu, and the shuimu (“Water Goddess”).

In 1861, John Henry Gray observed a ceremony to the Dragon Mother:

“…On a small temporary altar, which had been erected for the occasion, stood three cups containing Chinese wine. Taking in his hands a live fowl, which he continued to hold until he killed it as a sacrifice, the master proceeded in the first place to perform the Kowtow. He then took the cups from the table, one at a time, and, raising each above his head, poured its contents on the deck as a libation. He next cut the throat of the fowl with a sharp knife, taking care to sprinkle that portion of the deck on which he was standing with the blood of the sacrifice. At this stage of the ceremony several pieces of silver paper were presented to him by one of the crew. These were sprinkled with the blood, and then fastened to the door-posts and lintels of the cabin.”⁶

It wasn’t just sailors and locals to the West river who observed such pilgrimages and prayer rituals. When there was a drought, even government officials were tasked with conducting prayers to the Dragon King.

Failure to Worship the Dragon King, or Worse, Destruction of a Dragon King Temple, Can Lead to Heaven-Sent Disaster!

During the Great Flood of 1931 in Wuhan, one official lamented that the people blamed the flood on the destruction of a Dragon King Temple.⁷ The Dragon King Temple in Hankou had been demolished in 1930 to make way for a new road, so the timing of the flood was uncanny.

This flood affected 53 million people. The officials of Wuhan had to repent. Several prominent officials of Wuhan participated in rituals designed to placate the Dragon King, including the mayor. They kowtowed to the Dragon King altar, beseeching the deity to spare Wuhan from the flood.

Citizens of the region also blamed officials for outlawing the singing of “spirit operas” traditionally performed to assuage flood dragons.⁸

To those who worshiped the Dragon King, destroying his temple that sat atop the dyke was clearly a bad idea.

Maybe a River Near You Has a Dragon Deity.

Even if a Dragon King or Dragon Mother temple isn’t available, you can still make a pilgrimage to the rivers. At least forty rivers in China are named for dragons including these rivers in Shanghai: Shanghai: Longquangang He 龍泉港河 (Dragon Spring Port River), Bailonggang He 白龍港河 (White Dragon Port River).⁹

Just be sure to be properly deferential, and perhaps offer a song to the river dragon.

Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

We would like to thank Dr. Yasmin Koppen of University Leipzig for her friendship, and generously sharing her expertise and scholarship in East Asian dragons.

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Chau, Adam Yuet “Mysterious Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) 88.
Fan Lizhu and Chen Na “Resurgence of Indigenous Religion in China” (2013) 11.
Courtney, Chris “The Dragon King and the 1931 Wuhan Flood: Religious Rumors and Environmental Disasters in Republican China” (University of Cambridge, Twentieth-Century China 40.2, May 2015) p. 88.
Tan, Weiyun “Dragon mother temple keeps legend alive for 2 millennia” Shine, Nov. 12, 2021 https://www.shine.cn/feature/art-culture/2111128066/
Poon, Shuk-Wah. "Thriving Under an Anti-Superstition Regime: The Dragon Mother Cult in Yuecheng, Guangdong, During the 1930s." Journal of Chinese Religions 43, no. 1 (2015): 34-58. muse.jhu.edu/article/708611.
Poon, pg 41.
Courtney at p. 83.
Courtney at p. 100.
Zhao, Qiguang Chinese Mythology in the Context of Hydraulic Society Asian Folklore Studies Vol. 48, No. 2 (1989), pp. 231-246.
cindyxiong. “Ancient Bronze Dragons Carving in the Ancient Dragon King Temple along Yangtze River,China. Foreign Text Means King. Stock Photo.” Adobe Stock, stock.adobe.com/images/ancient-bronze-dragons-carving-in-the-ancient-dragon-king-temple-along-yangtze-river-china-foreign-text-means-king/100861913?prev_url=detail. Accessed 6 July 2023.

Author Features / What's New

Chasing the Nine Sons of the Dragon

July 9, 2023July 7, 2023a cat

opens in a new window opens in a new windowEbony Gate is a high-octane urban fantasy full of assassins and dragon magic, and set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. To prepare themselves for this thrilling series-starter, authors Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle had to hit the books before they wrote one. Now they’re here to talk us through some of their dragonic research!

Check it out!

by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

We went looking for a creature of fire, but what we found was a water god.

When we started writing Ebony Gate we knew we wanted to weave in dragons, but as children of diaspora we also wanted to incorporate the mythology of Asia, and the fantastic worlds that we learned of through our parents. In Chinese literature, Lóng is the closest analog to the Western dragon. Although it is visually similar to the Western dragon, Lóng occupies a different space in Asian myth and took our world-building in new directions.

Researching Chinese dragons presented a few challenges:

The sources were in Chinese and we couldn’t read them;
The sources were translated but super expensive university press books;
The sources were at a university library but it was lockdown; and
The sources were in the public domain and suffered from orientalism.

So we had to filter quite a bit and what struck us were all the differences between Western and Eastern dragons.

The dragons we grew up with (Dungeons and Dragons, et al) were predominantly fire-breathers, although tabletop gaming brought us ice, poison, and acid breathers as well. Lóng are almost exclusively water and weather gods, with the power to control both. Good and bad weather was often attributed to the moods of dragons.

The research we were able to access was filled with water imagery.

“Like the deities of other countries, the Chinese dragon-god (and the Japanese dragon) may appear in different shapes—as a youth or aged man, as a lovely girl or an old hag, as a rat, a snake, a fish, a tree, a weapon, or an implement. But no matter what its shape may be, the dragon is intimately connected with water. It is a “rain lord” and therefore the thunder-god who causes rain to fall.”

In Western fiction, the dragon is either a terrifying antagonist (Smaug, Maleficent) or a beast companion (Dragonriders of Pern, How to Train Your Dragon). There is no such occurrence in Chinese culture, though. Chinese Dragons are gods and don’t casually interact with mortals. Instead of villains raining fire and swooping in to steal cattle, Chinese dragons were the symbol of the emperor.

In ancient China, the power attributed to the dragon reads as both awesome and lyrical.

“The dragon dwells in pools, it rises to the clouds, it thunders and brings rain, it floods rivers, it is in the ocean, and controls the tides and causes the waters to ebb and flow as do its magic pearls … and it is a symbol of the emperor.”

The Chinese Dragon is typically serpentine, with a long body, four small legs, and sometimes wings. The dragon’s face usually has long whiskers. Chinese dragons are also very specifically referenced by name. The Great Dragon Father has nine offspring who are referenced by name, even before the Ming dynasty. They are fantastical hybrids and they can be seen all over Chinese architecture today.

For Ebony Gate, we loved the imagery of Yázì, which is a wolf/dragon hybrid. Yázì is depicted on a fan that leads our protagonist, Emiko, to a mysterious auction for a lost artifact. Cháofēng is a dragon/phoenix hybrid that is used on rooflines as a protective talisman and adorns the cornices of Emiko’s house as part of her magical security system.

We took all these differences between Western and Eastern dragons and used them as a framework for the worldbuilding of Ebony Gate. One similarity that we found and kept was their trait of hoarding treasure. Instead of distant deities or passive statues, our versions of the Nine Sons of the Dragon were actual gods living amongst their followers. They hoarded people, in addition to treasure, and imbued them all with their various magic. These people call themselves Lóng Jiārén and are living descendants of the dragons they served.

Lóng served as the genesis for our world and the magic of its people. All the rules that Lóng Jiārén live by, and their conduct flows from being in service of Lóng. But it’s the nature of man to twist things, dragon magic or not. After populating our world with dangerous people with the power of dragons, we knew our hero had to break the mold.

Emiko is diaspora, like us, but magical diaspora. Born without dragon powers, she doesn’t fit in either the world of the Lóng Jiārén, or with regular people. She only has her swords and tenacity to survive amongst her deadly peers. And in our world of dragons and monsters, it’s not the dragon who you should be afraid of—it’s Emiko.

Séance

The Empty Room

Suture

Niagara

Pre-order opens in a new windowProjections Here!

Order opens in a new windowSandymancer Here!

JONESY THE CAT, from Alien (1979)

THE CAT, from Coraline (novella, 2002; film, 2009)

GOOSE THE FLERKEN, from Captain Marvel (2019)

THE STRAY, from Stray (2022)

THE CAT, from Love Death + Robots (2019)

Order opens in a new windowStarter Villain Here:

Vibe I: Sing the World into Being

Vibe II: Hayseed Longing

Vibe III: God-King Troubles

Vibe IV: Grit and Teeth

Vibe V: Sass Regina

Vibe VI: Heads Will Roll

Vibe VII: Magic is Magick is Science

Vibe VIII: It’s the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine)

Order opens in a new windowSandymancer Here!

opens in a new window“You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate

opens in a new window“Devil’s Gun” by C.J. and Company

opens in a new window“Rumor Has It” by Donna Summer

opens in a new window“We Are Family” by Sister Sledge

opens in a new window“Heart of Glass” by Blondie

opens in a new window“Shadow Dancing” by Andy Gibb

opens in a new window“Take Me Home” by Cher

opens in a new window“You Can’t Lose What You Never Had” by Fantasy

opens in a new window“Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” by McFadden and Whitehead

opens in a new window“Never Can Say Goodbye” by Gloria Gaynor

Order opens in a new windowDevil’s Gun Here!

Order opens in a new windowExadelic Here:

Order The Cradle of Ice Here:

Fáfnir

The Sleeping Dragon from The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg

Verimthrax Pejorative, from Dragonslayer

A Dracolich, any Dracolich

Rand al’Thor, The Dragon Reborn[3]

Order The Warden Here:

A Brief Description of Rituals to Worship Chinese Dragons by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

Make Your Annual Pilgrimage to a Local Dragon King and Dragon Mother Temple For Blessings

Failure to Worship the Dragon King, or Worse, Destruction of a Dragon King Temple, Can Lead to Heaven-Sent Disaster!

Maybe a River Near You Has a Dragon Deity.

Order opens in a new windowEbony Gate Here:

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**JONESY THE CAT, from Alien (1979)**

**THE CAT, from Coraline (novella, 2002; film, 2009)**

**GOOSE THE FLERKEN, from Captain Marvel (2019)**

**THE STRAY, from Stray (2022)**

**THE CAT, from Love Death + Robots (2019)**