From Karel Čapek’s biotech machines of R.U.R....to Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore’s “The Proud Robot”...to Isaac Asimov’s positronic robots...to the many stories, films, cartoons, and games that have come since featuring cybertronic sex toys, robotic rebels, grandmothers with artificial intelligence, automatons, bots, droids, and so many other variations—these machines have represented our dreams as well as our anxieties. We love these literary creations but fear them as well. Stories from the last decade by top science fiction authors representing the many facets of robots in the twenty-first century: beautiful, hideous, and everything in between.

Table of Contents
“Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear
“A Jar of Goodwill” by Tobias S. Buckell
“Balancing Accounts” by James Cambias
“The Rising Waters” by Benjamin Crowell
“The Shipmaker” by Aliette De Bodard
“I, Robot” by Cory Doctorow
“Kiss Me Twice” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“Algorithms for Love” by Ken Liu
“Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
“The Djinn's Wife” by Ian McDonald
“Houses” by Mark Pantoja
“Artifice and Intelligence” by Tim Pratt
“Stalker” by Robert Reed
“Droplet” by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky
“Under the Eaves” by Lavie Tidhar (original)
“Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M.Valente
“The Nearest Thing” by Genevieve Valentine

Book One of The Vampire Musketeers

[This book will be published in April 2012]

In another world, history changes but heroes remain the same.

In a world where vampires have taken every humble chapel, defiled every grand cathedral, subdued most nations and treated every human as cattle, Dumas’ hero musketeers rise to a greater challenge than they ever met in their original adventures. Under the name of Athos, Raphael, Count de La Fere, has spent a decade fighting vampires in the king’s musketeers. He never expected to see his wife again—he’d discovered Charlotte was a vampiric servant, hanged and left her for dead ten years before —yet it is she who turns Athos into a vampire. Or does she? Despite the craving for blood and overwhelming sexual hunger, Athos walks the fine line between the worlds, remaining human enough to fight vampires. Only his commitment and loyalty to his friends—fellow musketeers Porthos and Aramis—and a young Gascon named D’Artagnan, allows him to keep his soul through an adventure that tests the heights of his heroism and the depth of his darkest desires.

Ebook Only

2039: The Russians didn’t use the big nukes. The ongoing Third World War has left parts of Europe in ruins. Into the chaos steps the Second Alliance, a multinational eager to impose its own kind of New World Order. In the United States—in FirStep, the vast space colony and on the artificial island Freezone—the SA shoulders its way to power, spinning a dark web of media manipulation, propaganda, and infiltration. Only the New Resistance recognizes the SA for what it really is: a racist theocracy hiding a cult of eugenics. Enter Rick Rickenharp, a former rock’n’roll cult hero: a rock classicist out of place in Europe’s underground club scene, populated by wiredancers and minimonos—but destined to play a Song Called Youth that will shake the world.

Also available as ebook or in print as part of A Song Called Youth, a complete omnibus of all three novels.

“Avid cyberpunk fans will appreciate this updated edition of a cutting-edge classic.”—Publishers Weekly

“Vivid, dense, powerful imagery...hard to put down!”—Washington Post

“A complex, bizarre, and unique vision of the near future, with a kaleidoscopic mix of politics, pop, and paranoia.” —Bruce Sterling

“John Shirley was cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier.”—William Gibson

“A Song Called Youth might very well be John Shirley’s signature production, still ringing with the clarion call of a bygone era.”—Asimov’s

“The 'Eclipse trilogy' by John Shirley is one of the finest examples of cyberpunk ‘war’ novels available. A mesmerizing dark future setting, coherent intrigue, heavy-duty warfare and lots of characters you care for...it will keep you awake at night.”—Transputer Qasar

Ebook Only

The guerilla war against the Second Alliance and its plans for a European apartheid intensifies in this second volume of John Shirley’s A Song Called Youth trilogy. From its beginning, thwarting the Second Alliance has been the first priority of the New Resistance; now the SA has decided it was time to return the favor, Resistance could not be allowed to interfere with the progress of the SA’s master plan. Eliminating the rebels will clear the way for Project Total Eclipse, which in turn would stretch the SA’s shadow over every remaining outpost of humanity—selecting scapegoats, directing violence, and creating an immutable new order. And the penumbra of the Eclipse would establish complete SA control over the Grid, the space colony and the survivors of the war . . . and also it to decide the fate of humanity.

Also available as ebook or in print as part of A Song Called Youth, a complete omnibus of all three novels.

“Avid cyberpunk fans will appreciate this updated edition of a cutting-edge classic.”—Publishers Weekly

“Vivid, dense, powerful imagery...hard to put down!”—Washington Post

“A complex, bizarre, and unique vision of the near future, with a kaleidoscopic mix of politics, pop, and paranoia.” —Bruce Sterling

“John Shirley was cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier.”—William Gibson

“A Song Called Youth might very well be John Shirley’s signature production, still ringing with the clarion call of a bygone era.”—Asimov’s

“The 'Eclipse trilogy' by John Shirley is one of the finest examples of cyberpunk ‘war’ novels available. A mesmerizing dark future setting, coherent intrigue, heavy-duty warfare and lots of characters you care for...it will keep you awake at night.”—Transputer Qasar

Ebook Only

The power of the Second Alliance has coalesced and terrorism institutionalized. New concentration camps bring the horrors of “Ethnic Cleansing” to a terrifying intensity. The SA stands poised to conquer the ruins of Europe with brutality. Media manipulation has become mind control—and mind control, an art. Secret treaties have been made in back rooms, on the Internet, and in hidden laboratories. Your only hope is the New Resistance. People like Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth; Claire Rimpler on the L5 colony, FirStep; Smoke, the damaged visionary; and Alouette, a precocious cyber-jacked little girl on the cutting edge on a strange new frontier of human collective-consciousness, the Entelechy. Ordinary people bound together by the truth and a single purpose: to keep the secret darkness from becoming humankind’s Total Eclipse—or die trying.

Also available as ebook or in print as part of A Song Called Youth, a complete omnibus of all three novels.

“Avid cyberpunk fans will appreciate this updated edition of a cutting-edge classic.”—Publishers Weekly

“Vivid, dense, powerful imagery...hard to put down!”—Washington Post

“A complex, bizarre, and unique vision of the near future, with a kaleidoscopic mix of politics, pop, and paranoia.” —Bruce Sterling

“John Shirley was cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier.”—William Gibson

“A Song Called Youth might very well be John Shirley’s signature production, still ringing with the clarion call of a bygone era.”—Asimov’s

“The 'Eclipse trilogy' by John Shirley is one of the finest examples of cyberpunk ‘war’ novels available. A mesmerizing dark future setting, coherent intrigue, heavy-duty warfare and lots of characters you care for...it will keep you awake at night.”—Transputer Qasar

An omnibus of all three novels, revised by the author, complete in one volume—Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona—of the prophetic, still frighteningly relevant cyberpunk masterpiece.

With a new introduction by Richard Kadrey and biographical notes by Bruce Sterling.

In a near-future dystopia, a limited nuclear strike has destroyed portions of Europe, bringing the remaining nation-cities under control of the Second Alliance, a frighteningly fundamentalist international security corporation with designs on world domination. The only defense against the Alliance’s creeping totalitarianism is the New Resistance, a polyglot team of rebels that includes Rick Rickenharp, a retro-rocker whose artistic and political sensibilities intertwine, and John Swenson, a mole who has infiltrated the Alliance. Vivid action and intrigue alternates between settings on Earth and the orbiting FirStep space colony. As the fight continues and years progress, so does the technology and brutality of the Alliance...but ordinary people like the damaged visionary Smoke, Claire Rimpler on FirStep, and Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth are bound together by the truth and a single purpose: to keep the darkness from becoming humankind’s Total Eclipse—or die trying.

“Avid cyberpunk fans will appreciate this updated edition of a cutting-edge classic.”—Publishers Weekly

“Vivid, dense, powerful imagery...hard to put down!”—Washington Post

“A complex, bizarre, and unique vision of the near future, with a kaleidoscopic mix of politics, pop, and paranoia.” —Bruce Sterling

“John Shirley was cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier.”—William Gibson

“A Song Called Youth might very well be John Shirley’s signature production, still ringing with the clarion call of a bygone era.”—Asimov’s

“The 'Eclipse trilogy' by John Shirley is one of the finest examples of cyberpunk ‘war’ novels available. A mesmerizing dark future setting, coherent intrigue, heavy-duty warfare and lots of characters you care for...it will keep you awake at night.”—Transputer Qasar

Also available in print format and

as individual ebooks of each novel:

A bewitching brew of stories sure to enchant.

Surrounded by the aura of magic, witches have captured our imaginations for millennia and fascinate us now more than ever. No longer confined to the image of a hexing old crone, witches can be kindly healers and protectors, tough modern urban heroines, holders of forbidden knowledge, sweetly domestic spellcasters, darkly domineering, sexy enchantresses, ancient sorceresses, modern Wiccans, empowered or persecuted, possessors of supernatural abilities that can be used for good or evil—or perhaps only perceived as such. Welcome to the world of witchery in many guises: wicked, wild, and wonderful. Includes two original, never-published stories.

Content (alphabetically by author):
“The Cold Blacksmith” by Elizabeth Bear
“The Ground Whereon She Stands” by Lean Bobet
“The Witch’s Headstone” by Neil Gaiman
“Lessons with Miss Gray” by Theodora Goss
“The Only Way to Fly” by Nancy Holder
“Basement Magic” by Ellen Klages
“Nightside” by Mercedes Lackey
“April in Paris” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Goosle” by Margo Lanagan
“Mirage and Magia” by Tanith Lee
“Poor Little Saturday” by Madeleine L’Engle
“Catskin” by Kelly Link
“Bloodlines” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“The Way Wind” by Andre Norton
“Skin Deep” by Richard Parks
“Ill Met in Ulthar” by T.A. Pratt (original)
“Marlboros & Magic” by Linda Robertson (original)
“Walpurgis Afternoon” by Delia Sherman
"The World Is Cruel, My Daughter" by Cory Skerry
“The Robbery” by Cynthia Ward
“Afterward” by Don Webb
“Magic Carpets” by Leslie What
“Boris Chernevsky’s Hands” by Jane Yolen

John Shirley Website
John Shirley Blog

A suspenseful, politically charged SF thriller . . . that could be day-after-tomorrow reality . . .

Twenty-year-old Russ arrives in the northern California town of Freedom to visit his dad. Freedom has peculiarities other than its odd name: the local mayor’s ideas of “decentralization” have left it without normal connections to state or federal government and minimal public services. Russ meets an interesting young woman, Pendra, but before he can get to know much about Freedom or its people, a savage tsunami strikes the West Coast. The wave of human brutality that soon hits the isolated town proves more dangerous to the survivors than the natural disaster. Russ, his father, Pendra, and the other townsfolk must tap all their courage and ingenuity—and find strength they never knew they had—if they have any hope of living to find real freedom.

Reviews:

In this slim, grim, and powerful novel, Shirley lets his imagination loose on the frightening possibilities of a massive natural disaster striking a small American town. A tidal wave transforms Freedom, Calif., from seaside idyll into a broken and perilously unstable landscape. Survivors include some natural helpers like Drew Haver and his son, Russ, as well as psychopaths Dickie Rockwell, a gang leader and drug dealer, and Lon Ferrara, the town’s ultralibertarian mayor, who privatized emergency services and now refuses help from FEMA. Treating women like commodities and wielding a plethora of weapons, these men fight for survival and ownership of the ruins. Shirley’s vision is vivid and horrifying... —Publishers Weekly

“One of our best and most singular writers. A powerhouse of ideas and imagery.”—New York Times best-selling author William Gibson

“John Shirley achieves things that other writers wouldn't dare attempt. Brilliant. The true quill.”—Bruce Sterling

“John Shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary tales to tell. I heartily recommend a journey with John Shirley at your side.”—Clive Barker

Award-winning author John Shirley is considered seminal in the SF cyberpunk movement and the “post-modern Poe” of dark fiction. He was co-screenwriter of the film The Crow, and has written other films and teleplays as well. As a musician, Shirley has written lyrics recorded by Blue Öyster Cult and others. His latest books are collection In Extremis: The Most Extreme Stories of John Shirley and the best-selling Bioshock: Rapture.

The award-winning writer of Tea With the Black Dragon and other acclaimed novels returns to fantasy with the intriguing story of Chinese-American artist Ewen Young who gains the ability to travel between the worlds of life and death. This unasked-for skill irrevocably changes his life—as does meeting Nez Perce veterinarian Dr. Susan Sundown and her remarkable dog, Resurrection. After defeating a threat to his own family, Ewen and Susan confront great evils—both supernatural and human—as life and death begin to flow dangerously close together.

" I love R.A. MacAvoy's books. Do yourself a favor and pick this up."—Charles de Lint

"For the brilliantly talented R. A. MacAvoy, no aspect of human life is beyond reach."—Orson Scott Card

About the Author: R.A. MacAvoy is the author of twelve novels. Her debut, Tea With the Black Dragon, won the John W. Campbell Award, the Locus Award for best first novel, and a Philip K. Dick Award special citation. It was also nominated for the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the Ditmar Award, and listed in David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she has been married for thirty-three years to Ronald Cain. They live in the Cascade Foothills of Washington State.

Reviews:
MacAvoy clearly still has the talent for the ingratiating characters and revealing detail that made her first novel so delightful; almost every chracter is handled with wit and grace...Death and Resurection turns out to be far less portentious adventure romance than its title implies...and almost inevitably more enjoyable...it's good to have her back.—Gary Wolfe, Locus

MacAvoy’s expansion of her 2009 novella “In Between” will please fans of her thoughtful hero Black Dragon, though new protagonist Ewen Young goes past philosophical to passive. Ewen, a Chinese Buddhist, just wants to be a painter and practice kung fu, but fate has other plans. He’s always had a touch of the spiritual, whether it’s an empathic bond with his twin sister or a psychic retreat he can share with others. When a brush with death kicks it up several notches, he ends up reluctantly guiding an investigation and a school as well as building a relationship with a strong-willed Native American vet and her body-hunting dog. Ewen’s (and MacAvoy’s) refusal to explore the origins of his powers takes the tone of the book further from most Western speculative fiction and toward magical realism or mysticism, which will delight some readers and irritate others.—Publishers Weekly

Death and Resurrection is the first novel by R.A. MacAvoy in quite a while, and although it is science fiction/fantasy, there is a romance subplot that becomes more rewarding as the novel proceeds, and I think that romance readers in general will be interested in MacAvoy’s work for its distinctive and likable characters.—Fresh Meat

Excerpt from Death and Resurrection:

Between one moment and the next Ewen was fully awake. He sat up, listening, peering around in the light of a new-risen moon, and the black dread came up in him. He disciplined it as he had before, but it welled up again. This time the object of fear was not in his mind.
It was outside.

He examined the darkness and now it was painted with the faces of bears and monsters. They were quite realistic, for—as he knew—they had been painted by his own imagination. His heart was pounding, and he felt a shred of fear that it might break open from the old scar of the summer, and out here there would be no medical science that could put it whole again. This thought, too, he disciplined.

Beside him Resurrection stood, stiff and lean, like the statue of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and her growl echoed through the cabin like the engine of a Harley.

Susan gasped, sat up and whispered, “I had a nightmare . . .” and then “Oh God. Oh shit! It’s here.”

The dog shot a deep amber glance at her human and her growl rose into a series of thunderous barks. She backed into Susan, straddling her.

“It’s fear,” shouted Ewen over the barks. “It’s only fear.”

“You goddamn well bet it’s fear!” Susan cried back and she was shaking. “That doesn’t mean it’s less dangerous!”

Ewen leaned over and touched her over her heart. “Step away from it,” he said, very slowly. “Let it move past you . . . I’ve been in situations like this before,” he added gently. Once, he added silently. And then it took a cop to haul me out of it.

Better not to tell her that part. Someone had to be cool and calm. Someone.

She looked at him, her face edged and delineated by the light of the moon, and she put her hands to her own breast, over his. Her shaking slowed. The voice of the dog, which had risen to a siren’s wail, also slowed, deepened, and again became a threatening roar.

Susan glanced at her dog and took an immensely deep breath. “You’re right. I gotta get over this. There’s something here and I can’t punk out this way now. Or ever. I’m the boss and it isn’t fair to Rez.”

Ewen almost grinned as she echoed his thoughts. She pushed his hand away from her and turned around in her bag, reaching beneath her for the cedar boughs. She pulled one free. “Here,” she said. “Rub this on yourself. Your hands. Your head.”

---

Ewen was busy: looking and listening. Feeling. But though he had no confidence in Susan’s own Indian magic, he saw that Susan needed something to do. In moments such as these, something to do made the difference between fight and panic. Ewen rubbed the soft needles into his hands and hair, and then wiped his aromatic hands over his face. It smelled good. Felt good. Not as good as a sharpened broadsword would feel in his hand, but good. He looked at Resurrection, who was now bounding repeatedly over them, from one side of the cabin to the other. Her eyes were shining, but she still growled.

Ewen wiggled out of his bag. He put his hand on the door latch. “I’m going to get out of here,” he said.

Susan’s eyes widened. “Out there? Bad idea! Ewen, that’s a very bad idea.”

“If something comes, I’ve got no room to meet it in here,” he answered, and he popped the door open and jumped out. What was actually in his mind was: It will follow me. It always follows men. It’s probably been following me since I went to the temple. I won’t lead it in here.

Outside it was very cold and crystals of ice sparkled on the dirt of the runway. The crackle of his own breath made Ewen strain for any other sound. He walked away from the plane, feeling his body heat sucked up by the night. Whatever it was, the cold was its ally.

Standing under the moon, Ewen did a breathing technique taught to him, not by his fighting uncle, but by Theo the pacifist. Tibetan snow-meditation. Heat-yoga. He raised the heat in his belly and sent it down his arms and legs. He felt it like a fire in his limbs. Hearth-fire. He looked about and waited.

The thing approached Ewen from behind, but when he leaped around, it was behind him still. This presence was not just fear: it was a lightless center that moved the air around it, and scraped over the ground. Ewen darted to a large tree and put his back against it. The thing spread slow fingers of itself around each side of the trunk, coming again from behind.

Across the runway stood another tree, its cascading branches reaching almost to the ground. It was a cedar. On an impulse, Ewen sprinted the width of the bare earth, slipping and sliding on the ice. He ducked under the spread of the tree, which was fragrant even in the frozen night.

It came straight for him and under the moonlight he could see it, though it tricked his eyes. It had a head of dissolution, of rotting death. It turned his guts to water and his stomach cramped.

The vision came into his mind of a drum made from a human skull Theo sometimes played. It had seemed a tasteless act to Ewen, once. But he remembered Theo saying to young Teddy, “It’s what we’re made of, son. We come and we go. It’s all okay.” Ewen visualized the rotting face as only a different form of the skull by Theo’s altar. A different form of his own face. The cramps in his stomach loosened. He moved a step away from the cedar trunk to see the thing better.

Behind him he heard Susan chanting something he did not recognize and the low howl of Rez. “Rub the cedar oil on your hands,” she called to him. “I’ve put magic in it.”

Susan’s Indian magic. Ewen felt a moment of pity for her and then remembered how pitiful his own story would seem to any number of people, had he been brave enough to share it. He hadn’t been brave enough, but now he rubbed his hands together. “Susan’s magic,” he growled with as much authority as he could muster.

And the thing moved away from him. For a moment he felt almost euphoric, but then he saw it was turning toward the airplane. This was not what he had intended, whether Susan’s magic surpassed his own or not.

The dog, howling, charged out of the plane to meet the heavy rotten thing. Wolf-like, she slashed with her teeth at the decayed flesh and her momentum carried her right into the blackness within it.

“Rez!” screamed Susan. She jumped from the plane and ran forward.

I am the boss she had said. And, It isn’t fair to Rez.

Ewen bellowed “No!” and he, too, ran from his place of safety. He saw the dog pitched out of the mass of darkness. Rez spun in the air and came down on the runway, skidding on the frozen ground. “No! No! It’s me you want!” he shouted. “I’m the holy man! I’m the man of power!” He was so frantic that he didn’t even hear himself shouting these absurdities. He ran and skidded, and came to the plane with legs spread to catch balance, sailing like a snowboarder over the ice.

Susan stood over the limp form of her dog, with only a cedar bough for weapon. She shook it in front of the encroaching shape of horror and she shouted, “You cannot come here! You cannot come!”

The thing turned its head back toward Ewen. “Throw me a branch,” he called to her. “Throw me a cedar branch. Magic it!” Without hesitation she reached back into the cabin and brought one out: a long and sturdy thing. She threw it at Ewen and the cedar bough made a lazy circle in the air toward him. She threw well.

The thing—the rotten monster—extended one heavy limb in a swipe at the spinning cedar. There were long, chunky claws at the end of its arm, if arm it was, but they did not reach the branch. Ewen grabbed it from the air and hefted it. This weapon was front-heavy, but then so was a broadsword. He tore a few of the lower twigs from it and strode toward the monster.

Which then took the shape of a bear—a bear not out of nature but straight out of Ewen’s worst imagination. It was much higher at the shoulder than Ewen’s head. It was black; it reeked and it roared.

Bear techniques, thought Ewen. I should have learned cedar broadsword against a monster bear. I missed that class.

It raised an arm the size of Ewen’s body and swiped its spiked claws at him. He leaped back and came down in a high-back stance, with his weight on his rear leg, and as the claws swept by him he lunged, sweeping down and to the right with his feathery weapon. The monster screamed. It reared up, so very, very high, and then struck with its other arm.

Now Ewen was no longer seeing the branch as a piece of rough wood and needles. He was seeing a Chinese broadsword, and he was very comfortable with a broadsword. He continued the sweep up, making a circle, and sliced into the other arm as it came at him. There was even a little red flag at the end of his broadsword. For some reason that gave him confidence.

The bear-thing stood like a man—a giant—a building—and it came down at him with all its terrible mass. Ewen bounced back, and found he was stopped by a heavy bough of his cedar tree stronghold and could go no further. The thing came down over him.

An image rose in his mind, and it was not one of broadsword work, or of martial arts at all. “Sam Gamgee!” he cried and flattened himself on the ground beneath the falling terror, his “broadsword” propped straight up beside him against the earth.

It was huge blackness and weight and fear, but the fear in it was not all his own fear. The shriek he heard was deep and deafening, and it was not from him at all.

Visit Jason Stoddard's Web Site

In the near future, Jere Gutierrez presents astounding “impressed reality” shows, and even in an outdated medium, draws million of viewers. His Neteno network is proof both old-fashioned linear stories and television can still be popular and profitable. But his “true in-the-moment” stories are really carefully orchestrated fabrications—and the public and his backers are catching on. Desperate for a story big enough to entrance the entire world, he teams up with a retired TV executive to create the ultimate reality show: a space mission to Mars, complete with corporate sponsors and competitors risking their lives for the ultimate prize of Winning Mars. But Jere has no idea just how captivating—and risky—his Winning Mars will be . . .

Reviews:
In a future where the art of “linear entertainment”—better known as TV shows—is giving way to interactive, massive multiuser online gaming (MMOs), producer Jere Gutierrez conceives of a “reality show” set on yet-to-be-colonized Mars. Eleven players, divided into teams that are each assigned a different goal, travel to the Red Planet to compete in a $50 million contest while the world watches on a five-minute time delay. The risk: a high probability of death. VERDICT Stoddard’s highly original story draws on the latest trends in reality TV and tension over U.S. vs. Chinese control of space travel. Powerful storytelling, a minimalist prose style that does not diminish the three-dimensional characters, and a keen ear for dialog add to this novel’s many pleasures.”—Library Journal, Starred Review, Debut of the Month

Excerpt:

Pitch

“Of course, someone is going to die. Probably lots of someones.”

Jere Gutierrez had heard a lot of stupid pitches, but most of them didn’t start so bluntly. He glanced at the old guy’s name and CV, scrolling in his eyeset: Evan McMaster. His last show: Extreme Losers.

“Death is a legal problem,” Jere said.

“For Neteno?”

“Neteno doesn’t do snuff.”

Evan gave him a thin smile. “What about the Philippines?”

“That was news.”

“How about the Three-Day Fever?”

Jere just looked at Evan, waiting for him to look away. Evan looked fifty, meaning he was probably at least seventy, scraping the last of the best med-tech before the docs threw up their hands and said, in fatalistic voices, We’re not miracle workers here!
While he waited, Jere skimmed his CV. Evan’s career started in the mythical hegemony of the 1970s, when television was God, and audiences sat rapt on their cheap sofas scarfing down microwave dinners, going to work the next day brimming with the warm commonality of experience. From staff writer for Five in a Room, he went on to produce a bunch of mindless crap to fill thirty-minute second-slots in the eighties and nineties. He’d been exec producer on one of the first reality shows, Endurance. From there, Evan’s work descended completely into the ghetto after the dawn of the internet era, and he’d done nothing past the aughties. The usergab on Extreme Losers pegged it a timewaster of the worst sort, a parade of physically unfit people put into situations where they were sure to kick it, except for some heroics at the end to save them. Most of the time.

Jere realized Evan was still looking at him.

“Make your pitch,” he said.

Evan just smiled, but said nothing.

“I’m amusing to you?”

“Not at all. I respect what you’ve done with Neteno.” Zero expression. Eyes like lead.

Jere turned to look through the window and out over the gray concrete expanse of Old Hollywood to the smog-brown west and the invisible Pacific. The view from Neteno’s office at the top of what had once been the Capitol Records building was always soothing. A reminder of how far he’d come.

“Are you going to pitch, or are you going to leave?”

“It’s a simple idea,” Evan said. “We resurrect the reality show. And we take it to Mars.”

Jere snapped back to look at Evan. To see if he was smiling, ha ha, good joke there. He wasn’t.

“Resurrect the reality show?”

“Yes.”

“And take it to . . . Mars? As in, the planet?”

“Yes. The planet.”

“For real? Not CGed?”

“For real.”

Jere stopped again. You gotta be fucking kidding me, he wanted to say. But . . . but it was a damn good idea. Except for the fact that it had to be colored all shades of expensive.

“I have data,” Evan said said, waving a tiny projector. “Can I show it?”

Jere nodded. “Lights down, screen down” he said. The window dimmed to twilight, and the room light ramped down, turning and blue as the screen descended.

There were brief flashes as the projector’s lasers found the screen, then garish graphics lit. WINNING MARS, it said, A Proposal for Neteno.

“First, let’s dispense with the death thing,” Evan said.

“Sponsors don’t like it.”

“Don’t lie. Sponsors love it. They just look properly horrified and give some insignificant percentage of their profits to the survivors and everyone’s happy. Your big problem is legal, and that can be surmounted.”

“And budget, I bet.”

Evan’s cocky expression wavered for a moment. He turned to the screen. “Let’s start with the reasons, first.”

Jere’s screen lit with colorful data, demographics, charts, multicolored peaks spiking like some impossible landscape. Standard 411, Inc. audience-inference data: size, engagement, propagation ability, monetization effectiveness. All stuff he’d seen before.

But this . . . this was wacky. Way out of proportion . . . Jere took a screengrab with his eyeset and blinked it out to 411 for verification. A message from one of their IAs shot back: Yes, this is ours.

Evan zoomed in on one of the datasets, labeled Political/Social factors. “First reason: the Chinese space program.”

“Didn’t the Chinese stop at the moon?”

“Yeah. But they said they’d go to Mars, and a whole lot of Chinese still want to go to Mars. And Koreans. And Japanese. And Americans.” Evan pointed out separate spikes on the chart, big, rabid, we-care-about-this-like-crazy spikes.

“Another reason is NASA. They’re gutted. After the Economic Rethink, everything’s de facto under Oversight. And if it ain’t promoting stability or leading to a shiny happy lower-consumption future, or helping someone get reelected, it’s a permanent deader. But there’s still an itch. People still want to see some great endeavor. Deep down, they dream about escape. It’s the Frontier Factor.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Henry Kase. Started on YouTube like you, but from the brainiac side. He’s been invited to the TED conference eight times, got a standing ovation from Zuckerberg at the last one. His algorithms found the guys planning that DC nuke. The Frontier Factor is his latest hobbyhorse.”

Jere’s eyeset barfed up lots of Kase video, but he blinked it away. “Go on.”

“Third reason, the Rabid Fan.”

Jere nodded. Everyone dreamed of creating a new Star Trek, still in syndication after all these years, or a new Simpsons, or a new Buffy. A show that made people dress up, go to conventions, meet in real life, invent languages, change dictionaries, and, most importantly, spend money in numerous ways.

“They’ll think this is too game show,” Jere said.

“Yeah. But they’ll watch. They’ll bitch, they’ll moan, but they’ll watch. All the trekkies and sci-fi nuts and people who dream about getting out, getting away, people who hate their lives for whatever reason, they’ll all watch. Look at the numbers.”

Data zoomed, showing tags of audience stickiness and inferred engagement, peaky and perfect and tantalizing. If they could create something like that . . . Jere sat silent for a long time, thinking, dreaming, imagining himself in control of a neverending, ever-licensing franchise.

Evan stole a glance at Jere, his eyes cool and calculating in the reflected laserlight.

Jere let him wait. Even though he was thinking about all the things he could do with a project like this. Selling ads was only the start. What would it be worth to have your logo on Mars? To have contestants drinking Starbucks and eating Marie Callenders? To have exclusive coverage of the tech? Reality advertising with the contestants?

Hell, how many trillions of impressions would they have for lead-up, and what kind of money could they make with user voting?

“Show me the budget,” Jere said.

Evan licked his lips, and his eyes stuttered sideways before fixing on Jere. “First, let me show you the vision.”

The screen switched to renderings of spacesuits with Nike logos, and something that looked like a big hamster wheel with a spacesuited person inside it, bouncing over the surface of Mars. The hamster wheel sported a Toyota logo. More data appeared: suggested sponsors, customized programs, and the like.

“I get the vision,” Jere said.

“The revenue possibilities—”

“I get that. The budget.”

“But I think we’ve found some additional opportunities—”

Jere just looked at Evan and waited. This time, Evan dropped his eyes. The slides flickered forward to black and white numbers, prettified by more renderings.

“We’re using Russian tech, the kind they’re using for the quarter million-dollar weeklong orbital packages. And we’re pushing it even farther, so we have some significant economies of scale—”

Jere laughed, long and hard.

“I don’t think you understand—”

“Oh, no,” Jere said. “I understand. I get it. I totally get it. And, you know what, I really like the idea. But that budget is bigger than the biggest of the massively multiplayer online games, and we’re stick down here in the linear narrative ghetto. Hell, that’s our topline for all of Neteno.”

“I think you’re missing out on the revenue opportunities, which counterbalance the investment.”

Jere glanced at the screen, expecting to see king-sized cost-per-impressions, exaggerated audiences, and sponsorship fees blown out of proportion.

But the numbers were solid. Evan hadn’t fudged. For a moment, Jere wondered: What if?

“It’s a show that could double the size of your network,” Evan said. “It could be your network.”

“Even if I said yes, our bankers would laugh us out of the room.”

“There are other ways of raising capital,” Evan said. “I would throw in personally.”

“How rich are you, Evan?”

Evan looked away. After a few moments, he turned off the projector.

“Lights up,” Jere said. The room brightened.

Evan turned to look at him, defeated. In that moment, he looked every bit of seventy, like something old and cold and prehistoric, dredged from the the La Brea tar pits. Evan didn’t wear animated clothing, didn’t have any visible tattoos, didn’t wear an eyeset. His jacket was black and boring and imperfectly tailored, as if it had been made by real, imperfect humans somewhere in the world, rather than grown to his shape. He wore a gray collarless shirt underneath, devoid of even a corporate logo. He even had a big clunky metal watch, one of those awful things that throbbed and ticked on your wrist like a bomb.

“I thought Neteno took chances,” Evan said.

“What?”

“I thought you still wanted to push the edge.”

Jere flushed, the hot stab of anger like a Buffy-stake in the heart. “We’ve pushed it.” Farther than you think, old man.

“I thought—”

“You’re not going to guilt me into this,” Jere said. “I told you how I feel. It’s a great idea. But the numbers don’t work.”

Evan opened his mouth as if to say something. Then he closed it. He put his little projector away, went to the door, and walked out without a word. He left it open as he slouched down the hall.

For a moment, Jere really felt sorry for him. It would’ve been a fun project.

But it just didn’t add up.