Award Eligibility 2018

written by David Steffen

It’s time for that January tradition, the Award Eligibility post for Diabolical Plots.

This has been a year of change, as we’ve been trying a new publishing strategy; instead of publishing stories only on the Diabolical Plots website, we’ve been shifting toward publishing them in ebook. Since there was a backlog of several years of stories already published, this resulted in three anthologies of stories that were first published on Diabolical Plots:

Diabolical Plots: The First Years in March 2018
Diabolical Plots: Year Three in June 2018
Diabolical Plots: Year Four in September 2018

Diabolical Plots: Year Four was particularly momentous, because it marked the point where the ebook publications have overtaken the website publications. And because of this change, as well as this being the first full calendar year with 2 stories per month, more DP stories are eligible than have ever been eligible before, because all of the stories that were scheduled on the site from January 2018 to March 2019 are eligible (January 2019 to March 2019 stories were all in Diabolical Plots: Year Four).

As ever, I’m not saying you should nominate these, but I do get questions about what is eligible, so here is a list of what is eligible, if nothing else it’s nice to look back at what was new this year.

Here are the stories, alphabetically by author, which are all eligible under the Short Story category (by Hugo or Nebula rules)

Short Story

“Brooklyn Fantasia” by Marcy Arlin

“The Fisher in the Yellow Afternoon” by Michael Anthony Ashley

“How Rigel Gained a Rabbi (Briefly)” by Benjamin Blattberg

“Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset” by Derrick Boden

“Soft Clay” by Seth Chambers

“Local Senior Celebrates Milestone” by Matthew Claxton

“Withholding Judgment Day” by Ryan Dull

“Medium Matters” by R.K. Duncan

“Artful Intelligence” by G.H. Finn

“The Divided Island” by Rhys Hughes

“The Hammer’s Prayer” by Benjamin C. Kinney

“For the Last Time, It’s Not a Ray Gun” by Anaea Lay

“The Memory Cookbook” by Aaron Fox-Lerner

“The Vegan Apocalypse: 50 Years Later” by Benjamin A. Friedman

“The Last Death” by Sahara Frost

“The Coal Remembers What It Was” by Paul R. Hardy

“The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Divining Colleagues’ Coming Misfortunes, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University” by Amanda Helms

“Glass in Frozen Time” by M.K. Hutchins

“What Monsters Prowl Above the Waves” by Jo Miles

“Still Life With Grave Juice” by Jim Moss

“9 Things the Mainstream Media Got Wrong About the Ansaj Incident” by Willem Myra

“Six Hundred Universes of Jenny Zars” by Wendy Nikel

“Heaven For Everyone” by Aimee Ogden

“Graduation in the Time of Yog-Sothoth” by James Van Pelt

“Pumpkin and Glass” by Sean R. Robinson

“Jesus and Dave” by Jennifer Lee Rossman

“The Man Whose Left Arm Was a Cat” by Jennifer Lee Rossman

“The Dictionary For Dreamers” by Cislyn Smith

“Crimson Hour” by Jesse Sprague

“Tank!” by John Wiswell

“Her February Face” by Christie Yant

Semiprozine

Diabolical Plots is eligible for the Hugo Award for the Best Semiprozine.

Editor, Short Form

I am eligible for the Hugo Award for the Best Editor, Short Form, for both Diabolical Plots and the Long List Anthology.

Other

Around this time of year people occasionally ask what The Long List Anthology and The Submission Grinder are eligible for, award-wise, since these lists are always Diabolical Plots short stories.

The answer is: not really any categories for the Hugo or Nebula, but possibly for other awards which I don’t keep up with as much.

The Long List Anthology is fiction, but by its nature it is entirely reprinted fiction from previous years, so all of the stories within it are already past their period of eligibility by Hugo and Nebula rules, and there are no categories for anthologies specifically.

The Submission Grinder is an online tool, which there isn’t a particularly suitable category for in the Hugo and Nebulas.

In both of these cases there might be categories in other awards, such as anthology categories in the Locus awards for the Long List Anthology, or categories in Preditors and Editors poll about writing tools.

If one felt very determined and maybe more than a little bit silly, I suppose one could nominate the Mighty Samurai cross-stitch photo series on the DP twitter account for Best Related Work.

DP FICTION #47A: “The Divided Island” by Rhys Hughes

On that island there are two kingdoms, equal in area, and both are distinct in character. The northern is a state of order and precision; the southern is a realm of chaos and indecision. Two borders with a narrow neutral strip between them mark the frontier. The northern is a wall of constant height that traverses the island in a perfectly straight line; the southern undulates randomly over the mountains and marshes.

There is no commerce between the nations, no diplomatic, cultural or academic exchange. The frontier is impassable; both regions are isolated and self-reliant. They receive foreign visitors rarely and discourage them with different methods; in the northern zone, by ignoring them until they leave; in the southern, by failing to protect them from violence. They are worlds unto themselves, reticent, exclusive.

Yet even divergent evolutionary paths can circumnavigate the sphere of possibilities and end up leading in the same direction. So finely tuned was the northern territory that no aspect of modern civilisation was absent from it and every facility enjoyed by the citizens of the most sophisticated outer countries was available to its denizens too. For example, it featured a zoo that was a public political experiment.

In this zoo was an enclosed area in which volunteers lived a life under the same conditions as the occupants of the southern zone. Law and order did not exist there; rules and regulations were made only to be violated as rapidly as possible. It was a capsule of chaos, a self-generated embassy of turmoil from the other extreme of the social spectrum, a stain on utopia, a logically necessary ugliness inside exactitude.

The rate of loss of volunteers was high, murder being the main reason, but there was no shortage of replacements. In such an ordered society, the zoo was the only opportunity for excitement and adventure. And it was in tune with the ideals of the kingdom, which was to manage everything in a competent and scientific manner, including brutality. A spot of anarchy in the lacquer of accuracy is part of that accuracy.

Unbeknown to the rulers of the northern state, the southern also had a zoo, but this had come about purely by accident. One day a man erected a fence haphazardly and the unplanned fence went in a ragged loop, joined up with itself and formed a compound. Inside this compound the random laws of chaos produced order, as they sometimes do. The order stabilised and persisted, another product of randomness.

Inside this compound people lived as citizens of the northern land did. They enjoyed security, reliability, equality. And so the two separate lands meshed at these points only, but not by design, only thematically. It was a wonderful illusion of mutual influence, and for years nothing occurred in either zoo to disrupt the situation on a grander scale. Both countries had a different system; and both had exemplary zoos.

Then logic played a trick, but whether that trick was mischievous and generous, or malignant and flamboyant, is still a matter for debate among those who ponder such topics. The zoos began a process without obvious end. The occupants of both demonstrated that the compounds really were authentic microcosms. An inevitable development, yet surprising to those who noted it, one that occurred simultaneously.

Thanks to the whims of chance, the volunteers in the chaotic northern zoo erected a fence that enclosed a smaller zoo in which order ruled. And those who lived in the disciplined southern zoo constructed a smaller zoo that contained a miniature state of chaos and flux. The next stage was for the residents of these smaller zoos to assemble even smaller zoos that had the opposite characteristics, and so on forever.

I suspect that you now believe the northern and southern kingdoms to be called Ying and Yang, but that would be too neat and allegorical. They have their own indigenous names that are hardly worthwhile giving here. I am one of the few foreigners to have visited both lands. My aircraft was in trouble; I bailed out. My parachute opened like the bloom of a pale sky flower with an aroma of fear, sweat and grime.

It was a cloudy day. I had lost my bearings. I was unclear whether my accident took place above the northern or southern half of the island. My landing was gentle and those on the ground completely ignored me. I was a stranger to be disdained. Unable to cope with this soul-eroding attitude, I tried to escape overland to the other kingdom; I did so and the physical integrity of my body was subsequently menaced.

It remains a mystery to me whether I landed in the northern kingdom and crossed to the southern, or whether I landed in the southern zoo and simply vacated the compound, or whether I landed in the northern realm and then entered the zoo there. Or perhaps my escape was from a smaller zoo to one even smaller. I lost count of the walls I scrambled over. At last I abandoned the attempt to establish my bearings.

Always the switch between law and chaos, stagnation and screams. It seems I am a necessary part of the equation. I have never left the island. I wander through geometries of harmony and confusion until I reach a wall over which I climb into a negative reality. I feel I am probing deeper into a labyrinth with the ultimate secret of human psychology at its centre, and not that I am merely lost in an extravagant conceit.

Author’s Note: My story ‘The Divided Island‘ was inspired by my love for the work of Italo Calvino. His fiction often consists of fantastical thought experiments in which a concept or situation is rigorously subjected to both linear and lateral logic. The results are usually original and amusing. This is a type of fiction I love to read and also try to write.

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He works as a tutor of mathematics. His first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995, and since that time he has published more than forty other books. His fiction is generally fantastical and whimsical. A lover of paradoxes, he incorporates them into his fiction as entertainingly as he can. His most recent book is a series of stories set in Africa called Mombasa Madrigal.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

GAME REVIEW: The Talos Principle

written by David Steffen

The Talos Principle is an FPS-style puzzle game with a philosophical science fictional storyline, developed by Croteam in December 2014.

The game begins as you, a new being, wake up into existence with the disembodied voice of a god-like being that known as Elohim. Elohim sets you on a series of puzzles in different segments of Elohim’s temples to prove your devotion, to earn yourself eternal life. As you go, you find messages left by previous pilgrims who have gone on the same quest before.

20160921223229_1 There are signs that this world is artificial (such as segments of wall fuzzing out, and that the messages from other pilgrims are in the form of QR codes). From time to time you find consoles that are supposed to be connected to the internet, but the net connection is down–you can still see fragments of locally stored files. You try to restore your internet access by working through the Milton Library Assistant which seems to be a little odd.

The puzzles in the game are focused on finding puzzle pieces that are locked behind barriers so that you have to make it past closed gates or hostile security elements (like mines or gatling guns).

An example of a couple of the items used in puzzle elements throughout the game that I thought were particularly interesting:

Disruptor: A tripod-based device that can be pointed at some other kind of device to disable it. This includes electronic gates, so that you can pass through, mines or guns so that you can pass by them without harm. It has its limitations, such as only being able to disrupt one device at a time, and can only actively disrupt something while the tripod is planted (so, for instance, you can’t carry a disruptor through a gate that is being held open by the disruptor, because picking up the disruptor turns it off). And you have to have a line of sight.
Connector: A tripod-based device that can transmit an energy beam from a source to an arbitrary number of receivers. These can be used to open certain kinds of gates or power other devices. And you have to have a line of sight.

As the game goes on, the main obstacle is the puzzles themselves, but a large part of the game is also the theological/philosophical side of the story. Elohim’s instructions discourage exploration, claiming he knows what’s best for you (he is your god after all, or claims to be). But does he know what’s best for you? What is going on in the outside world? When the Milton Library assistant tries to determine if you are human… are you human? Should you pass the test at all?

Visuals
Nothing particularly flashy by today’s standards. The look is relatively simple, but functional.

Audio
Quite liked the voice-acting, which mostly was two voices–the voice of Elohim speaking to you directly, and stored recordings from one of the researchers.

Challenge
It had what I would consider a reasonable level of challenge. Many of the puzzles I could solve with just a bit of experimentation. There were some major head-scratchers that took me quite a bit of time to work through, but I did solve every one without using a walkthrough, so that to me was a very satisfying level. Only a small portion of the game had a time limit, so you generally will have all the time you need to fiddle with all the elements of a puzzle to figure out how you want to approach it and to do some trial-and-error.

Story
Good story. Had a sort of golden age SF feel to it, while also having an interesting puzzle element that was sortof unrelated, and also having the conversational puzzles of dealing with the Milton Library Program.

Session Time
Mostly pretty short. The game auto-saves whenever you enter a puzzle area, solve a puzzle, or when you pass from certain areas, so you can shut the game off at any time without worrying about losing progress. The only exception is that some puzzles are complicated enough that it takes some time to set them up to be solved, and if you shut off in the midst of that you’ll lose your progress–and there’s a segment near the end of the game that you have to complete all at once, but that’s unusual.

Replayability
There’s certainly some replayability. There are collectible stars that you can find in certain puzzles if you explore beyond the strictly necessary areas. These stars can then be used to access locked areas of the game (I don’t actually know what’s in them, as I haven’t taken the time to go try to track all of them down, I tried for a bit but found it tedious since there’s no way to tell exactly where to look I spent a lot of time wandering and not accomplishing anything, which when you’ve only got small windows of playtime gets old fast.

Originality
Reasonably original. The set of items used to solve puzzles was an interesting set, especially the focusing crystals. What really made the game interesting though was as a whole, with the god-like figure of Elohim constantly pushing and prodding, and the Milton Library Assistant acting as a counterpoint to Elohim’s supposed wisdom.

Playtime
It took me about 20 hours according to Steam? I spent a disproportionate amount of time on a few puzzles, determined to solve them without help. And I spent some time looking for stars before giving up.

Overall
Enjoyable puzzle game which also has a branching conversation element in the talks with the Milton Library Assistant. Golden age SF feel to the main plot as you try to figure out what’s going on, how much you can trust various players in the system, and so on. For me it was the perfect level of challenge, enough so that it took some effort, but not so hard to be unsolvable.$40 on Steam.

GAME REVIEW: The Magic Circle

written by David Steffen

The Magic Circle is a first person puzzle/action game released by Question in July 2015.

Ishmael (Ish for short) Gilder is a celebrity in the gaming world, the designer of a wildly popular game twenty years ago, a text-based adventure. The fans have been pining for the first person fantasy sequel that Ish has been developing… for the last twenty years. Ish dithers over every little choice, never making firm decisions on anything, and so the game continues to linger in “development hell”. Not even so much as a color scheme, so the game in development is still in monochrome. He has become too emotionally attached to the game so that any actual game could never possibly live up to his expectations, and his ego has become so inflated he thinks of himself as the Starfather god figure from the fantasy world.

You are the protagonist of that game. But Ish is so indecisive, he won’t even allow the protagonist to have a weapon. So, you can’t possibly win an action fantasy game like that. Can you?

But soon you start to hear a voice that isn’t part of the game. A voice that is aware of Ish’s indecisive nature and the embarrassingly incomplete state of the game. And he knows how to help you. He knows where the cracks in the game are, to let you manipulate the environment to your advantage. You can harness energy from cracks in the program, and you can use that to generate glitches to trap enemy creatures. Once you’ve trapped a creature you can manipulate its attributes–its method of movement, its attack type, its passive attributes, its alliances. You can strip them away from one creature and attach them to another creature–make flying wolf, or a biting mushroom, or a flamethrowing rat.

20160527065246_1 The mysterious voice has a vendetta against the Sky Bastards, which is what he calls the programmers (because they manifest in the game as floating polygonal eyes with rotating wait logo for irises, and he wants to use you to get revenge against them.

The game is clearly broken in many ways and you can approach each obstacle from various approaches. You can make an army of creatures to follow you around everywhere, or you can make one creature your tank, or you can experiment with different attributes to find a different way.

As the game goes on, there are completely different kind of gameplay focuses in each one–but I don’t want to spoil the fun to work through them yourself.

Visuals
Fun graphics. Overly simple because much of the game is monochrome, (though that’s justified by story!). They did a good job making it look like a half-finished game. Besides the main fantasy quest game there is also some other segments of an unrelated game you end up, which has a fun but dated look.

Audio
Nice music, which is a nice plot element as well when it occasionally gets messed with because it’s not actually finished. The voice acting is really really good, especially Ish, who is constantly complaining about game design details, and you can find collectible dev audio notes.

Challenge
The challenge level is reasonable, and the game is flexible enough in strategy that you can adjust the difficulty by picking a different approach to the game.

Story
Fun metastory. The story of the game within the game is kindof all over the place, but of course that’s much of the entertainment. The “real world” story is consistently entertaining, and meshes with the in-game story as the real-world actions impact the game world.

Session Time
Mostly, very very short, because you can save at most any point during playtime, so it’s easy to put down. It… can be pretty slow to load, so might not be worth booting up if you know it’ll only be a few minutes of time to play. There are a couple of longer story sequences, which aren’t easy to escape out of, so if you happen to catch one of those at an inconvenient time, then it can be a little aggravating.

Playability
Easy to pick up. The only thing that took me a little bit of time to understand is that traits that you extract/give
Easy to get the controls down, challenging to master the game. The level of challenge escalates well as the game progresses.

Replayability
Definitely some potential for replayability, to get all the collectibles, to try to figure out a different approach to different obstacles.

Originality
Much originality! The FPS format is familiar, of course, but the metaformat where you’re in a game-in-development, where the slipshod state of the game is in itself an obstacle, where the point of the game is to get the game-in-the-game into some kind of releasable format, that all felt new.

Playtime
About 5 hours to finish according to Steam, on one straightforward playthrough. I didn’t take a lot of time to try to seek out every collectible, and there were some areas and abilities that I didn’t fully explore (i.e. the groupthink ability).

Overall
Fun metastory for a game, fun play, nice and flexible gameplay, great humor element as the creator continually sabotages his own creation, and a good human story too as the various real-life people act against each other. A lot of fun, well worth a playthrough. $20 on Steam.

TV REVIEW: Twin Peaks (2017 Revival)

written by David Steffen

The original Twin Peaks was a murder mystery created David Lynch and Mark Frost, which premiered in 1990, and ran for two seasons. The story began with the discovery of the corpse of the homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). As the town grieves the loss of one of their own, FBI special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachland) arrives to investigate the murder. Charmed by the small town atmosphere, Agent Cooper works with the sheriff Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) to uncover clues to the mystery. What seems at first an ordinary murder (although unusual in this smaller town), uncovers more strange details and soon everything they think they know is called into question. Even though the main plot of the show was pretty dark, there were plenty of moments of levity, fun moments between characters, intentional awkward pauses. The show has a large ensemble cast who all play a major role at times, many more than would be worth bringing up in a review of this length. The show is well worth a watch, though you might want to keep in mind that it gets weirder as it goes on, to the point where some of the weirdness is just confusing rather than compelling, and if you are expecting the confusing parts to make sense later, they often don’t.

If you are thinking about watching the original series, you might want to stop here, because you can’t discuss the least part of the revival without spoiling some of the most major events from the original.

The original series, which as a whole I would describe as hopeful, especially in regards to the protagonist Dale Cooper, takes a very dark ending. Cooper visits the Black Lodge, a dark and mythical place with figures who speak strangely seeming to spend all their time in red-curtained rooms. He is warned that he might meet his doppelganger there, and if he does, he must face the doppelganger head on, or else the doppelganger will steal his body. In the moment of truth, Cooper flees, and the doppelganger does exactly that, and Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge while the doppelganger returns to our world in Cooper’s body, and carrying the murderous spirit Bob along with him. The original show ended with Cooper’s doppelganger smashing his own head into a mirror and laughing at the reflection.

One of the first weird things that happened in the original was a strange and vivid dream Cooper has about what he will later find out is the Black Lodge. In the dream, it is 25 years in the future, and he is talking to Sarah Palmer. It’s interesting that the original show set it up that way, and that they timed the revival to air 25 years later, and so they recreate this scene as part of the new show. Cooper is still trapped in the Black Lodge, and his doppelganger has been committing terrible crimes in his body, off the grid. Cooper soon finds a way to leave the lodge, and tries to reclaim his body in our world, but he is soon sent off on a confusing and surreal journey.

The most appealing part of watching the revival is to see all the old characters, see how they’ve aged (much of the cast of the original were high schoolers, so they’re in their early 40s for the revival), see what jobs and circumstances the characters find them in. We get to see Cooper in multiple personas, it is super weird to see him as the surly grizzled doppelganger when we’re used to him being clean cut and chipper all the time.

But overall the revival is… confusing. David Lynch loves the confusing. And not confusing in a mystery novel kind of way, where it all comes together at the end, rather the opposite, it all makes less sense as the series goes on. Entire episodes occurred where I literally had no idea what happened, with long silent stretches (or worse, ear-wrenching terrible noises that were super fun especially with a kid sleeping in the next room). Cooper’s travels through the Black Lodge in particular are whole episodes of nothing but the surreal, with no clear idea where he’s going or what the rules are or anything.

Overall, I thought it was a disappointment, but it was fun to see the old characters again. I just wish it was a more coherent story to go with it.

MOVIE REVIEW: Smallfoot

written by David Steffen

Smallfoot is a 2018 computer-animated musical adventure children’s film about a town of yetis living in high mountains above the clouds, oblivious of the human world until plane crashes and a young yeti, Migo (Channing Tatum) sees a smallfoot (their name for humans). Everything about the yetis’ lives is defined by the laws written on ancient stones worn by their leader the Stonekeeper (Common). Migo is the son of Dorgle the gong-ringer (Danny DeVito) who rings the gong every morning to make the sun rise. Every day is spent with daily labors that don’t have a clear purpose but are prescribed by the stones. Migo and his young friends, including Meechee the Stonekeeper’s daughter (Zendaya), Gwangi (LeBron James), Kolka (Gina Rodriguez), and Fleem (Ely Henry) question the wisdom of the stones.

The pilot who survived the plane crash escapes and tells the humans down below about what he saw and unethical documentary filmmaker Percy Patterson (James Corden) decides to stage a hoax video with his assistant dressed in a yeti costume when he accidentally runs into Migo. Migo and his friends interact with Percy, trying to exchange information about their worlds, when they realize that they need to return Percy to the human world or he will freeze to death in the mountains.

This was a fun kid’s movie, with some catchy musical number, especially “Let It Lie” by Common in a very memorable reveal. Great cast, though the plot overall is a little predictable for an adult, there’s a lot of fun stuff in it for kids.

DP FICTION #46B: “For the Last Time, It’s Not a Ray Gun” by Anaea Lay

Connor was shy, introverted and a thousand other things that made sitting there, at the tiny coffee shop table, torturous. He didn’t want to be tortured. He wanted to hear harp music and cherubs giggling and all the other noises that accompanied your first date with your soul mate. It had taken him weeks to screw up the courage to ask Kayla out for coffee. As far as he was concerned, glitter should ooze from the walls in a poltergeist-style reward for the brazen bravery he’d demonstrated.

Meanwhile, Kayla pretty clearly didn’t realize this was supposed to be a date.

She wasn’t being weird or anything. And Connor wasn’t sure what she ought to be doing instead. But she wasn’t nervous or awkward or in any way different from how she was when they hung out with Debra and Joe and the rest. This was basically the same as hanging out in Kayla’s workshop for their hack-a-thon sessions, except the coffee was better, nobody else was around, and Connor felt entitled to glitter ooze.

Kayla was in the middle of a lengthy monologue about the various activities going on in her workshop. “Joey was pretty adamant about getting the beta testing approved by the IRB but we managed to talk him out of it before he actually filed any paperwork. Can you imagine, just telling the government what you’re planning like that? Ruins all the fun of making them figure it out for themselves.”

Connor was so nervous and uncomfortable that he couldn’t process any of the things Kayla was saying. He cared about what she wanted to talk about a lot. He just couldn’t get past the absence of cherubs and harp music. So he was completely astonished when she stopped. She glared at the table next to them, then rifled through her bag. A moment later she retrieved a silver and black object covered in wires.

“Uhm, Kayla?” Connor said, finding his voice for the first time since he’d ordered his coffee.

“Mm,” she said, her eyes steadily fixed in a death glare on their neighbor.

“Why do you have a ray gun?”

The neighbor was a petite girl with curly hair trimmed in an asymmetrical bob and thick eyeliner. The eyeliner covered her face in wavery trails, distributed by the tears she was actively shedding.

“It’s not a ray gun,” Kayla said without breaking her gaze.

Connor might be nervous, and he might be overwhelmed, but he damn well knew a ray gun when he saw one and that was a ray gun. But this was their first date and, even if Kayla didn’t know it, and he wasn’t about to pick a fight in the middle of it. “Please don’t shoot that girl in public.”

“If she wanted to be shot in private, she should have kept her crying fest there.” Kayla pointed the ray gun at their tearful neighbor.

Connor wanted to check the return policy on this date. Did dates come with return policies? Maybe there was some sort of insurance you could buy for first dates, like you did with airline tickets.

She pulled the trigger. Connor was blinded by a sizzling white beam emitted by the metal tip of the not-a-ray-gun. The light hit their neighbor who gave a startled yelp.

The light faded, and the weeping girl was gone, replaced by a dapper man with a cravat and a monocle. The man folded his hands on the table and looked around the coffee shop. Then, his voice low, breathy, and thick with the Queen’s English, uttered two words that would come to haunt Connor. “I say.”

***

If there was a gold standard for good at people, Connor was the opposite of it. Talking to people was just about the most terrifying thing in the whole world, even scarier than those raptors from Jurassic Park. If he started a conversation with people, they might expect him to know something about popular music, or sports, or lutefisk. Worse, they might want him to talk about himself.

But Connor didn’t want to die friendless and alone. He didn’t even want to hit middle age that way. He was useless in a conversation, but he was good at listening, and he liked to tinker and to collect things. So he decided to start tinkering with social groups and to collect interesting people.

Kayla wasn’t the crown jewel of his collection. That would be Debra, who took up new hobbies and advanced to the cutting edge with the same ease other people deployed in changing their socks. But Kayla was funny and had quirky interests and never seemed bothered by Connor’s shyness. On the contrary, she tended to praise his reserve. Other people seemed to like Connor with an asterisk. “He’s great when you finally get to know him.” “Once he opens up he’s pretty cool.” Kayla liked him without wanting him to talk or expecting him to crack a joke. It put him at ease, which ironically made it easier to open up, but it was also a relief. He hadn’t realized how much he wanted other people to let him be shy and scared until he had it.

Which might be how he missed the early clues that Kayla was completely unhinged.

***

Sitting at a small table in a coffee shop, deprived of spontaneously manifesting symbols of compatibility and romance, Connor stared at the Englishman née crying girl. It was possible he was facing something more frightening than conversation about lutefisk.

“Kayla?” Connor asked. He didn’t take his eyes from the Englishman. Maybe, if he kept watching, the Englishman would disappear and the crying girl would be there, still crying, and Connor wouldn’t have to face this.

“Yes, Connor?”

“Did you just shoot somebody with your ray gun?”

“I already told you, it’s not a ray gun.”

“What is it?” Connor was blinking hard. He’d just now realized that the mug of coffee the girl had been drinking transformed, too. It was a delicate china cup, white and blue. The Englishman took a dainty sip.

“The Social Propriety Enforcer Mock 1. I call it SPEM.”

Connor silently repeated the name to himself. “Is the effect…permanent?”

Kayla patted the side of the gun. The gesture was distressingly similar to what you might perform on a terrier or toddler. “Yup. I’ve been waiting to test it for days. Isn’t this great?”

This was worse than Kayla not realizing they were on a date. Somehow, Connor tried to connect with his soul mate and instead he’d become an accessory to some sort of demented homicide.

Or was it homicide?

“Excuse me, sir,” Connor said, his fear of talking to strangers momentarily outmatched by sheer bewilderment.

The Englishman’s posture was perfect. He settled his cup on the table. “Yes?”

“How long have you been sitting at that table?”

He tilted his head thoughtfully, then reached a finely manicured hand into his morning coat and retrieved a pocket watch. “It must be the better part of an hour,” he said, tucking the watch back in place.

Just as long as the crying girl had been there. Not murder, then. Kidnapping? Assault? Was there even a name for the crime of turning random strangers into Englishmen?

“Does it always have the same effect?” Connor asked. Maybe that girl had been crying because deep down inside, she desperately wanted to be a dapper Englishman, and the Social Propriety Enforcer Mock 1 operated by granting wishes.

“Don’t be silly. Of course not,” Kayla said, to Connor’s great relief. If it was a wish granting gun, then this was great. His first date with Kayla was salvaged. Heck, she could shoot him and then they’d get those cherubs he was still waiting on.

His hopes were utterly dashed with her next comment. “English people aren’t a monolith.”

***

Connor knew when he needed advice. Having an awkward first date with a girl you really liked, when she didn’t even know it was a date, was definitely a situation for which he was not at all qualified. The right thing to do would be to go to the most competent person he knew and see what they said. But Debra was a little intimidating. Instead, Connor went to Joey.

Joey was a knitter/weaver/soapmaker/blacksmith extraordinaire. Connor met him three years before at a maker fair where Joey was giving a presentation that heavily implied that to be a real knitter, you needed your own herd of specially bred sheep that you sheared yourself. With shears you had, of course, forged on your own. It was unclear whether you should also mine and refine your own ore.

Connor didn’t have any interest in sheep, but he collected interesting people, and in addition to his maker talents, Joey could karaoke to Lady Gaga like nobody’s business. Connor acquired him.

So Connor screwed up his courage, lured Joey out for drinks, then explained his dilemma. He went into fairly extensive detail, for Connor. It took him three sentences.

Joey was knitting when he wasn’t actively pouring beer into his mouth. It was unclear what Joey was knitting. “You mean you have no chemistry?”

Connor cursed himself. He’d spent too much time lamenting the absence of glitter ooze. “No, that’s not it.” How to correct his mistake? “She didn’t realize it was a date.”

Joey nodded. “You said that. But I think maybe she did. It sounds like there was no chemistry, so she was letting you down easy.”

Connor tried again. “She turned a stranger into an Englishman.”

“Were they crying?”

“Yes.”

Joey shrugged. “That’s sorta Kayla’s thing, isn’t it?” He had a point.

To hear Kayla tell it, she was locked in an adversarial relationship with the universe. She, a natural born super villain, had endured a lifetime of petty torments at the hands of unseen cosmic forces. Prominent stoplights along her frequent routes would linger on red just to slow her down. Her favorite TV shows were always canceled after half a season. She moved to Seattle for its cool, rainy weather, and the entire Pacific Northwest immediately became warm and sunny. Also, wherever she went, people cried in public.

“In Seattle, instead of shaking hands, people share their sexual histories and sad childhoods,” she’d lamented during one of the hack-a-thon sessions. “Don’t people know that’s unhealthy?”

Pointing out details like, those red lights have always been slow, Fox cancels anything good, and global warming has been around since before you were born, did nothing to budge her conviction of persecution. She took a weird sort of pride in her war. It was charming.

“What do I do?” Connor asked.

Joey’s knitting needles clacked madly as he worked. Was it possible to knit a sheep? It looked like Joey was knitting a sheep. “Ask her out again?”

***

Their second date was just as lacking in tangible manifestations of romance as their first. This time, Connor expected that, so that was okay. Kayla still didn’t show any signs of knowing it was a date. That was less okay. Twice she pulled out SPEM and transformed a bawling bystander into an unobtrusive Englishman.

“Did you put ‘pew pew’ stickers on your ray gun?” Connor asked the second time.

“It’s not a ray gun,” Kayla said. “And yes. I did.”

Yup. This was definitely love.

***

There are ethical problems to consider when dating somebody who doesn’t know you’re dating them. The first time, it’s an honest mistake. The second time, it’s bad communication. After that?

After that, you decide that you don’t care whether it’s a date or not. You divorce yourself from the idea of dating. You’re just having one-on-one hangouts with the girl who happens to be your soul mate, and while yes, you should probably mention your discovery of your cosmic entanglement to her, particularly given her already fraught relationship with the universe, maybe the whole world should remember that you are terrified of conversation, especially about yourself, and cut you a little slack and oh holy hell there are Englishmen everywhere.

No really.

Everywhere.

When Connor catches the bus to work, the driver is an Englishman. So are half the passengers.

Mailman? Englishman. Amazon Prime bike delivery guy? Englishman. Barrista? Who are we kidding? The entire coffee shop is English. They’ve started serving crumpets. Connor doesn’t know what a crumpet is. The homeless people living in Cal Anderson park all wear tweed and play cricket.

“I think I would like it if Englishmen took over the world,” Kayla said on their sixth date.

“They did that once,” Connor pointed out. “We call it colonialism.”

“Sounds like fun. Let’s start with Portland.”

“You did get the memo that colonialism is bad, right?”

Kayla rolled her eyes. “Duh. I didn’t mean we should all fall under the Queen’s rule. I mean everybody should adopt the English reserve. Their ability to repress emotions and cope with everything by drinking tea. It’s so healthy.”

“Healthy?”

“Mm-hmm,” Kayla said, sipping from her coffee. “It’s important to keep your feelings inside. If you let them out, you become structurally unsound and run a high risk of deflating. That’s why everybody in Seattle is depressed.”

That didn’t sound right to Connor. “I thought it was the rain.”

Kayla leaned back in her chair, then raised her arms. “What rain? The weather hasn’t been right since I moved here.”

She was definitely wrong about the weather changing to thwart her. But she had a point. The last two years had set records for sunshine and warmth.

***

Is it still creepy to date somebody who doesn’t know you’re dating when you are sincerely concerned that, if you try to have a conversation about how you feel, you’ll horribly embarrass yourself and ruin everything? What about if there’s a real risk that she’ll turn you into an Englishman?

***

Connor and Joe were supposed to have a planning session for the hack-a-thon, but Joe was late. Being late is a classic practice for west coasters in general. Flaking out and canceling is a specialty of the Pacific Northwest. But Joe was usually pretty good about hack-a-thon related things. Connor gave him twenty minutes, then called.

“Joe?” he asked when the call connected.

“Speaking.”

“Are you coming to the meeting? It’s getting late.”

“Goodness gracious, what are you nattering on about?” Joe asked.

Connor dropped his phone. Then he looked around the coffee shop. There were no mugs. Instead, everybody was drinking from porcelain tea cups with saucers. The tables were covered in doilies. Every single other patron in the coffee shop was wearing either wool or tweed and there were an alarming number of ascots on display. Connor, in his blue jeans and T-shirt, was the only non-Englishman in sight.

He scooped up his phone and fled into the street. Without thinking, he ran to Kayla’s, weaving through Englishmen out and about in the course of their day. As far as he could tell, everybody in Seattle had been transformed into an Englishman. He ran faster. He had to reach Kayla before she packed up her ray gun and went to Portland.

“I say!” somebody protested when Connor pushed them aside to cross an intersection.

“Pish tosh!” another exclaimed when he accidentally bumped into them.

“I’m pretty sure English people don’t actually say that,” Connor shouted over his shoulder has he ran on.

Finally, he reached Kayla’s door. Sweaty, chest heaving, gasping for breath, he rang her doorbell. She opened the door almost immediately.

The ray gun was in her hand.

She had to be stopped. Somehow, Connor was going to have to talk some sense into her. It just wasn’t okay to go around transforming people because you didn’t like the way they behaved in public. He took a deep breath, preparing the words he was going to say. What came out was, “I think we’ve been dating for three months.”

Kayla frowned at him, the gun held close to her body. “Three and a half.”

“What?”

“Our first date was that time we caught the bus together to go to Debra’s. When that weird guy started ranting at you about lutefisk. I figured that was the end of it, but you were so discombobulated, you asked me out for coffee.”

The whole world spun away from Connor. He’d completely blocked out the memory of that bus ride. Had there been glitter or cherubs then? He’d never know. “You didn’t turn a crying girl into an Englishman on our first date?”

“God, no,” Kayla said. “You can’t do things like that on a first date.”

She was right. Waiting until the second date to assault strangers with a ray gun changed everything. And, Connor realized, he wasn’t a giant creep after all! They’d both known they were dating the whole time. He just hadn’t known they’d known. “I think I’m in love with you.” The words poured out of him in a rush, relief masquerading as courage.

Kayla’s whole frame slumped. “Aw, Connor. What’d you have to go and do that for?” She raised the ray gun. An intense white light enveloped him.

He had a desperate hankering for a good pot of tea.

Author’s Note: This is the real life, completely true story of how I moved to Seattle, discovered some charming cultural quirks, and helped fix them. Everyone in Seattle is now very stoic, if not happy, and nobody drinks coffee anymore. You’re welcome.

Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, IL, where she engages in a torrid love affair with the city. She’s the fiction podcast editor for Strange Horizons, where you can hear her read a new short story nearly every week, and the president of the Dream Foundry, where she gets up to no good. Her fiction work has appeared in a variety of venues including Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Pod Castle. Her interactive game about running a railroad and finding love, Gilded Rails, is forthcoming from Choice of Games. She lives online at anaealay.comwhere you can find a complete biography and her blog. Follow her on Twitter @anaealay.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

written by David Steffen

Hotel Transylvania 3 is a 2018 computer-animated children’s comedy produced by Sony. The legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler) is running a successful hotel for monsters in Transylvania with his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and her husband Johnny (Andy Samberg), but he is feeling lonely and depressed that he hasn’t found new love since the death of his wife, although he believes in soulmates so feels that he has already met his one true love (which he describes as “Zing”). Mavis senses his mood, but attributing it to overwork, decides to plan a family vacation, taking a monsters-only cruise. But on the cruise he gets the “Zing” when he meets the ship’s captain Ericka and with this newfound interest, he tries to woo her, not knowing that she is a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing, who had been his nemesis long before, and that she has planned this cruise as a way to trap him and his other monster-kind.

If you liked the previous two movies, you’ll probably like this one too; it’s very much cut of the same cloth, with much of the on-screen time being with the supporting cast of monsters like Murray the mummy (Keegan-Michael Key) and the werewolf couple (Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon) and the invisible man (David Spade).

But, compared to the other two, I thought this one was a marked improvement in having a central plot that wasn’t one protagonist deceiving his daughter into staying home forever like the first movie, or obsessing over whether his human/vampire grandson is “too human”. There is an antagonist and the plot of the movie couldn’t be resolved by simply not being a giant narcissistic jerk.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania 2

written by David Steffen

Hotel Transylvania 2 is a 2015 computer-animated children’s comedy produced by Sony. The Legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler) runs a hotel in Transylvania with help from his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and her human boyfriend Jonathan (Andy Samberg). Mavis and Jonathan get married and have a baby they name Dennis (Asher Blinkoff) who is adorable and lovable and apparently very very human to Dracula’s chagrin, because he thinks that his vampiric blood is very strong and will make any of his descendants very vampiric as well. The common knowledge is that vampire kids have to show their fangs for the first time by the time they turn five or they will never show them at all, so Dracula is determined to show Dennis the vampire life and make the fangs show.

If you liked the first movie, it’s very much more of the same, same ensemble cast in general, plus a new red-curly-haired maybe-vampire baby added to the mix.

The first movie was almost entirely based around Dracula trying to build a framework of lies to keep his daughter from being interested in the outside world. This one is very similar in premise in that it’s based around Dracula pretending he doesn’t care about Dennis being “too human” for him and trying to force him to show vampire nature in ever-escalating ways that, if he were entirely human, would be child endangerment in a major way. While the kid was cute, and it was good to see the relationship between Mavis and Jonathan stay pretty solid with a new member of the family in the mix, I found the central premise frustrating rather than funny. Dracula is SO controlling, and where Mavis doesn’t let him get away with it forthright he just sneaks around behind her back and endangers her child in private instead. And despite claiming that he is okay with Jonathan, his utter fixation on making sure the kid is a vampire shows his underlying prejudices (I’m not saying his prejudices are entirely unbased, since humans did kill his wife, but he should have learned by now that those humans were not representative of the whole human race), and pretty much the entire plot of the movie is based on those underlying prejudices, it’s hard to take that as a comedy premise.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania

written by David Steffen

Hotel Transylvania is a 2012 computer-animated children’s comedy by Columbia Pictures. The legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler), after the death of his wife at the hands of humans, raises his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) as a single parent. Frightened of violent and unpredictable humanity, he has made a life for them by founding a five-star hotel in Transylvania just for monsters, and telling Mavis constant horror stories about the human world so she won’t to go. But it’s her 118th birthday now, which means she can make her own decisions and for some reason she still wants to go out into the world. To make matters worse, a human named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) somehow finds his way to the hotel and is not scared away by the monsters, and Jonathan and Mavis hit it off.

It’s a fun idea, and since there’s been three movies to date and a cartoon TV show, clearly the kids especially like it. There are some funny bits, particular from Jonathan as he is an oddball human to have made it so far into Transylvania without being scared off. The ensemble cast (Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, CeeLo Green, David Spade, Fran Drescher, among others)

Adam Sandler isn’t super Adam Sandler-ish in this one, so if you tend to hate Adam Sandler movies as much as I do (some notable exceptions exist), I didn’t get that vibe about it. But the main plot of the movie is based around a fragile scaffolding of transparent lies that Dracula has been building for a century–it was pretty clear it was going to crumble at the slightest touch and then most of the basis for Dracula’s relationship with his daughter would be revealed to be completely fabricated and so the relationship between the two most important characters in the movie would be almost entirely built of lies while her father tries to intimidate and force Jonathan out of the hotel so that she can’t get to know him. Especially since Mavis is an adult even by vampire reckoning at this point, this level of interference in her life was more annoying than endearing, and I thought she was remarkably chill about her dad being revealed to have been running a long-term con on his own daughter instead of trusting her.