As always, feedback, comments, criticism, and requests for things you’d like to see in future E&A stories are appreciated. Happy reading.

Why am I releasing 2 chapters?

Well, because I promised to finish up the current story, “Hybrid” this week but the final installment came out too long for one chapter. So I’ve taken a page out of Tarantino’s book and gone Kill Bill on it. The first half was released yesterday and the second will come on Friday or Saturday.

Wait – Empire and Animal? Hybrid? I’m confused.

Here’s how I’m doing this. I am releasing a serialized book called “Empire and Animal”. That means that chapters come out one at a time, somewhere between monthly and weekly. I had some hiccups when I got started but I’m now aiming for as close to weekly releases as I can get.

Now the other format I’m trying for this book is episodic. It’s not one single narrative beginning to end like a standard novel. Instead it’s a collection of stories in a single world taking place within the same rough time frame. If you’ve ever read the old Thieves’ World books or any of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser collections you’ll have an idea what I mean. So far E&A has included the stories “Salatis and The Dog” (Chapter 1), “The Turn of a Coin” (Chapters 2&3) and now “Hybrid” (Chapters 4-8).

Note: I’m noting planning to double the length of each subsequent story. It just happened that way with these first three. So I hope that clears things up about how E&A works. Please stop by and give it a read, and don’t forget to +vote for every chapter! If you’re confused about how JukePop itself works stop by tomorrow – I’m going to write up an explanation of that too.

For now I say:

1. Find Empire and Animal here: http://www.jukepopserials.com/home/read/91
2. Check out this word cloud for the final 2 parts of “Hybrid” (click for larger):

In the case of Lauren Beukes my answer is an unqualified, absolute, as-soon-as-possible-please, YES!

So…ya, Zoo City? I liked it.

The story’s protagonist is Zinzi December, a former journalist turned finder of lost things and writer of email scams. The book sports a good-sized cast of supporting characters, but at the end of the day this is Zinzi’s story. Actually, that doesn’t feel quite accurate. Zoo City provides a window through which we can catch part of Zinzi’s story. Like any “animalled” person she’s carrying around a lot of baggage and history. Many things have already happened in her life before we join in on page 1.

Oh, “animalled”? What’s that you ask?

Sorry, I should probably explain. In the world of Zoo City (and I do mean the whole world, all over Earth – not just the slums of Johannesburg actually called Zoo City) people who carry a certain level of guilt or criminal culpability gain a mashavi, a sort of spiritual companion, which takes the form of an animal. Zinzi’s is a sloth. The mashavi brings the animalled person the benefit of a mystical/psychic power. Zinzi’s is the ability to see connections between people and the things they’ve lost. Being animalled also brings with it a host of problems, social and mystical. Chief amongst these is the fact that if the animal dies the Undertow, a mysterious, shadowy force will show up to do away with the repeat offender. In the world of Zoo City it’s two strikes and you’re out.

Now, as I was saying, this is Zinzi’s story and while I’m going to try to get through this review without dropping any spoilers I want to stress that you should avoid forgetting that fact when you read Zoo City. For awhile I did forget that, and at certain points in the story I became a bit frustrated because I let myself assume I was reading a story I wasn’t actually reading.

Zoo city has elements of a crime thriller to it, but it’s not about a criminal conspiracy.The setting has an unexplained magical phenomenon that first showed up in the world relatively recently, but the story is not about explaining it or fighting it. There are many interesting characters with their own stories, tragedies and dreams, but Zoo City isn’t about any of them. Zinzi has a magical power, but the story really isn’t about her use of it at all.

No, Zoo City is about Zinzi. It’s about the place she’s found herself in and where she might go next. It’s about her choices, her guilt, and her place in the world. Keep that in mind and I think you’ll find a lot to enjoy about it.

For my money, I’ll be surprised if I read a more memorable book this year. I’m frankly worried that I’ve started this reading challenge on such a high note that I’ll be comparing the other books I read to it and find them wanting. Perhaps that’s silly, I don’t know. I just know I loved this book. I loved that it made me reassess what “Urban Fantasy” could be. I loved the fascinating world Lauren Beukes created, and I loved that said fascinating world was there to serve the story, and not the other way around.

Now I just wish I could figure out a way to keep up with this reading challenge, work through my extensive personal backlog of already purchased ebooks, and find a way to squeeze in reading Lauren Beukes’ previous book Moxyland and her soon to be released The Shining Girls. Given how good Zoo City is, I really don’t want to put reading more of her prose on hold.

The result makes me want to run out and watch a David Lynch movie. If that’s the sort of vibe you like then perhaps you’ll enjoy a story of

The Day The Undertaker Came

The Undertaker came to The Library at the beginning of the end. He came to prepare us, though we didn’t know it at the time. He wore sable robes that swallowed light and dimmed the corridors as he walked through them. If he had a face we never saw it; he kept his hood pulled high and forward like an opaque veil.

I don’t know how he could see, but he seemed to know where he was going and plodded though our halls without hesitation.

We trailed along behind; I don’t think we could have freed ourselves from his wake if we wanted to. Soon I had a premonition of sorts and I knew where he was going.

The cube waited in our central reading room. A curiosity, nothing more, the ornate box looked like silver, but had been undamageable, and unopenable since the day it was found. When science had grown tired of trying to understand it it had become nothing more than an interesting piece of art, a strange oddity to be pondered and gawked at.

After it found its home with us some people would travel here only to see the cube. Others considered it an interesting side benefit to visiting the library for the more expected reasons. Whatever they may have thought before encountering it I don’t think anyone who came into sight of it ever dismissed it as unworthy of consideration. In fact, we kept it in the great reading room because it demanded attention. It was the perfect thing to draw a readers eyes when they took a break to roll a new idea around in their head and feel the texture of its possibilities.

When The Undertaker entered the room The Cube had it’s first ever competition for attention. For his part, The Undertaker continued forward at his same pace until he stood directly before it. I don’t know what anyone expected to happen next, but I felt close to terror. I couldn’t have told you why right then, but I was afraid. If passing along the wisdom of lessons learned still held any point I would tell people to always trust their instincts.

The Undertaker stood in front of the cube and raised one robe-wrapped hand to it. When that unnervingly black cloth brushed the cube an entire side dissolved before our eyes. Within The Cube, a box that had never been opened before, we saw the Earth. Not a globe. Not a picture. But Earth. Rotating in the darkness of space. In The Cube.

From a pocket of his robe The Undertaker drew an envelope and what looked like a letter. It was a regular letter-sized envelope, but it’s whiteness hurt to look at in contrast with the black robes. He turned to a table beside him, picked up a pen and began writing on the envelope in an alphabet I could not read and had never seen. When he finished, he put the letter inside and sealed it. Then he turned back to The Cube and flicked the envelope toward the Earth. It spun round and round, but when it crossed the plane of The Cube’s now missing side it transformed into a bird. The bird was made of paper still, like origami, but it flapped it’s wings and flew, somewhat lazily, toward the Earth.

We watched as it hit the atmosphere and caught fire. As the bird burned before our eyes inside The Cube, all the light streaming in from the library’s windows turned orange, as if a great fireball had passed overhead.

When that paper envelope bird caught fire I felt something stir in my mind. By the time it had been consumed completely I, as well as everyone else on Earth, knew our time was up. There was a storm coming. A great front of teeming chaos and entropy. Pure destruction, and it left nothing in it’s wake. His message delivered, The Undertaker turned and began to leave in his plodding manner.

I was sure then that no man hid beneath those robes. This was an emissary, a piece of the oncoming storm, sent as herald. In the cube we could see the teeming front of pure destruction approaching the Earth-in-a-box that was truly our own home that we stood upon at the same moment. It will be here soon, and I’m confident nothing can be done, but I wanted to tell you – I thought you should know. I didn’t just receive the message as everyone did. I was there when it was sent and I saw it all with my own two eyes, just as I’ve told you. You’re not crazy and it is not a hoax or mass delirium as some would have us believe.

The storm is coming. Even now you could go to The Library and see just how close it is. Inside The Cube the storm front will soon kiss the earth. Then the end will really begin. Those are the facts, though I don’t know what to do with them. Some want to give in and hurry their own end, others think we should strive to fight. To push back against the forces of ending by becoming forces for new beginnings. Create in the face of entropy and hurl effort against futility.

Will it save us? I don’t know. Something tells me it won’t. But I see no reason to hasten our enemy’s victory either. We have choices to make before the storm arrives. What will yours be?

The End

Comments always welcome and appreciated. Feel free to poke around and see what else is going on around here too. Comments on old stories are equally welcome.

Read it here: http://www.jukepopserials.com/home/read/91

Please remember to vote for every chapter, assuming you enjoy them.

This chapter tells more of Abana’s story, introduces a member of the Growers Guild, lets us in on some of the internal politics of the Fleshcrafters Guild and has lots of Zogby, the first alchemist of the Fleshcrafters and one of my favorite characters.

Check this out: a word cloud of the chapter.

The Box

Our family’d had the box forever. As a kid I’d felt unreasonably proud about it. No other family in Bunker Complex 10 had one like it.

Looking back I realize it was a stupid thing to be proud of. It wasn’t even useful. It didn’t open, so you couldn’t put anything inside it. It was practically sacred to us, so you couldn’t use it for a table or desk. No, it just sat there taking up space. I was proud all the same. Who wouldn’t be proud to own something that could save the world.

That was what Grandma always told me. “This world could be better Jake, but it does OK. If it ever doesn’t, if the world ever seems hopeless, that box might be able to fix everything.”

I had another reason to feel proud growing up, but this one wasn’t based on a family thing. It was generational. I, my sister, and all our friends, we were THE generation. We were the first generation born in Bunk 10 who’d be able to leave it. The first back to the surface.

I remember it was a strange day when the January kids, now newly recognized adults, gathered to crack open the vault. It was a celebration. This was the day the community had been waiting for generations to see, but there was sadness in our elders eyes. I could see it hiding there. Sure, I think they were really happy, but there was something else going on too.

We learned soon enough what it was. Turns out we were the first generation of Bunker people kept in the dark about the dangers of rejoining the world, because we were the first generation who wouldn’t suffer the consequences. Wouldn’t suffer the physical ones that is.

Bunk 10, probably all the bunkers, had engaged in a slow program of genetic modification. Each generation had been nudged closer to capable of handling the environment outside while at the same time the environment slowly healed. Two lines on a graph. Our increasing resilience, the worlds decreasing inhospitably. When those lines met? That was my cohort.

In a perfect world it would’ve made sense to wait a couple more generations to ascend. Let our grandchildren go and everyone would be OK. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a machine made yet that could last forever and Bunk 10 was getting well past its use by date.

So up they went.

And soon people started to die.

Grandma was one of the first, and our parents came clean about it all. They hadn’t wanted us to know until it was too late. Figured it’d be easier on us that way. It wasn’t, but I understand what they were trying to do. Best of the bad choices they had.

Too many variables, not enough facts. That’s my best guess about what happened. Maybe the damage was worse than they’d known. Maybe we weren’t as prepared as they’d believed. The why doesn’t really matter when it’s too late to fix something you’ll never get another shot at. By the time my best friend went the same way Grandmother had it was obvious the plan had failed. Not completely — not everyone was getting sick — but too many who weren’t supposed to, were.

That was the day my sister and I found ourselves sitting in our central room, staring at the box.

“Would you say it’s hopeless?” she said.

“I would,” I said.

“What’s it do though?”

“I don’t know. I begged Grandma to tell me, but she said she didn’t know.”

“Do you think she lied?”

“Not that time.”

The box was a beautiful thing. Gorgeous wood and brass with fine detail work all over it. We studied it for hours before Helen gave a cry of surprise when she pushed too hard on one end.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I think I broke it, this piece just pushed in!” she said.

Instead of breaking it she’d just discovered its first secret. The box was a puzzle. It took a lot of pushing, prodding and experimenting, but we eventually found the right combination to open it. Inside, like a bad joke, was another box. Also inside: a map, a compass and coordinates.

I picked up the smaller box and shook it in frustration. Helen started checking out the map and coordinates.

“Do you have any idea what Washington means?” she asked.

 #

 No one in Bunk 10 had any clue what Washington meant, but we had a map, a compass and nothing else to try.

We stocked up for a long journey. We could see how far away our destination was on the map — about 50 miles — but we had no way to really understand what that meant.

I won’t recount the trip except to say it was both amazing and terrifying, not to mention agonizing. This was really not the sort of thing we were used to. Things got easier after we found an ancient roadway.

We had decided that Washington must have been an ancient city, but we had no idea why we should take the second box there. Still, trying it seemed better than sitting around waiting to see how many would die.

The city had been mostly reduced to rubble and the rubble seemed to only recently have begun to be reclaimed by nature. Having no better idea we decided to make our way to the general centre of this ancient place. There we would try to figure out the box.

Soon after entering the city proper, the box began to hum and glow. A little experimentation showed that the hum and glow grew stronger depending on where we walked so we chose the path it reacted to the most. After perhaps an hour of walking the glow hurt our eyes. I put the box down and it pulsed a single brilliant flash that forced us to look away. After, the box disappeared. In its place sat a strange red object and a piece of paper.

The thing had two main parts connected by a spiralling, stretchy cord. The base had a series of buttons with numbers on them. The smaller piece had two connected circular ends. The words on the paper read ‘Trust in hope’.

Eventually Helen shrugged and said, “Well…we’ve got to do something with it. Pick up the small piece.”

I did and I could hear a faint sound coming from one end while the button with a ‘1’ on it began blinking. Putting the sound making end to my ear I heard voices arguing. It sounded like a room of them. Startled, I slammed the thing back on its cradle.

“What was it?” Helen asked.

“People. I heard people arguing.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well try again. And listen this time!”

So I did.

“They’re talking about something that’s got them all scared. Something call Cuba and the Soviets. They’re trying to decide what to do. Someone called Krushchev has them confused.”

“Why?” Helen asked.

“He’s given them mixed messages. One they like, they other they don’t. I think one of them is in charge. The others are telling him what to do.”

“What do they say?”

“I think some of them want to believe the good message. The others think it’s too risky. They want to ‘strike’ their enemies.”

“Jake.”

“Yes?”

“What do you think that blinking button does?”

I licked my lips and shrugged. In my ear the men continued arguing. It sounded like the strikers were winning.

Helen held up the little paper. “Trust in hope. I think you’re supposed to tell them.”

I nodded and Helen gingerly pushed the blinking ‘1’.

I could hear something ringing in the room. It startled the men. They went quiet. I heard a click and a single gruff voice, one of the ones from room, spoke clearly in my ear.

“Yes? Who is this?”

I opened my mouth to tell him. I wanted to say the words from the paper, but suddenly I heard another voice, risen from my memory.

“This world could be better Jake, but it does OK. If it ever doesn’t, if the world ever seems hopeless, that box might be able to fix everything.” Grandma’s words.

I looked at Helen, and I thought about our friends in Bunk 10 who weren’t getting sick. I thought about the other bunkers out there. I thought about Grandma’s words, and I put the red thing back on its rest.

“Jake,” Helen began.

“Wait,” I cut her off. “I think we should trust in hope. This world could be better, but I’d rather a world with you and our friends in it. I’d rather a world Grandma and our family had lived in, than one they hadn’t.”

I don’t know how long we sat there not saying anything, it was probably just the longest minute of my life, but then she nodded.

“Let’s go home Jake.”

The End.

My random elements were: a Parallel Universe, The Capital City of a Lost Civilization
, and a Puzzle Box.

Find more of my fiction here.

If you like short fiction, flash fiction, writers getting paid fairly and Chuck Wendig please consider checking out this kickstarter. Fireside magazine puts out great stories and if they get funded for their second year they’re going to run a 12 part serial fiction experiment by Chuck Wendig! Also a short story and 2 pieces of flash fiction every month! Only 4 days left! Note: I’m not affiliated with Fireside in any way, I just strongly believe in what they’re trying to do.

The writing challenge came from the fantastic musician John Anealio. Well, to be specific this isn’t a writing challenge, its a challenge to be creative. He’s calling it “23 in ’13” and, as you might guess, it’s all about doing 23 creative things over the course of the year. His goal is to create 23 new songs this year. My goal is to create 23 new short stories that I consider good enough in quality to submit to editors. I’m a little behind myself but I’ve got one new story out in the slush piles (it’s already gained it’s first rejection) and one new installment of Empire and Animal.

You can join in the fun over at John’s blog. I recommend getting on his mailing list. You can also download the three instrumental pieces he’s made for the challenge so far or pick up his album “Laser Zombie Robot Love” which is really good.

The reading challenge comes from Worlds Without End. They are having a Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge. The goal is to read 12 books this year each by a different woman author that you have never read before. If you sign up they’ve got a great tracking page set up for the challenge and a huge list of authors to explore. Full participationi also includes writing at least a small review for each book you read but it gives you a chance to be featured on their blog. If that happens you also get put into a poll for a chance to win Amazon gift cards! I highly recommend joining in this.

I’ve read my first book for the challenge, Lauren Beukes amazing “Zoo City”, and I’ll be posting my review in the next day or two. I’ve started my second book, Kelly Link’s “Stranger Things Happen”. After that it’ll be Octavia E. Butler’s “Wild Seed”. After that? Who knows. Something awesome I’d bet.

Any of you participating in these challenges? Know of another great one? Got your own? Shout it out in the comments!

The most recent pro (at the time of this post) was the fantastic Tobias Buckell (@tobiasbuckell), and the most recent guest bringing in a story to kick around was me!

I had a lot of fun doing the show and I know when I sit down to write my story it will be greatly improved because of it. You can find the episode here. Please feel free to spread the word about not just my episode but the Roundtable in general. They are easily one of my favorite podcasts. If you’re a storyteller of any sort you should really be listening in – the ideas lessons learned about the craft of storytelling on both kinds of episodes is well worth your time.

Oh – I’ll probably be back later today with a new post about two challenges I’ve recently taken on. One is about reading and the other is about writing!