The Broken Pathway

“The Broken Pathway” is available in The Immersion Book of SF, edited by Carmelo Rafala and published by Immersion Press, which will be coming out at the end of September. (But you can preorder it on Amazon now!)

This is a story that’s especially fun because it’s set in the neighborhood where I live, featuring Wonmi-san (Wonmi Mountain) the small mountain where I have, several times in the last few years, gone hiking daily, and which was also the setting for a few stories by the inestimable Korean author Yang Kwi-Ja in her collection 원미동 사람들 (or, as the English translation by Kim So-Yong and Julie Pickering was titled, A Distant and Beautiful Place).

Of course, my story is set a little more than a hundred years before I ever arrived in Korea, during the Sino-Japanese War, when Japanese mapmakers really were tooling around the Korean countyside, doing land surveys and collecting data so they could have a tactical advantage over the Chinese if need be. The timing is crucial — only a year or two later, the train line linking Incheon to Seoul would begin operations and, I assume, the young monk sent to Seoul for help would have gotten there sooner–although who knows how things might have turned out in that case.

As for the primary supernatural element, well… I actually think of this story as SF in a way similar to how, say, Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God” is: it takes a supernatural idea that, for a long time, was understood not as supernatural but as “scientific,” and runs with it, asking what follows if this “scientific” premise is true. (I don’t explore the question the way Chiang does his, but the starting principle is similar.) After all, even today a number of people take seriously notions of 풍수 (風水) — which sounds like “pung-su” and is the Korean derivation of Chinese feng shui.

Minsoo Kang’s article ,”Kyongbok Palace: History, Controvery, Geomancy” (1999; available online if you have access to Muse; if not, it is also available in his interesting book of (mostly) fiction, Of Tales and Enigmas) discusses the idea of the use of spikes as supernatural, geomantic weapons against Korea used by Japan during its colonial occupation of the country. Supposedly the spikes driven into the earth are understood (by believers in such things) as having an effect analogous to the needles inserted into one’s skin during the acupuncture treatment depicted in the story — to enable or block the flow of energy. So the spikes were believed to have been used as a means of sabotaging the Korean national “gi” (ie. “ch’i”, life energy, 氣, etc. Kang’s more recent thoughts on the subject appeared (via correspondence posted by a commenter) on The Marmot’s Hole, here.

Realistically, and no offense to Kang, but this sounds curiously like standard Korean revisionist historiography for a number of reasons, of course — one of which being that the Japanese occupied Korea in part as a place to send Japanese to live and work; why would they want to ruin geomantically the geographical resource (and source of many material resources, like rice and labour) that they’d just taken over? The division of “nation” (as a kind of spiritual essense) from the material content of a specific region — its agricultural capacity, its people, its viability as a landbase — seems a bit far-fetched, and I’m not so convinced that constructions of “nation” were even as abstracted then as they are now, or that the Japanese thought the Koreans had anything like a distinct “national spirit” to be broken — according to a number of writers, most recently B.R. Myers in his study of North Korean official culture, The Cleanest Race, but I think it’s also suggested by Gi Wook Shin (in this book) and Henry H. Em (in his essay in this anthology), that idea was primarily an import to Korea from Japan, in part from philosophical writing, but also, as Myers shows, in part as a component of Japanese propaganda in Korea). But it’s interesting to put aside those objections and ask the question… what if Japanese geomancers did think they could sabotage a potential colonial subject state using the “science” of geomancy? What then?

One more thing: while the Sanshin (mountain god) in my story — of whom, yes, you do get a glimpse — is male, plenty of mountain spirits were actually female; I’m told, actually, that originally they all were, and it was the influence of Chinese Taoism, Buddhism, and especially Confucianism that turned almost all of them into patriarchal figures.

The Bodhisattvas

“The Bodhisattvas” appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean, guest edited by Johnathan Strahan for Spring 2010. (A Korean translation, by Kim Chang-gyu, titled “보살들,” appeared slightly earlier in 백만 광년의  고독 (One Million Light-Years of Solitude) SOAO Workshop anthology from Omelas, December 2009.)

This story was influenced by my attendance of two astronomy-focused workshops for creative writers (and other creators): The SOAO Workshop at Sobaek Mountain (South Korea) hosted by the Korea Astronomical and Space Science Institute in February 2009, and the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop in July 2009.

The original version of this story formed part of my MA Thesis, back in 2001, for a degree in English Literature (with a concentration in Creative Writing.) It was extremely different, though some of the characters appear in both stories. Those interested will have to pry the files from my cold, dead hands. I don’t have a hard copy of the thesis, though it does exist in the holdings of Concordia University Library in Montreal, Canada, and, maybe, some national archive where they collect Canadian grad theses. I don’t advise the search, though. It’s not worth it.

The original story was much closer to the inspiring source material, much of which appeared in the book Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, edited by Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000). In particular I drew upon “Guarding the Earth: A Conversation with Joanna Macy” by Wes Nisker and Barbara Gates (originally published in Inquiring Mind). A quotation from this interview with Macy, best-known as a Buddhist environmentalist activist (here’s her website), was the epigram for the original version of the story, which focused on a group of deep-future Buddhist monks (the last sentient beings on Earth) living on the site of an old nuclear waste site.

This is the quotation, from Macy’s answer to a question about future generations grappling with our creation of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons:

The challenge for beings of the future will be in accepting what their ancestors have done, and for that acceptance to occur, a measure of forgiveness will also be necessary.

It seems to me that even though I have removed the epigram, this observation has aged increasingly well: now, undeniably, our descendants will have to deal not only with whatever toxic waste we fail to find a way of processing into oblivion ourselves… but now, we have ocean levels rising at scary rates, a biosphere that’s crumbling, slowly but unmistakably, and only a small proportion of the public, and of our global leaders, are taking it seriously enough to keep alive any slim hope that we’ll avoid the ecological holocaust depicted in my story.

(An article by Macy on this basic theme, and with a line startlingly similar to this quote, is available via Google Books.)

Other bits of the book that also inspired the story include:

Finally, the text I relied upon most for my (weird, distorted) theories about a interbrane “biosphere” was Dr. Lisa Randall’s book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, which, if it treats a whole bunch of speculations, I found at least admits they’re speculative and is relatively even-handed about it. (From what I could understand. There are certain kinds of nonfiction books that feel like a physical workout. This is one of them. And for advice regarding the physics (and to some degree the Buddhist-related material) I am particularly indebted to my friend Mark Ancliff for comments and suggestions.

Yana’s religion, though it is clearly a form of Buddhism, is a loosely imagined future school descended from the traumatic collision of Mahayana Buddhism with climate disaster, ecological collapse, and the exodus of a significant proportion of humanity from our solar system (followed by the dieoff of the majority of the human species — specifically those who could not afford passage on the escaping starships). It is in no way intended as a depiction of a real-world, modern form of Buddhism.

While to my knowledge romantic coupling, marriage, and childbearing are not part of life on a normal Mahayana sangha in our world (though there is room for married people or parents to take monastic vows, for example, and some Buddhist traditions expect a degree of permeability in the line separating monk from layperson), the monks of Yana’s time have no other option to replenish their population, and have consciously decided that participating in the circle of life is a sacred and necessary part of their Buddhist practice. It’s not so far-fetched, if you buy that anyone would hang around stewarding the ruins of Mother Earth after The Collapse. The far-fetched part is the bit about mass exodus: the impracticability of such an escape for even a small portion of humanity means that the reality would be, I fear, much darker.

Edit: Oops, I forgot to note one thing: this story was written and edited in a repeating loop mostly of one song, Kenny Garrett’s (quite uncharacteristic, but very beautiful) “Tsunami Song,”from the album Beyond the Wall. Here’s the track:

Sarging Rasmussen: A Report By Organic

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This story appeared in the anthology Shine, released 30 March 2010, and edited by Jetse de Vries. It was written specifically in response to de Vries’ call for near-future, optimistic SF. An excerpt of Sarging Rasmussen is available here, as well as other stories in the anthology; if you like what you see, information on the many ways to get a copy can be found here.

I have been interviewed by Charles Tan in relation to this story. There’s lot’s of background on this story there, so check it out. However, I will list off some of the texts and media that influenced the story, at the end of this post.

Special thanks go to Charles La Shure and Mike Hartman for comments and feedback on the story, and to Jetse de Vries for helping me edit it into shape, as well as putting together the Shine anthology.

Reviews:

“Gord Sellar offers up a great title… and a great story about the use of the current creepy trend of Pick-Up Artistry, augmented by cyberstuff, to save the world and find a li’l love.” — Nick Mamatas (@ Sci-Fi Wire)

“… fuses pick-up artistrywith, of all things, environmental treaty negotiations – to amusing and surprisingly compelling effect. Both are notable for the efficiency of their world-building.” — Sumit-Paul Choudhry (@ NewScientist/CultureLab blog)

“Striking the balance between sense of wonder, hard science fiction (be it biological or sociological), and social relevance is “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic)” by Gord Sellar. This one immediately catches your attention with the author’s style, and actually manages to sustain it until the very end. To me, this is optimistic science fiction done right, even surpassing de Vries’s own fiction. The conceit here is that the short story doesn’t read like it’s preaching an agenda to you, and Sellar’s enthusiasm for the story is conveyed in the text. There’s a Second Foundation vibe to it and reminiscent of Nicola Griffith’s “It Takes Two” from Eclipse Three but Sellar takes the concept into a different direction.” — Charles Tan (@ Bibliophile Stalker)

“Like [Alastair] Reynolds’ story, Sarging Rasmussen by Gord Sellar lifted my spirits through humour rather than lecturing, featuring a bunch of sleaze bags who use the language and persuasion techniques of the pickup artist scene (google it if you want to lose all faith in the male gender) to affect a positive result in political ecological negotiations. The idea of re-purposing social technology (which is what the vile PUA ‘rules’ is) for good is a brilliantly original idea that Sellar pursues with enormous wit and energy to produce something genuinely new and interesting.” — Patrick Hudson (@ The Zone)

“… uses the argot and philosophy of the pick-up artist movement to sneakily suggest that politics and activism aren’t perhaps as different as the two camps tend to think…” — Paul Raven (@ Futurismic)

“I absolutely loved [it]… a very smart story that, I suspect, may please more the male readers… It is very well written, humourous and full of excellent sarcasm…” Yagiz (@ Speculative Fiction Book Review)

Incidentally, one thing that surprises me so far is that nobody has pointed out that the UN HQ is in New York City in our world, not in The Hague. The main reason was that I wanted to write a story set in Europe, but peopled by folks not exclusively European. There was, somewhere in the earliest drafts or notes that led to the story, a reason for a move of the HQ — some combination of more funding available in Europe than in the recently re-crashed American economy, the American political climate, and a spate of terrorist attacks (foreign and domestic, but especially domestic) on New York — but none of those explanations ended up in the final draft of the story.

Nobody seems to mind! Maybe the impression is given that the meeting that has gathered so many of the characters is a temporary one, that my globe-trotting characters aren’t living there but just passing through for the Nth time, or something else. I’m not sure. It’s an interesting example, either way, of how much what one can get away with, without explanation.

A few of the books and media sources helpful in writing this story include:

Alone With Gandhari

“Alone With Gandhari” appeared in Clarkesworld #42, in March 2010. It was the second story I sold in 2010, but the first to be published. It was very sudden, and very exciting!

Despite going from sale to print so quickly, my first attempt at the story was back in graduate school, sometime around 1999 or 2000. (In the dreadful original, a rural Indian named Gautam, working for his biotech-terrorist and nutball-Hindutvavādi uncle Prabinder, unwittingly unleashes a [fortunately quite unfeasible] biotech plague designed to emaciate cows and render them and their offspring permanently unfit for agricultural use; the plague ends up mutating and affecting humans too, and he and his young cousin flee across the border and make a futile attempt to take cover in Vancouver). Far-fetched it was, but hey, everything’s gotta start somewhere, right?

Other than the passing mention of this plague in the final story, the only element remaining from the original is the epigram, from Romesh C. Dutt’s (very) late-19th-century translation/abridgement of the Mahabharata; while condensed not as well-regarded as other translations, I find Mr. Dutt busted a hell of a rhyme for a man of that time.

Kate Baker’s commentary at the end of the Clarkesworld podcast of the tale is astute: the story feels among the most near-future of my published SF stories so far, simply because so much of what’s in it — an obesity epidemic, religious extremism, and the sickening state of the majority of the corporate world’s attitude towards nature — are all just slightly funhouse-mirror versions of things that are major concerns in North American (or maybe all of Western, or even, increasingly, world) culture right now.

And while Guru Deepak is a caricature, I shall have to hope that readers realize he’s not intended as a caricature of Indians in general (nor is his insane cult meant to be any sort of mockery of real Indian religion or religions); rather, I’m mocking the public persona (and New Age cult) of just one very famous Indian(-American?) who ranks among the biggest purveors of woo-based idiocy in the West. I’m sure readers aware of the fellow can easily guess whom it is I’m mocking.

(His use of the name Gandhari for the much-revered cow alludes to the Gandhari of the Mahabharata having borne a hundred sons, perhaps a dark omen of the kind of biotechnological response Deepak hopes to inflict upon bovine population of the Earth through the cow of the same name, and upon humankind as well. (This was the plot of an earlier version of the story.) Deepak apparently ignored the fact that the Kauravas failed… or maybe thinks this is their second chance, or is sarcastically using the name to highlight the ignorance of his followers.)

Of Melei, of Ulthar

“Of Melei, of Ulthar” appeared in the October 2009 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine, which was thrilling for me. (And even better, it appeared on the Locus 2009 Recommended Reading List! And got an Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, and was on the long-list for the British Fantasy Awards 2010!)

I was especially happy to have my work appear at Clarkesworld, as  it was one of the first professional magazines to which I submitted my work, and because I’d long hoped to write something of the right length to submit there! And having just met Neil Clarke at WorldCon a few months before its publication just adds to the pleasure.

Reviews:

“There is nothing here that one could really call a plot, but it’s not much missed. What we have is description of the places and cities that Melei sees, both waking and dreaming. Descriptions fantastic and wondrous.” — Lois Tilton @ The Internet Review of Science Fiction

“For all its dream-like, inverted complexities, the story is relatively straightforward: whispers of mystery, brutality, and warmth intertwined. The prose wanders from verbose and overwrought to more concrete as the decision sharpens within the protagonist, and the slow realization of the dream-world’s location – which could come off as overly trite or precious so very easily – is effective when wrapped in Melei’s breathtaken wonder at fierce survival in the face of overwhelming bleakness and apparent lack of the divine (or supernatural).” – Deborah J. Brannon @ She talks to wolves…

A little background: I started the story as a response to a call for Lovecraftian stories. HP Lovecraft was the first author within the wider genre whom I read. For me, at the time, he was a horror author and I was puzzled by his strangely bewitching Dreamlands stories. While a lot of people write stories that riff on his Cthulhu stuff, I don’t know so many who work with those lovely mythic fantasies. (And the few I know about, such as Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow novels, somehow didn’t work for me. I have ‘em on the shelf — found them in hardcover in a free-books pile in a foreigner bar in Korea — and tear through one occasionally, so yeah, I can say my opinion hasn’t changed.)

So I set out to write something in the Dreamlands… and failed. I set it aside for a few months, and then after a brief holiday on Jeju Island (a lovely island off the coast of Southern Korea) I was approached by someone who needed a story pronto. I didn’t have anything of the appropriate length, but said I could try finish this Lovecraftian story I had half-written. (Actually, not really half, more like 1300 words or so.) I sat down in the Sweet Buns coffee shop with a Korean study book and began writing, taking a two-hour break to have a Korean lesson. The final result wasn’t quite what got published, of course: I sent the story to the editor who’d solicited it and while he loved it (the rejection letter began with stunning praise), it didn’t quite fit his needs.

So I tweaked a little, fiddled a bit, trimmed and tickled and applied makeup, and send the story to Clarkesworld. End result? Yay!

There are a few Easter Eggs buried in the story for specific people to catch while reading it. I’m not telling what they are. But while bits of life are woven into this tale — life is all about decisions, is it not? — but the characters and situations are piecemeal assemblages, and I am pretty much a magpie gathering up shiny bits and lining my nest with them. Which is what every writer is, at bottom.

Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands

Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands appeared in Apex Online’s issue for February 3rd, 2009. You can read the story here, or pick up the anthology in which it was republished, titled Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. 1, edited by Jason Sizemore and Gill Ainsworth.

This story received an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 2009 (Vol. 2), and in Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection.

Reviews:

“This is a vivid, engrossing tale, told in wrenching detail. Its subject matter is brutal, but its heroine rises above her situation with a strength and grace that is apparent in her voice from the beginning.”
– Kimberly Lundstrom (@ The Fix)

This is a story which grew from a very short flash piece I wrote during Clarion West in Seattle, when I found myself unsatisfied by my handling of the same theme in a historical setting.

The fact is, you cannot live in South Korea and not encounter, at some point, the “Comfort Women” issue. (The name is out of currency in Korea, where it is considered politically incorrect, but I use it here as it’s the best-known term in English for these women.) Hearing the most common Korean version of the story first–tales of evil Japanese kempeitai (military police) driving into towns and abducting girls, and recruiters tricking girls into thinking they’d be working as nurses or in factories (and then turning them over to the military to become sex slaves), you cannot help but feel a sense of horror that never really dissipates no matter how long you study the subject.

And then, when you look closer at the history, for example by reading books like Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military by Sangmie Choi Schellstede and Soon Mi Yu and The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War by George L. Hicks, you come to see plenty of blame to go around. Not only did Western troops end up using Asian girls in the same way, during the lingering military presence that followed the war in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, but, worse is the complicity of  some Koreans in the enslavement of these women, and of many Koreans in these womens’ sufferings in the decades after their emancipation which many of these women spent as social pariahs and outcasts, until more than a small portion of Korean society decided to publicly acknowledge and protest the horror, long after many of the women had died and when the remaining ones all had white hair.

Even the contemporary political use of these women’s victimization–and the relationship, discussed in the Hicks especially, between contemporary Korean feminist groups and the surviving “Comfort Women”–is profoundly disquieting. Still more disquieting is the special status given to this particular form of exploitation of women, differentiating it profoundly from the larger pattern of misogyny and exploitation of women that prevailed in Asia both before and after World War II.

This is an era when at least some female children were so unappreciated as to be named things like “Hunam” (”After this, a boy!”) and “Seopseop” (”Disappointment”). Some women named these names are still alive today, though the preference for boys seems to be on the decline. The pattern of exploitation of women stretches quite far back, in Korean history, and it continued energetically after the war, not just in Japanese “kisaeng” (”geisha”) tourism (discussed briefly here) as a means of economic growth. (If you have access to JSTOR, ahem, there’s an interesting article from a critical Japanese woman’s point of view here which in part questions why the Korean government promoted postitution in this way, and also, interestingly in 1977, criticized the enslavement of Korean women, thirteen years before anything like a public movement arose in Korea regarding the issue).

In “villes” near military camps that were set up to “service” the American troops stationed in South Korea, women were also, according to men serving at the time, restrained against their will, sometimes by local police under the conceit of their being indebted to their “bosses.” Here’s a dated piece in Time about it. These days, it comes as little surprise that everyone is busily denying any involvement, but eyewitnesses tell a different story.

Not just in those forms did exploitation persist: a certain percentage of Korean women were always sexually exploited, and most heavily by their own countrymen, a fact that was always kept to the side, and which remains true even today;  in fact, it’s been claimed the trade escalated after widespread “crackdowns” on prostitution in recent years. And now, the exploitation has spread to that of women from other backgrounds: the trafficking of foreign women into Korea and of Korean and other women abroad, for example, is a growing problem, and as outgoing tourism explodes in Korea, Korean sex tourism is also on the rise in places such as Cambodia, Mongolia, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, the mail-order bride industry in Korea continues to grow at a stunning rate, with some — not all, but some — cases being depressingly exploitative. This is provoking interesting reactions abroad, including a sharp decline in Korea’s reputation in these places.

[I should note, however, that despite some occasional horror, a number of foreign wives, while finding life in Korea difficult, do not perceive themselves as exploited or as victims, even if there is a degree of "rational exchange" involved in their marriage. More here. Indeed, not all prostitutes see themselves as victims, or dream of liberation from their circumstances, either, else they would not have hit the streets and demonstrated against the crackdowns. (Photos and a brief discussion also here, in the context of other unusual protests in Korea.) It's a complex situation, is what I'm saying, and part of a larger context of systematic exploitation and disempowerment.]

To acknowledge this in a critical manner isn’t to excuse the terrible acts of Japan: nobody can or should ever try to excuse that. It’s just that those actions aren’t the whole story: they’re part of a bigger context which is often ignored in contemporary South Korean (and North Korean!) discussions of the subject.

But the discussion is rarely framed that way, in a historical context. To reframe it in discussions that way, if you are a Westerner, is sometimes to invite pretty harsh responses. Not always, mind you: I’ve had some really sensible discussions and debates, and learned a lot from those discussions, too. But some people just refuse to be–or are incapable of being–rational and resist reframing the “Comfort Women” in their larger historical context. Still, it leaves me leery of dealing with the subject too directly in a piece of fiction, although I have plans to do so at some point.

For this story, part of my solution for dealing with this is to having set in the future within a greater historical continuum of sexist exploitation, depicting it elsewhere (but not too far away), involving racial groups foreign to the debate in Korea, and linking it all to radical technological/social changes to show that show this is not just history, but a deep-seated issue that has persisted and mutated through radical cultural and social upheavals in Northeast Asia.

In any case, the story as it stands owes particular credit to Nick Mamatas, who knows who to write an instructive rejection letter; to feedback from several of my friends from Clarion West; and to help with Chinese terms (even if I ignored some good advice) from my long-lost friends Huang Xue (Faith) and 黄 绪 (Lisa).

The Country of the Young

“The Country of the Young” appeared in Interzone 219, December 2008.

If you missed the print edition, Interzone 219 is available as an eMagazine at Fictionwise.

This was the third full story I drafted at Clarion West, for the week when Nalo Hopkinson was our instructor.

(And both Nalo’s and the class’s comments, and some discussion of the biology of aging with my classmate Guy Immega, were a great help to me.)

I’d long been thinking of writing a story set in a post-reunification, corporate-annexed North Korea. A theme I’d intended to work with earlier ended up being set aside, in advance, for the next story I planned to write at the workshop, but that worked out well because it gave me a chance to explore themes in the corporatized North: politics and class, immigration, the glitchiness of life-extension technology and its effect on future immigration, intercultural relationships, and more.

Also, I decided to work very literally with a comment made by Maureen McHugh a few weeks earlier, but I won’t say more as it’s a spoiler for the story.

Reviews and Comments:

“… distinctly my favorite piece in the issue… Sellar has done a superb job on every count. The characters and setting feel alive, three-dimensional, and absolutely convincing. From these, the plot grows naturally—absorbing, meaningful, and free of contrivance. And detail is handled perfectly, showing real-life richness and complexity without ever getting bogged down, and without ever leaving the reader missing crucial information. Kudos, Mr. Sellar, for an excellent story.” — Ziv Wities @ The Fix.

“a sombre tale rich in detail, and a convincing look at how someone can be driven to the extremes of mass murder. Good stuff.” — Lawrence Conquest @ The Barking Dog

“A very realistic depiction of what a growing age difference would do to a marriage, set in a chillingly believable universe.” — Aliette de Bodard (!)

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