This week I’m giving you the introduction and sample chapter to a new book we just released at WordFire Press, written by award-winning authors Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, who were two of my writing students at Writers of the Future. I’ve done my best to mentor these two as they needed it over they years, and they’ve both become quite successful authors for Tor Books.

Jay just recently passed away on June 1 after a long battle with cancer, and we rushed METATROPOLIS through production, getting a finished copy in his hands less than two weeks before he died.  This is a great, compelling SF work and I very much hope you’ll read it.  It is available in all eBook formats and in trade paperback (order from amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite local bookstore).

Introduction

It was in late 2007 that I proposed to John Scalzi an idea I called “The Shared Universe Project.” A group of authors would be given the same “what-if?” and write stories based in the new reality it posited. I even offered up what I thought were several clever concepts for what that operating principal might be. We then recruited a team of authors—who proceeded to boot all my ideas right out the door.

Which was the best possible thing that could have happened.

Instead, what John called “Our Little Cabal” spent an intense month building a world far richer and so much deeper than a single “what-if?” They created an all-too-possible future of zero-footprint cities, virtual nations, and armed camps of eco-survivalists. Each writer then claimed his or her own corner of this shared world to explore and wrote stories that were highly individualistic, yet fit together as a cohesive whole. Just nine months after that very first brainstorm, METAtropolis was published.

It wasn’t just the way METAtropolis was conceived and created that was unusual. Commissioned by Audible and appearing first as an audiobook original, it turned the traditional publishing cycle on its head.

Happily, the success of the original led to a sequel, METAtropolis: Cascadia (2010), and then another, METAtropolis: Green Space (2013). Along the way, the series earned the first-ever Hugo nomination for an audiobook and won the Audie Award, the highest honor in the audiobook industry. And several stories were deservedly chosen for “Best Of” and other major anthologies.

All the accolades are fantastic, of course. But, for me, the true joy of the METAtropolis franchise has been the experience of working with the best and smartest writers in the business. Even as the cast of contributors morphed from one installment to the next, and the timeline of the shared world moved forward, the overarching themes and the underlying premises remained remarkably consistent. And it was fascinating to see how the future the team created moved from one of growing despair to guarded optimism. Maybe when you live in a world for the better part of six years, it’s only natural to hope.

All of which brings me to the stories you’re about to read.

Over the three editions of METAtropolis, Jay Lake—later joined by Ken Scholes—created a story-within-the-story. It begins when a mysterious stranger called Tygre Tygre walks into the off-the-grid settlement known as Cascadiopolis—and ends many decades later when a very old man named Bashar races to save his wife, his daughter and, not incidentally, all of Seattle. I’m confident you’ll discover why Ken Scholes takes a back seat to no one as a storyteller and a world-builder—and that Jay Lake is one of the deepest thinkers in speculative fiction, predictable only in his unpredictability. For me, being able to witness their creative processes and to experience their craft first-hand has been a pleasure of the first order. (And I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Jay for taking on the additional role of Project Editor for Cascadia—and Ken for serving with him as Co-Editor for Green Space.)

So … prepare to be blown away. And once you are, I hope that you go on to savor every novel, every story, every word committed to paper (and audio!) by these two wonderful artists.

Steve Feldberg
Audible.com
March 2014

***

In the Forests of the Night

Introit

It would be nice to say that Tygre arrived in Cascadiopolis on the wings of a storm, riding the boiling front of electric darkness and lashing rain like a tall, handsome man out in some John Ford western. Or that he came through shadow and fire by a secret tunnel through the honeycombed basalt bones of these green-covered mountains, a hero out of templed legend following the journey of the gods. It would be nice, but inaccurate. Tygre arrived the way almost everyone comes to Cascadiopolis: either by accident, by judicial design or by following the damp silences between the trees higher and higher until there was nowhere left to go.

In Tygre’s case, all three.

His name was Tygre Tygre. Spelled the way Blake originally did, T, Y, G, R, E. Or, if you prefer to file it by last name as so many sentencing authorities and similar busybodies do: Tygre comma Tygre. Not that he had a file, which made him unusual for someone who wasn’t otherwise born and raised completely off the grid. But then Tygre was unusual from before we ever saw to him long after we laid him down in the forest loam beneath a simple stone marked only with a stylized flame.

Death improves everyone’s reputation. For some, it also multiplies their power.

• • •

Bashar grunts. A familiar, weary look nestles in his narrowed eyes, visible to the pickets even in the deep, green-black shadows of a Cascades evening. The men and women who stand at Cascadiopolis’ first line of defense know better than to give him cause for challenge. Not when he is in this mood.

Even the new fish like Kamila understand this with the same brute instinct that keeps young cats alive in the face of a battle-scarred neighborhood tom. Still, she is not so smart as she should be. Spiked into camo netting forty feet up a Douglas fir, she tries to sneak a hand-rolled smoke.

Cigarettes are so twentieth century, the pocket-sized equivalent of an SUV these days, but there’s been a fad for them in the cities up and down the I-5 corridor. Every generation ignores the lessons of the one before. It’s not tobacco—long haul transport is too difficult and expensive for something that doesn’t pay good Euros by the gram—but a mix of locally grown herbs and good old-fashioned ganja. Rolling papers can be sourced regionally from the old Crown Z mill up on the Washington side of the Columbia.

Everyone knows this. The old hands, meaning anyone who has been on the picket line for more than a week, also know that Bashar hates cigarettes with the same passion that he hates concrete, white people and internal combustion.

Kamila does not know this, so she clicks her sparker and takes a drag inside a cupped hand. Bashar has the hearing of a bat, they whisper to one another when the commander is on the far side of a basalt-ribbed ridgeline. He stops, pressure-rifle suddenly cocked, and without turning his head says, “Miller.”

She accidentally swallows the butt, then chokes hard on the mix of hot tip, raw smoke and an inch of lumpy paper going down her throat. “Sir,” she squeaks.

“Drop it.”

The new recruit almost says, “Drop what?”—a relic of oppositionally defiant teen-hood so recently left behind, but the absolute silence from her fellow pickets warns her. Cautiously she casts her sparker down. It hits the mossy ground with a muffled thud to be swallowed by the shadows at the base of her tree.

“The fag, Miller.” Now Bashar sounds bored. That is when he is at his most dangerous. “Drop the fag.”

“I don’t have it,” she whispers, then belches smoke and paper shards amid a searing pain in her larynx.

Still not looking over his shoulder, Bashar snaps off a three-needle burst from his weapon, which takes Kamila in the meat of her thigh. She squeaks with the agony of the non-lethal hit as the tangy reek of blood blooms among the trees.

Whatever he was going to do to her next was lost amid a startled challenge from Ward, a hundred yards downslope hunkered down behind a lichen-raddled boulder.

Her voice crackles over the dissociated network of turked comm buds, shouting, “H-halt!” A fraction of a second later the words echo through the cooling air.

Bashar moves like a mountain lion on a wounded sheep; fast, hard and silent as he makes the long descent in a dozen bounds. Ward knows better than to apologize—she is no new fish—but she has the stranger in her sights.

He is Tygre, of course, though none of us have heard of him yet, and he has walked right past the outer line of Bashar’s pickets as if they were a row of dead streetlights on some Portland boulevard. The picket commander meets the invader face to face in a rare pool of moonlight this deep beneath the spreading arms of the mountain forest.

For a moment, even this toughest of the renegade city’s partisans is lost in the mystery of the man who would be their king.

• • •

We quote from the introduction to a master’s thesis written during the last year that the Sorbonne was still a degree-granting institution:

The early decades of the twenty-first century brought the collapse of the American project. A noble experiment in democracy and economics had transitioned through imperialism, then dove straight into the same hollow irrelevancy which had seized the eighteenth century Spanish crown—a zombie empire shambling onward through the sheer weight of its extents, but devoid of initiative or credibility. Where Spain had been dogged by England in those post-Armada years, America after Reagan was hunted by a pack of baying hounds: transnational terrorists, post-NATO powers and resource-funded microstates with long-armed grudges. All this while rotting from the inside as the true failures of internal combustion-centered urbanism were finally exposed like worms in the heart of a prize bitch.

Hope was not dead, but it lived in strange, isolated colonies on the warm corpse of the United States. Astronomers listened to good news from outer space in their enclaves in Arizona, Wyoming and west Texas. Green entrepreneurs only a generation removed from South Asia and Eastern Europe clustered amid the Monterey pines of Big Sur, in the cornfields of Iowa, within sealed, half-buried arcologies along Pamlico Sound. The stochastic city blossoming hidden amid the near-ruins of Detroit, silent and extra-official as it was, prospered as no city had since the 1947 founding of Levittown unknowingly sentenced urban cores to slow death.

Cascadiopolis was an equally stealthy western answer to Detroit’s secretive rebirth. Built on Federal land, its inception funded by a handful of private philanthropists, its initial design ruthlessly controlled by a Colorado environment activist who fancied himself a latter-day Pablo Lugari blessed with a much larger canvas, the city-that-was-not-a-city hidden high in the Cascades grew not despite itself but through the sort of deliberate intent not seen in North America since Pierre L’Enfant laid out the streets of the District of Columbia. Where Washington’s diagonal avenues had been arranged to provide maximum opportunity for enfilading cannon fire to repel British invaders, Cascadiopolis defends itself in far more subtle, and effective, ways.

Tygre Tygre aimed to approach that city much as the British had approached James Madison’s Washington. Like his historical predecessors, he would set flame to the seat of power. Like them, he would ultimately fail, while the dream that was the heart city would endure.

• • •

Tygre is a tall man, like all natural leaders. We are not so far from the fruit trees of Central Africa, and the same height that confers the advantages of long-armed reach and the first glimpses of danger also helps dominate committee meetings and win bar fights. Our genes know this, far deeper even than our socialization, which only reinforces the message.

The newcomer is ambiguously colored in the pooling moonlight of the Cascades night. Bashar cannot decide for a moment exactly which species of hatred he will deploy on this intruder so arrogant as to walk straight through his brutally trained pickets. The newcomer doesn’t seem to be a white man, but neither is he safely, anonymously dark-skinned. Something weird, like Anadaman Islander, or someone from the genetic melting pots of late, unlamented West Coast liberalism.

Distrust is universal, Bashar reminds himself as he slips the muzzle of his weapon up into the soft skin at the bottom of the taller man’s chin. “Welcome to the end of the line,” he whispers.

Tygre is unperturbed, calm as a man being handed a check by a bank president. When he speaks, his voice has a timbre that could call armies to the march, bring men and woman alike to their knees, or fill an offering plate. “I rather prefer to believe this is a beginning.”

Bashar nearly shoots the man right there and then, but something stays his hand. He would be within the rules of engagement—nobody legally enters Cascadiopolis by night, not ever. “You never heard of the Granite Gate?”

That is the outpost much further down in the watershed, where the abandoned railroad spur runs out of trestle, where people with visas or deportation orders or any of a hundred essential materials cited on the ever-circulating lists can appear and apply for entry.

Even here in the heart of fog-bound anarchy, there are processes, rules, requirements to be followed. Freedom must be protected by a wall of suspicion. Only rats slip through under dark of night. They are trapped, beaten, skinned, and then hung out to rot on iron poles at the farthest boundaries of the city’s territory like shrike-impaled prey.

These measures are largely effective, making the work of Bashar’s pickets much easier.

But not tonight.

“It was not convenient for me,” says Tygre.

“Convenient,” says Bashar as if he has never encountered the word before. Despite himself, he is fascinated. No one has been so utterly unafraid of him since he hit puberty. Thirty years and a near-collapse of civilization later, Bashar’s very name is a byword for brutally effective security from Eureka to Prince Rupert.

“No.” Tygre smiles. In that moment the true force of him is revealed like diamonds being spilled from a velvet bag. Calling it charm would be like calling a North Pacific typhoon a breeze. A tall, handsome man with a voice like bottled thunder can take on armies. A tall, handsome man with a voice of bottled thunder and that smile can take over nations.

Even Bashar is set back. “We have rules,” he says weakly, a last gasp of bluff in the face of defeat. A million years of evolution have conflated with the raw tsunami of one man’s power to overcome even his profound distrust. His pressure rifle drops away from Tygre’s chin. “What’s your name?” Bashar barely swallows the “sir” hanging at the end of that sentence.

“Tygre.”

The word rolls through all the pickets on the turked comm circuit, echoes in the ears of those within shouting distance even though the man is whispering, launches into the air like the compressed chirp of an uplink releasing orbital kinetics on some unsuspecting ground site.

Some last vestige of procedure rescues Bashar from terminal embarrassment. “You have a visa, Tygre?”

“Do I need one?” His voice holds the infinite patience of a kindly god.

“Asylum,” mutters someone sotto voce in the dark.

Bashar doesn’t even seem to notice for a long, hanging moment. Then he echoes the word as if the thought were his own. “Asylum. You can claim it.”

“I claim asylum.” The gentle humor in Tygre’s voice would make a stone smile.

• • •