Conservation of Shadows

STORY NOTES


“Ghostweight”

This was the second-hardest story I have ever written, not because of the subject material (I find it funny to slaughter fictional characters, that bit’s easy) but because it took me the better part of six months to nail the opening. The thing about the story is that in the first paragraph you are setting up the story’s axioms, and this affects your ability to hammer in the QED at the end. It is like writing a proof. You have to know what your premises are so you know what you’re arguing from.

Charibdys’s prompt was “origami and consequences in space.” I believe I delivered. Ordinarily, when I’m writing to a prompt for individuals, I don’t write downers because people don’t seem to like downers. I had strong reason to believe that Charibdys would be okay with a story about genocide and treachery, so I went with it.

Once I had the opening, the rest was easy. The hinge is getting the reader to accept the ghost as a given and not question who the ghost really is, which is made easier by the fact that Lisse never thinks to question this. I could be mistaken; maybe a lot of people guessed that in advance. Let me know.

As an aside, this is set in the same world (far in the future) as “The Shadow Postulates,” but you’d only know it if you happen to be one of a small set of people who saw some version of the defunct source novel.


“The Shadow Postulates”

The shadow postulates came from a hazy conjunction of two things in math: Fermat’s last theorem and Euclid’s fifth postulate. Fermat’s last theorem is the famous one where he wrote in the margin that he had a great proof that wouldn’t fit. It is likely that he had a great wrong proof. I have not attempted to read popular math accounts on Andrew Wiley’s actual proof of the theorem because just reading popular math accounts of the prerequisites to understand the actual proof have scared me off. I love math, but a B.A. doesn’t get you very far.

Euclid’s fifth postulate is the one about how if there’s a line and a point outside the line, you get only one parallel line to the first one through that outside point. (That’s a restatement of the postulate called Playfair’s Axiom, but it’s the same idea.) Non-Euclidean geometry came about when people realized you could construct alternate consistent geometries by monkeying around with that postulate, which had been driving mathematicians nuts for ages because something about it felt weird and it seemed like they ought to be able to derive it from the other postulates.

By the way, if it’s any consolation, any time I get near the word “entelechy” I have to look it up in the dictionary. The definition refuses to stay in my head. But then, that’s what dictionaries are for.


“The Bones of Giants”

I had been watching anime about mecha and it occurred to me that fantasy would be great for mecha if you just dug up some big skeletons and applied necromancy. I may have been influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I’m not sure what you classify the Evas as except Bad News.

The necromancy system came from the fact that I had been reading up on traditional 2D animation for a few years. I am not an animator; I have only animated three things in my life (one in Flash, two in LivingCels), and I don’t draw well enough to try it, but reading about how it works fascinates me because it’s something I can’t do.

Also, you ever notice how you stick someone in a mecha and half the time they magically sprout a bunch of completely impractical but acrobatic moves? Possibly after a few false starts, but still. That struck me as ridiculous, so I made my characters work for their battle moves.

Sakera’s hand tremor came from a hand tremor I developed as a side-effect of a medication I was on. It’s very slight now, but when I sketch I long for beautiful, smooth, controlled lines and those are forever beyond me. Oh well.


“Between Two Dragons”

This story is about the Imjin War. The first two wars I grew up knowing about weren’t World War I and World War II; they were the Imjin War and the Korean War.

The Imjin War was a Japanese invasion of Korea from 1592 to 1598, and it gave Korea one of its two great national heroes, Admiral Yi Sun-Shin. (The other is King Sejong, who, among other things, invented the Korean alphabet according to phonetic principles.) To give you some idea, at the Battle of Myeongnyang Yi defeated the Japanese with 13 warships against 133.

The Japanese were very good at land warfare (and the Koreans were unbelievably bad at it at that time), but naval warfare was another matter. The Japanese idea of fighting with ships was to sail their ships right up to yours, board you, and hack or shoot up your people. The Korean idea of fighting with ships was to shoot your ships up with cannons. One of these paradigms works better than the other.

(As an aside, the turtle boat, or geobukseon, was almost certainly not an ironclad.)

Admiral Yi went undefeated, but due to intrigue he was removed from command after the Japanese went home for a breather. Then he was tortured, stripped of rank, and almost executed by the Korean king. After the Japanese came back and defeated the Koreans in a battle at sea, the king reinstated him.

Yi was famed for his loyalty, although the regime didn’t seem to deserve it much. I didn’t want to dump the war’s exact events into a future setting because I can’t improve on history, but I thought I’d explore the loyalty question by changing things around.

Probably the best single current English-language book on the Imjin War is Samuel Hawley’s The Imjin War. But you may find Stephen Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion, which focuses more on the Japanese perspective, easier to locate.


“Swanwatch”

I wanted to put more technical stuff about computer music in this story (at the time I was screwing around in Logic Pro), but one of my betas said she wasn’t interested in music theory, she wanted to know more about the characters. This is why I need betas. I am usually happy to spend pages describing things that no one cares about.

I have been fascinated by black holes since 4th grade, when an astronomy book terrified me by suggesting that black holes get bigger the more they (for lack of a better word) ingest, and the more they ingest the bigger they get. By the time I learned about Hawking radiation I was no longer worried, but black holes struck me as fermata-like, and the story grew from there.

By the way, in case anyone was wondering, the reason Tortoise never talks to anyone is that he’s dead. Although really, he owes something to Ghast Rhymi from Henry Kuttner’s The Dark World.

I would also like to report that I was forced to go to some astronomy department’s very helpful, well-illustrated website overview of Black Holes 101 in order to check some details about the event horizon (I was right, it turned out) because my husband the gravitational astrophysicist was so busy playing EVE: Online that he wouldn’t answer my questions. I am never going to let him live this down and I take particular pleasure in recounting this in front of other gravitational astrophysicists. Admittedly, this is not a huge set of people!


“Effigy Nights”

This story came from two places. Maybe two and a half.

My father is a surgeon. I am not sure what most children get as playthings from their fathers. Mine provided an endless supply of pens that advertised medications whose purpose I still don’t know (I like pens, so this was congenial), occasionally tablets of paper, and those small curved scissors that they use for surgery, once they were no longer suitable for actual surgery. Surgeon hand-me-downs are the best. I spent a serious amount of time trying to cut straight lines in paper with those scissors and never had any success; if you know the trick, please tell me. (I never tried the scissors on, say, a cut of raw chicken. Although now that I think of it . . . ) In any case, the scene in which Seran cuts free the Saint of Guns was originally going to be the opening of a novel, but I got bored of the concept and decided to recycle it into another story, and since this one had paper dolls in it, it seemed suitable.

The second is my childhood love of paper dolls. My mother provided these colonial American dolls of a grandmother and her granddaughters, I think, probably from Dover Publications or the like. I soon grew bored of these and started producing paper dolls of unicorns, multicolored river snakes (Crayola was my friend), and dragons. I cut out gemstones from newspaper advertisements of rings and necklaces so the critters could have hoards. (Hoards are very important.) I eventually worked up to two swordswomen with swords and sheaths quasi-laminated using shiny Scotch tape, so that you could slide the swords in and out of the sheaths. I wish I knew what happened to that old folder full of paper dolls and settings and hoarded gems.

As for the last half? One of my earliest memories is of one of the (many) times I scared the hell out of my mother. I can’t have been more than four or five years old. I had watched with great interest as my mother cooked fish in pans on the stove, and thought it looked terrifically fun. So, with impeccable logic, I drew fish on a sheet of paper with crayons, cut them out with scissors, put them in a pan, and turned on the stove. The fish started burning so I was satisfied that I was doing it right, which was the point at which my mother noticed the smoke and freaked out. (I think she had been distracted talking to one of my uncles.) The moral of this story is that I should not be allowed near paper critters.


“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain”

I only write about vague magical guns because I have no handgun experience and I have reliably been informed that the two things you Do Not Get Wrong in writing are horses and guns. I mostly stopped putting horses in stories after that (although I took a semester of equitation in undergrad anyway, to be on the safe side), but I am loath to give up a weapon option.

(Okay, I took a semester of riflery, too. But not handguns.)

The philosophical conceit for this story came from a book that I still haven’t finished reading, Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves. It has something to do with how inevitability and free will are not actually mutually exclusive. Someday I will start over, read the whole book, and figure out how this works.

The story tap-dances around the question of how ancestry is defined, and the answer is that ancestry is at least sometimes defined socially (“the line of Zot was founded by Zot the Brusque”) rather than an all-the-way-back-to-the-primordial-ooze line. Naturally, I forgot to include any such thing in the story proper, but maybe tap-dancing was the better move anyway.

This has the interesting distinction of being one of the few stories I have written that my husband liked. (We are friends, promise, just different tastes in fiction.) Of course, I know exactly what I do that makes him dislike the other ones, I’m just not willing to stop.


“Iseul’s Lexicon”

I used to say that “Ghostweight” was the hardest story I had ever written, but “Iseul’s Lexicon” beats it, mostly because while I was trying to hash the thing out, I was sick for over three months. It took me eight drafts, which is mildly appalling. My rough drafts are normally much cleaner, but not when I am bedridden half the day with pain.

I had been wanting to write a tactical linguistics story for years, although damned if I knew what on earth tactical linguistics meant. Then I thought up the Genial Ones’ penchant for lexicography and tossed in some genocide, and there it was.

Chindalla and Yeged are very loosely based on Korea and Japan, although it’s mashed up between the Imjin War and the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. I don’t know a whole lot about my family’s experiences of the Japanese occupation. For one thing, the language barrier made it difficult to ask questions. For another, the questions were bound to lead to some messy answers. My spoken Korean is so-so and works best on common domestic conversational topics like food or jump rope, and my ability to read Korean is pretty lousy. But I think about it anyway.

This story originally had a lot more cryptology in it, but my sister persuaded me that going into the combinatorics of how to encrypt syllable blocks in a featural code would bore the reader (I was thinking of working up to a nice Vigenère), so I gave up on that. The petal script is a stand-in for Hangeul. The story goes that when King Sejong introduced the alphabet as a vastly simpler alternative to the method of using Chinese to write Korean, the recalcitrant yangban (literati) remarked derisively that it was so easy that even a woman could learn it. So I decided to have the inventor of my fictional version be a woman.

Many thanks to my husband for helping me think through the plot. Physicists can be excellent plot doctors.


“Counting the Shapes”

Originally this story, which I started in high school, was about wine of immortality. I woke up and realized I had nothing to say about immortality, so I ditched that.

It’s clear to me now that this story owes a lot to one of my favorite fantasy novels, Simon R. Green’s Blue Moon Rising. I have read Blue Moon Rising many times and there is no particular math in it (except the bit about teleportation coordinates), but it has demons and last stands and magical swords.

As for math, I fell in love with it sideways, without realizing it. I hated math passionately until 9th grade. 9th grade was geometry and they introduced proofs, and suddenly math wasn’t about a bunch of arbitrary facts and procedures, math came from somewhere. I despise not knowing the reasons for things, so this was attractive. I read popular math books because it never occurred to me that this isn’t something people do for fun. I read about topology and chaos theory and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and catastrophe theory. I thought people should be writing stories about this stuff. It was more fantastic than the usual D&D fireball varieties of magic.

In my defense, I know about Greg Egan and Rudy Rucker now, but the only libraries I had access to were my school’s libraries in Korea and the selection was fun but necessarily limited. Ditto English-language books I could get at Gyobo Bookstore. My sister and I once got to order books (Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber) from Amazon.com by badgering our dad, as they would ship to Korea. I don’t remember what the shipping cost, which is just as well. It was glorious; but it was only the one time.


“Blue Ink”

In fiction I am wholeheartedly in favor of a good apocalypse and the associated mayhem, but I wanted to go somewhere different for this story. I wish I could tell you that I wrote this story in blue ink. Instead I wrote it at the computer. It occurs to me that I could have changed the font color, but that would have been obnoxious.

I sometimes drew comics in high school, but sadly they were never as interesting as the things Jenny came up with. Both this story and Jenny owe something to the three years of physics I took then, though. The physics textbook came with a lot of interesting sidebars. My favorite was the not-quite-a-joke about the three laws of thermodynamics (You can’t win/ You can’t break even/ You can’t get out of the game). I’ve always liked the idea of a battle at the end of time, when everything is winding down, and while this is not a new idea (my favorite instantiation is Tony Daniel’s “A Dry, Quiet War”), I couldn’t resist giving it a try.


“The Battle of Candle Arc”

This story came from an unpublished novel, which at this time I am still revising; you may or may not ever see it. But Shuos Jedao is one of the characters, and as part of the backstory, I mentioned in passing that he once decisively won a battle in space while outnumbered eight to one. I figured that since Candle Arc received all of two lines, I need never explain how he managed this feat, and I was safe from the reader.

(I should mention at this point that I live in terror that militarily savvy readers will tell me how much I fail to understand tactics, but on the other hand it would be good for me to be schooled, so I will accept my medicine. Just saying.)

Well, I was safe from the reader, but I wasn’t safe from myself. I became desperate to figure out how the hell he had done it. I complained to one of my betas, Daedala, that I wished I could crib from history, and she said well why not? Being Korean, I went straight for one of Admiral Yi’s battles, possibly his most famous one, the Battle of Myeongnyang. Yi did better than Jedao (outnumbered ten to one, killed more of the enemy, and lost no ships) but I figured I shouldn’t push the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

The hardest part was working out how to translate a naval battle taking advantage of a particular channel and its currents into three-dimensional terms, but fortunately I was saved by the fact that technology in this setting is keyed to competing calendars. Once you can artificially create “terrain” in space using the calendars, you can then arrange it to induce the necessary tactics. I swore a lot when I was trying to work this out. It took me embarrassingly long to remember that the simplest way to figure out what is going on is to draw a diagram, a lesson I learned from a couple West Point Military History textbooks; said textbooks are filled with loving maps and diagrams and it’s so much easier to follow what’s going on when there’s a picture instead of just words.

What’s really funny about Candle Arc is that Jedao is not actually deadliest on the battlefield. He’s deadliest when you let him talk to you. But that’s another story, and I couldn’t get into it here.


“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel”

I wrote this for Sam Kabo Ashwell because he was the one who encouraged me to read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I am wary of most people’s book recommendations because my tastes are weird and unpredictable. No one else is responsible when I hate a widely well-regarded book, but life is short and I want to avoid being stuck with books I hate. Anyway, but this is Sam, and after some resistance I bought a used copy I saw in a bookstore and he was right. I loved it.

What fascinates me about Italo Calvino is that this book, his prose, it’s unbelievable in translation. What the hell is the original Italian like? Does it sublimate off the page with its own incandescence? One of the things I regret is that I am not fluent enough in any language but English to have a chance at reading things. I had six years of French and I can make my way through texts sometimes (with a dictionary, unless it’s a monograph on group theory and then all the important vocabulary looks the same as in English), but that’s my strongest foreign language and getting nuances out of prose is a lost cause even so.

So, really, this is an Italo Calvino pastiche set in space, and the vector alphabet bit comes from the idea of basis vectors in linear algebra. I have a friend who derided linear algebra because it was so easy, and okay, it was easy, but it had clean lines and I liked the way it danced for me. I am aware there is an egregious amount of arrogance involved in the idea of pastiching Calvino, but I wanted to give something back to Sam and I figured it wouldn’t tear a hole in the universe for me to have a go.


“The Unstrung Zither”

The idea behind this story came partly from a fascinating bit in Kenneth DeWoskin’s A Song for One or Two: Music and the Concept of Art in Early China. I don’t have access to the book anymore, but the idea was that music had the power to create order in society. I’m not entirely certain if the book said that exactly or if I went off on a tangent.

I usually shy away from elemental magic systems because I don’t have anything new to bring to the table, but I thought I could go somewhere with the musical/magical correspondences. I spent a fair amount of time looking longingly at websites for places where you can get, e.g., guzheng lessons, but that was out of my reach. If I’d been thinking far enough ahead, I should have tried to learn the gayageum while I was in Korea. In any case, technique descriptions (including the one about using the pulse for vibrato!) are based on written accounts, but sadly I don’t know how it works firsthand as I’ve never played a zither and I’m not convinced classical guitar is close enough to be useful.


“The Black Abacus”

I wrote this story for my first semester of Narrative Writing in college. I am not sure what I got out of that class. The professor seemed to like my writing, but I had already sold a couple of stories and I was sure I could sell more on my own. Plus, almost everyone in the class was an English major. At that point I think I had declared for computer science. We were writing to vastly different genre expectations. On the other hand, if I wrote science fiction for the class, I could get the grade for the work, then turn around and try to sell the story. Twofer.

This is also the story of which I got asked, point-blank by the professor, “Is this about sex?” I am not sure how you get from quantum physics and information theory and people shooting each other in space to “sex” off a couple lines mentioning that two people are sleeping with each other, but perhaps I am missing something.

I was reading Scientific American at the time, and although I can’t remember which article it was, I was fascinated by the idea of quantum chess. I apologize for misusing “incoherence”; it should be “decoherence,” but in my defense an English major and a physics major both told me it was “incoherence.”

I know the thing I should have done to make the ending work better, which I didn’t think of until a couple years after its publication. Rachel’s answer wasn’t three lines, it was two words, and it’s obvious what the two words should have been. But then, I don’t write quantum stories; the version that’s out there is the version you get.


“The Book of Locked Doors”

I had the anime Code Geass on the brain when I wrote this, although there is not very much resemblance. (No giant robots, for one.) I came up with the title sometime in 6th or 7th grade, but I didn’t have a story to go with it, so I held off. Much later, I thought of a book of massacred people, containing their special abilities, and I thought that might finally be a decent use of the title. I must also confess the influence of 2nd ed. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—I can’t remember their names now and I also can’t remember which of the sourcebooks they were in, but there were magical books that would increase your stats if you read them.

The setting was loosely inspired by the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the subway ride owes something to the years I spent riding Seoul’s subways. I went back there a little while ago and was impressed at how much better it had gotten, but maybe it was because I wasn’t traveling during rush hour, when I used to have to wedge my way through the crowd with my viola case. A viola or violin (in a hard case) is about the right size for this job, by the way. A guitar would probably work too.

I still don’t know how I feel about asymmetrical warfare, on the grounds that if you’re a much weaker opponent, running up to the enemy in a full frontal assault just seems stupid, but on the other hand, there has to be some limit to what you can ethically get away with. I guess I will think about it some more.


“Conservation of Shadows”

This is what happens when (a) you fall in love with “The Descent of Inanna” in 8th grade, because there’s a Mesopotamian unit in World History and the teacher tells you about Inanna so you look her up in the school library, and (b) you watch your husband play Portal. I loved the voice-acting and the writing for that game, although I have still never played it because I am convinced the puzzles would kill me. I mean, beyond the fact that they start being lethal to your character.

I have this thing where I can dial prose up or I can dial prose down. Or I can pastiche someone. I am a style sponge, which makes me picky about what I read while I’m working on a long project, because as much as I adore Simon R. Green, it’s weird when my words come out that way when I’m working on a story that wants to be non-Green-like. For this one I dialed it up, which I usually avoid doing. There is always the danger of overwhelming the material with tinsel and I am already prone to that fault, but it’s worth doing once in a while.





PUBLICATION HISTORY

“Ghostweight” first appeared in Clarkesworld, January 2011.

“The Shadow Postulates” first appeared in Helix, June 2007.

“The Bones of Giants” first appeared in F&SF, August 2009.

“Between Two Dragons” first appeared in Clarkesworld, April 2010.

“Swanwatch” first appeared in Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams, 2009.

“Effigy Nights” first appeared in Clarkesworld, January 2013.

“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” first appeared in Lightspeed, September 2010.

“Iseul’s Lexicon” appeared for the first time in this collection.

“Counting the Shapes” first appeared in F&SF, June 2001.

“Blue Ink” first appeared in Clarkesworld, August 2008.

“The Battle of Candle Arc” first appeared in Clarkesworld, October 2012.

“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” first appeared in Tor.com, August 2011.

“The Unstrung Zither” first appeared in F&SF, March 2009.

“The Black Abacus” first appeared in F&SF, June 2002.

“The Book of Locked Doors” first appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2012.

“Conservation of Shadows” first appeared in Clarkesworld, August 2011.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoon Ha Lee is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.