graded by a ghost
Happy day-after-Earth-Day!
Asimov's has posted the beginning of my novelette "The Fifteenth Saint" on its website. It's a substantial excerpt, with lots of different things going on, including one of my own favorite scenelets, Judge Emenev's fight with his niece. Simet has made the strategic error of writing about something she thought was interesting on a standardized test:
“I kept writing my thesis because it was good!”
“The grader didn’t think so,” snapped her father.
“The grader is a machine.”
“It’s a machine intelligence, guided by the practice of an expert teacher,” Emenev interposed. “It has to be that way, for consistent grading. Every fourteen-year-old on this continent takes the literature exam.”
“Every fourteen-year-old everywhere has been taking a literature exam since before I was born. For all I know, the teacher is dead. They’re a ghost. I was marked unsatisfactory by a ghost.”
One of the joys of writing many stories in the same world is that they reference and cross-reference each other. Simet's essay is about "a classic poem of two centuries past." The same events are the center of a tiny text game I wrote a few years ago. The game's protagonist is youthful and enthusiastic--the "classic poem" is far in their future. They give their vision's central figure the folk-magical name "Saint of Vines," while Emenev calls it "an incarnation of the Divine." In-universe, this happens because Emenev has a stodgy bookish side. As a writer, I didn't want the reader to be confused by the distinction between the human "saints" recorded by Emenev's artificially intelligent book and the mystical Saint of Vines!
Gennoveus was definitely confused by my excitement about author copies, but he was willing to put up with it in exchange for chin-rubs:
Yours,
Ursula.