Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beware of alchemists, if alchemy is real in your universe. It can permit access to unlimited power, and while power might not corrupt, it can reveal deeply corrupt personalities.

This long but never slow novel centers around two people, not corrupt, who were created as a very corrupt alchemist’s experiment to manipulate the universe. What could go wrong? In Seanan McGuire’s capable hands, a lot. Human beings, even artificial ones, resist control. They will resist before they know what they are, and they will resist even harder after they find out what they can do.

From the first page, the story is told with urgent, evocative prose. “Timeline: five minutes too late, thirty seconds from the end of the world. There is so much blood.” Exactly what too late means becomes more clear as the story develops and adds successive layers of complications and depth.

This novel won major awards and nominations for a reason. It might break your heart — and it might make your heart full. Spoiler: it is not the end of the world. This time.

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My publisher, Tor, has made a few ebooks available at the special price of only $2.99 throughout the entire month of April:

•   Semiosis by Sue Burke
•   Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey
•   Afterparty by Daryl Gregory

Find out more about the books and get links to your favorite bookseller here:

$2.99 eBook Sale: April 2021

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My latest novel, Immunity Index, goes on sale May 4. Read an excerpt here. Read a different excerpt here.

I own a few bits of woolly mammoth ivory. Although the sale of ivory from elephants is restricted and highly controversial, woolly mammoth ivory is unrestricted and provokes few worries.

That’s because elephants are listed as threatened with extinction by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), and despite conservation efforts, illegal trade continues. Woolly mammoths, however, went extinct about 10,000 years ago. No mammoths are killed to obtain ivory because they’re already dead, so woolly mammoth ivory remains relatively easy to buy and somewhat affordable.

My ivory came from Alaska, and I bought it from a jeweler. He had bought a piece of tusk that came with a bark-like crust, the result of thousands of years of aging, which he’d stripped off and was selling for 25 cents per gram, since he had no use for it.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, either. It looks a lot like tree bark but feels and weighs more like stone, since it’s basically a mineral that our bodies can produce: a tooth. Perhaps I could use my bits to make jewelry that uses its rough aesthetics to artistic advantage.

I bought the ivory because a woolly mammoth plays a role in my latest novel — specifically, a mammoth recreated by genetic engineering. While the novel largely deals with other issues, it mentions a few of the problems with mammoth de-extinction. For example, mammoths, like elephants, led highly social lives. If we want to bring them back humanely, we need to bring back many large herds of them. In the book, sadly, that wasn’t done.

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The latest novel, Immunity Index, goes on sale May 4. Read an excerpt here. Read a different excerpt here.

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Much has been made of the lack of the word “blue” used by Homer to describe the sea in the Illiad and the Odyssey. Instead, he often compares its color to wine.

But water is blue! So is the sky! Therefore ancient Greeks had problems with the color. Perhaps they couldn’t even see it.

To which I say: hogwash. I live next to an inland sea, Lake Michigan, and it can be a variety of colors, depending on the waves, the turbulence, and the sky. Besides many shades of blue (from pale to deep), the water can also look green, gray, brown, black (at night), and white (in winter), among other colors, sometimes several colors at once.

The sky can display a multitude of colors as well, especially at sunset and sunrise.

And so, on some wonderful mornings, water can be turned, briefly, into wine.

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Tangentially, there’s this discussion of the color of the sea from Ulysses by James Joyce, about which I have no comment.

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My next novel, Immunity Index, goes on sale May 4.

I made two mistakes when I started writing the novel Immunity Index.

The first mistake was to try “pantsing” as a writing technique — that is, to write from the seat of my pants rather than from a plan and an outline. While my first drafts are always shit (which does not make me at all like Hemingway in any other sense), this first draft was especially bad and required nine painful complete rewrites.

The second mistake was trying to tell a story set in the near future. Events in the future, like the things seen in a convex mirror, are closer than they appear.

This vision of the future, however, started back in the 1980s. As a newspaper reporter, I was covering news about AIDS, then a terrifying new disease. One evening, before a meeting, I was chatting with the Wisconsin state epidemiologist. He said that as bad as AIDS was, it could have been worse. He was a gay man, and we both knew that AIDS was already a disaster, and the disaster would keep growing.

He said, though, we were lucky that AIDS was only communicable, not actually contagious. Worse would have been a fatal illness that could be spread as easily as a cold.…

In 2018, I imagined a deadly, contagious coronavirus. It was fiction. Until it wasn’t.

My fictional story, though, is better than our shared reality. For one thing, the novel has a happy ending — and it has suspense, intrigue, adventure, and a woolly mammoth.

Immunity Index, goes on sale May 4. Publishers Weekly has a review. Read an excerpt here.