Crossed Genres is running a ‘donate for Haiti’ campaign by having SF/F authors link free stories to their site. Contra Mundum originally appeared in After Hours 18, p. 30; Spring 1993 (all my stories published there can be found in The Realms of Fire). The talented Joanna Barnum graciously gave me permission to use one of her lovely watercolors to enrich the story. If you like the works, please consider making a donation to one of the charities listed at Crossed Genres.
The Tiger’s Bride © Joanna Barnum
Contra Mundum
by Athena Andreadis
Note: Ariáthne, the maiden aspect of the Minoan Great Goddess, was the Mistress of Animals. Her chariot, like that of her Semitic counterpart, Ishtar, was pulled by lions. There are persistent rumors of mountain lion sightings in the Massachusetts Quabbin Reservoir. No one has proved or disproved their existence.
——-
After an interminable interval of slate-gray skies came one day as clear and hard as a diamond. Ariáthne decided to postpone her — so far fruitless — job search and get out of the city. On the way north, she stopped at the Stoneham zoo. She had never been there before.
Her heart swelled with anger and pity. The animals were crowded, emaciated, sickly. She had left the big cats for last. Many visitors were gawking intently into the tiger pit. It was feeding time; the older, much larger male stood over the beef haunch. He periodically interrupted his eating to slap, with increasing ferocity, the young female that kept stealing up to the food, undaunted by the blows that left bloody furrows in her fur.
Ariáthne walked up to a uniformed keeper. In a voice raspy with checked wrath, she asked:
“If they don’t get along, why do you put them together?”
“We don’t have any more space,” he said helplessly. “It takes ages to have a proposal approved by the committee. We had hoped that they would tolerate each other, but the only way this could happen now is if she were to go in heat. But her weight has dropped so much, that has also become impossible. She’ll die of anemia or concussion. Or they’ll come to their senses and have her put to sleep.”
Ariáthne left, hardly knowing where she was going. She drove to Plum Island, but the beautiful place had suddenly become invisible. Burned onto her retina remained the image of the thin, multiply scarred flank of the tigress. She returned home, sat unmoving till it grew dark. Then she rummaged through her tool chest, selected a crowbar and a large file and left.
——-
She had no difficulty scaling the walls. With such lax security, she was surprised the animals hadn’t been hurt. She timed the comings and goings of the single guard, then set to work. Despite the premature arthritis which was already crippling her fingers, the years of laboratory research had given her discipline and skill. She worked so quietly that the animals were not disturbed — except for the tigress, who had come up to the bars and was watching silently, intently.
Ariáthne finally released the lock and sprinted for the wall. She tumbled into the car, then turned to look. Outlined against the stars, the zoo fence suddenly sprouted a cat-shaped bulge. Without any hesitation, the tigress approached the car in a stately trot.
She is hungry, thought Ariáthne, and fear brushed her mind. The tigress put her face and front paws against the passenger window, transfixing the woman with the lamps of her eyes. Without pausing to think, Ariáthne opened the right door and flipped the seat forward. Soundlessly, the tigress jumped in the back and Ariáthne drove away as fast as the dilapidated engine would bear.
I must be finally going crazy, she moaned to herself. If I don’t get eaten, how am I to explain this to the authorities? The neighbors? My landlord? What will I do, hide her in the bathtub and feed her cockroaches?
The big cat’s musky smell flooded the car. Soon a rumble covered the noise of the engine and Ariáthne knew that her passenger would be civil to the chauffeur.
——-
When they reached her apartment house, she considered carrying the tigress upstairs wrapped in the dusty quilt kept in the car, but she was too tired and her package too heavy. So she opted for the matter-of-fact approach and simply used the stairs, since everyone else seemed to only employ the elevators. The tigress didn’t need much coaxing. Once in the tiny apartment, she investigated it minutely. The two resident cats initially reacted with agitation; however, they eventually decided that she smelled like their long-lost mother. Shortly thereafter, all three formed a tight, snoring coil on the bed. Exhausted, and aware that her blankets were being subjected to major shedding, Ariáthne grumpily rearranged the inert mass enough to carve out a small niche for herself. Lulled by the purring and warmth, she instantly sailed into slumber.
She awoke to snuffling and discovered that she was being examined as thoroughly as her apartment had previously been. The alarm clock showed late afternoon; the light through the window was already amber. Realizing that no one had been fed for the last twelve hours, she ran out, praying that in her absence the intra-feline truce might still prevail.
As she entered the elevator, staggering under the weight of six pounds of hamburger, she saw a note on the elevator wall: “Fumigation tomorrow, 9 am to 2 pm. Please remove all pets from your apartment.” Well, she would have to put the cats on the fire ladder as usual. What a nuisance — as if it had ever made a dent into the cockroach hordes. And then she remembered.
She went in, fed everybody. Then, to clear her mind, and recalling that big cats needed exercise, she snuck into the back alley with her unlikely companion, as soon as the darkness was complete.
——-
She had never liked the place. Dark, dotted with garbage dumps, broken bottles and struggling sumac trees, it mirrored and amplified the alienation around it. She waited uneasily for the tigress to finish, her back against a pillar that once had held an electric lamp. And then, the nape of her neck bristled and her bloodbeat faltered.
“Hey, baby.” He wasn’t loud; didn’t need to be. The alley was a dead end and very dark.
“Show us the good stuff.”
They herded her towards the trash cans against the back of the alley. One carried a knife, the other a short metal pipe. It would do. Tomorrow she would be collected with the rest of the garbage. To her, the weapons were in sharp focus; the rest of them remained a blur.
From the mouth of the alley came a low cough. The taller one clicked his tongue in annoyance.
“Check it out,” he rapped. “Damn old winos. I’ll handle this — you take your turn later.”
The other grumbled under his nose, then loped towards the source of the noise. The one left jabbed her lightly in the midriff with his knife.
“Make it real easy, honey. Maybe we won’t have to mark this pretty face.”
A short scream arose, then was bitten off. The man smirked.
“Sounds like the busybody met my friend. Hey, buddy,” he half-shouted, “come share the goods.”
A quiet pad, pad, pad was approaching. Two phosphorescent orbs appeared, stopped, started slithering towards him. He looked at her, fingered his knife, uncertain.
“This some kind of trick?” he started. “Don’t try to pull…” and then the tigress came into full view, and his voice died.
His knife clattered on the ground; a dark stain started spreading in the front of his trousers. The tigress, disgusted with the lack of spirit in her quarry, half-heartedly closed her jaws over his calf. He collapsed to the ground. She released him, batted him around a few times, gave the equivalent of a shrug and came up to Ariáthne.
Ariáthne looked him over; he was alive, more in shock than hurt. Then she headed out of the alley. There lay the other one, untouched, his eyes frozen open, dead of heart failure.
She went to her car, opened the door, flipped the seat forward. Without demur, the tigress leapt in. Pulling on her gloves, as it was getting bitterly cold, Ariáthne headed westward. She entered the turnpike. At some point, the tigress decided she preferred the front seat, much to Ariáthne’s discomfort. Nevertheless, she felt grateful to have warm fur nestling next to her.
On and on she went, under the brilliance of the Hunters, Procyon, Sirius and Orion. The highway was deserted. She started humming a Springsteen tune, the usual intoxication whenever she was at the wheel stealing upon her. She turned off at the Quabbin Reservoir exit, went all the way to the entrance of the park, climbed over the fence. The tigress followed. Then she let the tigress lead, since she had better night eyes.
When they were well into the foliage, she motioned the tigress forward. Reluctantly, the tigress moved into the bushes, then came back. Ariáthne shooed her on again. This was repeated a few more times. Finally, the tigress came over, rubbed her whole length against Ariáthne and melted away silently into the dark background.
Ariáthne walked slowly back to the car, happiness rippling inside her like waves upon the shore. There had been sightings of mountain lions in the Quabbin. Somehow, they had made their way eastward across the urban sprawls. The tigress would find her own kind. In a few years there would be striped cubs frisking in a hollow — and, with some genetic luck, perhaps the beginning of a new species… Felis Ariathnénsis.
She reached her car, looked back. The sounds and movements of approaching day were starting. In her line of sight, an eagle rose, started riding the thermals upward. A good omen. She smiled; a few hours ago, she thought she would never live to see this sunrise. Now she must go back to attend to her life. It was a good thing the exterminators were coming today — she strongly suspected the tigress had harbored fleas. She headed back east, into the gates of dawn.
Like anyone who didn’t greet Cameron’s Avatar as The Second Coming, I received predictable responses to 
Sudden loud noises, abrupt luminosity changes, rapid irregular motion and objects fast growing in your visual field are among the triggers of fight-or-flight. Sound familiar? 3-D effects that force us to constantly flinch away from looming fronds or asteroids; car chases at a speed that our eyes can barely track; explosions, in-your-face gunshots and loud percussive soundtracks that make us jump – these are the common, blunt weapons in today’s blockbuster movie arsenal, aimed to jangle and pummel our brain into reflex mode.
If you think this is hyperbole, consider that Antonin Scalia 
James Cameron made two films that are high on my list of favorites: Terminator 2 and Aliens – not least because powerful women are central to the stories (even though he gave them the most conservative and clichéd motivation for heroism: maternal protectiveness). He was a taut, visually inventive storyteller once. But all his films after The Abyss increasingly resemble the Hindenburg: bloated, self-indulgent, lacking originality and subtlety in all but F/X.
The clunky clichés and logic gaps of Avatar are wince-inducing even if you accept the film’s premises. Here’s a species that’s essentially the “neocortex” of a sentient planet – yet they have… nuclear families and hereditary chiefs. The conceptualizations of the avatars and of the Na’vi neural links to the Pandoran flora and fauna are too silly to dissect. If the link worked as advertised, they wouldn’t need to hunt (or, conversely, killing an animal would have concrete physiological repercussions). I discussed mind uploading in 
There’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying Disney-level spectacle, as long as they don’t make it their moral, intellectual or esthetic measuring stick. An artist with Cameron’s credibility and clout should undertake real challenges that inspire our innate desire to explore instead of recycling militaristic violence porn and preachy feel-good platitudes. He did it incredibly well before, he can do it again. And some childish dreams should remain dreams. They work far better as beckoning beacons.
The world has changed since then, the US more than most. American culture has always proclaimed its distrust of authority. However, the nation’s 
I’ve been reading SF since the early seventies, ever since my English became sturdy enough to support the habit. In both reading and writing, I favor layered works that 
Please understand, I don’t miss the turgid exposition, cardboard-thin characters and blatant sexism, parochialism and triumphalism of the Leaden… er, Golden Era of SF (though the same types of attributes and attitudes have resurfaced wholesale in cyberpunk). My lodestars are Le Guin, Tiptree, Anderson, Zelazny, Butler, Cherryh, Scott – and Atwood, despite her protestations that she does not, repeat not, write science fiction. They all prove that top-notch SF can incorporate gendanken experiments that contravene physical laws: FTL travel, stable wormholes, mind uploading, a multiplicity of genders and earth-like planets, anthropomorphic aliens, to name only a few.
I don’t know if any of these novels will ever get published. But these two green shoots have given me great joy and hope. It was my tremendous luck to have devoted friends who urged me to keep writing the saga; to meet Kay Holt and Bart Leib whose vision of Crossed Genres focused exactly on hard-to-categorize works like mine; and to enjoy the unwavering certainty of Peter Cassidy, who’s convinced that one day the entire saga will emerge from its cocoon and unfurl its wings. Dhi kéri ten sóran, iré ketháni.
When I belonged to several forums, my head resembled a gull rookery, awash with noise, random peckings and guano. Facebook was by far the worst offender, even after I ruthlessly pruned my friends list to a quarter of its size. And trying to reason with loud ill-informed semi-illiterates on scientific or political threads got tedious, sort of like having to handle teenagers who seriously think they’re the first and only ones to discover — nay, invent — sex.
many thoughtful, thought-provoking comments; it also attracted commenters who objected strenuously to the article without having read it. Some brandished Star Trek, The Matrix and Kurzweil’s Singularity at me as science textbooks (or gospels, take your pick).
As a companion piece to Calvin’s 
Update 1: They say good things come in threes. When I got home tonight, I found a surprise package: Jack McDevitt’s just-released novel, 
50 Voices of Disbelief
One of the earliest and most lasting narrative models in science fiction is Frankenstein. The recent SciFi channel reboot of Battlestar Galactica owes itself as much to Mary Shelley as to the original 1978 television series. In the original, the robotic Cylons are creations and inheritors of a now-extinct reptilian race; in the 2003 reboot, the Cylons are our own creation. Like Frankenstein’s creature (in the novel), the reimagined Cylons are as capable of tormented philosophical reasoning as they are of homicidal rage.
nt writing and acting, but by the final season Battlestar Galactica (or BSG to its friends) deteriorated into a self-parodying soap opera. We were told at the beginning of episodes that the Cylons “have a plan,” but it became increasingly clear that creator Ron Moore was making it up as he went along; by the series finale he had written the reboot’s most compelling creation, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, into such a corner that he could only end her story by having her melt into the wind like an bad odor.
Caprica is far better than The Phantom Menace, but that is a low bar, and neither is Caprica as compelling as the opening Battlestar Galactica miniseries. We are supposed to sympathize with Zoe’s grieving father, a Bill Gates-like character, but his distance from wife and work also distances him from the audience. Much more intriguing is Joseph Adams, a well-dressed lawyer who lost his wife and daughter in the same bombing that killed Zoe, and who is attempting to reconnect with his young son William, all the while in a dangerous dance with a Mafia-like gang from his Tauron homeworld. Young William, of course, grows up to be Bill Adama, who helps to save the human race 58 years later as captain of the Galactica. The Adama drama is much more compelling than the dull Frankenstein, I mean Greystone, family but is curiously underplayed here despite a few dramatic scenes.
Two articles of mine appeared today in very different venues.
I saw District 9 yesterday. This gory bore won an 88% rating at the Tomatometer? As well as rave reviews from intelligent, well-educated people across the age spectrum? Once again, as with 
The cruelties of segregation, the plight of refugees, our treatment of Others — those are burning subjects. So is the question of how we would interact with sentient aliens. None of them gets real treatment here. Instead, the film manipulates its viewers into feeling virtuous by being superficially “daring”. District 9 is neither science fiction nor social commentary; it’s violence porn — or, as producer Peter Jackson himself called it on io9, splatstick.
Several decades ago, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) wrote a story in which aliens eyeing the lush terrestrial real estate introduce something in the water or the air that makes men kill women and girls systematically, rather than in the usual haphazard fashion. Recent events have made me wonder if a milder version of Tiptree’s 
Of course, parity is not even remotely demanded — a mere one or two representatives often suffice as a sop (to such lows have we fallen). The bleatings about qualifications and tokenism are absurd, given the vast, stellar non-male non-white talent pool. The excuses sound even lamer (if not malicious) when one scans the predictable, often mediocre, rolodex-friend picks actually made in cases 1 and 2 above… and in more instances than I care to recall at other times.
A story of mine, 
A recent entry by Mike Treder at the IEET site (Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies) 
About a week ago, the Internet went wild with the announcement that a “fountain of youth” drug had been found that extends life by about 10%. I picked a site at random and read the report, knowing full well what I would find buried somewhere in the story. Sure enough, there it was, tucked at the end of a paragraph halfway down: the study was done on mice.
Yours truly 
Alan Sokal was a teaching assistant in my quantum mechanics (QM) course. I still recall vividly the day he came with a graph showing the spike of the first-ever observed strange particle. I remember, too, the playful twinkle in his eye. Thirteen years ago, Alan (at this point a physics professor at NYU) submitted a paper to the prominent cultural studies journal Social Text, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.
I like the aesthetics of Zen Buddhism very much. However, there is nothing to attract me in the religion’s misogyny (women cannot become Buddhas and must be reborn as men to attain Nirvana), its primitive cosmology of universe-toting turtles, its punitive stance that suffering is the result of bad past karma, its oppressive policies whenever it gained temporal power (including pre-Chinese Tibet, which was a far cry from Shangri-La) or the dog-like master/disciple formula that I dissected in my 
crystal domes, or as incandescent engines that create life? Science needs no pious platitudes or sloppy metaphors. Science doesn’t strip away the grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become lovelier as more keep appearing and coming into focus. Science leads to connections across scales, from universes to quarks. And we, with our ardent desire and ability to know ever more, are lucky enough to be at the nexus of all this richness.
