Conservation of Shadows (42 page)

“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.

“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.

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.