Author: stantlitore

To my American readers, happy 4th! To everyone: What a summer this has been! I am overwhelmed and joyous. Besides the release of a new time-travel novella (Ansible: Rasha’s Letter), I am delighted to report that I have a new son, and a new house. And there’s quite a story behind both…

Círdan Leto Litore Fusch is named for the Elven shipwright Círdan, keeper of the Grey Havens, who appears often on the coasts of Middle-Earth to rescue refugees and bear them across the sea – like an Elven Dunkirk.

His middle name Leto is from Dune. Duke Leto is a noble character, known for statements such as “Without change something sleeps inside of us, and seldom awakes. The sleeper must awaken.” Leto II, his grandson, is the God Emperor – part human, part giant sandworm. You can see a little of the resemblance in Círdan Leto in this photo, in which the young God Emperor is not amused:

His sisters River and Inara are named for characters in Firefly. Yes, we are a most nerdy family. My oldest, River, has entirely adopted baby Círdan:

Young Círdan Leto is healthy and strong, and about 7 1/2 pounds (roughly 3 1/2 kilograms, for my metric readers in Europe and elsewhere), and I am so excited to get to know him better.

The other big news from this science-fiction writer’s life is that we are moving this month to a new house. This started as a crisis: our landlord announced unexpectedly that we had a few weeks to leave the home we’re renting — this despite having a special-needs child and a new baby about to arrive. We negotiated with her for a little more time, but the long and the short of it is, we need to move. Quickly. I was taken aback, but I sent up the bat signal and called for help. The beautiful thing is that we have many people who care about our family: local readers and fans, other writers in our city, our faith community, colleagues at work. A host of some twenty to twenty-five people showed up a couple of weekends ago and helped us pack up the entire house. Usually I expect from readers only that they enjoy my novels (or don’t); to have so many fans of Ansible, The Zombie Bible, or The Running of the Tyrannosaurs show up to help us box up a house we were being ejected from – that touches my heart deeply. Some fans and writerly colleagues even instagrammed or tweeted it:

I am more grateful than I know how to say.  I have few ways to say thanks other than having offered pizza on packing day — and other than writing many more stories for my friends and fans to enjoy, but that I certainly will do.

While all this was taking place, we rushed about looking at houses in our town, found one, went under contract, went through inspection, and now we are just waiting to close. (It has been a flurry; I don’t recall having been this sleep-deprived in many years.)

So this began as crisis (no one wants to move rapidly while a new baby is arriving, especially in a high-cost housing market where there may not be any room at the inn), but there was a gift hidden inside the crisis. Yes, we are buying a home. And, to our shock, it’s our dream home. And no one else wanted it. All the young yuppie couples in our town are looking for two-story, American farmhouse-style homes. We wanted a one-story ranch: perfect for Inara, who will do most of her moving around by wheelchair for some years yet. It’s also an open floorplan. River was zooming Inara around the long living space in her wheelchair, cackling with delight:

It’s big, and there’s a spot for a basement study where I can put in a window and some rugs and bookshelves and write. It’s astonishing to us that we were able to offer on this place affordably. It really is our dream home, though: Inara’s life can be lived on one floor, and there is space for her medical equipment and, well, everything. It’s immense.

This is Inara and her big sister River, seeing Wonder Woman recently at the theater.

Also Inara. One of my readers saw this photo and said, “Why am I just immediately assuming she’s pulling an assassin’s knife out of her hair? Because it was my IMMEDIATE thought.”

I won’t be writing as much for the next month, except for scribbled notes and partial sketches of scenes on the backs of receipts and index cards, but I think this will be a lovely home to write in. And after years of renting apartments under the persistent pressure of medical bills and scribbling down novels on dining room tables – and then finally renting a house but only for a short while – this is a luxury I can barely imagine. The children are excited; we made looking at homes as much of an Adventure for them as we could.

For me, when I think back, it has been a long journey. I was born in a trailer perched on a little hill on five acres of rocky ground, and later as a boy I lived in a mobile home. To step today, unexpectedly, into a house like this makes me want to weep. Let’s hope everything goes very smoothly with closing.

The real hero of all this story, however, is my wife. Jessica is unstoppable and improbably indefatigable. As I write this, she is coordinating and planning an effort to get a bill in front of our state government to require that landlords give more advance notice when requiring that a tenant with a disability vacate a home. Earlier this season, she took our daughter in her wheelchair and held in-person meetings with our local congressman (after months of persisting in getting an appointment), and changed his mind on a healthcare bill at the eleventh hour. (Few human beings survive an encounter with my wife unmoved.)

She delivered baby Círdan by C-section and was out of the hospital in less than 48 hours:

The next day, while weepy from baby blues, she said a brief goodbye to baby Círdan, kissed me, and headed right out to the car that was waiting to take her to a local social justice summit, where she gave an impassioned speech on accessibility.

I said to her before she left, “Go change the world. I love you. I’ve got the kids.”

I watched her go, sleepily, deeply admiring of her. Then I tucked baby Círdan into my arm and took him back inside the house. I saw that his big sisters were napping, momentarily as exhausted as their parents. Círdan looked wakeful and needed entertainment. A light bulb went off in my head as I walked to my desk: “Come on, baby boy, Daddy’s going to show you how a PS4 works.”

I sat down, revved it up. “Check this out…”

In roleplaying terms, my wife is serious DPS (damage per second), while I am the bard, the minstrel, the sometimes-healer. She changes the world. I tell the stories and hopefully move a few others to change the world, too.

And last, a photo of writer and daughters.

Thank you all for following our journey. You can read more of my daughter Inara’s story in Lives of Unstoppable Hope:

Lives is the story of my daughter Inara’s journey through illness, and my journey with her. It is also a freefall through the Greek text of the Beatitudes: both memoir and devotional. It is from the heart: The story behind all the stories I write. I hope you will enjoy it and find something in it that moves or inspires you.

And I imagine there will be more photos of Círdan Leto on my blog soon. Meanwhile, you can also support my family and my fiction by becoming one of my Patreon members, which grants you complimentary access to the ebook editions of my novels and a behind-the-scenes look at new science fiction and fantasy projects in progress:

I hope one day to have 1000 readers on Patreon. This is a really significant number to me.

I want to write stories that move people’s hearts and make them cry and give them hope when hope is hard to have. When I started sharing my novels and short stories, someone asked me what “success” would look like to me. I said, “If I move the hearts of a thousand readers, then my stories have done their work.” I want to build a community of 1000 readers in my Patreon family. So come take a look.

If you would like to explore my fictional stories further, check behind Door Number 1, 2, or 3:

Choose wisely, as great dangers await…

Thank you for all for reading, and may your year ahead be filled with beautiful stories and much imagination, and maybe with unexpected gifts (though I don’t wish on any of you that the gifts come hidden inside of crises).

Stant Litore

Yesterday I got to see my favorite comic book character on the big screen. Jessica got to see her too. And my daughters got to see a little girl like them grow up into a woman who believes in truth, love, and courage, who may make mistakes but will never let others’ mistakes or their opinions on how she should do things hold her back, and who kicks righteous ass. In the Year of Trump, I don’t have words for how much this means to me.

When Diana of Themyscira walked up onto No Man’s Land and strode across that wartorn landscape with that determination in her eyes, I was cheering, and I’m not ashamed to say it.

When she saw wounded people hurting and disinherited or enslaved and demanded the world stop for them, my heart melted and warmed.

Of all the comic book characters of my childhood and teenagerhood, Diana speaks to my heart most because she is our conscience, because she never stops believing that we can choose to be the best that we are rather than the worst, and because, as the Doubleclicks sing it, “her heart’s on her sleeve and the truth’s in her lasso.”

So I am still riding the glow from yesterday.

Other notable items from the movie:

– Badass middle-aged fighters of varying body types on Themyscira. Not an island of young wispy supermodels. That was pretty damned awesome.

– Trevor — beautifully scripted character. Highly competent, driven, confident in and humorously aware of the masculinity he’s performing, strong and true-hearted though haunted with demons, a well-written hero/spy who never overshadows Diana but whom the script-writers never shortchanged. What I loved about Trevor was he knew who he was.

– Nuance. Covert (Trevor) and overt (Diana) ways of fighting injustice and genocide get in each other’s way, but both respect each other, and … in the end … learn each other. It would have been nice to have a few more lines of dialogue to explore this, but I liked seeing that as well-handled as it was.

– Gal Gadot. Enough said. She blazed in that role.

Happy now.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

When a community of well over 100 avid readers came together to support my fiction on Patreon, it meant the world to me. Not just because it happened at a time when my family was in medical and financial crisis, but because finding such a community and kindling their hearts with stories was what I set out to do with my fiction in the first place.

I want to write stories that move people’s hearts and make them cry and give them hope when hope is hard to have. When I started publishing novels and short stories back in 2011, someone asked me what “success” would look like to me. I said, “If I move the hearts of a thousand readers, then my stories have done their work.”

Now I want to build a community of 1000 readers in my Patreon family.

Patreon is a monthly membership that allows me to keep my stories independent and keep them coming — and gives you backstage access to the stories you love!

If you’ve been moved by my books or my posts — come be a part of this! http://www.patreon.com/stantlitore. Membership dues are whatever you set: be it a dollar or two a month, or five dollars (the cost of one overpriced latte), or more. And you get the books. You get in on their development, on the early sketches for art and illustrations, and you get to read the new stories long before they are released to the public. Come join us! If I can move 1000 readers, who knows what these stories can do in the world?

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

All my characters are somewhere inside me still, inside my heart – even the evil-minded ones. But the good ones, too. Having written their stories, I hear them speak again, from time to time. When times are darkest, I am especially glad that Polycarp and Sahira are still in there. Polycarp asks his friends, when they are despairing, “What do we believe? What do we know to be true?”

I believe in love that endures.

I believe in the irreducible value of every human being.

I believe in tikkun olam: repairing the world, each day, by doing justly and by telling stories.

I believe stories have the power to change lives and to change the shape and course of the world.

I believe that stant litore puppes, that even if half the world is burned to ash, what grows in its place will still be beautiful, because renewal and resurrection and new birth is written into the rhythms of existence, and because ash is very fertile. And though the next chapter does not change what was lost, it is never the end of the story.

I believe in never giving up.

I believe in education, that ‘knowledge is our ally in the night land, our shield against terrors.’

I believe my first duty is empathy. I believe in compassion and in paraklesis: in standing by another who is vulnerable, hearing them, and advocating for them.

And when I am weary, I will reach into that place in my heart where Polycarp and Sahira still stand by me, paracletes themselves, ready to help me to my feet and kindle my heart with a story and walk with me to stand together between the one who is hurting and the one doing the hurt. I am often glad they are there.

I believe in stories. No less now than when I was seven.

Stant Litore

Art credit: The image above is an illustration of Regina, a detail from Lauren K. Cannon’s cover art for my novel What Our Eyes Have Witnessed.

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

On writing the other and writing diversity in speculative fiction:

Dear fellow SF&F authors who are conscious of social issues and diversity…

[Note: If you are a) not conscious of social issues and diversity; b) don’t care; c) only care about accurate representation of some people and not others; or d) are a Nazi, then this post is not intended for you, and it will make you growly and probably not do you or me any good.]

For the rest of us: I’d like to submit a few thoughts for our consideration.

When we are writing a novel that foregrounds marginalized people, and readers who are a member of that marginalized people reach out to us with upset at how they are being portrayed in the book, a helpful response is: “I am sorry; I didn’t realize it could have that impact. I’d like to understand this better.”

And it’s helpful if we’re sensitive to the fact that marginalized people are being asked constantly to explain (and justify or prove) their experiences, over and over and over again, and that by asking them to explain it yet once more, we’re asking for some emotional effort on their part (and their time).

It’s something we ask if we’re really genuinely serious about wanting to understand our fellow human beings better and about wanting to tell complex, riveting stories, rather than just peddle stereotypes (knowingly or unknowingly). We ask it because we want to learn. For the same reason that we ask astrophysicists and biologists and geologists all the questions we ask them, for the same reason we’re reading science updates all the time, so that we can get new ideas, challenge our current understanding of the universe in which we operate, and tell stories that do the same for our readers.

If we stop listening and learning, the stories we tell soon become flat and shriveled and empty and dead.

I really believe that.

We are storytellers because we are such avid listeners and learners that we are constantly bursting with wonder and we are driven to share the wonder with other people. We spin stories because the world is so damn cool and so damn tragic and so damn comic sometimes too, and we can’t hold it all in.

We want to tell stories that make the world bigger, not smaller.

That’s why, I hope, we wrote stories that included marginalized people in the first place, rather than just stories about straight white dudes traveling to other planets and sticking flags in the soil. That’s why we’ve wanted to “write the other.”

Now, as with any feedback we get, we will have to make our best judgment as to how to take that feedback, what weight to assign it, and how to learn from it for the future. People have different experiences, and we will get contradictory feedback. But it behooves us to listen openly first, and hear it.

I mean, if we can survive 591 rejection letters from editors, we can survive hearing a little feedback from people whose lives are impacted or influenced by the stories we tell, so that when we make our best judgment as storytellers, it’s a more informed best judgment than otherwise.

This is especially the case if you are hearing similar feedback from a LOT of people about the portrayal of their lives in your book. Just as if you received feedback from a whole bunch of astrophysicists who all agreed that your science was complete and total bunk, it’s worth paying attention if you’re hearing from lots of marginalized people that your work is tapping damaging stereotypes and misconceptions that you might not be aware of.

So, a helpful response is: “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it could have that impact. I want to learn more.”

Unhelpful responses include:

“I’m sorry that you’re upset.” (That’s not an apology. It’s a dismissal. It’s also a passive-aggressive invitation for matters to escalate swiftly.)

“Well, my one black [or gay, or trans, or Native] friend told me…” (Please, for the love of God, do not ever play the One Black Friend card. “One Black Friend” is not research, and going there makes you look like a shmuck. Even if your One Black Friend is Frederick Douglass back from the dead, don’t go there.)

“I am among the least racist/sexist/transphobic authors in the genre, just look at all my credentials, and I think you’ve taken it wrong.” (Not only will this make you sound like Donald J. Trump, which isn’t a good look, but it is defensive and silly and what it sounds like you are saying is: ‘I know more about your life experiences and the experience of being marginalized in the way that you’ve been marginalized than you do, and I have no need to learn anything more.’ So, whereas the One Black Friend card makes you look like a shmuck, the I Know More About Your Marginalization Than You Do card makes you look like a pretentious and arrogant shmuck.)

“I did my research. I know what I’m talking about.” (This isn’t helpful, because we’re always learning more, and because when someone says you’ve misrepresented them, that’s a learning opportunity. That is literally a new research opportunity. Don’t disrespect your readers by not taking advantage of the opportunity to listen.)

And, by the Hugos and the Nebulas and all sacred science-fictiony things, by all that you hold dear on this green earth, don’t elaborate on your “I know what I’m talking about” with: “I shared the idea for the story with all my friends [who look just like me] and they adored the idea!” That’s…not research. Really, it’s…it’s not. (And, stepping back for a moment, if your primary reaction to being challenged is a PR-focused reaction, then it’s worth pointing out that more research earlier in the process, before actually publishing the novel, might have proven helpful.)

The point is, even if you are an award-winning author, you are always learning. As storytellers, a certain humility and eagerness to listen is expected of us, by the nature of what we do. And if we aren’t interested in learning more and more about our universe and the people in it, we might be in the wrong line of work. I mean, if we’re just here to pontificate and be worshipped, we might want to try running for a position like President of the United States. It’s an easier job to get with lower entrance requirements and it pays better, too. On the other hand, if our work and craft is a matter of listening to as many stories as we can, learning as much as we can, and then passing on the stories we hear or weaving their materials into new stories, that’s hard work, and humbling work, and exciting work. Our stories have impact, because we understand our lives and our community and our world through our stories. We are the weavers of dreams, and dreams create the hopes or fears of a community. There’s no task I would rather be engaged in — but it’s also not a task to take lightly.

How I want to work: Learn, listen, then tell the best story I can. Then learn some more, listen some more, and tell an even better story.

I know of specific things I flubbed in earlier books of mine, and I don’t doubt there are some things I flubbed of which I’m currently unaware. You know what I do once I realize that’s the case? I listen, I learn as much as I can, and I try to WRITE ANOTHER, BETTER BOOK. And I will keep trying to write another, better book until I die.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

Someone unsubscribing from my newsletter took the time to write me a note today, to say: “I’m not interested in reading biased and left leaning ‘literature.'”

Well, I never called it ‘literature,’ as that would be a mite presumptuous of me. And there was no mention of politics, none, in my email announcing the arrival of Rasha’s Letter today. So I assume that the note he sent me actually means, “I’m not interested in reading stories about Muslim time travelers who are not terrorists.” Or maybe it actually means, “I am not interested in reading science fiction about refugees.” Or, if he got as far as reading the description of the novella on Amazon, maybe it means “I don’t want to read about people who are bi.” Who knows.

Ridiculous way to limit your reading, but whatever floats your boat, sir. Seriously, I’m not going to cater to readers’ bigotries. That’s both a recipe for boredom and fundamentally a lost cause. I could write a story about sentient chewing gum (and don’t tempt me), and I am certain someone would still take political offense and find it to be ‘biased and left-leaning literature.’ So I’m just going to write what I want to write, about characters who move my heart facing challenges that move my heart.

However: If, unlike my surly note-scribbler, the rest of you would be interested in reading Rasha’s Letter, it is live today! I am excited to give this story to you. It is one of the best and most moving I’ve written, according to some of the early readers. Part time-travel thriller, part love story: you can get it here.

You can read the entire Ansible Saga here.

Stant Litore

P.S. Got another of those unkind notes in my inbox, from a different reader, almost the moment I posted this. The note read: “Unsubscribe me If you’re seriously peddling this Islamic Puke I Don’t want this crap.”

Seriously, I never got this when my first Ansible stories came out, but I’ve been getting this more frequently ever since 2015, though only from my U.S. readers. What the hell has Trump and his souped-up Islamophobia done to this country?

My response was:

It is Good Friday. This is a day that resonates powerfully for me as a storyteller. Here are two things about the Good Friday story that sink into my heart today:

1. No matter who you are, no matter how the world has treated you, no matter how alone you feel, you matter so much – both in your uniqueness and in your identity as an essential part of humanity – that a handful of people in what is now Israel, Syria, and Turkey once wrote down a story about a God who, out of all the infinite cosmos, wanted to live on earth and breathe and have dinner and walk and talk and love and grieve and die with you. You matter.

3 years ago when I started the Ansible series, I wanted to continue my SF/F explorations of the Near East, this time imagining that in the world after climate change (and projecting from today’s current and extensive investments in higher education in the Near East) that history may swing around and the Near and Middle East and Southeast Asia would lead the world in science, mathematics, technology, and long-distance exploration in my 25th-century imagined future. As has happened before in history.

So I set out to write the stories of intergalactic exploration and time travel through the eyes of Islamic explorers from Iran, Indonesia, Arabia, Egypt, the Sudan, etc. … I really didn’t think of it much as a ‘statement,’ political or otherwise. It was speculative fiction, speculating about possible futures and about time travel and space travel and what one might find out there, and what you might bring with you when you did find it. And about the utter loneliness of reaching across such vastnesses of space and time.

Over the course of those three years, however, my country has gone absolutely raving bonkers. I mean, it was bonkers before. But now it’s completely unfettered-bonkers.

Which is how I find myself at conventions explaining to certain individuals that no, I am not writing about terrorists. That yes, there are Muslim scientists. Many, in fact. That no, this is not an “Islam-takes-over-the-world” dystopia, and no, for the love of God, fellow author, I don’t want to read your “Islam-takes-over-the-world” dystopia. And that if you would just read a damn history book once in a while or learn anything at all about the many, many cultures of Asia and Africa, you might not be as shocked by a science fiction book with a hijabi botanist on the cover. And if you really get combative with me, I’ll lose patience and explain to you how the first story of interstellar exploration was written by a 13th-century Arab. If you can’t handle speculative fiction that speculates about how other cultures would approach first contact, get. Find yourself another author who will cater to the tiny-ness of your world.

Fortunately, even today, the larger percentage of readers who stop by are genuinely intrigued. They actually want some speculation in their speculative fiction, and most don’t bring with them a requirement that a fictional twenty-fifth century conform to their prejudices.

They just want a really good story, and they still have enough curiosity to want to see the stars through more eyes than their own.

And that gladdens me.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

Her name is Sahira.
And she is our last hope.

She is the time-traveling, shapeshifting hijabi defender of humanity you meet in the second season of Ansible, striving across time and space to protect our descendants from the most unexpected and dangerous threat our species has ever faced.

This portrait of Sahira by artist Lauren K. Cannon will be featured as the cover art for Ansible: A Thousand Faces, an omnibus edition of the Ansible Saga. I am elated to have another cover from Lauren, and I thought you might like an early look!

Read the Ansible Saga.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

I just read several blog pieces describing the phenomenon over the past decade in megachurches in which large congregations don’t sing, they just…listen and applaud as a worship team on stage sings. And I am genuinely floored. I really hadn’t known this. Having only ever been an active member of two small churches, I hadn’t known that going to the sanctuary to stand as a silent audience and watch a performance was a thing.

I don’t mean this as snark, truly: I just feel a little punctured.

My heart wants to ask, “But… but when does the congregation praise God?”

My head wants to note, “This might explain so much about the commodification and politicization of Christian media and megachurches, and the substitution of loyalty to charismatic leaders in place of communion with God and his Body.”

And my heart and mind wants to plead: But… but… but! Our church BEGAN with people gathering in secret to sing to God together. Pentecost, the Phos Hilaron, the hymn at Colossae … Paul and Silas singing in a jail cell… It’s why, when I wrote Regina’s story in What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, as she waited in a shed not knowing if the Roman guardsmen would execute her, she sang. She sang with her whole heart. Because that’s what you did if you were a Christian or a Jew or a member of any religion from the East, whenever the first, second, or third-century Roman government went on one of its periodic “we don’t like people from the Middle East and we need to make Rome great again” xenophobic binges. When that happened, you got flogged and thrown in prison, and you sang. You sang with each other. You sang to each other. You sang to God. You sang the psalms. You sang the hymns. You sang because it was how you remembered what was true when the whole world went dark. You sang because in the morning you might be crucified or burned alive or made a spectacle of for the amusement of those in power, and because the hope you and your brothers and sisters sang about was all you had. You sang the way that Kurdish pop-singer sang, as she stood by the tanks and screamed her joy at life and her defiance across the lines at Daesh (ISIS). You sang the way Maya Angelou used to sing, when her heart would be so full of sorrow and pain and love and faith and hope that she would lean back from the podium mid-speech and just sing. But you all sang, together, because you didn’t have a Maya Angelou or a Kurdish pop-singer. You weren’t an audience; you were the spectacle, and you were never going to chant the words the Empire wanted to hear. You were going to sing to God with all your heart because you liked his story better than Caesar’s and better than the story that other men and women had written for you. Because that story had set free your heart, though your limbs remained in shackles.

It was the jailors who didn’t sing.

It was the Romans who forgot how. Who stood applauding in silence or chanting repetitive catchphrases while ever-more decadent Caesars paraded their wealth and power in the street.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!