Search Worlds Without End

This story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 16, May-June 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Welcoming Hiromi Goto to the Arsenal Pulp family is very exciting. It’s like having your long-lost cousin show up to your eighteenth birthday party and discovering you are exactly alike. And now, you get to show her off.

A lot can happen in a cousin or auntie’s life, and it might not be pretty. While some take their scrapes and call them unhealable wounds, these are not the ones Goto writes about. Goto describes the mothers, the grandfathers and the children that start out different, or end up strange but never gape at their otherness.

Goto’s characters are imbued with confidence and comforted by the magic of their alienness. Whether you believe that the hard things in life make you stronger, or people are just born that way, these Hopeful Monsters will impress you with their tenacity and their ability to bend Fate.

James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for Science Fiction and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Winner, 2001

Sunburst Award Nomination for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, 2002

From the award-winning author of Chorus of Mushrooms, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian Region and was co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Award, The Kappa Child is the tale of four Japanese Canadian sisters struggling to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat.

In a family not at all reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, four Japanese-Canadian sisters struggle to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat. Their father, moved by an incredible dream of optimism, decides to migrate from the lush green fields of British Columbia to Alberta. There, he is determined to deny the hard-pan limitations of the prairie and to grow rice. Despite a dearth of both water and love, the family discovers, through sorrow and fear, the green kiss of the Kappa Child, a mythical creature who blesses those who can imagine its magic...

Melanie Tamaki is human-but her parents aren't. They are from Half World, a Limbo between our world and the afterlife, and her father is still there. When her mother disappears, Melanie must follow her to Half World-and neither of them may return alive. Imagine Coraline as filmed by the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Howl's Moving Castle), or Neil Gaiman collaborating with Charles de Lint. Half World is vivid, visceral, unforgettable, a combination of prose and images that will haunt you.

Adopted as an infant, Gee has been kept ignorant of his troubled past. Now, at sixteen, he is a loner both despised and feared by his classmates. Dark feelings slowly grow inside him, but as he struggles to control them, his past catches up with him. Abandoning his adoptive grandmother and the place he has called home, Gee is compelled to travel to Half World, one of the Three Realms all living things must pass through. Fractured at one time, the Realms of the Flesh, Spirit and Half World have been reunited, but they are at risk: their fate rests on Gee's own journey of self-discovery. With two unlikely companions, a heartless cat and a self-destructive Neo Goth girl, Gee must fight the monstrous and the horrific and, most difficult of all, he must overcome his own propensity for evil.

Gripping and mesmerizing, Darkest Light is a compelling journey through despair in a desperate search for redemption.