When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don’t just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

When I think of the photograph of the girl I used to be, a stranger now, I think how much I miss her, and how she was never really happy in the first place. I still don’t know why she went to Brazil, or if she meant to stand in front of a dump truck or not. But she probably couldn’t see in the dark, or walk on the bottom of the ocean, or take a pun

“Before…How old are you, Elphin?” She turns away, ignoring it. I guess it was a rude question. But something about her is starting to make sense. For the first time, I can see past the teenage waif look and see how old she really is. And what she is now—a being partly sylvan goddess and partly animal, a fairy. She’d been left behind by everyone she

But—and I stress this—it’s not enough. You can be as smart as you want to be, you can be the smartest man in the world, but if you try something like this, a Special Forces reject is still going to rappel over the wall and punch you in the stomach. And then you’re going to be the smartest man on the floor sucking wind. You need to prepare for this

My world is a sphere of rock that circles an orb of nuclear fire, and science and I are setting our backs against it, and it will move. That much is clear. In my island fortress, I keep an elephant tusk, 32,000 years old, incised with a few scratches marking the phases of the Moon, made by the hand of a Paleolithic supergenius, the progenitor of th

There’s no further comment. The Scepter of Elfland has been placed, diplomatically, at the close of my list, without comment, and I wonder about that. Am I being sent to face our worst foe? Maybe, but it’s like a secret between Damsel and me. I’m going to meet the woman who raised her after her mother left, and that’s an odd little intimacy, especi

The thing of it is, I actually liked Erica, even afterward. Even after the headline HERO THWARTS WOULD-BE WORLD CONQUEROR appeared over her byline. She was a sharp writer, although her book of short stories never got much attention. I didn’t see her much after that—she was swept away into the bright lights of the superhero world and the society pag

And if Jason hadn’t been there, I’m sure someone else would have stepped in to save her. He just happened to be standing there, right in position to play the hero and push her out of the way. The zeta beam caught him full in the chest, and he was silhouetted in a shimmering golden haze of particles, penetrating his body, infusing him with the limit

Absurdly, Jason actually took the time to try to read and even review my work. I think he raised some churlish objection about Calabi-Yau manifolds. It was one of our last conversations, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have listened. That was probably the last time when I could really have done something differently. He’d done some calculations