#thresholder

This is an index of things I've written and posted online, with minimal descriptions because most of them have blurbs if you click the link. This list is not exhaustive, especially because there are a bunch of short stories and dribbles in various places. If something you liked is missing, let me know.

Web Serials

Worth the Candle - Juniper Smith is a teenaged Dungeon Master who ends up in a world filled with all the things he dreamt up for his campaigns, along with signs of his friend who died months earlier. This Used to be About Dungeons - Five teenagers live in a house together, bake bread, tend the garden, and occasionally fight monsters in dungeons. Thresholder - Thresholders travel from world to world, fantasy one minute and scifi the next, always encountering an opponent, growing stronger as they battle. Shadows of the Limelight - Fame gives you superpowers, and Dominic just saved the world's greatest hero from defeat in full view of a large audience. Glimwarden (unfinished) - A small town huddles around lanterns that keep the darklings at bay. Four teenagers must grow in power as the darkness encroaches. The Dark Wizard of Donkerk (unedited) - Two men steal a baby from an orphanage, then find out he's too cute to sacrifice and raise him as their own.

Fanfic

The Metropolitan Man (Superman) - Lex Luthor attempts to unravel the secrets of the alien. A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good (Superman) - Superman gets really into effective altruism. Instruments of Destruction (Star Wars) - A fable of project management aboard the second Death Star, through the eyes of Admiral Tian Jerjerrod. Branches on the Tree of Time (Terminator) - Sarah Connor is working as a software engineer at UCLA when a naked man shows up on her doorstep. A Bluer Shade of White (Frozen) - Elsa can make life, and Olaf is smarter than he looks.

Shorts

Eager Readers in Your Area - Artificial intelligence has left authors scrambling for readers. Charlotte clicks on an ad. Variations - An orc visits an art exhibition where she feels out of place. Contratto - Julia takes a job as a marketer, working for the vampires to keep their secrets safe. The Randi Prize - James Randi offers a prize for anyone who can demonstrate supernatural abilities. Coming Home - After a long time isekaied to a fantasy kingdom, an errant father has coffee with his estranged son. Drips and Drabs - A collection of microfiction

I also post short stuff to this very tumblr, which can usually be found under the #microfiction tag unless I forget. Usually this is mirrored on AO3, unless I'm lazy.

Web Comics

Millennial Scarlet - Lamont Pearce is a gig economy demon hunter whose mother ran a government agency meant to defend against Hell. Worth the Candle - A webcomic adaptation of the web serial

Non-Fiction

@weaselandfriends released the first three chapters of 1 Over X, a horror novel set at an elite all-girls school. Horror in prose is notoriously difficult, as the effectiveness of the scary beats is really contingent on how vivid the reader's imagination is. Indeed, 1/X seems interested in deconstructing horror as a genre, examining what exactly it takes to make a story scary. Bavitz is a diehard horror fan who's clearly spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The rest of the story will be posted at an accelerated rate over the coming weeks, but these first three chapters give plenty to dig into, ending on a wicked twist. I do think, particularly thanks to the quality of Bavitz' prose, he's succeeded in creating an unsettling vibe, preying on the universal anxiety of being alone in the dark:

The closet told another story. Above hangers of neat-pressed outfits a nook burst with stuffed giraffes and elephants, board games, dolls in dresses, rolled-up posters, a soccer ball, an electronic dog that was supposed to speak but didn't, bags of paintbrushes and phials of paint, stacks of paperbacks about famous fives and secret sevens, six toy horses, a tube of glitter, and the art anatomy manual with the nude models hidden under a duffel bag of old coursework. There was more out of sight; the closet extended well past the doorway. Buried in blankets up to my chin, I must have been staring at that unseen continuation. I must have been training my eyes right there, wondering about Eric and who did what wrong, when I noticed it. It hovered, halfway hidden, in the closet doorway. Just under the upper nook, amid my blouses and uniform tops. Everything was so dark, I couldn't tell what it was. I didn't remember anything there before. It wasn't one of my things. I squinted. Shapes became clearer. Lines, details. I felt, suddenly, that I did not actually want to know what I saw in my closet. What that shape, exactly, was. But I could not look away. Looking away, I knew, would be fatal.

@alexanderwales released Chapter 167 of Thresholder, which is now on Volume 5. Thresholder has been Wales' most action-heavy work to date. The basic concept is that a guy who loves to argue with people online has been sent through a portal to other worlds, hopping between dimensions, accruing abilities and being drawn into conflict with other Thresholders. He's got a serial-numbers-filed-off suit of Iron Man power armuor with a built-in AI, and a flying sword. As usually, Wales' big strength is his worldbuilding; he's easily the most imaginative writer I know, and his writing is full of compelling little details. It's a story tinged with melancholy and purposelessness, but with a real sense of struggle. The protagonist, Perry, is a real freak, and I adore inhabiting his perspective, it makes me want to crawl up the walls. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the web publishing business, the first four (completed) books have been removed from Royal Road; you can get them on Kindle. Book 5 is slated to be the final book, but it's been kicking Wales' ass from an output perspective, so I'm just savouring each chapter as they come out.

He dismissed the memory — the reconstruction of a memory, or whatever it was — and went further into the past. He saw Earth again for the first time in years, his Earth, not the Earth that Marchand came from. He went on a hike through a forest, sat in a classroom, listened to his friends talk about inane political topics. It felt specific and clear, but also more than what he actually remembered, and he tried to follow the argument, to see if there were seams, but he was tired, and simply let it wash over him. The argument was about Japan, and their right to self-defense, and whether this was an example of American imperialism. He heard his own voice, and fell asleep to himself being right about everything.

And finally, @lurinatftbn dropped Chapter 218 of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, a maximalist murder-mystery set in a far-future science-fantasy world that is genuinely unlike anything else you've ever seen. I'm just going to repost what I said about it when I first caught up a few years ago: "Extending human life past the age of 500 has recently been legalised, so an immortality-seeking secret society goes public by inviting the world's best class of gifted wizard-medics to give PowerPoints at their hidden underwater base. Oh, and our heroine Su doesn't know it, but she's in a time loop. What are the "prosognostic events" that force everyone to wear veils in public? Why is there no such thing as iron? What happened to the cook? What happened between Su and her grandfather to make her so invested in the society? Why is everyone lying? Whodunnit? Flower isn't a murder-mystery about solving one measly death. It's about solving lots of deaths. All of them, in fact. And as a fair-play whodunnit, it invites you to puzzle it out yourself, by listening to that little voice that says 'you're forgetting something VERY IMPORTANT'. What do you do when the older generations won't listen, won't stop lying, keep telling you that your lives are perfectly safe in their hands? When it's too socially awkward to acknowledge the monstrous thing before your eyes? How can one break the cycle of death and rebirth? In the spirit of the high-concept visual novels that inspired it, this is the slowest of slow burns, in service of a rare richness of characterisation, worldbuilding, and foreshadowing." It's undeniably a masterpiece. Since I wrote that review, the first half of the story has been concluded, and Lurina has kicked off the second half with a mystery-in-miniature, which has now also come to its conclusion.

I stood there awkwardly. Despite the window being a crack open, the room was effectively soundless, to the point I could hear every crinkle in the parchment as they gripped the rim, and even the movements of their lips as their expression subtly shifted in reaction to whatever they were reading. I had been in this room for less than 30 seconds, and I was already managing to turn it into a torturous experience. This could not continue. I cleared my throat. "Should I, uh… May I sit down?" They shrugged. "It's a free heaven."

Read the full article on my neocities page.

What is a Thresholder? 

Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

Except they’re not like you. If you believe in equality, they’ll think it’s acceptable to do the bidding of slavers and bigots. If you fancy yourself a free market entrepeneur, they’ll be a communist who wants to saddle your efforts with labor law and insidious union talk. If you see no issue with eating meat (if “in this world, they butcher and eat animals” doesn’t even occur to you as a observation to make), then you’ll meet a vegan willing to treat carnists with that same callous regard.

Even if the differences aren’t philosophical, you just won’t be able to stand them. They’ll be reckless if you’re careful, blathering if you’re quiet, and don’t even ask their opinion on pineapples on pizza.

You can‍ ‍—‍ must‍ ‍—‍ suppose there’s an intelligence behind the portals. (A guardian of the threshold, if you will). Of all the uncountable places in the multiverse, they’ll plop you down where there’s air to breathe and proteins that don’t prion‍-​ize your biology. The people will speak your language, they’ll probably even be human.

If it can select for all that, of course it can select just the wrong person, whom you’ll have no choice but fight‍ ‍—‍ kill, even. And if nothing else, they will have been through more portals than you, and it came to blows in every world. Why wouldn’t they expect you to be the same as all the monsters and wretches they’ve faced before? Why would they even give you the chance to explain? The portals can turn anyone into a thresholder.

After all, the next portal won’t open until one of you beats the other. If you find yourself in a world of post‍-​nuclear desolation where acid rains from the sky, the only chance of seeing air conditioning again is to kick some ass.

kingdom hearts 2:

i found a post on discord from back when the series was still being planned, and its initial scope seemed smaller. you talked of spending ~20k words on each world.

now, that sounds a lot less satisfying than what we got; so many interesting ideas could not have seen the light of day, so i love that thresholder grew in the telling

but if you were paid to cut things down to a couple chapters per jump, what would you focus on for each of the worlds we saw?

Let me think about this; 20K words would be novella length, which is maybe workable. You'd cut the "Worlds Of" chapters, never do a flashback of any kind, do a lot of elision ... but maybe? Thresholder chapters average 5K words, so that's four chapters apiece. First chapter is arrival and fish-out-of-water exposition, second chapter is meeting the enemy and the first fight, third chapter is some kind of consequences from the fight, licking wounds, engaging with the world's thing, and fourth chapter is the climax. And that feels very tight.

So maybe the solution would be to make liberal use of in medias res and timeskips, cutting down each world even further to a mélange of scenes that have very little connective tissue.

So a fully abridged version of Thresholder would look more like the start of the current version of Book 1 looks, which has 2 chapters for Earth 1, 5 chapters for Earth 2, and 6 for Seraphinus.

For the five worlds covered in the five books:

Spoilers for Thresholder follow ...