The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard): A Tor.com Original

By Matthew Kressel

"The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)" by Matthew Kressel is a science fiction story about a dying writer who is trying to finish one final novel on the distant planet he settles on for his demise. His encounter with a young girl triggers a last burst of creativity.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780765395696

Matthew Kressel

Matthew Kressel is the author of King of Shards and Queen of Static, and is a World Fantasy Award finalist and multiple Nebula Award finalist. His short fiction has appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, Interzone, the anthologies Cyber World, Naked City, After, and many other markets. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. By day he codes websites, and by night he recites Blade Runner in its entirety from memory. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

When I lift up my shoe in the morning there’s a dead baby lizard underneath. It lies on its back, undersides pink and translucent, organs visible. Maybe when I walked home under the strangely scattered stars I stepped on it. Maybe it crawled under my shoe to seek its last breath while I slept. Here is one leaf of a million-branched genetic tree never to unfurl. Here is one small animal on a planet teeming with life.

The wind blows, carrying scents of salt and seaweed. High above, a bird soars in the eastern wind. I scoop up the lizard and bury it under the base of a coconut tree. Soon, I’ll be joining him. I can’t say I’m not scared.

*   *   *

All tender-belly spacefarers are poets, goes the proverb, and I’m made uncomfortably aware of its truth every time I cross the stars. I ventured out to Ardabaab by thoughtship, an express from Sol Centraal, and for fifty torturous minutes—or a million swift years; neither is wrong—gargantuan thoughtscapes of long-dead galaxies wracked my mind, while wave after wave of nauseating, hallucinogenic bardos drowned my sense of personhood, of encompassing a unitary being in space and time. Even the pilots, well-traveled mentshen them all, said the journey was one of their roughest. And while I don’t hold much faith in deities, I leaped down and kissed the pungent brown earth when we incorporated, and praised every sacred name I knew, because (a) I might have met these ineffable beings as we crossed the stellar gulfs, and (b) I knew I’d never travel by thoughtship again; I’d come to Ardabaab to