The Night Soil Salvagers: A Tor.com Original

By Gregory Norman Bossert

A Tor.com original story from World Fantasy Award-winning author Gregory Norman Bossert.

The Night Soil Salvagers no longer need to perform the service they have provided for longer than memory can account for. Instead, they pass the nights in playful and profound acts of artistry, music, trickery, gardening, and honoring the city they know and belong to more so than anyone.

Uncover the heart of this mysterious community through the tales they tell each other, the tales that others tell of them, and the scores of their Dadaesque nocturnes, as they strive to lessen the burden of the city on the Earth.

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250625397

Gregory Norman Bossert

Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He started writing on a dare in 2009 at the age of 47. Since then his fiction has appeared in print and online, in audio, foreign translation, and Year’s Best anthologies, with stories in Conjunctions, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. When not writing, he wrangles spaceships and superheroes for legendary visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic.

Book preview

The Night Soil Salvagers spend little time these days attending to their ancient calling. Sixty percent of the city is now connected to the sewer system, and public privies provide for a fair portion of the rest. The Salvagers can visit the remaining households, those of the low slums and the great estates, in no more than a third of the night’s hours.

Some of the night’s remaining hours are spent gathering other types of waste: food scraps and food to be scrapped, the street leavings of horse and dog, the ceaseless shower of detritus the city sheds that can be put to use elsewhere and otherwise. And as has always been done, some of the Salvagers work through the night sorting and processing the collected waste into forms whose value is more readily apparent.

The Night Soil Salvagers spend more of those leftover hours in transporting items of the most unlikely natures and most urgent confidence, a service that has become nearly as vital to the city as is their traditional