PodCastle Miniature 77: The Tome of Tourmaline
Show Notes
Rated PG
The Tome of Tourmaline
by Ken Liu
“Come, come!” the attendants at the gate of Tourmaline call to you. “Come and bathe your feet.”
The water is refreshing, ice cold, straight from the glaciers on top of the mountains far to the west. You wash away the dust of your long journey across the desert, and marvel at the streets lined with twenty-foot slate slabs, the centers slightly depressed from centuries of traffic. You squint at the bright blue murals depicting rearing elephants and leaping lions in smooth jade and lapis lazuli.
When you stand up, the attendants hand you a towel and point you to the center of the city.
“But I haven’t told you why I’ve come,” you protest.
“All visitors come here for the Tome,” they tell you.
About the Author
Ken Liu
Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and a forthcoming third volume) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016), a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017).
In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous works from Chinese to English, including The Three-Body Problem (2014), by Liu Cixin, and “Folding Beijing,” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners.
About the Narrator
Wilson Fowlie
Wilson Fowlie lives in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada, and has been reading stories out loud since the age of four. He credits any talent he has in this area to his parents, who are both excellent at reading aloud. He started narrating stories for more than just his own family in late 2008, when he answered a call for readers on the PodCastle forum. Since then, he has gone on to read dozens of stories for PodCastle, as well as all of the other Escape Artists ’casts, and many other fiction podcasts all over the web. He does all this narrating when not reading copy for corporate videos, and acting in local theatre productions.
