Sojourn

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “A Sojourn in the Fifth City” by P H Lee. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!The Painted Skeletons of ÇatalhöyükA Sojourn in the Fifth CityThe coffin she carried had felt like an imposition at first—a holy imposition! a welcome imposition! but an imposition nonetheless. But by now she had carried it on her shoulders out…

Overwatch Season 2 will see the playable character of Sojourn receive a considerable downgrade. The latest development update from Blizzard detailed a number of changes that will be coming to the game, including the addition of new Tank hero Ramattra, a new payload map, and a number of balancing alterations. Those alterations will see the deadliness of Sojourn’s rail gun significantly reduced, while  Doomfist will receive a hefty upgrade. “Both metrics and player feedback have shown Sojourn dominating the highest tiers…

Inset of the original cover to Homeland by artist Jeff Easley.Image: Wizards of the CoastAfter the success of The Icewind Dale trilogy and the immense popularity of its breakout star, Drizzt Do’Urden, R.A. Salvatore was inevitably going to explore how the one non-evil drow elf in the Forgotten Realms became… well, non-evil. The result was the Dark Elf trilogy, which began with Homeland. It was by far my favorite Dungeons & Dragons novel when I was a kid, and now, 30+ years later, it still is.Homeland chronicles…

The most exciting part of any Overwatch update, or in this case sequel, is the new heroes. Overwatch 2 launched with not one, but three brand new heroes across its three classes to expand the already impressive roster. The cast of Overwatch was already quite diverse in terms of design, but also how each hero functioned, with unique abilities, strengths, and roles in the competitive shooter. The new additions for Overwatch 2 include Sojourn, Kiriko, and Junker Queen. Damage heroes are generally the most popular of the…

Overwatch 2 has finally arrived, bringing a ton of change to the hero shooter. That means a switch to 5v5, a new battle pass, and new heroes to kick off the launch. One of those new heroes is Sojourn, a new DPS hero with a high-powered machine gun that is also a railgun. While Sojourn has been a known quantity to the Overwatch community for quite some time, she is now actually in the game and can be used. Here's everything you need to know about Sojourn.Sojourn overviewSojourn is an offense focused DPS…

It sounds like a handsomely prestigious assignment. The year is 2005 and the unnamed narrator of Amit Chaudhuri’s latest novel has moved to Berlin for four months to occupy the role of Böll professor at an unnamed university. Awarded a generous stipend, he is put up in a spacious flat that once housed the Nobel prizewinning author Kenzaburō Ōe. He has a minder who handles his admin, frets over his cultural intake and introduces him to luminaries in the department.But the narrator is under no great illusions. At his…

Amit Chaudhuri’s eighth novel reminded me of 1993’s Afternoon Raag, featuring an alienated English literature student at Oxford, or 2014’s Odysseus Abroad, about Ananda, a poet adrift in London. Sojourn has the same impressionistic tone – everything feels dreamlike, illusory and yet attentively described. There’s a similar meandering and languid style that likes to survey minor day-to-day details, mingling and suffusing them with the wider significances of history. This time we are in Berlin, though, and our unnamed…

An accomplished writer and a trained musician, Amit Chaudhuri’s prose has the soulfulness and lilt of the ragas. Even his paragraph transitions are akin to a harmonic cadence or a progression of two or more chords at the end of a phrase in music. 176pp, ₹499; Penguin Sojourn, his latest novella, takes forward his tradition of a melodic narrative style. The typical Chaudhuriesque manner of fiction writing doesn’t have a plot in the conventional sense but still efficiently captures the smaller (and at times…