“Slick as oil over water, Katia headed for the house of the man whose dreams she needed to reprogramme. She shifted through his bedroom wall like damp through old bricks to wait by his cot for the right moment. Then, as his eyes began to flick back and forth and his long limbs twitched, she bent close to his ear, reintroducing the precious seed stolen by the Reversionists to demolish the future.”
In ZeroFlash in response to prompt including, um, zeros!
Written for Every Day Fiction’s one-time invitational.
Photo credit: adapted from Polaris the north star by pakpolaris-d34x4z1 via Google images.
“If you walk on the cracks, the bears will get you.”
“No, they won’t.”
But they did. Not bears exactly, more trans-dimensional, multi-versal, quantum-coherents with no sense of humour.
‘The Spooking of Einstein’ is in Urban Fantasist’s Grievous Angel today. 290 words, free to read.
If you had to choose Earth’s representative for First Contact with aliens, it probably wouldn’t be a 3’6″ Black Glaswegian with no diplomatic experience, would it? ‘When Gliese* Met Glasgow (and Muira made a mint)’ reached the Finals of Pen2Paper, a competition run by the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities; goodness knows how! They’re all here, free to read: http://www.txdisabilities.org/pen-2-paper
* Gliese exists. It was the first star system found to have at least one potentially habitable planet in its orbit.
I am a fraud because I don’t think I’ve actually written about dragons. Much of the time though, I’m not too far removed from the fantastically speculative sphere in which they might be found, and I do have several. They spend their observable time in static states – meta
l, ceramic and the like – transforming to wreak havoc at times only cats can see and who are mostly complicit in the resultant wreckage. Also, if it hadn’t been for the raining thread, I would have moved to Pern and got myself a flock of fire lizards. So I am accepting this award, kindly conferred by Sarah Higbee, on those spurious grounds, and to be consistent with my roundabout qualification for it, I’m going to mess with the rest of the rules too.
Let’s get the fifteen onward nominees out of the way first: as I know of very few (my problem, not theirs) and Sarah is one of them I’m going to risk setting up a perpetual loop in which WordPress continually refers to itself by citing the ones on her list – minus me, of course because that would be proper silly, wouldn’t it?
– Mhairi Simpson – Crazy Creative
– Lizzie Baldwin – My Little Book Blog
– Sara Letourneau’s Official Website & Blog
– Michael D. Griffiths – Yig Prime
– Joanna Maciejewska – Melfka
– Leiah Cooper – So I Read This Book Today
– Anastasia – Read and Survive
– Zeke Teflon – Rip-roaring reviews
– D. Parker – yadadarcyyada
– Ionia Martin – Readful Things Blog
– Siamese Mayhem – Musings on YA novels and pop culture
– Humanity’s Darker Side – A book review blog
And Sarah, of course.
I’m going to add some favourite stories too, in case you haven’t come across them or their authors. First up, Sara Maitland’s Moss Witch and Other Stories. Sara often injects real science into her stories but so expertly woven that you’d never guess. Then there’s Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice collection the first of which, Singing My Sister Down, demonstrates the sideslip of Lanagan’s imagination. And what about Catherynne M Valente’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time? This is an extraordinary mix of SF, fantasy, and philosophy – and it’s in audio too so you can sit back and listen instead of taxing your eyeballs. Another mind-grabber is Aliette de Bodard’s 2013 Hugo nominated Immersion which is about wearable avatars. Finally, Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie which swept the board of SF awards in 2012.
So now the facts-about-me thing.
Hm.
Hm.
Hm.
Ok, here’s one: I was a Captain in the Territorial Army for a short while and was put on standby for the first Gulf war. They sent the other field hospital which was fortunate as no one had shown me how to wear all the various hats in the manner befitting.
It’s the time of year for them isn’t it, tiny helpless little balls of fluff that seem to have been abandoned? But we’re told to leave them be, they were put there, the parents are watching. Perhaps these people should have done the same with what they found, out there in a capsule in deep space. From the recycler, Baby Bird was published by Read Short Fiction in 2012. About 1500 words.
When disease surfaces in a world long free of illness, the old techniques for containment must be put in place, if anyone can remember how. Incubators is free on Readwave 2705 words
From the recycler: ‘No Arrests in 2039′ Every Day Fiction, 7th September 2011. A bit of SF here but with some extraordinary science in the offing that makes it a chilling possibility. 851 words
A little bit of sci fi first published in Powfast Fiction in 2010 and re-posted here in the interests of promoting (see what I did there?) recycling: https://conboyhillfiction.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/promotion/. Very short.
‘Something odd was happening. The air had been tingling for days; fizzing when he wafted his hand across his face.’ On Readwave now.
