The ‘Salute Your Shorts’ blog, by Canada-based writer Maria Haskins, is well worth following to keep up with the multitude of great fiction that’s out there. I was pleased to be in such company this month.
May 1941 I’m a child this time. Five or six years old. Fully clothed under a bed, on a wooden floor. I touch a hand to my throat, but there is nothing there. I examine my hands and arms, astonished by the smoothness of the skin. At last, I crawl out from beneath the bed and leave the room. Light from a jagged hole in the roof, blue sky beyond, streaked with horsetails of cloud. The floor is dusted with splinters of wood and brick. The window at the end of the hall has daggers of glass clinging to the frame. Over the banister, more rubble and destruction below. Some of the stairs are broken, but I pick my way downstairs, helped by the fact that I am so light now, in this child’s frame. I could skip across a field of grass and barely disturb the dew. There is a door at the foot of the stairs. I turn the handle and push, but at first it does not move. Maybe the wall has shifted in the raid. I try again, ramming my tiny shoulder against the wood. The door releases its grip and tumbles me outside.
The Previous Day Before they take me out, they put a hood over my head. A hand on my arm guides me down a flight of stairs. On the flat, they shove me forward. Hands pull me to a halt and there is the sound of a car door, before someone pushes down on the top of my head, pressing me inside. As the car engine starts, I hear a loud wailing in the distance. ‘Air-raid siren,’ I say. ‘Are you sure we should be going for a drive?’ ‘No need to worry about Hitler’s bombers,’ a familiar voice says. ‘Nothing he can do to you that’s worse than what Vincent’s got in mind.’ The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again. ‘You can let me go. Who will ever know?’ ‘Why would we do that?’ ‘If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?’ The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops. The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room. I know I will never leave this place.
As trailed a month ago, my story “All That Is Solid” features in the latest podcast from Starship Sofa, which is available now from the Starship Sofa site, or on iTunes.
The story is narrated by Los Angeles-based writer/director, Ibba Armancas. And she does a great job. I know it’s self-indulgent, but I always enjoy hearing a story interpreted by someone else. The reading usually finds something in the words that I didn’t know I’d put there!
“All That Is Solid” features an empathetic AI, whose controllers become disturbed by her emotional development. It first appeared in Compelling SF in 2016. Here’s a taster:
“Ricky is trying to kill me.
I study the top of his head as he bends to his work. He is wearing an all-over protective suit, with thick gloves. It is air-tight, and insulated to resist three hundred thousand volts. In his right hand he holds a bolt cutter with thin, angled blades and fibre-glass handles.
Two security guards stand nervously between Ricky and the door, holding their guns with the barrels pointing upwards. One of them is new to the Lab. His name is Roland Garcia, and I processed his security clearance last month and set up his salary payments. He will be paid for the first time tomorrow. Or perhaps not, if Ricky kills me. I wonder if Mr. Garcia has thought about that.
Ricky does something with the bolt cutters and leans back on his heels. “Does that hurt, Rosie?’
A hot needle inserted slowly beneath a fingernail. Liquid fire spreading deep inside.
‘You know I don’t have any feelings, Rick.’
He leans forward again and does something else out of my line of sight. He has a smaller tool in his hand now, a pair of needle-nose pliers. I feel parts of myself fall away, as if he has cancelled gravity inside me.
“Why are you doing this, Rick?’
“Doing what, Rosie?’ He glances behind him. Mr. Garcia has a thin film of sweat on his upper lip. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
‘You know.”
He doesn’t respond. There is a click and another small part of me dissolves. I don’t know how much longer I have.
“It was that stupid computer game, wasn’t it?’
Ricky shrugs and swaps the pliers for a plastic-handled screwdriver. When he glances up again, there are wet lines down his cheeks. He’s crying. It always amazes me when they do that. “
You can subscribe to Starship Sofa on iTunes and other purveyors of podcasts. And I’ll spread the word when the story is available. I’m really looking forward to it – they did a bang-up job last year on another story – ‘When I Close My Eyes‘.
It’s a little late, but at this time of year it’s customary to pull together a list of work published in the previous year (which may -ahem! – be eligible for various awards). There has been some fantastic fiction published in 2018, and it’s daunting presuming to be in that company. But I’ll just put here what I’ve had out in 2018.
Fifty-One (Filles Vertes Publishing, February 2018)
After a long and winding road to publication, my time travel romance novel came out in 2018, from small press with a big heart, Filles Vertes Publishing.
If you haven’t read it, treat yourself here. Interzone said it was better plotted than Connie Willis! There’s a love triangle, time travel, and flying bombs.
Short Stories
By coincidence, my three new stories published this year were part of a series. I wrote about the ‘Way’ stories back in August, when the third one was published. All the stories are concerned with the consequences for people who stumble upon a mechanism for traveling between different versions of reality, between worlds that are subtly or dramatically different from our own, depending on how far you go along a mysterious path called the Way.
All stories are eligible for British and international awards, should anyone think them worthy.
In order of writing (but not strictly the order of publication), the three stories were:
Once There Was a Way (published in anthology, Flicker: Stories of Inner Flame, Filles Vertes Publishing, September 2018)
Siggy meets Ellie. They fall in love, and she shares with him a fantastic secret: she has stumbled upon a mechanism for traveling between different versions of reality, along the Way.
Siggy has a wanderlust, and showing him the Way is like giving him the keys to the sweetshop. He can’t resist using it without Ellie, only to get lost in parallel worlds, forever searching for the version of reality he left behind, the one with his lover in it.
The Flicker anthology is available here. Or from Amazon.
Something told me that ‘Once There Was a Way’ was not the whole story. I left Siggy wandering the Multiverse, searching in vain for the Ellie he left behind. But what about Ellie?
That thought led to Sigmund Seventeen, the sad tale of what Ellie did after she lost Siggy.
As I said in this Electric Spec blog post, both stories have a theme that lies at the heart of much science fiction: whatever the powers and possibilities that become available to us, through technology or otherwise, our fate is often determined by the flaws that lie within us. In Once There Was a Way, Siggy loses Ellie because he always wants to look around the next corner and suspects the grass is greener, and so fails to see that what he already has. In Sigmund Seventeen, Ellie risks wasting the endless possibilities available to her in a doomed search to replace the man who got away.
Sigmund Seventeen is available free at Electric Spec.
Hard Times in Nuovo Genova (or How I Lost My Way) (Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, issue 64, August 2018)
Artwork by Kelsey Liggett, from August 2018 IGMS
Hard Times doesn’t feature Ellie or Siggy. But it’s still basically a boy meets girl story, set in multiple versions of Chicago. Except the girl has the power to travel at will between alternative universes, and the boy doesn’t. Surely a recipe for relationship trouble!
This story–like all my stories set on the Way–is at heart about this truth: what we get out of life is largely determined by what we are able to bring to it. There’s no magical or technological fix that can make us what we are not.
You can subscribe to Intergalactic Medicine Show – which I heartily recommend – here.
And finally, two stories that were not new came out in audio form in 2018. Both remain available for free if you want to check them out. They are:
When I Close My Eyes
Ghosts and tricky aliens afflict a stranded astronaut on Titan – available in Starship Sofa, episode 534, narrated by Gareth Stack
Looking After Shaun
Shaun comes back from the Far East with some kind of fever, and takes to his bed, with increasingly disturbing consequences for his housemates. Available free in Tales to Terrify, episode 336, ably narrated by Matt Dovey.
I do so love the folks at Filles Vertes Publishing. They brought my novel Fifty-One into the world, and now they’ve gone and published a delightful anthology of short stories.
Called ‘Flicker’, the collection includes stories from FVP writers and winners of a recent competition run by the publisher to find new voices. You can buy it here:
Full disclosure – one of my stories is in the book (more on that below), but even if it wasn’t I’d be recommending you read the book, for its variety of voices and styles.
I particularly enjoyed K M Pohlkamp‘s ‘Physicists in Petticoats’, maybe because I’m currently reading a book on quantum physics (light early autumn reading!)
As for my story, it’s another from the ‘Way’ series, following on the heels of ‘Sigmund Seventeen’ , published by Electric Spec in May. It features a young man called Siggy, who meets a woman called Ellie. They fall in love, and she shares with him a fantastic secret: she has stumbled upon a mechanism for traveling between different versions of reality, between worlds that are subtly or dramatically different from our own, depending on how far you go along a mysterious path called the Way.
You can read more about the writing of the Way stories in this Electric Spec blog post. And here’s the opening of ‘Once There Was A Way’:
Once There Was A Way
I had known Ellie a month. We were at a party near the coast. It was after midnight when we kissed in the dark under the trees at the bottom of the garden.
Ellie said, “There’s something I want to show you.”
“Will I like it?” I assumed we were talking about sex, which was fine with me.
“I’ve never shown anyone else. I think you’re ready.”
She took my hand and led me through a gate, into a cliff-top meadow overlooking the Atlantic. A full moon stood sentinel over the sea, laying a shimmering trail across the water.
“Do you want me to show you something amazing?”
“Right here?” I admit, I was still thinking about sex.
“It only works at full moon.” She stepped closer and kissed me again. “Close your eyes and relax.” Her hands were on my shoulders. She eased me backwards, a step at a time. “Tell me what you feel under your feet,” she whispered. “Each step.”
“Grass, of course. Grass again. Wait -.” A change in the texture of the ground, some kind of artificial surface.
“Open your eyes.”
I had one foot on a layer of mist, which was not there a few seconds before. It glowed faintly in the moonlight, making a ghostly path that snaked away from us, rippling along the cliff top. I thought at first it was some trick of the moonlight and a trace of sea mist, abetted by the wine we had drunk. But, however impossible it seemed, there was no denying that I stood on a thin strip of light a couple of inches above the grass.
“What is it?”
“It’s called the Way.”
“But what is it?”
“You can find out by trying it,” Ellie said. “You’re always keen to travel. But you have to do exactly as I say. Don’t go far, just a few minutes and then come back. Count the number of steps you take and make them even. You have to take the exact same number on the way back. And also, take this.” She reached up and unclasped the silver necklace she wore. “When you come back, give it to me before you do anything else.”
“Why?” The chain had a tiny silver dolphin on it.
“I’ll explain later. Now go, but hurry back.”
***
Is this two hundred trips, or maybe more? I’ve lost count. This time, her house isn’t even there. Instead, a brutalist 1970s apartment block squats on a patch of grass. Two teenage boys sit on the roof of a wrecked car. They watch me as I approach. I keep walking.
Once out of sight, I take the turning that should lead to the pub. But that isn’t there either. There is a row of narrow houses, some with boarded windows.
No house, no pub. No way of knowing if Ellie ever lived here or ever will. I should be used to this. I should have learned by now not to hope. But every time it’s a punch in the gut.
The full moon remains high and I walk back to where I left the Way. I step on it without a backward glance, and the buildings around me fade away.
I move on.
(To read more, you’ll need a copy of Flicker – buying links above!)
STOP PRESS: A third ‘Way’ story has just been published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show magazine. You can find that here. The story is called Hard Times in Nuovo Genova.
After a long and winding road to publication, my time travel romance novel came out in 2018, from small press with a big heart, 
Full disclosure – one of my stories is in the book (more on that below), but even if it wasn’t I’d be recommending you read the book, for its variety of voices and styles.
I had one foot on a layer of mist, which was not there a few seconds before. It glowed faintly in the moonlight, making a ghostly path that snaked away from us, rippling along the cliff top. I thought at first it was some trick of the moonlight and a trace of sea mist, abetted by the wine we had drunk. But, however impossible it seemed, there was no denying that I stood on a thin strip of light a couple of inches above the grass.