New story klaxon!
As trailed a couple of months back, the latest issue of online SF magazine Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show features a new story.
Called ‘Hard Times in Nuovo Genova’, this is the third of my ‘Way’ stories. It’s a story of love and loss in multiple versions of Chicago.
One of the things that always interests me about writing fiction is the way that you make stuff up and sometimes the characters and the ideas take on a life of their own. You think you’ve written something the way it should be, only to find that you have to go back and explore it some more.
A while back, I wrote a story about 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 travelling 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.
That story–called Once There Was a Way*–ends sadly. Siggy has a wanderlust – showing him the Way is like giving him the keys to the sweetshop. He can’t resist using it on his own, 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 concept of the Way (which I don’t claim is especially original) obviously lends itself to a series of stories, and sure enough I wrote others. The story of Siggy and Ellie hadn’t been fully told. I left Siggy wandering the Multiverse, searching in vain for the Ellie he left behind. But what about Ellie?
That thought led to my story Sigmund Seventeen, the sad tale of what Ellie did after she lost Sigmund. That story is available online at Electric Spec magazine.
What both those stories show is a truth 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, Sigmund loses Ellie because he always wants to look around the next corner. He suspects the grass is greener, and so fails to see 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.
I’m thrilled that the latest Way story has been picked up by Intergalactic Medicine Show. Hard Times in Nuovo Genova doesn’t feature Ellie or Siggy. But it’s still basically a boy meets girl story. 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 new story also–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.
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*If you want to read, Once There Was a Way, it is included in the short story anthology Flicker, out now from Filles Vertes Publishing. Filles Vertes also published my new time-travel romance novel, Fifty-One, which is available now.
The story was originally published in the magazine, Devolution Z, in February 2016, and it’s fun to have it pop up again now, in audio form. In it, Shaun comes back from the Far East with some kind of fever, and takes to his bed, with increasingly disturbing consequences for his housemates.
My story, “When I Close My Eyes”