The contents list for the latest collection of the Best of British Science Fiction has just been published. You can see it here.
It would be an understatement to say I’m thrilled that my story ‘Hard Times in Nuovo Genova’ is included. It’s always a pleasure when an editor wants your story, but doubly so when it nestles alongside tales from such a crowd of great British SF writers, in a collection pulled together by Donna Scott. Can’t wait to read them.
‘Hard Times’ was first published last August in Orson Scott Card’s sadly now-defunct Intergalactic Medicine Show (I didn’t break it, honest). It’s one of three stories published last year in the ‘Way’ cycle of tales of love and loss in alternate universes.
This is two years in a row that I’ve had a story in the Best of British anthology. Last year it was ‘When I Close My Eyes.’ You’ll have to wait until August for the launch of the 2018 anthology, but you can still buy the 2017 version (and you really should). Preferably direct from NewCon Press.
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.
After a long and winding road to publication, my time travel romance novel came out in 2018, from small press with a big heart, 
