Even the name – Covid-19 – is like something out of a science fiction story, and truly we are living in strange and dystopian times. We have to take our comforts where we can.
That being so, it’s great that so many organisations have stepped up and made content available free at a time when we’re locked down. The online magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, sadly closed last year. But they have now posted all their stories online, free of charge. You can check out 14 years’ worth of stories and artwork here.
While you’re browsing, you might want to take a look at my story, Hard Times in Nuovo Genova, which featured in IGMS in August 2018, and was later included in the Newcon Press collection, The Best of British Science Fiction 2018.
I wrote about the story in my post of August 2018. It’s basically a boy meets girl story. Except the girl has the power to travel at will between alternative universes, and the boy doesn’t. A recipe for relationship trouble, if ever there was!
Go on – give it a read. You know you’ve got time. Here’s a taster:
Hard Times in Nuovo Genova (or How I Lost My Way)
I see them occasionally, wandering through Columbus Plaza or hanging around the lakefront. Always alone.
They’re obvious, if you know what to look for: something a bit off about their clothing; maybe the material or style sticks out–buttons on the shirt when everyone here has those tiny hook and eye things; blue denim worn tight when the men of Nuovo Genova favor baggy cotton pants.
It’s how they act, too. They drift up behind market traders on a cigarillo break and eavesdrop while pretending to tie a shoelace. They sit alone outside a café, pretending to read a newspaper. But they never turn a page as they listen to the talk at the table behind.
They’re passing through and they need to learn about the place fast. It’s not as if they can ask: Excuse me, what country is this? Was Roosevelt president in 1940, or was it Lindbergh?
I spot them easily because that was once me. Before I lost the Way.
Sian is waiting when I appear. She puts a finger to her lips and leads me off the beach. We sit with our backs against a tree, facing the lake.
The air is cold, with no sound except our breathing and the murmur of waves. I sniff the air. There’s something odd about the smell: metallic and smoky, like ash washed by rain. I look south toward Chicago, but there are no lights.
“It doesn’t feel good,” Sian whispers.
“How can you tell?”
“You develop an instinct. We should stay here until light.”
It’s hard to sleep on a cold beach when you have just arrived somewhere completely unknown. Several times, I am close to dozing off when a noise from the trees makes me stiffen and pull Sian close. There’s a screech like an animal in pain, followed by a low scraping sound, moving away inland. Another time, an eerie howling, like a pack of wolves a mile away.
“Maybe it’s a werewolf,” I say. “Full moon, after all.”
“You think you’re joking.”
Somehow, we sleep and wake to daylight the color of dirty dishwater. A bloated, rusty sun emerges from the lake. Oily cords of cloud paint stripes across the sky.
“Look at the city,” Sian says.
At first glance, the skyline is comforting in its familiarity. Then it comes into focus: stunted towers, like broken teeth; a wall of dark buildings, lit in places by sunlight on jagged remnants of windows. A rusted hulk of a ship half-submerged in the lake two miles south.
We stay on the beach all day, watching the dead city, but we see no movement. We leave with the moon...
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.
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.