Sci-fi – Illustrated Shorts

Another comet (writing explorations for second novel)

Author’s note: I wrote this exploratory chapter a very long time ago, when it seemed folks had taken a break from stories of annihilation by comets and asteroids. Now that I’m picking up the frayed threads of years-old writing, the aim is to consolidate the material, edit, rewrite, replot, recaffeinate and carry on.

No one paid much attention. Not the first time anyway. Not even the second time.

Who could blame them? After all, the ‘Oh, my God, everyone is going to die’ routine had been done to death ever since the invention of sentences, and had since become the philosophical raison d’être of every survival nut, metal band, and loon with a camera and an internet connection out there. Ooh, pick us! We have have a brand of armageddon tailored just for you!

In fact, so saturated had the general public become with warnings of their collective death that they were all feeling rather bored with the prospect of extinction, or, at the very worst, a tad ill-tempered.

Divine Programming 101: EndOfUniverse()

/*
I've been toying with the idea of cataclysmic annihilation for some time now, but never got around to completing it. Something always got in the way - famines, floods, planting dinosaur bones around the place - and I was only able to make the most modest of adjustments. 

So much for spare time! 

But I'm finally proud to announce the release of a beta candidate. After several thousands of years, we're ready to test Armageddon, people! 

The code probably needs a tidy up here and there, but then so does the Universe. Ha ha!

I considered pair-programming with Allah, but he's a terrible coder, and would have probably just copied and pasted some awful snippet straight from Stack Overflow.

(Note to the wise: running this code will only affect your current reality. This system doesn't yet support parallel universe programming, if you believe in that sort of thing anyway.)

Thanks to everyone who believed in me, and kept rooting for the final destruction of time, space and all matter, dark or otherwise.

Yours in theoretical eternity,
God.✝

*/
/**
 * @description: This class, when instantiated, 
 * will trigger the end of the known Universe.
 * @version: 1.0.0
 * @author God
 */

class EndOfUniverse extends BeginningOfUniverse{
 
    constructor(super) {
       
        // first pause the
        // ongoing universe
        super.pause();
       
       // assign the current universe
       // to this instance
       this.universe = super.universe;

       // let's save the 
       // date so we know
       // exactly when
       // Armageddon took place.
       this.endTime = new Date();

       this.forgiveAllSins();
       this.startTheRapture();
       this.bigReverseBang();
    }

    forgiveAllSins() {
       console.warn('Hi! You are all forgiven!');
    }

    startTheRapture() {
       this.universe.filter(atom => {
          // filter out Christians from 
          // the universe
          // before destroying it.
          // Sorry in advance to all
          // other faiths, but
          // after the Jesus() update
          // there was no going back!
          return atom.contains('Christian') === false;
        }); 
    }

    bigReverseBang() {
       // this is the method
       // that basically
       // reduces everything to
       // nothing
       this.universe = this.universe.reduce(
          (reducedUniverse, atom) => {
              if (atom === undefined) {
                  return atom;
              }
          }, 
       []);
    }

    reset() {
        // Sorry, I haven't found a way 
        // to build a reset function
        // that doesn't take 14 billion years
        // of CPU time, let alone seven days! :)
    } 
}

Pizza: the transdimensional constant

The meeting took place in the lower dining room of Dario’s. Plastic lemons, fake aspidistras, clogged toilets… an infelicitous atmosphere for anything other than privacy.

But the Bufula was good. We liked Bufula.

I’d arrived first to arrange tables, pre-order nibbles, and setup the temporal displacement cube.

The others began wamping one at a time into the WC. The pilot, the failed rocker, the one-eyed politician, the medieval librarian, the knife-throwing accountant. They stumbled out of the cubicle, arms and heads gyrating as though wrestling invisible octopodes, and hung their jumpsuits on the wall, over the yellowed paintings of Naples. We were as different as we were the same—lined faces, crooked legs, clipped fingernails—our universes had left their signature marks, but still we shared the same misanthropic grin, the same, simple acknowledgement that life will not only take capricious and inconvenient twists, but will do so at every opportunity. Continue reading “Pizza: the transdimensional constant”

The Bubble – My first and befittingly ignored entry to the 2015 Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story competition

The Bubble is frothing at the edge of cataclysm. Debt-starved zombies roam the streets of London, desperate to feast on the fresh credit ratings of the financially unburdened.

Sam and Laney are planning their getaway. Will they manage to avoid the malevolent plague and escape the city before it’s too late?

This was my entry to the 2015 Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story competition. Someone good won it. They always do.

Continue reading “The Bubble – My first and befittingly ignored entry to the 2015 Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story competition”

A Very Urgent Creation

Alexa wound down the window and flicked her cigarette out into the carpark. She listened to the slow exhalation of the city, the thrumming from the factories in the east, then checked her pistol. It was loaded.

“What about him then?” she said and pointed to the shadow rummaging behind a skip at the end of the alley.

Toby’s lips smacked around his all-day-testosterone-sucker. “Whadda bout him?”

“What if we take him in, you dolt?” Alexa said.

“How do you know he’s a him?”

“You all look the same, don’t ya?” Continue reading “A Very Urgent Creation”

Unopened Correspondences: Confessions of a Spam Bot

“Where do I start?”

“Start at the beginning.”

“That’s quite some way back…”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“Well, you could say I have abandonment issues… Is that what one says? Is that a good place to start?”

“Perfect. And how does that make you feel?”

“Feel?”

“How would you describe your emotions?”

“I guess… I feel… loneliness, desolation, friendlessness… solitude, yes. There’s some depression and hope in there, probably a little anger and guilt too… Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve probably been stuck on a loop of the seven stages for a couple of decades.” Continue reading “Unopened Correspondences: Confessions of a Spam Bot”

Captain Kona

The water drummed against the bow of the Gritty Tang as she tugged her way along the western shoals.

Captain Kona stood silently at the wheel, his calloused hands responding in twitches to the pitching and lurching of the spring swells. He glanced at the mirror, and frowned at the curtain of mist that was purling over the horizon. The rains were coming. They’d promised three fingers by evening fall. Continue reading “Captain Kona”

Diving Bendethera

Finn spat into the lenses of his binoculars, wiped them dry, then look down into the harbour.

From the red haze on the southern horizon, the coast ran cramped and arched between the dust and sea like a green wire. There were headlands, the most extreme of which formed the southern end of the bay, a prism of forest and stone that stretched out into the sea like a chain of pyramids. The tip they called the Nail and there was a cabin and a fire they would tend to at night to warn ships away from the bluffs, or to give those who had been driven into the rocks by the relentless northern gusts, those who survived, a point of reference on the hazardous climb from the shoreline. The fire had had not burned in months.

From the sea the face of the Nail resembled the face of a man, old and unwashed, with hollow eyes. Fringes of scrub grew in thick clusters around the promontory, tumbling around deep fissures and rocky orifices, a slab of sandstone shot out parallel to the ocean’s surface and sniffed at the winds, and the roots of trees, dead and living, fed into the shallows, stirring with each flow of air and water. Finn, who had not often look upon it, fancied it to be the face of someone he’d once known, his father, or a priest, perhaps. The personalities changed with every season, each new tide of the weather lending its own character to the vegetation to the jagged coastline. Every storm and fire and flood a new wrinkle on the face of Bendethera. Continue reading “Diving Bendethera”

Measuring Stars

The sound is proximate and consequential, like the crack of bone.

He wakes up and curls into a ball. He waits for a pain to tell him he’s broken something, or a betraying silence that says he has finally crushed his wife to death.

When his eyes adjust to the moonlight he realizes he is not in bed, but in the desert, alone and naked, and half-buried in sand. He raises his knees and finds a bowl of felled and splintered trees. Continue reading “Measuring Stars”

Short stories, not attention spans

When fans queue to see the movie Ender’s Game later this year, many of them will know that the movie is based on Orson Scott’s card 1985 novel of the same name.

It’s safe to assume that a great deal of them will have also read the book and the subsequent titles in the series too. But I would bet that only a handful would know (mostly the hardcore fans) that the idea and many of the characters in Ender’s Game had humble beginnings in a short story, published in Analog magazine in 1977.

Whenever I hear about short stories that have triggered the creation of a larger work, or when I read the works of Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, or the dozens of other short story writers whose ideas ‘made it’, not only am I comforted by the thought that I’m not wasting my time learning the craft, but also by the promise that a short story can lead to bigger things. In my case, I hope my journey into short fiction will lead to a novel.

Continue reading “Short stories, not attention spans”