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Science Fiction
Science fiction stories, some of which involve my future history.
Bureau
Metamorph Stories
- Acid Warriors
- Gee, guess which mind-altering chemical I was on when I wrote this one. And, they're right; nine is too few to do convincing emergent behaviour.
- Android
- A fine example of the cloud of disinformation thrown up around the Nikolai Kingsley / Kelanie Camden / Gary Ferntree relationship. Lazar's Android Works is taken from the ZBS radio drama Ruby, and I'm sure that if a service like this actually existed - someone who would ship mechanical sex-slaves to your door - they'd be richer than Bill Gates within six months.
- Backgrounds
- this is additional material for my novel, sort of sidebar material. technically, i suppose it's SF. Eloissa's poem and her essay ideally would go in columns next to each other
- Beth
- Marian has a second cousin called Bethany, a ten-year-old girl who was rather intimidated by this imposing, black-clad troll when we met. I kept thinking, "What can I do to convince her that I'm not going to bite her head off or sacrifice her to Cthulhu? A gift, perhaps?" The idea of the alien device that can show scenes from anywhere in the galaxy was partly based on the Lemarchand Lament Puzzlebox from the Hellraiser films. The implied-lesbian ending was all Bek Oberin's fault. :)
- Biker
- Based on the idea of getting off on the vibrations from a motorcycle. This story doesn't seem to be set in my future history, although it's hard to tell. I was informed that if I could work out a less downbeat ending, this story could be commercially distributed.
- Cache (1 - 2)
- Another improbable alien toy. This story is a vehicle to describe how multiple personality syndrome might be a benefit. I thought describing the various alien treasures they found might be fun, but it got boring very quickly.
- Dispenser
- I think this is what long-term unemployment does to the brain. Part of my `Let's Write About Cyborgs A Lot' phase.
- Dummy
- A bit of exposition for my future history, told from the old-codger-by-the-fireplace point of view.
- ED-209-B
- Someone once said of Kelanie that she'd do it with anything - even an ED-209 (that being the rather odd security robot from the Robocop films). This story followed, and was hastily converted into another Apocryphal Doing of the AnarchArtists.
- Eugene
- This was written well before network Quake became a reality; a real-time, 3-D graphic Star Trek simulation. I'm still waiting for someone to implement it.
- Fear of Falling Forever
- A result of my "think of an unusual image and then write a story describing how it could have come about" phase. These stories often pissed people off, because they either couldn't understand them or tried to read symbolism into them that just wasn't there.
- Fast Food
- This is a brazen rip-off of Hunter S Thompson's tale of shipping Cuban Refugees into America, from The Great Shark Hunt. I expect if he ever reads it, the mere fact that I attributed it to him won't stop him from wanting to rip my nuts off with a plastic fork.
- Fragments..
- Inspired by the trailing end of some message in talk.bizarre. The first few minutes of The Thing, viewed from the alien's perspective.
- Fuck Me Gently With A Chainsaw
- I've been waiting to do a story around that expression ever since Elizabeth emailed me, saying "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, I've been quoted in Playboy Magazine!" I classify this as SF, because the erotic content is minimal.
- Hailja (1 - 3)
- a rare thing, this: a Dominion VR story
- A woman becomes trapped in a Virtual Reality system designed to trap the sorts of people who... well, you get my drift.
- Kitchen
- In an episode of that Gerry Anderson TV series, Space: 1999 they once met a society of robots who pretended to be human, and treated their human slaves like robots. I tried to imagine what it would be like. This was written around the time I got seriously into washing dishes, a fetish which I still have.
- Lensman
- This was based partly on a dream and partly on contemplation of what life would be like if the police could read our minds. Scary.
- Lost
- Another story with a Maracite in it. Two people lost onboard a giant alien spacecraft, who can communicate with each other but neither has any idea where the other is. The pendant 'Fiveskulls' is a real thing, and currently hangs around my neck.
- Lost Day (A Monologue), The
- This was written for a Council of Adult Education class in Performance Writing; it details the last few hours of the Ordinator of the NoSaNoOs Dominion before the attackers disable it... and what happened after.
- Machina
- A sideways extension of the idea of sleeping with a robot, giving consideration to the problems that most writers gloss over.
- Medical
- Three people who were injured in various ways and healed by different alien races. Well, attempts at healing were made. I saw this as a way cool method of emphasising differences between humans and aliens.
- Missile
- Den Whitton suggested this idea; how to deal with a smart missile that loves you.
- Mop Stories: Desert
- I've been doing quite a lot of mopping, lately. It doesn't take a lot of processing power, brain-wise; often, my mind will drift in directions inspired by, say, the shape of the mop brush after it's been left standing for a few days..
- Mop Stories: Alien Tour
- Another things-you-think-of-while-mopping story; what if you were mopping up for aliens? That was the original premise; putting it into my future history seems to have worked the usual spin, taking it and making it something quite different. I managed to squeeze in a lot of exposition, and it looks like the Acid Warriors - minor characters at first - are going to have their own cycle.
- Pak
- This was a recurring nightmare I had for a long time; imagining that I'd been turned into one of Larry Niven's incredibly intelligent aliens but not having a clue as to how to proceed from there.
- Persuasion
- This was an exercise for Literature Analysis; chapter nine of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, written in the Cyberpunk genre.
- Puppets
- A play I wrote for the CAE writing course. Could be easily staged with four people and some cheap props. The good old "Man creates and is destroyed by his creation" theme. Can't go past that one.
- Robots
- One of the reasons I made artificial intelligence illegal in my future history was to avoid having to write about things that were smarter than people. Unfortunately, these laws didn't apply after the alien empire fell, and this happened.
- Rope
- The first thing I wrote after the devastating Hard Drive Failure of 1996. I felt that I wasn't competent to operate a computer and that I should retire to a monastery and untie knots in rope or something.
- Search
- A nasty exposition of the breeding patterns of the Bythian; a nasty way to deal with VR addicts. I have given up trying to convince Sandrine Turner that I WASN'T writing about her.
- Secure
- The last libraries left in Victoria after World War III. Written for Audrey Falconer.
- The Stareye of Liritashis
- Someone posted a message in talk.bizarre with the subject "The Statute of Limitations." Someone else replied to it and changed the subject to "The Statue of Limitations". I saw the opportunity to start a creative thread and replies with this story. I'd been meaning to write something more about the Parkry, and there it was.
- Tank
- Based on a dream; tank repair in a feudal post-apocalypse society.
- Telemetry
- I wrote this after watching Desert Storm, and wondering what kinds of messages the aliens would be exchanging as they landed in Algeria and began pacification.
- TG-20
- I was feeling the pressure of being long-term unemployed, so I started fantasizing about having a job and having technical problems to overcome. Quite sad, really.
- Vekam, Adonai!
- One of the earliest aliens in my future history was the set of various plants known as Pthalklin. This describes the characteristics of one member of that family.
- Virtual Reality
- Two more short "let's explore the weirdness potential of VR" stories.
- Quiet
- Standard SF theme, this one. I'm sure it's been done before, and in a better way, but i was desperate for material to submit for Fail to Suck Day 1998.
- Viral "Make Money Fast"
- An exercise in protracted name dropping, among other things. Selling advertising space in genetically engineered diseases. I'm sure that this sort of thing will happen as soon as advertising people realise how fast their ads would be propagated this way.
- Your Tax Dollars at Work
- This is a guaranteed way of coming up with at least a vaguely interesting story: take a common everyday phrase and push it in a different direction. Example: imagine if the dollars actually did the work...
- Watcher
- You Might Become A Biscuit
- Coma White
- DS9 Plot Reject
- Tube Wars Revisited
- Wormholes
- Third Structure
- A Warm Place
- A Warm Place (stripped down version)
- There's Hope For Them Yet
- I Was Almost An Alien Urine Cow For The CIA
- My Sad Toys
- Real Robots
- Pawelewski's Stratagem
- First Contact
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