This is the reason why these three work so well, because each one is built in or on the foundation of the last. That, in turn, highlights the genius of these stories and of having three authors work on them in unison; the stories mirror the survivors, building on what’s gone before and turning it into something new but still completely human. This isn’t just a book of stories about how the world ends, it’s a book of stories built like they would be after the world has ended, scraps of information and memory tied together with determination and hope. Something wonderful, just visible in the snow.

The reviewer, Alasdair Stuart, is also very generous in his praise of The Last Stand of Edward O’Malley:

It’s a story about being broken and what happens after it, the moment where you realize the very worst thing that could happen to you has and you’re…still here. That sense of peace, of serenity is something that post-apocalyptic fiction almost never captures and it’s done with real delicacy and grace here.

Couldn’t have asked for a better review!  All three of us are very proud.  Read the whole thing here.  And, in case you’ve put Winterlands on your reading list and lost the link, you can pick up a copy here.

Arctic pic from here.

I’m Picard. This is my Number One. We don’t have Number Twos on this ship.

Don’t you think that’s kind of weird? We see them fulfil the other necessities of life: eating; sleeping; social contact. We, in fact, have entire plot lines which revolve around them. And the plasma relays burn out on a weekly basis, but the plumbing is always perfect. You never hear of a ruptured sewage pipe on G deck when they take devastating fire from the Borg. Where the hell does the Enterprise even keep its toilets, anyway?

It’s one of those things that, once you see, you can’t unsee it. Almost no one in modern spec-fic goes to the loo. Entire civilisations thrive without a single toilet.

When I’m world-building, it’s these kinds of things that I need to think about. I need to think about how a culture’s psychology and morality is going to be reflected in the way they deal with the necessities of life.

In our culture, we take a dump in the most valuable resource on Earth, pull a handle and don’t give it another thought. Someone else’s problem, right? That’s pretty telling.

On the Enterprise-D… I dunno. They must be horrified by their bodies. Utterly, utterly repulsed. You notice how all their medicine is very clean, doesn’t involve blood or cutting. Doesn’t, in fact, involve touching the body in any way in most cases.

If a writer fails to demonstrate they know how the culture in their fiction deals with its crap, it feels akin to failing to demonstrate that they know where they get their food from. It’s a pretty damned fundamental flaw. I’m not expecting a song-and-dance routine, just half-a-sentence to let me know that they know.

I’m not saying I’m going to throw a fit if Into Darkness or the next Interzone doesn’t have at least one toilet scene. I’m just saying, well… once you see it, you can’t unsee it.  Almost no one in spec-fic goes to the loo.

Well, that’s a screenshot from post on the Science in My Fiction blog encouraging people to create alien species who’s social structure doesn’t follow the same pattern as ours:

“So how might aliens differ in measures of metabolism? Well, if you look at tiny mammals like mice, they tend to maintain very high energy levels for short periods of time, and then flop down for a rest, and then go back at it. Cats also have incredibly high intensity sometimes, but sleep a lot. Some animals have stamina for hours, and some don’t. Thus, if you’re extrapolating culture for an alien based on a particular body plan, metabolism will have an enormous influence on the way they organize their daily time. Energy levels will translate into work patterns, and also into such cultural details as furniture – perhaps, whether your people keep couches handy to sleep on when they’re taking a break from work.”

You can see the elevator pitch for The Long Road Home right there in my second comment.

It’s the kind of neat-sounding idea that occurs to a lot of people. Sometimes I’ll write them down in my notebook, and sometimes they’ll grow from there. Sometimes they just drift away.

The process of nurturing and carefully guiding the growth of the neat idea is what separates a writer from someone who has neat ideas, and that separates the stories from the ideas. It’s the obvious-in-retrospect donkey work that is nothing like the beautiful plant that is eventually presented to the reader, but more like a sprawling wasteland we writers seed with as many plants as possible in the hopes of getting that one beautiful plant.

So, why did that particular idea get written down and seeded?

Probably because I’m a fan of Chandler and bad puns.

The less-glib answer is also less satisfying. Like anyone else, my conscious mind is a river: constantly flowing, constantly changing, picking things up and depositing things on the banks. For some reason, conditions were right for this idea to stick and grow.

My first notes talk about how the biological necessity of hibernation has affected the aliens’ culture:

“There’s a tradition of having a small statue watching from the hearth. Before hibernation, the statue is smashed so it can report to the gods about the family over the year.”

The idea of the hard-boiled detective is strong on the first page. While the unnamed main character reluctantly sits through the ‘proper’ ceremony with his girlfriend, he only feels satisfied after returning to his dimly-lit office, standing by himself and smashing his own statue on his table with a smouldering cigarette dangling form his lips.

Artimus Hyde, myself and Allegra noiring it up for Children in Need at the office. Art bleeds noir.  (Incidentally, management chose that day to tell us they were launching a consultation to shut our office and make us all redundant. They told they were going to do just that on Christmas Eve. True story.)

The interesting thing about ideas is that, when they have momentum, they generate a gravity. They suck in any stray ideas that drift along the psychological river. My next paragraph talks about how, in this alien society, their companies are like our families: they look after you, they love you, they nurture and protect you to the point where their language has no separate concept of ‘company’ and ‘family’. It’s an idea integral not only to The Long Road Home but to the Cheware, to their society and psychology. The culture and the story couldn’t work without it, but where did it come from? It’s not in that elevator pitch. It was just in my head and got… sucked in.

Something else that got sucked in was the idea of touch talk. A few years ago, I went through a course of cognitive behavioural therapy to help me deal with my depression. It was an incredibly painful experience, but also an incredibly beneficial one. It opened my eyes to the fact that our conscious thoughts are little more than flotsam and jestom floating on the ocean’s surface. What drives us, what makes us who we are is hidden away, generating those surface thoughts like the code of our computer’s operating system.

“Habitants don’t believe in absolute truth because their minds are so complex and interaction with their bodies and society so complex that they can’t know with absolute certainty the things driving their thoughts and actions”

However, their bodies betray their non-conscious thoughts through prehensile tails, ears and whiskers and, I put in my notes, scents. It seemed only reasonable that they’d see the humans as simple-minded, because we tell ourselves that we know why we’re doing and thinking things. Looking from the outside, the Cheware assume we’re all surface thought and no depth.

So, that’s where the story started. We have a hard-boiled detective, a society that sleeps through the winter and makes no distinction between your employer and your company, and a species who’s social norms are based around the idea that other people know you an awful lot better than you know yourself. And, of course, a murder. A hard-boiled detective without a murder is like a dame without a heater hidden in her dress.

After that, many hours of research and note making and following paths happened. The idea of touch-talk went from facial expressions to the conservationists physically pressing against each other so they could feel the tiny changes in each other’s pulse, small twitches of their muscles, their breathing and all those other minute non-verbal queues that give away mood and feelings. The hard-boiled detective is always on the outside, normally a veteran of World War One with borderline PTSD and alcoholism, but mine went in a different–and far more personal–direction. And there were questions that needed answering, like, ‘why are humans even on this planet? And how did they get there?’

“We killed them and took all of their stuff!” Yeah… a bit more like, ‘To explore strange, new markets, to exploit new life and new resources, to boldly plunder where no one has plundered before!’

Some ideas were written down but left by the wayside. The idea that the Cheware display their accomplishments in their clothes or with badges like the military or cub scouts, for example, or the idea that they can enter a meditative state that allows them to slowly strip away all the conscious surface thoughts and focus on a single point, a single idea or thought, and be entirely within that moment.

Other ideas threw up interesting questions. If there is a small colony of humans on an alien planet, so far away from Earth that even getting a message back home takes decades, how are those colonists going to cope? How are they going to change, to adapt, to view the planet and culture their great-grandfathers came from but they’ve never seen?

I started writing the first draft of The Long Road Home on the 10th March 2011. I left that elevator pitch comment on the Science in My Fiction blog on the 23rd January 2011. Part-way through developing the story, I broke off and made notes for three other stories. Clearly, my mind wandered…

For me, a first draft is like selecting the piece of marble to carve. Once you have the marble in the workshop, you can start shaping it, discovering and following its natural grain, revealing the statue you initially saw in it. The Long Road Home went through four drafts–which is about average–two edits with Michele Jenson, my editor at Twenty or Less Press, and one with Michele and our copy editor. Yeah, it’s been a long road. But hell, we got somewhere pretty special.

Picture of Kirk from here. Photo taken by Cal Wimsey.

Barney works the bellows while a fellow minion smashes the ore. Flames erupt from the top of the bloomery like it’s a god-damned jet engine.

It’s also fantastically hard work. Barney, the guy running the demo, took ten hours to build the bloomery. Ten. Hours. Before he could even start the work. Then the iron ore had to be smashed into small pieces. The bellows had to be manned and pumped for seven hours. We got through at least two kilos of charcoal and smashed about the same amount of ore. Despite the other things going on at The Telling, I stayed around the bellows almost all day.

Some time during the afternoon, I started wondering why I didn’t want to do anything else. What was it about a Iron Age bloomery that had me so fascinated?

As I pounded pellets of ore between two stones, I realised what I was doing. I was making metal.

I was turning rock into metal.  Into the metal that would be made into swords and shields, if we were in the Iron Age. But we’re not. We’re in the twenty-first century.

Rocks!

I was making the metal that would be made into the girders which support sky scrapers. That gets turned into car chassis. Or aeroplane wings. Or the knives people use to pierce the film of their ready meals. Or the screw drivers they use to change screws.

It was the metal that makes the electric cable which powers our homes. That is painted onto circuit boards for TVs and laptops and iPods. That makes SCART sockets USB to mini-USB cables.

God-damned flame-spewing rocks!

Everything around us. Everything we take for granted. Everything I’ve always just kind of assumed… appeared out of thin air and onto supermarket shelves, I guess. It all comes from rocks. There’s no magical well of printed circuit boards, there’s just some poor bastard hauling huge lumps of rock out the earth. Rocks that are smashed and smelted and beaten into shape.

Rocks sent to a new world to vaporize alien rocks!

Poor old Ug the Caveman. He gets so much stick for sitting in his cave, banging his rocks together. Oh, the technological hipster says, with their tablet computer and smartphone and wet dreams of transhumanism, you’re so primitive. You’re such a cavemen. Why don’t you just sod off back to the Iron Age and let us developed humans live in the twenty-first century?

You know, that technological hipster sounds a lot like me five years ago.  The truth–past me–is that we’re banging rocks together just as much as Ug is. The difference is that Ug knows what he’s doing, and we’re happy to believe that our high-end consumer goods simply materialize out the ether. If Ug could see us now, and if we could see the look on Ug’s face, it would be the same look he reserves for his children when they gasp in uncomprehending wonder at the sparks which materialise out of the ether as he bangs his rocks together.

(Addendum.  I know it takes more than just metal, or other minerals derived from rocks, to make nearly all our consumer products.  It also takes planets and petrochemicals.  And petrochemicals are just really old plants and animals.  That’s it, folks.  Our modern age of wonders, all just rocks, plants and animals.)

Armour picture from here.  F/A-18 jet fighter from here. Curiosity Rover from Wikipedia. Picture of Barney working the bellows taken by me!

You underestimate the power of homeopathy… and overestimate the value of scientific evidence. I am truly evil.

It’s odd, really. Defying death is an obsession for our culture. Not just CAT scans and laser keyhole surgery, but even down to central heating and surgically sterile food. All to make sure we can live safe, comfortable, long lives. We cling to life with the rabid obsession of Gollum and his precious.

I’m not sure what the word is for my worldview, but I despise the notion of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. There are fundamental laws which describe how the universe works. These laws apply to every single thing in the universe. Everything, from bunny rabbits living in a woodland paradise, to smog-filled cities of broken-backed worker-slaves, obeys the same rules. The process of childbirth and genetic engineering, the movements of the tides and nuclear bombs, a mother’s love and genocide. All the same rules. If something is possible, it is natural. If something is not possible, it’s entirely academic because it’s never going to happen. And if it does happen? Then our understanding of the universe is clearly wrong and we need to change it.

Natural as fook! Of course, I’m not saying it’s not incredibly creepy…

So why should death, and the ‘cheating’ of death, be a hallmark of evil? Cheating death is possible, so it’s natural. The universe doesn’t give a shit. Karma is not going to appear from no where to deliver Terrible Consequences if you’re a walking coma patient, or if you make sure you take your vitamins every day. Poke death in the eyes–sell your soul, splice your DNA, drink the alien goo. It’s all natural.

Of course, when you accept that nuclear bombs are as natural as bunny rabbits, you’ve got to accept a few other things. Like Plant Earth really doesn’t give a crap about us. We can cover the whole planet in thick clouds of smog, boil ourselves in our skins and turn Earth into a second Venus. Mother Earth will be all like, ‘meh, it took you thousands of years to find the slight bruise the K-T ‘extinction event’ left on me’. But the human race… well, we may be given a few last moments for regret. Whether defying death will help to produce the kind of environment and society we want to live in is another matter.

I guess I’m just sick of the ‘defying death must lead to Terrible Consequences’ trope. It’s overplayed, and it’s just plain wrong. And considering the obsession we have with defying death ourselves, it’s incredibly hypocritical. Let’s have a little truth in our fiction, eh?

Picture of Vader from this Cracked article.  Creepy mouse-ear shot from here.

This week has been something of a shocker.  Journeys in the Winterlands and Shadows that Scratch at Frosted Glass came out last Friday, and today you can finally buy a copy of The Long Road Home in eformat for a mere $1.49.  That’s around 95p if you live in Britian, or 1.11 Euros for those in the Eurozone.  I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but 95p in the UK will buy you a bag of posh crisps (like Tyrells), a king-sized Mars Bar, a normal Mars Bar and a packet of gum…  It’s not the kind of money you’d worry about spending in a supermarket.  You’d just throw it in your basket on a whim or vague fancy.  So don’t worry just because it’s online and not a tiny thing in a whole basket of shopping.  Treat yourself!

The planet of Rheged is covered in meters of snow, and the natives are getting ready to hibernate for the winter.  In a seedy, cheap part of town, a human is found dead.  Murdered.  Rembik tai Pilas has three days to find out who killed the human and why, and the future of his whole society is resting on the answers.  Unfortunately, Rem and his partner are social outcasts, and all paths seem to lead back to his girlfriend.  Why, of all the people possibly, did Rem get told to investigate this?  And why does the dead human start to haunt Rem?  And how is the one person in all of their society who can be lied to, the one person how has always been on the outside of his society, the one person no one else wants to deal with, going to fix all of this?

If you want some more amazing fiction for your weekend, you can purchase Issue 6 of Encounters Magazine, which features my story, Shadows That Scratch at Frosted Glass.

Juna captains a small trawler, working the deep space dust clouds for hydrogen ions.  She has problems with the companies buying her catches squeezing her out the market, she has problems with her first mate Adele, and she has problems with her son.  But none of those problems compare to those of her sleepers, the people who lend their sleeping minds to the on-board computer so the trawler can take a short cut through dreamspace and travel thousands of light years in just a few weeks.  Something has noticed the sleepers, something greater than anything their minds can hold.

“There’s good fishing around Seventeen,” Alex said. He leaned over the table and lined his shot up. “I heard skipper say she’s been going there for years.”

“And I’ve slept for her the whole damned time. I’ve requested dozens of transfers and I’ve been rejected dozens of times.”

Louisiana finished her drink, turned around, leaned over the counter and mixed herself another.

The eight ball cracked into the corner pocket. “I heard Seventeen was haunted,” Alex said.

“That’s what they said, before I was assigned here. I laughed. Haunted? That’s a child’s word. But Seventeen is a dark place. When I sleep there, I am not myself. I am possessed by something. I am in my body, but I do not control it. It is like being a puppet for God, and God is an old, old thing. Humanity is nothing to it.”

He glanced up at Louisiana. She watched him carefully over the rim of her glass.

“Maybe if I’d been sleeping there for four years, I’d unplug too,” he said.

A sleeper who believed in ghosts was a liability, and no one would hire a liability. It was a dangerous confession.

She traded him in kind.

“I feel it when I’m awake sometimes,” she said. “It watches me. Like a shadow on the wrong side of frosted glass.”

She watched him, worried she’d said too much. If he ruined her, it was one less person he had to compete against for work.

But then he nodded, and she saw the fear in his eyes.

He understood.

Issue  6 also features fantastic fiction from Robert Mitchell Evans, Thomas Canfield, Steven L. Peck, Wade Peterson, Jeff Barr and Harry F. Kane.  So don’t you dare say you’re not getting value for money!

But what is this ‘Winterlands’ thing, Foxie? You’ve not mentioned it before!

The Winterlands anthology started as an exercise in collective storytelling. Allegra wrote the first story, and passed it along to the next writer to do with as they saw fit. Through the writing and editing process, we worked together to build a world, to create characters, to make something greater than the sum of us as individuals. We are all very, very proud of what we’ve achieved.

It started with Callista, a lonely figure crossing the icesheets that now cover much of Europe, searching for her mentor. The permanent, global aurora borealis has driven most of humanity mad and those who’ve kept their sanity fight the frozen desert, and the once-human Affected, just to survive. But stories have spread and breathed hope back into Northern Europe. A hero has arisen, has fought the ice and the Affected and reminded people that humanity endures, and it thrives, regardless of hardship. Because of hardship.

And if Callista can find him, maybe she’ll refind hope, too. Maybe the horrors of the Affected cities, of their steam-driven machine-men, of their towering harvesting machines that pluck human beings like ears of corn, maybe they won’t be so haunting. And maybe she’ll realise that searching itself is an act of hope, that it’s enough to reignite hope in others.

What did Allegra, John and myself do with the seeds Allegra sowed? Well, there’s only one way you’re going to find out…

There’s a lot of examination Western cultural and intellectual imperialism in the play, which, frankly, passed my nineteen-year-old self by. My thirty-two-year-old self shall have to remedy this.

However, what struck my equally-long-haired former self was the arguments in the play about restoring the fresco.

The British expert, Oliver, believes that the obvious thing to do is restore it to its original self, make it look like it did when it was finished in some time in the thirteenth century. At the time, there was a lot of talk of restoring old frescos. Maybe I just noticed it. But it all made perfect sense to me. As the British expert Oliver, very sarcastically, says:

Michelangelo took five hundred years of candlegrease and overpainting into full account when he painted the Sistene ceiling, and thus actually intended it should turn a dark brown.

Surely we should see these paintings as they were originally painted. As the artist intended them. That’s just common sense.

I don’t know what I was expecting as a counter-argument, but I didn’t get it. Leo, the American, says:

Whereas the problem with scrapers,– Gabby, is that for all their spritz about the artist’s intentions they, too, have their prejudices, which is for things to look as bright and bland squeaky clean as television. And if they believe there’s no real difference between a quattrocento Venus and a pin-up, and the Sistene’s back wall is just a billboard, then why not strip ‘em down and make ‘em look that way.

Later, he says:

That’s what paintings are, stars, of the Hollywood variety. With tours. And fans. And franchised merchandise. And — entourage. And as such, they are, they must be, universal and eternal. Not allowed to change. Most surely, not allowed to fade. To crumble, to grow old. And of course, they’ll never die.

But paintings do grow old. Their history is written in their faces, just like it is on ours.

It’s taken me over a decade, but I’m beginning to see Leo’s point. I’m on the verge of agreeing with him. Things accumulate history and crumble and fade and… And that’s okay.

But what’s fascinated me for those tenish years is the idea of all the dirt and candlegrease being the history of the painting. Of it being as tactile a record of the painting’s life as the creases on our faces. Of the painting slowly and accidentally recording its life story as it interacts with its environment.

You know how you get the face you deserve? Fuck that! Slice your face up and erase the past! Just like it never happened!

So, yeah. I’ve grown to like the smell of old books. That strange aroma that tells you of a life lived, of the thumbs that have turned pages and the shelves that have held it. That reminder that I am one link in a chain of owners, that I’m a part of the ongoing history the pages are accidentally accumulating. That this book has had many special someone’s, but right now, it’s special someone is me. We will share pleasure, and then pass it on so someone else can share it.

History and life and all of us are messy, complicated things. I’m happier acknowledging and growing to love it than I ever was wanting nothing but the smell of fresh glue and new paper, wanting everything to be as clean as a television screen or a billboard.

So, thanks, David Edgar. Maybe one day I’ll get to see the play actually performed.

Of course, Allegra beat me to all of this by years.

Images:
Photo of the face-life taken from here.  Pentecost’s cover from Amazon.

This was my house yesterday when I left for work. The sight made me skip work, loot several chain stores while I still could, and refuse to doff my cap respectfully when the local landed gentry sailed by on their unicorn-pulled sled. I spent the rest of the day building a guillotine and stalking the royal family through celebrity magazines.

It seems strangely apropos, though.  I have two stories in the birthing canal and almost ready to enter the world, and they both take place in worlds buried beneath snowy blankets.

~*~

The Long Road Home, from Twenty or Less Press

Three days before hibernation and the corpse of the human ambassador Rembik is sent to investigate is as cold as the winter smothering Rheged.

“Find an answer,” Uncle tells him. “We’ve spent ten years building a relationship with the aliens, and you need to give them a damned good reason not to leave.”

But Rembik and his partner are social outcasts and his girlfriend appears to be in the middle of everything.

Maybe the reason the human’s ghost keeps following Rembik is that they’ve got more in common than either realized.

(I’ve been making the very final edits to The Long Road Home over the past few days. I’m very proud of what Michele, my editor, and I have put together.)

~*~

Journeys in the Winterlands, from Vagrants Among Ruins

“The world that we were living in was hanging by a thread.  We could all see it.  If it wasn’t this, then it would have been something else: war, famine, disease… Society could not sustain itself forever.  Everything ends.”

Three writers.  Three stories.  The end of one world.

Nine years ago, the Earth struggled in the throes of an industrial revolution.  Steam trains scythed across the countryside, and great aerostats drifted lazily across the skies.  The cities swelled with factory-smoke and bilge-water while people thrived or starved in their streets.

On All Souls Day, that all changed.  A great star fell into the sky, bringing a perpetual twilight that turned most of the population against each other–twisting men and women into the ferocious, sky-mad Affected.  When the star finally disappeared the world froze.  Now, Callista trudges across the icy wastes in search of her mentor: everyman-turned-folk-hero The Web of the North, who might just be the last frozen glimmer of hope that she has left.

Allegra Hawksmoor, John Reppion and Dylan Fox come together for an exercise in collective storytelling and world-building that will lead you into the ruins of factories submerged beneath the ice, probe the wrecks of burned-out airships, and provide a glimpse into the minds and deranged communities of the Affected and Unaffected that struggled to survive out in the snow.

Flip down the sky-guards on your goggles, and step into the Winterlands…

(I talked about my contribution to the collection in my Next Big Thing post.  The collection, though, is certainly greater than the sum of its parts and full credit needs to go to Allegra for making it live and breathe.)

~*~

Don’t worry.  I’ll let you know–in no uncertain terms–when you can buy them.  The Long Road Home will be available as a download, and Journeys in the Winterlands will be available in both download and dead-tree formats.