Looking Up at the Sky

Got to judge a writer by what they write, amiright?

•  The Long Road Home (14,000 words)

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.

Originally published through Twenty or Less Press, February 2013

• Shadows that Scratch at Frosted Glass (8,700 words)

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.  The sleepers have a problem, too.  They’re meant to plug their minds into the ship’s computer so the ship can cover hundreds of light years of physical distance in just a few weeks, so it can take a shortcut through the realm of ghosts and gods, through dreamspace.  Dreamspace is meant to be quiet.  But something has noticed the sleepers, something greater than a human mind can hold.

Published in Encounters Magazine #6, February 2013

• Journeys in the Winterlands

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

Nine years ago, the Earth struggled in the throes of an industrial revolution.  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.  And then 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 minds and the deranged communities of the Affected and Unaffected that struggle to survive out in the snow.

Published through Vagrants Among Ruins as part of an original anthology, February 2013

• Restless (3,800 words)

In the East China Sea in 1870, Commodore Paul Nelson leads a flotilla of ships to the Chinese mainland. They escort the Colossus Engine, a weapon of unparalleled terror and destruction, and carry orders to subdue China and claim it for the British crown. A young Han girl called Bik Shu shovels coal in the ship carrying the Engine, on a mission from a long-dead wuxia to protect her homeland…

Originally published in Alt History #4, June 2012

• Son of a Bitch (3,300 words) (Read on-line, or download in .pdf)

Inspired by myths of the Golden Age of the Internet–where every user was equal and information was free–a team of engineers create a quantum computer network and endow it with sentience. But it’s not long before the network has more in its mind than chess problems and RickRolling, and the engineers discover that even the purest dreams need cashflow.

• Angeline of the Woods (8,600 words)
  

Finding his way to a small trading community on the banks of a river, Feathers Justice B is desperate to find Angeline of the Woods, a figure surrounded in myths and legends more than fact. He has a quite simple reason:  She is the death of him, and he’d very much like to keep on living.   However, if it was as simple as that then Angeline wouldn’t be the figure she is and Feathers wouldn’t find himself in situations where he’s staring at the wrong end of the Reaper’s scythe.

Originally published in Issue #36 of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction

• Buckets of Light (2,100 words)

Henry Maur’s job is to watch a black hole he affectionately calls Becca-Two, after his niece.  However, the observational data he’s been collecting has been forcing him to keep a guilty secret from his colleagues.  Secrets, though, have a habit of exploding…

Inspired by the Launch Pad lectures, and published in the Science in My Fiction blog, November 2010.

• Of Mice and Journeymen (6,400 words)

Carter Brown travels from town to town, setting type for any union print shop willing to give him work.  His ambitions stretch as far as avoiding sobriety and avoiding the attentions of the Hisaabs, the self-appointed autocracy which uses obscure technology to predict and control the population.  However, Carter’s been bringing more than his union card from town to town and has an old score to settle with the Hisaabs.

Originally published in SteamPunk Magazine Issue #6, September 2009

Of Mice and Journeymen was translated into Hebrew by Ehud Maimon of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and can be read here.

• Mind Games (8,200 words) (.pdf download)

Broken-heated and desperate, Hugo Large begs his unemployed sister, Jennifer, to find the beautiful socialite who gave him an unforgeable one-night-stand, and then forgot all about him.  But when Jen finds the girl, she’s fleeing from the sort of trouble only the rich and powerful can get into and offers ten times what her brother is paying her.  So Jen starts following leads and finds that, in a city so large it has a whole county of quaint English hamlets built on top of it, and that has solved its immigration problem by artificially imprinting memories into every foreigner who wants a job, a mind is just another commodity.

Originally published in  Concept Sci-Fi, Issue #5, March 2009

• Professor Wincheart’s Amaznig Radioactive Roadshow (5,500 words) (.pdf download)

‘Professor’ Wincheart and his assistant, Clewid, bring their wagon of cheap technological tricks through the less-civilised and less-connected parts of the solar system, dazzling the locals and passing a cap around the crowds.  The Radioactive Roadshow has been whispering to Clewid in the dead of night, though, and there’s more truth in Wincheart’s spiel than he’d care to admit.

Originally published in The Nautilus Engine Volume 2, Number 3, April 2009.

• The 14:08 from Liverpool Street (2,000 words)

John Woodbridge disappeared without explanation in 1991.  In 2008, the police find him wandering across train tracks and bring him home.  His brother, Adrian, deals with the emotional fallout by getting drunk but quickly realises that his older brother needs his support.  Whatever’s happened to him in those seventeen years is coming home to roost.

Orignally published in Bewildering Stories, 2008.

• Diwedd y Tir (710 words)

The world is slowly disappearing, and Julian stands on the beach staring at the horizon. It’s not just where the land meets the sea, it’s where the land ends.

Originally published in the Shine! Journal