My story, "Hey, Marilyn," is in an anthology with stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and Gareth Powell - among other legends: Fission #5. I'm over the moon.
I'm looking forward to reading the other stories.
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| Cover of Fission #5 |
My short story Nine Dioptres has been published in IZ Digital, joining Sunless (April 2023) and a story in 2021 in the print magazine, Interzone.
Nine Dioptres is the story of a family of bargees moored along the the River Thames, at Tilbury Enterprise Zone. A visitor asks Aminah to smuggle her south across the river. But the bargees shun modern electronic devices, and there's something strange about the visitor that makes Aminah hesitate to help her.
"The town to the north, Tilbury, had died in Aminah’s grandmother’s day, razed, ploughed and planted with Poppier. Her grandmother had told her of the souk on the north bank, where thousands of young women, hardly covered at all, haggled for fine leatherwork and embroidery. In those days, before the border was enforced, the young people crossed the bridges in cars and set up street stalls selling knock-off iPhones and MacBooks, outlawed today as instruments of Satan. Aminah’s mother, Jyutsna Begum, still lived with her grandmother on the water under Lizabeth Bridge. Their cutter’s engine had, of course, been sold for scrap many years before.
Background to the story
For those interested in the genesis of the story: Even today, London has enterprise zones between Canvey Island and Dagenham, and the government is eager to develop the zones as Freeports, or Free Trade Zones, in which excise taxes are not applicable until goods are moved out of the zone and into the UK proper. Although inside the UK physically, the zones are outside it for certain purposes.
In the story, the people living in the freeports, including on the river, cannot enter London without a passport. The sea level has risen, causing some population changes in the area (and a lot of new marshland) but a second, much larger Thames Barrier at Southend keeps floods from London proper.
I am very pleased to announce my new story Autonomous is published in the latest edition of Aurealis magazine, #157. And a superb edition it is too - great stories, beautifully illustrated and wrapped in a nice cover.
"Autonomous" tells the story of a man working at the user support call-center for a brand of self-driving cars. If a vehicle fails to sense road conditions adequately, it notifies the help center and a support tech takes manual control until the vehicle is back within specifications. The job entails long hours on the night shift, short periods of white-knuckle anxiety interspersed with time to think about things. Too much thinking leads him to a revelation about his place in society.
Excerpt from the beginning of "Autonomous":
It wasn’t immediately apparent why the autonomous vehicle notified Surya that it wanted to hand over control to a human. Surya, sitting in his cubicle in the Faraday data centre, struggled with the camera views before he realized the person in the driver’s seat must be incapacitated. Surya could tell they had slumped over from the way there was no head between the rear-view mirror and the car’s internal camera. Drunk, asleep, giving head… It wasn’t his place to figure out why. His task was to get the vehicle to safety.
I wasn't particularly excited by the rise of AI text generators until February 20th, when Neil Clarke had to close Clarkesworld (a major SF short story market) to new submissions in order to fight off a sudden flood of computer-written short stories.
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| Input: Please write a short fiction story (about 500 words) in which the Superbowl Left Shark becomes the first marine dancer on Earth's Moon. |
"Please write a short fiction story (about 500 words) in which the Superbowl Left Shark becomes the first marine dancer on Earth's Moon.""Left Shark had always been a talented dancer. He had spent years perfecting his moves, and his performance at the Superbowl had made him famous around the world. But even as he basked in the glory of his newfound celebrity, Left Shark knew that he was destined for something more.One day, as he was watching the moon rise over the ocean, an idea occurred to him. What if he could dance on the moon? It was a crazy idea, but Left Shark was determined to make it happen.He spent months training in a specially-designed underwater tank, perfecting his moves and building up his strength. Finally, he felt ready to take on the challenge of dancing in space.The day of the launch arrived, and Left Shark climbed aboard the spacecraft that would take him to the moon. As he blasted off into the sky, he felt a thrill of excitement and anticipation. This was his chance to do something no one had ever done before.When he landed on the moon, Left Shark stepped out of the spacecraft in his specially-designed spacesuit. He could feel the difference in gravity immediately – it was like dancing in slow motion. But he was undaunted. He had practiced for this moment, and he was ready to show the world what he could do.As he began to dance, Left Shark felt a rush of adrenaline. The lunar landscape stretched out before him, a barren expanse of rock and dust. But as he moved, he created something beautiful – a dance that was both powerful and graceful, a celebration of the human (or, in his case, shark) spirit.As he danced, Left Shark felt a sense of freedom that he had never experienced before. For the first time in his life, he was truly weightless, unencumbered by the limits of gravity. It was like he was flying, soaring through the void of space.And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the dance was over. Left Shark returned to Earth, hailed as a hero and a trailblazer. But he knew that his journey was far from over. There were other planets to explore, other dances to be danced.Years later, as he looked back on his life, Left Shark knew that he had achieved something truly remarkable. He had gone where no dancer had gone before, and he had shown the world what was possible when you dared to dream."
