Tag Archives: science fiction

What is “Science Fiction?”

I was touring blogs over my lunch hour here at the office, and came across this interesting selection on The Passive Voice, titled Rockets, Robots, and Reckless Imagination. It’s an article about science fiction in Pakistan and how popularizing it as a genre might benefit the country down the road, and why the author believes this to be true. I liked the article, but as is often the case, the comments to the article are very thought provoking.

So I started thinking about what Science Fiction was, to me. Sometimes I think it’s one of those “I know it when I see it” types of things. I read a novel or a short story and I know if its SF or something else.

I believe there are two different things in play. First, there are the trappings of SF. Think Star Wars. Think Buck Rogers. Think Star Trek, even. Put futuristic weapons in a story, set it on a different planet, at some point in the future, and some people will box it up and call it “Science Fiction.” Is it? Hardly, in my view.

Star Wars has a lot of SF trappings in it. There are space ships, robots, laser weapons, interplanetary travel, and aliens in that universe. Another example is a Stephen King short story called “The Jaunt.” Have you read it? It deals with a way to travel between two distant points instantaneously. It’s sort of like warp drive or teleporting in the Star Trek universe. Is it science fiction? I say it’s not. The only point of the wormhole, or whatever it is that allows them to travel between the two points, is to create a real horror story. It uses a science fiction device to tell a frightening tale.

Instead, I believe that it is the second thing that makes something a science fiction story, and that thing is “idea.” Good science fiction explores ideas, extrapolates them into the future and tells a story within the framework of that idea. Can dystopian fiction be science fiction? I believe it can be. Can post-apocalyptic fiction be SF? Again, my answer would be “yes.” But SF can be many things. Sometimes it’s a mystery or a thriller, set in the future and using ideas about the future at its core. (I’m thinking of some of Asimov’s robot stories, and also of the fiction of Steven M. Moore.) Sometimes it is more straightforward, focusing on the effects, near-term or far-flung, of some important scientific discovery that is within the realm of possibility, however improbable.

You can’t just throw out a handful of SF trappings and make something “science fiction.” Those trappings have to be integral to the story. As has been said in many places and many times, Star Wars could have been set in the old West (and in fact, may have been set in imperial Japan?) and the story would be the same. You could replace the lasers with revolvers or swords, you could replace the robots with people, and you could replace the spaceships with horses or trains or whatever, and you’d have essentially the same story.

Take a science fiction story and replace the “trappings” of SF in it, and you won’t have the same story. You likely won’t even have a story.

To me, SF takes an idea, maybe from today, and extrapolates it in some way, shape or form. It may or may not have robots, lasers, and space ships, but it will have an idea that has become integral to the story.

*****

The comments at TPV talk about religion versus science, and one poster (Antares) points out that for most of us, science has an element of faith in it. We put faith in a scientist or a teacher or a research paper and accept its pronouncements as truth, much the same way that we accept the pronouncements of a church or a religion as true. He mentions that few of us have actually done the work to “see” that DNA is a double helix, but we accept that it is based on the assertions of scientists and observers. I found this interesting. Something about it seems short-sighted, but I can’t figure out exactly what it is. Anyone have any thoughts?

*****

TOMORROWLAND (the movie) and inspiration…

Having read quite a bit about Walt Disney, I may be seeing this recent Disney film with tinted glasses. I remember being inspired by the stories that Disney put on film and on TV in a myriad of ways back in the 1960’s, when I was inspired by the stories and the music to write my own stories and to learn to play the songs. I didn’t take my inspiration for my love of science from Disney (directly); it was the space program that grabbed me and made me want to learn. Yeah, I was one of those kids who wanted to be an astronaut. I dreamed about traveling to the Moon or to Mars, or to even more distant places. My interest was fed by writers like Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke (the so-called Big Three) and by Charlton Heston movies like THE OMEGA MAN and PLANET OF THE APES.

It wasn’t till I started to study Disney that I realized how interested he was in the space program himself — and in scientific advancement! He made promotional films for NASA to help generate popular support for the project to put a man on the Moon, and in his parks was this area he called “Tomorrowland.” Tomorrowland celebrated the future by promoting the achievements of corporations in that direction. It had exhibits like “The House of Tomorrow” and a futuristic “People Mover” and its retrospective tribute to technology, “Carousel of Progress.” I didn’t know about these things till relatively recently because I didn’t go to Disney World until 1975, and then as a member of my high school band who was less concerned with appreciating what I was seeing than with the existence of high school girls from other band programs in other parts of the country.

So what’s all that have to do with TOMORROWLAND, the movie? I believe there is something of Walt Disney’s persona in this film. And that something is “Optimism.” Walt Disney was a futurist, according to Ray Bradbury. A forward-thinking man who had his eyes on solving the problems of the world with technology, through corporations.

The movie isn’t as focused on corporations as agents for positive change, but it has the same optimism about the future that Walt had. If I understood correctly, the story is that scientists figured out how to access an alternate dimension of reality and then proceeded to create a world where science was king — where just about anything was possible. (Sort of goes with Walt’s old “If you can dream it, you can do it” mentality.) In fact, the film starts with a boy inventor traveling to the World’s Fair that Disney used as a testing ground for so many things that found themselves into his parks, including the aforementioned Carousel of Progress and the “it’s a small world” attraction. (At that fair, for the Illinois exhibit, Walt and company built an audio-animatronic Lincoln that people reported rose and stepped into the audience, shaking people’s hands – of course it did no such thing but, well, that’s how imagination works I guess.) He makes his way to Tomorrowland with the help of a pretty young girl and a pin that she gives him. Cut to the future – our future – where our space program is being dismantled and where pessimism reigns. What’s the best an intelligent young man or woman can hope for in this world? It certainly isn’t the Moon, or Mars.

In the film’s case, the intelligent young person is a high school girl who becomes intrigued by a pin she finds among her belongings after she is released from jail — she was arrested for sabotaging the machines that are destroying the launch platforms at Cape Canaveral. The pin shows her a shining land of science and technology that is beyond her wildest dreams, and she must find it.

The straightforward adventure story that follows is competently written and it plays out in an entertaining manner. But it was the concept behind that adventure — the idea that you can make a difference, that your brain is more powerful than anything else, and that amazing things can be accomplished if our best and brightest put their minds to it — that intrigued me.

And it wasn’t just me. My kids were intrigued by the ideas, by the inspiration that they were able to take from the story. I have smart kids, and we’ve always talked about accomplishing big things through intellect (not in those words, obviously), and they saw in this film something more than an unrealistic adventure story. It’s the same sort of feeling we have when we leave EPCOT or Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom. There’s an enthusiasm after those visits, a feeling that anything IS possible, in fact.

I found a review on a sometimes-Disney site called FutureProbe and I’m going to just quote the end of it:

The lesson our characters should have learned is that Tomorrowland isn’t a place you escape to, it’s something you make wherever you happen to be. The movie shouldn’t have ended with a bunch of robot children setting out to bring people to Tomorrowland, but with them setting out to bring Tomorrowland to the people.

I agree with the sentiment, but I think it’s being nit-picky about the final message. So what if the robots are setting out to bring the best and brightest to Tomorrowland instead of rejoining the real world? In a sense, they are metaphorically doing exactly that – inspiring the young people to create the future instead of accepting it and “gaming the system” for their own benefit. Maybe “Tomorrowland” is MIT or Harvard or University of Illinois for some particular teenager, and maybe it’s going to work for an environmentally aware company. Maybe it’s just getting the best out of yourself instead of coasting.

In any case, I found a lot to like about this movie. I’m not going to argue that it’s the greatest piece of filmmaking ever, but it’s more than an entertaining story, or at least it can be.

*****

Why “horror?”

My post from yesterday talked about what scared me, and I promised that I’d write something about why I write what I write, which is mostly horror. The short answer is that it’s what comes out when I start writing. So there.

There’s gotta be a longer answer, right?

Well, let’s see. I write horror because I think it’s fun to imagine scary scenarios. There’s usually a morality play at work in such stories; even if they glorify gore and torture, there’s a good-vs.-evil thing going on. You the reader root for the good guy (usually).

I cut my fiction teeth on mysteries when I was small. All mysteries seem to me to be “small horror” stories in a way. Something bad has happened. The mystery is who did it, or why. Sometimes it’s a puzzle story about the act of figuring things out. Think of thrillers. Murders, terrorists, evil government agencies, disappearances, bombs, plane crashes — all these things can be elements of a horror novel. But the focus is on the good guy solving the problem, not so much on the victim.

I remember a mystery I read when I was younger titled THE BLACK SPANIEL MYSTERY (or something close to that). I remember that these puppies were disappearing. Or rather, they were being replaced. But one of the kids noticed that the markings of the puppy were not the same as the markings on the original puppy. Why? I can remember feeling for those puppies, as well as for the kids who were hurt by the puppies’ disappearance. That the kids took it upon themselves to solve the puzzle made it a mystery. But what if the puppies were being stolen just to hurt the kids? Or they were going to do a “Cruella DeVil” on them and skin them for their lovely fur pelts? That’s horror, no?

Further, I moved on to science fiction. Asimov and Heinlein were my two main sources of entertainment for a long time (considering how many books both of them wrote, you can well imagine that getting through their catalogs took a few years…). Again, we had mysteries, even in something like FOUNDATION, where the whole book is basically a search for the Second Foundation. Along the way there is The Mule, a mutant who can rule the universe with his advanced mental powers. That’s sort of scary, isn’t it? He’s almost an alien in those books, and here he is taking over the human race. Admittedly, Asimov’s emphasis doesn’t focus on any horrific elements, so it remains firmly in the SF realm.

Then finally, I found Stephen King. Now here was horror. We had a psychic girl going destructo on her high school prom, we had vampires taking over a town, we had the ghosts of evil in a big hotel recruiting the caretaker and convincing him to murder his snowbound family, we had a psychic who sees the end of the world in a politician’s handshake and acts to stop it, we had a virus which kills off 99.4% (or something like that) of the population of the U.S., setting up an epic battle between good and evil. We had ghosts, we had aliens, we had monsters, we had zombies from a pet cemetery…all manners of horror. All done with style.

I didn’t really read horror to be reading horror for a long time. I just read authors. Dan Simmons wrote some horror (Summer of Night, Carrion Comfort). Robert McCammon did, too. So did Orson Scott Card (Lost Boys) and Dean Koontz. Finally I found authors who wrote nothing except for horror. Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum, Phil Rickman, Melanie Tem, Nancy Holder, Poppy Z. Brite… So many names, so many scary stories. The tales varied. Some were gross and bloody, some were moody and ephemeral.

I wanted to write science fiction, but nothing I wrote seemed to really work all that well. Although I have a science background (chemistry major, lots of health sciences in dental school, and interest in the space program dating to my childhood, so I always took in information about the goings-on in science), my stories never seemed really plausible to me. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I knew enough to know that what I was thinking wasn’t really going to work, but not enough to figure out a way to make it believable. Anyway, as big of a fan of SF as I am, I’ve only written three short stories that are more or less in the realm of SF.

Everything I write seems to always come back to either the supernatural, or to something evil. I’ve liked that in short stories I can sometimes have the bad guys win (see my short story GARAGE SALE which is found in THE STRIKER FILES 3-In-1 COLLECTION, or my story THE FUN HOUSE in DIE 6). I like going in that direction with my stories. It seems natural to me.

I like stories about characters. I believe that most horror, at least most entertaining (to me) horror, is character-centric. If you don’t care about the victims, then you won’t care much about their story. And there is always a very important struggle between good and evil, between right and wrong. To me, that’s the cool part of a story in the horror genre — it’s the “good will rise over evil” aspect, the fact that while not everyone might live through this evil, in the end, somehow, the good characters will triumph. Perhaps it will be at a steep cost, perhaps their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. Sacrifices have to be made. That’s a good story right there, in my opinion. It’s a universal story; one that can be adapted across genres. Maybe all, or most, good stories have it at their core, somehow.

Recently I read a book called SEASICK by Iain Rob Wright. In the book a troubled cop on holiday finds that he’s reliving a day over and over and over and over and… well, you get the picture. It turns out (SPOILER ALERT, though I think that even if you know the end, you can probably read the book and enjoy it because it’s a pretty fun read) that there is a killer virus on the ship, released by terrorists, and when the ship reaches the dock, it’s going to infect the port, and the world, and everyone’s gonna die. How is the cop going to get out of this?

Is this a thriller or a horror novel? Well, the virus turns people into some sort of zombies, so that makes it horror. But…terrorists…a plot to release a virus…a hero cop…thriller, right? But, a sorcerer who is causing the day to repeat for this cop until he gets it right…back to horror… But…

You see what I mean. A good horror novel can be a good thriller. It just has supernatural aspects, and doesn’t shy away from depicting the bad stuff that happens, even if it happens more or less “off camera.”

I like writing character-driven stories. I think that most of my stories start with the characters and move on from there. I don’t know if I succeed. Read something I’ve written (all short stories, until THE CAVE goes live sometime this weekend, then I’ll have a novella in the mix as well) and come back and tell me what you think. It happens that most of my stories end up being horror in some way, but they’re mostly just stories.

One of the best horror series I’ve read in recent years is F. Paul Wilson’s “Repairman Jack” series. Why is it so good? Because Jack is facing off as the champion of a supernatural entity, and opposing another, more involved supernatural entity, but the horrors are a mix of real-life horror and horror caused in an unbelievable way by something supernatural. Because Jack is fighting for himself as a sort of every-man, and his family, and even for people he doesn’t know but shares humanity with. Because in the end you just have to know what’s happening, how it’s going to resolve, and what will become of Jack and Gia and Vicky and Abe and others.

It is a character-driven series, in my view, and they are the type of books I love to read, and aspire to write.

Anyway, that’s a long answer as to why I write horror. Mostly it’s because those are the kind of stories that I make up. Lot of words to get back to that short answer. Sorry!

*****

Michael Jasper’s THE WANNOSHAY CYCLE

[I read this book a number of years ago and wrote this review immediately after reading it. I recently came across a short story by Michael Jasper titled “Drinker,” which is set in the Wannoshay universe. The short story was different — set on the Wannoshay homeworld, entirely populated by the aliens. I didn’t think it was as successful, though it was beautifully written. It didn’t grab me like this novel did. But revisiting that universe made me think about how much I liked the novel, and I remembered that I reviewed it on Journalscape back then. So here is that review, from February 18, 2008, with some edits and deletions (like a reference to what I was reading next…):]

I started reading THE WANNOSHAY CYCLE by Michael Jasper on Wednesday or Thursday of last week, finished it on Friday night, and went back to reread a few chapters over the weekend.I don’t know how many here have read it, but for what it’s worth, I thought this was one of the best “alien” type SF novels I’ve ever read. I won’t talk about the plot here; if anyone wants to know more about it, check it out on Amazon and read the description.

I will say, though, that the depiction of aliens is up there with Niven’s Ringworld aliens, in my opinion. It is superior to those, in some ways. I felt like I *knew* these creatures better than I ever knew the Puppeteer or the other alien from RINGWORLD. I could visualize them much better than I could the alien beings in Asimov’s THE GODS THEMSELVES, and the aliens in Robert Sawyer’s CALCULATING GOD were less well described, I thought.

Jasper’s vision of the near future, an Earth where things like You Tube and blogging have been extrapolated to one possible logical conclusion, where the government’s response to terrorism has become a way of life in itself, sort of, where designer drugs evolve into Blur, was both familiar but yet clearly IN the future. I thought it was very well imagined and described.

Michael Jasper writes beautifully, also. Nary a clunky sentence to pull one out of the story to be found. Characters are fully realized; you “know” them very quickly, including the aliens to the degree that any alien can be understood. One of the nice things about the story is that the author does not try to explain every last thing about these creatures; leaving me to believe that there are some things about the aliens that just are outside of human experience.

This is up there with the best SF I’ve read in a couple of years. And seriously, I’m not just kissing up because Michael Jasper journals here, and might (or might not) read this. If anyone reading this likes SF, you can confidently give this book a go.

*****

Review of ILIUM and OLYMPOS by Dan Simmons

Once upon a time there was a vibrant and eclectic field of genre fiction known as science fiction. Here the giants played: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, PK Dick, and many, many others. But alas, over time the field dwindled. Oh, there were some new voices, writers like David Brin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, Robert Sawyer, and James Hogan turned out many interesting stories in the field. And now, the field is experiencing something of a rebound as self-publishers skip the Big 5’s filters and publish the stories they want to tell without being told that “it can’t sell.”

Occasionally a writer transcends genre, finds that he or she is able to write in more than one style, tell more than one type of tale, with power and passion. I believe that writer, in this time period, is DAN SIMMONS.

Dan Simmons has written a lot of excellent fiction, crossing genres with works such as CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT and CARRION COMFORT in the horror genre, HARDCASE and DARWIN’S BLADE in the mystery genre, and THE CROOK FACTORY, a spy thriller starring Ernest Hemingway. But some of his most ambitious fiction has been done in the science/speculative fiction field. He wrote the excellent four book series featuring HYPERION, THE FALL OF HYPERION, ENDYMION and THE RISE OF ENDYMION. And now, he works again in the SF field with his latest two volume tale, ILIUM and OLYMPOS.

ILIUM, as the title suggests, starts off as a story based on the Trojan War and Homer’s ILIAD. The familiar heroes of that saga, Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon, Paris, Ajax, King Priam, and of course, Odysseus, are present as they fight the war according to Homer’s ILIAD. There is a notable exception, however. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., a classical literature professor from Indiana University, is on hand to watch events unfold. Hockenberry has been “reanimated” to report the unfolding events to his Muse, and in turn to all of the Greek gods. Yes, the gods themselves are on hand, in person, to watch these battles be fought, and to interfere anywhere they might. Hockenberry’s job is to report to the gods if the battle deviates from the history he knows so well. He isn’t alone – the gods have other resurrected “scholics” to also report on the war. Hockenberry is the senior scholic present; the gods do not have any compunction against eliminating scholics as they see fit, and most end up being destroyed when they anger the gods in any way shape or form. Somehow Hockenberry has so far escaped their wrath.

Hockenberry, however, has another secret. He’s been ordered by Aphrodite to spy on and ultimately kill Athena. And since he knows that it will be his demise either way he acts in this situation, he looks for a way to change the course of the war. And finds it.

Two other threads of story are progressing at the same time. First, the sentient machines of the Jovian moons, known as “moravecs”, have detected unusual quantum activity on the planet Mars, which has been “terraformed” in less than 200 years, a feat that should be impossible. The moravecs decide to send a delegation to investigate. With this group go Mahnmet, a deep sea explorer moravec who is also very interested in Shakespeare’s works, especially currently the Sonnets, and Orphu, a huge crab-like moravec who is interested in the works of Proust.

The second thread is of a group of old style humans living on the surface of Earth. They live an idyllic existence, free of stress and worry. But they are limited in their lifespan to 100 years, at which time they “fax” up to the ring cities circling the planet at the equator and around the poles and join the “post humans”, the next step of human evolution. But for 100 years, they live a very nice life, protected by strange creatures called the “voynix” and taken care of by robotic “servitors”. Every 20 years they fax up to the firmary to get a sort of tune-up to rejuvenate them before faxing back to their Earth.

The story threads seem to be independent of one another until the moravec delegation is attacked, and their ship basically destroyed, when they reach Mars, by a very tall humanoid on what appears to be a chariot. Greek god? Olympos? Aha. Things are more related than they seem.

In OLYMPOS, we find out more about who these gods are, how they terraformed Mars in just 150 years, and what the source of the excessive quantum activity is on Mars. We also meet zeks, also referred to as little green men, chlorophyll-based beings on Mars who have no mouths or ears and who communicate by physical touch. Our friend Hockenberry has succeeded in changing the course of the war, thanks in part to the timely arrival of the moravecs who seem to always be there to save him. The heroes of Troy and Greece have declared war on the gods themselves, and have taken the battle to Mt. Olympos through a rip in space-time called a “brane hole”. Back on Earth, the power has been shut down and the humans, so used to being taken care of, have to act to save their lives, as the mysterious voynix have taken to hunting them down. And one of them, Harman, has been shanghaied into a voyage where the answers become clearer.

I loved this story as it unfolded. Simmons has a vision of the future that is actually quite beautiful and quite frightening at the same time. The technology that he envisions, and the story that he tells, does not depend on traveling faster than light. It uses the theories and speculations of today’s physicists and scientists and extrapolates forward to a future where some of the theoretical possibilities of quantum physics become useful realities, and even the Star Trek transporter technology becomes doable.

And who would have thought about using the Trojan War in a work of science fiction? THE ILIAD was written as a sort of accurate history, poetic as it may be, and the idea that perhaps the “gods” are actually present and their magic is actually very advanced science ala Clarke’s rule is a neat premise for a novel. I would have been happy with just that.

But the rest of the story weaves in nicely and finally it starts to become evident just how these divergent plot lines are going to converge. If it wasn’t almost 700 pages long, I’d probably read it again right now. I almost certainly will revisit the tale some day.

If you enjoy speculative fiction, this is a winner, albeit a long one.

*****

(I wrote this review several years ago, before self-publishing became a real option — I had to add in the part about the rebirth of the field of SF…)

*****

Dystopian vs. Post-apocalyptic

Ran across the internet site The Short List, who posted this list of “dystopian novels.” The list was controversial, omitting plenty of good novels and listing some that were arguable, like THE HUNGER GAMES and ARTICLE 5. Also it mixed “dystopian” with “post-apocalyptic” novels as if there were no difference.

I think it’s likely that both dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories attract many of the same readers. I know I am attracted to both. But is there a difference? In many comments, it is argued that post-apocalyptic novels are a subset of dystopian fiction, while others argue that the two are separate, closely related perhaps, but both branches occupy the same level of whatever tree one might be making to categorize science fiction.

I have my own “End of the World” list of both types of novels on Amazon on which I tried to stick with “post-apocalyptic” types of novels. I did not include classic dystopian stories like Orwell’s 1984 or P.K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? because they don’t paint a picture of a society that’s been wiped out by some catastrophe (hence, the “apocalyptic” part of the genre tag). I stick to stories describing the world after something decimates (not literally; “decimate” means eliminate one of every ten people, I think) human society. In The Stand, it is disease. Likewise in Edward W. Robertson’s Breakers novels. In Hugh Howey’s Wool, it is another form of disease brought on by nano-bots. In Lucifer’s Hammer by Niven and Pournelle, it is an asteroid hitting the Earth. In Stephen Baxter’s Ark and Flood, it is a flood of super-biblical proportions that destroys the environment as we know it. In Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, it’s Ice-9. (Read the book! It’s lots of fun!) In David Brin’s The Postman, it’s nuclear war. In a bunch of books, it’s zombies! How do the zombies get created out of your friends and neighbors? Disease, usually.

I see “dystopian” as being something different. I see it as a society that’s gone “off track”. Orwell’s vision is the classic example. Suzanne Collins paints a dystopian society in her Hunger Games trilogy, and so does Veronica Roth in her Divergent novels. (Apparently, The Hunger Games is a blatant rip-off of another earlier novel, possibly of Japanese origin, which I’d never heard of…but the knowledgeable commenters knew all about it.) Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged paints a dystopia of sorts, and apparently so does her novel Anthem. (I’ve read the first, not the second, and I remain unimpressed with the “philosophy” found in Atlas Shrugged, but that’s just me.) A lot of current young adult fiction can be categorized as dystopian, especially The Giver. How about The Maze Runner? Dystopian, and possibly post-apocalyptic (I haven’t read the follow-ups yet.) (Oh, and I know The Giver isn’t really current, but my kids were both assigned it for school reading recently, so for me it’s current…)

Anyway, lots of good suggestions for reading were given in the comments, and I plan on checking out a few of them. There’s something about the current crop of dystopian novels, especially the YA stuff, that grabs me – maybe it’s the attention to social orders as we see them today, and the way that kids relate to one another. Maybe it’s just that it’s more accessible, with a more modern style of writing. I don’t know. But I know for me, it’s sometimes hard to get to the excellent story, because of the style in which an older novel was written. Earth Abides and On The Beach are both like that for me; so is Brave New World. Great, if frightening visions of the future, but stylistically, they seem to take more concentration or something, and seem harder to get into, for me at least.

If you have comments about any of this, I’d love to hear them. (And I really don’t need to hear from the Vuitton Bags or Nike whatever spammers anymore…everything gets caught in the spam filter and I delete it all because I simply don’t have time to check four or five hundred posts…)

*****

DIE 6 now available!

It’s live! DEADLOCK PRESS and I are pleased to announce that DIE 6, a collection of 6 short stories, is now available in the Amazon Kindle Store for $2.99.

Here’s the description:

A short story collection that contains:

AN ARTIFICIAL YEARNING – a young man meets the girl of his dreams online, and yearns to take the next step – meeting in person. But the love of his life is not what he expected…

BLOOD TIES – a psychic who is in debt to the wrong people sees a way out if he can talk to the ghost of a bank robber and find the money that was stolen. Of course, it’s never as easy as it sounds…

THE TOOTH FAIRY – Perion, queen of the Dentata, is captured by a boy whose tooth she has come to collect, and tries to make a deal for her freedom, the cost of which is extremely high…

THE FUN HOUSE – Natalie is stuck taking her little brother to the carnival, but when they enter the Fun House, they experience the thrills and chills of their young lives…this Fun House is a little too real…

TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS – When a woman shows up at Joseph’s door with an unbelievable story, he is left with no other choice but to accept it when agents from the future attack both of them in his time. His only escape – to travel to the future himself and attempt to set things right…

THE GHOST TRAIN – Three high school students in Addison Falls try to solve the mystery of both the strange dreams they are having and the reappearance of a “Ghost Train” passing directly through their mall. The answers are found in the past…

Plus a brief author’s note and a sample of “Rick’s Rules”.

Two SF stories, two horror/ghost stories, and a couple that cross genres…Enjoy!

It’s about 36,400 words of new fiction, along with a brief author’s note (no need to read it if you’re not interested in any backstory on the works), a sample of Rick’s Rules, and links to my other stories.

Please take a look at it, download the sample, and give it a read! Thank you!

*****

QUANTUM ZOO is live on Amazon!

QUANTUM ZOO was released while I was out of the country, on June 17th, and has already hit number 1 on the Amazon SF Anthology list!

If you haven’t picked it up yet, get it now…it’s on sale for a limited time for $0.99! It won’t be such an incredible deal for too long!

Here’s the link: QUANTUM ZOO in the Amazon Kindle Store

There are 12 (count ’em!) high quality stories in the collection, ranging from Egyptian gods to alien zoos. Even a little supernatural stuff! And of course my story, PLAYING MAN, can be found right smack in the middle of all this SF/Fantasy goodness!

Grab a copy and read it! You won’t be disappointed!

Go ahead. I’ll still be here when you get back….

*****

QUANTUM ZOO has a website!

If you’re following along at home, you will already know that I have a story which will be published in the indie anthology QUANTUM ZOO, along with eleven other authors. I was honored and thrilled to be included in their numbers. Most of them have significant writing credits and credentials; all of them have more of those things than I do.

Anyway, there’s a website! It contains info about all the authors as well as story excerpts and some other goodies.

There is going to be a Facebook release party as well, though I won’t be able to “attend” due to other commitments. I’ll post more when I know more.

Here’s the website address: http://quantumzoo.blogspot.com/

Please check it out!

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