HELP WANTED: Further Elucidation

 

To expand a bit on yesterday’s call for help:

I’m looking for people who have experience with producing podcasts, or at least with consuming a lot of podcasts, who ideally can help us to create and produce a hypothetical Stupefying Stories podcast, or at least point me at some good examples and help to teach me how it’s done.

I am not committed to doing a podcast. This is just an idea we’re floating as a possible successor to SHOWCASE. The whole idea is to produce something that draws in potential new readers, and if Fortune smiles upon us, to sell them books.

That’s what Rampant Loon Press is all about, you know. Selling books. To people who want to read them. Sharpened to a fine point, that is the reason why RLP exists. That is the only reason why RLP exists.

I have seen some terrific podcasts we could never hope to emulate, as we’re operating on a shoestring budget. (Oh, to be able to afford two shoestrings, so that I could have both shoes tied at the same time!) 

I have seen more terrible podcasts that strike me as good examples of what not to do. Here in the latter half of the third decade of the 21st century, for example, I think doing streaming video is a must, and a purely audio podcast would be a waste of time; but I also have seen a lot of video podcasts that prove that some people really should stick to radio. By far the worst example I’ve seen thus far was a solo video podcast that looked much like the stock art photo above, except that the guy’s studio was much grubbier and more cluttered, his hair and beard greasier and more unkempt, and he never once turned to face the camera. Worse, it was apparently some kind of live call-in show, but he never put the incoming calls on the audio track, nor did he repeat the questions he was asked. He just droned on for half an hour, talking to his computer screen.

At least, I assume it was for half an hour. After about five minutes I started fast-forwarding, hoping it got better. It never did.

Second worst place, by the way, goes to a show that was hosted by two photogenic gents who sat there like a pair of department store mannequins, sharing a split screen, smiling and laughing at each other’s jokes, and never moving. If you’re going to use video, for Pete’s sake, do something!  

[No, not for your sake, Pete Wood. Though I must say that I loved your story, Quantum Doughnut, and would really love to be able to include short indie films, like Quantum Doughnut, the movie, in our podcast. The rest of you: if you haven’t seen it, it’s only ten minutes long, and it’s free on YouTube. After you’ve finished reading this post, go watch it.]  

I’ll confess, watching that split-screen podcast made me wish I had some construction paper and a pair of scissors, so that I could replace those hosts with South Park-style animation; or at least that I had a pair of socks handy, so I could replace them with sock puppets. It would have been an improvement.

There, that’s another thing I’d like to be able to include in our hypothetical podcast: short animated sequences by indie filmmakers. And perhaps even a musical interlude or two. In my mind an ideal episode would be something like a good reading of Mark Niemann-Ross’s story, “The Music Teacher,” followed by an interview/Q&A segment in which we get the author to talk about the story, and why and how he wrote it (e.g., On Writing “The Music Teacher,” in SHOWCASE #4). And then, since Mark is a musician and music is so integral to the story, perhaps we could even have a few minutes of music illustrating some of the concepts in the story.

You see my problem? I grew up on The Firesign Theater and radio plays, and spent way too much time in recording studios. If it was purely up to me and I had an unlimited budget, I’d want to do full-cast recordings, complete with sound effects and incidental music. 

But, I know my limitations. I’m a perfectionist. I’m the kind of guy who can spend six hours in a recording studio, just to get the perfect three minutes down on tape. I have video production experience as well, and the same thing applies. The reason the “Liberty Biberty” commercials resonate with me is because I’ve worked with people very much like that yutz. 

[Sidebar: On one educational video project I did there was an “Interview” scene in the script, but the schedule didn’t permit us to get both actors in the same place at the same time. Worse, one of the actors looked great, but couldn’t remember two lines in succession. We ended up taking two days to shoot that scene, with one of the crew standing in for Mr. Perfect Haircut on the first day, and then the next day shooting Mr. Haircut reading all of his lines separately, slowly, one at a time, with multiple takes to ensure that we got the best readings, after which we spliced it all together in post so that it looked like the two actors were in the same room at the same time and interacting with each other. At the time I was perversely proud that we’d managed to pull it off. In retrospect, it was an insane amount of time to spend to get less than five minutes of usable running time.]

§ 

As I hope I’ve gotten across by now, technically, I could do this myself—but I don’t want to. I don’t want to be The Face of Stupefying Stories, or at least not the sole face, though I don’t seem to have a choice in that matter. I don’t want to do a Two Talking Heads Sharing Banter show, at least, not for the entire show; even Statler and Waldorf would have gotten tiresome if they’d ever been on screen together for more than a few minutes at a time. I don’t want to be the sole writer/producer/director, as I already know that would play to my worst character flaws.  

What I would like to see us produce is more of a variety show, focusing on SF/F stories and the people who write and read them, yes, but also including other people’s video and audio work. Ideally, I’d like to find people who can independently produce short segments that can be integrated into a larger program. 

Most of all, I want to find people with fresh ideas; ones I haven’t imagined yet.

At least, that’s my line of thinking. Now tell me what you would like to see.

~brb

P.S. And then go watch Quantum Doughnut. 

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Help Wanted: Podcast Geniuses Needed

As I continue to work towards the relaunch of Stupefying Stories, one fact has become clear. 

The days of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE are over. When we first launched SHOWCASE as a webzine, with Issue #1 on June 14, 2013, it was a great idea. There is still a lot of great content out there—e.g., "Smart Money," by Samuel Marzioli—and you can still browse the site, if you know how to find the secret entrance—

But a Google search can't find the site anymore, and even I have trouble getting into it, and I created the blessed thing and have full admin rights. This may simply be another strange behavior of Edge, as with its absolute refusal to let me enter smart quotes into a Blogger post…

But I digress. My point is, SHOWCASE began as a webzine, then migrated to become a free short-story feature on this Stupefying Stories parent site, and the longer we produced it, the clearer it became that this was not an effective way to deliver fiction to readers or to attract new readers. We have published hundreds of stories in SHOWCASE over the past thirteen years, and in so doing developed a long list of what doesn't work.

• Weekly serials, such as "Market Futures," by M. Ian Bell, don't work.
  
  
• Long-format complete stories, such as "Welcome to the Death Machine Factory Tour," by Ray Daley or "Planting the Flag," by Graham Brand, don't work.
  
  
• Wildly experimental stories, like "On the Menu Stains of Madness," by G. Scott Huggins, (which, by the way, I love and think you should read right now) don't work. 

What does work?

Short stories. Really short stories, the shorter the better. Better yet, can you cut it down to just a paragraph or two? Gimme an eye-catching image and a quick emotional gut-punch. Readers these days are busy, and don't have the patience to scroll through anything longer on their cell phones. And no, they will not click-through on "read more" links.

The numbers don't lie. The longer the story, the fewer the number of people willing to read it online, and the longer we kept doing SHOWCASE, the fewer the number of readers we were drawing in for each new story we published. Eventually even the flash fiction failed to draw a significant number of readers.

So, it's time to admit that the parrot isn't merely pining for the fjords, he's dead, and it's time for us to move on to doing something else.

Such as?

That's where the idea of a podcast comes in. This is not alien territory to me. I do have a background in radio and television production, after all, not that I speak of it often. I did name the company Rampant Loon Media when we incorporated, with the idea that we would branch out into audio and video production eventually. 

Okay. Eventually is now.

Hence this call for help. We have done some experimenting with the idea. We do have a Stupefying Stories YouTube channel, which we have yet to make use of. We do have the first full season of The Odin Chronicles recorded and ready to release as soon as we settle on a suitable distribution channel, as well as the complete run of Dawn of Time. To give you some idea of what we already have in-hand, you can preview the first episode of The Odin Chronicles on my personal YouTube channel.

This is just a taste; a sample. It's good for what it is, but it's not complete. We have the tools. We have the technology. But what we don't have is a show.

That's where you come in. What can we do with Stupefying Stories, the podcast, to turn it into an interesting show, that people come back to again and again? I have some ideas, but right now I'm more interested in hearing yours. What works in a podcast? What doesn't? What would you love to see done if it was your show?

The lines are open…

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Macbeth in the 21st Century

Here’s today’s “Suddenly thought of while thinking about something else” idea:

Has anyone done a rewrite of Macbeth as a modern novel? I’m not thinking of a film, or of an updated or relocated version of the play. Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood pretty much definitively nails that, by resetting the story in feudal Japan, though DeRoest & Polling’s M’aQ’betH gets close, especially when performed in the original Klingon. No, I’m thinking of rewriting the story as a novel, as if one was doing a novelization of a modern screenplay.

Keep the setting in 11th century Scotland. Keep every scene and character, as originally scripted. Keep every line of dialog but update it to modern vernacular. For some inexplicable reason Wil’yam Sheq’spir failed to include the requisite number of shits, fucks, assholes, and motherfuckers that are the distinguishing marks of truly great modern literature.

Kirk: That’s simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.

Spock: For example?

Kirk: Oh, the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, the novels of Harold Robbins…

Spock: Ah. The giants.     

Do not update the story to modern times. Ian McKellen’s Richard III did that brilliantly, and if you haven’t seen the movie you should, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo + Juliet did it very badly and should serve as a warning. No, keep the story almost exactly as it is, but tell it in a more accessible manner.

Would enough people want to read such a novelization? If so, there’s a wealth of public domain source material that could be tapped for similar books, beginning with Macbeth and leading on through Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar… I wouldn’t want to touch Richard III or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for reasons, but I think a series of such books could be a both great deal of fun and very successful, if done with the right touch.

What do you think?

Over to you,
~brb

P.S. Bonus idea: Macbeth, The Graphic Novel! Done almost entirely in black, white, and blood-spattered red! The kids will love it!

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Where Do We Go From Here? • 7 July 2026

 

Three months later…

A lot of questions have been coming in. It’s time I began answering them. Eschewing the usual FAQ format, here’s what has been going on around here lately.

The recovery from my open heart surgery in March has been going… strangely. The people in cardiac rehab tell me I’m making remarkable progress and in no time at all will be back to normal, or at least to whatever it is that will pass for normal for me for the rest of my life. I was extremely fortunate in that they went in and did the surgery before I’d had a full and proper heart attack, so there has been little to no permanent damage to my heart. With careful attention to diet and exercise, I should continue to improve and have many years of life still ahead.

[Given that much time, I’m sure I’ll be able to find some way to make this fat-free, sugar-free, salt-free, caffeine-free, red meat-free, low carbohydrate, flavor-free diet interesting. There is only so much one can do when one must begin with extra lean ground turkey.]

The people in my cardiologist’s office, on the other hand, seem to be considering me to be a laboratory research animal. “You’re feeling better? Your health is improving? Great! Let’s change your medications again!” Two weeks ago I was doing so well they quadrupled the dosage of one of my medications, and produced exactly the results the Possible Side Effects sheet warned against: dizziness, chronic fatigue, painfully dry eyes and vision problems (Oh, that’s what caused that!), cold hands and feet, a slow resting heart rate, and a blood pressure so low the people in cardiac rehab began to panic when they first saw it. Thankfully, the effects reversed once we backed-off the dosage.

I will admit, I am not fully appreciative of this experience. I just want to get back to living something like a normal life—except that every morning, even before the fistful of pills I need to choke down before I can have my first cup of (decaf, bleah) coffee, I wake up in my bed, acutely aware of this mass of metal I now have in my chest where most people have a sternum. They didn’t even install a miniature nuclear reactor or give me superpowers or anything cool like that. I just have this big numb area where they severed and cauterized nerves and then put my rib cage back together with baling wire.

[Strewth, every time I look at that scar in the mirror, I think of the Sergeant’s speech at the beginning of Act 1, Scene 2 of Macbeth. After they unseamed me from nave to chaps, they at least saved the pieces and put me back together again, and my head did not wind up decorating anyone’s battlements.]

There are things—many things—I’m glad I didn’t know before going into surgery, and maybe we can talk about them another time, when we get into a discussion of the difference between terror and horror. Right now I want to move onto the BIG question, which so many people have asked: “What’s going on with Stupefying Stories?” (Or as one person stated it in a particularly memorable way: “Is your brain functional enough to write or publish?”)

Yes, I think so. Of course, I thought that in April, too, then in May, and then in the first weeks of June. I was eager to get back to work then; impatient, even. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t, as when I did try to write, everything I did was badly unfocused and going off in all directions simultaneously.

I seem to be past that now, though. Mostly. I’m ready to get back to work. I am, almost quite literally, back from the dead—and we can talk about that another time, too—and the experience was not what you may have been led to expect. I didn’t see Heaven; didn’t meet any dead relatives; didn’t come back with any profound insights or feelings of enlightenment. What I’ve mostly come away with is an acute awareness that life is short, and I want to do more of the things I find to be fun in the time I have left.

Fortunately, one of those things I find to be fun is running Stupefying Stories. 

Why? Pete Wood was trying to cheer me up, and he found this, somewhere:

Stupefying Stories is widely considered a great, quirky speculative fiction magazine. Founded by cyberpunk pioneer Bruce Bethke, it is highly regarded in the writing community for its hands-on editing, its focus on compelling characters, and its success at launching new authors. The magazine is published by Rampant Loon Press, and is particularly known for a few distinct traits: [...list truncated for length...]

Overall, if you are looking for fresh, accessible science fiction, fantasy, and horror that prioritizes pacing and character development over literary pretension, it is an excellent publication.

Okay, I like that. I’ll take it. So I suppose that means I’d best try to live up to it.

Therefore…

The plan du jour is to get a new book out as quickly as possible; preferably as close to August 1st as I can. Of course, this depends on my being able to scrape together enough stories to make a full issue. So far I have a few authors committed to this, and I plan to spend the rest of this week reaching out to as many more authors as I can, to see who is still on-board, who has given up and moved on, and who has placed their story somewhere else but has another story I might be able to use.

I know. It’s ambitious. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably impossible.

But then, that’s me, isn’t it?

Per aspera ad astra,
Bruce

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How We Got to Here • 7 April 2026

This story begins about six months ago, when I was raking leaves, cleaning gutters, and just generally getting the house and yard ready for the winter to come. I didn’t exactly injure myself cleaning the gutters; it was as I was putting away the 24-ft. extension ladder, trying to hang it back on the hooks, that I lost control of the ladder, tried to regain control of the thing, planted my left foot wrong, twisted my hip wrong, twisted my shoulders wrong, and just generally did everything that I could have done wrong, wrong. At the time I thought, “I should have just jumped out of the way and let the (^&$@!!! thing drop, and then started over.” 

As it happens: had I done that, I probably would not be alive now. 

As it happened then, I wound up with all kinds of weird bangs, bruises, sprains, and torsion injuries to my knees, hips, and shoulders, mostly. How badly banged-up was I? According to my diary, badly enough that I didn’t even feel up to writing and posting a review totally slagging TRON: ARSE, an idiotic movie that truly deserved every bit of invective I could sling at it. Yeah, I was in that much pain.

So what? Among other things my Dad was an athletic coach, of the old school variety, and I absorbed a lot of bad habits from him. You’re in pain? Put some ice on it! Rub some liniment on it! Tough it out! Tape it up and get back in the game! Later you can load up on Tylenol or ibuprofen, if you must.

Which is what I did, and for the most part it worked, but by mid-November it had become obvious that there was something seriously wrong with my right shoulder. It wasn’t healing. In fact, it was becoming worse, and even maximum dosages of ibuprofen weren’t doing the trick anymore.

Okay, enough of this stoic Spartan bulls**t. I called my clinic and made an appointment.

§

My doctor immediately confirmed my own initial assessment—that I had done something to seriously bugger up my rotator cuff—but equally immediately noticed two things I hadn’t: that my hands and feet were becoming swollen, and that I was easily winded. As for the swelling, it had crept up on me so slowly that I didn’t really register it, and as for being easily winded: I’d just written that off to age. My doctor, thankfully, wasn’t willing to settle for such a dismissive explanation, and ordered up a battery of tests and diagnostic imaging. The X-rays found nothing. 

The MRI of my right shoulder, on the other hand, found, just on the edge of the image, purely by accident... 

“A what?”

“A pleural effusion. Most often it means you have either congestive heart failure or lung cancer.”

“Is there a third, more benign explanation?”

“Not really. It could mean you have a bad case of pneumonia, but you aren’t showing any other symptoms, and your blood work shows no evidence of an infection.

“Oh, by the way, it’s the large doses of ibuprofen that are causing the swelling in your hands and feet. Stop taking them now. It’s damaging your kidneys.”

§

More tests and diagnostics followed. A CT scan. Another CT scan, to confirm the results of the first. An ultrasound of my aorta, to make sure it wasn’t about to pop. Lots and lots of blood and urine tests, to make sure my kidneys were recovering from the ibuprofen and my liver was still working as designed. An echocardiogram. They let me watch the monitor while they were doing it, and for some reason I kept thinking of Fantastic Voyage. Man, I loved that movie when I was 11 or 12 years old and remember talking the librarian at Llewellyn Library into letting me check out Isaac Asimov’s novel of it, even though it was shelved in the adult section of the library and I only had a J (for Juvenile) library card.

Years later I learned that Asimov didn’t originate the story, he’d only adapted a screenplay written by someone else. Also, he turned down the deal when first approached, because he’d thought it was stupid. It was only after his SF publisher leaned on him, telling him they’d recommended him for the job because they wanted him to have a big hit mainstream hardcover, that he relented—and then, years later, wrote Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, to try to correct all the things he saw as crass stupidities in the original book.

Sigh. Of such things are SF careers made. Maybe I should write Wild Wild West II: Destination Ass.

Sidebar: The original 1966 movie is free on DailyMotion, in a really nice HD transfer. If you’re interested, you’ll find it at this link: Fantastic Voyage (1966) - Complete Film HD - video Dailymotion 

§

Through December, January, and into February, the diagnostic noose tightened. My heart was failing, rapidly. Basically, I was running on three chambers, while the fourth was just barely functional. In one memorable metaphor one doctor likened it to my rocketing down the highway at a hundred miles an hour on three brand new tires—and one patched and bald retread that might blow at any moment.

The final straw came on February 17th, when they attempted an angioplasty, and gave up the attempt because my arteries were too badly blocked to allow them to place any stents. I had four major blockages in my coronary arteries. Somehow, miraculously, a minor artery had enlarged, and it was carrying the load of keeping me alive. This left me with just one option, and it might be a longshot: open heart surgery, to create multiple bypasses. I went into surgery on the morning of March 13th. 

§

For the next part of the story, I can only relate what other people told me afterward, as I was sedated out of my mind for the next few days. Once they opened me up, they found that I was in worse condition than thought and that the operation was going to be more complicated and take longer than expected. After it was finished, I was in the ICU for days afterward, having hallucinations the likes of which I hope never to have again. When I finally cleared and regained consciousness, I actually had to ask the nurse if I really had survived the operation, and to reassure me that this wasn’t just another particularly cruel hallucination in which I was only imagining I was still alive.

And then I had to ask someone else, to verify that the nurse wasn’t part of my hallucination. I developed a whole new appreciation for the works of Philip K. Dick in those days. How do you know, really know, what reality is? Especially when your hallucinations are fully capable of carrying on a seemingly reasonable conversation with you? 

After a few days in the ICU, I had stabilized well enough that they transferred me to a regular ward, and a few days after that, on March 20th, I was finally discharged to outpatient rehab.

§

People keep asking me how I feel. For the first few days, I felt as if I’d been the guest of honor at some particularly gory Mesoamerican sacrifice to a Sun God or something. After that, I felt as if I was a construct stitched together by a mad scientist—and not a first-rate mad scientist, either, but one who shopped at Crazy Igor’s House of Discount Cadaver Parts.

Eventually, I began to feel somewhat normal and human again. The pain in my left leg, where they harvested the veins used for the grafts, subsided from constant and throbbing to being manageable. I’ve regained my ability to walk, and more importantly, my ability to think clearly, although fatigue is still an issue. I’m doing PT twice a week and they tell me I’m making great progress, although I bet they say that to all the reanimated corpses. One thing I hadn’t counted on, that is more of a nuisance than I thought, is that one of the conditions of my parole is I must wear a combination heart monitor and portable defibrillator 24x7, except when I’m in the shower. I have come to believe that this thing is God’s punishment for my writing the DataBra into Headcrash. I didn’t make that thing nearly uncomfortable enough, and neglected to make it connected by an umbilical cord to a control unit about the size, shape, and weight of a motorcycle battery—and then to make that umbilical just short enough to be a real nuisance.  

Oh well, Another thing to add to Headcrash II: Destination Spleen, I suppose.

Still, it’s good to be alive, and it’s good to be back. Thank you for your kind wishes and support, and here’s to looking forward to my new life. 

Upward and onward,
Bruce Bethke

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Status Update • 16 February 2026

 

With two weeks left to go until the Nebula ballot cutoff, we’re pleased to report that THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE TO THE BIRDS has made it onto the SFWA Nebula Awards Recommended Reading list. If you’re a voting member of SFWA, you can download the full PDF text of the book for FREE at this link:

https://www.sfwa.org/reading-list-entry/the-day-we-said-goodbye-to-the-birds-by-dyen-shapiro-allan/

If you’re a mere mortal, you can buy the book pretty much anywhere ebooks or print books are sold, by following this link:

https://books2read.com/The-Day-We-Said-Goodbye-to-the-Birds

We have it on good authority that SFWA didn’t lock down the membership validation function on their download site as well as they might have and that it’s possible to bypass the check and download the PDF for free no matter who you are, but we have decided to leave figuring out how to do that as a challenge to your cyberpunk skillz. We don’t mind if you do so, but we’re not going to make it easy for you.

§

On the subject of cyberpunk: no, I wouldn’t call this one a “cyberpunk” book. I’d say it’s more on the order of an “ecological hopepunk” book. In looking at what other people have had to say about it I’ve found it classified as “cli-fi,” which is a category I didn’t know existed before, but I guess it does now.

I’ve also been a bit disappointed to see a few people dismiss it without reading it on the grounds that the title suggests this is a sci-fi riff on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Seriously, do you think I would publish something that thuddingly obvious? Yes, the backbone of this story is grounded in ecological bioscience, which is a subject near and dear to my heart, and yes, there are some birds in it, but if you’re thinking this is yet another story that’s going to club you over the head with an Important Ecological Message until you submit, you are way off base.

Trust me. I don’t publish sermons and screeds. I publish good stories.

§

On a tangentially related subject: one of the stranger questions to come in lately is whether this is a “gay” story, apparently because we got this very kind review on the QueerSciFi.com web site. Seriously? Because a gay book reviewer liked the book, that makes it suspect? 

The story is set in near-future San Francisco. There are people in it; lots of people, some of them with speaking parts. This being San Francisco, some of those speaking characters are gay. So? You know, it is possible to set a story in contemporary or near-future San Francisco without having it end up in the middle of a pride parade in the Castro District, and without it turning into a sermon or screed on LGBTQ+ issues. I’m just saying. 

Geez…

§

Finally, for those who have been wondering what’s happened since the 1 February status update: things have been developing at a remarkable rate. I’m having an outpatient procedure tomorrow, which should reveal the answers to a lot of questions, after which we’ll have a much clearer path forward. I won’t be online or answering email tomorrow, but more likely will be sedated and having sweet dreams of tiny submarines the size of microbes and a young Raquel Welch in a skin-tight wet suit.  

See you next Wednesday,

~brb

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Status Update • 1 February 2026

 

The universe is taunting me.

Or if not the universe, at least Netflix.

Friday night I turned on the TV, intending to find a movie to doze off to, but got sidetracked and didn’t get straight to giving it my undivided attention. When I finally got back into the living room, I found that Netflix had wandered off into some kind of slide show mode I’d never seen before, and was sequencing through a succession of title cards for movies it thought I might like to watch. After a few minutes I realized it was more complicated than just a simple slide show; within each slide, it flew in a series of keywords, to tell me more about why I might want to watch the movie.

Oh.

You don’t say?

Okay, I’ll concede that Johnny Mnemonic earned that keyword. But the others? It seemed like every third movie Netflix showed me had that keyword, and a lot were movies I never would have associated with anything even remotely related to cyberpunk.

Hmm.

In Niven and Pournelle’s novel, Inferno, there is a special place in Hell reserved for advertising and marketing people who craft catchphrases, slogans, and earworms that are too successful. There they spend the rest of eternity suffering in misery, forever tormented by their own stupid words being flung back at them.

Is this to be my fate?

§

A lot of people have written lately to ask how I’m doing and what’s going on with Stupefying Stories. The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Last fall, we had a really solid plan for what we were going to publish and how we were going to finish out 2025. Then, in October, I had a really stupid accident of the self-inflicted kind involving a 24-foot aluminum extension ladder.

And then, in November, I compounded the stupidity and really ripped with living shit out of everything in my right shoulder.

Since then we’ve been on a journey of discovery, figuring out how to patch me back together and turn me into a functional human being again. For a span of some weeks I was lucky to get two hours of sleep each night, which did nothing good for my ability to think clearly. We’ve been exploring the GRAS list—the list of medications “generally recognized as safe”—trying to determine which are actually safe, at least in the dosages I need to take in order for them to be effective. I have experienced some of the most amazing allergic reactions and rashes, but at least haven’t had another Somogyi reaction in the past month. Those are truly fascinating, in retrospect. Remind me to tell you about them sometime.

People have made the observation that I appear to be active on Facebook again. If you look more closely, you’ll note that I’m not really active there. Mostly I’ve been sharing photos that amuse me, and sometimes appending a few lines of snark. There are days a few lines of snark are all I have left in me.    

Progress and recovery has been slow, slow, painfully slow. There are days I’m almost able to work for a few hours. There are other days I lack the strength and coordination in my right hand to do so much as lift a cup of coffee—and if you know anything at all about my longstanding relationship with coffee, you know this is serious. Fortunately I’m left-hand dominant, so I can do most of what I need to do one-handed, but this is a right-handed world, so I’m having to relearn how to do a lot of things I’d surrendered to the pressures of the world and learned to do right-handed.

There are days when all it takes is one slightly wrong stretch or twist to leave me curled up in a ball, whimpering and waiting for the searing pain to recede.

Whimpering? Yes. I exhausted my store of profanity sometime in December.

For reference, typing on a keyboard is not a transferable skill. You can probably imagine how frustrating I find this. It’s taken me hours longer to write this post than it normally would. 

§

In a perverse way, though, I’m lucky this happened now. As I said before, this has become a journey of discovery, involving a lot of time spent in various diagnostic imaging clinics. Along the way, quite by accident, literally on the edge of an image intended to let my doctors take a closer look at something else, they discovered—

Oh. That is not right. Which led to further follow-up appointments, more blood tests, more imaging work, and I feel quite thoroughly imaged now. During the last session I was able to look at the screen over the technician’s shoulder and could swear she was tracking the movements of a microscopic submarine as it traversed my left ventricle.

The current assessment, then, as of today, is that there is something previously undiscovered and seriously wrong with my heart. As soon as the doctor began to describe it in detail he didn’t need to, as it’s the same thing that killed my Dad thirty years ago this month. The irony of the date is not lost on me.

The advantage I have is that we’ve discovered it now, while I’m still deceptively and to all appearances healthy, and not as they found it in my Dad, when he was face-down on the floor and the paramedics were charging up the paddles. So given the advance warning we now have, we should be able to get this under control before things proceed too much further along the road to Hell in a hand-basket.

What form will this control take? 

I don’t know. Ask me again in two weeks, after the next round of tests and diagnostic imaging is done.

—Bruce Bethke

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“The Spheres of NilSpace” • by Rebecca A. Demarest

When the first bubble appeared, in Mx. Zarblat’s regurgitation chamber, it was the size of a fruit a human might call a melon. It lasted one lunar cycle, before destabilizing and disintegrating, taking a dusty collection of shells with it in the process.

The second bubble appeared in the middle of their town, thankfully out of the way of traffic, and in a flower bed that could use some sprucing up anyway. This one was bigger, almost big enough to fit two or three humanoids, and there were cryptic glyphs and bright yellow stripes around the whole thing. This one stayed, floating in mid-air.

But the third…

The third appeared on top of old friend Grununckle, right where he was standing, lecturing the youth on their lack of standards.

One minute, haranguing. The next minute…

The scientists did all they could think of. The military fired all they had. (Sans the piegogroblaster. It was a populated area, after all.) Nothing could crack that hard metallic shell. It was cordoned off, with a two-block safety zone, monitoring being the only choice left.

Now, we all know that the military are not the brightest of bulbs in any ‘verse, but these—they left the dregs of the dregs to watch the nonexistent readings. This meant there was no one to stop the prophet from approaching with his flock.

The prophet was no green acolyte, fresh to the calling of the people. They had first led a group of believers into the wastelands as a young sprout, many years ago. And though the promised revelation was just chemically purchased, distributed via the shared water source, their pocketbook was full and the next flock beckoned.

This was exultation number five for this profitable prophet—if you were keeping track—but this one they almost believed.

Even though the three-moon night cast an amber glow across the sphere, it still glowed brighter in a white-blue hue and the prophet could not resist laying a hand on its skin.

“It’s hard, and cool!” the prophet proclaimed, running their digits over the seamless metal. “And it feels…it feels like when you scuff your tentacles across a fuzzy floor, and then—”

What else the prophet might have said is a topic hotly debated by those who watched him be chosen by the fourth such bubble of metal. At least by those who came to believe in the metal-bubble rapture.

The proportion of the population who came to believe in the prophet and their wise words about the spheres that started to appear—in increasing frequency—was much higher than the scientists would have liked. Of course, that was always the way when science failed to find an explanation.

A thriving free market sprang up, with specialists all claiming to understand the precise desires and methods of the metal spheres. Where would they appear? Who would they take?

Crime dropped as some folks favored the opinion that they had to be pure. Hatchings skyrocketed as young humanoids threw caution to the wind in the face of what might just be the end.

And the bubbles continued to appear.

Not heeding any predictions, nor any discernible pattern. In this neighborhood or that, in countries around the world. Geologists observed the formation of them in the planet’s crust. Astronomers found them in orbit.

Every so often one would wink back out of existence, but it was always three new orbs appearing to each one dissolving, with the steady growth of orbbed real estate brandished as proof of arguments on all sides.

No one ever returned.

It only took a couple of years before fully a fourth of the planet was consumed by the spheres. A decade before what remained of the population was huddled in the odd sphere-free land. The only common factor among these refuges was a high concentration of certain radiation wisping through the air, causing cancers to bubble and grow in their hosts.

Adapt or die is a universal law, which is what they tried to do, but at the end, when the last few humanoids were left keeping watch for new spheres in their heavens, they still could not help but reach out.

Touch them.

Bargain with them.

Beg them.

Chant the words upon them, which some code-breaker had long ago managed to crack before being taken:

Oh NilSpace, Limited, TR,

Hollow be your spheres.

Property of NilSpace

Let your presence bring me light

Caution: Keep Clear

            Make me—

 

---

 

Rebecca A. Demarest (she/her) is an award-winning author, playwright, book designer, and writing instructor living in Seattle, WA with her husband and two muppets. Her short work has appeared alongside authors like Cat Rambo and dramatized for the stage and NPR. When not being held hostage by words, you can find her at her day job (working the people side of unbelievably awesome tech), tending to her indoor jungle, crafting, sewing, playtesting tabletop role playing games, and failing to teach her dogs new tricks. For more information on her work, please visit rebeccademarest.com.

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“Waiting for Thermidor” • by Bruce Bethke

I am a science fiction writer. I get paid to think about the future. 

I do it a lot, have been doing it for decades, and have given a lot of thought to exactly how I do it. Consequently, here’s a writing tip for you. If you want to write formulaic, derivative, science fiction-flavored prose product (which I will admit, can be quite lucrative), you should read and watch nothing but other people’s science fiction. Do this for years, without fail, and you will never be at risk of accidentally having an original idea.

Case in point, all these years into the Stupefying Stories saga, I remain appalled by the amount of thinly disguised Star Trek fan fic that continues to show up in “new” science fiction. These stories bother me not because they exist, but because of the utter desolate poverty of authorial imagination they reveal. For pity’s sake, folks, if you want to write an “our navy at war in space” story, at least read the World War II Pacific theater combat history that Gene Roddenberry lived, and based his hopes and visions of the future on.

Do this, and possibly, just maybe, you might come up with an idea for a story that has not already been used and reused until it’s threadbare by every generation of SF writers for the past 80 years.

Which segues into our second writing tip for today. If you do want to think seriously about the future, and increase your odds of having an original idea once in a while and perhaps even of writing a story that might be of some consequence someday, read history. Knowing humanity’s past is not a perfect guide to imagining humanity’s future, but it’s a good place to begin.

Personally, I read a lot of history, and the more I read, the more I realize the truth of one of my favorite quotations:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

—Karl Marx

The trick when you see an historical pattern repeating itself is to figure out which it is this time: tragedy or farce?

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In 1789 the French began their revolution against the ancien régime—which is to say, against pretty much everything old: the monarchy, the Catholic Church, their own history; they even revolted against the calendar, creating a new calendar composed of twelve thirty-day months divided into three 10-day weeks (décades) each. This new calendar retained none of the traditional month or day names; Year One began with the abolition of the monarchy and the founding of the Republic, on the date formerly known as 22 September 1792. Therefore, by the French revolutionary calendar, Friday, June 26, 2020, was 9 Messidor CCXXVIII—or Nonidi of décade 28, or for rural peasants who apparently weren’t thought to be capable of mastering decimal numbers, Échalote (Shallot) Messidor, each day of the year being named for a different agricultural product.

The next month in the French revolutionary calendar is Thermidor, which begins on July 19^th and runs through August 17^th.

The astute observer will note that in the revolutionary calendar a year is 360 days long, as opposed to be the more conventional 365(ish) days we know. The French were still trying to resolve this problem—along with the problems of how to get people in general to throw out their old clocks and accept dividing each day into ten 100-minute hours, and how to get workers in particular to accept only having the weekend off once every ten days—when the wheels came off the whole damned thing. Today, vestiges of the hottest month on the French revolutionary calendar survive in two things only: the name of the recipe for Lobster Thermidor, and the political concept of the Thermidorian Reaction.

A Thermidorian Reaction, in general, is the moment in nearly every revolution when some well-armed and disciplined faction, usually the nation’s army, says “Enough of this,” and steps in to restore order at bayonet point. Thermidorian Reactions are typically characterized by massacres of protesters, summary executions of revolutionary leaders, mass executions of their followers, show trials and long prison terms for those revolutionaries who survive, and the establishment of an iron-handed military dictatorship.

The original Thermadorian Reaction took place in July of 1794, when the French army finally decided it had had enough of Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety’s Reign of Terror, and decided to put a stop to it—permanently. A day later, Robespierre was a head shorter, and really most sincerely dead.

§

Contrary to Star Wars this did not result in an immediate flowering of peace, freedom, happiness, and democracy, but in considerably more violence, leading eventually to the rise of the Emperor Napoleon, and all that meant to the bloody history of the 19th Century.

The first Thermidorian Reaction defined the term and established the pattern, but it was only the first. Leon Trotsky described the events that led to the rise of Stalin as the “Soviet Thermidor,” and was rewarded for his observation by being murdered with an ice axe. If you’re familiar with the history of the Weimar Republic the rise of Hitler would also seem to fit the pattern, as would the brutal Soviet reactions to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968, and the Chinese army’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Or very nearly, some might argue, as would the events that took place on the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the United States, which seemed to be teetering right on the brink of a Thermadorian Reaction, got a good clear look at what that would entail, recoiled in horror, and then found another way forward.

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The events of this past month have been deeply troubling, at times horrifying, and at still other times merely profoundly saddening. Some of the conversations that have followed these events have been appalling, though. From one side of the political spectrum I’ve heard people calling for a proper Thermidorian Reaction; for the government to send in heavily armed troops to reset the world to the way it was a month ago. From the other side I’ve heard people dreading the same possibility, for fear that the United States might be just one more executive order away from becoming yet another former democracy turned tin-pot dictatorship. And from the furthest fringes of both sides of I’ve heard people actually claiming to be eager to provoke a Thermidorian Reaction, in the belief that once the rotten core of the system is exposed and everything falls apart, people will flock to their banner and they will emerge from the chaos victorious, as the people in charge.

If I have learned one thing from reading history, it’s that that last outcome almost never happens. It’s far more likely that the people trying to provoke a violent reaction, be they on the right or left, will be the first ones up against the wall once the reaction begins.

Another thing I’ve been hearing a lot in these past weeks is people saying this year has turned into 1968 all over again. As someone who clearly remembers the summer of 1968, I would say, “Close, but wrong year, and wrong country.”

If you seek a historical model for what’s happening in the United States right now, look to China, in the summer of 1966.

§

The Red Guards began as a student-led social movement in the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Socially conscious, ideologically driven, and very often privileged, in the sense of being the sons and daughters of Communist Party cadres, they set off on a self-appointed mission to improve their society through rigorous Marxist criticism and by rooting out intellectual elitism and bourgeois tendencies. At first denounced as radicals and suppressed—imagine that, Marxists who were too Marxist, even for the People’s Republic of China—in time they were given tolerance, then support, and ultimately political legitimacy, after which the movement quickly snowballed.

In August of 1966 the Red Guards were directed by the Central Committee to attack the “Four Olds” of Chinese society: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. While this instruction apparently was intended to produce critical and metaphorical attacks, with the acquiescence of some local police and government officials it quickly turned into the real thing. Libraries were burned, museums looted, temples and shrines destroyed, historic streets and places renamed—often by taking a hammer and chisel to ancient carvings—and archaeological sites were looted and destroyed. Cemeteries were desecrated; the remains of long-dead emperors were dragged from their tombs, defiled, and burned.

Worse, the Red Guards quickly turned on their own teachers and other intellectuals, sometimes killing them outright, other times destroying their lives and careers with accusations of politically incorrect thinking and driving them to suicide in “struggle sessions” that amounted to public torture and humiliation. Penultimately, thousands of innocent victims died at the hands of the Red Guards. This being China, the exact toll will never be known. In August and September of 1966 the Red Guards murdered nearly 2,000 people in Beijing alone, typically by beating them to death.

Ultimately, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said “Enough of this,” and stepped in to restore order at bayonet point. Thousands of Red Guards were killed resisting the PLA. Unknown numbers more were captured and then died in some of the largest mass-executions in Chinese history. In the end more than 16 million Chinese students were rounded up and exiled to the countryside, to be “re-educated” by being forced to become subsistence farmers or unskilled factory and foundry laborers. The number of students who died in the process, from starvation, disease, or harsh treatment, will never be known, but it’s believed to have been enormous.

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Sixteen hundred words into this column, assuming you’re still reading and haven’t said “tl;dr” and wandered off already, you are no doubt wondering what all this history has to do with writing science fiction. As I said when I began, over the past four decades I have given a lot of thought to how I write science fiction.

Only lately have I begun to think seriously about why. Or as one of my less tactful co-workers once put it, “Why are you wasting your time writing this sci-fi crap when you could be writing real literature?”

The answer, when it finally came to me, was something of a surprise. I read, write, and enjoy science fiction because deep down, as strange as this may sound, of all the modern literary tropes and genres, science fiction is nearly unique in that it is the literature of hope.

Sometimes that hope is hard to discern. Sometimes it is found only in subtext. Sometimes the message is buried so very deeply, and overlain with so many thick and nearly impenetrable layers of grim darkness, that it is nearly lost in the background noise. But the one idea that almost all science fiction has in common is very simple, and yet incredibly important: people—people recognizably like us—are there.

That’s the core message of science fiction. Humanity has a future. Our species will survive. And not just at the basic, lowest, animalistic level, living lives that are nasty, brutish, and short: we are a work in progress, and that progress isn’t over yet. Our future doesn’t have an eschaton—a fixed end-point—at least not yet, and not anytime soon.

What message could be more hopeful than that?

Okay, you in the back there, raising your hand and waving it like a preschooler with a bladder control problem and all too eager to blurt out, “But my religion says…” Yes, yes, that message is hopeful too. The difference here is that in science fiction, humans have agency. We have free will. We are not sitting on our butts waiting or down on our knees praying for someone else to solve all our problems and make everything all better.

We have a choice.

We are not the victims of fate. We are not the pawns of callous deities. We are not mindless automatons still running the programs installed in our ancestral genes four million years ago in Olduvai Gorge. There will be setbacks, yes. We are capable of doing terrible things. We can make horrible, stupid mistakes. We can blunder about and break things and say and do things that will have miserable consequences for years to come that we can’t even begin to imagine at the time we do them.

But we are not the prisoners of our past. We can learn from our history.

We have the power to choose to be better.

Then the ever-present tentacles of contemporary news slither into my consciousness again, and I see what new atrocities and idiocies were wrought overnight, and somewhere in the back of my mind I hear the screams and gunfire in the offices of Charlie Hebdo as terrorists slaughter cartoonists and writers because they didn’t like what they were saying and were willing to kill them to make them shut up, and I feel the concussion as the Taliban dynamite the Bamiyan Buddhas, and feel the thuds of fists and feet on flesh as the Red Guards beat historians and teachers to death, and smell the smoke as the Deutsche Studentenschaft burn books in the State Opera square in Berlin, and hear the creak of the wheels and the crying of the condemned as the Jacobins drag them in tumbrels to meet the guillotine…

And I think: yes, we have a choice. Will we choose to learn from our history and be better, or will we choose to be stuck forever in Year One of the revolution? The choice is yours.

No one else’s. Yours.

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

—George Santayana

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