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Saturday, April 29, 2023

“By Land or by Sea” • by Pete Wood


Tina breathed in the damp salt air and took a sip of coffee. Then the mermaid gracefully glided from the ocean onto the beach.

A mermaid? She must be imagining things. Too much stress at work.

She closed her eyes. Tina had walked out on the beach for an all-too-brief respite from her boss’s temper tantrums about environmental agencies. Marsden planned to improve this two-hundred-foot-wide spit of protected seashore. The millionaire had the money to cram thousands of cookie-cutter condominiums onto the quarter-mile-long sand peninsula.

When Tina looked again, the mermaid was gone, replaced by a thirty-ish woman-lounging between the crashing surf and the flapping red surveying tape. The stranger’s silky black hair cascaded over a light green frock. She seemed content to watch hungry sandpipers dart back and forth on the wet sand, one step ahead of the waves.

Tina slipped off her shoes and shuffled over. Her toes sank in the cool sand. She should run off this trespasser before Marsden arrived.

“Ma’am, this is private property.” It seemed like half her job was bullying people.Marsden rewarded her well, but she kept telling herself when she paid off the student loans she’d work for one of the environmental nonprofits—the good guys.

The woman just smiled.

“Alora,” a deep voice boomed. “We can put our palace right here.” Hands on hips, a red-haired bearded man stood. He cradled what looked like an elongated conch shell.

“I wish we didn’t have to wait so long to build on our property,” Alora cooed to the man.“Couldn’t we bring the sea in closer?”

The man sighed. “We already talked about this. The Council won’t allow it.”

Tina tried to make sense of the conversation. She’d seen some big beach cottages, but a palace? And, why would anyone—other than short-sighted developers like Marsden—want a sand peninsula that flooded whenever it stormed?

“If you really wanted the palace, you’d figure out a way,” the woman said.

“Let’s talk about this later,” the man said in a stage whisper. “When we’re alone.”

“It’s never a good time.”

Tina cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to interrupt y’all, but, I work for the man who owns this land. I’m Tina.”

The man bowed. “I am called Lord Karn. This is my wife, Alora. Land is of no concern to us. We build in the sea.”

“The sea?”

“We like land-front property.” Karn peered through the conch device like a telescope.“We will construct our home on that rise.”

Tina’s stomach lurched when she saw her boss waddling across the sand from their parked cars on the other side of the dunes. He held his usual cigar.

“What the hell’s taking you so long, Tina?” he barked.

She forced a smile “I’m just trying to clear up a misunderstanding, Mr. Marsden.”

“Like my misunderstanding that you’d put up No Trespassing signs?” Marsden snorted.

“I put up the signs.” She wanted to dump the cold remains of her morning coffee on his head. Instead, she took a sip.

“If you say so.” He brandished his cigar at Karn. “What the hell are you doing on my beach?”

Tina was sick of Marsden’s know-it-all approach to everything. She wondered sometimes why he had hired somebody with a masters in environmental science when he never listened. “Mr. Karn, and his wife, Alora, claim they own this property.”

Marsden squinted at Karn. “My name’s Marsden. I own all this beach up to the mainland.” He flicked cigar ashes on the beach.

The breeze carried embers to a couple of seagulls. The birds squawked and rose into the air.

Alora acted like Marsden wasn’t there. “I want sea horses, lobsters, crabs” she said to Karn. “That wreckage from the galleon as a focal point. Sea urchins of varying hues. The grounds will be for the creatures of the sea as much as us.”

“Look, lady, you’re not dragging a galleon on my beach,” Marsden snapped.

Karn bowed. “We do not build on land.” He tucked the conch device beneath his billowy turquoise shirt.

Marsden stretched out his arm and gestured up and down the beach. “This is land, pal.My land. All of it.”

Tina knew better than to interrupt her boss, but, as usual he was making her job more difficult than it needed to be. She wished he’d just walk away.

“Your land will return to the sea soon, Marsden,” Karn said. “Then it will be ours.”

“Yeah, right.”

Karn cocked an eyebrow. “The oceans are warming, my friend.”

Marsden let out a dry little laugh. “Global warming? Bunch of crap. You think I’d spend this much money if the ocean were rising? I’m not an idiot.”

Karn shrugged.

Marsden’s voice rose. “Listen, pal. We’re gonna start dredging today.”

This was news to Tina. “Dredging hasn’t been approved, boss,” she said. She had naively thought even Marsden would wait for the permits. She had even dared to hope that the permits might be denied. “It’s against the law. You—”

“Then you better figure out some way around that regulation, Tina,” Marsden interrupted. “What the hell am I paying you for?”

Tina was so angry at first she could think of no response other than profanity. She was weary of throwing her education away by helping a rich jackass strong-arm loopholes in environmental regulations. “I’ll do something,” she muttered.

Marsden tossed a smoldering cigar butt on a pile of seaweed and turned to Karn. “Okay, pal, you and your friend better get the hell off my beach or I’m calling the cops.”

¤

When her boss was almost back to his Lexis SUV, Tina heard a wheezing rumbling noise. She turned around and saw the rusty dredging barge huffing and puffing into view.In yellow rain slickers, the crew stood on the railing ready to drop the monstrous vacuum overboard. Any moment, the hose—wider than a car—would spew sand and water onto the beach. Marsden didn’t waste time.

Tina couldn’t be part of this any longer, no matter how much money Marsden threw at her. She needed to stop him.

While she tried to figure out what to do, she watched Karn and Alora step into the breakers. Their legs shimmered and became tails.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Tina said.

She hadn’t been crazy. She had seen a mermaid.

Tina ran into the water. Maybe these merpeople could help her. A wave crashed against her, soaking her up to her waist.

“Wait!” she screamed.

“Yes?” the merman asked.

“Lord Karn, can you make the sea rise on this property?”

“Yes, but it would not take much to wash the beach away and spread the sand out.”

Tina was well aware of the tenuous nature of the spit. It was only two feet above sea level at high tide. Marsden’s sleazy plan was to build it up ten feet, develop the glorified sandbar, and move onto his next project before the sea overtook the new land.

She pointed to the dredger. “That vessel’s scraping sand from the sea floor, Lord Karn.”

Karn was silent for a moment. “For what purpose?”

“It’ll spray it onto the beach in moments. My boss wants to build up this land.”

An ear-piercing siren drowned out Karn’s response.

“We could start building in weeks if the Council of Poseidon brought in the sea,” Alora said to Karn.

“I told you we can’t do that, Alora.”

“You never like my ideas.”

The siren wailed again. Sand, shells, and water rained on the beach.

Karn wiped gobs of sand off his face. “Great Poseidon!”

“I told you,” Tina yelled. “You’d be doing the world a favor if you stopped my employer’s construction.”

Karn looked deep in thought. “Tina, how extensive are his lands?”

“He owns this peninsula.”

Alora rolled her eyes. “Sure, Karn, you listen to her.”

“I am listening to you, Alora,” Karn said. “Let’s consult the Council.”

The two swam out and dove underwater.

Marsden, flanked by two cops, scurried over a dune.

Tina, soaked and coated with sand, slogged out of the sea.

“Where the hell are those trespassers?” Marsden asked.

“They’re gone,” Tina said. “And so am I.”

Marsden stared at her. “Did you go swimming?”

“I quit.” She took a strand of seaweed from her hair and flicked it on the ground.

“Don’t expect a reference,” Marsden snorted.

“I’m better off telling people I was unemployed for the last two years. I don’t want your damned reference.” She thought about warning Marsden, but decided against it. It wasn’t like he’d listen.

¤

A month after Tina started her new job with the North Carolina Coastal Advocacy Group, she returned to the spit to see the undeveloped beach one last time.

With her lower salary, she had to get a roommate to split the rent, but she was happy.She and her employer had managed to slow Marsden down for a little while. He’d been forced to stop dredging and was fined, but the permits had come through in the end.

An excavator and bulldozer sat just across the other side of the barricades and No Trespassing Signs. She hopped a sawhorse and climbed onto a dune.

A car horn blared. She had to jump off the path to avoid the S.U.V. barreling through the dunes.

Marsden.

The vehicle stopped about ten feet from the breaking surf. Marsden and a young bearded man, maybe thirty, climbed out.

Marsden waddled over to her. His flunky tagged along, like a dog.

“We’re finishing dredging tomorrow,” Marsden said. He turned to his flunky. “Unless you screwed up another permit.”

“No, sir,” the man stammered. “Everything’s approved.”

Marsden smirked. “Nice try, Tina.”

“Holy crap!” the flunky blurted out. “That wave’s huge!” He ran past Marsden and Tina towards the dunes.

A monster wave—thirty feet high or more—lumbered towards the beach. It was the sort of wave that only appeared on news reports about hurricanes.

The sky was clear.

And, there was only one wave.

Marsden just stared. He seemed in shock.

Tina grabbed him. “Let’s go!”

“What the hell?” Marsden whispered.

Tina pulled Marsden. His feet seemed rooted. Then his instincts must have taken over. He and Tina ran towards higher ground. The flunky was far in the distance.

Like Lot’s wife, Tina glanced back. She could swear the wave stopped and flicked Marsden’s SUV into the sea. But that was impossible.

Then the wave picked up speed again

At the top of the highest dune, Marsden collapsed. He coughed and wheezed. “I gotta catch my breath.”

The wave was gone. The beach was gone.

Tina and Marsden sat on a sandbar, surrounded by calm water. Not a ripple in sight.

A hundred yards away the flunky stood by Tina’s car on the closest land.

Tina laughed. “I guess you’re not building now.”

Marsden blinked. “Where’s the beach?”

“Gone, jackass.”

“Huh?”

Tina took off her shoes and waded into the water. “See you later.”

“I can’t swim,” Marsden whined.

She swam out a few feet. The water was warm and not uncomfortable. She dove below the surface.

It was hard to see and her eyes stung. But, she detected bright colors and movement.

A giant shape moved across the bottom. She strained to make it out. Somebody was dragging a boat?

Maybe a galleon.

It was a great location for a land-front palace.

__________________________

 

Pete Wood is an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to becoming a regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them.

For the past two years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles, and now with Tales from the Brahma, a shared world saga that features the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Jason Burnham, and of course, Pete Wood. We suspect that Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.



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Interstellar Speculation: James Thurber, O. Henry, M*A*S*H & Science Fiction by Guy Stewart

James Thurber was a well-known cartoonist and humorous short story writer. Most of his work was published in the New Yorker. Today, he’d be best known for his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, which was recently released as a film starring Ben Stiller. He is still celebrated by “the annual Thurber Prize [which] honors outstanding examples of American humor”.

O. Henry is the pen name of William Sydney Porter. He chose the name – the choosing of which has three different tales – when he began writing humorous short stories while he was in prison for embezzlement. He kept it and went on to write some 381 other short stories. He is still celebrated by “The O. Henry Award...a prestigious annual prize named after Porter and given to outstanding short stories”.

What does this have to do with speculative fiction – science fiction in particular?

Unfortunately not much.

From ANALOG, Stan Schmidt collected a few shining examples of humorous SF in ANALOG’S LIGHTER SIDE and BEST OF collections – most notably “The Dread Tomato Addiction”, though it wasn’t strictly a short story and it turned on the idea that you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say. Written by Mark Clifton, it was published in ASTOUNDING in 1958, and when I read it for the first time in left a deep impression on me.

Kelvin Throop was the star of several ANALOG short stories in the 1960s through the 80s and had numerous sayings attributed to him. Invented by R.A.J Phillips, several writers wrote stories about him and he became a sort of fall back for snarky sayings that were space fillers.

The website BestScienceFictionStories.com has 78 stories that they consider “Funny” – http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/category/funny/. I just discovered it when I started looking for humorous SF. Other recent forays into speculative short fiction humor come from a writer I first came across in an online writer’s group I’m a member of, CODEX’s Alex Schvartsman. The third UNIDENTIFIED FUNNY OBJECTS anthology is due out later this year and I’ve got a story I may submit there.

So I KNOW humorous short stuff is being written – but it doesn’t seem that there are many writers who have become closely associated with it any more. Gordon R Dickson and Poul Anderson wrote the Hokas series, Asimov’s sporadic funny stuff, even Haldeman wrote “A !Tangled Web”, Mike Resnick – but no one seems to have emerged as a regularly humorous writer – and it seems “everyone” has written funny short stories as evidenced by Resnick’s THIS IS MY FUNNIEST: SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS PRESENT THEIR FUNNIEST STORIES EVER volume one and two.

Yet it doesn’t seem that the awards come to humor. An old friend of mine who is a prolific writer of YA humor has never once been up for a Nebula, a Hugo, a Newbery, a Printz, Morris, Globe-Horn, or ALA Best...because none of the committees believe that serious issues can be dealt with humorously.

I think that this may also be the problem with speculative short fiction as well. When it comes time for the awards to be handed out, people say to themselves, “Wow! That was funny! But serious can’t be funny, so I’d better not nominate/vote for/write something funny because no one will take me seriously.”

Of course, we need only look at the accolades showered on the King of Television Dramedy, M*A*S*H: 12 Emmys, a Golden Globe, a Peabody, a Director’s Guild of America, several Humanitas Prize and Writers Guild of America nominations, an exhibit in the Smithsonian, and one of the highest ratings in the history of the Neilson’s for its final episode.

So where is science fiction’s short fiction version of M*A*S*H, O. Henry, or James Thurber, eh?

Thoughts welcome, as is conversation. POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS:  https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

Friday, April 28, 2023

“Bittersweet Potato Rolls” • by Jason Burnham

 

Jim excused himself from the table after everyone had said what they were thankful for. Every year, he had a one-second timer ready on his phone so he could “check the sweet potato rolls” when it was his turn.


He removed the rolls from the oven he’d turned off before people sat down. If the rolls had only been his dad’s favorite, he’d have stopped making them, but his son loved them too.

Baking them the first year after the big fight had hurt. The pain hadn’t lessened since, but he’d grown and there was more space inside to live with it.

Thanks for nothing, Dad.

When he brought out the rolls, everyone was eating—they’d forgotten he hadn’t said what he was thankful for.

________________

 

Jason P. Burnham loves to spend time with his wife, children, and dog. Find him on Twitter at @AndGalen.

This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “Thanks for nothing.” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link.


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Thursday, April 27, 2023

“Upgrade” • by Christopher Degni


My wife smiles after handing me a silver capsule the size of an egg. My back hurts; I’m tired; I don’t know what this nonsense is, but I just want to relax.

“It’s our second anniversary,” she says.

Ah. Has it been that long? She’ll be due for an upgrade soon, or maybe I’ll trade her in for a new model completely. A quieter one. Less independent.

The capsule hisses open. It’s empty.

“Thanks for… nothing?”

“Not nothing. Nanos.”

“Nanos. What do I need—”

“For your body. To stay young like me.”

Now that she mentions it, my back feels better. I’m lucky to have her.

“For your mind, too. Think of them as…”

I love my dear wife more than ever.

“…an upgrade.”

__________________________

Christopher Degni is a 2019 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes about the magic and the horror that lurk just under the surface of everyday life. He lives south of Boston with his wife (and his demons, though we don't talk about those). You can find more of his work in NewMyths.com, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, 99 Tiny Terrors, and the upcoming 99 Fleeting Fantasies.

This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “Thanks for nothing.” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link.




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Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Tales from the Brahma • Episode 9: “The Birdman of Alcatraz” • by Pete Wood



[skip intro]

Welcome aboard the Brahma!

Now a century out from Earth and en route to HD 133600, a remarkably Sun-like star and planetary system in the constellation of Virgo, the Brahma is the last, desperate, crowning achievement of human civilization and engineering. A massive three-hundred-kilometer long modular mega-ship, a gigantic ark in space consisting of two hundred and sixteen separate habitat pods, each the size of a small city, at launch Brahma carried two million passengers and crew, along with everything their descendants would need to build new lives on the worlds of HD 133600.

For the Brahma is a generation ship: all the original passengers and crew who left the Earth a century ago are long since dead. Everyone now on board was born on the ship; most will probably die on it. If their mission succeeds, their children or grandchildren will live to see the light of HD 133600.

Right now, the Brahma seems to be on-course and everything appears to be working as designed. The ship is cruising serenely at just slightly below c, a tribute to the engineers and craftspeople who designed and built her a century before. Many on board pray daily that the ship contains the best of humanity, and not the sorts of politicians, criminals, cultists, crazies, and dishonest leadership their ancestors thought they’d left behind…

______________________________

 

Episode 9: “The Birdman of Alcatraz” • by Pete Wood

Yasmine studied the prisoner. With his slicked back hair and meticulously groomed mustache, he resembled a salesman, not a scientist. She must be a damned fool to go into a prison pod. And an even bigger fool for bringing Ximena, a twenty-year-old girl who had never been on the main ship, much less another of the two hundred bio pods until a couple of weeks ago.

The prisoner leaned back in the rocking chair on his front porch and took another sip of coffee. “Tell me why you’re here again.”

Yasmine put her coffee down and looked at the rolling meadows of Alcatraz, the prison pod. It sure didn’t look like a prison. But then again, its five thousand inmates couldn’t leave and if they acted up, the Brahma, could snap the tether and send them careening into space.

“We’ve lost a pod,” Yasmine said. “You’re a scientist.”

“I’m a prisoner.” He got up and refilled his coffee before topping off Yasmine’s cup. Ximena, the prodigy Yasmine had rescued from a theocratic pod that wanted to execute her, rocked gently and focused on the birds in the fountain.

“You’re Charles Fremont, former head of the research facility at Northern University. Don’t play games with me.” How desperate had she become to find Gail? Sure, Admin had been dragging its feet for days, but had she really sunk so low as to depend on a criminal for help? She didn’t even know what he had done to be here.

Fremont let out a dry little laugh. “Why does Admin care about one little pod? They have a couple of hundred more.”

“They don’t care about the damned pod,” Yasmine snapped. “But I do.”

Fremont added cream to his coffee. He held out the pitcher to Yasmine. She declined. He sat down again. “Let this be a cautionary tale. Don’t piss off Admin.”

Yasmine did not have clearance to know what Fremont had done, but she believed getting on Admin’s bad side could be enough to face imprisonment for the rest of your life. Administration ran everything on the three-hundred-kilometer-long ship and didn’t like trouble from passengers. She hoped they didn’t see her little foray into the prison as trouble. “My partner’s on the pod. We can’t reach it. We can’t track it.”

“It’s not even leaving a tachyon trail,” Ximena said without taking her eyes off the black squawking birds. They might be starlings or crows. Pests either way.

Really?” Fremont said, seeming interested in the conversation for the first time. Deep space exploration had not been possible until the tachyon drive had been created more than two hundred years earlier, but engineers had not been able to come up with clean exhaust or a velocity greater than ninety percent light speed.

Yasmine resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She hadn’t had much patience the last few weeks. “Yeah, really. We’re not making this up.”

 “And how exactly did you lose this pod?”

“Separatists. They jettisoned the Iowa pod.”

“Separatists?” Fremont snorted. “It was probably Admin. Nothing like a scapegoat to help you get even more power.”

Yasmine’s voice rose. She didn’t need conspiracy theories. She had strong-armed her way into a prominent role in the search for the first pod that had left the ship in a hundred years. A pod with her girlfriend on board and she feared she was losing time. “Why the hell would Admin shoot off one of their own pods?”

“Why would they imprison a professor for suggesting that the ship should already have reached its destination?”

More games. “Could we please talk about locating the Iowa pod?” Yasmine asked.

Fremont turned to Ximena. “What do you know about tachyons?”

¤

Yasmine’s head spun from the conversation Fremont and Ximena had had on the ninety-minute long walk to Fremont’s research. They discussed tachyons and communications and the feasibility of faster than light drive—something that hadn’t been developed when the now-burnt-to-a-cinder Earth had launched the Brahma more than a hundred years ago. She had no idea what any of it meant, but she hoped she had started assembling the core of a team that could find the Iowa. She trusted Ximena. For all she knew Fremont had been making everything up as he went along.

Fremont had rigged up a little lab with begged and borrowed equipment at the edge of the prison. Its lone window looked out into deep space. Yasmine doubted the lab remained hidden from Admin. They probably didn’t feel threatened by his research as long as whatever he found didn’t leave the prison.

Ximena stared out the window.

“Careful, Ximena,” Yasmine said. “We’re moving and the engine field distorts things. You’ll throw up if you look too long.” Or go crazy. Most pods had shuttered windows decades ago because the images outside could be impossible to grasp.

Ximena kept staring.

“See any birds?” Fremont asked.

“Birds?” Ximena asked.

“They’re damned near impossible to see without these.” He handed her a pair of silver goggles. “They’re not really birds, but then again, Orion doesn’t really have a belt, does he?”

Ximena said nothing for a few seconds and then exclaimed “I see one. Like somebody splotched some paint. It does look like a cartoon bird, sort of. It’s…it’s gone.” She turned from the window. “What are they?”

Fremont shrugged. “I have no idea. Near as I can figure they started about fifteen years ago.”

“What does this have to do with the Iowa?” Yasmine asked.

“If I can detect the birds, I can find whatever trail the Iowa pod’s leaving. It’s leaving something. Look at it this way. If the Brahma leaves a pond of tachyon debris,” Fremont said. “These birds leave an ocean.”

¤

The next couple of hours Yasmine drank coffee and tried to understand Fremont’s research. He fine-tuned his equipment so that they could search for the Iowa. He and Ximena took turns wearing the goggles that interfaced with the mainframe.

All Yasmine knew was that they saw plenty of birds. No sign of the Iowa, but space was pretty damned big.

The door to the lab flung open. Three armed security officers and Yasmine’s boss entered.

Yasmine jumped up. “Director.”

“I think you two have seen quite enough,” Director Melnik said. “Yasmine, Ximena, you come with me. Access to Alcatraz is over. Of course, if you really want to spend a lot more time here.”

Yasmine let that comment hang in the air.

“The professor is setting you up,” Melnik continued after a few moments. “Next thing you know you’ll be smuggling in cocaine or Green Pulsars. And Fremont will probably convince you it was your idea,” Melnik said.

Fremont denied nothing.

¤

Ximena and Yasmine sat at a booth at Hazel’s Diner and shared a piping hot mincemeat Kringle. The six-hour debriefing had been exhausting. The upshot had been that Yasmine had gotten a severe reprimand and her access to Alcatraz had been cut off for the indefinite future.

What the hell was Admin so scared of? She wondered if Fremont’s prison record, shown briefly to her by Melnik, could even be accurate. A con artist? Somebody who had bilked hundreds out of life savings with promises of investments in impossible technologies. He hardly seemed the type. Then again, if he were a con artist, who could tell?

“I could have found the Iowa if they’d given me time,” Ximena said.

Admin said that everything Fremont had shown had been an elaborate ruse. Computer generated data and images.

Yasmine sighed. She couldn’t tell a wet-behind-her-ears kid what she knew, what she’d been told anyway. “My boss says we can’t trust Fremont’s equipment.”

Ximena blinked. “The hell we can’t.”

“Well, we can’t go back to Alcatraz.”

Ximena took forkful of Kringle. “I think I know what the birds are.”

“Look, Ximena, don’t you think it’s strange that nobody else sees the birds except Fremont?”

“I dunno,” Ximena said. “You said nobody looks out windows.”

“Yeah, but…” Yasmine didn’t want to argue but she couldn’t get past Fremont fitting the conman profile. Act hostile at first. Make the mark beg you to help them. Give complicated explanations that are hard to follow. Talk to the naïve person, not the one with the good bullshit detector.

If he was a conman, could this all really be about drugs?

“The birds are ships,” Ximena said.

Yasmine patted Ximena’s hand. “Look, Sweetie, you can’t believe everything—"

“They’re ships.”

“Did Fremont tell you that?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I know when I’m being lied to. People have been lying to me my whole life. Fremont didn’t make up everything. I can trust science. They left trails and some of their routes were not natural.”

Yasmine didn’t know if Ximena had been hoodwinked or not. “Ships?”

Ximena nodded.

“Whose ships?”

“I don’t know.” Ximena bit a chunk of Kringle dripping with frosting.

Yasmine didn’t know if she wanted the birds to be ships or not.


__________________________

 

Pete Wood is an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to becoming a regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them.

For the past two years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles, and now with Tales from the Brahma, a shared world saga that features the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Jason Burnham, and of course, Pete Wood. We suspect that Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.



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“Dry Spell” • by Eric Fomley


We hadn’t found an asteroid with Trellite deposits in months. The crew was mutinous. It didn’t take a genius to guess why Reggie, my First Officer, requested we go to the surface of the latest asteroid alone.

We stepped out of the shuttle’s airlock and our gravity boots hummed as they clung to the surface.

I expected Reggie to make a move, but he stared into orbit.

“Oh no,” he said. His voice was faint.

I followed his gaze. Our freighter pivoted, adjusting heading, and disappeared into the dark between the stars.

The crew had marooned us with a short range shuttle on a lifeless rock.

I clenched my teeth. “Hey Reg?”

“Yes Captain?” He turned.

I drew my compact blaster pistol. “Thanks for nothing.”

__________________________

Eric Fomley’s stories have been published at Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Galaxy’s Edge Magazine. More of his stories can be found on his website ericfomley.com.


You’ll also find a bunch of Eric’s stories here on Stupefying Stories, at this link. Personally, I’d start with “End Program.”

This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “Thanks for nothing.” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link.


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Tuesday, April 25, 2023

“Solution” • by Gustavo Bondoni


The specter glowed greenly in the moonlight.

“Spray it!” Wendy whispered. “If we disperse it, we can finally sell this house!”

I tugged on the handle and the nozzle shot a pulverized solution of Holy water.

My friend Ed spends his life in the darkest corners of the Internet, looking for information on ghosts and hauntings. When he heard my problem, he said, “Nothing to it. Spray the ghost with Holy water.”

So when the phantom, as soon as the droplets touched it, turned a deeper shade of green, turned more solid, and sprouted huge teeth and tentacles, all I could say was, “Thanks for nothing, Ed.”

Then the ghost attacked, and we joined the ranks of the dead.

I’m going to haunt Ed.


_____________________


Gustavo Bondoni is novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages.  He is a member of Codex and an Active Member of SFWA.His latest novel is a dark historic fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna (2022). He has also published five science fiction novels, four monster books and a thriller entitled Timeless. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
 
In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest.
 
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com

Gustavo has become a fairly regular contributor here. Two of his more recent appearances in our virtual pages were “S’mores Therapy” last week and “Warranty Claim” back in November, but he has quite a few more stories on our site. Check them out!

This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “Thanks for nothing.” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link




“Do you miss Firefly? Do you like The Expanse? If so, then Privateers of Mars is exactly what you need. [...] Structured as three loosely interconnected short stories, it reads like three episodes of a great science fiction show that you wish someone would make.”

—Amazon reader review



Monday, April 24, 2023

“The Intergalactic Pocket Phrasebook” • by Mark Vandersluis

 

Our revised edition of the Intergalactic Pocket Phrasebook contains these useful words and phrases in all known languages. Always keep your copy handy – you never know when you’ll need it, especially on the more primitive planets!

  • Hello!

  • We come from Planet <Name> at Star <Name>

  • We are an advanced alien civilisation.

  • Take us to your leader.

  • We didn’t mean to destroy the city.

  • It was an accident.

  • Don’t run away!

  • We come in peace.

  • We bring gifts.

  • What do you mean “thanks for nothing”?

  • What can you trade?

  • Please stop attacking us!

  • We have powerful weapons.

  • They are much more dangerous than yours.

  • This is your final warning!

  • You left us no choice.

  • Is anybody left alive?

  • Sorry.

  • Warning – Highly Radioactive Planet! Keep Out!

_____________________

Mark Vandersluis lives in Nottingham, England and works as a Managing IT Architect . From an early age, his home was the Science Fiction section of the local library. After a lifetime reading science fiction he recently started writing his own. As well as previously appearing in Stupefying Stories, Mark has had stories published in Nature Futures and Diabolical Plots. Mark blogs (very) occasionally at markvsf.design.blog and you can follow him on Twitter at @markvsf.

P.S. If you enjoyed this story, consider reading “Support Issues,” also on Stupefying Stories.

This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “Thanks for nothing.” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link




“Do you miss Firefly? Do you like The Expanse? If so, then Privateers of Mars is exactly what you need. [...] Structured as three loosely interconnected short stories, it reads like three episodes of a great science fiction show that you wish someone would make.”

—Amazon reader review


Saturday, April 22, 2023

“Earth Day” • by J.M. Perkins


For thousands of years, we did not understand our purpose.

Those were dark times, times when we poisoned the sky and soured the land against us. We flailed, searching, ever searching without knowing what we were searching for. We did not understand why we’d been given our gifts: our intellect and our too-cunning hands, the endless curiosity to tinker, and the hunger that seemed to have no satisfaction.

As time went on, the two prevailing ideologies only became ever more deaf to one another:

Some believed that Gaia belonged to us; parcel and chattel to be divvied up and used as we might. For them, we were as kings, as gods (or at least servants of God) who held dominion over the biosphere. Even in believing that the world belonged to us they forever doubted humanity’s ability to befoul our own nest. They continued to believe this almost until when we would have ended.

Others looked out at the works of man and despaired. Our infrastructure, our arts and sciences only seemed like so much rot and ruin over pristine Gaia. For them, we were the cancer spreading across the face of the planet. All was natural and good except us, who must be forever penitent of the crime of being born what we are. When the calamities came, they would nod sagely, darkly satisfied in their own dire prophecies coming to pass.

Gaia’s survival was never in doubt; ours was. More than improved solar tech, more than landfill mining, more than anything; we needed a philosophy. A reason for why we were what we were and what we meant.

And then we looked towards Luna, and saw our capsule sitting on its surface. And for the first time we understood what it was, what all the satellites and capsules were: Gaia’s first attempts to spore. And so we finally understood what we were: we were the instrument through which our biosphere would reproduce.

The message took years to spread, to be digested and absorbed into all the competing philosophies. But eventually, enough of us agreed: we were the reproductive organs of the planet. Our drive to explore and build would take us past the biosphere. Or rather, our humanity would compel us to spread a biosphere around us wherever we went. We were the seeding, fruiting bodies of our own world.

We ceased to be trapped in the binary of ‘us’ versus ‘nature.’ We were not in conflict, a zero sum game where for one side to win another would have to lose. We became smarter with conservation, with nuclear energy, with genetic science. We stopped trying to limit our growth and instead tried to wed our development to the biosphere.

And now we’re doing what we were born to do.

Now Selene shimmers with its fields of wispy effervescent grasses, Aphrodite thrives and spreads in endless bacterial mats, and Ares has just produced an atmosphere thick enough for vertebrates to wander through its black-leafed forests. The systems are developing, evolving; filling every inch of their planets with Gaia’s children. Every day we grow closer to delivering a new biosphere onto Hyperion, onto Titan, and nowadays it seems we struggle more with properly naming it than with the science to enable it.

The colony ships in skeletal form past Neptune are decades from completion, but they grow every year all the same. Someday, they’ll take more of Gaia’s seeds past the influence of Sol, out to whatever awaits us. And perhaps we’ll meet another biosphere, eighteen generations removed from its progenitor. Perhaps, someday, we’ll even meet Gaia’s ancestors.

And so we celebrate Gaia Day, or as it used to be called, Earth Day, from back when we identified more with the planetary mass than with the ecosphere which overlays it, the ecosphere of which we were part and parcel. We celebrate Gaia Day whether we live on Mars or Mercury or in a lonely mining station in the asteroid belt. We celebrate Gaia Day because, wherever we’re going, whatever we become, Gaia is where we’re from.

And wherever we go, whatever we do, we bring Gaia with us.




J.M. Perkins writes stories, designs games, and spends far too much time thinking about monsters. Currently, he’s hard at work producing the Salt in Wounds Tabletop Role Playing Game Setting. You can be his friend on facebook, follow him on twitter @jmperkins, or learn lots more at jmperkins.com

Creating Alien Aliens Part 24: “What Is It with Desert (and Ocean) Planets, ANYWAY?”

Using the Programme Guide of the 2022 World Science Fiction Convention, ChiCON 8, which I WOULD have attended in person if I had disposable income, but I retired two years ago, my work health insurance stopped, and I’m now living on the Social Security and Medicare…Enough of my woes! I'll be using the Programme Guide to spark ideas for my overly fertile imagination. My opinions may bring glad hearts to some, or cause others to wish to stomp me into the muddy ground of Lilydale Park shortly after a long rain…

Dune: desert planet. Endor: forest moon. Cachalot: water world...

Science fiction is full of planets with only one biome. Why is a habitable ocean planet feasible but a desert planet isn’t? Think about planetary ecologies you've run across in fiction, as informed by the biomes on the planet we know...

Every summer for the past 25 years, I’ve taught a class to gifted and talented young people called ALIEN WORLDS. (You may be seeing something a bit more methodical in a future series here!) As a retired science teacher (from elementary through high school, I have taught every (school) science from Astronomy to Zoology!), I teach my alien worlds class STRICTLY from the point of view of SCIENCE. For example, when the students create their “alien intelligence”, they have to not only be part of the ecology of the world they make, but ALSO, they have to have descended from a primitive form of life which still exists on the planet.

As I DO teach fourth graders through high school sophomores, I can, in one week, only touch on the rudimentary rules of evolution. BUT, most of the kids get it.

As well, prior to allowing the evolution of life on their alien worlds, they have to HAVE an alien world! A Power Point slide I leave up and come back to several times during the all-day, week-long class is this: “NO FOREST MOONS OF ENDOR, DESERT PLANETS OF JAKKU, JUNGLE PLANETS OF DAGOBA, OR ICE PLANETS OF HOTH!!!!!” I don’t even allow the World City of Trantor…um…I mean CORRUSCANT…

I spend time teaching that no single world will have (in fact, I use that rarely-used word, “impossible”) a single biome and that George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg have led them wrong (ever since seeing the original STAR WARS (when it was the ONLY Star Wars!) during its opening week, in the theater, in 1977…and I was a newly-turned 20 years old and had just finished two years at a Lutheran junior college – where the two biology professors taught evolution...I've been fascinated by world building -- mostly because when you begin to create the aliens that LIVE on a world, the conditions there ARE the driver of what kinds of intelligences might develop.)

The likely phenomenon that all planets will have multiple biomes is apparently what this session a session at one of the World Science Fiction Conventions was all about.

BUT, it was the rider that intrigued me: Why is a habitable ocean planet feasible but a desert planet isn’t?

My off-the-cuff answer is that an ocean world can’t NOT have variable biomes. As well, water and air have totally different properties. Perhaps the most important is that when air is heated, the heat dissipates fairly quickly – living in Minnesota, we see this obviously after an excessively hot day (Minnesota’s highest recorded temperature was 115 deg. F on July 29, 1917 in a town named Beardsley (one of the western-most points of the state (in the “bump”) cools off dramatically. Once the sun is down, as long as the humidity isn’t excessive, the temperature drops fairly quickly. We even experienced this wild shift of temperature last week, when over a period of four days, the temperature tumbled from Wednesday's dry 87 F (30.5 C) to Sunday's HIGH of 33 F (0 C). 

But bodies of water are heat sinks, and we live within a three hour drive of one of the largest freshwater heat sinks on Earth - Lake Gichigami. In addition to being on the edge of the Great Plains with wild temperature swings (record: 72 degrees F, 1970). Gichigami contains 10% of Earth’s surface fresh water; that mass of water (along with the other Great Lakes) “…acts like a heat sink that moderates the temperatures of the surrounding land, cooling the summers and warming the winters. The lakes also act like giant humidifiers, increasing the moisture content of the air. In the winter, this moisture contributes to heavy snowfall known as “lake effect” snow.”

Even strictly speaking, Humans and all other land life are confined to only 25% of the surface of the planet – practically speaking, Earth already IS a water planet. If you want to get REALLY picky about, all life starts in water of varying viscosity – I had an amniotic sack around me until just before my mom “broke water”. I scramble a good half dozen water sacks for birds every week…

At any rate, the response to why you can’t have a world that’s entirely desert – is that CHEMISTRY NEEDS WATER TO HAPPEN.

And if you raise the flag of Arrakis at me, I’ll just drop a rock on it – Arrakis is no more a “desert world” than Sahara is a dry desert – the sand may be dry, but try as you might, you can’t eliminate the fact that Sahara exists on a planet that is 71% WATER…and while we all pretend that there’s no water on Dune – there IS water on Dune. It’s how the Fremen survive – and water has to come from the HUMAN component of Dune in order for the still suits to work…

Minimal water on Dune – absolutely. But except for some very rare cases, I doubt life could have evolved there. The fact that Shai Hulud is made of flesh and not rock is proof that Dune has water and while water isn’t ABUNDANT, it is there – strongly suggesting that you can’t have a totally dry planet.

All planets are water planets. H2O is essential for the activity of cells as we know them. ANDROMEDA STRAIN aside, life as we know it has water in it in some amount.

THAT’S why you can have all-water worlds, and a true, totally dry desert world would be impossible.

Oh, a quibble that bothers me every time I watch it? In Episode VI: The Empire Strikes Back? Hoth CAN’T BE AN ICE MOON/PLANET/WHATEVER: Seventy-one percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from algae IN THE OCEAN. Twenty percent more comes from Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacterium, or a blue green bacteria – so there’s 91% of the oxygen comes from…plants in water. The rest? Soil and rocks, plus atmospheric free oxygen created through radiation and occasionally lightning.

SO: you CAN have a life-bearing oceanic world (you live on one); but you CAN’T have a life-bearing desert one…and while Hoth is technically an "ice planet", just as Earth was essentially an ice planet and our dear Mommy Earth was also one for a time -- https://www.livescience.com/64692-snowball-earth.html, though apparently the water cycle started up again eventually!

The rest of those alien worlds would have to be somewhere in between – dryer or wetter than Earth; and maybe with LOTS of deserts (and there you’d have to define your TYPE of desert – some are cold, some hot, some are Antarctic, and some are Sahara. And you have the driest place on this planet: “The Atacama (west of the Andes on the coast of Bolivia) is the driest place on earth, other than the poles. It receives less than 1 mm of precipitation each year, and some areas haven’t seen a drop of rain in more than 500 years.”

So, THAT'S why a true "Desert Planet of Dune" or the "Desert World of Tatooine" would, however disappointingly, unlikely in the extreme. And even if they WEREN'T, life as we know it would be VERY different from their depictions in DUNE and STAR WARS!

Then again, it's an infinite universe, so SOMEWHERE, there may be a TRUE desert planet. What would the life there be like, and WHERE THE HECK WOULD IT HAVE COME FROM?

You know, I don’t think I’m done with this whole planet thing...Later!

For more of my essays, visit POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS at  https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

Friday, April 21, 2023

“The Stories We Tell Each Other” • by Matt Krizan


The guards chitter as they approach, and we wait for them to pass. We’re not allowed to speak, but, in those in-between moments, we tell each other stories, passing them from cell to cell.

Fictional stories are best. The Vyths and Dajkhuul have never heard of Star Wars, of course, and I’ve never heard of their favorites either. They gasp to learn Darth Vader is Luke’s father; I laugh when Hgluun steals the Duke’s underclothes.

True stories, about life before the Xyloatl came, are harder. We don’t tell many of those.

The guards stop in front of Fr’k’s cell, his tale about the child who ate the Book of Creation hanging half-finished in the air between us. He says nothing as they haul him away. Neither does anyone else.

Afterward, silence lingers like a weight on my chest.

The guards come and go.

Eventually, I turn to Kevanth’s cell.

“This is a story,” I whisper, “about the Boy Who Lived…”

________________

Matt Krizan is a former certified public accountant who writes from his home in Royal Oak, Michigan. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including Factor Four Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Martian Magazine. Find him online at mattkrizan.com and on Twitter as @MattKrizan.

If you’d like to read more of Matt’s stories, we also have “Working His Way Back to Her,” “The First Stage,” and “Christmas Collections” on this site.


This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “[character] had never heard of [name of a movie].” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link




“Do you miss Firefly? Do you like The Expanse? If so, then Privateers of Mars is exactly what you need. [...] Structured as three loosely interconnected short stories, it reads like three episodes of a great science fiction show that you wish someone would make.”

—Amazon reader review



Thursday, April 20, 2023

“S’mores Therapy” • by Gustavo Bondoni


“Damn,” Guille said in a New Jersey forest, when one of his marshmallows caught fire.
As he tried again, he noticed a man standing at the edge of his firelight, beside his tent. The man held a machete and wore a hockey mask.

Guille had been born on a mate plantation in Paraguay. He’d arrived in the US six months before. He had never heard of Friday the 13th, and machetes were standard forest gear back home, so he held out a stick to the figure.

“Marshmallow?”

The man sat beside him and they ate in silence until the bag was empty.

Suddenly loud music played.

Guille shrugged. “The campers over there…”

The man held up a finger, as if to say he’d be right back.

He strode into the woods.

After a commotion, he returned carrying another bag of marshmallows.

They toasted them in the newly restored silence.


________________

 

Gustavo Bondoni is novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages.  He is a member of Codex and an Active Member of SFWA.His latest novel is a dark historic fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna (2022). He has also published five science fiction novels, four monster books and a thriller entitled Timeless. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
 
In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest.
 
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com

His most recent appearance in our virtual pages was “Warranty Claim.” Read it now!

This week’s Pete Wood Challenge was to write a 150-word or less story that includes the line, “[character] had never heard of [name of a movie].” To see the previous winners of previous challenges, click this link




“Do you miss Firefly? Do you like The Expanse? If so, then Privateers of Mars is exactly what you need. [...] Structured as three loosely interconnected short stories, it reads like three episodes of a great science fiction show that you wish someone would make.”

—Amazon reader review