“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.

Read More

“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?

§

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.

§

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.

§

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

Read More

22 September 2025

“Cyberpunk” has been much on my mind lately, or more accurately, in my face. 

I’ve received the usual batch of fall semester queries from students writing papers, a few more requests from various publishers seeking reprint and/or translation rights—one of which was worth taking seriously, so I did, and I’ll have more to say about that book when we get closer to the publication date—and one request from an incredibly dedicated fan who had turned up a nice clean copy of the November 1983 issue of Amazing Stories and wanted me to sign it, specifically in the white space at the top of page 94.

Oh. That means I have to look at page 94 again.

Here, for your reference, is what the top of page 94 looks like. Note the introduction that George Scithers wrote more than 40 years ago for the original magazine publication of the story. Please read it closely.

And now, the story that some of you have heard or read before, but most probably have not. 

___________________________

I no longer remember the name of the con. It was somewhere around 35 years ago and I want to say it was a WorldCon, but really don’t remember. What I do remember is that I was with a bunch of other mid-list, mid-life, and mid-career pros, we were in the professional SF/F writer’s natural habitat—the hotel bar—and we were having just a great old time, drinking heavily and swapping divorce horror stories. My first wife, Nancy, had just kicked me out, changed the locks, and filed for separation, and to be honest, I deserved it. In those days I was Bruce Bethke, Semi-Famous Science Fiction Writer, and I was a real jerk.

What struck me at the time was how casually everyone there took the news. It was as if it was a rite of passage, or an occupational requirement, or perhaps even a milestone on the road to success. “Okay, you’ve just sold your fifth novel. Time for your first divorce.” “Ha ha, SFWA: we put the fun in dysfunctional!” Ben Bova gave me a signed copy of his book, Survival Guide for the Suddenly Single. The then-editor of the SFWA Bulletin asked me to write an article on how to protect your intellectual property rights in a divorce. A certain editor who shall remain nameless, assuming I was broke and desperate for cash, tried to talk me into a book deal, ghostwriting for a certain well-known media personality who had a burning desire to see his name on the cover of a science fiction novel but no actual time to write, knowledge of writing, or discernible writing talent. It was a wonderful evening of back-slapping camaraderie.

Later, when I sobered up, it began to disturb me. It wasn’t just that being a writer seemed to be toxic to marriage and family: it was how readily the writers I knew (and at the time, being on the SFWA board of directors, I knew hundreds of successful writers) accepted this toxicity. I realized I could count on my fingers all the writers I knew who had intact first marriages and functional families. By and large my peers were women whose cats were their surrogate children; women who had had one or two children with male gametes supplied by one or more long-gone donors; men who would never get married and father children because they just didn’t swing that way; or worst of all, really successful male writers who had been married, but were now perfectly content to let their children be raised by their ex-wife’s next man. Or woman. Or whatever.

That’s when it struck me. The problem wasn’t that being a writer is somehow toxic to marriage and family. It was a matter of selection bias. My peer group was composed of divorced SF/F writers because we were all, every one of us, people who believed it was more important to our careers for us to be there, at that con, drinking with our fellow writers and editors in a hotel bar, than at home with our wives and families.

This, in turn, explained a nascent trend I at first thought I was only imagining I was seeing. The world of SF/F—at least, the social, con-going, dedicated fandom part of it—was not merely family-neutral, but in the process of turning actively family-hostile. And the problem wasn’t just with passing trends in genre fiction, or the idiosyncrasies of the current batch of editors who bought it, or the greedy bastard publishers who printed it. The problem was the writers.

¤

It was too late to save my first marriage. The best I could hope for was to try to have a good post-marriage for the sake of my daughters. Later I remarried, and added a step-son and another son to the family. I worked—really worked—at being a good husband and father, and quit going to cons, unless I could go with my family. The last major con we went to was Dragon Con, and we went as a family.

Emily would have loved Dragon Con. She grew up to be a costumer, a crafter, and a devoted fan of all things Harry Potter. We lost Emily this week, 16 years ago, in late September of 2009—suddenly, from a natural cause that was undiagnosed, unpredictable, unpreventable, and apparently had been waiting years for the opportunity to kill her.

People often ask why I don’t try to put together a complete collection of all my short stories from the 1980s and 1990s. That photo at the top of this column is the reason. Whenever I try to do it, I get as far as the introduction George Scithers wrote for the original magazine publication of “Cyberpunk” and then grind to a stop. Other people look at my publication credits and see a bunch of short stories, some of them pretty good, some Nebula-nominated, some even world famous. 

What I see is all the time I stole from my daughters’ childhoods and all the damage I did to my first marriage, chasing the mirage of being Bruce Bethke, Semi-Famous Science Fiction Writer.

¤

A few people know that in 2010, when we went to Dragon Con, it was between the time Karen (my second wife) was diagnosed with breast cancer and the first round of what turned into a twelve-year odyssey of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and then more of the same. Karen beat the odds, I guess. When she was first diagnosed she was told to expect she had two more years to live; perhaps five, tops. She fought hard against it, and survived for twelve.

What even fewer people know is that in December of 2012 my first wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma. After a five-and-a-half year battle, she left this world in August of 2018.

For those of you who ask why I don’t go to WorldCon anymore or why I really don’t give a flying fig about any of the many cat-fights and pissing contests that are forever going on inside the world of SF/F writing and fandom: seriously, are you kidding? You think that stuff is important?

¤

Forty-two years later, we know some of the answers to the questions George Scithers posed in his introduction to “Cyberpunk.” Nancy and Emily now sleep for eternity, side-by-side in a small churchyard cemetery in rural Minnesota.

As for me? You can’t fix yesterday. But you can learn from experience, and try to pass on what you have learned.

This was my experience. Learn from it.

Read More

“Apollo 13: The Remake” • by S. Travis Brown

TO:     ALL HANDS

FROM:   S. Travis Brown
        CEO, Auteurs sans Honte ni Fierté, Intl.
        Hollywood, CA  90067

STATUS: URGENT!

RE:     Apollo 13: The Remake

Okay folks, I just watched a movie called Apollo 13: Survival, on Netflix. This 2024 documentary about the 1970 Apollo XIII disaster, which was pieced together from archive footage and rarely seen interviews with the participants, is pretty darn tense and captivating, right up to the final frames. What an epic story of survival! What a property it would make! And it’s all public domain, too! No agents to deal with or rights to buy!

But the more I think about it, the more I realize it has some pretty serious problems we’ll need to address before we can move forward. Good core concept, yes, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. And before anyone whines, “But that’s not historically accurate!” I have just one word for you: Hamilton.

Now, here’s my thinking. 

First off, the Apollo 13 crew is not balanced. It needs to consist of a handsome young Black male hotshot Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) who’s been unfairly passed-over for promotion, a beautiful slender blonde lesbian Command Module Pilot (CMP) who tries to warn everyone about the impending disaster but is ignored because she’s a woman, and an older white guy who’s the Mission Commander (MC) because he’s old and white, but who is also the guy responsible for stupidly throwing the switch that causes the explosion that cripples the ship.

Secondly, Chief Flight Director (CFD) Gene Kranz is just all wrong, in every possible way, from the top of his brush-cut hair to the soles of his wingtip shoes. The CFD needs to be a body-positive middle-aged Black woman—I’m thinking Viola Davis, am I right?—who stomps into scenes, shouts a lot, pounds her fist on desks and tables, and motivates her team by screaming threats at them and saying things like, “Come on, people, work this problem! Give me a solution!” She’s got to treat her staff in Mission Control like they’re a bunch of minimum-wage Subway employees who would be just sitting around playing games on their computers if she wasn’t there to motivate them by shouting at them.

Third, speaking of the Mission Control staff: all those people in all those scenes were way too male and way too white. We need more women in those scenes; more Blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians; at least one Russian—no wait, not Russian, better make him Ukrainian—and at least one transgender BIPOC person with a prominent speaking part who comes up with a brilliant idea at a crucial moment. Along with that, as long as we’re doing all the cutaways to the other people on the ground, what’s with this obsessive focus on Marilyn Lovell and the Lovell kids? We need a lot more cutaways to the CMP’s beautiful wife and their angelic child, anxiously waiting for word of the fate of the mission.

Hey, here’s a sidebar thought. Can we maybe get those three Black women from Hidden Figures—or they’re getting kind of old now, maybe we can get three lookalikes? Just for a cameo: say, at a crucial moment the Mission Control computer breaks down, and these three Black women step out of the shadows with legal pads in their hands and pencils tucked behind their ears, and they do the re-entry calculations in their heads. I think that’d be a real wow stand-up-and-cheer scene, don’t you?

Okay, where was I? Fourth, or is this fifth? Anyway, Nixon. You’ve got Richard Nixon in this story, and he’s completely wasted. You need at least one scene in which he’s smiling and sympathetic on TV, but then cut to him huddled in a back room with the rest of his Reichstag staff, scheming and discussing whether it will be more helpful for him in the next election if the Apollo 13 crew is killed or saved, and if killed, can they make it look like an accident?

Next, there’s no getting around this, the special effects in Apollo 13: Survival are just terrible. The movie misses so many opportunities to up the dramatic ante. When the oxygen tank in the Service Module explodes, the explosion should be louder, larger, longer, and much more colorful, with flaming crap flying everywhere, and maybe it should make the ship start tumbling, too. Then, when they slingshot around the Moon, they’re too high up: they should be skimming in so close to the surface they only make it by the skin of their teeth, and an antenna gets snapped off on a lunar peak that they just barely miss thanks to the CMP’s brilliant piloting. Finally, when they need to restart the LM engine for the Earth injection burn, it just starts, with no drama. It should fail to ignite the first couple of times, and not start until the CMP sobs, pounds her fist on the console in frustration, and gives it one more try.

Speaking of the Earth injection burn: the Apollo 13 crew members were all wearing Omega Speedmaster chronograph wristwatches. They had to time the engine burn manually and precisely, by closely watching their wristwatches. PRODUCT PLACEMENT, PEOPLE! PRODUCT PLACEMENT! Jesus, do I have to think of everything myself?

Finally, once they’ve made their last mid-course correction burn, that’s it. After that, they’re just waiting to find out if they survive. Tense, yes, but no drama. I’m thinking when they hit the atmosphere this is the perfect place for something to go horribly wrong, for the MC to freeze up, forcing the CMP to take over, and for the hotshot Black LMP to seize the controls and fly the ship in manually, wrestling with the controls and just dripping with sweat and machismo and showing off what a great big pair of mighty balls he has!

Then: happy ending. They splash down safely, the helicopters show up, we cut to them on the carrier’s deck, emerging from the capsule—only we don’t just have a bunch of Navy people standing around them, we have everybody. Think of the last scene of Independence Day. The CMP’s wife and child are there. The LMP’s husband is there. (Never reveal that your hero is gay until after his hero cred is solidly established.) The MC’s wife is there—better yet, she’s back at home, watching all this on TV with a drink in her hand and disgusted look on her face—no, wait, I’ve got it! She’s in a motel room in bed with her lover, watching all this on TV with a drink in her hand and a disgusted look on her face, saying, “Damn. I was really looking forward to being his widow.”

To sum it up: Apollo 13: Survival is a good movie. Great concept. Good story. It’s a solid “nice try.” But I think we can make the story better, and seriously, we must make it a lot better if we’re going to get Disney to green light and bankroll the remake.

Now get cracking, people! I want to see first draft script treatments on my desk by EOB Friday!

No pressure,
STB

 

---

Once upon a time, under another name, S. Travis Brown had a successful career as an SF/F writer, until the winds of taste changed direction and the kinds of fiction he liked to write became too hard to sell. When his own agent advised him, just before dropping him, to adopt yet another new pseudonym, preferably female this time, and to start his career over again as a writer of paranormal romance novels, he said, “[intercourse] this, I am not Doctor Who,” and went off to do other things that paid better.

Now comfortably retired, we don’t hear from him often, but when we do, we’re mostly happy to publish what he sends us. Mostly.

When asked to supply an author’s photo, he instead sent us this picture, with the explanation, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” We considered asking him to explain his relationship to this dog, but decided it was better not to ask.

Brown has no social media presence that we know of, and says he prefers it that way. 

Read More

“Presenting Ancient Humanity” • by Ruby Dae Mellinger

While Wilma took her seat and the other students clapped, the teacher let out a low, quiet sigh, seeing that Timothy was next to give his presentation. She was sitting in the back, so nobody saw her, but she still felt bad about the involuntary reaction as soon as it happened. She did not pick favorites among her students, she reminded herself, waiting for them to quiet down. Timothy was not a bad student nor a stupid individual, and this presentation promised to be well-researched because—as he rarely let anyone forget—his father was among the leading experts on the customs and cultures of ancient humans. The reason he grated on Ms. Garlan’s nerves was because he was… well… she hated the terminology, but there was really no better phrase to describe Timothy than “a little shit.”

“Timothy,” she said, shuffling her papers, bringing to the top of the pile the outline he turned in a week before. “It is time for your presentation on…” she paused, trying to decipher his handwriting, or trying to remember what she had decided it said last time she read it. “It's time for your presentation.”

He made his way to the front of the room in silence and settled a stack of note cards on the podium before looking up and beginning. “As you have heard so far from my esteemed colleagues,” he said, feigning a stuffy aristocratic air and gesturing loftily to his classmates, “the peoples of antiquity were very strange, indeed.” When he said the word “indeed,” it had far more emphasis on it than necessary and caused a ripple of laughter to run through the class.

“Timothy, try to stay on topic,” Ms Garlan said, with a hint of warning in her glance.

“My humblest apologies, my lady,” he said, with a deep bow.

“Timothy.”

“Yes ma’am, sorry.” His smug grin clarified that it was a hollow apology, but they had been through this song and dance enough times for her to know that she should be happy to get any apology at all.

“Continue.”

“We’ve heard a lot about strange things they did, and I’d like to talk to you today about a strange thing they did with their mouths.”

When snickers and whispers began running through the students and Timothy’s grin widened, panic began to well up inside Ms. Garlan. Every year in her Ancient Humanity class, some student got their hands on a piece of information about the sexual exploits of ancient humans, and every year it haunted her classroom—an unaddressed ghost underlying their conversations which they didn’t think she knew about. This year it had been the practice of oral sex that had captivated them, and of course, it was Timothy who had dug that one up and introduced it to his fellow students.

“You see, they used their mouths for LOTS of things. Some of them involved relationships between two people—”

“Timothy!” she warned over the uproar of laughter that followed.

 “What? I was going to say ‘like talking.’”

She gave him a pointed, knowing look. He went on.

“They used their mouths for talking like we do now, but they also did this thing called ‘eating,’ because the poor, inefficient slobs couldn’t just plug-in like we do and had to get their energy from the mechanical and chemical breakdown of organic material, which they often referred to as,” he paused briefly, glancing down at his note cards, “food.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “We already know about eating; it was a huge part of their culture and not only have we talked about it extensively in class, much of the language we still use today, being handed down from our ancestors, still reflects this infatuation. However, I wanted to talk today about a specific thing that they often ate. To demonstrate just how important food was to them, I want to demonstrate just how complicated of a process it was that they went through, to prepare this food that many of them considered simple.”

Ms. Garlan had to admit, it was actually a fairly well thought-out premise. She waited, hoping that her initial reservations would be proven to be baseless.

“We’ll start our story with a plant called…” he paused again, glancing at his notes, “Triticum aestivum. The story, however goes much further back than that. Our food-obsessed ancestors selectively bred and grew fields full of this stuff for over ten-thousand years, changing it slowly to get it to the form we are about to discuss.”

Timothy paused, and the class looked at him with large, shocked eyes. Ms. Garlan was impressed. Timothy often commanded the attention of his classmates, but it was rare that he used it for a productive purpose.

“They would pick huge amounts of this Tritic… whatever plant, then grind it up into a fine powder, and sometimes they’d even bleach it, to make it—”

“What’s a bleach?” interrupted Michael, a friend of Timothy’s who did get into trouble on occasion, but not usually without a bit of help.

“Raise your hands, please,” Ms. Garlan reminded.

“It’s a chemical used to make things look white,” answered Timothy, without even a glance towards the teacher. “Anyway, then they would mix this powdered plant with some water, sodium chloride (which they put in a lot of their food for some reason) and a few other things, like this single-celled fungus called ‘yeast.’ It was then left to sit a while so that the yeast could break down sugars and fart-out carbon dioxide.”

“What’s a fart?”

“I’m so glad you asked, Michael. A fart is—”

“Timothy, don’t you answer that question.”

“Okay Ms. Garlan.” And he actually had the nerve to wink at her before continuing. “Anyway, they’d go through all this trouble to make the stuff fluffy. They would then sprinkle it with the seeds from the… Sesamum indicum plant, then they’d put the whole thing inside a box that would heat it up a bunch, making it a very specific texture, making it dry, and killing all the yeast that they worked so hard to get in there in the first place.”

He paused here to let his glowing eyes pan over his fellow students.

“Now, you might think they’d be done at this point, but you’d be wrong. All that effort was just to make the part that goes on the outside.”

“The outside of what?” asked Wilma.

“Raise your hands, please.”

“Sorry,” replied Wilma.

“Between the pieces of post-heated plant paste, they would spread a bright red goo painstakingly made from the berry of the… Solanum lycopersicum plant, which had been mashed, mixed with a bunch more sodium-chloride, and some soluble carbohydrates, along with some other things, then heated for half a day.” Scattered mutters of astonishment could be heard around the classroom, but he talked over them, “They also sometimes included a bright yellow goo made from ground… Sinapis alba seeds that had been mixed with acid and... any guesses? That’s right, sodium chloride.”

“Why?” Michael again.

“Hands, please, Michael.”

“Just wait, it gets better. Aside from the red and yellow goop, they would put in slices of the gourd from the… Cucumis sativus plant that had been stored in weak acids with… Anethum graveolens leaves and the roots of the… Allium sativum, and that was all just extras, we haven’t even started to talk about the whole point of this food.”

More astonished mutters. Ms. Garlan had to suppress a grin. The students were really getting into this one.

“The whole point, it seems, for all the rest was as a delivery system for something, the description of which is not for the faint of heart!”

“Rein in the theatrics, please, Timothy.”

“Inside, they would put ground-up slices of ungulates!”

Cries of shock and outrage filled the room and Wilma, now horror-stricken, yelled out, “Like a giraffe?!”

“Quiet down now, kids. Timothy, a little sensitivity please.”

“I tried to warn them, but you called it ‘theatrics.’”

“They didn't really eat giraffes did they?!” asked Wilma, her little body clinking quietly as she shook.

“Wilma, feel free to step outside if you need to. Timothy, I trust you are nearing your point?” Wilma didn't move, obviously emotionally invested in whatever would come next.

“The… the lump of the… previously mentioned stuff…” he resumed with a grin, “would be burned over a fire, until it changed color and it was sometimes topped with a slice from a clump of coagulated lactation from the very same type of ungulate!”

This caused an uproar again and Wilma looked like she was going to faint.

“And they put that in their mouths?” yelled Michael.

“Settle down, now. Settle down.”

When they finally began to quiet, Timothy said, “Yes, all that effort was to gain what we get just by plugging into the wall. It really is amazing that they had time and energy enough to make us.” There were nods of agreement as he went on. “But it’s no wonder that they were so inefficient that we had to kill them all.”

Ms. Garlan smiled to herself as he made his way to his seat. Despite his antics and theatrics, it was a fairly well-done presentation, she thought, as she wrote an “A” on his outline.

---

Ruby Dae Mellinger is a trans woman from Monterey, California. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she develops data tools for a tech company. Ruby holds a Master’s degree in Physics from San Diego State University and is a big fan of soups and dogs (eating the first and cuddling the latter).

Read More

“In Fall, After the Harvest” • by S. Travis Brown

 

The little cybernetic gadfly popped up as soon as I logged in. 

“Dave Miller,” it dutifully nagged, “you are now 15 minutes overdue for your appointment with the company fitness consultant.”

Right. I clicked the ‘ignore’ button to kill the message and then continued with my morning routine.

As soon as I brought up Outlook, though, the message returned: this time in red, and with a flag. It was on my calendar. At the top of my To-Do Bar. Waiting in my email inbox and claiming to be “Urgent.” I had just about enough time to sigh and swear, and then my phone chirped. It was Heather, from HR.

“Dave—”

I cut her off. “Heather, how many times do we have to go through this? I am six-foot-four. I weigh 165 pounds. My doctor says I’m skinny as a rail but healthy as a horse. I do not want to work out, I do not want to weight-train, I do not want to join the company’s charity plod-a-thon team, and above all I do not want to take some idiotic fitness test first thing this morning and then spend the rest of the day smelling like a sweaty goat. I have a meeting with—”

This time it was her turn to cut me off. “Sorry,” she said, “but Frank set this appointment up for you personally.”

Oh, great.

Frank DeStefano, the company president and my boss’s boss, was a late-life convert to the Church of Serious Running, and since it made him feel so blasted good he’d decided to zealously inflict healthiness on the rest of us.

Wondering what I’d done to draw his attention this time—was it that Kit-Kat bar I’d sneaked during the PMT meeting last week?—I changed my status to “in a meeting,” loosened my tie, and reported to the conference room-turned-gym.

The moment I saw the fitness consultant, I hated him. Too many memories of my being the tallest, skinniest, and least-coordinated guy in my high school, I guess; too many memories of basketball and volleyball games that ended in broken eyeglasses and a bloody nose. I hated his little blue shorts and his white polo shirt. I hated the clipboard in his hands and the stopwatch on a lanyard around his thick neck. Most of all I hated his broad hairy chest, his thick hairy arms and legs, his prognathous jaw, and his five-o’clock shadow at 9 in the morning. His eyes were too close together, I decided; his nose was almost a snout, and his teeth were far too big, straight, and white for any normal man. “Good morning, Dave,” he said cheerily. I hated the way he presumed familiarity.

“Can we just get this over with?” I asked. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”

He tsk-tsked and made a little mark on his clipboard. “That’s a Type A high-stress attitude you’ve got going there, Dave. Bad for the heart, bad for the nerves, and symptomatic of repressed—”

“If you’re going to talk symptoms, I want to see your medical degree.” We were off to a rotten start.

§

The evaluation was long and tedious. He asked me a battery of questions about my diet and family medical history. He made me take off my shirt and then poked, prodded, and pinched me with a dial calipers. He plastered a bunch of electrodes to my back and chest and made me trot on the treadmill for twenty minutes. When we were finished, I was wheezing and drenched in sweat, and he told me I was—

“Ten pounds overweight?”

“Going strictly by your fat-to-muscle ratio, yes,” he said. “Not that I’d advise you to try to lose ten pounds. No, what you need to do is build your upper-body strength and endurance. Do that, and cut out the salt, sugar, caffeine, and saturated fats, and your weight won’t be a problem. Here’s the exercise regimen I recommend.”

Regimen was the wrong word. He should have said ordeal. Two half-hour sessions of calisthenics and weight-lifting daily, plus rowing and stair-stepper sessions every other day; I tried it for a week, and then said to hell with it and dropped out of the fitness class.

§

Which put me in a very awkward position. For as Spring grew into Summer, DeStefano got more and more converts to the company fitness program, and the lunchroom became a rigidly segregated place. By the time July rolled around the place was completely dominated by Healthies, grazing on their avocado salads and constantly guzzling from their omnipresent filtered-water bottles, while we poor benighted Flabbies were relegated to a few battered old tables back in one corner. By the beginning of August they’d taken the Twinkies, potato chips, and Coca-Cola out of the vending machines, and by the end of August, the vending machines themselves were gone, along with the salt packets and the unlimited free coffee. By Labor Day we were down to just four holdouts: myself; majestic Lorenz and his equally majestic stomach; Bill from IT, who claimed an allergy to sweat socks; and grizzled old Stinson, who’d been chain-smoking for thirty years and wasn’t about to quit now, even if the designated smoking area was now on the other side of the parking lot, next to the dumpster.

We had to put up with a lot, in that last month. For example, I love a good ham-and-cheese sandwich, but no matter how I timed it, there was always some sanctimonious jackass looking over my shoulder when I took my sandwich out of the microwave, and he or she never failed to say, “How can you eat that? Don’t you know what that cholesterol is doing to your arteries?” Lorenz, Bill, and Stinson got about the same treatment. We were getting very discouraged.

Until…

At first it was just a few amateur athletes, here and there. Runners, cyclists, triathletes; people who tended to work-out alone. It wasn’t until entire Jazzercise classes began disappearing that people began to take notice. Then, when half the runners in the Seattle Marathon simply vanished right before the TV cameras, it became an international crisis that had to be dealt with.

At about the same time, a confidential FBI report was leaked to the press. It seems that along with the athletes, thousands of private trainers and coaches were also disappearing. And when investigators began looking into the histories of the missing trainers, they found that 95-percent of them could not be accounted for before 2010.

The same 95-percent who were described by the people who’d known them as “thick, hairy, and prognathous.”

§

There are theories, rumors, and urban legends, of course. The most popular one holds that the Trainers—yes, they capitalize it, now—were transcendent beings of some sort, and the missing athletes were spirited away as a reward for their excellence, strength, winning attitude, et cetera, et cetera…

I never once heard our fitness consultant talk about any of that. What he wanted us to develop was lots of lean red meat.

It’s lucky there are four of us Flabbies left, now. Most of the card games we know work best four-handed. I spend most of my time in the lunchroom these days, drinking beer, eating junk food, playing cards, and smoking. I’ve gained thirty pounds of pure flab and have developed a real fondness for H. Upmann Cameroon Robustos. Things are very relaxed at our company these days, now that all the Healthies are gone.

We don’t miss them one bit.

 

---

 

Once upon a time, under another name, S. Travis Brown had a successful career as an SF/F writer, until the winds of taste changed direction and the kinds of fiction he liked to write became too hard to sell. When his own agent advised him (just before dropping him) to adopt yet another new pseudonym, preferably female this time, and to start his career over again as a writer of paranormal romance novels, he said, “[intercourse] this, I am not Doctor Who,” and went off to do other things that paid better.

Now comfortably retired, we don’t hear from him often, but when we do, we’re usually happy to publish what he sends us.

When asked to supply an author’s photo, he instead sent us this picture, with the explanation, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” We considered asking him to explain his relationship to this dog, but decided it was better not to ask.

Brown has no social media presence, and likes it that way. 

Read More

“Glossary” • by Allan Dyen-Shapiro

Glossary of Archaic Terms used in
Monograph on Human Culture
During the Period of Conquest
(Kindle Edition)

colonist (ˈkälənəst)

The humans’ term for us.

conflict (ˈkänˌflik(t))

The tendency of humans to compete with and/or kill others thought to be threatening. In the pre-Conquest Period, conflict often involved weapons marketed by competitors of Bezos. (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) When Bezos ended material scarcity by selling products of Colonist technology from his website, his competitors ceased operations. Conflict between humans abated. Bezos minimized Colonist-human conflict by acting as our intermediary. His Oracle, named “Alexa,” prophesied a Golden Age of peace and prosperity.

job (jäb)

(Disambiguation: see Jobs, Steve, a.k.a., “The Evil One”)

A preoccupation of pre-Conquest and early-Conquest-period humans when they weren’t eating, sleeping, copulating, or defecating. Most humans performed menial tasks, creating value, which was usurped by an elite class who owned the means of production and distribution. After Colonist-technology-based automation supplanted these workers, Bezos (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) supplied all goods and services. Few regretted losing their jobs. Research commissioned by Bezos indicated that sleeping until late morning, consuming fattening foodstuffs and video-based entertainment, and copulating satisfied 98% of those surveyed. When Bezos extended Prime membership to the entire world’s population and all wishes were fulfilled within two days at no extra charge, contentment greatly increased.

pregnancy (ˈpreɡnənsē)

A physiological state formerly required for procreation. Before the Conquest, humans reproduced via fertilization and implantation of an ovum within the body of a female, followed by nine months’ gestation in utero. Females endured pain and discomfort, in part thanks to an ancient conspiracy to convince them that the experience was rewarding. Surveys performed by Bezos (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) established that nearly all females preferred the procedure He initiated: one small blood sample, and then nine months later a fully developed baby was delivered directly to the female’s doorstep. Baby delivery in this era employed self-driving trucks, rather than the primitive methods replied upon by lower placental mammals.

r-selection (ˌär səˈlekSHən) 

(Disambiguation: compare to K-selection)

A reproductive strategy in which a species prioritizes producing a large number of offspring and only the growth rate governs population size. Freed from economic and biological limitations, humans behaved as if their species was r-selected, not realizing that Earth had reached its carrying capacity for humans and that behaving as a K-selected species was a more intelligent choice. To counter this trend, Bezos (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) tweaked his website’s algorithms to convince humans to order fewer babies and more video games, cell phones, and Chia Pets.

strike (strīk)

Originally a mass refusal of labor to do their jobs, guided by the belief that the owners of the means of production would change employment conditions when pressured to do so. The term broadened in usage to include any mass refusal. Pre-Conquest-Period examples of the expanded meaning include the sex strike in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Mahatma Gandhi’s hunger strikes. The Great Strike constituted humanity’s last act of attempted rebellion against us. If it had occurred earlier, some historians believe we would have been forced to make concessions to the humans who felt “robbed of their humanity.” Humans might once again have become artisans, laborers, or creatives and ceased to rely on Bezos. (All praise to our Glorious Ally!) Fortunately, the mass female refusal to provide us with blood samples for reproductive purposes happened late in the Conquest Period, and so posed only a minor inconvenience.

youth (yo͞oTH)

A term used to identify juvenile humans. The word’s usage declined following the completion of the blood-sample-derived genomic database and the establishment of parthenogenesis-competent oocyte cell cultures. Before the Conquest, “youth” were typically (but not always) raised by adult humans. Now, they mature in cages for three years, before being delivered to restaurants serving our Colonist population. Youth are shipped on ice to maintain freshness and are considered delicious when stir-fried with assorted Earth vegetables, garlic, and scallions and served on a bed of rice or vermicelli.  

 

---

 

Allan Dyen-Shapiro is a Ph.D. biochemist currently working as an educator. He’s sold stories to numerous markets, including Flash Fiction Online (where he is a First Reader), Dark Matter Magazine, Grantville Gazette, Small Wonders, Factor Four, Stupefying Stories, and many anthologies. You can find his blog and links to his stories at allandyenshapiro.com, or find him on social media at the following links.

https://www.facebook.com/allandyenshapiro.
author

https://www.goodreads.com/AllanDyen-Shapiro

http://www.twitter.com/Allan_author_SF

https://wandering.shop/@Allan_author_SF (Mastodon) 

https://bsky.app/profile/allandyenshapiro.bsky.social (Bluesky)

Read More