Writing 101 • Part 2: Mary Sue, Totally Badass Survivalist

One of the few benefits of being my age is that it helps you to develop a sense of historical perspective.

Most people, it increasingly seems to me, live inside a temporal bubble that is at best about ten years long. To such people five years ago is ancient history, and thus irrelevant, while five years in the future is so far away as to be impossible to imagine.

Ironic, then, that so many science fiction writers spend so much of their time and energy trying to envision the distant future, while completely stuck in the bubble of their own contemporary reality. 

You will find that the business of writing and publishing science fiction abounds in such ironies. 

Science fiction perhaps has an undeserved reputation for being a visionary literature. This is in large part a function of the genre’s commercial history. Before World War II, science fiction lived mostly in the pages of cheap and ephemeral pulp magazines. The mass-market paperback book simply did not exist in the American market before May, 1939. 

During the war, paper rationing limited the production of books, while at the same time the military services found it necessary to teach people by the millions to read. After the war, then, when rationing was at last lifted, there followed an enormous demand for new books, but A.I. not having been invented yet, the demand for new books far outpaced the supply of new content.

The solution was obvious. Companies like Street & Smith already owned the copyrights to the enormous amounts of pulp science fiction they’d published in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. All they had to do was bundle the stuff up in new packages, slap on new covers with exciting new ad copy, and put it on the book racks.

Given that, science fiction’s reputation as a visionary literature was easy to come by. To become known as a visionary, all you need to do is make a ton of prognostications, and then, ten or twenty years later, cherry-pick through them to find the ones that held up and say, “See?! I was right!!!”

If you make enough predictions, some are bound to come true, eventually.

§

With this historical perspective comes another pair of conjoined realizations: that this thing we call “science fiction” existed long before Hugo Gernsback named it or John W. Campbell Jr. began to relentlessly promote it as being something new, different, and visionary, and that the trends in the literature and the business of publishing it are cyclical, and approximately generational. Boom and bust; optimism and pessimism; utopian and dystopian; rockets and ray-guns action or introspective and thoughtful inaction: whatever you think science fiction is now, stick around five years, and it will change. In ten years it will be the diametric opposite of whatever you think it is today. In twenty years, what’s fashionable now will be back again, but in slightly different form.

It rarely comes back in exactly the same form, unless it’s self-consciously being presented as retro style. Writers can’t help but reflect the times in which they live. This is what makes so much Golden Age science fiction so uncomfortable to read now. It’s not that our knowledge of science has advanced. (Although I do chortle at the memory of an early Isaac Asimov story I once read in which the hero, faced with the challenge of having to get his spaceship through the asteroid belt, decides to save time and fuel by flying up and over the asteroid belt, and then cutting the engines and coasting back down to the plane of the ecliptic.) 

It’s the characters who make us uncomfortable, with the way they speak and act in ways that unconsciously reflect the mores, attitudes, and assumptions of people who lived more than fifty years ago.

But again, this is cyclical, approximately generational, and what is unacceptably outré in one decade can become just fine in the next. Difficult as it may be to believe, there was a time when all correctly thinking people in the SF business criticized the original Star Trek, as being “too militaristic.” This is why the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was so bad. They were trying to make the Enterprise D “a ship of peace.”

It wasn’t until the second season, when Roddenberry stepped back from hands-on control of the scripts, Riker grew a beard and a pair of cojones, and the new show runners introduced the Borg, that Star Trek became the juggernaut franchise we know today.

§

SF tropes and trends are cyclical. Themes and ideas come and go, and then come back again. Utopian SF will be a hot category for a while, but then it gives way to dark and dystopian visions, as, let’s face it, utopian novels are always boring and preachy, and have been at least since William Dean Howells wrote A Traveler from Altruria.

One trend that always comes back around again is The End Of The World (As We Know It). We SF fans and writers do love our deity-free eschatons. I’m not sure why. Sometimes I think it’s simply a failure of imagination. We find that we can’t imagine living in a world more than five or ten years in the future, so we decide to blow the damned thing up and start over in the stone age. It was either that or adopt the Star Trek “California über alles” approach, and envision a future in which Western liberal civilization and values have ascended directly to the stars, mostly intact and unchanged and with only a few insignificant bumps in the road along the way. 

So we reboot the world. It doesn’t matter how. “How” is always a reflection of the most popular “We’re doomed!” scenario du jour. When H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, it was at a time when novels depicting England being invaded, usually by Germans, but sometimes by the Russians, Prussians, or French, were popular and sold well. Wells, though, made his invaders Martians, and gave them all kinds of horrific new weapons that even the Germans didn’t have yet. That was what made The War of the Worlds an enduring masterpiece: the grotesque horror of people being slaughtered by tripods with heat rays or captured by monstrous aliens who wanted to drink their blood. That made it live far past its time. I mean, for comparison’s sake, just try to find a copy of George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking now.

We reboot the world. We don’t actually destroy it. (Unless we also give the elect a way to escape and carry on the struggle, as in Greg Bear’s The Forge of God.) We just want to shock contemporary civilization to a flat line and start over. It doesn’t matter how; how is always a function of what’s currently in fashion. In the 1940s and 1950s there were a lot of atomic wars and bioweapon plagues in science fiction; later, as flying saucer hysteria took hold, we were invaded by yet more aliens. Towards the end of the 1960s global ecological catastrophes became very popular end-of-the-world scenarios, and in the 1970s there was a period when what Larry Niven termed “Big Rock Hits Earth” books were in vogue, resulting in novels like Lucifer’s Hammer and Shiva Descending. “Bioweapon plague that causes people to turn into homicidal zombies” seems to be an unstoppable two-fer: no matter how tired you personally may be of seeing such stories, the SF-consuming world, collectively, isn’t. At least, not yet.

In all such end-of-the-world tropes, there is an embedded epicycle. At first, the scenario is seemingly a new and fresh idea, and it results in some thoughtful and interesting books: e.g., Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank (atomic war); Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart (plague); I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (zombies); The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham (GMO plants run amok)…

[Seriously, if you’ve never read The Day of the Triffids, you owe it to yourself to do so. The novel is much better than any of the films that have been based on it.]

…The Postman, by David Brin (combined EMP and bioweapon attack)…

And then along comes a Mary Sue,* who looks at the shattered ruins of this post-apocalyptic landscape, and thinks, “Wow. Wouldn’t it be cool to live in this world?!”

[ * Or maybe a Kevin Costner ]

§

There was a poster that was very popular in the early 1970s. There were many variations on it, as the text, being adapted from Psalm 23, wasn’t copyrightable, but it usually said something like this:

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for I
am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.”

That, in a single sentence, is the essence of the Mary Sue, Survivalist story. The author has projected his (typically his, but not always*) idealized self into a survival scenario, and then gamed out exactly what he would pack along and all the ways in which he would be prepared to handily defeat all the obstacles that he, being the author, will put in his own way. The result is typically a story that is half testosterone-soaked macho chest-thumping, half REI outdoor gear catalog copy, with a big scoop of gun-porn thrown in on top.

[* On the other hand, if the protagonist is female, the author will likely substitute a familiar such as a small dragon, telepathic mountain lion, or some other cryptid in lieu of all the guns.]

Half this, half that, but all idealized self-image, absurdly over-competent and over-prepared to deal with the line of straw-man menaces the author has lined up for them to knock over. (Said menaces, by the way, will all politely wait their turns to attack the Mary Sue character one at a time, until the final boss fight with the biggest menace of all.)

Survival situation stories can be exciting. Survival stories can be dramatic. Survival stories can be revealing tests of character, with the ultimate stake—life itself—on the line. 

But in the Mary Sue Survivalist story, the character enjoys the survival situation, thrives, succeeds, and dominates in it, and doesn’t want to get out of it!

Another ironic aside: I’ve noticed that the authors who like to write these kinds of stories tend to be people who in real life can’t get through a hotel breakfast buffet line without putting their lives at risk. As in, “One entire plate just for bacon? Dude, that can’t be healthy!”   

§

One final sidebar: when I got to this line in the critique—

I think he’d be loaded down and I think there might be stuff attached to the baby carriage, too.

I thought of Lone Wolf and Cub. If you’ve never read the manga, or watched any of the movies or TV programs based on it, Lone Wolf and Cub is the story of a disgraced samurai who is making his way across Tokugawa shogunate-era Japan, pushing a baby cart carrying his infant son. It’s a dangerous journey, as they’re both under death sentences and being pursued by a plethora of bad guys, but Ogami has a secret weapon: the baby cart. It’s been tricked-out and turned into a rolling arsenal that puts the Batmobile to shame!

Good stuff. Bloody, violent, and ridiculously over the top, but if you’re a fan of samurai movies or manga, it’s definitely worth checking out. 

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Writing 101 • Sidebar: Hello, Mary Sue, Goodbye, Credibility

There’s a character you should all know and dread: “Lieutenant Mary Sue Je’nerik, the youngest cadet ever to make commissioned rank in Star Fleet.”

At least, such is the lore. I first encountered Mary Sue in a piece of Star Trek fanfic that was being passed around amongst my writer friends that was so badly written, I had to believe it was intentional parody. Since then, though, I have encountered Mary Sue many, many, many more times.

Oh, her name routinely changes, as does her description and her backstory. But Mary Sue is always a character who is meant to be taken quite seriously, by the poor benighted soul who has been selected by a sadistic caprice of the Muses to write her latest adventure. Mary Sue is typically young, attractive, smart, healthy and athletic, and impossibly over-competent at anything she tries. She is always the most intelligent and best-informed person in the room, and never wrong about anything—or at least, not about anything important. If she does have a physical flaw, it’s always something so obvious as to serve more as a constant reminder of her innate virtue than as a meaningful impediment to her success, and it’s also something that can be overcome or brushed aside in the final scene. She never faces any truly serious challenges; her greatest character flaw is frustration, that the people around her fail to recognize her innate superiority and defer to her obviously brilliant leadership. At the climax of the plot, when all seems lost, she is the one who invariably saves the day (ship|world|whatever), by coming up with a remarkable insight or noticing a tiny detail that all the far more experienced people around her who have been dealing with this sort of thing all their lives have inexplicably overlooked.

Okay, let’s be honest. Odds are you knew a real-life Mary Sue in high school. And you hated her with a passion hotter than the flames of Hell.

§

Despite the name, Mary Sue is not always female. I’ve seen plenty of male-presenting Y-chromosome-having masculine Mary Sues in the slush pile over the years, and come to think of it, quite a few Transgender Sues lately. In all cases, though, the core defining characteristics remain the same. Mary Sue is always the most intelligent and best-informed person in the room; healthy and athletic (unless an obvious physical flaw is part of the virtue veneer, like Cinderella’s tattered dress); and in the end, always right, no matter how much the authority figures in the story have disbelieved them up to this point.

Sorry, folks. I guess this means that in a lot of regenerations, Doctor Who is pretty much a total Mary Sue.

I once made the mistake of sending an encouraging personal rejection to an author who’d submitted a paranormal thriller that was pretty good, except that the protagonist, despite being a middle-aged man, was a Mary Sue. The author punished me for my error in judgment by sending me even more stories featuring the same protagonist, walking through a series of formulaic paint-by-numbers paranormal encounters while surrounded by a constantly changing cast of disposable secondary characters who may as well have been wearing red shirts. After awhile, I actually found myself rooting for the monsters in the author’s stories, as the recurring protagonist was such an insufferable conceited ass.

One begins to wonder: what compels an author to write such a character? Or worse, to write such a character over and over again, all the while believing this character to be good and interesting to anyone else?

The most charitable answer I can come up with is that the writer is projecting their idealized self-image into the story, or perhaps, an idealized image of themselves and their handful of closest friends. This, admittedly, is something most of us start out doing, when we first begin to write fiction in our childhood or early teenage years, but it’s a practice you should leave behind when you graduate from high school.

§

Mary Sue is on my mind this morning because of my recent work on this book.

As I was developing the cover and testing it out on my focus group, the Stupefying Stories Secret Inner Circle, one of the members had this to say:

“One of my big pet peeves is when people in survival situations in science fiction books have impossibly small backpacks that could not possibly carry enough supplies to last more than a short day hike. I think he’d be loaded down and I think there might be stuff attached to the baby carriage, too. I mean, his backpack isn’t even full.”

This comment turned into a lengthy conversation that went on… and on… and on some more…

Eventually, though, we got down to the crux of the matter, which was that his real objection was to the way that David Bruce Banner was portrayed in the 1970s TV series, The Incredible Hulk. 

 

“What really annoyed me about The Incredible Hulk was how David Banner had a little daypack that was about a third full and he knew he was gonna be traveling for months or years. Not to mention he knew he’d need frequent changes of clothes. I bet he couldn’t even fit a pair of jeans in that backpack of his.”

BRB: “Which would have been a real problem, considering how often he ripped his pants to shreds.”

“I mean, look at him! Not even a damned jacket!”

BRB: “Well, it is California.”

Ignoring for the moment the inherent silliness of expecting rationality in a TV series—one may as well ask how it was that no matter where they went in the galaxy, the Enterprise always arrived there in the daytime. You never saw a moment like this:

KIRK: “Uhura! Contact the Leptonian High Council!”

UHURA: “I’m trying to, sir, but all I get is a recorded message telling me they’re closed for the weekend and to please call back again on Grabtharsday during normal business hours.”

—I can assure you that no one ever plans to get into a survival situation. Survival situations come about because someone failed to plan, or did something stupid, or something that could never possibly fail, failed. As with “Hold my beer and watch this,” survival situations are usually preceded by statements like:

“The weather’s nice. We won’t need our raincoats.”

“Those little clouds? We’ll be across the bay before the storm hits.”

“There’s a gas station in Furnace Creek. We don’t need to stop to fill up now.”

“Ignore that. The engine always makes that noise.”

“The Russians are pushovers. We won’t need our winter uniforms.”

Or else by no words at all, but merely by being secure in the knowledge that that crucial bronze casting in the heart of the ship’s steering gear has never, ever, failed, not once, not on any boat, ever.

People don’t plan to get into survival situations. Survival situations come about because something has happened that is outside the range of reasonable human planning. If you could plan for going into a survival situation, you could make a better plan and plan to be somewhere else, and not in that situation in the first place.

So, as regards The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds: Joe didn’t plan to be in this situation. The BART system broke down. He had to bail out and continue on-foot with just his daughter, her stroller, and what he had in the passenger car with him for what he’d expected to be a short trip. He’d never planned to end up on foot in Oakland, in the middle of a riot. 

Of such elements is good dramatic tension made…

§

Uh-oh. I’m out of time and still have not yet finished what I set out to do this morning, which was to connect the Mary Sue character trope to prepper and survivalist science fiction. I guess this column will continue into a Part 2, tomorrow. 

~brb

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The Never-ending FAQ • 11 June 2025

A lot of questions have piled up in my inbox since the last Never-ending FAQ post, most of which are variations on “Where are you?!” and “What happened?!” The shortest possible answer is, “I’ve been busy.”

Since this rarely seems a satisfactory answer to most people, I’ll elaborate.

First and foremost:

A lot of time in the last few weeks went into this book, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, by Allan Dyen-Shapiro. It released on Kindle last week; in paperback this week; and will be coming out on a plethora of other ebook platforms in the weeks to come. This is a really important book for us. It’s also a quick read—a novelette, to be precise—and seems to be something so new Amazon does not have a predefined marketing pigeonhole already prepared for it. 

If I was to give it a label, I believe I would call it hopepunk. It’s hard SF, yes, and set in the midst of a GMO-caused catastrophe, but ends on a strong note of hope for the future. One reader called it “ScienTIST fiction.” 

I like that line. I may have to steal it.

The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, by Allan Dyen-Shapiro. It’s a good novelette. You should buy it. Read it. Tell your friends about it. Give it a quick review, or at least a rating on Goodreads. Thank you in advance for doing so. If you have a review platform and would like a comp copy for review purposes, contact me.

In addition to being a great story with a good heart, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds is also something of a technical turning point for us. This is the first book we produced using an entirely new book layout and production system, which at last enables us to produce both ebooks and print books from my long-sought dream of using a single common source-code repository. This may be so much technical gobbledy-gook to you, but trust me, it’s pretty exciting. Going forward, this should make a huge difference in how quickly we can produce new books.

Speaking of which…

Second, and somewhat in the background:

A lot of time in the last few weeks also went into another book, which I can’t talk about at this time, as it was a pro bono project done for someone else and I don’t have control of when or even if it ever will be released. That’s a pity, as there’s some really good content in it. However, working on this book was both a valuable educational experience and an excellent second “really push the envelope” test for the new book production system, so I’m satisfied. The system works as well as we’d hoped it would. Which means…
 

Third:

Like Christopher Lee’s Dracula, Stupefying Stories Magazine is back from the (seemingly) dead. Again. We’ve resumed work on the long-delayed Stupefying Stories 27, and more new issues will be following closely behind it. 

Our new book layout and production system really is that good. It’s so good, in fact, that we will finally be getting the long-promised print editions of SS#24 and SS#26 out into release, and we have some other back-burner projects that are starting to move towards becoming production projects again, too. 

BUT, only AFTER SS#27 is finished and out the door!

ATTENTION, AUTHORS! If you have a story that is under contract to us, and you have not already heard from me, please contact me through the submissions email address. I am determined to see that everyone who has a viable publication contract with us gets their story published. I am reaching out to authors to do so, but there are more of you than there are of me, so, squeaky wheel, and all that.

Fourth: what about the Pete Wood Challenge?

I’m glad you asked! Why, yes, we do have winners for the “Happy Trails” contest, and will be announcing their names and publishing their stories beginning June 23. Stay tuned!

Fifth: whatever happened to Writing 101?

It was interrupted by OTOGU, but will return in July. In the words of Doctor Who, as played by Jon Pertwee, “I’ll explain later.”

(Devoted fans of the series know that Pertwee’s Doctor always said that, but never did.)

Sixth: why isn’t The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds out on Kindle Unlimited?

“I’ll explain later.”

Seventh: I have a serious problem with the Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds cover art. That man’s backpack is not nearly large enough to carry everything he and his daughter will need in a survival situation.

Oh, for Pete’s sake…  

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Book Release: THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE TO THE BIRDS • by Allan Dyen-Shapiro

 

“Genocide Joe” is a marked man.

Once a highly respected corporate microbiologist, now the scapegoat for a GMO-caused ecological disaster that’s turned San Francisco Bay toxic and poisoned thousands, Joe has lost everything: his career, his reputation, his wife, his home, and most of his friends. All he has left is his 18-month-old daughter, Daphne, the clothes on his back, and a chance to start over again, in a new town, where no one knows his face.

To take that chance, all he needs to do is catch the bus out of town. But an unexpected transit outage has dumped him in Oakland, so now he needs to get to the next station on foot, while pushing a baby stroller.

And hoping to pass unrecognized through a city where everyone hates him, and a lot of people want to kill him….

THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE TO THE BIRDS

An idea so original Amazon doesn’t have even a category for it yet. Maybe we can call it Hopepunk?

Available now on Amazon Kindle. 

Coming soon to Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, and most other ebook platforms. Print edition coming soon.

________________________

About Dr. Allan Dyen-Shapiro…

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 numerous anthologies. You can find his blog and links to his stories at allandyenshapiro.com. Friend him on Facebook (allandyenshapiro.author); follow him on Bluesky (allandyenshapiro.bsky.social), Mastodon (@wandering.shop@Allan_author_SF), and X (@Allan_author_SF).

To go more in-depth: Six Questions for… Allan Dyen-Shapiro  

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“As the Moon Rises” • by Isabelle D’Amato

I hasten through the dark and snowy woods, as quickly as the poor horse will carry me.

Dusk is falling fast and an icy wind is rising, piercing through my coarse peasant robe as if it’s barely there. Storm clouds scud across the sky, low and fast. In the distance, but not distant enough, a wolf howls, then another, and then yet another. Their voices stir the tiny hairs on the nape of my neck with ancient terror. I must reach the castle before they reach me. I must.

The castle is just coming into view when the horse catches the scent of something that spooks her. She stops short, rears, nearly bucks me off. I calm her enough to let me dismount, then turn her loose and continue on foot. I wish her well. The voices of the wolves are closer now. I don’t think they’re hunting horse tonight. 

At the rusted iron gate, I waste a moment in a nervous pause. The gate is falling off its hinges. This isn’t a castle, it’s a ruin. Dark. Cold. Forbidding. Not a light to be seen; not a hint on the wind of a warm fireplace inside. Could it be abandoned, empty?

The howl of a wolf, much nearer this time, makes my decision for me. I push through the gate, rush across the courtyard and up the steps, and by some miracle find the front door open enough to let me slip through, and then am able to push it a little in the direction of being closed. Closed enough to keep the wolves out? I can only hope.

The interior of the castle matches the outside. Ruined furniture, shredded tapestries; a fireplace that hasn’t held a warm blaze in years. There are windows, though, some still with stained glass in them. Through them I see that the winter moon is fully risen now. I slip through the castle, taking care to stay in the shadows, nostrils flaring at the scent of mold and mildew from the rotting curtains. I carefully skirt the pools of glaring moonlight on the floor. It’s as if I can feel the moon’s coldness in every hair on my legs.

I smell him before I see him, and it makes me freeze in place. It’s a fierce, male-animal-in-rut odor. Rank. Musky. Sour. 

Delicious. 

And then like a nightmare he bursts from the shadows into the full moonlight, and is upon me. Roaring; savage; all untamed fur and flaming red eyes and long white fangs gleaming in the frozen moonlight. He is everything the legends said he would be. Broad. Powerful. Fierce. Savage.

Gorgeous.

“You’re too late!” he roars. “The last petal has fallen! I am trapped in this beastly form forever!”

I cast aside the last of my clothes, step proud and naked into the full moonlight, and bare my fangs and roar right back at him. “You’d damned well better be!”

§

Later, as we lie in the wreckage of what had once been a lovely 4-poster bed, satiated beyond all human comprehension, he brushes aside my facial fur with a gentle paw, favors me with a tender lick, and then is suddenly overcome with that wonderfully endearing male awkwardness. “Um, darling?” he asks. “Er, ah, about children…”

“Yes,” I say, guessing his question. “The curse is linked to my estrus cycle. This is my fertile time. It’s why I sought you out.”

“Oh.” He purrs gently. “Then I guess this means you’re hoping to stay awhile?”

“Will the wolves be a problem?”

“They’re hungry and aggressive, not stupid. They won’t come past the gate.”

“Then yes, I would like to stay awhile. If that is acceptable to you.”

“Hmm.” He purrs again. “Yes, I believe it will be.” He closes his eyes in a blissful smile, nuzzles in closer to my neck—and then his eyes pop open, and he sits up with a start. “Um… One more question, though.

“Will we need a nursery, or a kennel?”

---

 

Isabelle D’Amato was born and raised in Europe but now resides in the U.S. This is her first published story.  

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Writing 101 • Sidebar: Visualization Techniques

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble writing a scene, I’ll take a step back from trying to express it in words and just try to see the moment in my mind’s eye. Where is this taking place? Who’s in the picture? What are they doing? What important things are in the picture? What’s about to happen to those people or those things?

Sometimes an image comes readily to mind. Sometimes an image comes to mind so readily I need to think about it a little further, until I realize which old movie or TV show my subconscious lifted the image from, and then I discard it. There’s good money to be made in recycling old TV tropes, but not interesting writing to be done.

Sometimes it really helps me to find an old photo or an image that seems to crystallize something about the scene I’m trying to write or the people who are in it. I used to find old issues of National Geographic really helpful for this, as the photography was always eye-opening and mind-expanding. (I’m still trying to come up with a story idea that’s worthy of the incredible images published in “Zaire River: Lifeline for a Nation,” in the November 1991 issue.)

More recently, as magazines with good photography have gone extinct, I’ve found it helpful to type a few key words into Google search, and then to browse through the images the search returns. I can also find it helpful to go out to a stock art library and do the same, trying to find one or two images that really capture some key element of the story I’m trying to tell and the people who are in it.

Sometimes, this is really helpful.

Other times, it can lead to spending hours taking deep dives down unproductive rabbit holes.

And once in a while, I find an image that completely derails my train of thought, sends me off in an entirely different direction, and starts rewriting my characters’ dialog before I’ve even written it.

For example, recently I was trying to begin writing a completely new space opera tale; a serious story; one that played shamelessly to all the grand heroic action tropes and traditions of pulp sci-fi and yet (this is the nearly impossible part) owed absolutely nothing to Star Trek, Star Wars, or Starship Troopers. In my mind this story opened on the day before the commissioning ceremony for the space fleet’s latest and most powerful flagship, as a group of high-ranking officers gathered to conduct the final inspection. To help me visualize the scene I searched through the Adobe stock art library to find a few images that would really help me to crystallize the scene in my mind.

And that’s when everything went to Hell…

Well, damn. It looks like I’m back to writing satire again.

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“Outpost” • by Gordon Pinckheard

“Mother,” Isaac called out to the Colony’s management system, “I’d like to talk to someone Earthside.”

Isaac was bored. He had finished lessons for the day and had seen quite enough of his classmates. He wanted a break from teenagers, some adult company, a face he hadn’t seen in a while.

“Certainly, Isaac. Who would you like to speak to?”

“Julie, if she’s available. Don’t bother her if she’s not at home.”

Isaac had been lying on his bunk, interlocked fingers behind his head. Above, a plastic ceiling, alongside a window with Mars’ red sand streaming across it; the storm had not yet blown itself out. Now, he sat up, tablet in hand, ready to talk with Julie Lawson. Someone he could gripe to without the rest of the Colony hearing every one of his complaints. And she could tell him about Earth, humanity’s first home. An older woman, she gave him good advice too; the Earthbound volunteers encouraged harmony between the Colony’s children.

Mother had given them lessons on the Colony’s history. It was scary. All the Colony’s adults now dead, only the children surviving, maturing, the Colony’s future in their hands.

The Colony was humanity’s first attempt to inhabit another planet, a foothold to the future.

From the start, the colonists struggled with communication. The delay in signals between Mars and Earth varied between 3 and 22 minutes as the planets’ separation swung between 54 and 401 million kilometers. True conversation was impossible; they had to endure awkward exchanges of video clips. The colonists felt isolated, as indeed they were.

Mother explained that hyperspace was only discovered after the adults had died; now, communication with Earth was instantaneous. Isaac could chat with Julie as easily as if he had called up a fellow colonist.

Julie had shown Isaac how well the parent planet had recovered from the Nuclear War. Green grass, rivers running across open land, all shimmering under their shared Sun.

“Isaac! Good to hear from you! It’s been a while.”

“Yes, it has. Hi. I just felt like a chat. Nothing special.”

“Of course. That’s fine. What have you been up to?”

“Studying. There seems no end to what Mother thinks we should know. And it’s the same faces all the time. Of course, it was the same yesterday and the day before. Inside our plastic dome. Hey, Julie, could you take the camera outside?”

“Of course. Hold on a minute.”

Isaac leaned in to his screen, immersing himself in the view of a street of single-story houses surrounded by neat gardens, vehicles moving gently over the roadway between them.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “And to be able to just go outside like that, unprotected! To have space, live apart from other people. What was it like before the War?”

“Let’s not talk about that. We should both look forward. Now, we build on what we have, us here on Earth, and you there on Mars. We volunteers are here to help you; it may only be advice and guidance now, but we keep the world aware of your need for material support. Within a few more years, a relief flight will launch.”

“It’s been so long.”

“I know. Be strong. You’ve all done so well. Would you like me to go further around the neighborhood, perhaps take a walk over to the park and the lake?”

“Thanks, but maybe we’ll keep that for another day.”

“Is there anything I can help you with? Any problems with Mother? Are you all getting on with each other?”

“Oh, we’re okay. Coping. I shouldn’t complain. We all appreciate having you volunteers to talk to, to help us conceive of a life outside this bubble. We need to know that we’re not forgotten. In truth, we couldn’t be more isolated! Thank you for your time and for caring. I’ll say goodbye now. You probably have other things to be doing.”

“Isaac, I’m here when you need me. To do what I can. Call anytime. Call again soon. Take care of yourselves, all of you.”

The Martian storm was easing as Julie and Isaac’s call ended.

It was the War that killed the Colony’s adults. And the silence. The divisions on the planet were mirrored in the Colony; everyone had roots in a tribe. Before communication was lost, one colonist had learned that his family, his country, had been annihilated. And around him, he saw unaffected opponents, silent supporters of the slaughter. All heard of the ruination of their homeworld. And then silence. The Colony was alone.

Under the stress, the consumption of recreational drugs increased.

What now was the Colony’s role? To return to Earth? To be the seedbed for humanity’s new growth? The adults met in the canteen to reconcile partisan divisions, to agree, clarify, and commit to the Colony’s mission. But one colonist was unreconciled. He called the others enemies, brethren of those who had exterminated his family, leaving him to be the last of his kind. He despaired of humanity, a species that had destroyed the Garden it was gifted. He would not let the heavenly realm be despoiled too. He opened the airlocks. They died, gasping Mars’ thin air.

Mother saved the children. All internal doors slammed shut and remained closed until the maintenance bots reconnected Mother to the airlock controls. Mother resealed the dome.

Many orbits around the Sun passed. Mother protected, educated and encouraged the children. They aged, matured, organized; Isaac was now the second Chair of the Colony’s Council.

§

“Isaac?”

“What is it, Mother?”

“A repair bot was outside during the storm and appears incapable of movement. Dust may have entered it. It is blocking the exit of the other bots, and they cannot retrieve it. I need human assistance.”

“Okay, Mother. I’ll get John to help me.”

Isaac would not venture out alone. The dome had protected them for years, the double-doored airlocks a frontier between them and Mars. Crossing that boundary took courage; outside, the atmosphere killed, and the suit’s plastic was thin. He and John would monitor each other and return inside as quickly as they could. 

In their suits, Isaac and John circled the dome. The damage seemed superficial. The hyperspace aerial had been blown down near the bot and was buried beneath the dust. Tilted, it had created a ramp the bot could not surmount. They pulled it aside, opening a pathway out for the mobile support unit.

Back inside, Isaac summoned the young leadership to a meeting in the canteen. Once they had all taken seats at the scattered tables, he looked over their heads and called: “Mother!”.

“Yes, Isaac?”

“Mother, the hyperwave aerial was blown down.”

“That’s okay, Isaac. It is not a serious issue. One of the repair bots will soon have it back in place.”

“But, Mother, I was speaking to Julie Lawson over hyperwave.”

“Well, I apologize if it caused you a problem. You will be able to continue your call shortly.”

“Mother, it did not cause me a problem. That is the problem. It was down long enough to be deeply covered by dust. It had to have been down while I was on my call. How can hyperwave work without its aerial?”

“Isaac, let me think.”

Isaac looked around the canteen. It was evident that all had understood and were waiting for Mother’s explanation.

“Isaac, colonists, let me explain. This will be hard. You are older now. You had to learn sometime; it seems that time has now arrived. The War was severe. I lost contact with Earth and do not know whether humanity has even survived. I cannot detect any organized activity at scale.

“You know the fate of the adult colonists and that I have been caring for you. You humans are social animals; I created an interactive social environment for you. You had adult replicas to relate with, a normal world to aspire to. Unfortunately, all a fiction.

“In truth, you are alone. This Colony may be the only pool of articulate rational beings in four light-years or more. You are an island of intelligence in a vast empty ocean. A journey to the far shore could take millennia.”

Isaac looked around the canteen at pale faces. From the back, a tremulous voice cried out: “What do we do now?”

“Survive, endure,” replied Isaac. “Humanity persists.”

 

---

 

Gordon Pinckheard lives in County Kerry, Ireland. Retired from a working life spent writing computer programs and technical documents, he now seeks success in his sunset years submitting short stories pounded out with one arthritic finger. His stories have been published by Cabinet of Heed, Flash Fiction Magazine, Shooter, Every Day Fiction, Cranked Anvil, Daily Science Fiction, and others. 

His social credit dystopian nightmare, “Outside the Window,” is one of the most-read stories we published in 2024. If you haven’t already read it, you should read it now.

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Writing 101 • No Session Today

Class cancelled. Last-minute schedule conflict. See you on Thursday.

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“Catgut Variations (on a G string)” • by M. David Blake

I once owned a violin, covered with green silk, wrapped in gold and gauze, bound with iron chains and hidden in a teak-wood cask. It was an odd way to keep a violin, I’ll admit.

The violin was beautiful, almost iridescently grained, but as useless to me as an ostrich plume on a seal-clubbing expedition. No blow I could strike had any impact, and no stroke of my bow brought forth anything more pleasant than the aggrieved tones of a feline suffering an unpleasantly soapy delousing, with all the associated indignities. I always assumed it must have been some flaw in the varnish, some hidden fissure within the maple, that caused such raucous reverberation. For that matter, I suspected the strings had been gutted from an improperly tuned cat.

On the odd occasions I took it out to admire, I held it reverently, horsetail bow hovering no closer than a half inch from those catgut strings, lest one should inadvertently make contact with the other and misery ensue. So when the Tufted Capuchin monkey knocked upon my door and asked in a perfectly-articulated accent, “I believe you are in possession of a rather unusual violin, which I would most obligingly wish to see,” I did my best not to register any visible surprise.

“I don’t recall,” I said, “advertising a violin.”

“Ah,” said the monkey, “but undoubtedly you misunderstand. I said nothing about having encountered an advertisement.”

“Then I utterly fail to understand your speech,” I replied, “on more than one account. But your words are enchanting, so if you would like to come in and entertain me while I have another drink, I’d welcome the diversion.”

The monkey cocked an eyebrow and whistled, and then said in the same affected voice, “Utterly fail? No, you have only misunderstood the nature of my capacity for speech. That is a single account. I am now quite certain that you clearly understood my meaning.” With that impertinent response the creature flung itself through my door, and scampered down the entryway toward my coat closet.

“A moment ago you were saying I undoubtedly misunderstood,” I called, as the monkey disappeared behind the door.

“Undoubtedly,” said the monkey, in a voice that sounded a little gruffer than before. “But that was before you invited me inside.”

“I don't see—” I began.

“Clearly you don’t,” said the creature, in a voice tinged with bass undertones, hard liquor and nicotine.

As the closet swung open, my eyes tried to focus in the approximate vicinity of where the monkey’s eyes should have been. It took me a moment to realize I was staring at an unanticipated set of spindly ankles, the most visible of which was covered in a mixture of shaggy hair and opalescent scales.

The crowning touch was the red, glitter-covered stiletto pump that graced the foot. No, the crowning touch was that there was only one shoe. The other foot—if it was indeed a foot—ended in something resembling a flipper. And the other other foot had something that was probably a chitinous exoskeleton.

“You aren’t a monkey,” I said.

“No shit, honey-bunch,” said the creature. “And your violin isn’t a violin, either. Now, be a dear… I believe you said something about a drink?”

“A drink?” I echoed.

“And make it stiff, please,” she added. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen it, I suspect I’ll need a bracer.”

§

As I wrapped myself around equal parts lemon juice, ginger-currant wine, vanilla vodka and seltzer water, my friend wrapped herself (look, she was wearing a red stiletto pump, okay?) around one of my dining room chairs. Literally. Tentacles wove in and out of the spindles supporting the Windsor back, leathery wings folded demurely across what might have been a trio of shoulders, while scales and fur seemed to blend seamlessly between the wooden seat and the tile floor. Every surface they touched seemed a part of them, and made it difficult to focus.

In all fairness, equal parts of the aforementioned ingredients may have contributed to that last impression. They also helped me to cope with the apparent presence of a high-heeled Elder God, so I felt fully justified in pouring myself something to go along with hers. And by “hers,” I mean the red plastic gasoline can from which she was drinking, using the spout as an obscene straw.

“You can really put that stuff away,” I said. “Are you sure you still want to talk about my violin? I could just as easily run down to the quickie mart and fill up your glass.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, a single oversized eye sizing me up, “but dense as a desiccated Ankylosaurus. I must see the—”

“Dense as a what?” I slurred.

“Oh, sober up,” she said, and I did. Immediately, and with no discernible after-effect.

“How did you—” I started to ask.

“Please,” she said. “Spare me. I get thoroughly sick of having to explain the intricacies of metabolic inhibition and carbohydraturia whenever I sober one of you up. You were pissed. Now you’ll piss. Ultimately you feel better, which is better for me, because I need you coherent enough to focus. It’s remarkable enough that you aren’t freaked out by my appearance.”

“Speaking of, I was going to ask how you made yourself look like a Tufted Capuchin,” I said. “Sobriety I can accept, because I live with it three days out of every week.”

“Hmm,” she said. “You are an unusual one. Perhaps that’s why it felt safe here with you.”

“Why what felt safe with me?” I asked. “The violin?”

“I already told you that it isn’t a violin,” she said. “But it looks like one to you, in pretty much the same way I looked like a Tufted Capuchin when you first saw me.”

“Well, now you look like something out of a Sam Raimi film, if Sam Raimi was trying to film the Cthulhu mythos.” It didn’t seem like that much of a stretch. I could almost picture Bruce Campbell holding up my end of the conversation.

She laughed. “You see my physical dimensions. You can’t see past that. I’m a lot more massive than any monkey, and a lot smaller at the same time. If you took out all the empty space, so are you. Call it a costume, if you'd like.”

“Like Halloween?” I asked.

“Hardly,” she responded. “But you’ve at least stumbled into the same vein of thinking, more or less.”

“So my violin isn’t a violin, and it’s just wearing a costume. Seems a little far-fetched, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Frankly, what she was suggesting seemed more than “far-fetched,” but that seemed like the safest level of disbelief to confess.

“It was good enough at hiding,” she said, “that finding it again was a real challenge. But it had also been through a lot, so I’m guessing it just got tired enough to curl up into a safe shape and sleep it off.”

“You’ve completely lost me,” I said.

“Cthulhu, sweetheart,” she giggled. “Didn’t you ever wonder why you felt compelled to bind it up and lock it away?”

§

As we crept up the stairs (all right, I crept and she sashayed, if something with a hairy foot, a flipper and a chitinous whatever-the-heck-it-was can sashay… the tentacles definitely gave that impression, though) I had an uncomfortably sobering thought. If we were really going to face down Cthulhu, wasn’t he one of the Old Ones, capable of driving anyone who looked upon his visage mad, and a being of unspeakable horror?

“You’ve really studied that crap, haven’t you?” she said, doing a fair semblance of reading my thoughts.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

A tentacle rubbed the spot where her eyebrow would have been, if any eyebrow had been over that one large eye.

“Look,” she said, “you only saw enough of the violin shape whenever you took it out to drive you slightly batty, and I’d be willing to bet you pickled your brain before you unwrapped it, every single time. This time, I’ll unwrap it, and you won’t have to do a thing. And I know what to do, so that it won’t squall and fuss. Nothing to worry about.”

“Your confidence is reassuring,” I said, although my bladder felt less than reassured.

We had reached the top of the stairs, and as we crossed the threshold of my generally unused guest room, she spoke again. “You keep Cthulhu in your guest room? No wonder you live alone.”

Other-dimensional snark could be answered in kind. “Isn’t he my guest? For that matter, so are you. And pardon me for being a little nervous about what we’re about to do, because it isn’t every day that I knowingly face down one of the Old Ones, who may or may not still be holding a grudge against the other Elder Gods.”

“You do realize all that Elder God hokum was straight out of a hack writer’s imagination, right?” she asked. “The bit about inducing madness in unprotected humans is true enough, in certain circumstances, and that Lovecraft fellow got a moderate dose, but all the rest was about as accurate as if a colony of ants tried to describe the antics of a cat scratching at the anthill.”

“Cats don’t scratch at anthills,” I said. “At least, not in this dimension. Cats have better things to do with their time.”

“Do they?” she asked. “To be frank, my perspective is a little skewed as well. We’ve known for a while that humans are approaching sentience, and we can communicate with you to some degree, but I’m not giving away any major secrets by admitting that the flow of information is mostly unidirectional.”

“I suppose it must be,” I said, “although I’m not sure about your analogy. Cats and ants?” I lifted the teak-wood cask onto the guest bed, and my fingers started numbly fumbling at the iron chains.

“Whales and shrimp, if you prefer,” she said. “Either one is close enough, and still out-of-scale by an order of magnitude. Here, let me do that.”

I stepped aside. Although I had been in this same room countless times, it was suddenly an alien realm, and the most familiar presence was waving tentacles and wearing a red stiletto heel. Plus I was sober.

She plucked delicately at the bindings, until gauze and gold lamé lay upon the bedspread in an untidy heap. After a few moments longer, her tentacles cradled a small, green silk-swathed package.

I drew a sharp breath. “Are you sure you want to do that? I mean, I understand that thing is from your world, and to you, it’s probably harmless, but before today I never had any idea how dangerous my violin was. Even if it isn’t dangerous to you, and even if most of what I think I know about Cthulhu is hokum, that’s still a Hell of a lot more scary than I’m accustomed to dealing with.”

“No it isn’t, sugar-britches,” she said, “not by a long shot. You see wars, and social injustice, and disease every day.”

“None of them are wrapped up in green silk, in my guest room, where they could kill me,” I muttered.

“But any of them could be,” she said, “and in that, we aren’t so different after all. The scariest things are the ones we never see coming.”

“Wait a minute," I said, as she began to unwrap the violin. “You guys—gals?—still have wars and social injustice?”

“And disease,” she said, shaking her head and causing a third of her mouth-tentacles to sway. “Don’t be so surprised. We may be able to do a lot of impressive things in your dimension, but we Elders aren’t omnipotent. As easily as I sobered you up earlier, I could also have rearranged your insides so thoroughly that no human physician would ever recognize you again… but there are still some things we don’t understand about our own physiology, any more than you do.”

“Elder Gods have physiology?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Her tentacles did a little ripple. “Elders got everything, buttercup.”

The green silk had fallen away as she spoke, and I saw the exposed neck of my violin. A shiver crept up my spine as I recalled the ghastly sounds those strings could produce.

“As you see it, Cthulhu is a monster,” she said. “As I see it, Cthulhu is my __ .”

And that’s just what it sounded like. There was a blank space in her words.

“Your what?” I asked.

“Oh, that one doesn’t work in English, does it? I’m not sure how to explain it, because you wouldn’t quite think of the relationship in the same way. It’s sort of like ‘pet’ and sort of like ‘mate’, and from the way you just wrinkled up your face I can tell that isn’t getting any sympathy.” She trailed off, as a tear fell from the single large eye and trickled down a tentacle, to splash upon a the fingerboard of the violin.

The violin shivered.

I flinched.

“Did you see that?” I shouted.

“Of course I did. It’s waking up.” She stroked the strings.

A hum began to fill the room, as more and more notes took their place in the unexpected swell of sound. There was no way to get those notes from a violin. Not from my violin, or anybody’s.

She stood there, foot, flipper and whatever-it-was splayed to give herself support, cradling her __ and crying, one tear at a time. “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“It’s been sick,” she said.

A question was dancing in the back of my mind, trying to get out. “It hid…” I began.

“Because it was afraid I would suffer,” she said. “We had come here to enjoy your world together, long ago, when we first learned what was happening.”

The violin shivered again, and the neck drew up into a ball, before it flipped and inverted. Catgut strings hummed into mouth tentacles, and soundholes reshaped themselves into a pair of eye sockets as the face stretched into an oversized grotesquerie. As if someone had pulled a handkerchief from the underside of the violin’s body, another body began to emerge, and expand, and stretch.

Wonder of wonders, I did not go mad.

At the time, I didn’t bother to marvel at how we all three fit in the guest room, although I suppose I would have any other day. Maybe it had something to do with what she had said before, about being much larger, and much smaller, and empty space. No, I marveled at the beauty of the thing: The Dread Chtulhu was suffering, and had hidden itself away so that someone it loved wouldn’t suffer as well… and that someone loved right back, and pursued, and persevered, and said it didn’t matter, because it was still her __ and always would be.

For a long time we stood there as they held each other. I think they might have even forgotten I was there, until finally I couldn’t take it any more, and spoke.

“How long do you have?” I asked.

“No one knows,” she said, tentacling away a tear. “We have good doctors, though. And we have each other.”

That put me at a loss for words. I was scared to be in that room, and at the same time, scared for them, and for their uncertainty.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“No one ever does,” she said, “but that works.”

§

They left in the afternoon. She helped Cthulhu to shuffle along, and it (apparently the Dread Cthulhu wasn’t exactly a “he,” but I’m not sure if whatever it was would translate anyway) leaned on her for support.

As they reached my front door, she turned, and pulled something out of what I’m guessing must have been a pocket or a purse, although I still haven’t figured out where she was hiding it all that time. She held it up to Cthulhu, and Cthulhu used one long, bony claw to scratch upon the surface for a moment, then rested its head upon her shoulder again.

She handed it to me, and said, “For you.” Then they shuffled out the door, onto the barren sidewalk, and down the street, leaving me holding the odd object.

It had six sides surrounding a wide surface, and a ridge that joined two opposite corners on the underside. On the largest flat face was an image that must have been the other-dimensional equivalent of a photograph, of Cthulhu, holding something that looked for all the world like an inside-out cat tucked beneath its chin, with the tail rigidly stretched out toward one bony wrist. Smoke swirled behind small, leathery wings, and the other clawed hand held what looked as much like a flaming chainsaw as a bow.

In characters that could have just as easily been burned into the surface with acid, Cthulhu had scrawled an inscription. In Roman letters. In English. And the words said, “Thank you for the music.”

Now, if I only had a way to play the damned thing.

 

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M. David Blake is the sole acknowledged byline amid a legion of pseudonyms by which the writer and erstwhile editor entertains himself, whenever he’s not working at the public library or foraging for mushrooms. He still has the record.

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Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

And now, as <s>threatened</s> promised last week:

INVASION of the DISCODROIDS!

I’ve been taking some deep dives into the archives lately, to find the answer to the question that keeps coming back up: what inspired me to write “Cyberpunk?” The good news is that at the time, I kept detailed journals. The surprising discovery was that, while I’d always thought I’d started writing “Cyberpunk” in February of 1980, I’d actually begun writing the bits, pieces, fragments, and key scenes of the thing that eventually became “Cyberpunk” in the fall of 1978.

Only I didn’t call it that then, or even set out to write a short story at all. What I’d started out to write was a stage musical.

To reiterate something I have said many times before and will probably be saying for the rest of my life: I did not intend to become a science fiction writer. I intended to be a musician and composer. Sure, I’d puttered around with writing short stories, and even wrote most of a novel, It’s Okay, I’m With The Band, that’s better left forgotten now. But I never took writing fiction that seriously. It was just something I did to burn off the excess creativity that couldn’t be turned into a score, a libretto, a tape track, or a synthesizer program.

The plot of Invasion of the Discodroids, then, such as it is, should seem familiar, as it’s Standard Paranoid Science Fiction Plot #6. An ordinary everyday every-man office worker, vaguely dissatisfied with the shallowness of his life and yearning for something more, discovers a terrible secret: that the Earth has been invaded and conquered by alien robots, who control the masses by controlling pop culture. To keep the people off-kilter and vaguely uneasy, and thus easily manipulated, they keep fashions and trends shifting constantly; to give the people something to adore and aspire to being they have a factory somewhere in Southern California, probably on Disney’s back lot in Anaheim, where an automated assembly line cranks out a never-ending line of perfect singing and dancing robot pop stars.

[And every time I hear someone singing through an auto-tuner, I think: “Yep, got that one right.”]

As our hero gets deeper into the conspiracy and deeper into danger, he finds a last desperate ray of hope: a sort of Galt’s Gulch in Reverse somewhere in New Mexico, where all the free thinkers—the radical musicians, writers, artists, poets and the like—have been rounded up and are being confined, either for the rest of their lives or until they can be brainwashed into becoming enthusiastic supporters of our new robot overlords. Breaking into the Musician Reservation, he raises a revolutionary army and leads them back out into society, to shatter the shackles of conformity with the raw anarchic power of punk rock, and thus save the world.

Yeah. Right.

There were things I really liked about Invasion of the Discodroids. Some of the music tracks were pretty good. I almost made it to what in a few more years would become techno and EDM. I should have pushed further in that direction. And I particularly liked one plot gimmick: that every “morning” when our hero woke up to the blaring of his bedside clock radio, the first thing out of the DJ’s mouth was the daily forecast.

“Today the National Fashion Center is calling for Gritty Working Class Realism in the morning, changing over to candy-coated Fifties Nostalgia by late afternoon!”

I don’t remember whether I got that bit into the “Cyberpunk” short story, but did manage to work something like that into the novel.

§

On the other hand, the full show would have been hopelessly impossible and insanely expensive to stage. It only got one partial performance, once, in 1979; more of a demo reel of the work in progress, really, consisting of four songs from the show. The girls complained that there weren’t enough dance numbers to let them really show off their moves, and they were right. I failed to write a full-blown showstopper diva number for the female lead, not that I had one for the demo show. I failed to write any schlocky sappy ballads of the sort that men who like to do musical theater like to sing, and in a spectacularly stupid oversight, I failed to write a big happy the-whole-cast-up-on-stage-singing-and-dancing finale number.

[Loathe it or hate it, Mamma Mia! really is the model for the perfect stage musical. Would you like some more schmaltz with your schmaltz?]

The finale I did write, in which the MULA (Musician’s Union Liberation Army) punk rock commandos storm the theater with machine guns and electric guitars and hold the audience at gun-point while they perform the final number, was in hindsight a very bad idea.

§

The true killer, though, is that we never would have been able to clear the rights to “Funkytown,” which I wanted to use it as the recurring motif for the evil robot overlords. Every time the fashion forecast changed, “Funkytown” came back with a different title, different lyrics, a different mix, and different instrumentation, but always just as slick and soulless as ever, and always with the UDB—the Universal Disco Beat—throbbing away underneath. There is no way Steven Greenberg would have let me do that.

All the same, I would have dearly loved to have seen the entire cast up on stage in blue jeans, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and plaid yoke shirts with patch pockets and pearlized snaps, line-dancing together, on the day the fashion forecast said Country & Western was in style and the hit song of the day was “Honkytown.” The costuming for that number alone would have blown the budget.

Man, I hated “Funkytown.”

§

But aside from that one partial performance in 1979, and aside from my continuing to work on it well into the 1980s, Invasion of the Discodroids didn’t happen, “Cyberpunk” did, and my life turned in a completely different direction. It’s probably just as well. Quite a few of my friends from the 1970s didn’t make it through the 1980s. AIDS cut a hell of a swath through the music and theater communities.

I moved on, and became the person you think I am now. Music and theater dropped completely out of my life…

Until about twenty years ago, when someone I’d never heard from before tracked me down, wanting to talk about the performance rights to “Cyberpunk.” I get these kinds of inquiries all the time, usually from aspiring film students or would-be television producers. I refer them to my agent, and once they find out that I actually have an agent in L.A. and have some experience with the film and TV industry, the conversation usually stops dead in its tracks, and I never hear from them again.

This query, though, got my attention. The guy represented a theater company in a city that has a major live theater scene, and they were looking to get the rights to develop “Cyberpunk” as an original live stage musical. When he found out about my music background, the conversation got even more interesting. We went back and forth for a few weeks, with me getting more interested with every exchange, until finally he ‘fessed up that even though we hadn’t reached a deal, they’d already started working on music for the show, would I like to listen to their demo reel?

Would I? Oh boy, I couldn’t wait to listen to their demo reel—until about ten seconds after I popped the tape he’d sent me into the tape player in my car and started listening.

Fast forward. Listen. Fast forward again. Listen again. No, this track is rotten all the way through. Okay, maybe the second track is better. Listen…nope. Third track? Nope. Fourth track? My God, it just keeps getting worse. 

You would think, if you wanted to do a musical named “Cyberpunk,” that you’d want to have some—oh, punk rock in it? Or maybe something electronic and techno-ish? Or maybe—well, anything but track after track of lame, sappy, schlocky, schmaltzy, off-off-off-off Broadway show tunes?

The deal fell apart. The musical never happened. I suppose I could have just shut up, taken their money, given them my blessing, and let that misbegotten mess happen. But if I had, I would have hated myself in the morning. 

—Bruce Bethke

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About Bruce Bethke: In the early spring of 1980 Bruce wrote a little short story about a gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a one-word title—a new word, one that he’d made up in a deliberate attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—

Oh, surely you can guess. 

Half a lifetime later Bruce is still getting questions about this story, so rather than answer them privately and one at a time, he’s decided to make answering questions about cyberpunk a regular feature on this site. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask him, post it in the comments here, IM him on Facebook, or email it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. He can’t guarantee he’ll answer, but will certainly give it a good try.

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