Oh this one is just stupid… I was working on something good, but it’s turning into a full length story. So here’s something daft.

.

THE MESSNGER

The alien thing – white and oblong like a small refrigerator – was still smouldering and popping as Brad slid down the loose soil into the great gouge it had cut into the earth. Suddenly isolated Brad felt his drunken bravado slither away.

He looked up to where the crowd had gathered on the crater’s lip. For a moment Brad considered scrambling back up the soft slope but the pressure of the crowd’s expectation kept him pressed into this hole in the earth.

He turned back to the alien thing.

“Hi!” Brad said, softly, acutely aware of all the eyes looking down at him. “I come in peace?”

 Suddenly the thing chittered and throbbed. Rob yelped and leapt backwards, stumbling, and sprawling into the warm dirt.

Dozens of whip-like tendrils morphed out of the alien thing’s body, seemed to sniff the air, then flicked in his direction.

Brad screamed.

Somebody up above laughed, but he could hear the rest of them gasp and feel them stepping back, leaving him alone.

The alien thing shivered and, silently, a seam split down one face. Fierce white light ripped the night. Brad raised a hand, blinded.

“Congratulations dear friend!” The voice crackled. “You have been chosen as the most fortuate, winner of a very grand prize in the Antarean lottery. To claim your uncountable winnings simply place thirty kilograms of – ”

Thud! Crack!                              

Brad started kicking the alien thing. From above, on the lip of the crater, the growling crowd surged forward as one.

“I don’t want to go in the cart,” cries the body, “I think I might go for a walk.”
It appears we can relax. Ridley Scott was wrong. Paul Howlett in today’s Guardian says science fiction cinemay still has a future. Hurrah!

 Thank fuck for this. Stephen Pinker is a wise, wise, wanker.

 This, though, seems incredible. A two second improvement in reaction time seems too good to be true - surely, even at my advanced age, my reaction time in twitch games is less than two seconds?

And thank god for the good folk at Kudos who, with Spooks and Life on Mars, are making the most stylish genre drama on TV (Spooks is sf, damn it, you know it is) - whose new production sounds as though it could either be a total mess or a really interesting take on a cross-time drama. I have no clue how this might work - each episode will apparently be set in a different time period - but given the producer’s track record I’m really keen to see what they do.

Focus went to press last week, I hope the mailing should be hitting people’s mats in the next couple of weeks as I think we have a full run of magazines ripped and raring to go.

This issue of Focus includes:

Can a holiday romance last forever
Okay, this is just my editorial, but I had an interesting writing experience by the seaside and I thought I’d share it. I might post this here later.

The further into the zone the nearer to heaven – by Nina Allan
This is intended to be the first in the “Welcome to Poughkeepsie” series – where we ask writers to talk about the things that inspired them to write. Nina Allan (whose superb new collection of short stories I intend to plug here at every given opportunity – go here to buy it now) talks about some of the books that made her a speculative fiction writer.

Tomorrow’s soldier: The Future of War – Anthony G Williams
Again part of what I hope will be an ongoing feature – Research Corner – where we ask experts to speculate about the foreseeable future of their special area of knowledge.

Masterclass no.2: Inspiration/Observation – Christopher Priest
Christopher Priest continues his masterclass series with some great advice about turning ideas into stories. I know I’m the editor of the magazine and everything, but what I like most about this series so far is how much it makes me laugh while I feel like I’m learning things.

How do I stand out on the slushpile – Jetse de Vries
Advice from the man himself. The great lord of the Interzone slushpile tells you how to get his attention.

Basic Bootstrap Branding – Paul Raven
Why getting noticed online requires more than a Facebook page.

Do I need an agent?
Advice about how to approach agents, plus a list of those UK agents who encourage submissions from genre authors.

Weighing the writing – Dev Agarwal
Exploring the challenges of starting the second draft.

Poetry – Gareth L Powell
A selection of poems from the Gareth L Powell – I was going to stop publishing poetry in Focus, but “Ragnarok” convinced me to let it stay.

Ridley Scott is an accomplished film-maker – a man who has managed to transfer a practically obsessive desire for visual verisimilitude and a god-complex into commercially stellar and critically respected career. In terms of his films the brilliant claustrophobia of Alien, the enduring beauty of Blade Runner and the fantastic scale of Gladiator all stand out as movies anyone would be proud to have on their CV. Add to that Thelma and Louise and the most convincing portrayal of modern warfare yet to grace celluloid in Black Hawk Down (while not ignoring the problematic elements of that film) and it’s a history that can encompass the occasional stumble (Black Rain, Kingdom of Heaven, A Good Year) without losing any of its gloss.

What do we make of it, then, when the man responsible for two of the greatest genre films of all time argues that sf as a film genre is so tired and unoriginal that it may be going the way of the Western in today’s The Times.

Read more »

Ahem!

It’s hard to know who reads this and how much attention they pay. My ISP says I’m getting over 200 unique visitors a day from actual web browsers (as opposed to robots who account for about the same number of hits again) - more when I actually post something! Is that good/bad/indifferent? I have no idea. But it’s far more than I imagined so, since I haven’t told my mum I’m doing this, there must be quite a few real people passing through.

And I realised I hadn’t done a proper round up on here of my fellow Friday flashers, so that any of my “loyal readers” (heh!) who aren’t au fait with the excellent work being done elsewhere can check it out.

First up: Paul Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board who, this week brings us Diplomacy. Proving that when it comes to just talking to each other men are from Mars err… no… Earth and aliens are from, well, somewhere else, obviously.

Then, there’s Shaun C Green, whoss title Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey nearly says it all - although of course it doesn’t otherwise there’d be no point in reading the story.

We shuffle next to the Gareth L Powell’s neatly told, and powerful, Snowball. Gareth started all this so if you don’t like it you can blame him.

From there we skip lightly to the home of Gareth D Jones who offers you this apocalyptic take on a familiar story in The Last Adam.

Finally, but by no means least, Neil Benyon gets all apocalyptic on your arse too with a chatroom conversation that takes a nasty twist in SCL69. If I can manage to say this without sounding patronising, Neil’s making some great progress each week, his stories keep getting better and better.

So there you go, a full round up of the other known Friday flashers (perhaps I should rethink that sobriquet) - go, read my multitudinous minions, and enjoy.

Next week, I promise, magazine deadlines all met, this blog will feature some real content.

Eskragh

We buried Calum’s da today. We put him in the same patch of ground that we’d pretended to put Calum in. Eighteen months. I never thought the old man would last so long.

#

I remember the funeral. The other one. It rained hard, there was no wind and the water fell in heavy sheets across the graveyard. That place is on a hill and normally you can see for miles – from Lough Neagh in the east to the Sperrins in the west. That day, you couldn’t see as far as the grey stone wall that penned-in the dead.

The ground around the grave sucked at our feet and the wooden boards beneath our soles were swollen and soft, like decaying flesh.

Not that there was any of that in the coffin we were putting in the ground.

Calum’s dad turned to me after he threw a heavy clod of mud onto the empty box. He grabbed my arm, his fingers hard as bone and cold as death, and he fixed me with sunken grey eyes.

“No man should live longer than his children,” he said. I’d been Calum’s friend for twelve years and that was maybe the first time he ever spoke directly to me. He only spoke to me once more.

#

This is how we lost Calum.

The sky was the sharpest, fiercest blue with a single skiff of white cloud scraping the edge of space high above us. We were at Eskragh Lough, six of us. We’d dumped our bikes in the long grass that grew right to the edge of the lough, tossed our clothes behind us and dived into the water.

Eskragh’s not a big lough, but it’s deep and the water was still icy.

We roared at the shock of it and made for the big wooden raft that was tethered near the middle of the lough.

And then we lay, for an hour or two or more.

Sometimes we talked. Bullshit about girls or football or the Brits or music.

Sometimes we swam.

Sometimes we just lay and let our fingers and toes trail in the water.

Then, at some invisible signal like a flock of birds suddenly rising, we were up and off and swimming back towards the shore and our bikes.

But only five bikes were picked up.

We called and shouted. I swam back out to the raft. We swam deep into the lough.

We looked and looked. And then we went for help. And they looked and looked.

Eskragh isn’t big, but it is deep.

They never found Calum.

#

I was walking past Fallon’s, it’s an old man’s pub full of serious drinkers – men whose faces burn red with the tracery of veins spreading from their nose. The sacred heart lamps.

Calum’s da came stumbling out, hard drunk on a Thursday afternoon. I was walking home from school, still in my uniform, and almost walked into him.

He looked at me. Did he recognise me? I don’t know.

I opened my mouth to say something but found I didn’t have any words.

“Eskragh took my son,” he said. “It won’t give him back.”

#

It’s dark. Eskragh is black and slick and smooth and it laps stickily at my feet, spreading a sickly chill up my body.

I take off my shirt and stand naked and shivering before the lough.

I take a breath and then I wade in fast, knowing that I must move quickly before the cold takes away my will. Another breath, almost a gasp as the water grips my chest, and then I dive in.

Down.

Already my lungs are aching.

Down.

Eskragh isn’t a big lake, but it’s deep.

(for Connor)

Hitting and running. Unbelievably busy at the moment, finishing off the new Focus and putting to bed the magazine at work.

Afraid this is an oldie and not really a goldie.

Promise more effort next week, off to read my daughter her bedtime story.

Too late, spaceman

“Five…”

The astronaut scanned the console. All green. Good to go.

“…four…”

Far away engines roared, his helmet muffled the noises but vibrations still rattled his teeth.

“…three…”

He thought of the crowd, miles away, cheering. He imagined his parents and his wife and child. He smiled.

“…two…”

He would be a hero. The first man on Mars. Three years in space. His boy would be almost full grown when he returned. Three years without his wife. Three years and his father, already sick, might be dead.

“…one…”

Was it really worth it?

“Wait!”

“…blast off.”

Helix – Eric Brown

This is a likeable book without being particularly good.

The story has a colony ship (humanity’s last hope following environmental disaster on Earth) crash landing on a vast big-dumb-object, the titular helix of worlds, strung around a star. The small crew must set out to find a spot where the surviving colonists - still hibernatign - can thrive. On their journey they meet aliens both violent and benign across a variety of wild and unfamiliar environments. There’s something slightly old-fashioned about this set-up. One could almost imagine the basic outline being used for one of those Irwin Allenesque sci-fi shows (like The Time Tunnel or Lost in Space or, more recently, Quantum Leap or Sliders) where our heroes encounter a new planet every week which must be explored and overcome before, like The Littlest Hobo or Bill Bixby in The Hulk, they must move on in their apparently endless quest (which actually ends ingnominously about half way throught the third season when the studio pulls the plug and we never find out what happens) to the sound of a poignant piano theme. Interspersed with this is the story of Ehrin Tesla an airship designer of an alien species whose world is ruled by a rigid and cruel theocracy. Read more »

Time for a quick catch-up on some of the things I’ve been reading recently.

Brasyl – Ian McDonald

This is a book that, for me, ended up being more than the sum of its parts.

There was quite a lot here that I found disappointing, at first, but as McDonald interleaves the three different plot threads across three different worlds/times I found myself being drawn by the story and worrying less about the niggles.

Let me start by setting out the causes of my disappointment.

Once, not too long ago, I had an idea for an epic story set in Brazil that would spiral out from a favela through wealthy Rio and into the jungle. As a result I did quite a bit of research on Brazil, from the football through capoeira to religion, music, dancing and then the mythologies of the jungle. Of course being (i) a lazy bastard and (ii) a mentally constipated idiot, I never got beyond the planning stage of my epic. But I did have the background research, notes, a plot outline all in place. I knew my subject pretty well.

So, where McDonald’s last novel River of Gods took me to a nation I really knew very little about and amazed me with the wildness of it all, there was a sense when reading Brasyl that I could feel McDonald going over the same areas that I’d covered and not, necessarily, showing me anything I hadn’t have uncovered myself - I literally groaned when the “fateful final” entered the story as a plot point. Read more »

Here we go. GLP reckons 80,000 words in a year’s time at this rate amongst those of us contributing to this little “project”. If we manage that, I say we pick the best of what we’ve done and indulge in a dose of vanity publishing…

Anyway, there’s lots of stuff I want to talk about it, but I don’t have time because of work (look, it’s nearly 3:00am and I’m only just finished) especially the debate about short fiction publishing. Maybe at the weekend.

Here’s the story. Another brand new one.

Dust to dust

I’ve got two old shirts wrapped around my mouth and nose but, even so, I can still feel the dust coating my teeth, prickling on my tongue, and the thought of breathing it in, of swallowing it, is making me feel sick, The world is gyrating insanely, like a child’s spinning top just before it tumbles over. I close my eyes but it only makes things worse. My gut churns and the little food that I had for breakfast leaps into my throat.

I fight back the urge to puke, swallowing hard, afraid that it will only mean gulping in more of the fucking dust. Forcing down the razor-sharp bile that’s slicing at my throat brings tears to my eyes.

I drop to one knee, causing another cloud of the dust to rise up around me, and cradle my head in my hands, praying for the nausea to end.

I feel a touch on my shoulder and look up into Areus’s solemn gaze. He is wearing his heavy rebreather mask, the one everyone covets but no one dares to touch. There’s something insectile about the way he looks with that mask on. It makes him even more intimidating.

“Are you okay?” He asks, his voice muffled by the rebreather.

I shake my head. “You?”

Areus stands up straight, looking out at the plain of dust that stretches to the horizon in every direction, broken only by scattered fragments of shattered buildings. He draws back his shoulders and raises his head against the slight flick of wind. He’s imperious. I can see why some of the younger ones practically worship him. With his long dark hair and heavily muscled torso, he has the look of a demi-god.

Then he swoops and kneels beside me, leaning close and never once breaking eye-contact. There’s something in the way he looks at me that is chilling. I have been assessed and I have failed to meet his standards.

“It’s only dust,” he says. “Get back to work.”