Archive for the ‘Short Story’ Category

New Story Online: The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad (With Exciting Poster Illustration Action)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Who doesn’t love giant mon­sters ter­ror­iz­ing the land?  Who doesn’t love geeks who love giant mon­sters and crack­ing wise?  If you don’t, then you can skip this story.  If you do… read on.

This is prob­a­bly one of my most pop­u­lar sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries, and for what­ever rea­son, I’ve never got around to get­ting it put online.  With the spare time I have lately to work on my skillset, I decided to do a fun poster illus­tra­tion for the story and a hope­fully easy-​​to-​​read layout.

The story orig­i­nally appeared in the May 2005 issue of Interzone, edited by Andy Cox.   It’s my first print mag­a­zine sale.

So with­out fur­ther blath­er­ing, here’s the story and the illustration:

The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad by Jeremiah Tolbert.

Fantasy Magazine: The Men Burned All The Boats by Patricia Russo

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I haven’t been read­ing much short fic­tion lately, but I am sub­scribed to the Fantasy Magazine feed.  I saw the open­ing of this story and the words drew me in.  I had to read it, even so early.

The men burned all the boats, so it is impos­si­ble to leave the island now. Everyone cheered when the pyres were lit. The danc­ing went on for three days, as if for a wed­ding. The men chanted, We are fear­less! Let our ene­mies attack us now. We will slaugh­ter them, and take their boats as war prizes. And if the sea folk come against us, we will crush them, too. Our magic is so strong we will pur­sue those cold ones under the waves, torches blaz­ing. We will burn out their black eyes, tear their sil­ver flesh to strips, and lick up their pale blood. We are mighty. We are invincible.

via Fantasy Magazine » The Men Burned All The Boats.

Patricia Russo is another Fortean Bureau alum.  It makes me so happy to see a new story by her, and one that is so great.  I highly rec­om­mend you give it a read.

First Story of 2009: Engines of Survival, by Larissa Kelly

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

At least, the first one I have read.  My goal is to read at least one a week now that I am writ­ing again.  My think­ing is

Strange Horizons Fiction: Engines of Survival, by Larissa Kelly.

It’s always the lit­tle things in the future that are the hard­est to adjust to. You’ll be walk­ing in the park after mak­ing your deliv­ery, tak­ing amused note of the robot nan­nies and the teenagers rac­ing in their jet har­nesses, soak­ing in the expected nov­elty of the scene. And then all at once, you real­ize that the young man on the path ahead isn’t walk­ing a small dog, as you had orig­i­nally thought, but a raccoon.

Cryptic cap­sule review: like an acci­den­tal brush of an attrac­tive stranger’s hand across your own in a crowded space.

Speaking of short fic­tion, I miss Nick Mamatas over at Clarkesworld.  Damn you Viz!

Cat Rambo’s “Events at Fort Plentitude”

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Weird Tales Jan/​Feb 2008 Issue

I haven’t fin­ished the issue by any means (I read ridicu­lously lit­tle right now.  It’s a com­bi­na­tion of the impend­ing move and hav­ing too much work to do), but I wanted to rec­om­mend this story, “Events at Fort Plenitude.”  The only com­plaint I have about it was that it wasn’t novella length.  The set­ting is a weird American West, includ­ing native tribes and harsh, starv­ing win­ters.  It has buf­falo! But also demons in the magic, and roy­alty in the polit­i­cal struc­ture.  It hints at some larger place, one that I would very much like to revisit.  Call me a coun­try rube, but I am a sucker for fan­tasy obvi­ously set in the Midwest. Also for sto­ries told in the diary for­mat.  Cat’s a fine writer, and I doubt this is any­where near her best story, just because of how good she writes, but I enjoyed it for the above rea­sons.  If you like those sorts of things, then you should read it too.

Recommended Reading: The Wreck of the Grampus by Jeremy Adam Smith

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Lone Star Stories — The Wreck of the Grampus by Jeremy Adam Smith

“Do you under­stand the story, you machine? If there is an intrin­sic design to the uni­verse, human­ity has not been able to find it. We must make our own, and so are most fully human when in sit­u­a­tions that are wholly artificial.”

Picking some­thing from this story to quote was not easy. This is one of the best, if not the best sci­ence fic­tion story I have read this year. It has senswunda note after senswunda note–a ver­i­ta­ble senswunda orches­tra. It has robots and deep philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions and giant under­sea crea­tures. Believable human char­ac­ters, deeply human in their ways, and some deeply strange. This is a future that does not leave me cold like many post-​​singularity sto­ries do, which are so com­mon these days. In those sto­ries, you can almost feel the sil­i­con wrapped around you. Not here. There’s so much I want to say, so many sur­pris­ing bits, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

I think it’s absolutely fan­tas­tic, and the author, Jeremy Adam Smith, and Eric Marin, the edi­tor and pub­lisher, should have as many kudos I can throw at them. This is damned good sci­ence fic­tion. Read it. Let me know what you think. Let the edi­tor and author know.

My only prob­lem is, the author’s name is Jeremy. I can’t stand that name!

“Where We Live” by Daniel J. Pinney

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Strange Horizons Fiction: Where We Live, by Daniel J. Pinney

Grim, grim, grim–as I’ve come to expect from Strange Horizons lately. A future with­out hope, and yet, the char­ac­ters them­selves con­tinue to exist. This story is full of telling details. I didn’t have to read the author’s bio to know that he had lived in the Middle East. Every descrip­tive line speaks with authority.

The character’s life unfolds slowly, in a non­lin­ear fash­ion, mov­ing back and forth through time. The pro­tag­o­nist moves through life, ever for­ward, never hes­i­tat­ing, never despair­ing, despite the appar­ent end of the world around him.

The ending–I have to men­tion the ending–fucking per­fect. Absolutely god damned per­fect. The scene before it, even more so. I don’t want to spoil it for any­one who might read it, and if you read this, go read it.

It builds slow, sets the stage, fleshes it out, piece at a time. It’s hor­rific, and beau­ti­ful. And hope­ful. Did I say that?

More, more of this, please. Daniel J. Pinney is going on my “to watch” list, you can bet on that.

“We Love Deena” by Alice Sola Kim

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Strange Horizons Fiction: We Love Deena, by Alice Sola Kim, illus­tra­tion by Hellen JoIt’s the clas­sic tale of love lost, obses­sive love. Girl meet edgy girl, who kills peo­ple pro­fes­sion­ally for the gov­ern­ment. Girl loses edgy girl. Girl pos­sesses half the other women on the planet attempt­ing to seduce edgy girl once more. Haven’t we read this one a mil­lion times before?

Well, no, actu­ally. This is actu­ally pretty good. The pro­tag­o­nist is believ­able, even sym­pa­thetic in her stalker ways. The story moves along at a very nice clip, and it ends in the only way it could. I’ve never heard of Alice Sola Kim before, but I will be look­ing for­ward to more.

Still have that death obses­sion going a lit­tle, Strange Horizons. This story was perky, but still kinda dark and twisted like every­thing else lately.

Art Is About the Lonliness of Sentience, Especially SF

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

f you haven’t read it already, I rec­om­mend you go check out Jetse de Vries’ story in Clarkeworld today, “Qubit Conflicts.” I am kind of spoil­ing part of it here in this post, so if you are against that kind of thing, go read the story and then come back here.Interesting, wasn’t it? I like the uncon­ven­tional sto­ries, that take risks with not hav­ing con­ven­tional char­ac­ters and sto­ry­lines. I can’t write them, but I love read­ing them. Anyway, the end­ing of this story, I think, could be read as an inter­est­ing response to some of the ideas of Mundane SF. And it gets to some­thing that I am only just now pick­ing up on, which is maybe what pur­pose art serves and why we cre­ate art at all.

The end of the story has this super intel­li­gent sin­gu­lar­ity AI remark­ing on how maybe it was a mis­take to set a think­ing pace so fast (Planck speed), and ulti­mately how lonely it is, wait­ing for aliens to con­tact it. And it got me think­ing about some­thing I read recently, a quote of the late great Kurt Vonnegut, about how every being needs to be reminded that they are not alone, that there are oth­ers like them out there.

I think there’s some­thing inher­ent about the nature of our sen­tience that brings along a cer­tain lone­li­ness. I can’t quite put my fin­ger on why being able to think and being self-​​aware means that we pine for the minds of oth­ers, to know them, but we do. Maybe it’s a side effect of being the evo­lu­tion­ary end prod­uct of a social species. Maybe a sen­tient soli­tary preda­tor wouldn’t have this prob­lem, and it’s only a pecu­liar side effect of our own sen­tience. But any sen­tient cre­ations of ours will have this prob­lem, as Jetse seems to con­vey. I think I agree with that. Their intel­li­gence, while arti­fi­cial, will be mod­eled after ours. And we def­i­nitely seem to be lonely, every one of us, and I think we cre­ate and con­sume art because it soothes that fear that we’re alone. We get to, through a com­plex invented sys­tem thou­sands of years in the mak­ing, enter the mind of another being. No mat­ter what the nar­ra­tive is, there is that, in the back­ground, that comfort.

And SF takes that them and makes it explicit in tales of the extrater­res­trial. Fantasy does the same thing. Honestly, I don’t find SF/​F that com­pletely rules out the idea of the Other Mind very sat­is­fy­ing. It can be com­pelling and enter­tain­ing, but aliens and elves and all of it, they are a salve that we have invented to soothe a pain of which we’re barely aware.

Oh no. What if our species is the Emo Kid of the Galactic Lunchroom?