we shall make monsters . . . audio version

A few years ago – quite a few years ago – I wrote a sort-of steampunk, sort-of tongue-in-cheek horror SF piece poking fun at the then newish trend of manufactured “boybands”. You know the sort, the four or five-piece set of healthy-looking young men with a gleam in their eyes and a polished smile beneath carefully styled hair. They’d dance, sing – sometimes well, sometimes well enough – and be pretty much indistinguishable from all the other boybands that did exactly the same thing. You’d even confuse the names of the bands and be unsure which of them was singing which song.

As far as I could work out, these bands seemed to have been born out of the manufactured hits of the late 80s, those awful sound-alike songs of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. I pretty much stopped listening to Top 40 radio when these songs dominated the airwaves, and back then Top 40 radio was pretty much all there was when it came to music on UK radio stations. (Remember, kids, this was before the internet and almost unlimited choice through streaming services. We had an AM and an FM dial, and if we didn’t mind excessive crackle, we could find some foreign longwave station looping in and out of tune depending on the atmospherics in the evening.) But those SAW songs were everywhere, and you couldn’t avoid them. If they weren’t on the radio, they were on the TV; if they weren’t on the TV, they were in the clothes store or on the speakers of the supermarket.

I got to thinking that it was all a bit Frankensteinian, and remembered – or misremembered, I’m not entirely sure – a line from Frankenstein: “We shall make monsters.” It seemed a neat little phrase that tied into the idea of the most popular records in the charts being referred to as “monster hits”. When such ideas hit you, you don’t have much choice. Go forth and apply pen.

So I did, and for a laugh called the boy band “Stepfor’d”, a contraction of Step Forward and a nod to Ira Levin’s satire on male insecurity The Stepford Wives. I think at that point, I had stopped caring that I was riffing on the back of one of the most celebrated books in history with Frankenstein, so was happy to nod at a modern classic. What was I thinking? The answer is I probably wasn’t. I was having fun. With that in mind, I’m sure that it is entirely coincidental that the first-person narrator of the tale has the initials S.A.W. 

Anyway, the tale was picked up for publication by Mad Scientist Journal and is available to buy in the Spring 2014 edition for ebooks.

If, however, you would like to listen to the tale, then the lovely people at Sage and Savant have produced an audio edition, in two parts, that can be accessed free via their site and/or which you can download from iTunes. You can either listen online or download the piece to keep. Sage and Savant is a great little site, with a cast production of an ongoing series podcast that, at the time I write, is up to episode 203. If fun SF with a steampunk bent is your thing, then this is the place to be. As well as the series podcast, S&S also has a set of short stories you can listen to by, amongst others, Harry Turtledove, Allana McFall, Greg Bear, and Alan Dean Foster. You can't do much better than that.

Composer and Sage and Savant cast member Chip Michael was generous enough to apply his talents to my tale. Thanks, Chip! If you’d like to, you can listen to Chip’s reading of my story here.

prof fox

Somewhat appropriately, given the UK Tory government's attempts to effectively repeal the ban on hunting foxes with dogs - hashtag bloodsports, folks - I have a new story out . . . and it concerns foxes. Sort of. It's a piece called "Prof Fox" and it is available to read in the Australian anthology Roar 6, edited by Mary E Lowd, and published by Bad Dog Books. 

Here're the opening paragraphs, kindly reproduced with Mary's permission.

“The fox went out on a chilly night,

he prayed for the moon to give him light.”

Trad. folk song.

When people saw the “Prof” on Danny Foxx’s business card, they nearly always leaped to an assumption he did nothing to discourage and thought it was an abbreviation of “Professor”.

Clothes made the man, and his tweed suit played to people’s assumptions, reinforcing what they thought they already knew. As they fastened on the inscribed “Prof” Danny would study their expressions. They’d be thinking: here stood some horrible bore they needed to extract themselves from – and quickly, before he indulged himself in the finer points of one of his inscrutable Big Thought papers. Some way to spend a party that would be, they’d worry.

“Prof” – short for “Professor.” Well, what else could it be?

If you want to continue reading this one, you can order a copy here.

Here's the cover.

  

mad scientist journal, spring 2014 ebook

Anyone who's been reading this blog -- which I reckon amounts to two guys in the Australian Outback and a mule somewhere in the deep forests of Montana -- might remember I had a short story called "We Shall Make Monsters" up on the Mad Scientist Journal site earlier this year. You can still read that tale, completely free of charge, by clicking here.

But if you'd rather read the piece on your trusty e-reader, along with the other tales that appeared in spring of this year, then you can buy for very little money a copy from Smashwords here. Or by going to Amazon.co.uk here. In a few weeks' time, the tale should blow through onto the Kobo store. I'll put in a direct link when it's appropriate.

Jeremy Zimmerman and Dawn Vogel have done the editing and compiling. Big cheer for them and raise your glass in their honour.

a considerate invasion

It’s my very real pleasure to say that I have a short story in the latest issue of Bastion SF Magazine. Bastion’s a new player in SF, and my piece just missed out on appearing in the inaugural edition. Hopefully that means I bypassed any bugs and traumas involved in the production of the first issue, and led to the smooth passage through editing and rewriting that my tale underwent. It’s always good to get feedback from editors who want to improve a tale, and work with you to improve it. That’s what happened here.

Anyway, it’s a piece called “A Considerate Invasion,” and I rather like it. I don’t really do “blast em up” SF – though I’ve no real objection to the form and don’t rule out having a go at some point – so this is a quiet and hopefully thoughtful piece. Here’s how it begins.

Even though he’d seen plenty of pictures of them before, what surprised Ashton Clarke the most about the Mernons’ flyer was that it looked exactly like a 1950’s UFO. Almost everyone his age knew the type, with the bulge of the dome on top and a few ports studded equidistantly around it for windows. A sharp rim that made up the saucer effect traced the circumference, coming to a leading point at the front like a dolphin’s nose, and there were a couple of stylish fins around the back of the craft, where hazy vents of radiation blurred the air.

As it descended through the train of white clouds spotting the otherwise clear sky and came down towards him, Ashton realised it was even glitzed out in the bright and gaudy colours from that decade of atom bombs and creature-feature movies.

Fiery reds, cerulean blues, and daffodil yellows shone from the craft in the sunlight. Ashton rather disdainfully thought it looked like a drag-car enthusiast had painted it.

He spat on the ground and waited.

There’s a sample from the magazine: “The Endless Flickering Night” by Gary Emmet Chandler, which you can find on the current issue page too, to whet your appetite.

You can get the magazine in ePub and Mobi formats for the ereader of your choice. Or as a PDF for reading on a tablet or computer. Details here.

in the white of the snow

Here’s a short story, available to read for free on the Daily Science Fiction website. It’s actually a fantasy piece, rather than a science fiction piece, but free thinkers that the editors Jonathan and Michele are, they’ve been nice enough to publish it on their site.

Daily Science Fiction publishes a story every weekday, with a big email subscribers list, ensuring that anyone who’s signed up – for free, too, they’re not charging you  - gets a new short story, usually short enough to read in five or ten minutes, delivered into his inbox Monday to Friday. Can’t say fairer than that. Free subscription sign up here. Writers can find submissions guidelines and payment rates here.  

IN THE WHITE OF THE SNOW by Mark Patrick Lynch

In the white of the snow, dusk-stained and bordering on invisible, the footprints were increasingly harder to follow. The curled moon was of little use to see by. It turned the land grey. Clouds would soon make everything dark. We’d have to use our electric torches then, and that could ruin it all.

“We’re too slow. We’re not going to make it.” Prentice halted, bringing me to a stop also. He paused to reclaim his breath. “Once we’re in the wood it’ll be like midnight. We’ll never find her.”

Continue reading by clicking here.

Or you can go through the Free Fiction section to get to it.