Fiction, Poetry, and Games by Stewart C Baker
As the post title suggests, the deadline for voting in the Quantum Shorts competition is coming up.
Voting is open until “the end of January,” which I’m guessing translates to the middle of the day January 31st in most places (the contest organizers are Singapore-based).
My story “How to Configure Your Quantum Disambiguator” is on the short-list, along with a lot of other great stories. Go give them a read and vote for your favourite!
It’s Monday again! So here’s another entry in the Last Words series.
I’m still in a science fictional mood, so back to space we go! But not quite as far into space as with last week’s “Reported Final Words of God-Empress Min-Jo.” This week, we’ll turn away from space opera for another trope: that of the generation ship.
Don’t trust the captain’s——
Aren’t generation ships fun?
Oh. Wait. *reads the story he just wrote*
Aren’t generation ships dangerous?
This is actually my second foray into writing about them, the first being a full-length story that was one of my earliest published at something like pro rates. If you have a bit longer to spare, you can listen to that one, “Behind the First Years,” for free at StarShipSofa. (And apparently you can’t read it for free anywhere any more, because COSMOS has taken all their old fiction down. Huh. Will have to submit it somewhere. You can buy a shiny hardcover anthology which features it though, if you like.)
As I’ve probably already mentioned a few times, my story “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” is on the short-list for the Quantum Shorts flash fiction competition.
The “people’s choice” voting for the contest has been extended to the end of the month, so if you haven’t checked it out and voted yet, go give it a look! There are a lot of strong stories in the top ten, and still a whole 11 days to read ’em.
Also, don’t forget the youth division: http://shorts2015.quantumlah.org/shortlisted-stories
There are many genres of Science Fiction, and I enjoy pretty much all of them.
But perhaps my favourite is space opera. I love the breadth of the stories, the vast sweep of space, the clashes and conflicts of different factions of humanity (and/or aliens). And of course the larger-than-life heroes and villains with their dramatic plots, counter-plots, betrayals, and high-stakes winner-takes-all victories (or losses).
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this week’s ‘Last Words’ story is space opera.
Only forging you, my love . . .
Unlike last week’s piece about Baron Munchhausen, the influences in this one are much more modern.
Asimov’s Foundation series is probably the first space opera I remember reading, long before I knew the term. My mother had copies of them on our bookshelf, which I think I have now. And in high school, I read Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels (of which, Player of Games is my favourite). Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos followed five or six years later. (I’m sure there were more in between, but I have a poor memory for titles.)
Most recently, though, and serving as more-or-less direct inspiration for this little story, I’ve devoured Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, about a rogue ship-based A.I.
And most recently of all, A. Merc Rustad‘s utterly fantastic “Tomorrow When We See the Sun”, which you can read in Lightspeed for free. And should read. Right now. If you haven’t already. And even if you have, to be honest.
I think there might be the tiniest amount of Steven Brust’s Phoenix Guards in there, as well, even though that’s fantasy.
(Point of interest: This story was actually the first of these five-word stories I wrote, after an off-hand comment to the editors of Liminal Stories that I was going to send them a one-word story because they didn’t have a minimum wordcount.)
Here’s a first—a guest post!
Daniel M. Bensen is a fellow member of the Codex Writing Group, and he is doing a blog tour in celebration of self-publishing his novel Groom of the Tryannosaur Queen, which he describes as “a time-travel romance with dinosaurs.”
Here’s the cover blurb:
Former soldier Andrea Herrera isn’t happy with where her life’s taken her. Specifically, to Hell Creek, Montana, 65 million years before the present. As far as careers go, making sure the dinosaurs don’t eat her paleontologist clients comes in a pretty dismal second choice to serving her country. But when their time machine malfunctions, Andrea and her team are trapped in a timeline that shouldn’t exist with something a hell of a lot more dangerous than terrible lizards: other humans.
Sounds like a lot of fun to me, so without further ado, here is Daniel M. Bensen telling us how dinosaurs can fix your need for speed:
I self-published Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen (http://www.amazon.com/Groom-Tyrannosaur-Queen-time-travel-romance-ebook/dp/B018UD6DH2 ) on the first of January, but before that, the book sat in my trunk for two and a half years. In the last editing-run through I did in preparation for publishing, I was expecting (dare I say “hoping”) to find that the two books I’d written since had taught me something. I hoped I would find big fat rookie mistakes to fix. I did, but I also found some scenes that were really good. Better, in fact, than anything in my subsequent books. There are scenes in Tyrannosaur Queen where there isn’t much action going on, the plot isn’t moving, and we’re not learning about the characters. We’re just watching a velociraptor hunt or a quetzalcoatlus fly or a tyrannosaur stand in the rain. In my later books, I knew more about how to efficiently craft a story, but I had apparently forgotten how to stop and smell the dinosaurs.
Here’s how I wrote Tyrannosaur Queen. I had your standard three-act adventure story outline of a character finding herself in a strange new place, coming to terms with that place, defeating the bad guy, and going home. Then I focused in on those dinosaurs. I sat down and described them. What did they look like? What were they doing and why? I dropped those dinosaur scenes into the outline. Now, as I was writing I had a series of goals. I had to get my characters to their next encounter with an animal. If there was no such encounter coming up, well then, how about a nodosaur suddenly attacks?
Because an outline is just the bones of the story. As anyone who reconstructs dinosaurs can tell you, bones need to be covered in muscles, fat, and skin with feathers or spikes or those weird little wattles and dewlaps. There needs to be something useless and ornamental in your story, or else it’s just a boring list of stuff that happened.
I led myself through the novel with this trail of beastly bread-crumbs and I kept the process of writing fun. I hope that shows.
Now that’s a metaphor for storytelling I bet you haven’t heard before.
Groom of the Tryannosaur Queen is now available on Amazon Kindle, and you can keep Drack of Dan over at his website, The Kingdoms of Evil.
It’s a new year! If you use that whole Gregorian Calendar thing. Plus there’s a whole extra Monday at the end of next month.
This calls for something special, so I’ve decided that I’m going to run a series of micro-fiction pieces every Monday this year (except the first one, because I was too busy being indecisive).
All these little storylets will adhere to the following rules:
This is something I’m doing for fun, although I’d certainly prefer if other people find them amusing as well. Because they’re very, very short, I’ll likely also include a little bit of chatter about each week’s story or related notes of interest.
So to start us off, here’s one inspired by my love of tall tales, lies, and (more directly) by Alliteration Ink’s call for stories for their “No Shit” anthology, which ended a few days back and to which Matt Dovey and I submitted a co-written story.
I was (no shit) going to submit this there, but (alas!) they had a minimum wordcount of 2000 words.
No shit, there I was…
Baron Münchhausen, for those not familiar, was a fictitious German nobleman based on a real one (of a different name) who had a penchant for telling egregiously ridiculous stories about his travels to Russia, the bottom of the ocean, and the moon (among other places). He’s made a brief appearance at the very end of one of my other stories, Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things, which you can also read for free online, courtesy of the wonderful folks at The Sockdolager. (This story may or may not present the same Münchhausen.)
In other news, I’ll have a guest post up this Wednesday, by the inimitable Daniel M. Bensen. So if you want to learn how dinosaurs can fix your need for speed, be sure to keep an eye out for that.