Fiction, Poetry, and Games by Stewart C Baker
Given the mass shooting in Orlando, I almost don’t want to post one of these at all.
Here’s a compromise: the last words (and many other words) of hate itself:
I was so afraid…
If you have some spare funds, please consider a donation to It Gets Better, Human Rights Campaign, or any other LGBTQ+ advocacy or support group you know of.
It has been so hot around here lately that my ears are starting to melt and drain out from my brain. (ETA: as proof of which, I set this to post ten days after the right day.)
No, wait, should that be the other way around?
Maybe it should. Maybe it shouldn’t. More importantly: what does it have to do with this week’s “Last Words” post?
Absolutely nothing. I just thought you should know.
[unintelligible mumbling]
It’s almost Towel Day, that special day which comes but once a year when fans of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy come together (even if they don’t come together) to remember the author and his work.
I read a lot of Hitchhiker’s Guide as a teenager (the whole “trilogy” of five books at least ten times, I’m pretty sure) and doubt I’d have quite the same warped and strange sense of humour if I hadn’t.
So as a feeble form of thanks, here’s an early Towel Day present in the form of a five-word “Last Words” story. (That’s one word for every book in the trilogy!)
Free towels! Supplies are limited—
And since it is almost Towel Day, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the famous last words from the bowl of petunias in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself!
So here, in a similar style, they are:
Oh no. Not again.
If you’ve never read Adams’s work, there’s still time to rectify that! I recommend getting the whole trilogy at once in one of the lovely hardback editions that exist.
I’ve somehow neglected to post about this, but I have two original science fiction stories and one reprint out this month (plus a translation of the reprint, interestingly enough).
The first story is “Just Another Night at the Abandoned Draft Bar and Grill” in the May issue of Galaxy’s Edge. This story is a meta-fictional dig at some of the harmful, clichéd stereotypes which tend to permeate less-than-stellar writing—it features a woman named Mary-Sue, a black man named Alphonse, and a Chinese man who’s so much of a stereotype he barely exists beyond his peasant hat.
You can read “Just Another Night at the Abandoned Draft Bar and Grill” at Galaxy’s Edge for free through the end of June, along with stories by Tina Gower, George RR Martin(!!), Kij Johnson(!!!), and many other super-talented writers.
The second original piece is my story “Images Across a Shattered Sea,” which was my first-place story from Writers of the Future volume 32! I like to tell people it’s an anti-war story about post-apocalyptic Morocco, time travel, and the Open Access movement. (Wait, what?!)
Here’s a teaser:
The air on the cliffs above the Shattered Sea was hot as a furnace and twice as dry. Still, Driss couldn’t suppress a shiver at the way the shimmering message-globe moved through the sky, dozens of meters above the churning, black waves of the sea.
He had seen the globes before, of course, but only after they’d been captured and put on display in the village’s little museum. It didn’t quite seem real, the way the little ball bobbed and danced on the breeze, drifting ever so slowly towards Fatima where she stood atop a heap of boulders at the edge of the cliff.
“Here it comes,” she said, waving her net back and forth as she hopped from foot to foot.
Her eagerness just made the dangers of the place worse, Driss thought. It was as if she didn’t care that one misstep would send her tumbling to her death. He himself would have been happy never to have seen the coast in person. It had always been a deadly, desolate place, even in the days when the message-globes blew across the sea in huge clouds which blotted out the sun. And those days were long since past: They had seen only three globes during their two week hike, and this was the first that had come anywhere near them.
“Gotcha!” Fatima leapt into the air, hooking the bubble-like ball in her net and pulling it down from the sky. “What do you think is in it?”
The story (like all others in the anthology) is gorgeously illustrated, in my case by the talented Seattleite Paul Otteni.
You can buy a copy of Writers of the Future through various retailers, all listed at http://www.wotf32.com along with information about the anthology’s writers and illustrators. If you want to try it out before you buy, I have electronic samplers to give away. E-mail me and I’ll send you one! :)
On the reprint front, my Nature story “Love and Relativity” is now up at Flash Fiction Online, along with three wonderful original stories by Gary Emmette Chandler, Lynette Mejía, and Evan Dicken.
“Love and Relativity” is also due to be translated into Croatian by fanzine Eridu later this month, which is pretty cool.
From last week’s unrelenting bleakness, let’s move on to something silly.
It was Oscar Wilde (or perhaps his goatee-wearing evil twin from one of the mirror dimensions) who penned the words “I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do the day after.” Words to live by, my friends! Words to live by.
I haven’t memorized that yet!
Words to live by indeed. He says, as he comes up with another piece of microfiction the night before his self-imposed deadline…
In contrast to some of my other “last words” posts, this one’s a bit dark, and has nary a bit of humour to offset said darkness.
So if you’ve any deceased loved ones that you miss deeply, maybe best skip this little story-let.
I’ve missed you so much.
We’ve all been there. Sitting at home, minding our own business, when someone knocks at the door and turns out to be a future version of yourself who’s dead or dying.
Er, wait. What?!
“You must never go to—!”
Let this be a lesson to us all: When you’re time travelling back to the past to warn yourself of your impending doom, don’t bother with full sentences in case you die before you finish them.
Immortality’s a funny thing.
There’s a long fictional tradition, as TV Tropes and Wikipedia make abundantly clear, of playing with the idea, inverting and subverting it. For instance, we have “complete immortality” (where you can’t be killed OR die) versus just the regular kind (where natural causes won’t off you, but injuries still can).
Tolkien’s elves, for instance, are regular immortal. So are most kinds of fictional vampire. Beasties like the Lernean Hydra dispatched by Hercules and his nephew Iolaus, on the other hand, are essentially unkillable and can only be inconvenienced to a greater or lesser degree by (e.g.) lighting them on fire, killing most of their mortal heads, and burying their immortal head under a huge boulder at the roadside because your name is Hercules and you’re an asshole like that.
Uh. Anyway.
I, too, like to play with the idea of immortality!
Finally…!
Which I guess I kind of spoiled with that introduction but OH WELL, ONWARDS.
To some shameless plugs!
Shameless plug number one is that a story co-written by fellow Writers of the Future winner Matt Dovey and myself is in the currently-Kickstarting anthology “No Shit, There I Was.” Our tale is a glorious one of peril, fantastical hilarity, a magical sword welded by a kick-ass heroine who doesn’t take crap from anybody (except when she has to), true love, a soul-sucking evil wizard, necromantic basement weasels, and baby oil. Uh, but not necessarily in that order.
PLUS I MEAN JUST LOOK AT THIS COVER:
IS IT NOT GLORIOUS? You know you want that on your bookshelf.
Head on over to the Kickstarter! If you order a copy, lemme know in the comments and I’ll legit write you a 5-word story on a topic of your choice, following the same rules I follow for these “Last Words” stories, and post it on my blog (if you want) for all to be jealous over.
Shameless plug number two is that you can pre-order the Writers of the Future anthology on Amazon or at your fine book retailer of choice. More details about the anthology and where to order it are available atWotF32.com. (We’re still hoping to get electronic sampler copies of the anthology, so stay tuned for that…)
I’ll be the first to admit this one is full of in-jokes. But I’m still recovering from Writers of the Future workshop week, and that’s all I have the energy for at the moment.
Ha! Your muscles are biologically—
I’ll be announcing the winner of the signed copy of Writers of the Future volume 32 later on this week. Just need to find a spare moment to sit down with the random number generator!
No time, alas, for clever commentary this week!
Just a grisly little tale—or a magical one, depending on your point of view. (But then, isn’t all illusion and stage magic about point of view?)
Now you see me, now—
Just as a reminder, you can still win a copy of Writers of the Future, volume 32, by guessing which of the four 1st-place stories is mine. Head on over to the comments of this post to leave your guess!
I’ll be away from home at the Writers of the Future workshop until April 14th or so, but there should still be a “Last Words” post going up next Monday, since I usually set them up in advance.