Fiction, Poetry, and Games by Stewart C Baker
Writing about brexit? Me?
Naaaaah.
Are you lot still here?
(And this is my 100th post on this blog, apparently. Shiny.)
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]
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…)
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.
Since August, I’ve been trying out Tempest Bradford’s challenge of limiting my pleasure reading to things not written by cisgendered straight white males.
My reading habits skew female in any case, and I have favourite authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Ted Chiang, so this isn’t much of a stretch for me. But it has led to me reading some excellent novels I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, like Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (which I wish I had read long ago because it is astounding).
Anyway, while I might post more about that experience at a later date, I mention it today because this week’s “Last Words” post is inspired by Somtow Sucharitkul/S.P. Somtow‘s Starship and Haiku. Which I’m surprised I never found earlier because come on. Haiku! I write those.
Painsharping… Swimdeep…
As for Starship and Haiku, it was an interesting read, if a bit dated. Never mind that, in the book, WWIII destroyed most of humanity in the early 2000s. I felt like parts of it ran afoul of the Asian as Alien trope (oddly, considering its author is Thai) in ways that probably would not be considered okay today and in ways I couldn’t quite figure out was intentional subversion or something to be taken at face value.
Allusions to Mishima—not to mention the haiku, which included fun riffs on stories from Basho biographies—on suggest that Somtow is pretty well-read in Japanese culture, anyway, which was nice. But there were times when the text seemed to unironically describe Japanese people as “inscrutable” and that’s kind of…? And the Japanese are literally descended from whales (spoiler) which means that characters in the novel (Japanese and otherwise) are constantly talking about how they are literally alien compared to everyone else on Earth. Which uh…
Anyway. It has whales. And whalesong.
And it made me feel strange when I finished reading, which is a good indication that it succeeded as a SF novel on some level even if I found the racial aspects of it problematic and its depiction of Japanese culture a bit too early-Shōwa to ring true in describing a Japan set in 2023.
Benefit of living in the future, I guess.
Bonus!
For a more recent story about a Japanese girl and dolphins (close enough to whales, right?), check out Henry Lien’s excellent “Bilingual”, which is free to read on his website.
Another Bonus!
Although this is a huge tone mismatch with this story. The name Hananakajima has been shamelessly lifted from the wonderfully bizarre Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoi yo!! Masaru-san, the first episode of which the bravest among you can watch in regrettably low quality here.
And hooray, another guest post!
Today’s “Last Words” post is written for us by the mathtastic Aaron Moskalik in celebration of Pi day. (This makes Aaron the second person to remind me that Pi day exists, after my wife mentioned it to me the other day. I am a failure as a nerd!)
Without further ado, then:
Now, rounding Pi to three…
Math jokes! Math jokes are the best jokes.
You can see more math-related magicianry on display in “Division by Zero,” a comparatively long (100 word) story by Aaron over at Specklit, or in any of the Eric the Circle cartoons created by Mandle Brat, which is Aaron’s pseudonym on that site. (This pi-themed strip is a good one.)
Today we have a special treat: a guest post in my “Last Words” series!
Author, friend, Englishman, and fellow Writers of the Future volume 32 winner Matt Dovey sent this my way back in January with permission to publish it when I needed a weekend off. This is much appreciated this weekend, as not only was it my eldest child’s 6th birthday, but I have been in back/neck pain for most of the past week due to an unfortunate incident with a herd of transmogrified bovines, a feather duster, six gallons of dayglo purple ink, and one surprisingly small cucumber.
Uh. Where was I?
Right!
I was just about to present to you all…
No, Mildred, pull this first—
Very English, what ho?
The first of the month just happened to mark Matt’s first fiction publication (Woohoo!) so if this tickled your Guernsey, then head on over to this month’s issue of Flash Fiction Online, where you can read “This is the Sound of the End of the World,” a lovely piece of space opera filled with lies, propaganda, and a heck of a chorus.
Also featured is Shannon Peavey’s “Millepora”, a tale of transformation and coral, as well as two other fine stories.
n.b. No Guernseys, cucumbers, or other living beings were tickled or otherwise maltreated in the making of this blog post.