Fiction, Poetry, and Games by Stewart C Baker
Nonsense! Give him here.
I have nothing clever or amusing or interesting to add this week. Alas!
(Except that it is possible we will have a guest post next week, maybe.)
HEY so look it’s Monday! It’s… Monday… afternoon?
And I was supposed to post a new entry in the “Last Words” series this morning?
OOOPS.
No wait, here it is! And it’s totally thematic and appropriate that it was late. In no way did I hurriedly write this entry in a few minutes of panic because I completely forgot about this thing until just now.
Not at all.
I still have plenty of—
Anyone want to guess what that last word-analogue would have been if I did not have a 5-word limit per story the Entity had not been so hilariously tragically cut short? Er, poor choice of words there, perhaps.
(Hint: it rhymes with “rhyme.”)
Influences and gags! Because it’s no fun if I don’t explain them:
[body part]-analogue – I used to play this game called Kingdom of Loathing. It’s pretty fun. (And also the reason I first started writing haiku, but don’t tell anybody or you’ll ruin my haiku cred.) More to the point, there are various creatures in it like the Comma Chameleon who do not have actual body parts in all situations. As such, when canned combat dialogue which mentions those body parts appears, these beasties are described as having (e.g.) a “mouth analogue” instead.
WTF? – What is even going on in this bizarre little story? Don’t ask me. But it might have something to do with Jonathan Rosenberg’s hilarious and bizarre webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse.
Sushi. Mmm… Sushi…
Heeey! It’s Valentine’s Day!
What better way to celebrate than with an early installment of my five-word-story series, “Last Words”?
Okay, there are probably dozens of better ways. But I’m not going to let that stop me.
So, without further ado:
My love makes me invincible.
Ah. Love!
Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest, the sequel to Hugo-award-winning The Three Body Problem posits a field of studies called cosmic sociology which would explore the ways in which civilizations interact on a scale the size of the galaxy.
Spoiler alert: Not very nicely.
This week’s story plays with the same idea.
If anybody’s listening—Run!
Much as in Cixin Liu’s novels, this little storylet shows life in the universe to be a scary, tenuous affair. Hyper-advanced spacefaring societies lurk in the darkness between the stars, just waiting for newly technologized societies (like us, or the unfortunate Gliesians) to reveal themselves so they can destroy them and keep their own foothold in the galaxy secure.
Is that how things would actually turn out, if we ever were to be contacted by extra-terrestrial life?
I hope not.
And I don’t think so.
But I guess only time will tell… (Although the chances of meaningful contact at all is pretty slim, given the time scales and distances involved. As several hypothetical solutions to the Fermi Paradox argue.)
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.)
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.