Marty Halpern's Blog, page 43
September 28, 2011
Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #22: "Exo-Skeleton Town" by Jeffrey Ford (Part 1 of 4)
Just a quick opening comment: I've been blogging each week about the stories in Alien Contact in their order of appearance in the book. What readers need to know is that I've kept all the authors who contributed to this anthology in the dark as well. So as I reveal one story each week, the authors themselves also learn with whom they share this anthology. I've received some cool feedback from some of the authors, like when they discover that one of their favorite stories has been included in the book. Alien Contact is now available for preorder and will be published in November by Night Shade Books.
"Exo-Skeleton Town"
by Jeffrey Ford
This story was originally published in the premier issue (Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2001) of Black Gate magazine, and is approximately 9,000 words in length.
In an earlier blog post, "Reflections on the 2000 World Fantasy Convention," I recalled attending the Jeffrey Ford reading and then meeting him afterward, all of which led to my acquiring and editing his first short fiction collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002). Prior to that convention -- and as I wrote, one of the reasons I attended was to specifically meet Jeff -- I had already read a number of his short stories. And, much to my delight, this first issue of Black Gate was one of the freebies included in the goodie bag that was handed out to con attendees. When I scanned through the magazine's table of contents, I was pleased to see that the issue contained yet another new Jeffrey Ford story. I
If you're not already a fan of the old, classic Hollywood movies -- and the actors and actresses that made these films such classics -- then you certainly will be after you've read "Exo-Skeleton Town." This is probably the quirkiest story in the anthology. And it remains one of the more unique story concepts I've ever read. In fact, even though I'm the editor, I'm almost tempted to ask Jeff: "Where the hell did this idea come from?"
But I don't really have to ask him that question, because he's already answered it. With Jeff's most kind permission, I'm including here most of his afterword to "Exo-Skeleton Town" in The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. [Note: There's a bit of spoiler here, so you may want to skip this quoted text for now and scroll a bit farther down.]
In addition to allowing me to include this afterword, Jeff has also given me permission to post the contents of this story in its entirety here on More Red Ink. So, for your reading pleasure, here is "Exo-Skeleton Town," which won the 2006 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, the French national speculative fiction award. The French certainly do appreciate those old Hollywood movies....
Exo-Skeleton Town
by Jeffrey Ford
(© 2001 by Jeffrey Ford.
Reprinted with permission of the author.)
An hour ago I came out of Spid's Smoke House and saw Clark Gable scoring a couple balls of dung off an Aphid twice his size. It was broad moonlight, and Gable should have known better, but I could see by the state of his getup and the deflation of his hair wave that he was strung out on loneliness. I might have warned him, but what the hell, he'd end up taking me down with him. Instead I stepped back into the shadows of the alleyway and waited for the Beetle Squad to show up. I watched Gable flash his rakish smile, but frankly Scarlett, that Aphid didn't give a damn. When he gave up on the ancient film charm and flashed the cash instead, the bug handed over two nice little globes, sweating the freasence in droplets of bright silver. Love was in the air.
Then they descended, iridescent in the dim light of the streetlamps, circling in like a flock of Earth geese landing on a pond. The Beetles were always hot for action and they had a directive that allowed them to kill first and ask questions later. The Aphid they just kicked the crap out of until it looked like a yellow pancake with green syrup, but Gable was another story. Because he was human, they shot him once with a stinger gun, and when the needle pierced his exo-flesh, the real him blew out the hole with an indelicate frrrappp and turned to juice on the street. The dung balls were retrieved, Gable's outer skin was swiped, the bluebottles swooped in for a feeding, and twenty minutes later there was nothing left but half a mustache and a crystal coin good for three tokes at Spid's. I crossed the street, picked up the crystal, and went back into my home away from home away from home.
This is Exo-Skeleton Town, the dung-rolling capitol of the universe, where the sun never shines and bug folk barter their excremental wealth for Earth movies almost two centuries old. There's a slogan in Exo-town concerning its commerce—"Sell it or smell it," the locals say. The air pressure is intense, and everything moves in slow motion.
When the first earthlings landed here two decades earlier, they wore big, bulky exo-suits to withstand the force. It was a revelation when they met the bugs and by using the universal translator discovered that these well-dressed insects had smarts. I call them Beetles and Aphids, etc., but they aren't really. These terms are just to give you an idea of what they look like. They come in a span of sizes, some of them much larger than men. They're kind of a crude, no-frills race, but they know what they want, and what they want is more and more movies from Earth's twentieth century.
In trying to teach them about our culture, one of the members of the original Earth crew, who was an ancient movie buff, showed them Casablanca. What appealed to bugs about that pointless tale of piano playing, fez wearing, woman crying, I can't begin to tell you. But the minute the flick was over and the lights went on the mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town, a big crippled flealike specimen who goes by the name of Stootladdle, offered to trade something of immeasurable worth for it and the machine it played on.
Trying to work détente, the crew's captain readily agreed. Stootladdle called to his underlings to bring the freasence and they did. It came in a beeswax box. The mayor then whipped the lid off the box with three of his four hands and revealed five sweating bug turds the size of healthy meatballs. The captain had to adjust the helmet of his exo-suit to get a closer look, not believing at first what he was seeing. "Sure," he said in the name of diplomacy, and he forced his navigator, the film buff, to hand over the Casablanca cartridge and viewer. The navigator, wanting to do the right thing, also gave the mayor copies of Ben Hur and Citizen Kane. When the captain asked Stootladdle, through the translator, why he liked the movie, the big flea mentioned Peter Lorre's eyes. The earthlings laughed but the mayor remained silent. When the captain inquired as to what they were supposed to do with the freasence, the answer came in a clipped buzz, "Eat it." And so began one of the first intergalactic trading partnerships.
I know it sounds like we humans got the messy end of the stick on this deal, but when the ship returned to Earth and scientists tested the freasence, it proved to be an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac. A couple of grains of one of those spherical loads in a glass of wine and the recipient would be hot to go and totally devoted for half a day. The first test subjects reported incredible abilities in the love act. Those original five globes disappeared faster than cream puffs from a glutton's pantry, and none of it even made it out of the laboratory. So another spaceship was sent, carrying Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Double Indemnity, and Gone with the Wind. Ten balls of dung came back at warp speed, and the screwing started in earnest.
Two decades of this trade went on, and by then we had bartered copies of every movie we could find. Private corporations started making black and white, vintage original films by digitally resurrecting the characters of the old films, feeding them into a quantum computer, and putting them in new situations. The bugs got suspicious with the first couple of batches of these, especially one entitled We Dream with Bogart, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Carmen Miranda, and Veronica Lake. It was about a love pentagon during the Nazi occupation of Brooklyn. In the end Welles explodes, Trevor Howard poisons Bogart and then is shot by Carmen Miranda, who runs off with Veronica Lake. The problem with the film was that it was too damn good. It didn't have what the ancients called that "B" quality.
To offset this problem the specialists came up with a batch of real stinkers, starring the likes of Mickey Rooney, Broderick Crawford, and Jane Withers. One in particular, Lick the Devil, was credited with having saved the precious dung trade. I've seen it and it's terrible. Crawford plays an Irish Catholic priest, Withers is the ghost of the Virgin Mary, and Rooney plays a slapstick Chinese waiter in the racist fashion of the old days with a rubber band around his eyes. I've always said I'd like to shake the hand of the insidious mother who made that one.
Anyway, as the ships kept coming, trading their bogus movies, technical advances were made on Earth in the exo-gear that humans would have to wear on the bug planet. The geniuses at the Quigley Corporation came up with a two-molecule-thick suit that hugged the body like a second skin. Everything that one needed was shrunk down to nano-size and made part of the suit. It breathed for you, saw for you, heard with a built-in translator for you, ate for you. The only task that was necessary was emptying the exhaust twice a day through a three-inch-long circular spigot in the crotch area. The device you emptied the spigot into was a vacuum, so that when the pipe opened for its instant, the crushing weight of the atmosphere couldn't splat you. This new alloy the designers used was so flexible and strong it easily withstood the pressure.
The first of these exo-skins, as they were called, gave Earth traders back their human form, so that they now had false faces and eyes and smiles and skin color and hair. The exo-skins were made to resemble the people that they encased like so much sausage. Then some ad exec got the idea that they should make these suits in the guise of the actors of the old movies. Bogart was the prototype of these new star skins. When he showed up on the bug planet, they rolled out the brown carpet. Stootladdle was beside himself, calling for a holiday. The dung rollers came in from the luminous veldt that surrounds the town and there was a three-day party.
As time went on, the exo-skins improved, more authentic with greater detail. They made a Rita Hayworth that was so fine, I'd have humped it if Stootladdle was wearing it. Entrepreneurs started investing capital in an exo-skin and a ticket to the bug planet. They'd bring a couple of movies with them, score a few turds, and head back home to cut the crap up into a fortune. At first, one trip was enough to set up an enterprising businessperson for the rest of his life. Back on Earth, the freasence was so sought after that you could only buy it with bars of gold bullion. For the wealthy it was the death of romantic love, but the poor still had to score with good looks and outlandish promises.
The bugs rationed how much freasence could be sold in a year, and on Earth the World Corporation did the same, because the rich didn't want the poor screwing out of their class. In Exo-Skeleton Town, if you were caught trafficking without a license, like poor Gable, you were disposed of with little ceremony by the Beetle Squad. Anyone could come to the bug world and try to get a license, but they had to go through Stootladdle and he operated solely out of whim. If you had an exo-skin resembling a star he admired, you had a good chance, but sometimes even that didn't guarantee anything.
So a lot of people made the space flight, which took a year each way even at three times the speed of light, and got stranded on the bug world with no way to raise the money to finance the return trip. If you brought a hot movie, something the bugs were into, you could make enough money to survive by showing it to individual bugs at a time for a few bug bucks, which were actually mayflies that when dried and folded resembled old Earth dollars. Twenty mayflies could be exchanged for a crystal chip.
Some unlucky bastards brought movies they were positive would get them some action on the freasence market. I can see them on their trip here as the stars stretched out like strands of spaghetti during the warp drive, thinking, "Oh, baby, I've got a Paul Muni here that's gonna make those cold-blooded vermin do a jig, or Myrna Loy has got to be worth at least a turd and a half." But when they got here, they found the fickle tastes of the population had changed and that of all people, it was Basil Rathbone and Joan Blondell who were making the antennae twitch that year. So they were stranded with an old movie not even a mosquito would watch and no means of support. The bugs didn't care if these interlopers starved to death. I remember seeing Buster Keaton sitting in a dark corner at Spid's for a week and half. Finally, one day a Mantis figured out the silent comic had died and took him away for his private collection.
I got into it probably at the worst time, but I was young and so determined to get rich quick, I didn't heed any of the warnings. I didn't have a lot to spend on my skin, so instead of trying to get a top-shelf actor suit, I figured it would be wise to go for someone who was only on the verge of super stardom but who showed up in a lot of the old movies. The company I bought from showed me a nice Keenan Wynn, but after becoming a student of the old films in preparation for my journey, I knew Wynn was strictly television movies and light heavies in the full-fledged flicks he had done. Then they showed me a Don Knotts, and I told them to go fuck themselves. I was about to leave when they brought out a beauty of a Joseph Cotten. I knew better than the people who made the suit how cool Cotten was. Shadow of a Doubt, Citizen Kane, The Third Man. I plunked down my money and before I knew it, I was walking home with a bag full of suave and vulnerable everyman.
[Part 2 Forthcoming]
"Exo-Skeleton Town"
by Jeffrey Ford
This story was originally published in the premier issue (Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2001) of Black Gate magazine, and is approximately 9,000 words in length.
In an earlier blog post, "Reflections on the 2000 World Fantasy Convention," I recalled attending the Jeffrey Ford reading and then meeting him afterward, all of which led to my acquiring and editing his first short fiction collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002). Prior to that convention -- and as I wrote, one of the reasons I attended was to specifically meet Jeff -- I had already read a number of his short stories. And, much to my delight, this first issue of Black Gate was one of the freebies included in the goodie bag that was handed out to con attendees. When I scanned through the magazine's table of contents, I was pleased to see that the issue contained yet another new Jeffrey Ford story. I
If you're not already a fan of the old, classic Hollywood movies -- and the actors and actresses that made these films such classics -- then you certainly will be after you've read "Exo-Skeleton Town." This is probably the quirkiest story in the anthology. And it remains one of the more unique story concepts I've ever read. In fact, even though I'm the editor, I'm almost tempted to ask Jeff: "Where the hell did this idea come from?"
But I don't really have to ask him that question, because he's already answered it. With Jeff's most kind permission, I'm including here most of his afterword to "Exo-Skeleton Town" in The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. [Note: There's a bit of spoiler here, so you may want to skip this quoted text for now and scroll a bit farther down.]
This story got turned down more times than my Visa card. What's not to like? It's got giant alien bugs, Hollywood stars, balls of aphrodisiacal insect shit, drug consumption through a spigot in the crotch, and Judy Garland...shooting herself in the head....
I got the idea for this story from a book my son bought about the history of Japanese monster flicks titled Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! by Stuart Galbraith. Before looking through it, I was unaware that the great actor Joseph Cotten had done a bunch of low-budget monster movies in Japan near the end of his career. I never saw any of them, but the book had plenty of pictures. "Exo-Skeleton Town" is told in the melodramatic fashion of the black and white movies I watched on TV in the afternoons when, as a kid, I'd skip school, which was pretty often.
The name of the movie that is coveted by the mayor of the bug world, The Rain Does Things Like That, came from a deranged guy who wandered the streets of South Philly when I lived near Marconi Plaza, only a stone's throw from Monzo's Meatarama. I'd see this guy at least once a week, and he never tired of repeating that same phrase.
I've often thought that someday I'd like to write the story of the rise to power of Stootladdle, the flealike mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town. Thanks go out to Dave Truesdale and John O'Neill [of Black Gate] for bringing this creature feature to a theatre near you.
In addition to allowing me to include this afterword, Jeff has also given me permission to post the contents of this story in its entirety here on More Red Ink. So, for your reading pleasure, here is "Exo-Skeleton Town," which won the 2006 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, the French national speculative fiction award. The French certainly do appreciate those old Hollywood movies....
Exo-Skeleton Town
by Jeffrey Ford
(© 2001 by Jeffrey Ford.
Reprinted with permission of the author.)
An hour ago I came out of Spid's Smoke House and saw Clark Gable scoring a couple balls of dung off an Aphid twice his size. It was broad moonlight, and Gable should have known better, but I could see by the state of his getup and the deflation of his hair wave that he was strung out on loneliness. I might have warned him, but what the hell, he'd end up taking me down with him. Instead I stepped back into the shadows of the alleyway and waited for the Beetle Squad to show up. I watched Gable flash his rakish smile, but frankly Scarlett, that Aphid didn't give a damn. When he gave up on the ancient film charm and flashed the cash instead, the bug handed over two nice little globes, sweating the freasence in droplets of bright silver. Love was in the air.
Then they descended, iridescent in the dim light of the streetlamps, circling in like a flock of Earth geese landing on a pond. The Beetles were always hot for action and they had a directive that allowed them to kill first and ask questions later. The Aphid they just kicked the crap out of until it looked like a yellow pancake with green syrup, but Gable was another story. Because he was human, they shot him once with a stinger gun, and when the needle pierced his exo-flesh, the real him blew out the hole with an indelicate frrrappp and turned to juice on the street. The dung balls were retrieved, Gable's outer skin was swiped, the bluebottles swooped in for a feeding, and twenty minutes later there was nothing left but half a mustache and a crystal coin good for three tokes at Spid's. I crossed the street, picked up the crystal, and went back into my home away from home away from home.
This is Exo-Skeleton Town, the dung-rolling capitol of the universe, where the sun never shines and bug folk barter their excremental wealth for Earth movies almost two centuries old. There's a slogan in Exo-town concerning its commerce—"Sell it or smell it," the locals say. The air pressure is intense, and everything moves in slow motion.
When the first earthlings landed here two decades earlier, they wore big, bulky exo-suits to withstand the force. It was a revelation when they met the bugs and by using the universal translator discovered that these well-dressed insects had smarts. I call them Beetles and Aphids, etc., but they aren't really. These terms are just to give you an idea of what they look like. They come in a span of sizes, some of them much larger than men. They're kind of a crude, no-frills race, but they know what they want, and what they want is more and more movies from Earth's twentieth century.
In trying to teach them about our culture, one of the members of the original Earth crew, who was an ancient movie buff, showed them Casablanca. What appealed to bugs about that pointless tale of piano playing, fez wearing, woman crying, I can't begin to tell you. But the minute the flick was over and the lights went on the mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town, a big crippled flealike specimen who goes by the name of Stootladdle, offered to trade something of immeasurable worth for it and the machine it played on.
Trying to work détente, the crew's captain readily agreed. Stootladdle called to his underlings to bring the freasence and they did. It came in a beeswax box. The mayor then whipped the lid off the box with three of his four hands and revealed five sweating bug turds the size of healthy meatballs. The captain had to adjust the helmet of his exo-suit to get a closer look, not believing at first what he was seeing. "Sure," he said in the name of diplomacy, and he forced his navigator, the film buff, to hand over the Casablanca cartridge and viewer. The navigator, wanting to do the right thing, also gave the mayor copies of Ben Hur and Citizen Kane. When the captain asked Stootladdle, through the translator, why he liked the movie, the big flea mentioned Peter Lorre's eyes. The earthlings laughed but the mayor remained silent. When the captain inquired as to what they were supposed to do with the freasence, the answer came in a clipped buzz, "Eat it." And so began one of the first intergalactic trading partnerships.
I know it sounds like we humans got the messy end of the stick on this deal, but when the ship returned to Earth and scientists tested the freasence, it proved to be an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac. A couple of grains of one of those spherical loads in a glass of wine and the recipient would be hot to go and totally devoted for half a day. The first test subjects reported incredible abilities in the love act. Those original five globes disappeared faster than cream puffs from a glutton's pantry, and none of it even made it out of the laboratory. So another spaceship was sent, carrying Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Double Indemnity, and Gone with the Wind. Ten balls of dung came back at warp speed, and the screwing started in earnest.
Two decades of this trade went on, and by then we had bartered copies of every movie we could find. Private corporations started making black and white, vintage original films by digitally resurrecting the characters of the old films, feeding them into a quantum computer, and putting them in new situations. The bugs got suspicious with the first couple of batches of these, especially one entitled We Dream with Bogart, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Carmen Miranda, and Veronica Lake. It was about a love pentagon during the Nazi occupation of Brooklyn. In the end Welles explodes, Trevor Howard poisons Bogart and then is shot by Carmen Miranda, who runs off with Veronica Lake. The problem with the film was that it was too damn good. It didn't have what the ancients called that "B" quality.
To offset this problem the specialists came up with a batch of real stinkers, starring the likes of Mickey Rooney, Broderick Crawford, and Jane Withers. One in particular, Lick the Devil, was credited with having saved the precious dung trade. I've seen it and it's terrible. Crawford plays an Irish Catholic priest, Withers is the ghost of the Virgin Mary, and Rooney plays a slapstick Chinese waiter in the racist fashion of the old days with a rubber band around his eyes. I've always said I'd like to shake the hand of the insidious mother who made that one.
Anyway, as the ships kept coming, trading their bogus movies, technical advances were made on Earth in the exo-gear that humans would have to wear on the bug planet. The geniuses at the Quigley Corporation came up with a two-molecule-thick suit that hugged the body like a second skin. Everything that one needed was shrunk down to nano-size and made part of the suit. It breathed for you, saw for you, heard with a built-in translator for you, ate for you. The only task that was necessary was emptying the exhaust twice a day through a three-inch-long circular spigot in the crotch area. The device you emptied the spigot into was a vacuum, so that when the pipe opened for its instant, the crushing weight of the atmosphere couldn't splat you. This new alloy the designers used was so flexible and strong it easily withstood the pressure.
The first of these exo-skins, as they were called, gave Earth traders back their human form, so that they now had false faces and eyes and smiles and skin color and hair. The exo-skins were made to resemble the people that they encased like so much sausage. Then some ad exec got the idea that they should make these suits in the guise of the actors of the old movies. Bogart was the prototype of these new star skins. When he showed up on the bug planet, they rolled out the brown carpet. Stootladdle was beside himself, calling for a holiday. The dung rollers came in from the luminous veldt that surrounds the town and there was a three-day party.
As time went on, the exo-skins improved, more authentic with greater detail. They made a Rita Hayworth that was so fine, I'd have humped it if Stootladdle was wearing it. Entrepreneurs started investing capital in an exo-skin and a ticket to the bug planet. They'd bring a couple of movies with them, score a few turds, and head back home to cut the crap up into a fortune. At first, one trip was enough to set up an enterprising businessperson for the rest of his life. Back on Earth, the freasence was so sought after that you could only buy it with bars of gold bullion. For the wealthy it was the death of romantic love, but the poor still had to score with good looks and outlandish promises.
The bugs rationed how much freasence could be sold in a year, and on Earth the World Corporation did the same, because the rich didn't want the poor screwing out of their class. In Exo-Skeleton Town, if you were caught trafficking without a license, like poor Gable, you were disposed of with little ceremony by the Beetle Squad. Anyone could come to the bug world and try to get a license, but they had to go through Stootladdle and he operated solely out of whim. If you had an exo-skin resembling a star he admired, you had a good chance, but sometimes even that didn't guarantee anything.
So a lot of people made the space flight, which took a year each way even at three times the speed of light, and got stranded on the bug world with no way to raise the money to finance the return trip. If you brought a hot movie, something the bugs were into, you could make enough money to survive by showing it to individual bugs at a time for a few bug bucks, which were actually mayflies that when dried and folded resembled old Earth dollars. Twenty mayflies could be exchanged for a crystal chip.
Some unlucky bastards brought movies they were positive would get them some action on the freasence market. I can see them on their trip here as the stars stretched out like strands of spaghetti during the warp drive, thinking, "Oh, baby, I've got a Paul Muni here that's gonna make those cold-blooded vermin do a jig, or Myrna Loy has got to be worth at least a turd and a half." But when they got here, they found the fickle tastes of the population had changed and that of all people, it was Basil Rathbone and Joan Blondell who were making the antennae twitch that year. So they were stranded with an old movie not even a mosquito would watch and no means of support. The bugs didn't care if these interlopers starved to death. I remember seeing Buster Keaton sitting in a dark corner at Spid's for a week and half. Finally, one day a Mantis figured out the silent comic had died and took him away for his private collection.
I got into it probably at the worst time, but I was young and so determined to get rich quick, I didn't heed any of the warnings. I didn't have a lot to spend on my skin, so instead of trying to get a top-shelf actor suit, I figured it would be wise to go for someone who was only on the verge of super stardom but who showed up in a lot of the old movies. The company I bought from showed me a nice Keenan Wynn, but after becoming a student of the old films in preparation for my journey, I knew Wynn was strictly television movies and light heavies in the full-fledged flicks he had done. Then they showed me a Don Knotts, and I told them to go fuck themselves. I was about to leave when they brought out a beauty of a Joseph Cotten. I knew better than the people who made the suit how cool Cotten was. Shadow of a Doubt, Citizen Kane, The Third Man. I plunked down my money and before I knew it, I was walking home with a bag full of suave and vulnerable everyman.
[Part 2 Forthcoming]
September 22, 2011
Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #21
I have created an "Alien Contact Anthology" Facebook page; in the column to the right, scroll down a bit to see the widget. If you are an FB user, please consider a "Like" on this FB page for future updates, including the full text of more stories, book giveaways, and more. Alien Contact is now available for preorder and is forthcoming in November from Night Shade Books. This is story #21:
"Amanda and the Alien"
by Robert Silverberg
This story was originally published in the May 1983 issue of Omni magazine, and is approximately 6,400 words in length.
My connection to this story goes back to 2003, when Claude Lalumière and I selected it for inclusion in our co-edited anthology of sardonic fiction (aka stories with attitude) entitled Witpunk, which was published at the time by Four Walls, Eight Windows. So, in selecting some of the best "alien contact" stories of the past 30 or so years for this new anthology, how could I not include this classic Robert Silverberg story: "Amanda and the Alien."
Cribbing from a couple different reviews, if I had to sum up this story in one line, it would be: A deadly, shape-changing alien, who escapes from a government detention center, has the misfortune of meeting Amanda. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the story:
Amanda eventually contrives a way to use the alien to get even with her boyfriend, the aforementioned Charley Taylor, who stood her up that weekend. And to hell with the consequences. Typical seventeen-year-old behavior? You be the judge.
Amanda and the Alien was filmed in 1995 as a Showtime cable movie, directed by Jon Kroll (Big Brother, The Amazing Race, Blade: The Series), and starring Nicole Eggert (Baywatch), John Diehl (The Shield), Michael Dorn (Star Trek franchise), and Stacy Keach (Prison Break).
[Story #22 Forthcoming]
"Amanda and the Alien"
by Robert Silverberg
This story was originally published in the May 1983 issue of Omni magazine, and is approximately 6,400 words in length.
My connection to this story goes back to 2003, when Claude Lalumière and I selected it for inclusion in our co-edited anthology of sardonic fiction (aka stories with attitude) entitled Witpunk, which was published at the time by Four Walls, Eight Windows. So, in selecting some of the best "alien contact" stories of the past 30 or so years for this new anthology, how could I not include this classic Robert Silverberg story: "Amanda and the Alien."
Cribbing from a couple different reviews, if I had to sum up this story in one line, it would be: A deadly, shape-changing alien, who escapes from a government detention center, has the misfortune of meeting Amanda. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the story:
Amanda spotted the alien late Friday afternoon outside the Video Center, on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked over.
"You're doing it wrong," Amanda said. "Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are."
"Bug off," the alien said.
"No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center, or don't you?"
The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, "I don't know what the crap you're talking about."
"Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you," Amanda said. "I think you're getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me, and I'll teach you a few things about passing for human. I've got the whole friggin' weekend now with nothing else to do anyway."
A flicker of interest came into the other girl's dark, chilly eyes. But it died quickly, and she said, "You some kind of lunatic?"
"Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That's all I can do, is try," Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didn't look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylor's interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure.
[…]
"Wait," the alien said finally.
Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.
"Yeah?"
"How can you tell?"
Amanda grinned. "Easy. You've got a rain slicker on, and it's only September. Rainy season doesn't start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old Spandex kind. People like you don't wear that stuff anymore. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but you've got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That's just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. It's like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear and then tried a little of everything. The closer I study you, the more I see…. You may think that you're perfectly camouflaged, but you aren't."
[…]
"Why should I trust you?"
"Because I've been talking to you for five minutes and I haven't yelled for the cops yet. Don't you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a minute. Here." Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline on the afternoon Examiner was:
BAY AREA ALIEN TERROR
MARINES TO JOIN NINE-COUNTY HUNT
MAYOR, GOVERNOR CAUTION AGAINST PANIC
"You understand that?" Amanda asked. "That's you they're talking about. They're out there with flame guns, tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. There's been real hysteria for a day and a half. And you standing around here with the wrong chevrons on! Christ. Christ! What's your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?"
"Home," the alien said....
Amanda eventually contrives a way to use the alien to get even with her boyfriend, the aforementioned Charley Taylor, who stood her up that weekend. And to hell with the consequences. Typical seventeen-year-old behavior? You be the judge.
Amanda and the Alien was filmed in 1995 as a Showtime cable movie, directed by Jon Kroll (Big Brother, The Amazing Race, Blade: The Series), and starring Nicole Eggert (Baywatch), John Diehl (The Shield), Michael Dorn (Star Trek franchise), and Stacy Keach (Prison Break).
[Story #22 Forthcoming]
September 19, 2011
GRRM's Stolen Thrones
George R. R. Martin has reported that two autographed scripts from the television series A Game of Thrones, which were intended to be auctioned at WorldCon for charity, never arrived at their intended destination. GRRM is assuming the scripts were stolen, and is calling on all his fans and readers to keep an eye out for them: "Whoever s[tole] these scripts will presumably try to cash in at some point. So if any of you ever see scripts fitting this description turn up on eBay, one of its competitors, or on some dealer's table -- notify me at once, and report the stolen property to whatever local authorities are appropriate. Here's what was taken: two teleplays, final shooting scripts for episodes nine and ten of season one, 'Baelor' and 'Fire and Blood,' autographed by writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and director Alan Taylor, printed on white paper. Like Bloodraven, I have a thousand eyes and one. So let's keep 'em all peeled, boys and girls."
You can read GRRM's original blog post, which includes more than 70 comments, some insisting the scripts were stolen, others insisting they were eaten by postal machinery. Regardless, it won't hurt to remain vigilant for any A Game of Thrones scripts that show up for auction or sale.
September 16, 2011
Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #20
Alien Contact: 26 stories to unveil -- one per week in order of appearance in the anthology. This is story #20. Forthcoming in November from Night Shade Books. If you are new to this blog, you might want to start at the Beginnings.
"What You Are About to See"
by Jack Skillingstead
This story was originally published in the August 2008 issue of
Asimov's Science Fiction
, and is approximately 5,100 words in length.
On September 10, 2008, I contacted author Nancy Kress for copies of her three "alien contact" stories (see her "Laws of Survival," Story #19). In that same email I asked Nancy to recommend one or two other stories "you think are the best -- or at least your favorites -- that have been written since 1980." And Nancy graciously responded the following day: "As for other authors' first-contact stories, there was a good one in the recent, August 2008 ASIMOV'S: Jack Skillingstead's 'What You Are About to See.' Very weird alien."
The previous year, in July 2007, I had been contacted by an agent for the Virginia Kidd Agency, on behalf of Jack Skillingstead, to inquire if I would be interested in a collection of his short stories. At the time I had already planned to depart Golden Gryphon Press at the end of the year, so I suggested the agent contact the publisher directly.1 I had some familiarity with Jack's stories, but certainly not all of them at that time. So, after receiving the recommendation from Nancy Kress, I contacted Jack's agent, explained the basics of the anthology, and requested a copy of the story, which she kindly provided. I then printed out a copy and added it to my increasingly large pile of stories to be read and considered.
The fact that "What You Are About to See" is included in this anthology shows that I was indeed taken with this story. In fact, I've probably read the story at least four or five times now, and each time the story still leaves me in awe. This is one of those stories that slithers in behind your eyeballs as you read, and tweaks the hell out of your mind. I asked Jack for some personal thoughts on the story and this is what he wrote:
The story has a flashback (or two) as we learn how Brian Kinney, the protagonist, came to be involved with the NSA -- and how he ended up face to face with "Squidward." Just one more brief excerpt:
If you would like to read "What You Are About to See" online, Night Shade Books will be publishing the complete story via their newsletter, website, and Facebook page next month. You can subscribe to the NSB newsletter here (at the top of the right column) to be notified when the story is available, or simply check back here as I will certainly be linking to the story as soon as it is posted.
[Story #21 Forthcoming]
---------------
Footonote:
1. Jack Skillingstead's short fiction collection, Are You There and Other Stories , was acquired and published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2009, with very cool cover art by the inestimable John Picacio. John has written a lengthy blog post on the "process" he went through, including a complete redesign, to create the cover art.
"What You Are About to See"
by Jack Skillingstead
This story was originally published in the August 2008 issue of
Asimov's Science Fiction
, and is approximately 5,100 words in length.On September 10, 2008, I contacted author Nancy Kress for copies of her three "alien contact" stories (see her "Laws of Survival," Story #19). In that same email I asked Nancy to recommend one or two other stories "you think are the best -- or at least your favorites -- that have been written since 1980." And Nancy graciously responded the following day: "As for other authors' first-contact stories, there was a good one in the recent, August 2008 ASIMOV'S: Jack Skillingstead's 'What You Are About to See.' Very weird alien."
The previous year, in July 2007, I had been contacted by an agent for the Virginia Kidd Agency, on behalf of Jack Skillingstead, to inquire if I would be interested in a collection of his short stories. At the time I had already planned to depart Golden Gryphon Press at the end of the year, so I suggested the agent contact the publisher directly.1 I had some familiarity with Jack's stories, but certainly not all of them at that time. So, after receiving the recommendation from Nancy Kress, I contacted Jack's agent, explained the basics of the anthology, and requested a copy of the story, which she kindly provided. I then printed out a copy and added it to my increasingly large pile of stories to be read and considered.
The fact that "What You Are About to See" is included in this anthology shows that I was indeed taken with this story. In fact, I've probably read the story at least four or five times now, and each time the story still leaves me in awe. This is one of those stories that slithers in behind your eyeballs as you read, and tweaks the hell out of your mind. I asked Jack for some personal thoughts on the story and this is what he wrote:
"What You Are About to See" was inspired by my first-ever visit to Arizona back in 2006. I got three stories out of that Nebula Awards weekend. Which is weird when you consider I never left the hotel. Looking down at the desert from my 737 I thought of mirages, flying saucers, and a 7-Eleven store in Portland, Maine. I have no idea why. These unrelated elements came together when I needed them to at the keyboard.
It sat in a cold room.
Outside that room a marine handed me an insulated suit. I slipped it on over my street clothes. The marine punched a code into a numeric keypad attached to the wall. The lock snapped open on the heavy door, the marine nodded, I entered.
Andy McCaslin, who looked like an overdressed turnip in his insulated suit, greeted me and shook my hand. I'd known Andy for twenty-five years, since our days in Special Forces. Now we both worked for the NSA, though you could say my acronym was lowercase. I operated on the margins of the Agency, a contract player, an accomplished extractor of information from reluctant sources. My line of work required a special temperament, which I possessed and which Andy most assuredly did not. He was a true believer in the rightness of the cause, procedure, good guys and bad. I was like Andy's shadow twin. He stood in the light, casting something dark and faceless, which was me.
It remained seated—if you could call that sitting. Its legs, all six of them, coiled and braided like a nest of lavender snakes on top of which the alien's frail torso rested. That torso resembled the upper body of a starving child, laddered ribs under parchment skin and a big stretched belly full of nothing. It watched us with eyes like two thumbnail chips of anthracite.
"Welcome to the new world order," Andy said, his breath condensing in little gray puffs.
"Thanks. Anything out of Squidward yet?"
"Told us it was in our own best interests to let him go, then when we wouldn't it shut up. Only 'shut up' isn't quite accurate, since it doesn't vocalize. You hear the words in your head, or sometimes there's just a picture.…"
The story has a flashback (or two) as we learn how Brian Kinney, the protagonist, came to be involved with the NSA -- and how he ended up face to face with "Squidward." Just one more brief excerpt:
"Listen to me, Brian. We finally got one. We finally got an honest to God extraterrestrial—and it's in there."
"In the 7-Eleven."
"No. In the Arrowhead facility that looks like a 7-Eleven in our present consensus reality. The alien is hiding itself and the installation in some kind of stealth transdimensional mirror trick, or something. I've been here before. So have you. Our dreams can still remember. I've come out to the desert—I don't know, dozens of times? I've talked to it, the alien. It shuffles reality. I keep waking up, then going back to sleep. Here's the thing. It can cloak its prison, reinterpret its appearance, but it can't escape."
I regarded him skeptically, did some mental shuffling of my own, discarded various justifiable but unproductive responses, and said: "What's it want?"
"It wants you to let it go."
"Why me?"
"Ask it yourself. But watch out. That little fucker is messing with our heads."
If you would like to read "What You Are About to See" online, Night Shade Books will be publishing the complete story via their newsletter, website, and Facebook page next month. You can subscribe to the NSB newsletter here (at the top of the right column) to be notified when the story is available, or simply check back here as I will certainly be linking to the story as soon as it is posted.
[Story #21 Forthcoming]
---------------
Footonote:
1. Jack Skillingstead's short fiction collection, Are You There and Other Stories , was acquired and published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2009, with very cool cover art by the inestimable John Picacio. John has written a lengthy blog post on the "process" he went through, including a complete redesign, to create the cover art.
September 15, 2011
Alien Contact Anthology -- Bits 'n' Pieces
My Alien Contact anthology can now be preordered from Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com, as well as other fine bookstores (physical and online). You may notice that the pub date is listed as January 2012; according to the publisher, Night Shade Books, this is incorrect and the book is on schedule for its November publication.As you can see from the Facebook widget in the right column -- "Find us on Facebook: Alien Contact Anthology" -- I have just set up a "fan page" for the book. If you are an FB user, and you are so inclined, I would appreciate your click on the "Like" button. More stories from the anthology will be forthcoming, as will a giveaway or two, along with news and reviews.
On Sunday, September 11, I attended the Tachyon Publications "Sweet 16" birthday party at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. The party marked not only Tachyon's sixteen years of publishing but also the tenth anniversary of their first birthday party. On hand to celebrate the birthday, in addition to Tachyon's own Jacob and Rina Weisman, Jill Roberts, and Elizabeth Story, were Peter S. Beagle, Kathleen Bartholomew, Nancy Kress, and Jack Skillingstead. Nancy and Jack were in town for the previous evening's SF in SF event, so they hung around an extra day for the birthday festivities. Also on hand were Charlie Jane Anders, Terry Bisson, Grania Davis, Jeremy Lassen, Nick Mamatas, and Pat Murphy, to name just a few.
During the Tachyon birthday party each year, the Norton Awards are also presented. The awards are given for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason," in memory of Joshua Norton I, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States of America and Protector of Mexico. Norton Awards judge Jacob Weisman presented the book award to Steven R. Boyett for his novel Mortality Bridge (Subterranean Press); and Norton Awards judge Richard A. Lupoff presented the creativity award to Rudy Rucker for his autobiography Nested Scrolls (PS Publishing). Both Boyett and Rucker were on hand to accept their award. Rudy has a lengthy blog post, including photos, on the award. Rudy and I go way back, to the '80s when he was teaching at San Jose State; I wrote in a previous blog post of my interviewing Rudy Rucker regarding the Philip K. Dick Award, and our friendship over the years.
Anyhow, you may be wondering why I'm including the Tachyon Pubs birthday party and related events in this blog post on my Alien Contact anthology. And to answer that, I will share the following photograph with you:
Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead, and the ARC of Alien Contact
I had planned to attend the Tachyon Pubs birthday party since I had received the first announcement, but my circumstances changed a few weeks ago (see Status blog post). In fact, as of Saturday evening, due to work deadlines as well as the cost of public transit to San Francisco ($47.40 round trip for the two of us, using both Caltrain and BART), I had decided to stay home that day and work, in between loads of laundry. Mid-morning on Sunday I turned on the PC to send an email to Rina to let her know I would not be attending, when, to my surprise, I found an email in my inbox from Cliff Winnig letting me know that I could hitch a ride with him to San Francisco for the b-day party. It was a sign....
As both Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead were making a rare Bay Area appearance (they hail from Seattle), this gave me a chance to chat with them (and to meet Jack for the first time) about their contributions to the Alien Contact anthology. I revealed Nancy's story last week -- "Laws of Survival" (Story #19) -- and Jack's story just happens to be Story #20, which will be revealed shortly.
I'm not much of an autograph collector these days, but I did have both Nancy and Jack sign my copy of the ARC, as well as Pat Murphy, too, who contributed the story "Recycling Strategies for the Inner City" (Story #7) to the anthology. [Sorry I didn't get you in the photograph as well, Pat; hopefully next time.]
September 9, 2011
Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #19
You might want to begin here....
"Laws of Survival"by Nancy Kress
This story was originally published in the December 2007 issue of
Jim Baen's Universe
, which, sadly, ceased publication with the April 2010 issue. "Laws of Survival" is approximately 12,400 words in length, and is the second longest story in the anthology.
I was considering two other stories as well, by Nancy Kress, but I chose this one for a number of reasons: among them, the first person point of view, the absent (but still ever-present) aliens, the unusual premise -- and most important, "Laws of Survival" is a damn good story. A couple pages into the story, Jill, the protagonist, wonders: Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?
The author had a few words to share with readers about the story:
Oh, did I mention that this story is all about dogs? And aliens... Well, sort of. Jill encounters two different floating robotic computers, which she names "Blue" and "Green," respectively. What came to mind when I read this story was the space probe "Nomad" -- "Sterilize! Sterilize!" -- in the season 2 episode "The Changeling," from Star Trek: The Original Series. Anyhow, the robot computers need the dogs, and this is where Jill comes in. From the story:
Jill remains steadfast throughout the entire story, adhering to her own Laws of Survival as best she can; that is, until the very end, when she makes a bit of a change to Rule #5. And trust me, you'll be shocked to learn why "These dogs here must behave correctly."
[Story #20 Forthcoming]
"Laws of Survival"by Nancy Kress
This story was originally published in the December 2007 issue of
Jim Baen's Universe
, which, sadly, ceased publication with the April 2010 issue. "Laws of Survival" is approximately 12,400 words in length, and is the second longest story in the anthology.I was considering two other stories as well, by Nancy Kress, but I chose this one for a number of reasons: among them, the first person point of view, the absent (but still ever-present) aliens, the unusual premise -- and most important, "Laws of Survival" is a damn good story. A couple pages into the story, Jill, the protagonist, wonders: Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?
The author had a few words to share with readers about the story:
"Laws of Survival" is about coping with dogs. It's also about coping with aliens, but for most of the story the protagonist is coping with difficult dogs, courtesy of the aliens. I think the story is revenge against my toy poodle, a very difficult dog. Too bad she can't read. At any rate, Gardner Dozois liked the story well enough to include it in his Year's Best Science Fiction annual anthology. But, then, Gardner never met my poodle.
Oh, did I mention that this story is all about dogs? And aliens... Well, sort of. Jill encounters two different floating robotic computers, which she names "Blue" and "Green," respectively. What came to mind when I read this story was the space probe "Nomad" -- "Sterilize! Sterilize!" -- in the season 2 episode "The Changeling," from Star Trek: The Original Series. Anyhow, the robot computers need the dogs, and this is where Jill comes in. From the story:
I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn't arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn't out scavenging....
That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday's garbage load, I'd heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I'd find bread, or even fruit that wasn't too rotten.
Instead I found the puppy.
[...]
I hate it when grief seizes me. I hate it and it's dangerous, a violation of one of Jill's Laws of Survival. I can go for weeks, months without thinking of my life before the War. Without remembering or feeling. Then something will strike me.... I can't afford joy, which always comes with an astronomical price tag. I can't even afford the grief that comes from the memory of living things, which is why it is only the flower, the birdsong, the morning sunlight that starts it. My grief was not for that puppy. I still intended to eat it.
But I heard a noise behind me and turned. The Dome wall was opening.
"What to do now?" [Blue speaking]
"You tell me," I said.
"These dogs do not behave correctly."
"Not behave correctly?"
"No."
"What do you want them to do?"
"Do you want to see the presentation?"
We had been here before. On second thought, a "presentation" sounded more like acquiring information ("Notice everything") than like undertaking action ("Never volunteer"). So I sat cross-legged on the platform, which was easier on my uncushioned bones, breathed through my mouth instead of my nose, and said, "Why the hell not?"
Blue repeated, "Do you want to see the presentation?"
"Yes." A one-syllable answer.
[...]
The [holo] "presentation" ended.
"These dogs do not behave correctly," Blue said.
"These dogs? In the presentation?"
"These dogs here do not behave correctly."
"These dogs here." I pointed to the wet, stinking dogs in their cages. Some, fed now, had quieted. Others still snarled and barked, trying their hellish best to get out and kill me.
"These dogs here. Yes. What to do now?"
"You want these dogs to behave like the dogs in the presentation."
"These dogs here must behave correctly. Yes."
[...]
"Blue, who tells you what to do?"
"What to do now? These dogs do not behave correctly."
"Who wants these dogs to behave correctly?" I said, and found I was holding my breath.
"The masters."
Jill remains steadfast throughout the entire story, adhering to her own Laws of Survival as best she can; that is, until the very end, when she makes a bit of a change to Rule #5. And trust me, you'll be shocked to learn why "These dogs here must behave correctly."
[Story #20 Forthcoming]
September 8, 2011
Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #18
In a previous blog post I unveiled the cover for my forthcoming Alien Contact anthology (Night Shade Books, November) along with a recap listing of the first 17 stories. The anthology is now available for preorder on Amazon.com. And here is story #18:
"If Nudity Offends You" by Elizabeth Moon
This story was originally published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, February 1988, and is approximately 4,900 words in length.
I read this Elizabeth Moon story when it first came out, and loved it for the young female protagonist's strength and attitude, for the way she focused on her day-to-day living -- money concerns, boys, clothing, makeup, work, etc. -- totally oblivious to the finer details of what was actually going on around her.
Nearly 20 years later, in 2007, I had an opportunity to read this story once again as I compiled the contents for Elizabeth's short story collection, Moon Flights, which was also published by Night Shade Books. (This short story collection is well worth your serious consideration.) Then, a year later, when I was putting together the proposal for Alien Contact, this story was at the top of my list for inclusion in the anthology.
I asked the author for her thoughts on "If Nudity Offends You," and she wrote about the story's genesis. Be aware that there are definite spoilers in what follows:
One final, brief excerpt: The morning after Louanne's uneasy meetings with her electricity-stealing neighbors:
The story does, in fact, end well for Louanne; she even snags a new boyfriend.
[Continue to Story #19]
"If Nudity Offends You" by Elizabeth Moon
This story was originally published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, February 1988, and is approximately 4,900 words in length.I read this Elizabeth Moon story when it first came out, and loved it for the young female protagonist's strength and attitude, for the way she focused on her day-to-day living -- money concerns, boys, clothing, makeup, work, etc. -- totally oblivious to the finer details of what was actually going on around her.
Nearly 20 years later, in 2007, I had an opportunity to read this story once again as I compiled the contents for Elizabeth's short story collection, Moon Flights, which was also published by Night Shade Books. (This short story collection is well worth your serious consideration.) Then, a year later, when I was putting together the proposal for Alien Contact, this story was at the top of my list for inclusion in the anthology.
I asked the author for her thoughts on "If Nudity Offends You," and she wrote about the story's genesis. Be aware that there are definite spoilers in what follows:
In 1979 we moved to a very small town in central Texas. Although I had grown up in what I thought was a small town, this one was much smaller and much more insular (much less so now). I enjoyed the differences, and especially the way oral storytelling—from short anecdotes to long involved family histories—had survived.
"If Nudity Offends You" resulted from the collision of two stories told me by a local woman. Her brother took a job as a rural mail carrier, and one day he had to deliver a registered mail package to a mobile home in a remote area. When he got there, a neatly printed sign by the door said "If nudity offends you, please do not ring this bell."
He thought it was a joke of some kind (surely no one would really come to the door with no clothes on) and he had to get a signature for the package. So he rang the bell. And sure enough, a woman came to the door with no clothes on and he tried not to look as she calmly took the package and signed the form. But he told his sister, who told me, of his astonishment that the woman with no clothes was brown all over—no tan lines—and she wasn't the least embarrassed.
Hmm, I thought, that's the kernel of something. It's an anecdote, not story, but it's oddball enough to be interesting. I was writing mostly science fiction at the time, and didn't initially see anything SFnal in it.
A year or so later, the same woman told me about her son's girlfriend, who lived in a trailer park where there'd been trouble with people stealing power by switching the cords to someone else's plug. Her son's girlfriend had been one of several victims; her son had traced the cord to the wrong plug and then confronted the power thieves. This anecdote vibrated in the depths, but not enough to generate a story when I was neck deep in a different story. Again, a kernel, but nothing more.
Then I overheard a few phrases of an argument between a couple of old men sitting on a bench downtown. "How could you tell if they were aliens? I know people who don't act much like people."
Almost instantly, the kernels merged, formed a story's critical mass. What if the alien lived next door? In a trailer park? What kind of person would see an alien naked and not notice? Someone for whom noticing another person's nakedness—when not sexually involved with them—would be unthinkable. Someone so focused on their own concerns, their immediate needs and desires, that they could miss an unexpected reality.
I showed the story, when it was finished, to an older woman who volunteered at the little town library. She read it, laughed, and then looked thoughtful. "I wonder who does live next door, really...do we ever know?"
When Louanne opened her light bill, she about had a fit. She hadn't had a bill that high since the time the Sims family hooked into her outlet for a week, when their daddy lost his job and right before they got kicked out of the trailer park for him being drunk and disorderly and the kids stealing stuff out of trash cans and their old speckled hound dog being loose and making a mess on Mrs. Thackridge's porch....
Anyhow, when Louanne saw that $82.67, she just threw it down on the table and said, "Oh my God," in that tone of voice her grandma never could stand, and then she said a bunch of other things like you'd expect, and then she tried to figure out who she knew at the power company, because there was no way in the world she'd used that much electricity, and also no way in the world she could pay that bill.Actually, I can not only picture all of this, but I can even smell the humid heat, the dusty air, too -- but then that's just me....
One final, brief excerpt: The morning after Louanne's uneasy meetings with her electricity-stealing neighbors:
She overslept, and had to run for it in the morning, dashing out of the door, slamming into her car, and riding the speed limit all the way to work. It wasn't until noon, when she paid the bill at the power company with the twenties [which the neighbors had given her], tossed the crumpled envelope in the wastebasket by the counter, and put the change in her billfold, that she thought of the foreigners again. Something nagged her about them, something she should have noticed in the morning's rush, but she didn't figure it out until she got home and saw lot 17 as bare as a swept floor.
They were gone. They had left in the night, without waking her or anyone, and now they were gone.
The story does, in fact, end well for Louanne; she even snags a new boyfriend.
[Continue to Story #19]
September 7, 2011
August Links & Things
My apologies for the belated August links wrap-up. This has been a trying two weeks...see my previous blog post for an explanation. Onward:
The novel The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, by Andrew Fox, does for food what Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 did for books. In honor of the forthcoming eBook edition of TGHM, Andrew has posted links from around the world on "Food Police, Food Fascists, or GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) food terrorist stories." Here's just one: "Washington bureaucrats work to have Tony the Tiger Placed on the Endangered Species Act." [Note: I edited TGHM for Tachyon Publications.]
When is the last time that you sent a postcard? In fact, have you ever written and mailed a picture postcard to someone? Received a postcard? In the NY Review of Books blog, Charles Simic takes a nostalgic look at "The Lost Art of Postcard Writing": "Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you're bound to get an email enclosing a photograph....The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety. It wasn't just the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, or some other famous tourist attraction you were likely to receive in the mail, but also a card with a picture of a roadside diner in Iowa, the biggest hog at some state fair in the South.... Almost every business in this country, from a dog photographer to a fancy resort and spa, had a card." (via @smallindiepress)
On occasion, I have used the Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine) to find links and such to use in my blog posts. The nonprofit Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle in order to save a copy of every web page ever posted. New Zealand's 3 News reports that Kahle has launched a new project: "the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published." (via @bkwrksevents)
From foliomag.com: Penton Media's American Printer magazine ceased production after 128 years. The August 2011 edition was the last edition published. (via mediabistro.com)
From postcards, to books, to magazines, to bookstores... Opened 32 years ago, the Travel Bookshop, made famous in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts flick Notting Hill, has closed, according to TheBookseller.com.
Have you read Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld? Or possibly The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan? Or perhaps Push by Sapphire, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Precious? These are only 3 of the more than 20 books banned by U.S. schools so far this year. Censorship is on the rise. Read the list. (via @RickKlaw)
While a handful of authors such as J. A. Konrath and John Locke sell a million-plus copies of their Kindle eBooks, the regular, everyday author has a different story to tell. Here's one such story, by Kindle eBook author Walter Ellis, with a guest post on the FutureBook blog entitled "I publish, therefore I am invisible." (via Victoria Strauss's Facebook page)
In my April Links & Things I linked to author Tobias Buckell's blog in which he posted, by the numbers, his experience for one year selling an eBook edition of his short story collection. Author Ken McConnell (who also links to the Buckell post) does the same, for his novel Starstrikers, in a blog post entitled "A Year of Selling Indie Sci-Fi." [Sorry, Ken, but I absolutely detest the word "Sci-Fi/SciFi" unless you're referring to media-related content.] This link courtesy of Tobias Buckell's Facebook page.
Jane Friedman, in a blog post (via her Facebook page) entitled "5 Things Beginners Need to Know About E-Book Publishing," provides details, including links on: 1) E-book publishing and distribution services are nonexclusive and do not take any rights to your work; 2) Single-device publishing/distribution services and multiple-channel distribution services can be used in tandem; 3) Successful e-books generally require excellent cover design, appropriate pricing, and strong social currency; 4) Amazon royalties favor pricing between $2.99 and $9.99; and 5) Calibre is a free e-book conversion software to output e-book files from many types of sources.
Headline: "New Statistics Show Publishing Isn't in a Death Spiral After All" -- from eBookNewser (@eBookNewser) via mediabistro.com. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) has launched a new program, BookStats, "to provide an in-depth study of publishing industry statistics." This from their first comprehensive report: "Between 2008 and 2010, sales for the publishing industry as a whole grew by about six percent. That's a bump of around $1.4 billion, with sales in 2010 totaling $27.9 billion."
A couple years ago, I edited a novel for a Canadian writer; the story had some very lengthy, detailed fight scenes. Each individual action in any given fight scene was fairly well done; but overall, the fight scenes were choppy, they didn't flow properly. I told the author that a fight scene had to be choreographed, so to speak, as if it were a dance. And on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, author R. A. Salvatore explains "How to Write a Damn Good Fight Scene." When the author is asked: "What do you think about before writing a fight scene?" He responds: "For many years, it was about the dance, about how two or more armed characters can move about each other in ways that mesmerize, excite, and make sense. Fighting is more about your feet than anything. Balance, balance, balance. Now, after so many battle scenes, I find myself spending my preparation thinking about the battlefield itself...."
Kameron Hurley, author of God's War and Infidel (both from Night Shade Books), discusses how both covers came to be, in a blog post entitled "The Politics of Cover Art: Skinny White Dead Chicks and Selling Books." Hurley writes: "Most writers are stuck with their cover art. It is what it is. If you're lucky, you get to say something like, 'Can that white chick with the sword on my cover actually have brown eyes or something? I mean, she's supposed to be hispanic.' But if you write the sorts of books I do, which posit worlds that aren't teeming with white people, more often than not what you end up with is something like what Justine Larbalestier went through [link], which is that not only does your cover not feature your protagonist, but your brown protagonist magically becomes a white one for 'marketing purposes.'"
In my April Links & Things post I included a link to an online article on the shutdown of the SETI Institute's alien-seeking radio dishes due to a lack of funds to cover operating expenses. Well, the good news is that, for now, the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California "is back on track, thanks to more than $200,000 in donations from thousands of fans.... Among the contributors are Jodie Foster, the actress who played a SETI researcher in the movie Contact; science-fiction writer Larry Niven, creator of the "Ringworld" series of novels; and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who flew around the moon in 1968." So, ET, if you're listening, forget home -- phone Earth!
The novel The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, by Andrew Fox, does for food what Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 did for books. In honor of the forthcoming eBook edition of TGHM, Andrew has posted links from around the world on "Food Police, Food Fascists, or GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) food terrorist stories." Here's just one: "Washington bureaucrats work to have Tony the Tiger Placed on the Endangered Species Act." [Note: I edited TGHM for Tachyon Publications.]
When is the last time that you sent a postcard? In fact, have you ever written and mailed a picture postcard to someone? Received a postcard? In the NY Review of Books blog, Charles Simic takes a nostalgic look at "The Lost Art of Postcard Writing": "Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you're bound to get an email enclosing a photograph....The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety. It wasn't just the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, or some other famous tourist attraction you were likely to receive in the mail, but also a card with a picture of a roadside diner in Iowa, the biggest hog at some state fair in the South.... Almost every business in this country, from a dog photographer to a fancy resort and spa, had a card." (via @smallindiepress)
On occasion, I have used the Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine) to find links and such to use in my blog posts. The nonprofit Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle in order to save a copy of every web page ever posted. New Zealand's 3 News reports that Kahle has launched a new project: "the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published." (via @bkwrksevents)
From foliomag.com: Penton Media's American Printer magazine ceased production after 128 years. The August 2011 edition was the last edition published. (via mediabistro.com)
From postcards, to books, to magazines, to bookstores... Opened 32 years ago, the Travel Bookshop, made famous in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts flick Notting Hill, has closed, according to TheBookseller.com.
Have you read Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld? Or possibly The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan? Or perhaps Push by Sapphire, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Precious? These are only 3 of the more than 20 books banned by U.S. schools so far this year. Censorship is on the rise. Read the list. (via @RickKlaw)
While a handful of authors such as J. A. Konrath and John Locke sell a million-plus copies of their Kindle eBooks, the regular, everyday author has a different story to tell. Here's one such story, by Kindle eBook author Walter Ellis, with a guest post on the FutureBook blog entitled "I publish, therefore I am invisible." (via Victoria Strauss's Facebook page)
In my April Links & Things I linked to author Tobias Buckell's blog in which he posted, by the numbers, his experience for one year selling an eBook edition of his short story collection. Author Ken McConnell (who also links to the Buckell post) does the same, for his novel Starstrikers, in a blog post entitled "A Year of Selling Indie Sci-Fi." [Sorry, Ken, but I absolutely detest the word "Sci-Fi/SciFi" unless you're referring to media-related content.] This link courtesy of Tobias Buckell's Facebook page.
Jane Friedman, in a blog post (via her Facebook page) entitled "5 Things Beginners Need to Know About E-Book Publishing," provides details, including links on: 1) E-book publishing and distribution services are nonexclusive and do not take any rights to your work; 2) Single-device publishing/distribution services and multiple-channel distribution services can be used in tandem; 3) Successful e-books generally require excellent cover design, appropriate pricing, and strong social currency; 4) Amazon royalties favor pricing between $2.99 and $9.99; and 5) Calibre is a free e-book conversion software to output e-book files from many types of sources.
Headline: "New Statistics Show Publishing Isn't in a Death Spiral After All" -- from eBookNewser (@eBookNewser) via mediabistro.com. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) has launched a new program, BookStats, "to provide an in-depth study of publishing industry statistics." This from their first comprehensive report: "Between 2008 and 2010, sales for the publishing industry as a whole grew by about six percent. That's a bump of around $1.4 billion, with sales in 2010 totaling $27.9 billion."
A couple years ago, I edited a novel for a Canadian writer; the story had some very lengthy, detailed fight scenes. Each individual action in any given fight scene was fairly well done; but overall, the fight scenes were choppy, they didn't flow properly. I told the author that a fight scene had to be choreographed, so to speak, as if it were a dance. And on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, author R. A. Salvatore explains "How to Write a Damn Good Fight Scene." When the author is asked: "What do you think about before writing a fight scene?" He responds: "For many years, it was about the dance, about how two or more armed characters can move about each other in ways that mesmerize, excite, and make sense. Fighting is more about your feet than anything. Balance, balance, balance. Now, after so many battle scenes, I find myself spending my preparation thinking about the battlefield itself...."
Kameron Hurley, author of God's War and Infidel (both from Night Shade Books), discusses how both covers came to be, in a blog post entitled "The Politics of Cover Art: Skinny White Dead Chicks and Selling Books." Hurley writes: "Most writers are stuck with their cover art. It is what it is. If you're lucky, you get to say something like, 'Can that white chick with the sword on my cover actually have brown eyes or something? I mean, she's supposed to be hispanic.' But if you write the sorts of books I do, which posit worlds that aren't teeming with white people, more often than not what you end up with is something like what Justine Larbalestier went through [link], which is that not only does your cover not feature your protagonist, but your brown protagonist magically becomes a white one for 'marketing purposes.'"
In my April Links & Things post I included a link to an online article on the shutdown of the SETI Institute's alien-seeking radio dishes due to a lack of funds to cover operating expenses. Well, the good news is that, for now, the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California "is back on track, thanks to more than $200,000 in donations from thousands of fans.... Among the contributors are Jodie Foster, the actress who played a SETI researcher in the movie Contact; science-fiction writer Larry Niven, creator of the "Ringworld" series of novels; and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who flew around the moon in 1968." So, ET, if you're listening, forget home -- phone Earth!
September 1, 2011
Status
Today is the first of the month and I should be working on my link wrap-up for August; this is also week #18, which means story #18 from my forthcoming anthology Alien Contact is to be revealed. But, alas...
My mother has entered hospice care and I am visiting her and spending as much time as I am able, as well as dealing with legal paperwork, and bills and such, and also a house that she has lived in since 1965 (and, of course, where I lived until it was definitely time for me to leave home). Sometimes I don't know whether I'm coming or going, and sleeping only about 5 hours each night since Sunday, well, that's not helping matters much either.
I've had little time to be online, so my apologies for the limited content, other than the anthology's cover art that I have just posted. So, there won't be any other blogs this week, unfortunately. As for next week, I have a lot of letter writing and faxing to do (Power of Attorney) on behalf of the mom, but I'll do my best to make up for the shortfalls this week.
Thanks for your continued support and for reading the words I post here.
Cheers, all!
My mother has entered hospice care and I am visiting her and spending as much time as I am able, as well as dealing with legal paperwork, and bills and such, and also a house that she has lived in since 1965 (and, of course, where I lived until it was definitely time for me to leave home). Sometimes I don't know whether I'm coming or going, and sleeping only about 5 hours each night since Sunday, well, that's not helping matters much either.
I've had little time to be online, so my apologies for the limited content, other than the anthology's cover art that I have just posted. So, there won't be any other blogs this week, unfortunately. As for next week, I have a lot of letter writing and faxing to do (Power of Attorney) on behalf of the mom, but I'll do my best to make up for the shortfalls this week.
Thanks for your continued support and for reading the words I post here.
Cheers, all!
Alien Contact Anthology Uncovered
Seventeen weeks, now -- and I have blogged about the first 17 stories to be included in my Alien Contact anthology, forthcoming from Night Shade Books in November. In fact, of those 17 stories, four of the stories were posted in their entirety, plus I included a link to the text of another story posted online elsewhere as well as a link to a podcast of a sixth story. Nine stories remain....Here are the first 17 stories, plus the introduction, with links to their respective blog posts:
Introduction: "Beginnings..." by Marty Halpern
Story #1: "The Thought War" by Paul McAuley
Story #2: "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" by Neil Gaiman [link to the entire story content online]
Story #3: "Face Value" by Karen Joy Fowler
Story #4: "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove
Story #5: "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger
Story #6: "I Am the Doorway" by Stephen King
Story #7: "Recycling Strategies for the Inner City" by Pat Murphy
Story #8: "The 43 Antarean Dynasties" by Mike Resnick [the complete story in three parts]
Story #9: "The Gold Bug" by Orson Scott Card
Story #10: "Kin" by Bruce McAllister [the complete story in two parts]
Story #11: "Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song" by Ernest Hogan [the complete story in three parts]
Story #12: "Angel" by Pat Cadigan
Story #13: "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" by Ursula K. Le Guin
Story #14: "Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's" by Adam-Troy Castro
Story #15: "A Midwinter's Tale" by Michael Swanwick
Story #16: "Texture of Other Ways" by Mark W. Tiedemann [the complete story in three parts]
Story #17: "To Go Boldly" by Cory Doctorow [link to a podcast of the entire story online]
Story #18 to be revealed real soon now....
