Geoff Nelder's Blog, page 6
January 1, 2020
A #decade of writing 2000-2019
Decadal writing[image error]
2003 first short of the decade was called 2020 Vision published in the Chester Writers anthology
2003-05 ESCAPING REALITY http://hyperurl.co/nyjaiv Only as an ebook now
2005-08 EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEE http://hyperurl.co/du4s3h
2009 HOT AIR http://hyperurl.co/di4y0h
2009-12 ARIA LEFT LUGGAGE http://smarturl.it/1fexhs
2013 ARIA RETURNING LEFT LUGGAGE http://hyperurl.co/tgtid6
2014 ARIA ABANDON LUGGAGE http://hyperurl.co/26trxv
2014-17 XAGHRA’S REVENGE http://myBook.to/Xaghra
2018 INCREMENTAL http://mybook.to/Incremental a collection of 25 surreal shorts
2019 SUPPOSE WE, https://mybook.to/SupposeWe
2019 FALLING UP https://mybook.to/FallingUP
Plus over 80 short stories published in such journals as Jupiter, SF Perihelion, The HorrorZine, Twisted Tails, Alternate Historical Fiction, Another Realm, Aphelion, SFerics, Monk Punk Omnibus, Extreme Planets.
Particularly fun is that the first story of the decade I had accepted was called 2020 Vision about a far-future home in 2020!
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December 12, 2019
Falling Up released
[image error]The first novella in the Flying Crooked series was SUPPOSE WE. Commissioned by LL-Publications (the publisher of the ARIA science fiction trilogy) to bring back the passion in space exploration. In Suppose We a ship crashlands on a faraway planet, but the natives are so far ahead of Earth that they ignore the hapless humans in need of help. The human crew follow the native Keps to their habitats only to find strangeness beyond their experience. If you read Suppose We and you thought it as original as writers such as Jaine Fenn did, then just wait until you read Falling Up. Well, the title tells you, doesn’t it?
Why is Em flying up as in the cover picture? An anomaly, obvs, but what kind and why was she running and what to? You can find out today! The ebook version is released on the 12th of the 12th 2019. Yes, Britain’s election day though it has nothing to do with it. On the other hand if you want to celebrate or seek solace then what’s better than to dive into an out-of-this-world novel? (Several other things but it’s a start)
Leading on from the cover art of a falling up girl and the cunning upside-down lettering, we’ve tried upside downing the chapter headings. And just wait till you see what we’ve done in Chapter 22.
FALLING UP is available as Kindle for £1.99 in the UK and $2.99 in the US. When the paperback is released it will be £7.99
Link to amazon for Falling Up https://mybook.to/FallingUP
If you’ve yet to salivate over SUPPOSE WE you can grab an ebook copy from
Kindle for 99 cents or 99 pence from today. Kindle Unlimited is FREE[image error]
The paperback can be found on Amazon too.
Just thinking out loud now. If we eventually create a boxset for the Flying Crooked series with 1) Suppose We 2) Falling Up and 3) Kepler’s Son I could include a used SpaceWeb patch, Vegan Cookbook in Space and a sample rock from Kepler-20h imbued with a gravity anomaly.
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November 5, 2019
#Chester Author is nuts
[image error]
I was 26,291 days old (72 years in Earth orbit terms) and went for a hike in Delamere Forest in Cheshire. I forgot to smile because…
…I am worried. It’s book three of the Flying Crooked series and it’s getting away with me. Characters are writing themselves and telling me to fuck off, make a cup of tea while they get on with plot, subplot, craziness, proving me right by being wrong and all that.
I was teaching in Chester’s Queen’s Park High in Handbridge when I wrote my first novel. While I enriched kids’ lives with my antics, field trips and tales of blood and fire (I taught Geography and they loved natural disasters) I found a piece of amber with a fossil seed in it. A kind of Extinction Rebellion group was able to grow the ancient plant, which was like bind weed. It was used to plant bomb nuclear silos in Russia and the US. Convolvulus. I sent it to publishers all over. A near miss, but I knew Michael Crichton had read it and critiqued it as a jobbing reader for a publisher. He wrote to me years later after Jurassic Park was published by him. Yes, I MIGHT have given him the idea but he improved on it to include dinosaurs. Fair enough.
On school days, I’d go home at night, mark books and prepare lessons then write stories. My humorous thriller, ESCAPING REALITY was published in 2001 but under a pseudonym John Ambit because of the bubble-wrap sex and other naughty bits.
I was convinced I was going nuts while teaching because my discipline was becoming awful. One day a class stood up halfway through a lesson and walked out. I thought, funny, they don’t usually do that. The last one said, Aren’t you coming, Sir, the fire alarms going? I wasn’t crazy, just 85% deaf. Happiness is when Cheshire County Council gives you 100% teacher’s ill-health retirement pension 5 years early and say, On yer bike, Nelder. So I did.
I wrote articles for cycling mags and blogs, but mainly wrote novels.
Another thriller, HOT AIR, is based on shooting down a hot air balloon. What? Yes. Most of it is set in Mallorca so a field trip during a heat wave. Wife not happy because she had to work and said my key mightn’t work when I get back.
EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEE (not bear as in the Winter’s Tale by Bill S) is a strange scifi novel. Alien artefacts are already here under the surface and they are leaving. Not like Apollo rockets but incredibly slowly. The army and scientists are baffled. There’s one under Glastonbury Tor and the top of the hill goes up too. Problem: as the spheres leave, time goes wrong on Earth. Time quake disasters. A Mars mission piloted by a feisty woman is diverted to chase after the aliens to persuade them to return and fix things. Great fun to write – especially the sex in space.
LEFT LUGGAGE again features the bindweed but another author doesn’t pinch it this time. Main premise is infectious amnesia. I was stunned that no one has written fiction with that before. Still haven’t. An alien case is opened. The virus means everyone nearby loses a year’s memory per week. No immunity. Disaster. Book two and three get madder. ARIA – Alien Retrograde Infectious Amnesia.
XAGHRA’S REVENGE came about on Gozo, a tiny, quiet and quaint island next to Malta. I discovered that in 1551 pirates abducted all 5,000 Gozitans. Sold as slaves in Libya and Turkey. Outrageous. Their souls demand revenge and I give it to them.
INCREMENTAL is my best collection of madness ever. 25 shorts of a mix of scifi, surreal, Kafkaesque (As prof Stanley Salmon of Chester writers called it) and more mental than incremental. A pothole doubles in size every day – how long before countries are swallowed? The Earth? Yet it doesn’t finish there… A man thought he had amnesia but is the imaginary friend of a girl… A noise heard the world over increases by a decibel every day… All of them great fun to research and write.
SUPPOSE WE is book one of the Flying Crooked series, a commissioned novella and first of three. LL-Publications asked me to bring passion back into scifi space exploration. The ship crashlands on a faraway planet. Sadly, the natives are intellectually, and physically so far ahead of Earth that they ignore the humans. Luckily the planet, Kepler 20-h has a problem and the solution is in the humans’ mission package – a secret known only the ship’s AI, which has gone a bit mad.[image error]
SUPPOSE WE is the name of the human’s spaceship. It was a temporary name but it stuck. The novella was released on May 20th 2019.
FALLING UP is the sequel to SUPPOSE WE. The title alone tells you that if you thought book one was a bit mad then book two is whacky yet great fun. On Falling Up from Peter Wilhelmsen, fantasy writer: “Your book is an awesome ride. The characters jump out of their pages and their personalities really shine through.”
Now we come to Son of Kepler, book three of the Flying Crooked series. It’s not been written, but it is dancing around in my head. When I start writing the characters surviving from FALLING UP push me out. It’s a struggle in my inner space. Watch this outer space.
Links to the books named above:
Escaping Reality – humorous thriller • http://hyperurl.co/nyjaiv
Hot Air – thriller set in Mallorca • http://hyperurl.co/di4y0h
Exit, Pursued by a Bee – scifi with timequakes • http://hyperurl.co/du4s3h
ARIA: Left Luggage – infectious amnesia scifi • smarturl.it/1fexhs
ARIA: Returning Left Luggage • http://hyperurl.co/tgtid6
ARIA: Abandon Luggage • http://hyperurl.co/26trxv
Chaos of Mokii – scifi short – a city exists in minds only • http://mybook.to/ChaosOM
Xaghra’s Revenge – Malta historical fantasy with pirates / slaves • http://myBook.to/Xaghra
Incremental – 25 surreal short stories • http://mybook.to/Incremental
Suppose We -science fiction space exploration • https://mybook.to/SupposeWe
Home • http://geoffnelder.com
Facebook • http://bit.ly/2DnAmRS
Twitter @geoffnelder
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October 27, 2019
FALLING UP
FALLING UP is the sequel to the surreal science fiction novella, Suppose We, published in May 2019. The fifth draft of Falling Up is now complete having gone through the rigours of Orbiters 7.
Orbiters? That’s one of the critique groups of the British Science Fiction Association. Every two months we send around 5,000 to 9,000 words of our latest oeuvre to be hacked at by eagle-eyed wordsmiths in return for mutual editing. The funny thing is that if there are, say, six members of the critique group, by the time you’ve received five detailed edits (using MS Word’s Review / Comment feature) you’d think there’s nothing left to change. After all, Falling Up had already been outlined, rough drafted, tightened, lacerated and read out loud by me before submitting it to the group to start with. Even so, every member tends to be a specialist: punctuation, tenses, characterisation, voice, science and technology, credibility and so on, and finds something that irks them.
Now, it’s reached the stage where I’ve applied all the suggestions I agree with and I’m ready – nearly – to send the latest version to the publisher, LL-Publications, who will send it to their own editor and proofreader. In the past I find one has removed most of my commas and the other has thrown them back in!
SUPPOSE WE is the first in the Flying Crooked series of novellas. The premise: a spaceship crashlands on a faraway planet. Sadly, the natives are so far ahead of Earth in intelligence that they ignore the humans. Somehow the latter have to persuade the strange aliens – oops no, the humans are the aliens – to help. Luckily, the planet Kepler-20h has a problem and by chance the secret mission package contains a kind of solution. The book is acclaimed by Jaine Fenn.
Peter Wilhelmsen, fantasy writer: “The exploration-part, the unknown part of it all, made me want to turn the pages. The world building is impressive, and the way the humans interpret things makes the science behind it all easy to follow. And the Keps felt very alien-like, like something taken out of X-files. In other words, they worked for me. Their AI counterparts as well. Overall, I enjoyed reading Suppose We immensely.”
From Australian psychiatrist Dr Bob Smith The best thing about reading speculative fiction is the creative imagination of someone else, who thinks up things (even) I haven’t. If the writing is good, I join into the author’s reality-construction while reading. Then, afterward, the new concepts challenge me. I muse over “what if” considerations, and perhaps my view of the possible is enlarged.
This is why I enjoy Geoff Nelder’s writing. He and I think very differently. At first, some of his concepts strike me as bizarre — then they grow on me. (Please don’t take that literally.)
His latest, a story named after the spaceship, “Suppose We,” is just like that. The narrator, small, slight but bouncy Frenchman Gaston, is delightful. The four humans in the story have very real, contrasting personalities, leading to some fun and games, but most enjoyable is a character who names itself CAN, and then has endless fun punning on the name.
I won’t say anything about the story, but let you explore it for yourself.
David Leaper: Geoff Nelder is a visionary writer.
Colm Herron: Our world can be a terrifying place. And the world that Nelder portrays left me fearful, gripped, and yet giddy with laughter at times. This use of humour is utterly ingenious because it serves as a release valve.
Hopefully, Falling Up will attract similar reviews. If those readers thought Suppose We was surreal, then its sequel is even weirder. The title says it all, or at least the beginning when two of the crew members find themselves falling upwards when they emerge out of a mine halfway up a cliff. The planet is under attack by AIs and… I had so much fun writing it.
So, what about the cover art?[image error]
The alien AIs use a Jupiter-sized cutting sphere to slice up planets. I struggled to find an image exactly like the one in my head but saw a sculpture in the Algarve that was pretty close! A cycling pal who plays around with abstra
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ct art suggested a cover based on that.
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However, I decided on something simple. I hope you agree.
Other Nelder news
A short science fiction story of mine has been published by Aphelion and you can read it for free here. http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2019/10/Failsafe.html
Suppose We is on Kindle and paperback from Amazon https://mybook.to/SupposeWe
When Kiu found he was LOCKED OUT of his spaceship he knew he was in big trouble or in another of Nelder’s surreal shorts in INCREMENTAL.
For the cost of a coffee & cake you can laugh, be amazed, and blurt into your coffee.
#KindleUnlimited #Scifi
Other books on Escaping Reality • http://hyperurl.co/nyjaiv
Hot Air • http://hyperurl.co/di4y0h
Exit, Pursued by a Bee • http://hyperurl.co/du4s3h
ARIA: Left Luggage • smarturl.it/1fexhs
ARIA: Returning Left Luggage • http://hyperurl.co/tgtid6
ARIA: Abandon Luggage • http://hyperurl.co/26trxv
Chaos of Mokii • http://mybook.to/ChaosOM
Xaghra’s Revenge • http://myBook.to/Xaghra
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September 11, 2019
SUN DRAGONS
I’ve been taken over today by another writer, Gillian Rooke. We’ve known each other for many years online and unless she tells me differently, we actually met at a literary event in Derby many Earth orbits ago. Gillian was an early member of the British Science Fiction Association Orbiters, where members send chapters or short stories to each other for critique before submitting them to publishers.
SUN DRAGONS is a debut children’s science fiction ebook by Gillian. While it is a fantasy, there is some very interesting solar science behind it. This blog piece is her promo. Read and be amazed then buy her book for your children, nieces, nephews, neighbours.
Sun Dragons By J K Rooke[image error]
I see no reason to suppose that water is the only basis for intelligent life. Indeed, computers are intelligent by some standards and they certainly aren’t water based. The whole universe that man knows of uses the same set of elements, and the main reasons for different combinations of these, seem to be temperature and pressure.
Where methane is liquid why could it not be the basis for life forms? Yes, they would be in temperatures colder than any on Earth, but the life would have evolved in these temperatures, and it might have had the same timescale in which to evolve, as life on Earth.
Fire is a plasma but can often be considered to behave as a liquid, plus it has different zones giving interfaces which could provide a lively substrate for the seeding and breeding of life. We see how useful these clines are when looking at the number of species which specialize in living close to hot spots around the edge of boiling water. Above ground they are mostly bacteria, but in the hydrothermal vents beneath the sea there are unique creatures the size of a human child. Moreover, the species differ from vent to vent and it is a mystery in any case, how they could travel across thousands of miles of ocean to seek a new hot spot when the one they inhabit becomes inactive. In other words, how do you get such distinctive species evolving in the short timescale of an active hydrothermal vent? One solution might be that as the vent cools, they move inside it and travel along the lava tube until they find another hot spot. But here they would be likely to encounter active lava, and how would they get through this? There might be blow holes to the surface close to the newly active vent. Investigation is obviously difficult.
There is also a difficulty in discovering creatures that actually live in fire because of the limitations in our technology. As you would expect life forms in liquid methane to live “in the slow lane” and probably take a little longer to evolve than life on Earth, so creatures living in fire are in “the fast lane” and we would expect their lives, by our standard, to be short. However, this does not mean that the creatures would not be intelligent. In a split second they could learn as much as we can in our lifetimes. I have seen ball lightning, around the size of a football and at a distance of ten feet, and it really does give the impression of being alive.
There is also the fact that creatures evolved in fire would be far more ancient than any other life in our solar system. And it is odd that in so many creation myths fire creatures play a part. You could say that it is just because ancient man must have revered volcanoes as gods, because they are so spectacular.
There is a more persuasive myth, and this concerns the Salamander. We know that Amphibians evolved long before reptiles, and salamanders are perhaps the most ancient of amphibians. The giant salamander was revered as a sacred creature by the local people. But why were salamanders thought of as creatures of fire?
Well amphibians have abilities that no other vertebrate has. They can breathe through their skins, and more importantly some have the ability to expel water from their cells so that the cells do not burst when they are frozen. This can also happen in drought. A toad overtaken by complete lack of moisture can mummify itself, by collecting the remaining water in its body into the heart and Central Nervous System leaving the rest of the body dead but not rotting. When the water returns the cells in the mummified areas absorb it and the animal returns to normal business.
Now this ability to move liquid in and out of cells at will would be very useful to a creature that might have to move through fire, especially if they could absorb the fire itself into their cells, to allow of continued movement, or the part of fire that does not burn. We know so little about fire, and even less about plasma, because as I said before we haven’t got cameras that are fast enough to pick up what is actually happening. But we do know that in a candle flame the most active part of the chemical reaction, at the interface with the burning material, is not hot. If an animal has the ability to swim in the cool zones of a fire it is perfectly possible that even a DNA based life form could survive and live on the changing chemistry that the fire provides. Perhaps its skin would have to be a little more fire proofed than that of a modern salamander.
In the sun of course life would not have DNA as we know it, but the sun was around long before the Earth even began to form, plus anything living in the sun would be a “fast lane” creature anyway. There could be dragons in the sun and they might even have evolved as creatures on Earth have evolved, to live under a wide range of conditions of temperature and pressure, enough perhaps to occasionally visit the Earth as creatures with solid exteriors, but fire within which is exhaled in their breath. Because they are largely composed of helium they would naturally appear in the sky and they were in the past, rightly, seldom represented with wings.
In my ebook, SUN DRAGONS, by Gill Ian Point, in a hopefully realistic modern setting, I try to persuade people that such creatures are in fact possible and have even the astrophysicist father believing in them at the end. I always think it is sad when in most children’s books they grow up and reject the fantasy. They might not decide to consider it all as an illusion or dream, but they go on to lead normal banal lives as if the fantastic things never happened to them. I have always hated coming to the end of any fantasy book because it always ends with normal family life being the greatest thing that mankind could ever aspire to. I never want to write a book like that. It is such a betrayal of everything that happened in the book. After all if you read a detective book the murder victim is still dead at the end, and romances tend to end before the divorce, thus reinforcing the ‘true love’ myth they contain.
I just wish that people would be excited, stimulated, and accepting of the possibility that things are not always what they seem.
In SUN DRAGONS Corrie (age 9) sees dragons on the sun’s surface when she’s taken by her father to a huge telescope. The story takes her and the reader to the Large Hadron Collider at Cern and mayhem ensues!
Additional sun dragon inspirational art by Gillian Rooke [image error]
ASIN: B07K4FC48Z
£1.99 for the ebook or free on Kindle Unlimited.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07K4FC48Z
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August 24, 2019
Is Ggantija an astronomical portal?
[image error]Watching a documentary on an ancient Irish dolman the other night, in which a theory was proposed that it was built to observe and time the equinoxes, it seemed to me that perhaps the Ggantija ‘temples’ in Gozo’s Xaghra was built for a similar reason. The Irish dolman reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaulstown_Portal_Tomb
One thing to bear in mind is that the sea level around Malta was 5 metres lower [image error]when Ggantija was built 5 to 6k years ago. Not really important though is it?
Relevant though is plate tectonic activity. Much of northern Europe is in the middle of a plate but the Mediterranean still has tremors and quakes because of the northerly migration of the African plate. Over the years the Maltese islands would have been twisted so while the entrances of Ggantija are facing south east now, it would likely have been easterly when under construction. Added complications arise with the precession of the stars over thousands of years so the constellations would have been slightly different too.
Food for thought.
If you’ve yet to acquire the Kindle or paperback of Xaghra’s Revenge then the link is here http://myBook.to/Xaghra
Other Nelder News
SUPPOSE WE, my latest science fiction novella is on sale as ebook or paperback at https://mybook.to/SupposeWe
You can read an excerpt at https://geoffnelder.com/excerpt-from-suppose-we/
The Other side of the Pebble is a short story of mine giving Goliath’s version of the event in the bible with David. Facts as I could ascertain them from various historical sources are accurate with a tweak of my imagination. Goliath was bullied as a boy and well it is in this
http://www.alternate-history-fiction.com/magazine/ahf-magazine-6.html
INCREMENTAL is an amazing collection of surreal shorts. For a tenner, you can laugh, be amazed, and blurt into your coffee. paperback or as a Kindle and KindleUnlimited
ARIA LEFT LUGGAGE
Run, hide! alien apocalypse.
Infectious amnesia. Free on KindleUnlimited or
99 pence/cents smarturl.it/1fexhs
My other books can be found on the Amazon Author page http://author.to/Amazonauthorpage
Or if you fancy a children’s picture book about Timmy the Tornado – a kind of social story to help children grow up and be kind. ebook 99 pence https://payhip.com/b/2aj3
Chester’s Climate
Local to North Wales & Merseyside too. Data, graphs, analysis, Air Pollution
ebook £1.50
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August 17, 2019
#WorldCon in Dublin 2019
The international science fiction convention WorldCon is in Dublin as we speak! I can’t be there because I am recovering from a hernia op but my books are there for me. I hope they’re having a blast. Authors who are there who know of my SUPPOSE WE is Jaine Fenn who said the book has original touches, and Jon Courteney Grimwood who once said I wear science fiction like other people wear clothes – haha. My books are in the main hall on a stall manned by the facebook authors’ services group BooksGoSocial.[image error]
So if you’re in Dublin please pop in, say hello and pick up a 5 euros copy of Suppose We.
If you cannot do that it is on sale as ebook or paperback at
You can read an excerpt at https://geoffnelder.com/excerpt-from-suppose-we/
NELDER NEWS
The Other side of the Pebble is a short story of mine giving Goliath’s version of the event in the bible with David. Facts as I could ascertain them from various historical sources are accurate with a tweak of my imagination. Goliath was bullied as a boy and well it is in this
http://www.alternate-history-fiction.com/magazine/ahf-magazine-6.html
INCREMENTAL is an amazing collection of surreal shorts. For a tenner, you can laugh, be amazed, and blurt into your coffee. paperback or as a Kindle and KindleUnlimited
[image error]Xaghra’s Revenge is set in Malta Libya, a harem in Constantinople and in France.
When pirates abducted 5000 from Gozo in 1551 revenge was inevitable even though it took 500 years for me to give it to them. Free on KindleUnlimited
ARIA LEFT LUGGAGE
Run, hide! alien apocalypse.
Infectious amnesia. Free on KindleUnlimited or
99 pence/cents smarturl.it/1fexhs
My other books can be found on the Amazon Author page http://author.to/Amazonauthorpage
[image error]Or if you fancy a children’s picture book about Timmy the Tornado – a kind of social story to help children grow up and be kind. ebook 99 pence https://payhip.com/b/2aj3
Chester’s Climate
Local to North Wales & Merseyside too. Data, graphs, analysis
Air Pollution ebook £1.50
The post #WorldCon in Dublin 2019 appeared first on Geoff Nelder - Science Fiction Writer.
June 12, 2019
#Vegan in #Prague
Two big surprises for me in Prague. Everyone knows it’s a cultural city, steeped in history both ancient and modern. Even before the Slavs occupied Bohemia in the 6th century, there were Celts and German peoples living there. The city became a hub for culture, science, arts and the Hapsburgs over the centuries. Upheavals during the first and second world wars and a mix of feelings over Communist rule until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 saw through many changes. Ironically, the city kind of stayed the same, physically, since then. That is, the buildings, streets, trams, bridges, the large student population and an esprit de corps inhabit the city like a warm glow.
[image error]First surprise is the abundance of vegan eateries. I was concerned I’d not find much to eat last week and my rucksack bulged with emergency nosh. Silly because I can easily and happily subsist on fruit and nuts. Throw beans, rocket and chips at me in addition and I’m as happy as a Martian hamster. Interestingly, vegan bistros have gone through phases. The first I used was in Huddersfield in the 1970s – all organic, wholefood stuff with a rough wooden décor and a definite Bob Dylan music atmosphere. Then posh vegan nosh such as Cranks in London with prices above the ceiling. In Prague, out of a dozen or so vegan restaurants, bistros and eateries were a couple I didn’t fancy. They looked a bit scruffy, unhygienic. It’s as if vegan is now so normal that ‘greasy spoon’ vegan cafes are popping up. An excellent vegan bistro is Country Life close to the famous Astronomical Clock (built in the 15th century – after completion the designer had a hot iron blind him so he couldn’t make another for a rival city. He took his revenge by sneaking in – probably with his apprentice’s help – and sabotaged the clock. The authorities couldn’t get it to work for another 80 years – sweet revenge)
Second surprise came on the compulsory tourist trip to Prague Castle. As I strolled along the Golden Lane, or in Czech Zlatá ulička, I was entranced by the little terraced cottages built in the 16th century for the castle workforce and later for anyone who paid the rent. I stumbled across a notice: Franz Kafka stayed at number 22. What? I’d read his Metamorphosis (1915) years ago. It’d led me to a similar kind of surreal thinking and writing. My pulse galloped making me race through even the exhibit of medieval torture instruments to find #22. It’s tiny. Both Kafka and one of his sisters needed somewhere away from the hubbub of city life. She rented it in 1916 and he visited it after working at an insurance company to write. I was lucky: there is a tiny shop inside and I was able to buy Kafka’s A Country Doctor, a collection of shorts he wrote in that room! Marvellous. Kafka was a veggie with a mother who was a butcher. He was an atheist in a Jewish family. He was anxious because of many things such as the war, his overbearing father, and not getting his novels published until after he died. [image error]
His tendency to existential thinking led to such a phrase in A Country Doctor as when the doc visits his patient: I am feeling sick in the narrow confines of the old man’s thinking.
Look into his eyes to see his thoughts. [image error]Poor Kafka died of tuberculosis at 40, while I am the old man with crazy surreal writing to his mad genius. It boosts my flagging ego when readers sometimes describe my writing as Kafkaesque. Prof Stanley Salmon said so of my View From story in INCREMENTAL – in that short story a man wakes up on the ceiling…
Speaking of my surreal writing, decent reviews are already popping up of my vegan scifi SUPPOSE WE on Amazon and this one at the prestigious SF review site SF Crowsnest
For a taste of my surreal books head for https://geoffnelder.com
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May 23, 2019
Excerpt from SUPPOSE WE
From Chapter 12 in SUPPOSE WE Science fiction novella by Geoff Nelder
Setting: An exploration mission from Earth on Kepler-20h goes wrong. Their ship,
[image error]
Alt cover for Suppose We by Peter Baldiccino
Suppose We, crashlands and they need local assistance but are ignored. Their commander becomes unhinged during the 1062 years hibernation sleep and their AI has become weird too. French science officer befriends an alien butterfly and he can’t help quoting the Flying Crooked poem by Robert Graves and yet, unbeknown to him the butterfly is a virtual part of the planet’s most ancient Kep (a few thousand years old) and not the infant Kep the Frenchman thinks he is.
Scene: alien planet. The four humans see three pale natives glide towards them: their first contact.
Less than a hundred metres to go. The Keps hadn’t slowed nor changed colour. The shimmering continued in a kind of random flow in their skin, apparel, whatever. Gaston recalled the floating one he saw, but you couldn’t see space between the ground and these three even though they appeared to glide. Their faces were a smudge, assuming the more bulbous top quarter was a head. Hard to see their eyes or any orifice. He offered a thought to the others.
“Perhaps they are gel robots?”
“Or not even the local intelligentsia, but pets,” Em said. “Or this region’s wildlife. It might be like Captain Cook in 1771 asking a kangaroo if it’s had a nice day.”
Delta replied, “Suppose it is us who are the kangaroos?”
At fifty metres the figures could be seen more clearly although clarity would be an exaggeration. The three were at least distinguishable by height, width and subtle hues, possibly facial protuberances and indentations changing as if talking to each other.
A purple creature, a squirrel-sized centipede scuttled across the intervening rocky ground. Up and over low boulders and straight through thorny bushes. It stopped halfway, appeared to look at the approaching figures then at the humans then accelerated away out of sight.
It added to the eldritch, surreal nature of the moment.
“I’m quite light-headed,” Gaston confessed, “Delta, you have the loudest voice. Call out a hello?”
“Gee, thanks, but okay.” Between Gaston and Em she took a step forward and held out her arms, hands outwards.
She first whispered, “This is going to sound so corny, but they won’t understand English anyway.
“Hi, how’re you doing? We’re from Earth and we come in peace.”
Gaston worked hard to suppress hilarity at the banality of such a speech even though his preferred bonjour and ça va was hardly any different. His suppressed laugh transformed to the smile they’d agreed in spite of interpretation issues. His fidgeting fingers attempted to be still while open to show lack of weaponry. A sop to its ancient provenance with Roman soldiers greeting strangers. His nervousness at this first contact was modified only a little by thinking how in history it would be Delta who’d be noted for her initial speech. Such bravery too. If they were hostile, she could have been killed on the spot. Had she considered that?
Just ten metres and they’d not slowed. They would now see the whites of his eyes even if he could not say the same of them. He was surprised they’d not stopped to greet or shoo off these invading Earthlings. His initial euphoria albeit infected with nerves now disintegrated into an element of fear. His knees threatened to give way again. Perhaps Penn was right to keep out of their way even if not completely hidden.
“I said, hi, folks. We’re friendly,” Delta said stepping back in line.
With a shaky voice Em gasped, “Do you think they’re blind? Seriously? Maybe they don’t see us at all. I hear clicking, so they must hear.” She took a couple of steps back.
Gaston’s stomach knotted with dismay that he’d not thought of that possibility. Blind and deaf, at least to human frequencies. Non, it didn’t make sense. There’s daylight and air, so unless they’re above the surface by accident or a rare visit, they would have sensory perception in this environment. They must be able to detect our presence just five metres from them.
Another metre. Perhaps he was wrong, it had happened before.
Gaston stepped back and to the left a little while calling out, “Bonjour!”
Em waved her arms, took a couple of sideways steps out of the Keps’ apparent path and called in her English accent, “Hello there, we’ve come an awfully long way to see you.”
The creatures didn’t slow and advanced at walking pace even though their bodies didn’t quite touch the ground. So close now that Gaston caught a mildly pungent zing of ozone, reminding him of electrical sparking at fairgrounds. He was afraid Penn would shoot, so said to all, “Let us step away in case they really cannot detect our presence.”
Now only Delta stood her ground.
One metre to go and Delta had closed her eyes. Penn took a step towards her to yank her sideways, but he was too late.
Delta’s scream shot through Gaston as the tallest creature walked into her. The Kep travelled straight through her as if she wasn’t there, or made of non-solid matter. No lacerations and no blood. Delta stood there screaming, but intact. The three Keps carried on as if nothing unusual had happened.
Gaston held Delta’s arm in case she fell but let go when Em hugged her and asked, “Are you hurt?”
After a pause when Delta looked down, wriggled her fingers and then closed her eyes for a moment she said, “No. Not at all. How weird was that? Its body went through my body as if I wasn’t there.”
Penn laughed. “As if—ah that’s it, they must have been holograms. Where are they now?”
They all looked behind them at the cliff. Gaston pointed up at the tunnel exit. “There. How did they get up so quickly? And, Penn, I don’t think they’re holograms. I could smell them. We could see its form intersecting, travelling through Delta. Did you feel anything?”
“I still feel odd. Like a mild electric shock from front to back. I thought I heard clicking noises though it could’ve been my teeth before I started to scream.”
Em hugged her tighter. “I heard dolphin-like clicks too. So, all we have to do is learn castanet-speak.”
Penn used the scope to examine the backs of the Keps as they drifted into the tunnel. “Could it be their molecules passed through hers through all that space between atoms? You know, like sitting on a chair that is really mostly empty space?”
Gaston shook his head. “Normally, two atoms can’t occupy the same space. Quantum Mechanics say that two electrons with the same spin state cannot occupy the quantum orbital state. However, who knows what trickery future science can do? Temporal bond displacement. Perhaps they’re mostly non-baryonic matter. No. Si’l vous plait a chance to ask them.”
A membrane appeared over the tunnel exit, but the humans looked away and towards the settlement.
Penn laughed. “If they can come through us, then we can walk through them.”
***
If the above extract tickles your retinas you can read the whole novella as an ebook or paperback via Amazon and free on Kindle Unlimited.
Universal link https://mybook.to/SupposeWe
If even a novella is too long at 165 pages for you, try my 25 best surreal shorts in [image error]INCREMENTAL.
For example: When John woke up on the ceiling he knew he was in big trouble or another of Nelder’s weird people in his anthology INCREMENTAL For the cost of a coffee & cake you can laugh, be amazed, and blurt into your coffee.
http://mybook.to/Incremental
free on Kindle Unlimited
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May 14, 2019
SUPPOSE WE is released!
Is there anything special about May 20th?
Yes! Five important events occurred on that day:
1498 Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama discovers the sea route to India.
1609 Shakespeare’s sonnets are published for the first time.
1932 Amelia Earhart is the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic.
1972 Gaynor Smith marries Geoff Nelder in Latchford Methodist Chapel tucked in between the Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal. Yes 47 years ago!
2019 SUPPOSE WE is published – the first surreal science fiction novella in the Flying Crooked series.
Blurb:
When a ship crashlands on a faraway planet the crew needs local help. Unfortunately, the natives are a million years ahead of us. Ignored, the crew has to find a way to get attention.
Bringing back a sense of discovery and wonder to science fiction.
Magdelena Ball at Compulsive Reader: There’s always an element of action, a hint of steamy romance, and Nelder’s trademark twist.
John F Keane there is great sensory engagement here and many great phrases and descriptions. A masterclass in those, in fact.
It’s not May 20th yet but you can preorder the Kindle on Amazon already at
https://mybook.to/SupposeWe
[image error]The image is on this strange planet in the Keplerian 20 system and so is the butterfly. It’s alien. It’s not a real butterfly yet wondrous.
Published with great foresight by the indie publisher LL-Publications.
ASIN: B07RQW5LHR
More info at https://www.facebook.com/AriaTrilogy
The post SUPPOSE WE is released! appeared first on Geoff Nelder - Science Fiction Writer.
