Traverse through realms far and wide with seven unique tales from four veteran authors. Sharpen your blades, clean your guns, and never look back.
New sci-fi short story available!
One Foul Step from the Abyss
Edgar Lopez, a rotund man about to crest the final hill that separated middle age from senility, scratched his chin in amazement. “Thirty years I’ve worked here…” he muttered to himself and the glazed donut sitting on a cheap paper napkin in front of him.
“What’s that, Ed?” Gabriella, one of the college interns, called from her desk a few feet away. In the astronomy world, Edgar was something of a legend. He had worked at the Apollo Observatory and Space Research Facility longer than the handful of interns had been alive. He had a well-earned reputation and a list of awards and achievements that would make any scientist blush.
Despite his history, he didn’t feel like a legend. He felt like a failure. A stack of field reports sat on Edgar’s desk and stared at him. It was his last day, and Edgar had resolved himself to let his paperwork rot.
“Ed?” Gabriella asked again, this time with a hint of concern lacing her otherwise beautiful Spanish accent.
“Oh, nothing,” he told her politely, “just wandering off. You know how it gets.” Gabriella nodded and returned to her computer screen. “Oh, Gabriella?” He peeked his head over his monitor with the flash of an idea running through his head.
“Yes?” the eager intern replied. Edgar wasn’t sure, but he vaguely remembered that Gabriella was only a sophomore at the university and a foreign transfer at that. She would blindly follow him anywhere… and she wouldn’t be missed.
Edgar rose from his desk with the lumbering speed of a limp sloth. A lifetime of watching the stars through a telescope had added more weight to his belly than glazed donuts and coffee ever could. “Come with me,” he told her. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Gabriella verily leapt to her feet and grabbed a field report clipboard from a peg on the wall. “Yes, sir!” she chirped at his heels. While everyone called him Ed when he was at his desk, the moment he stood up changed the rules. Since the observatory was located on the grounds of an active military base, proper protocol had to be followed everywhere outside the offices.
Edgar made his way down a long hallway surrounded by computer monitors and busy interns. He smiled to himself and basked in the realization that he would never have to return to the observatory again. In just a few short hours, his time would be up.
Edgar and Gabriella arrived a few moments later at a large black door two floors beneath the office area. Large red letters across the top of the door told them where they were: the Deep Space Tele Relay.
“I don’t think I’m allowed to go in there, sir,” Gabriella said apprehensively. “Professor Moun-”
“Never mind your professors,” Edgar interrupted. With a heavy hand he unlocked the door and flipped on a light switch. A long hallway with several glass doors presented itself.
“What is this place?” Gabriella asked as she followed Edgar into the hallway.
“The Deep Space Tele Relay was built in 1978 after the Wow! Signal was picked up by the Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio State. It took a while to get it calibrated, lot of tinkering and the like, but we had it operational by the eighties.” Edgar stopped in front of a sliding glass door and pointed to the banks of computers and technicians working inside. In front of the four rows of computers was a giant screen with dozens of technical readouts and constantly changing charts and graphs.
“What does it do?” she whispered, peering through the glass like a little girl at a puppy store.
“After the Wow! Signal, we knew we weren’t alone. The public knew it too, but for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to care as much as us nerds here. We built the relay to send messages to the exact location where the Wow! Signal originated.” Edgar kept walking down the long hallway to another heavy black door.
The intern stopped in her tracks, and her voice caught in her throat. “I-I was taught that we never heard anything after the Wow! Signal. None of the radio arrays ever picked up anything like it again. That’s what we were all taught.” Gabriella shook her head, and a creeping sensation in her stomach told her to turn back. None of it made sense. The black door at the end of the hall lurked like a huge monster from her nightmares ready to devour her.
“Don’t believe everything your professors teach you, Gabriella,” Edgar said with a casual laugh. He punched in a long sequence of numbers on a metallic keypad next to the door. A series of clicking sounds emanated from the mechanism, and for the first time that day, Edgar smiled. “A few years after the Wow! Signal was recorded, the deep space tele relay located the origin. It was moving at an incredible speed, so it was hard to track at first.”
Gabriella’s eyes grew wide. “What source? A pulsar? A quasar? Those don’t move, do they?” Everything she had learned in all her advanced astrophysics and astronomy classes was rapidly dissolving into useless dribble inside her brain.
Edgar chuckled and turned to face her with a hand on the doorknob. “Everyone expected the source of the signal to be a quasar. You’re right… quasars don’t move. No, what the tele relay discovered was a vehicle traveling at near the speed of light.”
“My god…” Gabriella gasped. She muttered something inaudible under her breath in Spanish. “Why hasn’t the world been told? Why are you keeping it a secret?” For a brief moment, she thought of fleeing the observatory and running straight to the press.
Edgar laughed and pushed open the door. A world of strange sounds and flashing lights spilled into the otherwise dark hallway. Gabriella’s senses were completely overwhelmed. “Come with me,” Edgar commanded with just enough authority in his voice to ensure that Gabriella obeyed. All thoughts of running vanished the moment she took a step.
“The world isn’t ready to know, Gabriella,” Edgar explained as he walked into the laboratory. Dozens of scientists in white lab coats worked at stations with computers, beakers, slides of organic material, and all other sorts of equipment. Despite the door rarely being opened, none of the scientists seemed to notice the new arrivals.
“How long has this been down here?” Gabriella wondered aloud. She stepped out of the way of a scurrying scientist and noticed a smell she certainly knew but had trouble identifying. The scientist bowled past her to a large metal box with a series of complex locks. Once he opened the door, the man placed what looked like a tissue sample inside and locked the container once more.
“Watch. I think you’ll enjoy this part.” Edgar pointed to the box and took a step closer. After a moment, the device began to hum and vibrate with energy.
“That smell…” Gabriella remarked, still struggling to place it in her mind.
Edgar gave the woman a fatherly pat on the back. “We were surprised too,” he said. “The material they use to coat their communications smells like cedar mixed with dark chocolate. Altogether quite pleasant, if you ask me. We call it Gwycin Gel.”
“Wait…” Despite her advanced intellect and years of training, her mind couldn’t grasp the realities of what she was learning. “A substance to coat communications?” She shook her head. Then her eyes went wide and she gasped. “Who is they!” she practically screamed. “Who are they?”
Several of the scientists at nearby stations turned for a moment to regard her outburst, but none of them were bothered enough to speak. Edgar turned the intern to face a large poster hanging inside a protective glass case. “Have you heard of the Greys?”
Gabriella’s eyes devoured the information on the poster faster than her mind could process it, turning the images and captions into a blurred mess of science fiction delirium. “You can’t mean…” she sputtered.
“Oh yes,” Edgar reassured her. “The Greys are very real. When we finally locked onto their ship’s signal back in the early eighties, we couldn’t believe it either.”
“Roswell?” Gabriella asked with eyes wider than flying saucers.
Edgar shook his head. “Just another CIA hoax,” he explained. “The Greys had never been to Earth before 1986—or so they tell us. Honestly, we don’t know. All the evidence leads us to believe that none of the UFO stories you’ve ever heard are true, but in the end, we have to take them at their word.”
Gabriella looked back to the poster and the half-sized drawings of little grey aliens that fit the international stereotype so perfectly. A million questions whirled through her head at once. “Where did they land?” seemed like the most pertinent inquiry to rise above the maelstrom of her thoughts.
“Not far from here, just an hour or so south of the base.” Edgar motioned for the intern to follow him deeper into the complex, and the wide-eyed girl readily obeyed. “Ever heard of Hanger 18?” he asked.
Gabriella followed the man down a long hallway. “Only on the History Channel when they talk about…” she had a hard time saying it, despite knowing it was all true. “Aliens…” The word left a sour—yet intoxicating—taste in her mouth.
“That’s where they docked their ship,” Edgar explained as though he was stating something as banal and mundane as the color of the carpet.
“What ship?” Gabriella shouted, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.
“Shhh.” Edgar placed a hand somewhat forcefully on her shoulder and stared into her brown eyes. “You know…” he began slowly, drawing the intern’s intense gaze into his own. “Would you like… to meet one of them?”
Read the rest online at Simily.co
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Interview with Avery Dox, Sci-fi Extraordinaire!
Thanks for doing an interview! Right out of the gate, tell us about your series!
In short, it’s about a handful of characters whose lives are dramatically impacted by the discovery of cross-temporal communication (or in other words, a primitive modem that sends and receives binary data across different threads of time). It’s alternate world, set in a vast Pangea-like land mass, pre-continental drift. Different countries surround a large bay, each in various stages of technological advancement and economic development. Most of our characters live in Tenoch, a coastal nation-state currently undergoing a rapid industrial revolution, outpacing its former allies. Without giving too much away, the mass adoption of this new forward-looking technology has transformative effects on civilization.
How did you come up with the ideas that fuel your futuristic world? What kind of things give you inspiration?
I’m a software engineer by trade (and an amateur roboticist on the side), so the idea of interacting with binary data was already semi-familiar. Reading about quantum entanglement and how it violates relativity fascinated me; I got to wondering how exactly it’d work with time dilation at a binary level. I remember reading Jurassic Park as a kid, and Michael Crichton’s explanation of getting dino DNA from fossilized mosquitos blew me away. His inclusion of genetics in the plot provided a sense of plausibility that I hadn’t felt in a story before. I tried to emulate that feeling with this series. My hope was to promise the reader something that would make a huge impact on civilization—as lofty as the wheel, electricity, the internet etc.—without it being a let-down.
Sci-fi is full of awesome technology and terrifying advancements. Tell us about one thing you expect to see invented in the future that will benefit mankind and one thing that will ruin it.
I read about researchers in Russia who’ve been semi-successful in reconstructing imagery using brain waves, similar to those captured in an EEG. Elon Musk is working on something along those lines as well, with AI/ML enhancements. Some people may imagine this as a step toward some Cyberpunky/dystopian wasteland, but honestly, it sounds awesome. It’ll take a while for the technology to mature (obviously), but with all the time people spend interacting with phones and computers and tablets, the idea of a direct neural interface seems like a logical step forward. (On my never-ending task list, I have this absurd project to buy a home EEG kit with a USB output, hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and record my brainwaves while I think about something discrete, like a specific color or object. Then I can run that data through an ML image classifier and see how distinct the patterns are. Maybe I can change channels without a remote!)
Biggest threat to humanity? Maybe this is too serious of an answer, but any sudden imbalance of “mutually assured destruction” is truly terrifying. I realize the Cold War is over, but still…the sheer volume of annihilation that could occur in under five minutes absolutely boggles my mind. Rich Sanchez would say “just don’t think about it,” which is probably good advice. (Also, if you’re in Arizona, check out the Titan Missile Museum—lots of interesting stuff about MAD there.)
Being a writer is hard work. What aspects of the author life have you enjoyed the most and what’s been a pain?
More and more, it seems like individual creators are losing ground to larger enterprises. Gaming is a good example. I’ve toyed around with building games in Unity, but why would anyone bother to play my low-budget indy game instead of a triple-A masterpiece? Most gamers (myself included) expect pristine graphics, motion capture, endless side quests, etc. Anything short of that is subpar. Big gaming studios have entire TEAMS of people dedicated to nothing but particle systems! I can’t compete with that. On the plus side, the games are truly amazing, but for solo developers, most won’t bother producing anything on their own.
Writing, on the other hand, is a creative area that’s less susceptible to enterprise expansion. Sure, some big authors probably have researchers and ghostwriters and whatnot, but for the most part, each storyteller undertakes the same tasks: create a story, develop characters, set scenes, etc. Most still use Word or typewriters. It’s one of the few areas left where a solo creator can still be competitive.
As for challenges, the hardest part for me is maintaining a cohesive story—and all the themes and foreshadowing and everything that comes with it—throughout multiple books. Maybe I’ve gotten cynical, but establishing intrigue is easy—the hard part is delivering on it. Everyone’s been sucked into an intriguing story only to feel shortchanged in the end. When there’s no eventual payoff, the reader feels duped, and it can retroactively sour the entire work for them.
What’s next on the horizon for your writing career?
I’m debating between another series and a one-off novel. Either way, it’ll be the same genre: probably some kind of hard sci-fi, a little gritty, with occasional tech/existential concepts. The “alternate world” theme has been falling out of fashion for a while now, so my next project will probably be set in something more familiar, but I haven’t decided just yet.
Thanks for doing the interview! Where can readers go to find more?
Thanks for having me! My Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/Avery-Dox-114805126582598
Ebook/audiobooks for sale here (among other outlets): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089GXTP73?ref_=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_tkin&binding=kindle_edition
Publisher info here: https://deadreckoningpress.com/theschema
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Interview with Sci-fi author Alex Hansen
Firstly, I noticed a set of The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote in your author photo. Does history influence your writing? Have you ever written anything related to the Civil War?
Good eye!
I've only read maybe 25% of Foote's trilogy. I do like history, and I'm especially interested by my own country's history, but reading about it is just a hobby. Those books are beasts, but more and more I keep thinking that finishing them will just have to be one of those things I put off until retirement.
I don't read or write much historical fiction and I'm not sure why. I guess it's just not really my thing…although The Killer Angels is a notable exception. That one's definitely among my favorites.
Take us through your bibliography. You have several releases on Amazon. Where did your writing begin? What did you think when your first novel was released? How have things changed?
The first thing I self-published online was a novel called The Weather Man. It's presented as the main character's blog transcript, complete with reader comments and the occasional flamewar. I've been scribbling down stupid little stories and things for as long as I can remember, but this was the first time that I spent so much time and so much energy on a piece of my writing. Publishing it on Amazon gave me a pretty overwhelming rush. It's exhilarating to create something that only existed as jumbled ideas in your head, solidify it into a purposeful shape, and then throw it out into the universe like it belongs there. I got that same kind of rush from my second novel, Tiem Mechine, too, although I have a feeling that the first time will probably remain the most memorable for a good long while.
I also released a pair of short stories called A Vampire's Proposal and The Kill Room between the two novels, but that was mostly because I felt weird going more than a year without a second release on my Amazon resume. So I threw in a couple of shorts to break the silence.
Starting this year, I'm releasing a series of novellas that are adapted from my fantasy web serial entitled The New Devil. I have the first three volumes up so far, with at least five more to come.
As I publish more, I'm learning a lot about how to do it. I've been writing and revising and writing more since I was a little kid, so I was used to learning how to write better. But when it came to self-publishing, how to format ebooks, where to release them and how to market them, I was completely clueless. I still feel pretty clueless, but the more I do it, the more I'm forced to learn to do it better.
Explain the title of your sci-fi novel "Tiem Mechine" for those of us who still might think its a typo. Where did you get the inspiration for that novel?
Yeah…that title was kind of a gamble for an indie author!
In the opening pages of the novel, the protagonist buys a time travel device from an alien. The alien was a marketing consultant for a corporation from space that had been attempting to sell advanced technology to humans. Thinking that humans would freak out if they realized little green men were peddling space-age tech, they intentionally misspelled "Tiem Mechine" on the box so that everybody would just assume it was a bad translation for a Japanese product or something.
The main inspiration for that book was the Back to the Future movies. Those blend kind of a soft science fiction with comedy and adventure so well, and I personally get a huge kick out of how confusing it all is, especially in the second film, when there are two Marty McFlys running around at his parents' prom. So I decided I wanted to write a time travel story that was so ridiculously complicated that even most of the characters struggled to figure out what was going on. It took a lot of planning, and a lot of headaches, but I think I managed to create a really messy series of timelines so that all the events play out with a crazy, circuitous kind of logic. My hope is that the plot is confusing enough to be funny but just comprehensible enough for my readers to follow it without tearing their hair out.
Have you read the classics of sci-fi or fantasy? Do any authors in particular stand out as "must-reads" for fans of the genres?
I greatly prefer sci-fi to fantasy, personally. I mean, I've read the Lord of the Rings, and it's wonderful story, but after that I don't have much appetite for high fantasy. I've read some of the Narnia books, I really enjoyed the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and I used to love those Redwall series when I was a kid.
Sci-fi has a lot more appeal to me. The Foundation books by Isaac Asimov are a must-read, as far as I'm concerned. Fantastic Voyage and I, Robot by Asimov are up there too. For something a little more recent, I love me some Crichton, especially Jurassic Park, Prey, and Timeline.
My favorite sci-fi writer, however, was a young adult author whose books I stumbled across in a Scholastic catalogue when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. His name was William Sleator, and the book I ordered was called The Boy Who Reversed Himself. It was about a kid who could travel into to a fourth spatial dimension. It was a complicated concept to explain in a young adult book, but he did it and he blew my mind…all while telling a pretty great story.
When you write, are you more of a planner and note taker or a write-as-I-go author?
Both. Neither.
It depends on what I'm writing. I usually start off with a premise and a general ending in mind, and if the subject matter isn't too complicated, I like to fly by the seat of my pants. If I'd tried that with something like Tiem Mechine, though, I never would have been able to finish a first draft. I feel like my stuff is trending a little bit more toward plot complexity lately, and I'm starting to take my planning a lot more seriously.
If your work could be favorably compared to any current main stream author, who would you choose? What about their works makes them a literary icon?
Oh, man, that's a tough question.
Gun to my head, I'd probably have to say Dean Koontz, which seems weird. I don't think we're particularly similar, but I have a lot of respect for his work. He can craft some creepy, messed-up stories, but he manages to accurately portray a wide spectrum of human emotion in them, and he knows how to keep them light and funny to balance out the less pleasant stuff. I shed a few tears over Lightning and Odd Thomas, and I laughed my way through them, too. That's a delicate balance that I'd like to get the hang of someday. I don't know if he's a literary icon, but Dean Koontz is probably my favorite living novelist.
Have you read any other indie authors? Any that you would recommend?
I've read a few. My favorite indie authors to enter the non-traditional arena of self-publishing mostly started off in the even-less-traditional world of serial web fiction. There's The Zombie Knight by George M. Frost, which is action-packed and insanely intricate, Hidden, an urban fantasy series by Colleen Vanderlinden, and Hobson & Choi, a quirky detective story by Nick Bryan.
Isaac Asimov once published an article where he outlined the three types of science fiction. He defined them as gadget, adventure, and social. Do you buy into his theory? Which type does your sci-fi fit into?
I hate to disagree with Asimov, because I have tons of respect for the guy…and, let's face it, he has approximately 342 times the education that I have. But I don't think things always break down so cleanly. I mean, Tiem Mechine probably fits pretty safely inside the adventure sci-fi category, but I'm sure there are plenty of stories that qualify for more than one. But from where I'm sitting, I think it's safe to say that probably all science fiction can fit into any one or any combination of Asimov's three classifications.
What direction do you see for your writing in the future? When is your next anticipated release? Any big changes on the horizon?
Hopefully my third novel, tentatively titled Their Works Shall Be in the Dark, will be out in March or April. The next few months should also be peppered with subsequent volumes of The New Devil. The only big change I'm hoping for is putting out better material at a faster rate!
Rough recording of one of my short stories as audio book
I am currently in the process of getting audio books recorded for my novels. In the meantime, as a way to vet voice actors, I listen to their recordings of my short stories. Here is a really good one that I think will end up winning my vote and get the job. Let me know what you think.