Category Archives: Science Fiction

Anthology Submission Call—Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered

On June 20, 1870, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was published, giving the world a new type of vessel, and a new type of pirate.

The novel’s original cover

150 years later, on June 20, 2020, Pole to Pole Publishing will launch Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered, a sesquicentennial tribute to Verne’s masterwork. The kind folks at Pole to Pole have asked me to co-edit this anthology along with Kelly A. Harmon, and I’m honored to do so. Here’s the submission call.

But we’ll need stories, people! What’s your take on this novel? What story can you write?

You’ve got a few months until we open the antho to receive submissions, but Pole to Pole accepts stories as they go, and they’ve always filled their previous anthologies before the closing deadline.

Watch this space for more news about this upcoming anthology. For now, all the details are here.

In the meantime, let your imagination voyage as freely as Captain Nemo did within the Nautilus. Write your story. Eagerly waiting to read your submissions, I’m the co-editor—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

September 22, 2019Permalink

Author Interview – M. W. Kelly

You’ll enjoy reading my interview with an author whose debut novel just got published. A mutual friend and former submariner introduced me to my guest today, M. W. Kelly, a writer who also spent a lot of time beneath the waves.

M. W. Kelly became hooked on science after Neil Armstrong took an epic stroll one Sunday morning in July 1969. He later served as a submarine officer based in Scotland and New England. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Bryant University, and Swinburne University. After leaving the Navy, he spent two decades teaching college physics and astronomy. A member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers (RMFW) and the Hawai’i Writers Guild, Kelly loves reading and writing mind-bending literature. As a flight instructor, he has also published a column on flying among the Hawaiian Islands. He lives with his wife, Patty, in Colorado, and they spend their summers in Hawai’i.

Let’s dive into the interview…

Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you? 

M. W. Kelly: My father was a writer and instilled the importance of writing every day. I started with short stories just for fun. The short form is a great way to force yourself to craft a story that’s both concise and intriguing. I think the skills you practice writing short stories apply equally well to novels.

P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books? 

M.W.K.: I grew up reading the classics by A.C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. I really enjoyed hard science fiction best. The engineer in me craved cool technology, and the science geek in me demanded realism. After reading PKD’s books, I fell in love with speculative fiction having a strong character arc. This probably influenced my writing more than anything else. I just finished Ian McEwan’s latest book, Machines Like Me. It’s a wonderfully written example of character-driven science fiction. Fans of PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka. Blade Runner) will love it. It’s thought provoking and raises questions about the limits of machine logic and moral decision-making.

P.S.: Give us the elevator pitch about your new novel, Mauna Kea Rising (Lost in the Multiverse).  

M.W.K.: My readers tell me that Mauna Kea Rising is science fiction for people who hate science fiction. In the tradition of Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, character comes first, and science only adds spice to the hero’s journey. It’s set in a parallel world where the British Hawaiian Islands sit between rival superpowers, Japan and the UK. A single mother takes her son on a sailing voyage to Hawai’i, hoping to recapture the bond they once shared. Isolated at sea, the boat’s crew is unaware of a catastrophic solar flare. Throughout the Pacific, power grids fail. Cities plunge into darkness.

P.S.: Where did you get the idea for this novel, and the eventual series?

M.W.K.: The story’s premise came to me from years of teaching college astronomy, covering strange apocalyptic possibilities such as supernovae, asteroid strikes, and solar flares. One of my students joked that a better name for my course would be “Death by Astronomy.” But seriously, as we come to depend more on technology in everyday life, many solar astronomers warn us that a powerful solar storm could wreak widespread damage to our modern power grids. It only takes a temporary blackout to remind us how much we depend upon a continuous and reliable source for electricity. Think back to the last time your power went out, then imagine living like that for a year or longer. The people of Puerto Rico have had to endure this hardship for over twenty months. How did they do it? They adapted to simpler lifestyles and relied on each other for community support, but it’s a difficult struggle and over three thousand people perished.

The story’s setting came from my annual trips to Hawai’i. I fell in love with the aloha spirit and grew a deep respect for their self-sustaining way of life. The state is a leading developer of wind, solar, and geothermal power technology. Three years ago, the governor signed a bill directing the state’s power utilities to generate all their electricity from renewable energy resources by 2045.

P.S.: How is the parallel universe of your novel different from our own?

M.W.K.: The parallel world found in the novel differs in social-economic ways. America with only 48 states is akin to Switzerland, preferring to stay out of foreign affairs. Russia and China have lost world prominence after the Second Sino-Japanese War. Hitler never rose to power, and the Second World War never came about. Japan and the United Kingdom are superpowers where Britain rules the seas, and Japan explores the solar system.  Hawaii-50 is now the British Hawaiian Islands, a member of the (UK) Commonwealth of Nations.

P.S.: Was there a point of divergence from our universe, and if so, what was it?

M.W.K.: The setting for my series grew out of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.  The American physicist Hugh Everett first proposed every possibility embodied in Schrödinger’s probability waves is realized in one of a vast landscape of an infinite number of universes. The quantum multiverse creates a new universe when a diversion in events occurs, known as a “branch-point.” Whenever we decide upon some action, we create a branch-point in our timeline. Say you flip a coin. While it’s in the air, it has two possible future states: heads and tails. When you observe the outcome, you might see heads, but tails also exists—unobserved in a parallel world. In this way, a different universe branches from the previous one, creating a new world timeline. One copy of us sees heads, and another copy sees tails. Without giving too much away, each of the main characters in each book creates a branch-point where Earth’s world-timeline diverges. The Earth on which we live continues on, but now we have parallel, slightly different copies of our world.

P.S.: The cover image for Mauna Kea Rising is striking, very eye catching. Can you tell us about the image and how it relates to the novel?

M.W.K.: Thank you. I think the book cover turned out well because of the help many people gave me. After searching for months, I found a graphic artist in Germany whose covers jelled with my vision. She created a cover design that touched on two of the book’s major aspects: the solar storm and a strong female protagonist. After a few designs, I tested sample covers with about a dozen readers. Some were the book’s beta readers, others were science fiction fans. For those who hadn’t read an earlier draft, I provided a blurb or synopsis, so they knew the book’s premise. After getting their impressions, I finalized the book design.

P.S.: Your story involves the immediate aftermath of a civilization-destroying event. In what ways does your book differ from other post-apocalyptic novels?

M.W.K.: Unlike many apocalyptic thrillers, the book is an adventure story where an eclectic band of friends (a Celtic engineer, Polynesian navigator, and Hawaiian Buddhist) rebuild their lives after an epic solar storm hits Earth. Fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven will appreciate this approach. Like I mentioned earlier, the story centers on a community working together to adjust to life without the power grid. Sorry, no zombies here.

P.S.: It seems you’ve incorporated several aspects of your life into the novel (being a former submariner, teaching physics and astronomy, being a flight instructor, traveling between Colorado and Hawai’i). How did you strike the balance between getting the details right and getting too technical?

M.W.K.: That was hard to do. I imagine your own experience as a submariner reflects this. Back on the boat, it seemed we laced our every utterance with buzz-words. And oh, those acronyms! I think the problem facing guys like us is we are too close to the technology. We may be unaware of what our readers don’t know. That’s where beta readers are invaluable. I carefully chose my reader pool, looking for people from different backgrounds, races, and genders.

P.S.: Yes, it’s a challenge for me, too. What are the easiest, and the most difficult, aspects of writing for you?

M.W.K.: The easiest part of writing a novel is researching and outlining. I guess it’s because these steps come naturally to me after having spent my life in academic research and problem solving. Outlining is also the most fun. Starting with a clean slate is exciting. Everything is possible. The most difficult part is editing, and that’s where I spend most of my time. I work with a dense checklist that would make Admiral Rickover smile. Hopefully, by the fourth draft I’m done and ready to send off to my copy-editor.

P.S.: What is your current work in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about it?

M.W.K.: The second book in the series is a blend of magical realism and hard science fiction. Elle: The Naked Singularity follows the adventures of a main character in Mauna Kea Rising in an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Twenty-year-old Elle Akamu slips from 21st century Earth through spacetime into a parallel universe where she suffers cultural shock in the 1970s British Hawaiian Islands. Lost in the multiverse, she finds life is about confronting her past, finding love, and accepting a new home. A stranger in a strange land, this next book wrestles with our oldest questions—what is the nature of the universe? Are there hidden dimensions around us? What does it mean to be human?

P.S.: Can you give us any hints about what readers can expect as your Multiverse series continues?

M.W.K.: Sure. In keeping with the non-linear concept of time, you can read the other books in any order. I know that sounds a little crazy, but you’ll just have to read them to see for yourself. You might also get new insights by rereading them last-to-first after they all come out. Elle explores aspects of the multiverse and why time travel doesn’t necessarily violate the Grandfather Paradox. The third book, Yesterday’s Destiny, speculates on the point of deviation from our own universe that created the world in the Lost in the Multiverse series.

Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer aspiring writers?

M.W. Kelly: Write and keep writing every day. Don’t read every how-to book on writing—it’ll make your head spin with all the contradictory advice out there. Join a writing group or critique circle. Your writing will improve just by reviewing material other than your own. And that brings me to another activity—reading. Read good material outside of your own genre. You’ll develop a unique voice and story ideas will spring organically if you explore literary styles beyond your own category. A great place to start is Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose.

Thank you, Mark.

Interested readers can find out more about M.W. Kelly at his website, his Facebook author page, on Twitter, Amazon, and Goodreads.

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 14, 2019Permalink

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

My stories are set in lots of places. I finally mapped all of them to date.

Some anthologies and magazines ask writers to come up with a brief author biography. In my bios, I often state, “I take readers on voyages to far-off places.” I wondered if I could capture all these travels on a single map. Here it is:

On this map, green dots indicate published stories and red ones indicate unpublished stories for which I’ve written at least a first draft. There are some stories in which I don’t specify a geographical location, so I can’t show them on the map. In two of my stories, characters venture underground, and I just showed their departure and return points on the surface.

As far as coverage goes, things get cluttered in Europe and the United States. Obviously, I need to write some stories set in Russia, Australia, South America, and Antarctica.

Some writers feel they must travel to the settings of their stories and conduct research to give their tales a sense of credibility. That’s less common with science fiction writers, for obvious reasons.

I’ve traveled to almost none of my story setting locations, and I don’t think it detracts from reader enjoyment. Today’s readers care more about characters than setting, anyway. They crave stories that explore the mysteries, motives, fears, anxieties, and yearnings of the human mind. That’s much harder territory to depict on a map.

Even so, strange and interesting settings are fun to read about, and often the setting itself brings out all those character qualities. Many of us love ‘journey stories,’ and I’ve shown mine as lines on the map.

Well, enough of all that. Are your bags packed? Have you securely fastened your seat belt? Who knows to what extraordinary places you’ll go next with—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

August 4, 2019Permalink

Stepping on the Moon…Again…Someday

As you may have heard, July 20, 2019 marked fifty years since a human first set foot on the Moon. What follows is one fiction writer’s perspective of that event.

Neil Armstrong on the moon

I was eleven years old then, and watched the landing on my family’s small black-and-white TV. I stayed awake to watch the “first step” too, though it occurred close to 10 pm central time. There was no way to watch that live event and not feel pride and awe. Even those who balked at the mission’s expense knew how historic it was.

Fiction writers had long been imagining the moment, and had prepared us for the wonder of it. From Lucian’s True History, to Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Baron Münchhausen’s Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” writers had taken us to Earth’s silver satellite in our imagination.

Later science fiction writers gave the trip greater clarity and realism in such works as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, and Robert Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon.

As a writer of historical technological fiction, I’ve written of flights to the moon occurring before 1969 as well. In “A Tale More True,” a rival of Baron Münchhausen travels to the moon in 1769 using a gigantic clock spring. In “To Be First,” my characters from an alternate Ottoman Empire are returning from the moon in 1933 when the action starts. And in “The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall,” you can read about Dutch citizens traveling to the moon by balloon in the 1830s.

Although fiction writers helped us imagine the first trips to the moon, nobody prepared us for a five-decade lapse in missions. Nobody in 1969 thought we’d finish out the Apollo series of moon landings, and then stay away for over fifty years. If you could travel back in time from 2019 to 1969 and tell that to the world, not a soul would believe you.

The moon was ours! Surely by 1979 we’d have a moon base, then by 1989 a moon colony, and by 1999 the moon would be our springboard for trips to asteroids and other planets. The excited folks of 1969 would inform the time traveler that by 2019, naturally, average families would take trips to the moon for vacations.

How odd that we’ve stuck to our planet and near orbit for close to forty-seven years (since Apollo 17). Historians may well wonder what took humanity so long to go back, given the advances in technology that have occurred since the early 1970s. Here are some possible reasons for the long gap:

  • The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo series ingrained in the public mind that only governments can finance moon missions, and only at colossal expense.
  • The moon wasn’t that exciting, after all. Gray, dusty, airless, and lifeless, it was a place only an astronomer could love.
  • The war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal shattered the public’s former confidence in government’s ability to accomplish great tasks.
  • We’d gone there to accomplish the late President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and to win the supposed ‘space race’ with the Soviet Union. With no further goal, schedule, or apparent rival, we’d lost all impetus for further trips.

We’ll go back to the moon, of course, and with any luck, the next lunar landing will be witnessed by you and by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 21, 2019Permalink

Technology in Fiction

Most of my fiction involves characters struggling with new technology. These days, learning how to contend with technology is a relevant and fascinating problem for all of us, and I enjoy exploring it.

I wondered if I was roaming the full realm of that topic, so I decided to map it. There are several ways to do this, but I chose to create one axis showing technology development stages, and another describing the spectrum of character responses to technology. Then I figured I’d plot my published stories on that map, and color-code the roles my characters played.

If I’d done my job well, I thought, the map would show a good dispersal of scattered points. That is, I’d have written stories covering all the areas, leaving no bare spots.

Without further preamble, here’s the map:

To make it, I chose the stages of technological development posited by the technology forecaster Joseph P. Martino. These are:

1.   Scientific findings: The innovator has a basic scientific understanding of some phenomenon.

2.   Laboratory feasibility: The innovator identified a technical solution to a specific problem and created a laboratory model.

3.   Operating prototype: The innovator built a device intended for a particular operational environment.

4.   Operational use or commercial introduction: The innovation is technologically successful and economically feasible.

5.   Widespread adoption: The innovation proves superior to predecessor technologies and begins to replace them.

6.   Diffusion to other areas: Users adopt the innovation for purposes other than those originally intended.

7.   Social and economic impact: The innovation changed the behavior of society or has somehow involved a substantial portion of the economy.

I then came up with typical responses to technology along a positive-to-negative spectrum: Over-Enthusiastic, Confident, Content, Cautious, Complacent, Dismissive, Fearful, and Malicious.

I grouped my characters into four roles: Discoverer, Innovator, User, and Critic. Some of my stories involve people discovering lost technologies or tech developed by departed aliens, so I had to include that role. The other roles should be obvious.

The resulting map shows many of my published stories, indicated by two-letter abbreviations of their titles. Where a single story occupied two areas, I connected them with a line.

Details of the map aren’t important, but you can tell a couple of things at a glance. First, I’m nowhere close to covering the whole map. I’ve concentrated on the Operating Prototype and Widespread Adoption stages more than the others.

Second, innovators view technologies positively and critics negatively (duh), while users tend to view technology negatively in the early stages and more positively in the later ones.

As far as map coverage goes, I wonder if the Operating Prototype and Widespread Adoption stages provide more opportunity for dramatic stories than the other stages.

Has anybody studied technology in fiction using a similar method? I can imagine a map with hundreds of colored points on it, representing an analysis of hundreds of science fiction stories. It would be fun to see how my stories stack up against those of other authors.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to write. As more of my stories get published, perhaps you’ll see future versions of this map, updated by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 7, 2019Permalink

The History of Science Fiction…So Far

Many people have written histories of Science Fiction, including Anthony Gramuglia, Robert J. Sawyer, and (in infographic form), the artist Ward Shelley. What follows is my version.

I split SF history into five ages. For each age, I’ll give the years covered, some characteristic aspects, how the age reacted against the previous age, and a list of representative authors. The timeframe for each age is approximate; within each, some authors wrote works hearkening back to the age before, and some presaged the age that followed. My lists of authors are short and therefore incomplete. I’m only discussing text works here; the history of SF in movies tended to lag behind that of written works. Here we go:

Age of Wonder

This covered the time before the year 1800. There were few works, and they tended to involve pseudo-science and took place in exotic settings. They used magic or unexplained methods to convey characters to those settings, and often the character was a chance traveler and passive observer. Representative authors included Lucian of Samosata, Johannes Kepler, Cyrano de Bergerac, Margaret Cavendish, and Voltaire.

Age of Science

This age spanned from 1800 to 1920. With the advent of the Industrial Age and the Scientific Method, authors incorporated scientists actively discovering or inventing, and then exploring in their steam-driven machines. The settings were exotic, but more realistically described. This age rejected the magic and chance of the Age of Wonder, and highlighted the scientist deliberately creating his invention. Representative authors included Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Age of Engineering

Covering the years 1920 to 1980, this age exploded the genre with a lot more authors and stories. It was the age of aliens, robots, space opera, pulp fiction, atomic power, and mad scientists. Aimed at a largely white male audience, the heroes were often white male engineers who reasoned out the problem using science, rescued the woman, and saved the universe. This age rejected the primitive naiveté of the Age of Science, updating it with the latest rocketry inventions and astronomical/nuclear discoveries. Authors included Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Larry Niven.

Age of Punk

This age ran roughly from 1980 to 2010. It explored the consequences of computers and artificial intelligence, often with dystopian results. It gave us numerous alternate universes, epitomized by cyberpunk, steampunk, and many other punks. Female writers proliferated. Heroes were less often white males, and antagonists had backstories and motivations beyond pure evil. It reacted against the Age of Engineering by including racial and feminist themes, and warning against the hubris of over-engineering. Representative authors included Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Connie Willis, William Gibson, and K. W. Jeter.

Age of Humanity

Spanning from about 2010 to the present, this age turns inward more than any previous age. It’s about humanity in all its variants, and less about exotic settings. More than just women and blacks, we see LGBTQ authors delving into the future and consequences of sexual options. This is science fiction about biology and climate change. It includes mundane science fiction taking place in our solar system, without extraterrestrials or faster-than-light travel. Reacting against the negativity of the Age of Punk, it’s more a positive celebration of what it is to be human. Representative authors include Neal Stephenson, Melissa Scott, Robert J. Sawyer, Ted Chiang, and Charlie Jane Anders.

Age of…?

What’s next? I don’t know. Perhaps the next age of Science Fiction will be created by someone reading the blog posts of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 16, 2019Permalink

Fixing Science Fiction

In a Slate Magazine article, Lee Konstantinou argued that “Something is Broken in Our Science Fiction.” Is that true? If so, what can SciFi writers do about it?

Fixing some broken SciFi

Konstantinou’s thought-provoking piece declares that SciFi remains stuck in the cyberpunk era of the 1980s, seemingly unable to break free. He contends that cyberpunk and its many offshoot ‘-punks’ were products of the Reagan-Thatcher era.

To Kontantinou, the various punks share common attributes, such as (1) a setting not too different from our own, (2) an individual struggling alone against a flaw-ridden society, and (3) an absence of collective action by a group or groups. Even recent trends like dystopian SciFi and its positive counterpart (hope-punk?) typified by Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future are just cyberpunk derivatives.

Is he right? Is Science Fiction broken? Are the punks to blame?

As a writer of steampunk and clockpunk, I experienced an initially sour reaction to Konstantinou’s article before I thought more deeply about it. I agree with him that something seems wrong.

Whatever you say about the punks, give them due credit; they’ve had a good, long run. Konstantinou’s common attributes of punks are general enough to cover a lot of territory and appeal to a broad range of tastes. Moreover, the various ‘time period’ punks such as steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, etc. cater to readers’ nostalgic longings.

Still, I get a sense that SciFi is in a transition period, waiting for the next movement to explode on the scene. Likely the seeds of that next era are already here in some form, just starting to sprout into public awareness.

Maybe the next big thing in SciFi will spring from one or a combination of the current observable trends:

  • LBGTQ main characters, and explorations of alternate sexualities
  • Climate change extrapolations; humanity as a spoiler of environments
  • Artificial intelligence, the entire spectrum from the weak (narrow) kind, through the strong kind, to the super-intelligent kind
  • 3D Printing and nanotechnology implications
  • Cross-genre mashups
  • Biological and genetic science
  • Extended human lifespans, Trans-human possibilities, cyborgs
  • Mundane SciFi

More likely, the next SciFi movement will grow from something I haven’t anticipated or noted yet.

To paraphrase P!nk in her song “Just Give Me a Reason,” Science Fiction is not broken, just bent, and SciFi writers can learn to entertain readers again. One author who will make the effort is—

                                  Poseidon’s Scribe

March 31, 2019Permalink

8 Science Fiction Predictions for 2019

You’ve been wondering where the genre of Science Fiction will be going in 2019, haven’t you? I knew it. You’ve landed at the right blog post.

Author with CRISTAL Ball

How do I know the future, you ask? Do I have a crystal ball? No. That would be irrational and silly. I have a CRISTAL ball, a Computerized Recursive and Iterative Stabilizing Trend ALgorithm, which I packaged in a spherical shape for optimized computing speed.

Diagnostic checks are complete and the presets are accurate, so I’ll set parameters for 2019 and access the graphical interface. Let me gaze into my CRISTAL ball…

  • In 2019, you’ll see more science fiction books written by authors from previously underrepresented groups (women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc.) and these books will explore concepts of belonging and isolation, as well as bending our current notions of gender and race.
  • The superhero theme in movies will peak and begin a gradual decline. It’s been an amazing ride, but I believe the market has saturated and audiences are getting tired.
  • Very few, if any, best-selling scifi books will feature faster-than-light drive. Most authors have accepted Einstein’s speed of light limit. FTL now seems hokey to readers.
  • Having already peaked, the steampunk and alternate history genres will continue to wane in books and movies, though they may retain strength in the video gaming world. This genre trend in books is troubling to me, since I enjoy writing steampunk and other alternative history.
  • We’ll see more Solarpunk, and the Punk Family will grow by a few more. I think there’s a great deal of uncharted territory in the solarpunk genre and a general hunger for it among readers. Most new ‘punks’ added in 2019 will be future-based, rather than alternative histories.
  • There will be fewer dystopian young adult books, and there will be an upsurge in YA depicting a positive (though not utopian) future. I think dystopias have run their course for the time being, and readers are ready for less bleak outlooks.
  • Overall, as a genre, science fiction will do well in the visual media of movies, video games, and graphic novels, but not in traditional book form. Plenty of authors enjoy writing scifi, but readers will turn away from this genre in greater numbers. This is another prediction I find personally disappointing.
  • The trend toward series novels will remain strong. Once modern readers make an emotional investment in a set of characters and their fictional world, they want to know what happens after the first novel, and after the next.

At the end of 2019, I intend to run a blog post confirming the accuracy of my CRISTAL ball. In the meantime, you can tell everyone you’ve glimpsed the future, as predicted by —

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 30, 2018Permalink

Chessiecon Turkey Award, Second Worst Place

Every year, the science fiction conference Chessiecon offers an award, called the Chessiecon Turkey Award. The idea is to write the “worst possible opening to the worst possible SF/F novel (n)ever written.” It’s a SciFi version of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest.

I submitted an entry this year for the first time. As I was leaving the con, one of the Turkey Award judges told me I’d won second worst place! I couldn’t believe it.

Before I unveil my entry, please have all children at least exit the room, or preferably, the solar system. This entry is suggestive, racy, and risqué, but not necessarily in that order. Are all the kiddies gone? Good.

With apologies to H.G. Wells, here’s what I submitted:

“No one would have conceived in the last months of 2018 that this world was being debauched obscenely by protuberances straighter than man’s, as thoroughly as a man with a proctoscope might sodomize the prurient lechers in a tub of water. Yet across the gulf of space, inter-sexuals fast and cool and un-prophylactic regarded this earth with lascivious eyes, and Roly and Shirley spewed from their glands against us.”

Hmmm. I guess you’d have to call that novel Whore of the Worlds, or something. Good thing for humanity that nobody wrote that book. Ever.

Pictured below is the prize I won for getting second worst place. You guessed correctly; it’s the Flickin’ Chicken game, rated for ages six and above. My wife says I might be mentally old enough to play it next year. Yay!

Flickin’ Chicken, the Go Anywhere Game

On the package it says it’s “The Go Anywhere Game,” which is handy, because I won’t need a passport anymore.

It is my high dishonor to accept this “award.” I’d like to take this opportunity to blame all the people who helped me along the way, including my parents, my teachers, and H.G. Wells.

To all those who said, “Steve, don’t enter that bad-writing contest; you’re not immature or unskilled enough,” I say, “nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah. I am too. Thphthph.”

Besides, you doubters, who’s got a firm grasp of his Flickin’ Chicken now? I’ll tell you who, it’s—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 27, 2018Permalink

Chessiecon, Day 3

Chessiecon, the science fiction conference held on Thanksgiving weekend just north of Baltimore, concluded today.

Chessiecon Panel — When DId Sci Fi Become So Political?

I joined other panelists in a session titled “When Did Sci Fi Become So Political?” In the photo, from left to right (locational left and right, not political) are the moderator, Mary Fan, and panelists Linda Adams, Lanthir Calendae, and moi.

What a great panel topic and a fine group (including the audience) to discuss it! We covered the politics of early science fiction, of Star Wars, of Star Trek, of more modern authors, and our own fiction. We agreed that politics, which one may define as the activities associated with governance and power, is inherently part of all science fiction, and perhaps all fiction, to some degree.

Overall, it was a fine conference. Always inspired and energized after weekends like this, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 25, 2018Permalink