Saturday 29 October 2016

First Exposures – Update VI


More progress this weekend with positive news from a couple of quarters. First up, I’m delighted to report that my fantasy short story The Fall of the Dark God has been shortlisted with Ares magazine, and I should know in December if I’ve made the final cut. I really hope to make a breakthrough here as this one is a full pro-rate-paying marketplace!

The second piece of great news, the new title Helios Quarterly have asked me to write a piece for their fourth issue, due around mid-2017, and there’s an interview goes with it, so a wonderful piece of exposure for an early-career writer! I couldn’t be more thrilled, and look forward to tackling the challenge.

More news as it breaks!


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Wednesday 26 October 2016

I’ve Been Certified!



It’s nice to have recognition when you take part in something, and my entry into the Writers of the Future Contest earned me an Honourable Mention. The certificate just came in and I thought I’d share it – pretty specky, as they say, and I’ll have it framed one day!

I have entries in the next two quarters of the same contest and have my fingers crossed for an even better result!

Interestingly, this story, Petrichor, was short-listed at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination on its very first outing, though failed to make the editor’s selection. I hope it’s only a matter of time before this one crosses the desk of an editor who’ll give it a home.

Now back to the story in hand…

Cheers,


Mike Adamson

Monday 24 October 2016

Timeless Ideas or Homages?


Scenario: a team of explorers in an exotic, harsh environment enter an ancient structure and awaken something terrible – something alien, inimical and implacable. While the explorers have gone in with the best intentions they discover they have bitten off more than they can chew and one by one they die in horrific ways before a single survivor makes it out to an uncertain future, marked indelibly by the ordeal.

Sound familiar?

It should, it’s a tried-and-proven formula. Many would think of the original Alien, that SF classic now approaching forty years old. However, I was even more struck with the formula after watching the more recent instalment in the saga, Prometheus, yet was still not thinking specifically of that opus.

A few days earlier I had read the self-same theme/motif/concept in a volume of classic fiction, Return of the Sorcerer, a 2009 anthology from Prime Books, edited by Robert Weinberg, bringing together 18 stories by that master of the macabre, Clark Ashton Smith.

Smith’s most intensive writing was in the early to mid-1930s, and while he is best-known for his fantasy and horror work, he also wrote very much in the science fiction vein, a number of stories being set apparently on the Mars envisioned by Percival Lowell, at a time after human explorers have reached and colonised many worlds in the solar system. The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis is one of these, in which human explorers travel to an ancient ruin shunned by the living Martians of today with a rigid taboo, and discover the funerary vaults of a long-lost culture which remain cursed – with a long-lived alien organism which attaches to the victim’s head (reminiscent of Alien’s face-hugger, it must be said) and consumes both body and mind. This is a linear horror scenario placed into a science fiction context, and one is excused for seeing it as an archetype for the better-known outings to come.

Smith’s story appeared in Weird Tales for May, 1932, and must have stuck at the back of many a creative writer’s mind. An organism attaching to the face and taking over the host’s will featured in a strip story in TV-21 in the late 1960s, a truly strange outing for a kids’ comic, and one which, in retrospect, seems to echo Smith’s conception as surely as pre-guessing at least one element of Alien.

So, are these ideas just so timelessly perfect in their strangeness, their appeal to that in us which appreciates being scared witless, they are originated independently in different generations? Perhaps. But it might also be that a high fantasist set this particular ball rolling 84 years ago and an idea so good just can’t be left to lie between the long-yellowed pages of magazines from the golden age of pulps.


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Thursday 20 October 2016

First Exposures – Update V

Given the number of times rejections group together, I have somewhat optimistically wondered if acceptances might do the same, and the laws of chance seem to dictate that eventually it would happen. I’m delighted to announce two acceptances falling just twelve hours apart!

First, my flash-length SF short “Critical Need” has been picked up by the UK-based electronic title Kzine, a new publication styled expressly for the Kindle platform. The piece is not expected to appear for over a year, so I’ll post details when I know myself. Incidentally, this was my 200th submission overall.

And secondly, my horror short “Red Sun Rising,” has been picked up by Society of Misfit Stories, which is a branch of Bards and Sages Publishing. This one, the second of my “Lucinda Crane, Vampire Hunter” stories (following on from “Crimson Blade” in the anthology Spectral Visions: The Collection in 2014) should be appearing in the next few months.

Lately it seems I’ve been back to fielding a lot of rejections, so picking up two acceptances in quick succession is very encouraging, and I look forward to working on a new piece today!


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Wednesday 12 October 2016

Great Minds Think Alike, They Say


In 1993 Milan Trenc published a children’s book titled The Night at the Museum, and thirteen years later it was filmed, becoming a smash hit and spinning off sequels. It’s a family favourite to this day, and one of the success stories of the modern industry.

But a good idea is not necessarily unique, is it? I found myself wondering what could possibly have happened when  the movie came out, because (having not heard of the 1993 original at the time) I was naturally imagining my 1998 short story The Museum of Unnatural History had been plagiarised. It dealt with a new night watchman taking his first shift in a museum in which the exhibits came to life after dark and terrorised anyone there – sound familiar?

It was a vignette-length short in a batch I wrote on the guidelines of the fiction component of Elsevier Scientific’s “HMS Beagle” website (which no longer seems to exist). They took my story Innocuous but Lethal, but I was never able to get another past the post with them, despite showing them several, one of which was my museum opus. Not long afterward, “HMS Beagle” discontinued its fiction department and by the time Night at the Museum came out I had more or less lost track of them.

When I first heard about the movie I was pretty much dumbstruck and searched my records for contact names, got in touch with someone at Elsevier and found the fiction department long gone. It had been edited from another country entirely (Scotland, as I recall) and there was no information as to the disposition of manuscripts which had been through the hands of the editor. Any misdeed was of course entirely my own suspicion, and was wiped away when I learned about the Milan Trenc original – and especially that it was published five years before I dramatised the same idea.

The Museum of Unnatural History actually started life as an idea for an artbook, a series of paintings of the bizarre events unfolding, and I used it as thematic material in my third novel, Interpretations, written, oh, a very long time ago (1984) and never submitted. I simply remilled the idea in ’98.

So it’s true – great ideas are not unique and they occur to different people at different times. The one who gets on the stick and drives it to fruition is the one with (appropriately) the bragging rights. If there is a lesson in this it is never to let good ideas lie fallow – get out there and market them, and maybe one day you too will have the bragging rights!

As the story, in the wake of Night at the Museum, is simply a curiosity, I’m more than happy to offer it here, complete – I hope you enjoy it!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

(NB: The image accompanying the story is a free download from fabuloussavers.com)

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The Museum of Unnatural History

© Mike Adamson 1998

I confessed to myself a certain uneasiness, as I mounted the broad steps toward the impressive portico of the Angkor Prime Museum of Natural Sciences. The Employment Counsellor had concealed wry humor when I had accepted the position of Night Curator of the Exobiology Collections – the famous Galactica Exotica compiled by the MNS over the hundred years since Angkor Prime was settled.

I paused before the fused quartz foyer and saw the greenish glimmer of the evening sky reflected from the scintillent points of the pompous edifice, and glanced back across the City. The colonizer ship Provincia had been preserved as the core of the capital of this new world, and its mammoth shape formed the cultural centerpiece of an entire civilization. Around it had grown a city to rival many on old Earth, and its elder daughter colonies amongst the stars.

Shaking off the strange feeling, I passed through the self-acting doors into the cool foyer, swiped my ID through the outstretched receptor of the elegant receptionist robot, and moments later I was joined by the Chief Curator, Talbot. Now in his sixties, he had been an employee of the Museum his whole life, and had helped build much of the collection. He wore a sleek black bodysuit and his silver hair fell to his waist, the epitome of cultural style in the 26th Century.

"Good evening, Sirrah," I began with a formal nod of my own braids. "I'm delighted to meet you at last."

"Young Sirrah Gordon, likewise," Talbot began, extended a hand for a fore-arm grip. "Your CV was most fitting. The agency briefed you on your duties?" His voice was deep and rich, and his gene-smooth face seemed bizarre against his deliberately platinum locks.

"Indeed, Sirrah. I am to oversee the collections during the Museum's closed hours. I liaise with the Security mechanoids, communicate with agencies elsewhere on Angkor, and its extraplanetary affiliates. I will undertake monitoring and assessment of displays in accordance with the Cultural Directorate."

"Very good," Talbot said with a smile, gesturing to the broad stair that wound up to the main hall. Everyone on Angkor Prime had seen the vast Hall of Alien Life, where the extinct megafauna of seven planets had been resurrected from its fossil bones.

The only complete specimen of Centroseptelius giganteus, the mighty browsing beast of the ancient forests of Rigel 7, lofted its tiny cranium over fifty meters high at the end of its neck of 24 vertebrae, and I shook my head in awe as we walked almost under its six-clawed feet.

"Impressive," Talbot said with a small smile. "But simplistic in its gross magnitude. Not a clever beast, near as we can tell from its DNA. The peculiar thing is that it was so large it hosted a community of endemic species within its body, whose remains are found nowhere else. Latest work suggests the parasites wrote their genetic structure into that of the host and were reproduced in the offspring in a way akin to retroviral amplification, or even mitochondrial DNA. They were passengers in the host in every conceivable sense."

We left the great Hall and entered the maze of passages and stairs where gallery after gallery was lined with display cases. Fossil and embalmed remains of hundreds of organisms were displayed here, ranging from microscopic – with functional microvisual devices for public viewing – to massive creatures larger than an aircar.

"I was surprised to receive so prestigious a job so promptly, Sirrah," I said in conversation, becoming aware of the empty vastness of the Museum now that the flow of patronizing beings was subtracted.

"We have a ... high turnover in Night Curators," Talbot said mildly. He paused to inspect an exhibit, remove a smudge from a clear partition. "That's actually what I most wanted to speak to you about."

The unease came back with a rush. "Sirrah?"

"You'll have heard of the Curator who went insane a few months ago? I see you have. What you won't know is that he succumbed to raving after the Museum security systems failed. He spent most of a night in the company of deactivated robots and blind scanners, and by morning he was ... well, you know the rest."

"I see." I looked around the gallery of grotesque, leering beasts through which we moved. "An impressionable mind."

"Not at all. He was an eminently stable person. It was..." Talbot drew me to a halt as we reached a mezzanine overlooking the Hall of the Calendrian Menagerie, gestured vaguely at the riot of animalian forms that seemed frozen in the act of ripping each other limb from limb. "Let us say... The bacchanalia of life can be overpowering for some."

My eyebrows must have quirked, for he smiled with a peculiar, vindictive edge. "Surely there is more," I pressed.

"Certainly." He drew me on, up another ancient-style, ornate stair toward the Gallery of Birds, where a multitude of flying creatures from the Seven Worlds made a cascade of color from feathers, scales and membranes. "It started here, they say. A trail of damage that lead through the Museum to the Security Room, where he was found next morning by the day staff, when the systems were being rebooted. Damage such as we had never imagined."

"Such as?" I asked, feeling less superior by the moment.

"Scratch-marks... Fittings dislodged. Cases opened by force, as if he had ... tried to release the exhibits." Talbot grinned, skull-like. "I stood Night Watch when I was younger, and never encountered anything ... unusual."

I held my tongue now, let him lead me to the Security Room, and took a seat by the monitors of the manual alert system. Screens relayed the POV of robots already on patrol, and a relay bank chattered with flash traffic from expeditions and agents elsewhere on this and other worlds.

"This is your station," Talbot said with a raise of his eyebrows. "Take a hint. Don't leave it."

"You suspect...?"

"Let's just say, strange things seem to happen in this Museum at night. The systems never record anything, the robots detect nothing, but ... things are moved. Displays are fractionally different from day to day, and as often as we rearrange them, they change once more." He grinned like a skull. "Of course, you'll hear a lot of foundless hear-say from the lay community about the multiplicity of lifeforms here including types that only seem to be dead."

"Pardon?" I asked, grinning in spite of my earlier misgivings. "Zombie taxidermy?"

"Ridiculous, isn't it?" Talbot leaned on the console and seemed to be agreeing with my scepticism. "But there again, since the organism is cured complete by drying in some cases, and merely held in stasis fields to prevent bacterial decay in others, who's to say what capacities unknown creatures may have? I don't for a moment believe the Uvarovian Iguana prowls these halls at night, any more than that the Capellan Slime-Sac can escape its case and drag itself across dry land." He was still smiling, though he never made eye contact now. "Rubbish and nonsense. The last three Night Curators all died from completely normal causes." He rose, clapped a cold and unsympathetic hand to my shoulder and turned to go. "Well, I'll leave you to it. Have a good time with the ghosts."

My face must have been a picture, he cackled with laughter as he headed along the corridor. I saw his smiling face on several monitors as he went down to the foyer, checked with the reception robot and stepped out into the glittering night of Angkor Prime. The robot closed the doors and sealed them with a pass of its sensor-laden claw. I saw the displays indicate that the Museum had changed to secure condition, and that all was normal.

Normal. What was normal around here, though? Three curators? Surely he was joking.... Yes, I decided – joking. The authorities investigated exobiological phenomena diligently, and the MNS had been instrumental in creating the protocols for safe encounter and manipulation of dissimilar biologics.

I smiled. The Curator was enjoying levity at the expense of my inexperience. I relaxed, settled back and amused myself checking the influx to the mainframe of data from expeditions.

Perhaps an hour went by as I silently performed these checks, and the unease had fled when my head came up and I listened very carefully.

Scratch... Scratch...

My eyes flew across the readouts, and the screens were calm, nothing had interrupted the monitors and the robots were still roving without encounter.

Scratch... Scratch...

But as the internal scanners cycled through the frozen menagerie I was sure I saw not one but many doors on display cases standing ajar. The cameras cycled too quickly for me to be sure, but....

Scratch... Scratch...

But those doors were open, and suddenly my breathing was a hoarse rasp of fear as my hand went to the outside line. Because, all objectivity aside, I was in no doubt at all that something was scratching steadily, methodically, and with malicious intent, at the Security Room door.

THE END

Friday 7 October 2016

First Exposures – Update IV

I’m delighted to report I picked up another shortlisting today, my dystopian SF short “The Crime of Memory” cleared first-readers with the magazine Overcast, and I should know in a month or so if I have a placement.

I’m closing in on 200 submissions, with 43 stories out at this time, and am hoping the numbers are statistically on my side – that the law of averages means at least some of them will find a home. I’m prepared to me amazed, shall we say?

I’m working on a longer piece right now, one of my Tales of the Middle Stars opus, this one is an adventure piece on the desert planet Susa, following three recently-demobilised sergeants from the Colonial Fleet who have taken a security job with a most unlikely employer… The formula is a western, through and through, I realised the first day I started, but I managed over 8000 words that day, the story just wanted to be written, so I went with it. It’ll be novelette to short-novel range when it’s done, and I just hope there’s a market out there which can take a lengthy piece when the day comes.


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Thursday 6 October 2016

Science Fiction – but Hold the Science


There used to be an axiom of “proper” science fiction, that unless the scientific content was pivotal to the story – i.e., the story would not work without it – it was not science fiction. It may have been the great John W. Campbell who said it, though I’m not sure. This yardstick says the literate SF writer – and by default reader – must be up on the science and theory of the day if they are to participate in a very special and singular genre.

Fast forward to today, and the SF writer is sometimes conscious of the need to “dumb it down” if he or she wants to sell stories. Twenty years ago, the Hollywood journalist covering shows of the mid-90s for the UK title Science Fiction and Fantasy Model Review, when discussing the second season of SeaQuest DSV, commented “I preferred this show when there was some science with the fiction,” and that really sums it up. The mantra of Hollywood has long been dumb it down, sex it up, and never mind reality. Has this invaded the hallowed halls of literary SF too?

It takes only a cursory pass through the literature of the present generation to realise hard science has made something of a withdrawal from the field – oh, it’s certainly there, but it’s perhaps the opiate of a minority, and a considerable part of the “SF” reading public is neither scientifically educated nor wants to be.

That’s a sweeping thing for any commentarist to say, but work through a current issue of Apex, Fantasy and Science Fiction, or Albedo One or a dozen others, and you will quickly spot a certain formula – which is also generally reflected in the up-front submission guidelines of many markets.

For instance, Asimov’s say: “In general, we're looking for "character oriented" stories, those in which the characters, rather than the science, provide the main focus for the reader's interest. […] A good overview would be to consider that all fiction is written to examine or illuminate some aspect of human existence, but that in science fiction the backdrop you work against is the size of the Universe.”

Far from the science being firmly in focus, to connect with the modern reader the first proviso is characterisation. Relationships and interactions take priority over stylistic devices and writing quality for the power to involve. In many a case one would be forgiven for seeing exactly what the old axiom actually forbade – a story which will operate perfectly well in any other setting, and for which a science fiction context is merely the exotica of background. Or, that strangeness and encounters with the unexplained – with no real attempt to explain them – have become more attractive, more easily digestible, to the general reader.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, there are many terrific stories to be told which are a theme from other contexts transposed to science fiction. I don’t say this is a universal situation either, but when looking at the reading public in general one might think it. Technology is now omnipresent, there has perhaps been little that is genuinely cool about it in generations. Oh, we have gadgets, what is the modern kid without his super-mega-clever-fast-new phone? But how many of them could tell you how it works? Or care? Perhaps very few have ever really understood the workings of the devices of convenience around us, but it would seem Asimov’s “cult of anti-intellectualism” has taken a grip of iron and we are happy to accept the products of science while proudly eschewing its methods (to paraphrase Carl Sagan.)

If telling a story in which the science is obliged to be front and centre – a story which hinges upon a discovery and which can only be comprehended and dealt with in that context – one walks a fine line between the sort of narrative which catches a reader and a piece which “reads like a lecture.” If the story is dumbed down it loses its integrity as science fiction by the old definition, and may not even work at all. Does this mean the story should not be told? That is has become an idea badly suited to today’s market? If so, this is a dire commentary on a field which used to pride itself on its namesake. An old article discussing the shift from Golden Age adventure to serious, reflective speculation described it thus: “[there were] too many ‘rattling good stories’ being told and not enough thinking going on.” We seem to have come full circle and would far rather rattle than think.

Perhaps the most telling comment that can be made on this point is that a dedicated magazine now exists to fulfil the role for hard science and technology inside the now more widely-defined science fiction genre – Compelling Science Fiction, whose brief foregrounds these aspects as part of story structure. The genre seems capable of infinite subdivision, and its own origins and most sophisticated former selves have simply become facets of a more comprehensive whole. Whether this is a good or bad thing is perhaps, ultimately, irrelevant to all but academics studying the nature of the genre, as it is dictated by the market forces – which allow it to exist at all.

Cheers, Mike Adamson