Spec Fic Index
Here is your little pinned index file for the section
Welcome to my Speculative Fiction section here on my disturbingly eclectic Substack. Owing to how increasingly eclectic it’s all become, especially in reflecting on what I’ve written here in the last year (my first on Substack), I decided it would be so much easier – and nicer for my subscribers (and any other visitors) – to do a little reorganising/reshuffling.
So you may notice (or have already noticed) I’ve got two new sections. This is one, and the other is Unofficial-K, which is, well, it’s for Unofficial Katy, obviously – which is the anthology American Visidramas, feat Unofficial Katy & the Starseeds (there’ll be more than one volume, I’m sure). There will be a similarly pinned intro post there very soon, in advance of her second misadventure, coming soon to a theatre near you, the wonderfully named Pinko Commie Superbunker (yep, it is as funny as the title suggests).
I have also updated my About page. It has been 365 days precisely since I started this publication, and it’s taken me this long to work out some of the intricacies of Substack. Like, your About page is where unsubscribed visitors turn up, so tell them an enticing story. As my long-suffering already-subscribers are aware, no doubt, I have an infuriating tendency to ramble a lot of the time. You may be perfectly content with keeping things short and sweet, reader dearest, but I’m not you. And I shall not apologise for being myself. No one should ever do that. Well, unless they’re a psychopathic monster of course. In which case they’d never apologise anyway so, well, whatever, nevermind.
So this is the section where I shall be depositing all the speculative fiction (and some speculative non-fiction/philosophy – I have a few things roaming my head there) which doesn’t obviously fit into other sections. That’s to say either the Katrina-related, Paschat-related, or Unofficial Katy-related stuff. Likewise, the Alters section is where you want to go for the non-speculative writing (my poetry for example, and irregular features like the Saturday Pomes & Words and the Fairytale Sundays and all that). There are crossovers, however. But that’s just an indication of how my strange mind works. You’ll either get used to it, or you won’t.
This, then, is the Index page, as it were, where I shall provide all the necessary links for ease of navigation. Likewise for ease of navigation I’ll split this up into a few headings, namely the Immigration Control collection, the standalone pieces of fiction which don’t (as yet) feature in a collection, and then the speculative non-fiction (I haven’t done any of that yet, as it happens – although obviously this pinned page will be updated as and when).
For a short note on how I am intending to go on now I’ve had a year on Substack, I might also add that some of what happens in this section will be free for everyone, but a fair amount of it will be paid-only (like the last half of Immigration Control, for example). Thus far I’ve hardly given anyone any reason to take out a paid subscription, and if I do want to earn a living as a writer and not live below the poverty line anymore then I should really start putting a firm paw on the matter. At the current time of writing I have 88 lovely subscribers, and I do love numbers like that one. No paid subscribers, however. Others who started around the same time as I did, or even later, may have hundreds of subscribers already, including a bevvy of paid ones, and they must be doing something right, but I am going to say that in this instance, I’d rather be the Tortoise, than Achilles. I’m not entirely sure what I’m getting at here, but I do intend for this second year of mine to be fulfilling.
Hence this little reshuffle. And rejuvenated approach.
Anyway – see, I am doing another rambling intro – here is your little index to my new Spec Fic section.
Standalone Speculative Fiction Stories
Fragment of a Time Capsule – inspired by the prompt quest from Lunar Awards, this is a little vignette in the midst of an alien invasion of an off-world colony, in which Mistress Frey, with the help of her AI, must make a terrible decision. The style is a bit experimental, I admit. Some might want to read it twice. Others not at all. This one won an honourable mention! It’s around the 2.5k mark I believe.
The End of Space Station Fifteen – This is a six-part short story (around 14k words total). That link takes you to my intro/part 1. This is a fun sci-fi romp with a bit of espionage thrown in for good measure by virtue of a sort of cameo by Katrina (in flashback/found footage scenes). This is, in fact, the first proper story in which Katrina appears, so I thought readers might be interested on that note (and it does include a little insight into one particular episode in her parallel world backstory). I do think it’s a fun story though and it plays knowingly with a few sci-fi tropes. A bit of postmodernism, that is. There’s a little more in my intro. This story is taken from my book Rejected Messages, by the way (you can buy it at that link – go on, it’s only $3.99!).
Never Seen Stars – This short story was inspired by Prompt Quest #2 from the Lunar Awards. It’s a somewhat offbeat classic dystopian thing, in which the main character, who has dissident tendencies, is granted an audience with the ‘Entity’ (supposedly an AI) which governs the world in which he lives. But then it takes an unexpected twist. See also the first episode of the ChatGPT thing. I also plan to do a Fairytale Sunday prompted by this story, or at least my notes at the end of the story. [I have an update for this one, which is that it also won an honourable mention - yay!]. This is another short vignette of around 2.5k.
Johnny Gone to Charon - This is another one of my humorous postmodern movie-stories, inspired by another Lunar Awards Prompt Quest (see the story for details on that). Our protagonist, Johnny, has been rudely awakened from his comfy cryosleep to find the sleeper ship is being attacked. We join him as he desperately attempts to reach an escape pod, with the sporadic help of his sidekick Kay, the ship’s AI, who is not exactly functioning in tip-top condition. This one is about 4k words, it’s a glorious and funny romp, and it does just skip along.
Anthologies
Immigration Control
I will do a proper separate intro to this collection soon enough, with all the appropriate links, but here is a brief guide to be going on with (including word counts). In total the collection is around the 100k words mark. You are getting around half of it for free, with the rest for paid subscribers only.
The Prologue: Request Denied – This is a bit of a crossover, seeing as it is a letter to the late President Carter written by Shari’ana, the Paschat (you’ll get to know her in the Paschats section). It is a sort of response to Carter’s letter from the Voyager probe. This one is about 2.5k words. You will want to read this one first, as it kind of sets the scene for all the stories that follow.
Part I – Alt.Contact (44.5k)
XF - This is an offbeat First Contact story. It’s around 4.5k, but again, it does read quite skippily.
D-Zero Meson Oscillation – This is the standalone novella version (around 22k words) of Episode I of the Katrina serialisation (the Katrina in Paris episode). That link will take you to part 1 (of 10 in total); you can also read my intro there. Katrina turns up at the British Embassy in Paris claiming to be from a parallel world, and claiming to have some classified information. A young MI5 officer, Tom, is assigned to her case, and to look after her, and finds himself increasingly enamoured with the girl. But is there more to her than meets his eyes? Of course there is! This is a more upbeat version of Episode I, and is replete with postmodern pop culture references, including a nice little self-knowing twist at the end in that regard.
Ciao, SETI! – Technically this is Unofficial Katy’s first proper outing, so I have in fact put it in the Unofficial-K section. I’m including it here, though, because it will still be part of Immigration Control, albeit with a different ending to the second version, which will appear in my American Visidramas collection, where you can find all the Unofficial Katy stories. In this first little misadventure, a sassy young astronomy postgrad called Phoebe Drake, working at the Parkes Radio Observatory in Australia, discovers a genuine signal from an ETI, and has to engage in a little game of cat and mouse with some dastardly types from the SETI organisation to stop them from preventing the signal being made public. This is around the 16k mark, and I’ve split it into 8 parts.
Fortunately, I was Saved by the Aliens – This one, which is only around 2k words, so it’s just a little vignette really, is where the character of Katy really comes from. She’s not the final Katy, but she’s recognisably Katy. And as with Ciao, SETI!, it starts with her in a prison for being seditious, whilst an iconoclastic ETI-contact scenario is about to happen.
Part II – Exopolitics (16.8k)
Shipyard Ahoy! – This one’s for real sci-fi fans, and shows the real, lasting – and in my view historically inevitable – wonderful cultural power of science fiction storytelling. It’s delightful, if I say so myself, and I had huge fun writing it. This one was entered into the Lunar Awards Season Six. It also features a little cameo by Shari’ana, and a Captain Grissom from my Rejected Messages collection. So it’s another one of those crossovers.
Quantum Topography 101 – Instructions for new human students arriving at Tau Ceti Three for the eponymous course. It’s quite postmodern and quite wryly amusing, and somewhat replete with offbeat speculative philosophy. This one is very short, only 1.5k – so I may actually make this one a free for everyone post. Another reason for making this one free is because I am half-minded to make a lot of my speculative non-fiction essays in the form of lectures for spacefaring students. Human students in particular. You will, after all, need this sort of knowledge in the future, if we ever let you out of this system.
From this point, however, the rest is paid subscribers only.
X&Y – (12.8k) Humans learn of the arrival of a large ETI spacecraft in orbit around Venus; it’s told from the ETI’s point of view; I’m minded to make this the first chapter in a novel.
Part III – Only Disconnect (35.5k)
The Silver Cord – (10.5k) Preparations for the first experimental voyage to Alpha Centauri carrying only one person; it’s part psychological, part spiritual.
A Kinder Rain – (11k) A girl on a terraforming station orbiting Venus has just lost her mother, and decides to undertake a courageous trip to Gaia to help her father grieve; I was thinking about Venus a lot at the time. This is the story which won me a writing competition, which I wrote about in this update post.
Katy Disconnect – (2k) This is a very offbeat little Unofficial Katy fragment; it fits well into this Part III of the anthology, so I’ve left it here. It’ll probably go in the first Katy collection as well though.
Immigration Control – (12k) A starseed has to pass through immigration control at JFK airport, and keeps drifting into memories of her previous life and why she is here on this planet; this is also vaguely a Katy story – it’s a bit different to the other Katy stories though, in the sense that it’s not a humour-laden one; you could think of it as another precursor story, hence it belongs in this collection rather than the Katy-proper collection; it also does a kind of crossover with the Paschats; it’s quite intriguing though as an insight into the Katy character and her formative background.
The Epilogue: Sleeper Ship Monologue (I haven’t finished this one yet; during the very long journey each sleeper is awakened for one full cycle to roam the ship alone, with only the AI for company; this is a kind of prologue/fragment/outtake to X&Y)
Speculative Non-Fiction
I haven’t done any of these yet, but I’m sure I will in the future, at which point there’ll be updates to this pinned index file. By speculative non-fiction, I’m really thinking about some of the philosophy behind science fiction writing in particular. I’m also minded to write a series of essays about the universal background to most of my speculative fiction, as it does all take place in the same kind of universe, at least in terms of the laws of physics and the way that informs the composition and functioning of the galactic civilisation, along with galactic history. This does have a lot to do with what is and isn’t permitted according to those (true) laws of physics. If you are intrigued by this kind of stuff, then I have already written a fair few things in the Paschat section. For example, here is the Intervention & the (true) Prime Directive essay as part of the Event Day series (Event Day, and the Wow! signal and so on, does crop up a fair bit in many of my stories). In fact, the underlying theme in Immigration Control is largely based on this concept of intervention. It’s one of the glaringly missing variables in the Drake Equation, for example. Katrina wrote about that in DEXOS Part IV, which you can read at that link. DEXOS Part V sort of follows on from that and is her talking about SETI covering up genuine signals (so it aligns with Ciao, SETI!, in that sense).
In other words, if you are anxious to have a little speculative philosophy in your life, try out those links.
In the meantime, that’s about it for now; I shall return with further links as and when they emerge.
I do hope you enjoy the stuff in this section, by the way. If you are a fan of speculative fiction, then I am sure you will. There’s a fair few honourable mentions in there from various competitions, as well as that winning entry of course. So there!
Ciao!