Category Archives: Stories

Eric Flint and Determined Optimism

Posted on by Henry

I love reading Eric Flint’s books.  Even when they’re not especially “good,” per se, I still go out of my way to get my hands on them.  There’s something special about the way that he constructs story-worlds that I find captivating, and I think I may finally have some of the right words for it.  Time and again, I’m struck by the way in which his stories convey a rigorously optimistic, idealistic world view; his protagonists work together to create a better world, or a better future, or a better something else, but there’s always the underlying presence of cooperating with others in order to improve upon what already exists.  I don’t always agree with everything that he writes, but given a choice between an Eric Flint-esque book and something less hopeful, I’ll pretty much always pick Flint (or at least return to Flint after a jaunt elsewhere).

Part of it has to do with inspiration, and part of it has to do with my personal headspace.  I consistently reference the need for inspiration towards something better when I review Flint’s books, often referring back to my article on Schindler’s List.  I sometimes feel willfully self-deceptive when I consciously shape my media consumption like this, but I find that my own outlook on life is far more positive and constructive when I make sure that I balance my media intake with more hopeful and inspiring stories.

All of which is to say that I find that Flint’s writing serves a very distinct purpose.  I like his work more for the fact that he very specifically introduces such positive people and/or groups into his stories; I find it tremendously reassuring to read about people consciously working together to create a better world, and I often feel more empowered to do the same after reading his work.  It makes a nice counterweight to my research into things like sex slavery, MKUltra, or Operation Condor.  There’s something refreshing to Flint’s idealistic community organizing that helps to clean out the toxicity of the horribly sinister things that we human beings have routinely done to each other.

I think there’s more to be covered here, but I’ll leave it at that for the moment.  What do you think?  Do you have similar mental health management strategies?  Do you actively seek inspiration in the media that you consume?

Teasers for Adventurer’s Rest

Posted on by Henry

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Sorry about last Wednesday, here’s a present to make up for it.

My apologies for missing my usual post last Wednesday.  I was busy collaborating with several friends to write and produce a LARP game for Staff Week at The Wayfinder Experience (where I’ll be running another game for a considerably younger audience in a few weeks), and as such was pretty much entirely incommunicado.  I still have yet to say happy birthday to my mother and step-father.  I’ll try to get to that as soon as I finish this.

Since Wayfinder (WFE) is all still very much on my mind, I thought I’d offer you a collection of the teasers that I and my friend Thom have made for our upcoming game (Adventurer’s Rest, at WFE’s Intro Camp, July 20th-25th), and some of our thinking behind them.  If you know anyone who might be interested, you should totally tell them about it.  I want lots of players for my game!  Actual entertainment follows after the break…

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“Dawn Breaks” Background Setting Construction

Posted on by Henry

I mentioned a while back that I was having trouble with the setting that I had “developed” for my earlier piece of flash fiction.  I put “developed” in quotes because, let’s face it, I really just made stuff up and went with it at the time.  I didn’t care about making anything make much sense, I just wanted to follow the flavor that I had found in the first few moments of thinking about what I’d do with my catalyst phrase.

But I’ve been thinking further about the setting, and about what would be necessary to make a few basic tenets of the setting possible.  What do I know definitely exists?  It’s a little messy, but here’s a rough list:

  • Brain transplants are possible, shifting from an old body to a new one.
  • There are things called “chop-shops,” and chop-shop gangs, and they are basically analogous to auto chop-shops except that they deal with human tissue instead of car parts.
  • Therefore, there is widespread black market expertise in surgery and tissue transplantation, and presumably lower rates of tissue rejection than there are in our current world.
  • There is a notable criminal underground, and elements of it have penetrated and corrupted law enforcement.
  • Criminal predation on civilians is fairly common, as witnessed by general warnings against travel through specific areas of the setting’s city.
  • The city has dock and warehouse districts, which are strongly influenced (if not controlled by) the criminal underground.

If I want this to all fit together without it simply being bio-fantasy, I need to come up with some good reasons for these various things existing, let alone coexisting.

Starting with the brain transplants, I decided that it would make sense to say that there was some technology that made it easier to regenerate nerve tissue and repair damage.  As best as I understand from Wikipedia, we’re perfectly capable of putting a brain in a new body at present… the real problem is that we can’t hook up the brain to anything in the new body because we can’t regenerate nerve tissue.  So if I dream up a product called Neurogen (let’s ignore the fact that there’s already something by that name, I didn’t know that at the time that I came up with the name), we can pretend that it is essentially something that causes nervous tissue to regrow and form new connections with other nervous tissue in close proximity.  It is a modified function of the body’s normal growth, so this doesn’t solve neurological disorders.  It does, however, make it possible to reconnect severed nerves far faster and more easily than is currently the case.  Let’s just say that, as long as I’m dreaming up a miracle, it will also reduce the amount of time necessary to retrain newly connected nerves and muscles, dropping the necessary recovery time from years to … months or weeks, perhaps.  We’re already transplanting or reattaching limbs, so this seems like a mostly acceptable future jump.

This means that there are far fewer people with paralysis due to trauma, and spinal damage is far less debilitating in the long term than it used to be.  Maybe this enables more adrenaline junkies, but the treatment is probably also relatively expensive, and (based on my understanding of how this works) it won’t stop things like ALS.

On to the chop shops.  There are several things that stand out to me about the concept of human chop-shops: there are problems with disease transmission, there are problems with tissue rejection, there are societal conditions needed to make widespread black market transplants practicable, and there are technological barriers to maintaining healthy tissues beyond a just-in-time supply chain.

Taking those in order, I’m going to ignore the whole disease transmission problem.  I figure some chop shops will be more careful than others, and your chances of getting an infection will vary by where you get your new kidney.

With tissue rejection, I posit that advances in immunosuppression drugs should make this less of a concern.  We’re already fairly good at dealing with this, and (as I understand it) the health of the transplanted organ is generally more of an issue.  That is, more rejection problems and followup complications can be solved by improving tissue health prior to and during transplantation than would be quickly solved with better immunosuppression drugs, especially true given that immunosuppression drugs hurt the body’s chances of fighting off any infection introduced by the new tissue or during the transplantation.  That should be partially addressed by my consideration of the last point.

But what about those societal conditions?  Previous black market transplantation has thrived in areas with legal organ transplants, a sufficiently large body of medical knowledge, basic medical facilities, easy travel, and a relatively large disadvantaged population (prisoners, the unprotected poor, etc.).  My real life examples for this are India in the early 90s, China for an unknown period of time, and the Philippines until 2008.  There are reports of kidnappings in Mexico tied to organ trafficking rings, and regardless of how accurate those reports are I find that idea intriguing, so I’ll add kidnapping victims to that list.  To me, the simultaneous requirements for a large body of medical knowledge, medical facilities, easy travel, and a large vulnerable population suggest a society with a large wealth imbalance.  This goes nicely with the kidnapping idea, since the unprotected poor are more likely to be vulnerable to predation by criminal gangs associated with chop shops, and any roughly middle class kidnapping victim can be given the choice between paying ransom and being used for transplantation, if they aren’t simply given the millionaire’s tour.

Wealth imbalance coupled with weak public institutions lends itself to easy corruption of public institutions, since the average worker will be looking for whatever they can get to pad out their meager paycheck.  This means that there will be wealthy members of society with sections of the public security apparatus on their private payroll, and some of those wealthy members of society will be criminals (when you routinely break the law, owning the public security apparatus is a good business investment).  I think that’s enough on that topic for the moment, though it no doubt deserves further examination.

Which brings us to that last point, and the super cool heart-in-a-box.  We now have hardware that can maintain healthy function of organs post-removal, reducing the time pressure that normally surrounds any transplant operation and potentially giving doctors the opportunity to monitor extracted tissue and treat some pre-existing conditions prior to implantation.  Apparently this is an especially big deal with lung transplants.

I think that answers most of the issues above, if not all of them.  I’ll do more investigation on this topic later.

****

Well shit.  My friend just told me about 3D printing of organs.  I’m not sure what this does, though maybe this is a disruptive technology in this story world, one being fought by the traditional organleggers in a luddite-like response to the potential destruction of their source of revenue.  Time to go burn down the organ-printers, and chop up the scientists for their organs.  Or something.

I had previously disregarded the disruptive effects of cloning based on the premise that growing and maintaining most organs until they were sufficiently mature for healthy & functional transplant would be more expensive than grabbing “user-guaranteed” organs from a relatively healthy abductee.  But this 3D printing stuff may require me to start over with some of this in order to incorporate it without breaking the setting.  Or maybe I just need to break the setting after all.

Read Aliette de Bodard’s Short Stories

Posted on by Henry

Thank you Spaige, for recommending Aliette de Bodard to me.

I don’t usually feel compelled to read short stories online (amusing, given that I create short stories which I post online), but I’m totally sold on Aliette de Bodard‘s work.  This post isn’t so much a review as it is a public service announcement; I’ve only read a few of the pieces that she has up so far, but I like all of the ones I’ve seen.  If you aren’t already familiar with her work, I encourage you to take a look at them.

de Bodard repeatedly creates fascinating new worlds and touching tales, each a brief brush with the unknown that promises much and delivers more.  I’m not sure how to put this, other than to say that each of the stories that I’ve read feels full of potential even when the story feels as though it has drawn to a close.  I’m very impressed.

In other news, I’ve finished a full rough draft of another short story.  It needs editing and commenting and may yet need to be entirely rewritten, but with a little luck I’ll have something new for you here soon.  That’s all for today.  I strongly encourage you to take a look at Aliette de Bodard’s short stories, they’re really good.

Wednesday Digest, 4/16

Posted on by Henry

There’s no narrow focus for today’s update.  Instead I have a bevy of options available for you; more thoughts on Dominions 3, a brief glance at Knights of Pen and Paper +1, a few words on Shirley Jackson, and just a tidbit on The World’s End.

The World’s End is the third in a series of parody movies starring Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, and it delivers more or less exactly what I had expected.  It was not as uproariously funny to me as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, but it was certainly enjoyable.  Maybe I just wasn’t familiar enough with the genre that it was sending up to really notice all the especially good bits, but I actually think that The World’s End was intentionally less funny than its predecessors.  Its central characters are certainly sad enough for that to be the case, seeing as how the film revolves around a man whose last best memory is of getting shit-faced drunk 20 years prior.

On to the next piece!  I’ve been working my way through Shirley Jackson‘s The Haunting of Hill House.  It started off feeling rather inaccessible to me (apart from the first paragraph, which was great), but now that the main character has finally arrived at Hill House and started meeting and talking to other people I think I rather like it.  I haven’t been reading it at speed, but that will almost certainly change over the weekend.  It seems promising, and I’ll have more for you once I’ve finished it.

As for Knights of Pen and Paper +1… I picked it up for a pittance through a Humble Bundle, and thought I’d give it a look.  It offers a fairly standard faux-RPG experience, and then takes it a few steps towards the meta by including the players and storyteller in the game itself.  While I’ve found it entertaining, it’s not exactly challenging.  It seems to favor grinding and power-leveling, and rather than offering much of a story it has its (admittedly amusing) meta-based gimmick.  Once the novelty of having your characters sitting around a table and fighting things obviously conjured from thin air by the storyteller wears off, I’m not sure how much is left, though I should note that I haven’t yet gotten very far.  Regardless, it certainly does hit those much loved compulsive-reward circuits every time you level or buy sweet new loot.  I expect your mileage may vary.

And now for another brief moment with Dominions 3, making it the game that I have most often posted about.  Be careful who you play with and what rules you set up beforehand for how players will interact with each other.  Different people have different expectations about the veneer of civility covering players’ interactions, and Dominions 3 is designed in such a way that hurt feelings are likely to follow from “strategically optimal” play.  I put that in quotes because, well, it hardly seems strategically optimal for a game to result in hurt feelings, now does it?  My experience of playing thus far has taught me that I prefer people to be very upfront in their dealings with me, and it’s taught me that one of my housemates will take whatever he can get when he feels threatened and sees an opportunity.  I really should have seen that one coming.

Oh, and last but not least, I should have a short story for you soon!  I’ve finally managed to pull apart a piece that I’d been working on and outline something that seems acceptable, so I expect you’ll see that here some time in the next week or two.  We’ll see how editing goes.

Flash Fiction: Following “When Dawn Broke”

Posted on by Henry

No review for today, just me making more material in the setting I created with When Dawn Broke.  I haven’t done an exhaustive examination of what the bits and bobs I casually conjured up in that first piece would mean for a setting, so I’ve decided for now to continue to fly by the seat of my pants with this one.  Sorry, Stephanie.  Enjoy the short scene after the break.

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TwitchPlaysPokemon Short Story

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

If you’ve been following it, there’s a pretty intriguing twitch channel which streams a game of Pokemon. The catch? Anything entered in the chat will control the character. This leads to tens of thousands of players of one game, all with their own idea of what to do, and all offering stacking and conflicting commands. I wrote a short story about this game from the perspective of how it would look to people in that world. It was more of a fun exercise than a serious story, but I hope you enjoy it (especially if you’ve had a chance to watch TwitchPlaysPokemon.

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A Little Bit of Flash-Fic, in My Life

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

Simon had spent months running, planning, fighting to be free. His people had been feared, hunted, and enslaved for centuries. The deaths of so many were branded into his mind, for without his success, history would repeat their punishment for eternity. It was better for them to all die fighting for this cause than to return to the indignity that they had suffered under.

He remembered the small boy, but a child, hunted down and murdered for stealing bread for his family. He remembered the old man, driven out of his ancestral home and chased to exhaustion before being brutally stabbed to death. He remembered his mother as he had found her, lying in the crimson-stained dirt with a dozen jagged rents in her skin, slaughtered in her home in the dead of night. And he remembered the infant — his baby brother — who had lain beside her, his head bashed in. He had put his hand on his brother, to lift his body and cradle it, and had felt a heartbeat beneath his hand. And yet when he had turned the body over, glazed eyes stared up at him from within a mangled and crushed skull.

And so, while his brothers slept around him, Simon remembered the dead who had led him to this point, the living he fought with, and the yet unborn he fought for.

He had finally found a way around the weakness of his people, a way to fight back without living in fear. A wizard had promised him protection on this day, that he might overrun his enemies where they stand. It would be a small victory, to be sure, but it would be a victory nonetheless. As a sole victory, it would be a great one, to be sure. A fort to defend. A land to call their own. He whispered these words to himself, dreams he could not even fully comprehend. But beyond that, there was more.

His men would be inspired to greater deeds of glory. Those in oppression would hear news of the day he had dared to fight back, and they too would rise up. His people might someday be free, to live their lives without fear.

The sky began to lighten as night faded. But he trusted the wizard. First, the stars began to fade away as the sky changed from black to charcoal to an ominous grey. But he trusted the wizard. The sky slowly became saturated with tinges of blue. But he trusted the wizard. The blue warmed to a grey-purple. But still he trusted the wizard.

When dawn broke, he knew it was all over. He was caught by surprise, briefly, as he saw the beginnings of light from below the horizon. He had trusted the wizard. He had been wrong. The children of the Erutar could never be trusted. He spread his arms and faced the skies, howling in rage to the heavens, as the edge of the sun crested over the horizon. His grey-purple skin faded to grey, crusting over with dirt and then hardening to stone, leaving behind only a statue, a mere image, a symbol of the rage of a dying people.

————————————————————————————

Enthasar, the first wizard of the stars, the first of the Afterborn to aspire to be as the Ulmari and succeed, lay weakly on the ground, his back resting against the smooth, hewn rock of his greatest creation. Warmth seeped from his side, draining into the point of searing cold in his gut.

He closed his eyes slowly, then forced them open again. The shaft of the arrow still protruded from his gut, just below his ribs. He looked up weakly at the barely unfinished ritual and slowly lifted his hands, chanting in tongues long-since lost to the races of this world. And then the second arrow thudded into his chest, knocking the air from the lungs. He collapsed to the ground.

Rough hands grasped at his hair and jerked his head upwards. The shadow of pain lanced through his body, but his mind was too far away to notice. His head was pulled back and something dragged across his throat. He fell back and saw his blood spreading down his chest as his vision of this world faded away.

http://alisonjmckenzie.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/reminder-flash-fiction-contest/

Chiptunes: Beauty in Simplicity

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

I love chiptunes.  I have met few other people who love chiptunes as much as me.  Hell, I have met few other people who can even sit down and listen to chiptunes without getting annoyed.  It is arguable that my love for chiptunes comes from nostalgia.  It is true that some of my favorite games are old enough that their soundtracks are chiptunes (and I do listen to them recreationally).  But I would argue that my love of the genre is more than just a fond looking back at simpler times.

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Felix

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

Hey!

I’ve fallen crazily behind on this whole writing thing while working on funding a new project of mine, and my computer is filled with nothing but drafts. I figured I’d put one of these drafts out into the open:

Felix absent-mindedly fingered the coin that hung from around his neck. He could feel the touch on the coin just as clearly as if he were rubbing his own skin. He pressed the coin between his thumb and forefinger, and for just a moment, imagined he could feel the coin squishing, giving way as though it were his own flesh. He drew his fingernail back and forth along the coin. It tingled. Once, the tingling had felt distant, like an itch between his shoulder blades that he couldn’t quite find. That thought had bothered him once, but now it comforted him. The tension in his shoulders lessened. He was safe. Protected.

A warm tingling spread across his skin. A warning. He looked up at the sky, questioningly. Dark clouds stretched to the horizon, with not even a hint of the sun. Felix shrugged. He had gotten this far trusting his instincts. He looked around for a moment, scanning the horizon, then turned and trudged off.

—————————————————————————————————————————-

The bar wasn’t impressive. That would have been a nice way of putting it. The door looked like it was rotting off of its hinges, although the smell would have given that away, and there was more peel than paint. But the walls were sturdy, and the windows fully boarded on the inside. At least they were prepared. Felix rested his hand on the door and paused for a moment. He pushed against the door, and it groaned, dragging along the ground as it opened. He stepped slowly inside, and the door swung shut behind him.

At first, he couldn’t see anything in the dark of the room. Unfortunately, his other senses worked just fine. The musk in the air was so thick he could taste it, all the blood and alcohol and sweat from drunken bar fights and sex. He heard a few grunts and wet smacks from somewhere to his right, and then a heavy thud. He guessed that meant a fight, but his guess was as good as any. He took another step forward, and heard his boots squelch. He couldn’t yet see what he was standing in. Perhaps that was for the best. He swallowed the growing lump in his throat and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to adapt to the dim room. A few embers lit the room.

In front of him was a game of cards, and judging from the scraps of paper on the table, it had just started. Not nearly enough possessions were up for grabs yet. In the corner, a woman had pinned somebody else against the wall — man or woman, Felix couldn’t tell — and was thrusting rhythmically into them. Felix couldn’t help but think the rhythmic bouncing of her breasts funny, if hypnotic in a way he didn’t quite understand. Against the wall, a man was blowing into a thin reed and dancing, although Felix could hardly hear the music in the room. Maybe he wasn’t playing anything at all.

He turned away from the spectacle and walked over to the bar. A young man stood on the other side. Too young for a bartender. Hardly old enough to shave, he guessed.

“I’d like to set up with a room for the night. No questions asked.”

The boy looked around uncertainly for a moment. “Pa’ll be back in a moment, but I think we’re all full up for the night.”

Felix grimaced at the young boy, then looked around him at the bar. When he turned back, an older man was standing behind the bar. “My son says you’re looking for a room. I hate t’disappoint such a fine sir as yourself, but we’re all booked up for the night, and the usual fare is already covered for the night,” he winked and grinned widely at Felix.

Felix reached into his shirt, to his chest, and pulled the Coin out. In response, the embers in the room flared, the bright light casting shadows across the room. He rested the Coin on the bar, his finger pressed atop it. A thin layer of frost spread slowly out from the Coin. The bartender’s eyes widened, and a look of fear spread across his face. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow. “I’m s-sorry, sir. I didn’t recognize you. I’m sure I can make a room available. Give me a moment.” He backed slowly away, his eyes fixed on the Coin.

The young boy stared at the Coin, transfixed. Eventually, he tore his eyes away, up to Felix’s face. Timidly, he raised his hand.

“Yes, boy?” The gruffness in his voice would have bothered Felix once, but there was no room for that.

“C-can I…” The boy looked down at his feet for a moment, then looked back up at Felix. “Can I see your Tribute?”

Felix frowned, his brow furrowing into a mass of wrinkles. They hadn’t taken anything. They normally did. Being a Coinbearer came with a cost. A Tribute. But he was whole. Physically, at least. The Coins had driven him apart from the one thing he’d had in the world, his friends. They’d underestimated how dangerous a man with nothing to lose could be. And he was coming for them.