2016 Women in Horror Flash Fiction Contest

Congratulations to my friend and very talented writer, Myriah Strozykowski, for her win!  She wrote an excellent flash piece called 'Staying,' and won the Mocha Memoirs Press flash fiction contest for 2016 Women in Horror!

Check out her piece when it gets published in their ezine!

SALISH SEA - Today's Microfiction

"This is going to be great!" Dylan enthused from the front of the canoe.

"Shush, man! Be quiet," Robert said.

The two friends were on a canoe on the Salish Sea, pursuing the idea they'd hit upon during their weed-filled weekend. They were going to solve the mystery of the solitary human feet that washed up on Vancouver's shore. “Over there!” Dylan pointed.

Robert squinted through the fog. A shimmering circle of light hung over the water, at waist height. “What is it?”

“I have no idea.” The two rowed until the bow was under the hovering circle. The friends stared in awe at the glowing hole in the air. Dylan reached out one hand while Robert looked down at his waterproof pouch, fumbling out his phone.

SHWOOMP – and then a plop.

Robert looked up, startled. Ripples at the side of the canoe showed where something had fallen overboard.

Dylan was gone.

“Dylan?” Robert whispered. He tried louder. “Dylan?!”

He crawled to the front of the canoe and stood. The circle glowed peacefully.

Robert tentatively reached out one hand and touched the circle.

It sprang closed, pulling Robert’s arm and then his whole body into it with a quick sucking SHWOOMP. The circle snapped shut, and Robert’s left foot, still in a sneaker, fell free and dropped into the water to bob for a second before it sank.

Good News & A Contest!

I'm running a contest! Right here and right now.

As you know, my short story "Restore Point" was published by online zine Liquid Imagination. (http://liquidimagination.silverpen.org/article/restore-point-roman-rozas-iii/)

I am happy to report that the story was also selected for the 2015 Write Well Anthology for excellence in the short story field!

You can see the anthology (ebook and print version) here at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/2015-Write-Well-Award-Taubold-ebook/dp/B014B2Z0SO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1455939310&sr=8-1&keywords=2015+write+well+anthology

As you can see, the anthology does not have any reviews as of today.  So I have decided to have a contest!

Post your name and why you would like to write a review in the comments, and I will randomly select two commentators from the group and send them a free Kindle version of the anthology - on one condition.

You must agree to read the whole anthology and write a review on the Amazon website.

Sound good?  Let me know in the comments!

THE NERD AWAKENS - SOME THOUGHTS ON STAR WARS: EPISODE 7

WARNING – SPOILERS FOR THE FORCE AWAKENS (AND EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, TOO, I GUESS)

            It’s difficult to talk about Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (TFA) without spoilers, so I’m just going to go ahead and speak freely.  If you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading now.

            Okay, did they leave?  Good. 

            I really liked it.  Even though, as I was watching it, I was thinking the whole time, I shouldn’t be liking this.  TFA is a combination of a rehash of A New Hope, with pure fan-service scenes thrown in.

            Look at the parallels: a droid with information vital to the Resistance/Rebellion is stuck on a desert, rescued by an orphan and helped off planet.  They have to look for a ride in a crazy multi-species cantina.

            Later, they need to conduct a daring raid on a planet-sized death machine – explicitly compared to the Death Stars! – and there’s a daring trench run by X-Wings to finally blow up the giant death machine.  Meanwhile, the orphan has gotten in touch with the Force, and uses it to defeat the bad guy.  Scene wipe to end!

            And, by the Force, the perpetual fan service!  The shock reveal of the “hunk of junk” Millennium Falcon, the dejarik table, the seeker drone Finn finds as he rifles through storage, the knowing reference to “twelve parsecs” – I smiled and laughed at all of it, but in the back of my mind I kept wondering why am I liking this?

            I think what people like – what I like – about TFA is the sense of wide-open possibility that exists.  With the prequels (putting their quality aside), we knew where it would all end up – Republic converted to Empire, Anakin in black armor and a respirator, the Jedi Order destroyed.  Now, we have no idea what’s happening.  Is Rey Luke Skywalker’s daughter? How can Finn use a lightsaber (which is traditionally limited to Force-sensitives)? Why did Kylo Ren leave the Order? Why are the “Knights of Ren” not Sith?  A sense that anything could happen in Episode 8 and 9 has a liberating feel, and people are buying into it way more than the movie itself might justify.

            Again, not that I didn’t like it.  I saw it twice!  I had a smile on my face the whole time it was on, from the text-crawl in the beginning to Luke Skywalker’s pregnant stare at the end.  I’m just not sure my enjoyment was of the movie itself, or of what it represents. 

            Star Wars is back.

TIME IS NOT ON YOUR SIDE

Historically, time-keeping has been a hassle for large empires on Earth.  Different seasons, different time zones – all kinds of hassle.  Now imagine an interstellar empire.  Heck, just imagine a culture that exists on two or more worlds!

            With artificial habitats and ships throughout the Solar System, the problem is simple.  Everybody is on Greenwich Mean Time, a day lasts 24 hours and 7 days is a week; a year is 365.25 of those days, regardless of how long it took your personal cylinder of metal to circle around the sun.  See you all at the pub.

            Interject a planet with an environment that the residents have to interact with, however, and differences immediately begin to add up.  Take Mars for example.  If the first colonists (let’s call them Muskies, like Greg Benford http://www.strangerviews.com/books/war-dogs-greg-bear-book-review/ ) land on Mars on January 1, 2040, they’ll make camp and begin a day that is, generally, 24 hours and 37 minutes long, or 41 minutes longer than Earth’s 23 hours and 56 minutes.  As the days goes by, the Muskies will fall farther and farther behind Earth.  In fact, they’ll wake up around February 4, and it will be in fact February 5 on Earth.  On March 9, it will be March 11 on Earth.  (NASA mission controllers for Mars probes have a fascinating system for dealing with the problem but it is not one usable in the long-term.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars).  Other celestial bodies generate even worse problems.

            Some science fiction writers have turned to a “metric” or SI solution of using the kilosecond (I just finished reading Paul MacAuley’s In the Mouth of the Whale, http://www.amazon.com/Mouth-Whale-Quiet-War/dp/0575100753/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439907850&sr=8-1&keywords=In+the+Mouth+of+the+Whale and the characters use this scheme).  The second is a fixed, known period of time (roughly 9 billion vibrations of a cesium-133), and time-units based from there would be certain.  Under this definition, a day is 86.4 kiloseconds, and a month is 2.3 megaseconds, for comparison.

            A character living with such a system would say to his friend, “Do you remember that book I loaned you two megaseconds ago?”  “Grandma lived to be 2.5 gigaseconds (78 Earth years).”  Dates would be set by megaseconds from a fixed date: “Today is 1 kilosecond, and 1449 megaseconds After Moon Landing.”

Here’s the problem for the author and the reader: it’s hard!  When a character says, “X was two weeks ago,” you know exactly what they mean.  When they say something was a megasecond ago, you have to stop and do a quick calculation in your head.  It brings the narrative to a screeching halt.  It breaks up the flow of the dialogue or exposition, and may leave your less-than-hard-sf readers a little queasy.

On the other hand, a character living on an extrasolar planet, with a different rotational time and different length of the year, can’t simply write “July 5, 2042” on their checks.  That doesn’t even mean anything in the context of a world where the day is 28 hours and a year 36 of our months long.

            So which should it be, gentle readers?

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE...

Good old H20 is essential to life (as we know it!).  Luckily, it also seems to be pretty common in our Solar System, at least in its solid form of ice.  Even liquid water may be more common than we once thought, with oceans on Europa, Enceladus and Ganymede.  (https://www.sciencenews.org/article/aurora-shift-confirms-ganymede%E2%80%99s-ocean)

So my pet peeve?  SF writers who have aliens traveling light-years across the galaxy to steal our water. (By "our" water, I mean the Earth's water.  I leave to the reader the exercise of determining whether humans, vis-a-vis aliens from another star, "own" the Moon's ice, or Saturn's rings).

Why take our water?  It's at the bottom of a gravity well and surrounded by angry primates with nuclear weapons and a self-destructive streak.

There are things that invaders might want: heavy elements, which tend to congregate in rocky inner worlds, biological products that are unique to Earth's biosphere, etc.  Or they may just want to eliminate potential future competitors (http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/space-invaders-unlikely-for-now-130214.htm).

Just don't use water as your crutch, writers.  Pick something unique!

"Restore Point" SF Short now on Issue 23 of Liquid Imagination!

Happy to report that my SF short story, "Restore Point," is up today as part of Liquid Imagination's Issue 23!


http://liquidimagination.silverpen.org/article/restore-point-roman-rozas-iii/


Go check it out!