Author Archives: James Pyles

They’re Finally Here

clown

From the mini-series “It” (1990)

“I’m getting tired of all these clowns trying to lure our kids into the woods or back alleys and I’m going to stop them any way I can.” Brett stuffed the business end of his .45 into his waistband as he opened the back door.

“No, please don’t.” His wife Sheila ran up to him and grabbed his free arm, then staggered backward as her furious husband shook off her grip.

Nine-year-old Teddy and his six-year-old sister Pam were peeking into the kitchen from the hallway not knowing who to be more scared of, the clowns or Daddy.

For months, reports of clowns wandering the streets of communities all across America had been in the news, but in Alanville, Idaho, things had taken a frightening turn.

The small, rural town in the center of the state, famed for its apple orchards, had a population of barely 5,000. It was the type of American community where everyone still knew their neighbors, people waved and said hello as they passed each other on the sidewalk, and doors on cars and houses were only occasionally locked. It was what magazines called a “family friendly community,” a wonderful place to raise children, or at least it had been up until last month.

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Tuning In

flash of lightFrom the Flight Log of Freighter Pilot Camdon Rod

Just completed the jump into the Brinelli system and my head’s ringing like the Cathedral bells at the Lovibian convent on New Mederine. This is the fifth jump where I’ve heard ringing and come away with a splitting headache, and it gets worse with each jump.

Yeah, you know me. My name’s Camdon Rod and I’m the owner/operator of the jump freighter Ginger’s Regret. Right now, I’m regretting taking the job to haul replacement Calidantian micro-spanners to Brinelli for their underwater mining operations. Sure, the price is right since they can’t run the hydro-drills without these parts, but what the heck is happening to my head after each hyperjump?

This has never happened to me before. As you know, any ship equipped with a jump drive plots a virtual point-to-point connection between origin and destination points through hyperspace. The trip is instantaneous from a lifeform’s point of view and it’s impossible to perceive anything about the jump whatsoever, or at least it’s supposed to be.

No time to get careless. A distracted pilot is a dead pilot.

“Brinelli central control to Ginger’s Regret. Acknowledge completed jump.”

There’s Brinelli’s standard acknowledge call. “This is Ginger’s Regret acknowledging jump. Cutting in space norm engines. Estimate landing Ispanzu Port 1450 hours local time.”

“Confirming Regret’s estimated arrival at Ispanzu at 1450 hours local. Welcome to Brinelli. Enjoy your stay.”

“Acknowledge and thanks. Regret out.”

I’m just about gritting my teeth against the pain in my skull but I think it’s starting to ease off some. And so it goes.

“Need some pain killers, lover?”

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The Undying

gunfight

From the film “Gunfight at Red Sands” (1963)

In the old west, there was always some punk kid who thought he could outdraw the local gunslinger and who didn’t live to regret it. That’s because the gunslinger was really good at what he did and punk kids are idiots.

I’m not a gunslinger anymore, but I’ve still got young punks lining up to try to take me out. The outcome is always the same.

My name is Samuel Kane. Well, that’s not the name I was born with, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve lost count of the number of names I’ve lived under over the years. I speak dozens of languages, many of them dead, have seen empires rise and fall, seen commoners become Kings, and Kings fall to ruins at the hands of barbarian hordes.

In other words, I’ve lived too long to be impressed by much anymore.

It’s that damn wizard’s fault. Actually it’s my fault, but I blame the wizard for actually giving me what I asked for. He should have just killed me. Instead he did the opposite, which is much worse.

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The Apprentice

magical

Image: AA VFX YouTube channel

The Sixth Story in the Adventures of the Ambrosial Dragon: A Children’s Fantasy Series

This story resolves the cliffhanger begun in the previous tale The March of the Stuffed Animals. Read that story before continuing here.

Eldritch magic surrounded Buddy the Ambrosial Dragon and Tarmreiboth the Dark Wizard of Setioval as they battled for the very soul of a seven-year-old boy. Landon was lying unconscious in a circle of light surrounded by living stuffed animals, animated by Landon’s own spell which was secretly taught to him by the Dark Wizard, the animals ultimately being controlled by that same wizard.

Landon’s Dad and Grandpa watched helplessly, held motionless by the dark magic of the stuffed animals, as the dragon and the wizard wove brilliant and violent spells around each other designed to defeat; to annihilate. Buddy fought to take Landon and his family back home and to safety, while Tarmreiboth desired that the child become his apprentice and an operative of evil, perhaps one day to inherit the title of Dark Wizard.

The only illumination in this out-of-the-way “pocket” dimension, not a true realm, but a reality constructed for just this purpose, was from the circle of light surrounded by the stuffed animals and the flashes of magic woven by the two combatants, but somehow, Grandpa and Dad could see everything.

“You cannot defeat me, dragon. You never could. That’s why you ran away with the boy last time.” The wizard was confident and with good reason. Although possibly thousands of years old, in many ways Buddy was still young and immature. He could not make full use of his abilities yet, while Tarmreiboth was at the height of his powers.

“Me fight. Me win. Love Landon. Save him.” If a pure heart and determination were all that mattered, Buddy would have given the dark wizard serious competition, but unfortunately even goodness and love had to give way to superior skills and strength. Buddy could feel himself weakening.

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Should We Be Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Are They Trying to Kill Us?

seti

Image: SETI.org

I just read an article called “SETI’s mega alien hunt shovels more data onto IBM’s cloud” at The Register, which is a UK-based tech site with a satirical twist. The article’s subtitle is “Citizen boffins: Help find the alien that ultimately kills us all.”

SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, uses radio telescope arrays to gather hundreds of terabytes of data each day. That’s a lot of data to process. So they’re releasing 16TB of radio transmissions from the Allan Telescope Array (ATA), located near San Francisco, to IBM’s cloud under SETI@IBMCloud. The idea is that citizen coders can build apps capable of querying the data and possibly detecting information SETI technicians might have missed.

Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has gone on record as stating he believes aliens will destroy us if they ever find us. It’s not like they’d even have to be all that hostile. They could destroy our culture the way Europeans destroyed Native American cultures when they first arrive hundreds of years ago, the ramifications of which are still being keenly felt today.

I suppose that’s possible, but is it likely?

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Dreaming of Arabia Terra

mars

Image: Wikipedia

Commander Amanda Nichols was disappointed as she opened the Mars lander’s hatch and saw that her helmet obscured much of her first view of the upland region of Arabia Terra. Major Terry Chang, the lander’s co-pilot who was standing behind her, always referred to the Martian terrain as “planet Nevada,” but for Amanda, the stark beauty and even the romance of Mars far outweighed a more objective observation.

This is supposed to be one of the oldest terrains on the planet, heavily eroded and very densely cratered, which is part of the reason NASA chose this part of the Arabia quadrangle as the landing site of the first human mission. There’s a distinct possibility of studying evidence of tectonic activity and even volcanism here, plus previous robot landers detected the likelihood of ice water under the surface.

To Amanda, the landscape before her looked like God had taken the ancient red crust, rock, and dust in her field of vision and etched, crumpled, and then pounded it, creating a texture and fabric that spoke of a life lived long and hard resulting in a face marked with character and even a hint of majesty rather than merely scars and age.

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Lying in the Sands of Time

hourglass

Image: Shutterstock

“I took a walk around the world to ease my troubled mind.
I left my body lying somewhere in the sands of time.”

-Brad Arnold
“Kryptonite”
Performed by Three Doors Down

How did I get here?

I’m on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, but it’s like 1970s Berkeley. There’s the Federation Trading Post. They were closed down decades ago after Paramount sued them. The Dark Carnival Science Fiction bookstore. They moved to some other part of Berkeley, on Shattuck I think. I didn’t even know they still existed.

“Oh excuse…”

What the…! I thought I was going to bump into that woman, but she went right through me like I wasn’t here.

How did I get here, anyway? I should be hundreds of miles away in Long Beach. That’s right. I live in Long Beach, not Berkeley. I haven’t lived here since the early 80s.

Here comes someone. Maybe they can help me. “Excuse me, sir. Can you…”

He walked right past me without looking at me at all. Is he deaf?

“Ma’am. Excuse me, I know this might sound crazy but…” She didn’t look at me either. Why couldn’t she hear me?

Another guy. I’ll make it impossible for him to ignore me.

“Sir, if you could just stop a min…”

What? I stood right in front of him. He didn’t stop or walk around me. He walked through me. Am I a ghost?

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I’ve Just Been Published at “Theme of Absence”

I’m proud to announce that an original piece of my fiction has just been published online at Theme of Absence, which is an online magazine of fantasy, horror, and science fiction administered by Jason Bougger. An original fiction short story and author interview is published every Friday at that website. Today, I’m the published author.

You can go to the site right now to read my story The Anything Box which you won’t find in print or online anywhere else including my own blog.

You can also read my author interview.

This is the first time I’ve had a piece of my fiction writing accepted and published. I’m feeling pretty good about it.

Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy

pluto x-rays

Image: NASA

From the Flight Log of Freighter Pilot Camdon Rod

I wouldn’t have known there were X-rays being emitted by Conlon’s Object if Cepravez hadn’t moved its jump point to the outer system. Technically Conlon’s is a dwarf planet, but when it was discovered centuries ago using a standard, ground-based optical telescope, the hunk of rock wasn’t deemed worthy of even that status, at least by Manx Conlon, the astronomer who first located it.

Oh, by the way, my name is Camdon Rod and I’m the owner/operator of the jump freighter the Ginger’s Regret. The Regret and I have been through a lot together, particularly since I discovered she was haunted, and by the real Ginger no less.

Of course, that’s practically nothing compared to some of our adventures like being hijacked in interplanetary space and me falling in love with a ghost.

But the part about falling in love can wait. It’s waited for a while now. It can wait a little longer.

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The Pilot Episode of “Supergirl” : A Retro Review

supergirlNow that the television series Supergirl has moved to the CW from CBS, giving it a second chance at life and a second season, I thought I’d dust off my review of the series pilot, which I wrote last year for another blog.

I hadn’t originally intended on watching the pilot episode of Supergirl starring Melissa Benoist in the title role, but it was online, it was free, so I figured, what the heck. I didn’t expect to like it all that much, but I was curious how CBS was going to adapt decades of Superman and Supergirl canon. My reaction is mixed.

I’ve read a few of the other reviews of the pilot, both before and after I saw the episode, and they range from “good but not perfect” to “triumph for everyone wanting a strong female hero for a change”. You can see examples at Yahoo News, IGN, The Mary Sue, and The Los Angeles Times.

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