The Maker’s Daughter

catwoman

Image of Selina Kyle/Catwoman (voiced by Adrienne Barbeau) from the 1992 Batman the Animated Series episode “Tyger, Tyger.”

The solitary Leonine was lying, concealed in the tall grass near an acacia tree watching what she assumed was a frumpy, blinkered woman crossing the broad savanna as she carried her basket. She didn’t so much walk as bounce, as if she were treading upon a sponge or the vast skin of some overly ripe fruit. Her costume reminded the female adaptoid of those worn by puritans, except her robe was a bright crimson, while he coif, shift, and apron were canvas white. With her large handbag, the amused humanoid lioness thought she looked like “little red riding hood meets “a handmaid’s tale.”

Her pale, compact body approached a coppice, which apparently was her destination. Leonine didn’t have to restrain herself, having recently dined on a gazelle, but she was curious, so she rose and silently circled around the open grasslands, padding through the trees, and finally approaching her target from the right. Too late did she realize her mistake as the woman, now appearing much younger than she had thought, turned her head, removed her ancient spectacles, and gazed directly into her feline eyes.

Continue reading

Five Ridiculously Implausible Things The Progressive Left is Afraid Of

A.M. Freeman

A.M. Freeman as found on her blog.

A little while ago (as I write this), I came across something on A.M. Freeman’s blog called When The Satire Site Can’t Recognize Satire. It was written in response to an article at Cracked.com called 5 Ridiculously Implausible Things The Alt-Right Is Afraid Of (Yes, I ripped off the title). Apparently, the missive’s author S. Peter Davis read the Superversive Press anthology Forbidden Thoughts, first published in January 2017 (to which Ms. Freeman contributed a story), edited by Jason Rennie, and with a foreword by the highly controversial Milo Yiannopoulos, and didn’t like it very much (Oh, keep in mind, I’ve read some of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s work and frankly, I don’t have much use for it).

Reading his review, and assuming his rendition of the stories contained within the anthology are accurate, yes, the themes and content are wildly exaggerated outside the realm of probability, but that was exactly the point. As Freeman pointed out, they were written as satire, blowing modern controversial topics way, way out of proportion to prove a point. The same was done in another Superversive anthology I read and reviewed called To Be Men: Stories Celebrating Masculinity. Yes, they’re all written from a very conservative and sometimes religious perspective, but the concern here, and probably the reason for the existence of Superversive Press, is that SF/F is increasingly becoming biased (or so is the belief) toward the left and perhaps the progressive far left (alt-left?), such that the rest of us don’t have a voice in the genre.

Continue reading

Parting Lovers

hills

© Sue Vincent

“We’re almost at the snowline, Diann. We made it.” Randolph Withers adjusted his backpack and his rifle’s sling, took his young companion by the hand, and then they both strode toward their goal with renewed hope.

“Do you think the outpost will still be there?” She glanced up at the man who stood barely half a head taller than her, though he was over six feet in height.

“It’s our only chance. It will provide basic shelter, and we’ve seen signs of abundant game as we approached the mountains, so we’ll have food. Now if I can get the radio equipment working again, we’ll be in business.”

“What about the Seltin Beasts? You said you thought it was your radio experiments that brought them down on your people…our people from their lair in the high peaks.”

“It’s a chance we’ll have to take.” He patted the Colt .45 resting in its holster for reassurance.

“But they killed all of the others in your party, almost killed you.”

Continue reading

The Wrong Moon

moon

© Gah Learner

“Honey, come here. The full moon is so beautiful tonight.” Robin and Noah Clarke were celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in a small resort town and had just returned to their hotel room after dinner.

“Full moon?” Noah picked up his smartphone and started pushing virtual buttons.

“Can’t you leave that thing alone and come watch the moon with me, please?” Minor annoyance etched her voice. “We’re on our second honeymoon…”

“That can’t be the Moon. Moonrise isn’t for another hour and the window faces west.”

Robin turned and looked out again. “Oh my God. You’re right. It’s getting bigger.”

I wrote this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 100.

The light in the photo is apparently the Moon, but then again, what if it isn’t?

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

The Murasaki Betrayal

galileo 7

Image of the Galileo shuttlecraft from the Star Trek episode “The Galileo Seven” – Found at memory-alpha.wikia.com

Charlton Ortega piloted his light scout ship “Lily Sloane” into the nebulous Murasaki 312 quasar-like formation at half impulse power not knowing if he and his three crew mates would make it back out again.

“Shields are nominal. Continuing sensor sweep. Still nothing.” Helen Olssen was both the ship’s systems expert and Ortega’s lover, and they were nothing alike. While he was impulsive, adventurous, and as dark as his Inca ancestors, the Swede from Uppsala was fair-skinned, blond to the point of having almost white hair, conservative, reserved, and studious. If Retenox Five hadn’t been invented, she would have been a natural for a pair of horned rim glasses.

“This whole area for a diameter of twelve light years is completely infused in a shell of hard radiation. If our shields drop even for a few seconds, we’ll sizzle like bacon on a griddle.” The navigator’s east Texas accent was what Ortega called “thick enough to cut with a knife.” Bethany “Red” Harrington checked her navcom against the readings of the old shuttlecraft that had visited the unknown planet more than a century ago. They’d been uploaded to the Enterprise’s ancient duotronic-based information system seconds before the Galileo Seven had burned up in the atmosphere, and hopefully they’d be enough to guide the Sloane on its mission. “You sure you can fly this thing under these conditions, Charlie?”

Continue reading

Quoting You Are Not At Risk

pliskin

Rabbi Zelig Pliskin – Found at the website promoting the book “The Light From Zion.”

Fear of failure is a prime cause of anxiety. People think, “If I don’t succeed, I am a worthless failure.”

Someone who fears failure is not willing to take the risks that are an essential ingredient in every new undertaking. This prevents him from taking action in many situations in which he could accomplish a great deal.

If someone accepts that his intrinsic worth as a person is never at risk ― even if he does not succeed at a given task ― then he is likely to try much more to accomplish.

-from Rabbi Zelig Pliskin’s book “Gateway to Happiness,” p.131

Every morning, I get an email from the Jewish educational organization Aish.com containing, among other things, quotes like this one. Although I’m a Christian, I tend to “resonate” more with Jewish theological perspectives. Since lately, I’ve been discussing some rather negative trends in the world of SF/F relative to events at the recent WorldCon convention in San Jose, I thought I should provide a counterbalance. We should define ourselves by our best qualities, not by who or what we oppose.

So I thought I should start providing a quote from Rabbi Zelig Pliskin on this blog every morning that I’m able (next week, I’ll be taking a trip and may be offline for a few days). This is probably more in line with my religious blog My Morning Meditations, but I think it’s needed here.

Perhaps it will convince some people that the world of religion isn’t always evil or hateful, and that there may be a profound wisdom, kindness, and joy inside the hearts of many who have faith in a power greater than human beings.

Part 2 of “This is the World of Science Fiction and WorldCon?”

Okay, so in doing research to respond to some of the readers of my flash fiction story We Don’t Want Your Kind Here, I had to revisit my essay Who is a Nazi and Why Should I Care?. This led me to search the #WorldCon76 and #WorldCon2018 twitter hashtags for any mention of Nazis, which led me to this twitter conversation by Patrick S. Tomlinson (here’s one of his books on Amazon), and the screenshots below:

nazi1

twitter screenshot

nazi2

twitter screenshot

nazi3

twitter screenshot

Yeah, what a great guy, huh (However, if the allegation that the protesters deliberately were blocking access to a bloodmobile was true, I’d have a problem with it, too)?

Continue reading

Future Tension

marigolds

Photo by Surachai Piragsa – Bangkok Post – 2017

Adam had to look up the word Hemmablind to find out what his wife meant. Yeah, it described him pretty well. He just didn’t notice all of the little imperfections in and around the house. The tear in the back screen door, the weeds growing in the flowerbed, they were all the same to him, and her constant pestering about them was a pain in his pinfeathers.

Yet, as oblivious as he was to all the chores she set before him each morning, he was able to carry himself in a decorous fashion, even when she said the leaf-filled rain gutters and the clogged bathroom sink were the final straw.

Oh, he had attempted to summon up a token effort or two, but it wasn’t enough to draw her attention away from his overall pattern of inactivity. He used his bad back as a crutch, but that didn’t hold up as an excuse, and certainly did not hold their marriage together.

Continue reading

The Chernobyl Man

pripyat

© Dec 2016 – Google

The tourists have been here for quite a while, but due to the dropping radiation levels, I’m unconscious most of the time. Pretty soon, I’ll fade away altogether, though I expect that will be a blessing.

At first, I wasn’t sure if I was dead or not. Of course, the Chernobyl accident killed everyone, including my maintenance team, and the citizens evacuated from Pripyat because of the danger, but what happened to me was unique. Did the radiation convert my body to this invisible plasma, or is this the nuclear representation of my soul?

As the radiation levels began to subside, so did I. It’s been a lonely existence, but somehow these tourist seem like an intrusion to me. After all, for years, I was the sole King of my domain, the only one who could live in my personal city. Now I’m just a dying artifact of another age.

I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw challenge. The idea is to use a Google Maps image and/or location as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is 150.

Today, the Pegman takes us to Pripyat, Ukraine, which was a community abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster. Because of that, the city has a unique history, and due to rapidly dropping radiation levels, people can go on tours of Pripyat now.

Of course, I had to add another wrinkle.

To read other tales based on this prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Legendary

solar flare

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second – This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The sun simmered red as it slunk towards the jagged horizon. Herman Pope and Krista Hubbard stood watching it from the parking lot at the Houston Space Center anticipating their last day on Earth.

“When will the Object reach perihelion?” The twenty-eight year old systems engineer grasped the older gentleman’s hand without taking her gaze off of the sunset.

The fifty-five year old senior operations manager looked at his watch, which had been his father’s before his. “Less than thirty minutes.”

“That’s how long we have?”

“Maybe. Are you sure you don’t want to go back inside? The Argonaut is transmitting continual status updates.”

“Round trip communications between here and Mercury’s orbit is something like 13 minutes.”

“If it happens, we won’t feel the effects for a while.”

“Yeah, but my brother in Hawaii won’t be having a good day. He’s supposed to graduate from college there next month.”

“Come on, Krista.” He gently tugged on her arm.

“No.” She pulled back harder than she had to. “I want to stay out here.”

Continue reading