Tag: short story

Stone 382 at Perihelion

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

augcoverMy story “Stone 382” has just been published in the August issue of Perihelion Science Fiction – you can read it online for free (though you can donate at the site: they’ve already paid me for the story). This story was an honorable mention in Writers of the Future Q1, so it’s cool to see it published.

Here’s the opening:

“We’ve got a vessel incoming,” Jimmy said.

Keith saw him reach towards his console glass and tap it. Keith wished the kid wouldn’t do that. It was a nervous habit that was just irritating. Mostly Keith liked Jimmy, but sometimes his little habits annoyed him more than they should. Twenty-three years old, fresh out of training, and cocky. Too long cooped up in the tiny stations.

“Kernel” published in Aurealis

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Aurealis cover
My story “Kernel” has just been published in Aurealis, one of the leading Australian science fiction magazines. It’s complemented with a nice illustration by Matt Bissett-Johnson.

The issue, edited by Stephen Higgins, includes a story by Sophie Masson, an article on Kim Wilkins by Kate Forsyth, Carissa’s Weblog by Carissa Thorp as well as numerous reviews. It available now through the Aurealis website. The magazine is a $2.99 download, or $19.99 for a twelve month subscription.

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Story blurb:
Genn’s stuck in a spaceship with more questions than answers. He remembers an accident, but no one on board is giving him a straight answer. And the kernel that’s supposed to be helping him recover seems helpful, but does more deflecting than anything.
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Opening paragraphs:
They had given Genn the kernel right after the operation, when he was still feeling somewhat woozy and disoriented. This was in April, a month and a half before departure. The kernel was the shape and colour of a single corn seed: deep yellow at the broad end, tapering to a white tip. It was the size of grapefruit, occupying, when he held it—as he often did—the whole of the palm of his hand.
‘It will help you through the transition,’ the medical team had told him.
‘Transition to what?’ he’d asked, but they had just smiled and left him in the post-op room with the sounds of the rattling hospital for company. There might have been an accident. He remembered Janice yelling at him on the freeway. Was it a transition to a life without a
family?
‘Transition,’ the kernel said, ‘through the light barrier.’

“Turtles” – a Barris Space story – out now in Encounters Magazine

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Encounters 200x305 My story “Turtles” is out now in the April edition of Encounters magazine. “Turtles” is a story set in my Barris Space universe. Previously published stories include “Barris Debris” (Deep Space Terror), “Eltanin Hoop Anomaly Rescue” (Will it go Faster if I Push This) and the novella The Wreck of the Emerald Sky (The Colored Lens).Derel Larsen – a character in Emerald Sky – appears in this new story too.

I’ll be re-publishing The Wreck of the Emerald Sky as a stand-alone ebook and print book in the near future, and eventually will be gathering together all those Barris Space stories (and a couple of others) into an omnibus edition. In the meantime check out Encounters – there’s a whole bunch of great stories there.

A Visit to the Theatre – new ebook

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

vttt 2
I’ve just put up my story “A Visit to the Theatre” as an ebook through Triple V Publishing. The story first came out in the Static Movement anthology Bounty Hunter a couple of years back. The ebook is paired with a flash fiction story “The Neuron Thieves”, which was itself published in The New Flesh.

Here’s the blurb:
Nikki’s got a an urgent telex for an easy bounty. Niemann’s in town. All she’s got to do is find him. The trouble is, Niemann wants to be found.

ebook – $2.99
Kindle
Smashwords

Print – $4.99
Amazon

Imaginary Maid
The fabulous cover illustration is by Ateliersommerland, who also created the illustration used on “Imaginary Maid Forgets She is Late for a Banquet”.

Free fiction: Berg – a Titanic story

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Darn, I missed the – ahem – boat with getting this up on the 100th anniversary. Still it’s a story I’m pleased with. “Berg” first appeared in the Lame Goat anthology, The Next Time, and was reprinted in the Static Movement anthology About Time (which picked up many of those stories from the out of print Lame Goat volume). This piece is a short, humourous, alternate history.

The image by Reuterdahl is from Wikimedia Commons.

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Berg
by Sean Monaghan
copyright 2010

The Zodiac dropped two feet into the icy water and Tony realised that it must have been a different tide. He started looking for the iceberg and saw it off to port, maybe two miles away.

“There,” he said, pointing and Geoff started up the outboard, moving them across the glassy surface.

Tony scanned the horizon for lights but couldn’t see anything. She must still be a long way off. They had plenty of time. Geoff moved them up and Tony put a piton into the ice, then tied the boat up. They looked it over and decided the best place to put the explosives. Geoff got out the hot drill and they clambered up with crampons and ropes. They had to get into the heart of the berg and it took twenty-five minutes longer to drill the hole than Tony had expected. He saw the running lights on the horizon. She would arrive very soon.

“She’s coming,” Geoff said. His breath left a wispy trail. Like Tony he was dressed in full Arctic thermals.

Tony checked his watch. 11.21pm. Lots of time. He dropped the thin explosive pack down and tamped the lead to the detonator, hooked in the radio receiver and switched it on.

“She’s getting close,” Geoff said.

Tony looked and saw that the ship was perhaps a mile away. He smiled to himself as they made their way back to the boat, keeping their crampons away from the inflatable sides. Geoff backed them off and Tony realised that it would be close.

“Stop here,” he said. The ship was perhaps five hundred yards away now, already turning.

“Come on,” Geoff said.

Tony pressed the button. Nothing happened.

“Do it.”

“I did it already.” Tony pushed the button again and again. The ship was nearly on the berg.

“Too late,” Geoff said. “Leave it.”

The ship was beginning to make its gradual arc around the berg, moving slowly south of them. Tony was transfixed. It was extraordinary to watch this event occurring just yards away from his eyes. He’d seen it so many times in various movies, and reconstructions. He read about it so much he could have written a dissertation. Yet the experience was something entirely different. He felt his throat clench.

The percussive sound of the hull striking the berg gave him such a start that he dropped the transmitter.

The explosion rocked them back and Tony had to grab Geoff to stop him falling from the Zodiac. When he looked again the ship was already head down, sinking fast. It was supposed to take nearly three hours. It shouldn’t be going so rapidly. The explosives, intended to break the berg up into relatively harmless flows, must have blasted a hole in the hull and the sinking was taking moments.

They bucked in the waves as the wash from the explosion hit them. The propellers were up, the bridge already underwater. Tony remembered the Lusitania, torpedoed, taking only minutes to go down.

There was screaming and in just a few minutes the ship was gone.

“Holy crap,” Geoff said.

Tony stared at the still shivering water, listened to the screaming of the people who’d been thrown clear, freezing to death.

Geoff started the engine again.

“What are you doing?” Tony said.

“Picking them up. Wasn’t that the idea? Save their lives. We’ve surely screwed that up, so let’s do something.”

“How many do you think there are? Fifty, sixty? Most of them were in bed.”

They pulled twenty live ones from the water and got them to the Carpathia.

And that gave Tony an idea for their next try.

Geoff didn’t like that any better than the explosives, but at least it gave them a chance to get there early and stop their other selves placing the package.

A week later they dropped back into the water a couple of hours earlier. They pitoned a buoy to the iceberg with a message to themselves not to blow it up, that everything was under control, then they sprinted for the Californian.

Once aboard, in period costume they sat next to the wireless room and created their own CQD distress message. The captain started the ship moving towards the iceberg, further away than the 1912 estimate, but closer than the 1992 vindication.

“What’s he doing?” Tony said nearly two hours later as they watched from the Zodiac.

The Californian had arrived before Titanic and was slowly turning. The berg rested close by.

“He’s wondering about the distress call,” Geoff said. “This is the position, but there’s no wreckage, no boats.”

Titanic had crested the horizon and Tony realised that the Californian was dark, all the cabin lights out as the crew slept, just her small running lights showing.

“Lost amongst the stars,” Geoff said.

Tony thought he was doing poetry, but then he saw the problem. “They must see her,” he said. “They must.”

The Titanic was bearing down on the now stationary Californian. Lord had heaved to for the night again, unwilling to move into the ice field in the darkness. The Titanic lookouts hadn’t seen the berg, but surely they would see the other vessel. Surely. The big ship had a massive head of steam up. Looking for a record time. It swept past the Zodiac like a black curtain.

“This,” Geoff said, “is just one screw up from the beginning.”

Titanic cut the tiny Californian in half. The split little ship heeled over and began going down. The Titanic, slowed somewhat, still smacked hard, bow first, into the berg.

Tony noticed that their buoy was gone and saw the other Tony, and the other Geoff, silhouetted, arms upraised in disbelief.

And then Titanic began going down too. Her hull must have been cracked by the impact. Both impacts. Tony kept hoping that the watertight doors would work, but she just kept sinking. Faster.

“Any better ideas?” Geoff asked, as Titanic’s took on a list that was preventing half the lifeboats getting away.

“Maybe,” Tony said. He had to put this right. “Something much more simple.”

“Well, count me out.”

“You’ll like this, though.”

And of course Geoff did come.

They pitoned in another buoy, with instructions for the first team to leave their buoy, and not to call the Californian.

“Okay,” Geoff said when they’d backed off. “You still want me to circle the berg?”

“That’s the plan. The lookouts were searching for breaking water, but there never was any because the sea was totally flat. That’s why they saw the berg so late the other time.” Tony waved to himself in the other Zodiacs as they went around.

“Yeah, well, if this doesn’t work, neither of us get born, right?”

Both other sets of doppelgangers had got the idea and soon all three Zodiacs were circling, creating wakes that left breaking waves on the face of the berg.

Tony smiled. “It doesn’t bear thinking about. My head spins with the paradoxes.”

Imaginary Maid Forgets She is Late for a Banquet – new ebook short story

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

I have a new story out through Smashwords. Imaginary Maid Forgets She is Late for a Banquet is a magicpunk, or magic realism. The story was first published in the Static Movement anthology Alternate Dimensions.

The amazing cover art is by Ateliersommerland and sourced through Dreamstime. The waif has the perfect expression to suit Bianca’s character.

My little description at Smashwords goes like this: “Bianca’s had about enough of Paulette, the school bully. But when she calls up magic to help out, both girls are in for more than they bargained for. Much more.”

And though you can read the first 20% free anyway, I do like to put the opening paragraphs here for a teaser too:

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Bianca sulked. She’d pushed herself into a corner of the kitchen, crouched and squeezed herself right under one of the benches.
“Bianca,” Paulette called. “Come out.” She paused, giggled a little. “Come out, come out.”
“Wherever you are,” Bianca whispered.
“I’ll teach you, you little snipe. I will teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”
Bianca looked around the corners of the tiny dark space. She needed magic.
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~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


Perhaps in a little contradiction to my posts over the last couple of days, I’ve put my literary story “Canyon Rim” up through Triple V. The story is not pulp. It is literary, as much as I write literary pieces. There is a story to it (a man’s search for safety), but it is perhaps as much an exercise in voice. It’s written with a focus on language and rhythm. Have I succeeded? I hope so.
I tutor for a university course in literary fiction and some of the tenents include ideas such as “fiction’s only rule is that it must compel the reader”. As a literary course, it’s focus is as much on language as on story – the idea that we do thirst for language and that the nuances of skilled writers can tantalise and draw us forward with deft and bold touches.
I do admire literary writers and their skill with language. Too often, though, it seems that the cleverness with language becomes too much the concern and that compelling aspect is lost (on me, at least). I like a balance: strong and articulate language that remains readable, with a true story and engaging characters.
Canyon Rim is perhaps as close as I will come with literary works, though I have a few others up my sleeve that will likely show up over time. Squeezed out in between the pulp (if that makes any sense).

Here’s the opening
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Ernie Freiden had been born to a Canadian father and an Australian mother. Both had been vacationing through the national parks of Utah and Colorado when they met in 1982. Shirley had quickly abandoned the German tourist she’d been traveling with, and taken up with Thomas, in Moab, near Arches National Park. The German, Shirley later told Ernie, though through into his adult life he heard different and increasingly unlikely versions of the story, had flown back to Germany, almost immediately, and years later had been crushed to death in a museum accident by a part of the Berlin wall he was helping to put on display after the reunification.
Thomas, Ernie’s father, had quickly (though not as quickly as the German’s departure from U.S. soil) had his name abbreviated to Tom, and complained little about that, after all Shirley was as decisive a woman as Tom had ever encountered and what was a slight adjustment to his name in comparison to her company?

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The story is scheduled for publication in the Static Movement anthology Sleepwalkin’ and Picklockin’ sometime in 2012 and I’m grateful to editor Chris Bartholomew for releasing it to Triple V so it might garner a few readers in the meantime.

Jodi MacArthur at Beat to a Pulp

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

Jodi MacArthur has a new story published – Free Mercury – at the very cool Beat to a Pulp site. The story is a wonderful exercise in voice: layered, entwined and scary. Recommended read.

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Sun is high in the sky. Hot. Red hot. Flies buzz around it like a pile of bullshit. I stare, watching the flies buzz around and around.

Sirens break out behind me. I look at the road through the cracked windshield. I see I’ve swerved all the way off the road, all the way on to the grass.

Deadstick – Short story for 99 cents at Smashwords

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 3 Comments

Triple V’s first short story ebook release – Deadstick – is now up at Smashwords. Read the first 20% free.

“Deadstick” came from a fairy story I’d conceived, about a burning sailing ship running aground off a fairy village and the problems ensuing. A very different thing to how this dieselpunk story turned out. For a moment I thought of having a pair of stories, one fantasy and one sci-fi, both using that same device. This story, however, wrote itself very quickly, while the fairy one still sits in my head, not quite ready to pour forth. Perhaps it will come to me one day.

Deadstick was originally published in the Static Movement anthology Oil.