Morituri te salutent
Author’s note: I think the latin’s right. Any latin buffs out there, correct me.
Anyways, this one as I said is post-apocalyptic. The genre appeals to me, I think, because despite the world ending, it offers a new start in which all the old mistakes can be put aside and people can do things right. Or not. And therefore the genre speaks very strongly to what we assume of human nature. And obviously that’s what writers are about, more than just getting up on soapboxes and fibbing about themselves (which they can’t help, because they make fictions and probably they did think they were honest and open at the time that they were writing). I also like the idea of people making their own rules and being held to account by them. Because that’s what life should be like, aspiring to principles and sticking to them without the threat of a fine or a custodial sentence forcing you into being good.
Anyway, this is the last of the anti-romances. My relationship with romance is at a remove, I have to admit, so I treat it with scepticism in my writing. Partially to stop myself from throwing hearts and flowers at everyone. I’m not quite sure what the message ends up being in this story, whether it’s about hope and acceptance or if it’s just about surviving and making do. I guess that’s for you lot to decide.
The lake was burning. The water bubbled and churned beneath the flames. If anything had been living in the water, it wasn’t now.
Drake watched it from the copse. He crouched down on his haunches as he did when hunting rabbits and cats, and took quick sips from his flask. It was filled with a mixture of whiskey and vodka, ridiculously. He had grown used to the taste, and most days it dulled the pain in his left leg.
Some days he liked to feel the pain. Just to punish himself.
He pulled out the binoculars from a pocket in his hunter’s jacket and held up the uncracked lens to his eye.
The flames burned fast and high, coiling into thick black smoke the higher they went into the orange-red of the evening sky.
Under Rob’s skin
Author’s note: New story day! It’s another visit to the Superstuniverse, but this time round the story focusses on Robert Ribblesdale, the elasticated working class hero known also as Rubber Rob. Rob is a character who is a pleasure to write. He’s so utterly not like me, that writing him is a bit like acting. You have to find the points you can identify with and work from there. Frequently, when we were writing the original Superstu stuff, we would find that the scenes with Rob in them were our favourites and frequently the funniest. This is because Rob is the grit in the oyster. He’s a great source of conflict and dramatic tension, because he’s on the edge of likeability.
As such, this story lurches back towards the humour of those older stories, which I think is a good thing.
Disclaimer: Any resemblance the wholly fictitous characters and events portrayed in this story have with actual, real people and events is coincidental. Also, no skinless millionaires were harmed in the writing of this story.
It was cold in the office. The air conditioning was cranked up and blowing a gale, even though outside it was mild and still. It didn’t bother Rob so much; the manner in which his powers altered his physiognomy meant that he didn’t conduct heat like other human beings. It had proven quite useful in the jungle and when he, Stu and Matt had ridden a space station through Earth’s atmosphere.
But it also meant that Rob didn’t feel things quite as well as other people did. It was like being permanently drunk but without the buzz. Or like someone had sat on his whole body for half an hour. Generally Rob didn’t tell people about this and made it a point to get drunk so that he would have the buzz as well. He also didn’t tell them about the dreams where one of his limbs would not retract after stretching or the cold sweat he would wake up in afterwards.
He did tell them about the dreams where he pleasured two women at once, only omitting the fact that it was a dream.
Well, it didn’t hurt anyone.
Except the cause of Feminism.
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A death of matter and life
Author’s note: It’s time for Stark! My absolute favourite character in Farscape is Stark, the banik slave with the ability to help people pass over to the other side. When we first meet him, Stark has been driven mad through exposure to the Aurora chair, and he doesn’t get any saner. But Paul Goddard’s performance makes him at times pathetic, at times triumphant, funny, compelling. I think he was ill-used towards the show’s end when he seemed to become little more than a comedic foil because Goddard was good at portraying dramatic meat of a character who was never comfortable in his own skin.
The story takes place after the TV episode “The Choice” in which Stark, who is still nursing his grief over the death of his lover, Zhaan, is bluntly disabused by Aeryn Sun, who is mourning the death of her lover Crichton, of any feelings of friendship between the two of them. Stark leaves the group, claiming that Zhaan is calling to him. My feeling at the time was that this was a cover-up as Stark had convinced himself he was in love with Aeryn, something backed up by his next appearance in the show “John Quixote”.
There were more than a couple of websites I used to make sure my terminology was in keeping with the show so take a bow, Scifi.com’s Farscape Translator, and the apparently crashed SuperNova science fiction wiki. Wikipedia was also useful in providing episode titles and synopses to remind me of lo, all those days ago.
Disclaimer: Farscape is owned by the Jim Henson Company and therefore not by me. This story is presented purely for entertainment value and is not intended to infringe on the owner’s rights.
The gardener half-danced, half-floated around the hothouse. Vestigial wings of wire and glass fixed in a clockwork housing whirred on its back, lifting its fluffy mass just off the ground in a chaotic manner; though somehow it managed to miss the tables covered in plant life.
Its Brownian motion made it difficult for Stark to keep up. Having only one eye made depth perception an issue at the best of times, but when you were following something that could change directions five times a second it became a hazard. He kept being stabbed by edges, and the pots holding the plants were rattling with unfortunate regularity.
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Ace’s War Story
As promised, here is my first attempt at flash fiction. It’s a bit of Doctor Who fan fiction set between the old version that I grew up on and the new version that some other funny little kid is growing up on. It features the character of Ace, who was the final companion of the old show and is in many ways, the proto-Rose. Ace was a schoolgirl who had been swept away in a time storm to Iceworld, where she met up with the Sylvester McCoy version of the Doctor. More than any previous companion, the show revolved around Ace. The Doctor took her to visit her past and seemed to be working to fix the young woman, who was angry and unhappy. In the Curse of Fenric there is a moment where Ace tells the Doctor, “I’m not a little girl, anymore” and she means it.
It was the best of times. Doctor Who was showing levels of inventiveness and joy that it hadn’t in years, it was capturing the zeitgeist, but no one was watching it. So they stopped. So we didn’t get to see that the script editor planned for Ace to become a Time Lord. However, it’s such an affecting idea that I had to combine it with the unseen Time War that burned Gallifrey and hey ho! A bit of flash fiction!
Disclaimer: as you all should know, Doctor Who, the TARDIS and all related elements are owned wholly by the BBC. I have no rights to the characters or situations and present this story for entertainment value only.
On the planet Keriszhutra they sew people’s mouths shut with protein chains so that you couldn’t tell there had ever been an orifice there. It wasn’t a punishment, it was a reward. If you were devout enough you were allowed to inject food directly into your bloodstream, to be removed from the messy physical act. More devout still, they sealed up the other end and removed the larger part of the intestinal tract. Those who were the most zealous did not need eyes, did not need ears or noses or fingers or genitalia.
Dorothy McShane, neophyte Time Lord and ex-waitress also known as Ace, had none of her exits or entrances sealed and she had all the bits she had been born with. That was the way she liked it.
Living Death
Author’s note: So I wrote the first part of this story to work out how I felt about death. But I had so much fun writing it, that I suddenly realised that the story needed a balance. And so I realised that I needed to tell Stu’s story. And this one was going to be a story about how I felt about life.
It’s an odd thing to have to tell you, but the original Superstu stuff was all parody. It was just me and David Thomas thinking up funny lines and then trying to find a story to hang them on. But as tends to happen with comedies, the tragic elements began to grow in my head and suddenly Stu and Rob and Wanda and Dan were all living breathing characters. So much so that when I write one of these things, David will tell me when the characters don’t sound like the characters. Can you imagine that? Creating something whole cloth and then having it be so strong that someone else knows what the characters sound like in his head? And the freakish thing is that he’s usually right.
Some quick facts: these stories are set in Milton Keynes for historical reasons. But also, neither David nor I had ever been to Milton Keynes, so we created a false geography for the new town. Hence Camelot Lane and Cthulhu Close. In the original history, Stu was from the planet Krutan, his real name was Tao Ehl and his father’s name was Thikas.
One last thing. The ending. I know life isn’t really like that. I know it isn’t. But for one brief shining moment, I knew precisely what the ending had to be, and regardless of how unrealistic it is, that was the ending I wrote. And it’s perfect.
Two weeks after he returned from the future Stu’s nanotech started to break down. Gifted to him by people who would not be born for a thousand years, the upgrades had been floating around in his blood stream and circulating in his guts to maximise his metabolism and protect him from illnesses his immune system could not imagine. And now, not used to the level of pollutants available for inhalation and ingestion in the twentieth century, they shut down and passed out of him in explosive and unpleasant ways.
It began as a headache, though Stu had barely noticed it as he had been wracked with tension since he had stepped back through the time rift.
(‘The timeline is crunching!’ 0100010110 Brown had yelled at him. ‘We have to put you back where you belong.’
But I belong here, Stu hadn’t said. I want to stay here. I’m happy, I’m in love, and I’m accepted.
‘Okay,’ Stu had said. ‘How do we do it?’)
***
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A hero dies but one death…
Author’s note: As noted earlier, this story apparently shares common elements with a story from Buffy the Vampire Slayer I haven’t seen. All I can say is, “La la la, I can’t hear you.” This story is set in the Superstu universe. As I explained in an earlier post, Superstu was named by someone else. It’s not rampant egotism, honest Guv! I just couldn’t think of a better name for the character (although from now on he’ll probably only ever be called Stuart Stewart, the man so good they named him twice). He became cemented in my head with that name. And let’s face it, there aren’t enough Stuarts in fiction. There’s Pierce Brosnan’s character in Mrs Doubtfire, the mouse from the film with Hugh Laurie, and the inept cop in My Name is Earl and the gay cop in Taggart. And that’s about it. (Oh and Stewie Griffin in Family Guy - save the best ’til last.)
In the Superstu universe, super heroes exist, but as I thought they would be in the real world. Imagine if you had powers: would you dress up in skintight lycra and stop runaway trains (and she blew)? Or would you become neurotic about what would happen if you didn’t keep a handle on those powers all the time? Would the British government allow super heroes to run around, or would they force you to have a licence to use your powers? As the psychic funnel effect goes, Marvel Comics has recently used the same idea of super heroes being held up by government bureaucracy, albeit to point up civil liberty issues post 9-11. Swines.
Anyway, below is the first story in a diptych, the second half of which will appear next week, same stu-time, same stu-channel. Written in September as my dad was about to go into hospital for a triple bypass operation, I was thinking a lot about death. And life. And that whole eros-thanatos thing. Reputedly the survivors of 9-11 became very frisky, it’s a common reaction to death I hear. My dad made it through the operation fine.
Super heroes tend to die a lot these days. You might remember that the death of Superman in the early nineties got national press coverage, and the recent death of Captain America was similarly slow news day fodder in the US. But these people don’t stay dead. And I wondered what it would be like to live in a world where death was seen as temporary.
Disclaimer: I should point out that I have no special understanding of the female mind, so if Wanda comes across as a man in drag, I’m really really sorry… Also, the characters and events in this story are purely fictional; any resemblance to people living or dead is purely in the eye of the beholder…
It was uncommonly warm for November. A confused wasp zzubed its way around the graveyard too confused to sting those commemorating loved ones and thinking back on what was lost.
Rob and Wanda were the only ones to go to their friend’s funeral.
It wasn’t that he was ill-liked or that his death had not been important. It was just that people had yet to forget the last time or even the time before, and they were damned if they were going to take a day off work just so that he could pop up a month or so later to reveal that it had been an alternate timeline doppelganger who had died. Hence the lack of flowers and cards. Hence how cheap the service had been, and the way the vicar had rolled his eyes as he spoke his lines.