Beyond: Space Opera

by Milo James Fowler

  I must have been drunk. I glanced over at the wine bottle, still half-full. Incredible. Is this is what my mother felt like all of the time? I was drunk on reality.

  "Oh, okay," said Grey Cut's daughter. I would have to give her a name. No. I must ask her to name herself. She looked frightened. Can a mass of tentacles look frightened?

  I tried to be kind. "Don't worry. Every thing's going to be okay."

  I raised my glass of Rioja in salute to the diminishing view of the planet. "And believe me, my friend, you're better off without your mother."

  Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: Deborah Walker's Bibliography. Her stories have appeared in Nature's Futures, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Daily Science Fiction and The Year's Best SF 18 and have been translated into over a dozen languages. Check out her work on Wattpad.

  O R I G I N S T O R I E S

  "Captain Quasar and the Kolarii Kidnappers"

  Western tropes often rear their heads in space opera: the dangerous frontier of unknown worlds, the tentative relations with indigenous species, the rugged individualist who lives by his or her own moral code—blaster slung low and ready for action. But no matter what goes down, at the end of the day, the hero manages to fly off into the golden glow of a distant nebula, prepared to face whatever tomorrow brings.

  Back in the spring of 2010 when I first came up with the character Captain Bartholomew Quasar, I was going for a mash-up between William Shatner's James T. Kirk and Dudley Do-Right from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (but in Quasar's case, things seldom ever go right). I wanted him to be one of those classic pulp heroes with a heart of gold whose narcissistic tendencies often land him in hot water. I hoped readers could laugh at Bartholomew Quasar and root for him at the same time. He's ridiculous, but there's something about his fallible nature that most of us can relate to on some level. And he truly wants to see justice served.

  Most of Captain Quasar's tales are set in deep space aboard his star cruiser the Effervescent Magnitude, but in "The Kolarii Kidnappers" I decided to strand him on an alien world in the middle of a difficult situation and stretch him to his breaking point. It's easy to be the hero when you have an arsenal of plasma torpedoes at your disposal. But disarmed and at the mercy of an alien tribe? Quasar has to rely on more than his dashing charm and impressive firepower to get out of this one alive.

  I enjoyed testing Quasar's limits and seeing what he would do next. Kurt Vonnegut said that in order to tell a good story, we should be cruel to our characters: "No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of." What is Captain Quasar made of, besides a great physique, an amazing set of teeth, and a confident pose? You'll have to decide that for yourself.

  – Milo James Fowler

  "The Ungreat Escape"

  "The Ungreat Escape" originally started as a cover prompt for Comets and Criminals issue #3. The editor had a cover but no story attached to it, so a few of us from Absolute Write's forum decided to fill that void. Obviously I didn't get in.

  The story underwent revision, gained 700 words, and was sent off again into the great big world. For the record, it faced 12 rejections before it found a home with Cosmos (which means unlucky 13 was actually the opposite!)

  – Siobhan Gallagher

  "All Comms Down"

  There have been many times in my writing career when a particular theme or prompt has led to some of my most interesting work. This was one of those stories. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I do remember that the original prompt came from a small Australian press, and called for stories that took place in the empty space between galaxies.

  The first images to coalesce in my mind's eye were from Kubrick's film of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Vast reaches, swirling colors, laser grids, and madness. I love all the silence in that film, so faithful to the spirit of Clarke's story. But, of course, that particular story had already been (perfectly) written.

  It's fair to say that I wanted to preserve the vastness and silence of 2001, yet also have lots of characters in an enclosed space. So I created the Exceptional, a floating city transporting people from one galaxy to the next. And I alternated among three points of view to emphasize the many lives all being lived at the same time. The challenge for the characters on the Exceptional, as is true of Discovery One in 2001, is that nobody knows whether the technology is ready for such a voyage. It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that no, it's not ready! And that's where the silence comes in. But you'll have to read the story to see what I mean.

  – Anne E. Johnson

  "Remembrance Day"

  When I started writing "Remembrance Day" I basically only had the setting: the battered, lawless space-station in orbit around Mars built in the shape of a Möbius Strip. Constructed during the first-wave of human expansion into the solar system, it has now been left to fall into decay. But it has found a new lease of life as the home for a rag-tag assortment of outlaws and those wishing to live free from government control: refugees, artists, libertarians. There is no law on the Möbius Strip. Solar system governments tolerate it as a place their undesirables can be safely exiled to.

  The actual story for "Remembrance Day" grew out of the familiar trope of someone in a bar getting drunk in an attempt to forget their past. I thought it would be fun to turn this on its head and have someone trying to remember their past. Or at least, remember it accurately. This led me to the central character of Magnus, grizzled space-trooper veteran and owner of the Space Bar. The action of the story centers around Magnus confronting his past and learning just how (un)reliable his memories of the Basilisk War actually are. Making him a veteran like this also allowed me to team him up with his Mech: a three-meter war machine that is paired to him and programmed to defend him. Because that’s clearly just inherently cool.

  One day I hope to write more stories set in and around the Möbius Strip. The Space Bar is only one place you can visit. I figure there have to be lots of other stories to be told…

  – Simon Kewin

  "In the Lion's Den"

  I had just finished an anthology by Isaac Asimov when this story occurred to me. Those were some of the best sci-fi stories I had read up to that point—hard science stories that took place in space ships, on other planets with multiple suns, and with life-like robots roving around hot surfaces. In college at the time, I hadn’t read many stories quite so grounded in science that still managed to have characters at their core. I wanted to write one of my own.

  I came up with the idea of a guy being trapped in a room on a ship without knowing what lay on the other side of the door—death, or salvation? I imagined a lot of suspenseful internal dialogue, Poe-style, before the big moment of opening the door. I thought that would be entertaining. I’m not so sure I achieved it, but it was a starting point.

  Then I needed a reason for such a secluded room to exist, and I came up with animals. And once I knew the ship would be a mobile zoo, I had to trap my main character in with a lion. Suddenly my lonely, internal dialogue story had another element to it. I think that’s what ultimately made the story successful—internal conflict is nice, but external conflict with a lion? That’s fun.

  – Devin Miller

  "Captain Clone"

  I was in the mood for space opera when I wrote "Captain Clone". I was in the mood for pulp, '50s style fiction. I wanted spaceships. I wanted tentacles. The spacecraft on a distant planet, trapped by tentacles came pretty quickly. I also wanted cloning, and I'm a firm believer in clone rights. But, alas, alack-a-day, the world of my invention was dystopic. The clones of that world are very much second-class citizens. I do hope that when/if we get to the stage of cloning people, we're civilized enough to give everyone their full rights.

&nb
sp; As a writer I'm very influenced by my current reading. At the time of writing, I was reading Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho: the story of Patrick Bateman, Manhattan yuppie and serial killer. I loved the literary transgressive and postmodern qualities of American Psycho. I became very interested in Ellis' technique, particularly when he describes in great detail the accoutrements of yuppiedom, and the chapters directly addressing the reader critiquing the 1980s pop music. I found myself skipping over these sections, and this drew attention to the fact that I was also skipping over graphic descriptions of violence in the book. I thought that was interesting. How I could be skipping so much, and still find the book interesting.

  So, I decided to use a similar technique in "Captain Clone" with Mika's discussions of rioja. Thinking about wine, and indeed drinking wine, are distractions from the difficult circumstances of a clone's life. Additionally the theme of authenticity of wine also reinforced theme of authenticity of the cloned individual.

  So although a literary novel like American Psycho may be an unusual inspiration for a story with authentic space opera credentials, I rather enjoyed the effect. Maybe I should do it again. Now where did I put my copy of Ulysses? Brace yourself, gentle readers.

  – Deborah Walker

  This eBook or any portion of it may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the authors—except for brief quotations in glowing, 4.5-star reviews. (Your reward will be waiting for you in Heaven.) The stories contained within this eBook are works of fiction. All material is either the product of the authors' overactive imagination or is used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) or to actual events is entirely coincidental—and worthy of further investigation.