‘You mean a foetus?’ Orgida cried in horror.
‘Wait a minute,’ Taskell interrupted. ‘She said very similar. That’s different from saying that’s exactly what it is.’
Cylya nodded. ‘True. The computer also said the stuff didn’t appear to be totally mammalian in origin, but almost reptilian, like the goo you’d find in a crocodile egg, probably. That discounts the Kodiaknies, I would say. They don’t appear reptilian to me. However, we have to bear in mind our knowledge of them as a race is scant.’
‘I can’t imagine why you’d even think they used their own people to make kha,’ Taskell said. ‘They obviously breed the animals that provide it in the place Orgida saw today. That’s hardly a mystery, not even sinister.’ He sounded relieved.
Orgida sighed. How could he be so blind?
‘I would have agreed with you,’ Cylya said, ‘if it wasn’t for what that boy said last night. Have to take that into account, don’t we?’ She smiled. ‘But perhaps it is just my over-active imagination.’
Both Orgida and Taskell were silent.
‘Not our concern anyway,’ Cylya continued. ‘We’re off soon, thank the gods! I’ll show this to Scallion. It might interest him. See you.’
Orgida and Taskell stared at each other. Orgida picked up a photograph of the dome by the lake. Was it possible? She found herself thinking of hen’s eggs, and Argolk condemned to a life as some kind of battery chicken. Perhaps, once Kodiakny girls were chosen for the role of Mother Provider they even changed physically in some way. She remembered that awful scum on the lake, the eye-watering stench of manure. It would be kinder not to dwell on this aloud, she thought. Instead, she risked patting Taskell on the arm. ‘She was a pretty girl, for all her frog croak,’ she said. ‘I know you really liked her. I’m sorry, Task.’
Taskell took the photograph off her. ‘A pleasing diversion,’ he said, with unconvincing carelessness.
‘Yeah, well, I told you not to anthropomorphise,’ Orgida reminded him, carefully.
Taskell grimaced and put the photograph down. ‘I think I need a rest from this job,’ he said.
Story History
Mytholumina is the third volume in a series of books collecting all my published and unpublished short stories. I’ve loosely themed each collection – although a few were difficult to categorise, so were placed where they seemed most comfortably to sit. Most of the stories in this collection are science fiction, although there are a couple that could be term dark fantasy.
Immaculate
Of all my short stories, this was has been reprinted the most times, and in several different languages, but it first appeared in David Garnett’s New Worlds anthology (VGSF 1991). It was written while I was working on the novel Hermetech, and reflects the mood of that book.
When I wrote Immaculate I’d just bought my first ‘proper’ computer after writing two novels on a basic Amstrad word processing machine. I wanted to write about this new technology I was experiencing, even though I didn’t know much about it. However, as a writer, I could make assumptions and invent. Immaculate was also inspired by a news story concerning women who wanted children without the inconvenience of having sex with men. A woman had experienced a virgin birth, thanks to IVF treatment. My writer’s ears immediately pricked up as I read this piece. There’s no escaping the religious aspect of a virgin birth.
The Pleasure Giver Taken
This was the first story I sold, to David Garnett for his first ‘Zenith’ anthology (Sphere 1989). However, it was the second to be published, since GM Magazine slipped in quickly by printing ‘God Be With You’ before ‘Zenith’ got to the printers. ‘The Pleasure Giver Taken’ was written in the heady days when ‘The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit’ had just come out, and I really thought the world had laid a golden carpet before me covered in jewels. Reality soon took over! The universe of this story has recurred through a variety of other short pieces, and also in the two novels ‘The Monstrous Regiment’ and ‘Aleph’.
As with many of my short story characters, I wanted to write more about Tavrian Guilder, but just never got around to it.
As It Flows to the Sea
This story was written for the collection Tarot Tales, edited by Rachel Pollack and Caitlin Matthews (Legend, 1989). The idea behind the anthology was for each contributor to base their story on a selection of Tarot cards. I drew three at random, and came up with the idea for this science fiction story.
I think this piece reflects the mood in SF during the Eighties, which in itself reflected the mood of the world. In speculative fiction, the future was envisaged as corporate-mindedness gone mad, with huge intergalactic conglomerates, mostly sporting Japanese sounding names, filling the universe with their greedy, soulless pursuit of riches. This was yuppy sf, obsessed with technological gadgets and the ultimate in cool. It became a subgenre in sf, and was dubbed cyperpunk. Although I wouldn’t call As it Flows to the Sea a cyberpunk story, it contains cyberpunky elements in the avaricious character Gustav Mealie and the ideas behind the plot.
The College Spirit
This story first appeared in the Midnight Rose project’s Temps anthology, created by Neil Gaiman and Alex Stewart (Roc 1991). The premise behind this shared world collection was that superheroes, called paranorms, become real. An organisation called the DPR monitors these individuals. I can see now that in some ways the concept shares similarities with the X Men idea, since paranorms are treated with great suspicion in the world of the stories. I’m not particularly into superheroes, but because of the people involved in the project, and the ideas they had, I wanted to be part of it. The College Spirit is a lighthearted story, and I had great fun writing it.
Last Come Assimilation
This story first appeared in Digital Dreams, (New English Library, 1990), an anthology edited by David Barrett. It’s loosely connected with The Pleasure Giver Taken (which appears in the Mythanima collection), as it’s set in the same universe. It is the universe of my novels The Monstrous Regiment and Aleph, as well as several stories. Reading through it again, I can’t help feeling the technology in it sounds a little dated – computers and other technologies have come on so much since the Eighties; the futuristic predictions that writers used to make about technology then now come over as rather quaint. Still, I find it a pleasing little tale, and despite its SF trappings, it examines the concept of secrecy and betrayal in apparently close friendships.
Time Beginning at Break of Day
Quite often stories evolve from real life weird events that happen to my friends, or friends of theirs. The core of this piece is based on a frightening night’s lucid dreaming once experienced by a guy who used to lodge in my house, back in the Eighties. Happily, his real story was just dreams. What he tried to convey to me, as he told me about it, was the frightening sense of slipping away from consensual reality, his utter belief that the fabric of what was normal and solid was beginning to break down. In some ways, I suppose, you just had to be there, in order to appreciate the depth of his fears, but what is recorded here is the gist of his feelings.
I’ve never tried to sell this story, because it is really just a fragment, but I wanted to include it in this collection, because I felt it was too creepy just to sit forever on the hard disk of my computer.
Did you Ever See Oysters…
The next story appeared in Roz Kaveney’s More Tales of the Forbidden Planet collection, published by Titan in 1990. The title refers to an unlikely event; it derives from an old folklore saying. One of my favourite obsessions is abandoned old houses, and I think it is one of nearly everyone’s greatest fears to lose track of what is reality and what is not. This story, I think, follows on nicely from the above piece. It also examines what can happen when people’s imaginations begin to work overtime. Quite often, there are prosaic explanations as to what appear to be weird events, but then again… maybe not.
The Vitreous Suzerain
This story first appeared in a short-lived sf magazin
e called The Gate, in 1991. It’s quite an early piece and involves humankind trying to interact with an alien species. It’s about trying to establish a point of communication. The story is set in the same universe I used for ‘God Be With You’ and the novel ‘Aleph’ and again reflects the mood of sf at the time. I think it handles, quite ingenuously, heavy concepts like racial misunderstandings and the human drive to homogenise.
The Rust Islands
First appearing in Interzone magazine, in March 97, this story to me has the same techno-hippy feel of my novel, ‘Hermetech’. It’s rare I dip into the realms of pure science fiction, but this was a story I particularly enjoyed working on.
Built on Blood
The story first appeared in Interzone magazine in 1992, accompanied by some great illustrations by Dave Horton, who also illustrated the chapter headings for my novel, Sign for the Sacred. It was written way back in the early 90s and it’s quite amusing now to note the surname of the messiah type celebrity who appears in the story. Just for the record, this was obviously not intentional, and way predates recent governmental administration in the UK!
People’s obsession with, and perhaps need for, celebrities has always fascinated me, and I’ve examined the idea many times in my work. The person they revere is never real; it’s a construct. And why do they have to revere individuals in that way, making them bigger than life, like gods? There is a sinister side to it, when they can turn on the object of their affections. Or maybe that is a primal impulse associated with the phenomenon. The sacrifice of the Most Fair. This is my take on it.
God Be With You
A recurrent theme throughout my work is my distaste for organised religion and how fanatical beliefs can turn people into monsters. When this story first appeared in the gaming magazine, GM, back in 1990, there was a furore going on with fundamentalist Christians insisting that role-playing games were the work of the devil and should be stopped. GM got a regular pile of hate mail from these types, so it was often the topic of conversation when I had phone chats with Wayne, who was a friend and one of the editors of the magazine. When I was asked to submit a story, it seemed only natural to vent my disgust at what was going on in fiction form.
God Be With You is set in the science fiction universe that I visit often when writing in that genre. Because the piece was written for a gaming magazine, I felt I should include a game aspect in the story. This also goes for the story that follows, So What’s Forever. These were written for a specific market, so I was only going to include them here for the sake of collecting all my stories in this series of anthologies. But re-reading God Be With You for the first time since it was written eighteen years ago, I was surprised at how much I liked it!
So What’s Forever?
Lighter in theme than the previous story, this was another piece I wrote for GM Magazine, in 1988. Again, it was written for a specific market, so revolves around a role-playing game. In some ways, the piece was quite prophetic. When I wrote it, I had never played any games of this type and wasn’t particularly drawn to them. Back then, role-playing took place in ‘real life’; computers were still primitive. But over the past few years Jim and I have become involved in multi-player online games, so I can certainly appreciate the attraction more now. I’ve had many discussions with my fellow gamers – and you’d be surprised how many creative types you find in these virtual worlds – as to why the games and their worlds are so addictive. One friend said that when they are ‘inworld’, people can be who they want to be; they can set goals and achieve them. That’s sometimes not so easy in real life. The fantasy worlds we can visit now on our computers are so far beyond those primitive, clunky games that initiated the genre that you can only wonder how far it will all go. Will it eventually become some Matrix-style para-reality? And if so, how difficult will it be for people to leave these virtual worlds then? As one friend once said to me, ‘There is no real life, only AFK.’
The Germ of Life
This story was written to be submitted to one of David Garnett’s New World anthologies, but it didn’t make the grade. I can’t remember now what the editor didn’t like about it, but he was always a strong supporter of my work, so it must have been something serious! I did nothing with it thereafter, and only read it again while compiling this collection to see if it really was too bad to be included. Actually, I found it an enjoyable little read. It’s probably not heavy enough on scientific facts for a hardcore SF story, but with a bit of tinkering I felt I rounded it up enough for its inclusion here. It is again set in the universe of some of the other stories in this collection.
Mytholumina Page 30