Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits
Page 27
There’s an App for That
There are times when it seems like we do everything on our phones these days. People are obsessed with their mobile communication device of choice. When Pokémon Go hit the smartphone streets, there were all kinds of stories about people walking off cliffs and straying onto military bases in their search for little creatures that aren’t even there. Then Samsung had all their widely publicised problems with batteries burning up. Add those together and this isn’t a million miles away from being possible.
Ice, Ice, Baby and The Wheel
This is one of those times where I can say exactly where a story came from. You can blame Ash and Castle. Series (or season as the Americans insist on calling it) 4 of the entertaining police crime drama CASTLE contains an episode which revolves around the cryogenically frozen body of a murder victim. ARMY OF DARKNESS, the third of Sam Raimi’s increasingly bonkers (but always immense fun) EVIL DEAD trilogy concludes (spoiler alert!) with hero Ash overdrinking his sleeping potion and waking up in a future that has been devastated by some cataclysm rather than his own safe present time. I happened to see both in the same evening (one with my son and one decidedly not with my son). Ice, Ice Baby is the story that resulted. The story was meant to be a standalone, but Arnold J Potter is far too bad a man to be allowed to get away with his crimes, and so The Wheel, a coda of sorts, was needed to make sure that he got the comeuppance that he deserved.
There is No Sanity Clause
Christmas – you can love it or you can hate it, but you can’t ignore it. Not in the UK anyway. For every good thing, there’s a downside to be considered, but this is probably not the one that most people would consider.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. and the Spiders from Mars
Agent Ward is my most popular character and prior to his arrival I had never written a sequel. At the point this story was written, there are five novels and a bunch of short stories featuring him, not to mention a spin-off novel. This story was written to bridge a gap between the fifth and the sixth novel, which is currently in process, a chance for me to find Agent Ward’s voice and mindset again.
The World May Not Be Flat, But…
This is one of those stories that does not seem to come from anywhere at all, except a lifelong interest in space and science fiction, of course. The story’s punchline has echoes of the Crimson Pirate Insurance Company (spoiler alert) sailing off the edge of the world after certain assumptions about the nature of the world turned out to be horribly mistaken in MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE and I came to the punchline before the rest of the story. Then it was a matter of choosing which flight to pick (Apollo 8 being an obvious winner as the first flight to circumnavigate the moon and thus travelling further than any flight from the planet had done before) and some minor research to come up with a few salient details to flesh it out. I can recommend a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre simulator, which recreates the experience of watching a Saturn V rocket launch very impressively. I can also warn that the Airfix model of the Saturn V rocket is not suitable for an 8-year-old (or however old I was when I built it beautifully and then painted it terribly).
Another Brick in the Wall
Lego is wonderful stuff. So much fun. The idea of losing hours of time immersed in building one of the larger sets is no story and it’s not just for kids. I only recently rediscovered the joy of Lego when my son bought himself a BIG BANG THEORY set. Quite apart from this being a piece of marketing genius, it sparked in me the desire to build the huge STAR WARS super star destroyer that I had once seen on a trip to Legoland at Windsor. That set, originally £350 and out of my price range at the time, was sadly discontinued, but I was sure that I could get it on one of those online auction sites. I was right, but the prices for discontinued Lego sets are huge, double what the originals sold for. The more I looked for this kit, the more I found about the world of Lego and brick builders. There really is a community of them out there and they take their hobby seriously, as every good hobbyist should. Which led me to wondering if those brightly-coloured bricks could have a dark side. The answer is no, because Lego is wonderful stuff, but the story remains.
The Book
The Book is one of those stories that doesn’t come out of nowhere (the human mind doesn’t work that way), but has no obvious source or inspiration. Everyone knows about the Vatican’s secret library of heretical works and there must be loads of stories featuring books of forbidden knowledge. The Necronomicon and Pratchett’s piss take the Telecomnicon both spring to mind, not to mention the human-bound book in the Evil Dead series of films. The story does, however, share the sort of unanswered dilemma resolution that features in There’s An App For That. After all, would you risk it and open the book?
Also by Darren Humphries on Amazon Kindle
Fiction
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – The Curious Case Of The Kidnapped Chemist
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Zombie Apocalypse Now
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Do Dragons Dream Of Burning Sheep?
One Small Step For The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. Who Went Out In The Cold
Penny Kilkenny Saves The Day
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. Trilogy
New York City Legend
The Sword In The Tree
Stormwreck
The Great Rock N Roll Doomsday Tour
An Orc Not Like Others
An Orc Like Balrek
Spenser Goes North
To Infinity (and maybe that’s far enough)
London Dark
Short Stories and Anthologies
Sharing A Fence With The Twilight Zone
They Came From Beyond Pulp
A Goodreads Gallimaufrey (contributor)
A Splendid Salmagundi (contributor)
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.’s Christmas Carol
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.’s St Valentine’s Day Massacre
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.’s St Patrick’s Day Parade
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – Frights And Fireworks
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. – The Silence Of The Mimes
Non-Fiction
Goodnight Dear: The Unsentimental Diary Of A Bereaved Husband
The Sci-Fi Freak’s Guide To The Televisual Galaxy
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