by Mark Pirie
It is called ‘Dan and his Amazing Cat’
and is set in the future on a
desert, wasteland planet,
where humans live with
and among aliens. The story
is about a boy called Dan
who lives with his grandfather in an iron mining
establishment where they have to
work long back-breaking hours to make a
living. With the help of his cat
they set to work in building a rocket ship
from scrap materials found at the junkyard,
James and his cat complete the rocket –
ship and get laughed at by all the other aliens
and people at the place they live in.
James has to overcome superior robots and
cheating aliens in order to fi nd his way out.
And at the same time feed his cat.
As I’m not an SF writer, someone else can write it
for me perhaps – I’m quite a good illustrator though
and would love to illustrate the poem with detailed pictures.
99
James Dignan
Great Minds
Car. Open countryside.
Open road stretching out to meet the horizon.
To the left, a slumbering sea; to the right, a barren hillside.
Soft white ceiling of cloud.
Gravel fl ying as the car barrels down to the beach below.
Space. Inky night.
Hard brilliance of stars stretching out to meet forever.
To the left, a sheer wall of ocean; to the right, an empty infi nity.
Soft blue curve of atmosphere.
Metal heating as the ship tumbles down to the globe below.
The car comes to a halt.
Gulls stand, or pick their way among the rocks.
The air is calm and clear.
The driver gets out of the car, stretches, smiles,
And breathes the clean salt air.
Not far away,
Across the water,
Another holidaymaker
Enjoys a similar view.
100
Cath Randle
The Purple fantastic, feels like elastic, spangled and
plastic ray gun
The aliens left Helen a present
They came in the dead of night
She wore her curlers and they had green twirlers
So they gave each other a fright
The aliens left Helen a present
Formed in the fi res of the sun
It was a purple fantastic, feels like elastic, spangled and plastic ray gun.
Helen had no rifl e experience
She wanted to know how it feels
She closed her eyes tight as she looked through the sights
And shot off her car’s front wheels
Success left Helen excited
She saw why aliens have fun
With a purple fantastic, feels like elastic, spangled and plastic ray gun.
No one believed Helen’s story
Of alien ships on her roof
Three high schools expired when she took aim and fi red
And scientists suddenly had proof
Helen became very possessive
Hers was the only one
A purple fantastic, feels like elastic, spangled and plastic ray gun.
She never left her gun unattended
She slept with the gun in her bed
One night all of a sudden, she pushed the wrong button
And woke up in the morning. DEAD
The moral is…
Never let spaced out technology
Take over your fi lms or your life
Even if it’s a purple fantastic, feels like elastic, spangled and plastic ray gun.
101
Jane Matheson
An Alien’s Notes on fi rst seeing a prunus-plum tree
This is a device for recycling air
…so intelligently functional in its design
yet aesthetically pleasing in its line.
These delicate rose-petalled fl owers…
so soft to stroke, you can do it for hours!
It is wondrous too
that in the heat of the summer sun,
these fl owers become
marble-sized ruby-red rounds
of delectable fruit-fl esh.
Humans call it a prunus-plum tree
I would very much like
to take it back with me.
102
Harvey McQueen
Return
Great advance for a Gill. These cumbersome
uniforms work. Exhilaration mingles with
apprehension as Findolphin and I exchange
thumbs up. The fi rst time our species has
left the water. The star-sparkles are brighter
and appear closer here above the safety zone.
Cautiously, slowly we fl ip to the wall of
earth-weed that merges into the sand.
Diffi cult to cut, stems are tougher than
we anticipated. The gigantic growth
overhead is beyond our reach. Voice
tells us time to start our return.
Legend
has it that our ancestors once lived on
this shore & bred our gills to farm the sea.
Radical theologians reject this. Our elegance
has no need for such superstition, outmoded
like original sin. But it remains, a satisfying myth.
What’s this? A strange menacing creature
– looks like a seal with legs like a lobster
two fewer, baring teeth as it circles us.
We fumble backwards towards the foam.
Suddenly it lunges. Its claws pierce
Findolphin’s suit. The life-support
water fl ows out. I hesitate. Should I assist
him or get our specimens back. I seek advice.
Assist him they say. But a glance shows me
he is beyond aid the animal tearing at his
apparel & – horror – his fl esh. His look of
anguish I’ll never forget. Obviously a type
103
of land-shark. As more of the monster’s
kind burst out of the undergrowth I retreat.
I do not think we will ever survive in that
environment. My report is not well-received.
They build an obelisk on the outer side of
the reef to us but they make it clear I should
have died a martyr. For my cowardice they
condemn me. I now extract sea-snake venom.
104
Owen Marshall
Awakening
Life is but a dream the old song tells us
so what will be its joyous awakening.
What odd, alternative society will we
return to and share a fading recollection
of this time. What purple multi-mooned
sky, what novel vapours, what monstrous
company in which we are perfectly at home
fl ourishing a webbed membrane to subdue
incredulity as we recount a fantasy of
caged animals and AIDS, Gotham city arcades
silicon celebrities, children burned with
napalm bombs, and gleaming whales sunk in
poisonous seas. Our fellow creatures will
work their orifi ces and antennae to signal
joy that no such place could possibly exist.
105
Peter Bland
An Old Man and Science Fiction
The neighbours cut the world to fi t their pockets.
Now his were empty. His tramcar talk,
of no direct concern, revolved
around the village of his birth. What
worth to them, whose lives ran straight
between the offi ce and the garden gate,
the weekend roast and
all-consuming bed?
His company refused, he turned to other worlds
outside the scope of heaven and hell,
where skin-tight blondes
wear fi sh-bowls on their heads
and copulate with Martians deep in space.
Packing up a life that no one wanted
he left and felt the old world shrink
beneath his feet. The neatly laid-out houses
disappeared. Children ceased
their taunting in the streets. No
welcoming areas awaited his return.
Death would be a burn-out. Lost in space
he’d fl oat as a cloud-shine, there forever
adrift between raw gravity and grace.
106
When Worlds Collide
Katherine Liddy
Crab Nebula
They snap the blue, still-glamorous star,
the astronomy paparazzi, rapt: her corpse
ripe opportunity, her gaseous face
an enormous light clot leaking out
to stain the giant bath of space.
The telescope crowd absorbs her importance,
admires the electric silk of her fi laments,
and traces with ravenous eyes the hoard
of jewel lights and colourful elements.
If these are her relics then what was her life?
The bystanders wonder, regret that they missed
the scene of quick change, the second she burst
into fl ash last millennium, the splinter of doubt
between her being whole and her non-being,
but this will do for now. The bloom of death
is something apart, remains consuming.
The spillage has all she had. Though crushed
or changed the basic arrangements exist.
The distant voyeurs warm their brains
at white-hot threads, forked-lightning arms
backed by a brilliant blue continuum
and, at dead centre, the neutron star,
her heart, the burning ball of pulsar
the size of some town, the mass of earth’s sun
but brighter, of denser matter. It twists,
a souvenir of grandeur not quite gone,
a chandelier in a shipwreck, burning on.
109
Anna Jackson
Death Star
Outstare the stars. Infi nite foretime and
Infi nite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
– Nabakov, Pale Fire
The extinction of the dinosaurs
was just the last
of the mass extinctions
of the past:
fi ve we know of, tens of millions
of years apart.
It could be a ‘Death Star’ orbits
with our sun,
every few billion years
pulling down
a storm of asteroids like the one
that killed the dinosaurs,
punctuating a history
of cataclysms
of extinction, ecosystems
collapsing in disarray.
The most recent mass extinction
began a few thousand years ago,
110
when people took in great numbers
to the sea,
colonised, farmed,
industrialised.
We are losing species at a hundred times
the natural rate, a thousand times,
and the rates of extinction
are increasing.
We have become
our own Death Star.
111
Stephen Oliver
Manned Mission to the Green Planet
Behind some night bush Rousseau green,
some dwelling in one place, some in another,
it had been agreed between us by courier
and hesitation to meet in the village centre
at midnight. The fi rst fi gure to emerge
was to be greeted thus: America comes to
interpret its humour: the hurried reply;
community halls abound. Back, beyond our
allotted frequency, The General who had
not been posted gathered over another Power
Lunch. After the brief and the oiling of
rifl es we set forth across the causeway
through the marble green of foothills,
into the grey of higher ground. The thought,
like a saffron scarf caught on a thorn
bush seemed even now on the closed terrain a
crusade of sorts – kept us ahead. Amply,
unnumbered rivers plashed into the battery
green of immeasurable hollows. So it was
that we became inseparable, spirit creatures
to the forest life, the journey boundless,
the orders which concerned the depot, unread.
112
Hilaire Kirkland
Three Poems
I
A thing fl ed from daylight:
refuge
in the huge hollowness of night-among-stars.
A bead which spirals sparkling down the swinging string
of memory, linking
the warm-wombed earth to her wan child the moon.
And far-off lights, fl ung through space
(haphazard, heaped, dice on a dark cloth)
fl are and gutter as candles in a
wind-washed black-boughed tree.
But none to see the pendant bead
– binding a warm white throat, on a gold thread –
or remember the scent of pine in the rain.
II
Comet: insane spawn of a sick sun.
crimson clot of blood that scrawls
across burning skies.
Fine thin fi re interwoven, patterned without reason,
knitting a weird net of copper wire
To trap some star.
The bone-white moon.
Polished skeleton, stark skull staring,
dead marble fl oating in the night,
lip-lapped by waves of black
breaking on white beaches,
washed by long silences that fl ow from space.
113
To whimper up channelled ways, and soundless, ache in desert reaches
and cliff caves.
And on the moon an alien shadow fl ickers –
once – bright bead:
a blackened smudge upon a wall
or else a warmth-bewildered bee that crawls and licks
the honey-scented fl ower,
or a scorched moth in the hot night
whirring round an opalescent ball.
Bright eye winking eye everglowing –
earth’s brittle gift to her white child
lift and fall
pulsing thing come to this
high, pale timeless world.
III
Men say: ‘The moon, there no God is
for no man is, to praise.
only emptiness, a cold fantastic pastoral.’
I remember the brown bee
on a giant, tousled, yellow fl ower –
the cut grass, a garden singing with summer
(fl owers in the garden on earth in the summer)
yet here there is none to see.
Who shall decide where God is?
Where night upon heavy night slumbers in channelled ways.
age after age piles high,
a sifted dust that
stifl es the white plain in sleep.
long slow tides of silence creep
into oceans without ships, and lick the bone dry bays
and whisper on untrodden shores
and ebb, and fl ow –
and who shall say
if this is God, or no?
114
Michael O’Leary
Hey man, Wow! [Jimi Hendrix]
/>
(from the cricket novel Out of It)
Hey man, Wow! Like the white streak
Of power that provides the purple haze
Which is the universe propelling projectiles
Such as the Red Planet of Mars towards me
The centre of the star-spangled galaxy
There is a theory such as reverse energy
Matter which interpreted into reality
Means, if I fl ick this switch that’s in
My hand in the opposite direction, Mars
Will go fl yin’, I mean fl yin’, back
Through the same galaxy of time and space
And over the boundary of infi nity
Into eternity – far out, man!
Outside in the distance the wind cries
As the man who is as lost as a child
Throws his round red ball towards
My bat which I hold erect, yeah man!
The wind cries because this blood red ball
Pierces the skin of the air: the wind cries
With the awareness of its own existence
But the ball keeps coming and coming until it hits my
Bat mid-on, and I’m running and the wind is crying…
115
Robin Fry
Lift-off
‘Oh we’re ten years away from it yet,’
he said, his large eyes glowing.
There’s a fl ame that burns inside him
like the gas jet that lifts an air balloon.
In the night I hear it hissing while he sleeps.
‘I live to go to Mars,’ he said.
Did I choose to be a widow
like Mrs Cook?
While the Captain met his death
in distant islands
she merely grew old.
Women like us
live in the base camps of such men.
Like scientists, they are another breed.
What if he takes our sons with him?
In ten years they will be grown men.
Outside their door at night
I listen
for that hiss.
116
Tim Jones
Touchdown
The engine ceased and silence fell.
We had made it. Nine months,
nine months in a metal womb
drinking recycled urine
eating recycled crap
watching our dosimeters glow.
I earned my place as captain. Sure,
there was the PR angle: Venus fl ies to Mars!
Great for the ratings, all that sort of thing.
But a dream born in girlhood
honed through years of preparation
had fi tted me to take command.
‘We’re down,’ I said, ‘we’re clear and down.’
Fifteen minutes later
they would be cheering the news in Houston
but for now we had the planet to ourselves.