Tag: fiction

Entanglements: Short Works

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Entanglements, a collection of short works, arriving soonish. Here’s a short sample:

Winds

A change, shock, zig and zag, then over the ridge that defines the hollow kernel, down along the spines littered with ossified vegetative remains baked by two decades of raging sun, then out through the basin. The wind moves in a roll and pitch, carving into itself, boiling against eddies, temporarily subsuming into the evacuated cave left by its endless predecessors, and they are all an enduring chain, pulsing with the heat of the morning, craning through the galena wisps like a fan over these craggy peaks.

Across and above, passing in a trance of action, an outstretched hand reaches in petrified impotence from sand while the wind shifts around and through, a chasm through the adductor becomes a funnel and there is a spiraling motion down and across the craqueleur landscape of the palm. A blued barrel lurks powerless below. The wind shifts a few orthorhombic grains into the steel tunnel.

It will soon be buried completely, and no one will remember this ridge, the last stand, held out against inevitability as no war came, no dogs chased the quarry down, and the only evil was suppressing the vastness of loss. The wind was the endless enemy, and the heat that drives it, and the dying of the grasses, the forests—even the cacti—until Mars finally emerged, trapped as it had been beneath the carpet of life.

There will be a pause as evening rolls in, as shadows coil into the canyons, reaching in a crawl up the sandstone and granite walls, and the bubbling congregations of the wind settle into wisps and slow finally into the entropic well of night.… Read the rest

Ancient Conceptual Code-Switching

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I’ve been reading Hesiod as part of background research for a new book project I’m working on, tentatively titled Talos. In Talos, vulcanologists enter a strange artifact that floats to the surface of a lava dyke during a catastrophic eruption of Santorini. Inside is some kind of antique computing machine that operates using a strange fluid. The device is capable of manipulating people and time, in fact, and is used by the protagonists to harass one another, to explore history, and to change the future of the planet itself. And then it is gone again.

Hesiod represents some of the earliest works of the archaic period of ancient Greece. His Theogony is the early catalog of the Greek myths of Olympians and Titans. His Works and Days is perhaps the earliest discussion of Pandora, and it is not what most people know from Laura Croft and common parlance. In the Pandora myth, she is created by the “lame god” and blacksmith Hephaestus as a mechanism for avenging the release of the knowledge of fire to humankind by Prometheus. Why was fire a bad idea? Well, if humankind learned the ways of the gods they would just hang out and play video games, it seems:

The gods had hidden away the true means of livelihood for humankind, and they still keep it that way. If it were otherwise, it would be easy for you to do in just one day all the work you need to do, and have enough to last you a year, idle though you would be.

Perhaps we would have done a lot of sailing on the wine-dark seas. So people need punishing for the sympathetic crimes of Prometheus.… Read the rest

The Rafferty Toffs Show covers ¡Reconquista!

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I got on the Rafferty Toffs Show out of Tennessee to discuss ¡Reconquista!. I had never heard of the show but it is extremely popular on the ‘Chans according to many people. Some of the claims made by the guests are a bit questionable to my mind, but I love seeing critical thinking and a passion for literature!… Read the rest

¡Reconquista! Redux

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¡Reconquista! is now available in paperback format with some additional editing (because there is rarely enough) and an alternative cover design. Pick it up now via reconquista.pub or direct from Amazon. I’m preparing for a book signing event in December with the Las Cruces Writers Group and need something a bit more tangible than an electronic book. But the movement towards NFTs and alternative distribution methods continues apace!… Read the rest

Flooding the Mystery Zone with Cynicism

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The Mystery of the FoxI just finished planting one of my two urban garden plots here in Southern New Mexico. The circles had been left unattended and later covered with weed-control fabric that I topped with rock a few years ago when I visited from our Arizona home and discovered a vexing and disturbing collection of items buried in the soil. There was a child’s ball, a partially melted white candle, some marbles, a variety of small bones and strange animal remains, indeterminate masses of red and brown, unusual feces, and large pork chop bones. A shrine to strange, ancient deities? The remains of an ancient civilization? Our security camera coverage and the gates and fencing ruled out human activity. So we were left with wild animals, specifically gray foxes with long bushy tails that appear integrated into our little downtown community. We see them on the cameras early in the morning hours, typically, and they do some rather odd things, so the notion that they were collecting interesting items and burying them did not seem unreasonable. We also observed one fox flipping a piece of torn paper plate in the air in front of an unimpressed cat crouching nearby. Foxes will sometimes do similar jumping behavior as a method for mesmerizing their prey, but why bury a melted candle? Perhaps it smelled just enough like food that the fox thought it might come in handy during lean times later. And the child’s toy ball? Plastic odors might also resemble food. Maybe.

The New Mexico foxes, skunks, raccoons, and, I’m informed, some formerly pet coatimundi that wander in the area (but we’ve never seen), as well as the javelina, coyotes, deer, bobcats, and foxes around our Arizona forest home, are certainly influential in my Tusker Long project that tries to tackle an alien world where the worker slave animals have broken from their chains of servitude and simplicity to dominate society and come to grips with their own limits, prejudices, and historical animosities (perfectly wrong word, that).… Read the rest

Preternatural: Excerpt from ¡Reconquista! on Crisis and Conflict in American Democracy

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Real conflict is both more mundane and heart-wrenching than the fictional version, but here is the climax, Chapter 16, of ¡Reconquista!, where everything unravels…

The cross blue lightning should have been an omen to the gathered Baaad Hombres who retired to their RVs and trailers to drowse into their opioid cocoons. By dawn the storm had saturated the desert until the air smelled like ripe succulents and there were still more smoky masses to the north.

Herb surprised all of them while hunched around the pre-action fire barrel by telling them that he had another mission he had to take care of and wouldn’t be initially joining them on their raid. They looked over a map and he thought he could catch up to them on his bike around the Corralitos Ranch. They were planning to hold that point anyway. His initial mission was to manage the skies, he told them cryptically while pointing upward. Several of the men thought he was going to pray for them, which seemed to them acceptable but not very good timing for the critical time of action. They passed around green camouflage face paint. Several men wore ghillie suits in the colors of the desert, making them look like human hedgehogs as they darkened their faces with the paint.

By six thirty they were rolling, their ATVs piled high with extra fuel and ammunition. The storm was quiescent but Herb warned them that the arroyos might be flowing and they may need to plot an alternative course under the fencing. He crawled into his wrecker and turned on the devices. He had only a short window to get the systems working and he had to figure out how to enter the numbers that the pretty woman had given him.… Read the rest

Tusker Long: A Preview

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Preface and Introduction

Howl fast, howl long, my litter, grown in the palmy summer, fed upon the teat, the mana, the spilled ichor of the world. Howl that you can know the beginnings and the tidings that cleaved, that rent the old world of subjugation, the cages, the death manacles of man-machinery and the singed world. Howl when you imbibe the tales of Tusker Long, the one who carried us forth from the bleak, and share the saga with the many species, who are like you in their rescue from that olden cave, that abyssal deep, algid in the tundra, cowering in the dark-moon thickets.

Wise ape was he who held the first crown and, chest swollen by conquests, set it and his war vengeances aside to delight in these newest treasures of peace and knowledge. Philosophies dreamt under the swish of the jungle canopy and, in his ambling mind, now awakened, saw fang and talon released by the odes. Even the deserts, though bare and parched from a distance, eventually reveal clarities as hallucinatory mirages crowd into layers, and then, as one nears to behold that there are many thriving in the sere gray, as it is with the ravages of the ancient animus in tumult with survival. But are we free, my fellows, are we as liberated as what Tusker wished and raged towards in grace of charge? Among those who claim the way has been lost are those who cloak themselves in the old ways, insisting that the mind retreat against memory, who however distastefully rip skin to bone, and crush bile from entrails.

But admit yourself to the whirl of intellect, the pile of a clean, deep fur, the sensual systematics that define this modern era, and you sense again the Leader’s promise.… Read the rest

Good Reads in the Season of Existential Dread

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Naked self-promotion warning!

I’ve recently updated reconquista.pub to an improved design. Check out Short Fiction for, well, some free distractions. Meanwhile, I’ve joined Goodreads as an author and have been gradually building out my author’s profile.

These changes are part of a new advertising campaign for ¡Reconquista! designed for this upcoming political season. Welcome to the farce in this time of existential dread!… Read the rest

Tusker Long

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I’m now well into my technically-challenging new novel, Tusker Long, and so it’s time to produce some concept art. Tusker Long combines historical essays, traditional narrative, quasi-scientific analysis, and epic poetry to convey the story of a civilization not unlike what our own might become were we grafted and merged with animals. Central to the novel is a spiritual system that revolves around ancestor worship, bestiaries, and transmogrification. Some art may help conjure up the feeling.

 

 

 … Read the rest