Losers in Space

Description

It is the year 2129 . . . and fame is all that matters

Susan and her friends are celebutantes. Their lives are powered by media awareness, fed by engineered meals, and underscored by cynicism. Everyone has a rating; the more viewers who ID you, the better. So Susan and her almost-boyfriend Derlock cook up a surefire plan: the nine of them will visit a Mars-bound spaceship and stow away. Their survival will be a media sensation, boosting their ratings across the globe. There's only one problem: Derlock is a sociopath. Breakneck narrative, pointed cultural commentary, warm heart, accurate science, a kickass heroine, and a ticking clock . . . who could ask for more?

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Directive 51

Description

The first book in a new post-apocalyptic trilogy from "a master of the genre"

Heather O'Grainne is the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called "Daybreak." The group is diverse and radical, and its members have only one thing in common-their hatred for the "Big System" and their desire to take it down.

Now, seemingly random events simultaneously occurring around the world are in fact connected as part of Daybreak's plan to destroy modern civilization-a plan that will eliminate America's top government personnel, leaving the nation no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program...Directive 51.

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The Quiet Guy It Always Was (John Barnes Short Story Collection)

Description

Short story, 5700 words, most people can read it in less than an hour. R-rated if that matters to you, and if it does, you probably won't like it.

Ever know one of those quiet guys who seemed to get around a lot? Ever wonder what it was like to be one? (I know I sure wondered!) Ever wonder what they get out of it? And what if you could get even more of that?

Never before published, now from Metrocles House.

Heinlein once complained that he thought he'd written a science fiction story, but the editors who rejected it said it wasn't science fiction. In his introduction to it in one of his collections, where it was finally published, he finished up with a catalog of the scientific and speculative elements, followed by, "Excuse me, I must've been in the wrong church."

The Quiet Guy It Always Was has been turned down by most of the science fiction editors out there in the last few years, sometimes with the note that they liked it but it "wasn't science fiction," sometimes with the note that they felt it was reasonably good science fiction but their readers never would.

Well, following the model: 'scuse me, but isn't medical technology part of science? And isn't science fiction in part about the human possibilities that are opened up by changes in technology? And aren't the most science fictional choices the ones that don't occur in nature -- the things human beings can do, feel, and be that they couldn't before the technology? 

Well, 'scuse me. I must've been in the wrong church.
I do think there's one real reason why this doesn't feel science fictiony to many "sci-fi guys and spec fic chicks" as Ed Bryant calls the literary Usual Suspects... and that is the unwritten rule referred to by two of the famous and frequent rejection slips from John W. Campbell, that said, "You've stated a problem, now solve it," and "Your story should be about the person this hurts most."

In this case, I think I stated the problem and wrote about the person who enjoys it most. I wouldn't dream of solving his problem. Or hers. Or anyone's, when it comes to anything as complex as desire.

Since this is already a very quote-heavy intro, let me conclude with one from James Thurber:

 Love is blind, but desire doesn't give a good goddam.

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Short story, 5700 words, most people can read it in less than an hour. R-rated if that matters to you, and if it does, you probably won't like it.

Ever know one of those quiet guys who seemed to get around a lot? Ever wonder what it was like to be one? (I know I sure wondered!) Ever wonder what they get out of it? And what if you could get even more of that?

Never before published, now from Metrocles House.

Heinlein once complained that he thought he'd written a science fiction story, but the editors who rejected it said it wasn't science fiction. In his introduction to it in one of his collections, where it was finally published, he finished up with a catalog of the scientific and speculative elements, followed by, "Excuse me, I must've been in the wrong church."

The Quiet Guy It Always Was has been turned down by most of the science fiction editors out there in the last few years, sometimes with the note that they liked it but it "wasn't science fiction," sometimes with the note that they felt it was reasonably good science fiction but their readers never would.

Well, following the model: 'scuse me, but isn't medical technology part of science? And isn't science fiction in part about the human possibilities that are opened up by changes in technology? And aren't the most science fictional choices the ones that don't occur in nature -- the things human beings can do, feel, and be that they couldn't before the technology? 

Well, 'scuse me. I must've been in the wrong church.
I do think there's one real reason why this doesn't feel science fictiony to many "sci-fi guys and spec fic chicks" as Ed Bryant calls the literary Usual Suspects... and that is the unwritten rule referred to by two of the famous and frequent rejection slips from John W. Campbell, that said, "You've stated a problem, now solve it," and "Your story should be about the person this hurts most."

In this case, I think I stated the problem and wrote about the person who enjoys it most. I wouldn't dream of solving his problem. Or hers. Or anyone's, when it comes to anything as complex as desire.

Since this is already a very quote-heavy intro, let me conclude with one from James Thurber:

 Love is blind, but desire doesn't give a good goddam.

---

Daybreak Zero (A Novel of Daybreak)

Description

What began as a technothriller
continues as high adventure
in the newly savage ruins of civilization.
 
In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs,  smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak,
Heather O'Grainne, a one-time minor bureaucrat and former Federal agent, rose to become a vital leader in the struggle to restore civilization. That story was told in Directive 51.
 
Now Heather's story continues in Daybreak Zero.  In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together.
 
But Daybreak's triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and
culture. 

• Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it. 
• Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania.
• The Earth's environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm. 
• A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot.

 
Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent.  All the news is bad:

• Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois
• The last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land
• The crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist
• Tribals try to force appeasement on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics
• Seventeen states are lost to the Tribals as California drifts into secession and hereditary monarchy
• Everywhere,  Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war.

 
Heather's agents may be brave, smart, and daring, but can they be enough?  For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation,  can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak? 
 
Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years,
beginning from  Daybreak Zero.

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Things Undone (John Barnes Short Story Collection)

Description

This story was tied for second (with two others) for the Sturgeon Award for Short Fiction; I have long since ceased to caper about chanting, "We're One Third Of Number Two!" It also made it into the Gardner/Strahan Best of the Year anthology. So it comes highly recommended by people who read an awful lot.

This was sort of a trial canter for several ideas that I know I'll be back to later (some of which I've been to a few times before): the mutability of memory, the awkwardness of remembering things that other people don't (or say they don't), the genuine alien-ness of people with various socially-isolating brain syndromes, are all in one complex. In particular, in most stories in which time travelers alter the past, either some time travelers are immune, or everyone's memory changes instantly; I wondered what it might be like for a mind to feel the world ghosting in over it, maybe taking months or years (an idea I sort of played with in Finity and am sure I will play with again).

Another one has been with me ever since I noticed what the copywriter had come up with for the cover of an S.M.Stirling novel: "Think about history. Imagine it's worse." That led me to an idea I'm still playing with: how much worse would history have to be for us to declare a do-over or a scrape-and-pitch, i.e. just decide, well, that was all wrong, let's do something else? Pick your favorite bit of horror out of the last few centuries, say, and imagine sending back a force whose job was to prevent or mitigate it. If it's big enough, most of us would either cease to exist or cease to exist as ourselves; but if it's bad enough, might it be worth it? And how bad and big, and what about all the people who are just blameless byproducts?

Another idea: "live and let live" is an old idea but its prevalence is very much modern. Ages ago I ran across what seems a truthful comment: if you brought a European forward from 1200 A.D. to the present, the most inexplicable thing about all our greatly expanded powers to him would be that we hadn't declared a crusade and use the atom bomb to reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. It's probably--well, definitely--a good thing that our ancestors didn't have all our capabilities; you can construct your nightmares here about what a society with airplanes, electric fences, behavioral conditioning, effective psychopharmacology, and poison gas might have done in the way of slavery or genocide, back when those were done with virtually no compunction.

What sort of modern world might grow in a society that poisonous?

And what if we were descended from them? What if we could then reverse things so we would only, in that revised world, have been as wicked as we actually have been? How many never-weres would be a fair price to move from deep to less-deep evil?

---

This story was tied for second (with two others) for the Sturgeon Award for Short Fiction; I have long since ceased to caper about chanting, "We're One Third Of Number Two!" It also made it into the Gardner/Strahan Best of the Year anthology. So it comes highly recommended by people who read an awful lot.

This was sort of a trial canter for several ideas that I know I'll be back to later (some of which I've been to a few times before): the mutability of memory, the awkwardness of remembering things that other people don't (or say they don't), the genuine alien-ness of people with various socially-isolating brain syndromes, are all in one complex. In particular, in most stories in which time travelers alter the past, either some time travelers are immune, or everyone's memory changes instantly; I wondered what it might be like for a mind to feel the world ghosting in over it, maybe taking months or years (an idea I sort of played with in Finity and am sure I will play with again).

Another one has been with me ever since I noticed what the copywriter had come up with for the cover of an S.M.Stirling novel: "Think about history. Imagine it's worse." That led me to an idea I'm still playing with: how much worse would history have to be for us to declare a do-over or a scrape-and-pitch, i.e. just decide, well, that was all wrong, let's do something else? Pick your favorite bit of horror out of the last few centuries, say, and imagine sending back a force whose job was to prevent or mitigate it. If it's big enough, most of us would either cease to exist or cease to exist as ourselves; but if it's bad enough, might it be worth it? And how bad and big, and what about all the people who are just blameless byproducts?

Another idea: "live and let live" is an old idea but its prevalence is very much modern. Ages ago I ran across what seems a truthful comment: if you brought a European forward from 1200 A.D. to the present, the most inexplicable thing about all our greatly expanded powers to him would be that we hadn't declared a crusade and use the atom bomb to reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. It's probably--well, definitely--a good thing that our ancestors didn't have all our capabilities; you can construct your nightmares here about what a society with airplanes, electric fences, behavioral conditioning, effective psychopharmacology, and poison gas might have done in the way of slavery or genocide, back when those were done with virtually no compunction.

What sort of modern world might grow in a society that poisonous?

And what if we were descended from them? What if we could then reverse things so we would only, in that revised world, have been as wicked as we actually have been? How many never-weres would be a fair price to move from deep to less-deep evil?

---

Rod Rapid and His Electric Chair (John Barnes Short Story Collection)

Description

A short story originally published in HelixSF. A brain scientist and a policeman desperately try to figure out why one brilliant biologist tricked the world into total ecocide; the clues seem to lie in some of the worst boys' adventure books ever written. A funny story about the death of all multicellular life on Earth, a sad story about someone who just wanted something very simple, and a slightly cracked and goofy story about the terrible power of really trashy reading, even for those of us who know better.

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A short story originally published in HelixSF. A brain scientist and a policeman desperately try to figure out why one brilliant biologist tricked the world into total ecocide; the clues seem to lie in some of the worst boys' adventure books ever written. A funny story about the death of all multicellular life on Earth, a sad story about someone who just wanted something very simple, and a slightly cracked and goofy story about the terrible power of really trashy reading, even for those of us who know better.

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