So while I continue to labor at things I can’t talk about yet, y’all are gearing up to exploit expropriated Pagan rituals— whether you believe in them or not— for some time off. Good on you. I leave you with a festive, Christmas-ornamenty graphic to show that one can find the Spirit of the Season […]
Archive for fiblet
21
Nov
2016
Welcome to the Zombie Corps
Diallo goes out screaming. Hell is an echo chamber, full of shouts and seawater and clanking metal. Monstrous shadows move along the bulkheads; meshes of green light writhe across every surface. The Sāḥil rise from the moon pool like creatures from some bright lagoon, firing as they emerge; Rashida’s middle explodes in dark mist and […]
06
Jul
2016
Sigmoid.
I cried for the Chimp, once. I was there for his birth. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, and an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not […]
18
May
2016
Diamond Blogs
We had a legend, we denizens of Eriophora, of a cavern— deep aft, almost as far back as the launch thrusters themselves— filled with diamonds. Not just ordinary diamonds, either: the uncut, hexagonal shit. Lonsdaleite. The toughest solid in the whole damn solar system— back when we shipped out, at least— and laser-readable to boot. […]
08
Jun
2015
The 21-Second God.
We lost fifteen million souls that day. Fifteen million brains sheathed in wraparound full-sensory experience more real than reality: skydiving, bug-hunting, fucking long-lost or imaginary lovers whose fraudulence was belied only by their perfection. Gang-bangs and first-person space battles shared by thousands— each feeding from that trickle of bandwidth keeping them safely partitioned one from […]
30
Apr
2015
Colony Creature
I once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus. I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe […]
26
Jul
2014
But Not the Part Where Everyone Gets Burned Alive.
“The Colonel”, my Echopraxia tie-in, is slotted to go live at Tor.com over the next couple of days. I thought I’d give you a bit of a preview, in between checking out Snowpiercer and going my sixth round with the Russian bureaucracy. I don’t know whether Tor’s planning on luring anyone in with a teaser […]
26
Jun
2014
Collateral.
Daniel might like this. A couple of posts back (in a thread of comments I still haven’t had time to answer), he asked if I’d be willing to write military SF unconstrained by the limits of video games. As it turns out, I already have: “The Colonel“, upcoming from Tor.com, is sorta-military— although the only […]
25
Dec
2013
A Christmas Wish.
Things fall apart, Yeats wrote. He didn’t know the half of it. He was obsessed with trivia: Humanity, Good and Evil, angry imaginary gods. But it’s not just some rickety social construct coming apart at the seams. It’s the whole fucking universe. There’s no second coming for our cosmos, no Big Crunch after the Bang, […]
19
Dec
2013
Since There Still Seems to be Some Confusion Over the Title…
They’d arrived at what had once been some kind of air-traffic hub: a low-slung control shack whose walls and roof came together in a wraparound band of soot-stained windows angled at the sky. Two dead helicopters and a one-winged jump jet littered a scorched expanse of tarmac and landing bullseyes, barely visible beneath the scoring. […]
