SFFSat 18/1/2014

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

 Poisoned Ice   part 2

This is the second part of a science fiction short story.  Anton is in trouble; this time, we find out why...

Anton had barely seen the unknown singleship as Emerald weaved gracefully towards the Svenskite crop. He had seeded the ring segment nearly a Titan year before with the bio-engineered photosynthesisers, and had rightly expected to see a rich harvest. As he approached the area, noting his beacons staking the limits of his farm, he had spotted the stranger with its wings extending. As anger flooded through him at the blatant theft of his crop, the thin mist of the ring core changed from white to yellow, and Emerald's song had faltered. Anton had heard of pirates poisoning space to murder a singleship, but had dismissed such stories as spacegold – pretty, but worthless.

Now, Emerald was dying. And when the ship expired, Anton would die soon after. He bit back the curses brimming on his tongue, anger and terror vying with his frustration at being so helpless. He ran his hands over the interface that allowed him to talk to Emerald, trying wordlessly to communicate to the ship his feelings, trying to tell her how sorry he was and how much he cared. The murder of his ship hurt almost as much as his own approaching demise.

As always, comments welcomed.
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SFFSat 11/1/14 - Poisoned Ice

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

Just to prove I can write something other than Sorrel, I'm going to present a short story over the next weeks. This one is hard science fiction, as opposed to the steampunk/fantasy that is Sorrel's universe.

So with no further ado, I present... 

 Poisoned Ice.

 

The singleship was dying slowly around Anton. He tried to shut out the ship's keening wail from his ears, and pulled his helmet into place. He checked his suit seals again; Emerald was trying to maintain her internal atmosphere to the end, but he could no longer depend on her. He gazed hopelessly out of the clouded viewport at the silent, nearly motionless hailstorm around the ship. The rings were beautiful, and he and his poisoned ship were in their midst. Chunks of ice the size of office blocks spun in slow, stately majesty, the occasional collision spreading fragments of silver hail in increasing arcs. Between the largest boulders Anton could see the fragile loveliness of Svenskites spinning as they drank in the thin sunlight, turning slowly in unison to focus on the distant star. The crop here should have made him rich. He seethed, and gazed across the ring through the poisoned wonderland towards the other singleship as it turned its wings again to draw in the lifeforms. Even if he expended all his air to push him towards the pirate, he would not get there before his power expired, and he froze. 

 As always, comments welcomed!

 

SFFSat 4/1/14

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

This time, I'm putting up a snippet from Sorrel in Silver, the third volume in Sorrel's saga, still many months from publication and only a quarter written. Sorrel's adoptive town has been attacked by lloruk again. Sorrel is drowning her sorrows afterwards.

 

The tavern on Lantern Street was more volging comfortable than the Chancelry had ever been, even before it became a smoking ruin. I sat in one of the plush, upholstered chairs in the taproom with a pint tankard of cider, and thought to myself that in this respect, at least, the cascade of fire that had devastated the town's heart had not been such a bad thing. I'd needed five pints of cider to come to that conclusion, I might add.

I looked round the room, noticing that everything seemed brighter and a little fuzzier than it had been half an hour ago. I obviously needed more cider so I wouldn't notice how drunk I was getting.

'Daryan, Zandraal, now Tolgrail' Berindyl snarled. She and I had never been on the best of terms. I thought she was an appalling Guard Commander, and she thought I was an insufferably arrogant outsider.

So we were both good judges of character.

  As always, comments welcomed!

 

Angels

 

It's nearly Christmas, so I was thinking about a Christmas post. Not that you'd find the Angels I'm thinking of on a Christmas tree...

Female pilots in fiction are rare, but by no means unknown. The first TV female pilots I knew about were the Angels, flying the most advanced jet fighters to protect the Earth from the Mysterons.

Captain Scarlet was one of the Gerry Anderson puppet series, following on from Thunderbirds and Joe 90.

It was the darkest of his puppet series, with a hideous threat to the world from alien beings on Mars. 

Spectrum fought against the Mysterons, and one arm of Spectrum were the Angels. 

The five Angels were codenamed Symphony, Rhapsody, Melody, Harmony, and the Squadron Leader was Destiny, who was obviously the only one of the five with no ear for music.

Why all five female? There is no explanation (aside from ensuring they are a uniform group) – perhaps the cockpit of the Angel Interceptors was too small for a male pilot.

 

 Airfix made a kit of the aeroplane, which is relatively accurate to the models seen on screen... except that the pilot was a standard Airfix jet pilot figure, and clearly not the more curvaceous form of any of the Angels. The figure was swiftly labelled Cacophony Angel, and sacked. Fortunately, when Airfix re-issued the kit last year (still with Cacophony in the package) a resin replacement materialised from RetroSF, so that the model could have the proper pilot to fly the fighter.

 

 

In 2005, Gerry Anderson launched a new version of Captain Scarlet, with computer-generated animation.

 

 It looked spectacular, and incidentally included an updated Angel Interceptor and lovingly created new Angels.

 

 

It should have been very successful. Unfortunately, ITV management, who organised the broadcasts of the show, had been Mysteronized. They included the show in two chunks during their dire Saturday morning show, with no fixed time during the morning and with it hacked about to fit in with their scheduling.

 Anyone wanting to watch the show would be frustrated – anyone who was watching the enveloping show was not going to be impressed.

 

The show did not survive for long, despite excellent graphics and well-written scripts (Phil Ford, who wrote most of it, went on to write for the new Doctor Who). I suspect the show's failure was a result of an evil scheme by Captain Black...

Whatever the cause, the Angels were another source that fed into my own female pilot, Sorrel - who I suspect would kill to get her hands on a jet fighter...

SFFSat 14/12/13

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here.


This week's snippet is again from Sorrel Snowbound, and carries on from last week's extract. Moustachio just turned a pressure hose at our heroine, but missed, and the foul stuff hit his friend...

Beardy screamed, a high-pitched wail of agony – his uniform steamed and the side of his face against which the stream had spattered blistered in an instant, horrible pustules bursting out on his cheek and the side of his neck. 

 

Moustachio, realising what he had done, jerked the pipe back, swinging the jet wildly so it tore into the bushes to the side of me. He was still snarling – his eyes were on me, not the damage he had done to his friend. I saw his muscles tense under the threadbare uniform as he began to swing the jet back towards me. I didn't pause to temper my response. My anger flared inside me at his murderous effort, and I dived into the magerealm, grabbed the fireflow and flung it onto the psychopath.

It was his turn to scream. The flames were bright enough to illuminate the entire area. My stomach had twisted in sympathy for what Beardy was going through – it rebelled more at the sight of Moustachio's brief, incandescent agony, and I struggled to retain what little it contained. It was a hideous way to kill a man, even scum like this one. 

 Comments welcomed!

Airfix

We didn't have the internet when I was young. Information was harder to come by. Much of what I knew of aeroplanes came not from books or television, but from that indispensable source of cherished information, the Airfix Catalogue. We got this magnificent publication every year, and I would spend hours poring over it and dreaming about the extraordinary hardware within.








The Airfix box-art was some of the best artwork I had seen, and it brought the planes and trains and cars and ships to life. I bought dozens of kits.

 My favourites were always the aircraft. Not the WW2 spitfires and messerschmitts my friends raved about – my delights were helicopters, science fiction models (a rarity then and now)... and biplanes.

I was never a desperately good modeller. My kits would never have won prizes. But I really enjoyed making the detailed models, painting them and putting on the decals (transfers, as I called them then).

 

I had a squadron of aircraft on my shelves in front of my books on my bedroom wall.

The pictures here show just a few
of the kits I had...

...plus the one I wanted, but which was out of production at the time. I wrote to Airfix asking whether the HP 0/400 would be released again. They told me it was unlikely in the near future – and sent me the current Airfix Calendar, which had the HP 0/400 as one of the monthly pictures.

 

Small wonder I thought Airfix were a great company.


And perhaps it was not surprising that the heroine of my novels is a pilot, flying just such a structure of wire and doped canvas...

SFFSat 7/12/13

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here.


This week's snippet is again from Sorrel Snowbound, and carries on from last week's extract. Moustachio has just told Sorrel he is going to kill her.

  

Moustachio lifted something from a holster on the side of the trike. A straight metal pipe, with a protrusion upon it, and a brown leather tube running back from it to the body of the steamer. Something gushed from the pipe towards me. This was not white steam – it was a blue stream of vapour, and it sprayed out, covering the ten feet between us in an instant.

Every now and again I begin to think that my luck is better than it used to be. The jet hissed like rain on a pavement as it slammed into the road beyond me. It had to be something pretty unpleasant, but Moustachio had not quite got his aim right. If he had, I had no doubt I would be in no shape to do anything - ever. As it was, I had an instant to fling myself sideways, further away from the jet, and incidentally back to where Beardy was. Moustachio turned the jet to try to follow me, and the jet caught Beardy first.

Comments welcomed!