SFSignal's Close Encounters Continues: Nov. 4

SFSignal.com's close encounters with the contributing authors to Alien Contact continues with Mark W. Tiedemann and the "Alien Contact" interview.

SFSignal's Close Encounters Continues: Nov. 3

SFSignal.com's close encounters with the contributing authors to Alien Contact continues with Jack Skillingstead's guest post on "Thermalling" -- those "rising columns of air called thermals [that] are like free gas stations." Read how Jack relates these thermals, and thermalling, to his short story "What You Are About to See" in Alien Contact.

Gardner Dozois Investigates Alien Contacts

Writer, editor, anthologist, reviewer -- Gardner Dozois is all of these, and more. If you read science fiction, and short stories in particular, and you are not familiar with Gardner's many (many!) anthologies -- specifically The Year's Best Science Fiction series, now in its twenty-eighth year -- then I would be compelled to ask you: What planet are you from?

So I was thrilled to learn that Gardner Dozois reviewed my anthology, Alien Contact (along with other short fiction titles), in the November issue of Locus magazine.

The review clocks in at a brief 139 words (according to MS Word), but brief is good, as long as the review says what it needs to say, and mentions so many great authors and stories in the process.

There's no confusion about genre classification in Alien Contact, edited by Marty Halpern—it's just what it says that it is, stories about contacts with aliens, all of them science fiction, and all of them considerably more varied, subtle, and intelligent than the flood of shoot-'em-up Alien Invasion movies we got over the last year or so. This is another really solid reprint anthology, and another excellent value for your money. The best stories here are probably Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," Michael Swanwick's "A Midwinter's Tale," Bruce McAllister's "Kin," Molly Gloss's "Lambing Season," Pat Cadigan's "Angel," Paul McAuley's "The Thought War," and Nancy Kress's "Laws of Survival," but there are also good stories by Neil Gaiman, George Alec Effinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, Harry Turtledove, and thirteen others.... there's really nothing bad here.

— Gardner Dozois, Locus, November 2011

SFSignal's Close Encounters Continues: Nov. 2

SFSignal.com's close encounters with the contributing authors to Alien Contact continues with Paul McAuley and the "Alien Contact" interview.

SFSignal's Close Encounters Continues: Nov. 1

SFSignal.com's close encounters with the contributing authors to Alien Contact continues with Ernest Hogan's guest blog post entitled "Once Upon a Time in SoCal: The Making of 'Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song.'"

SFSignal's Close Encounters Continues: Oct. 31

Per my previous blog post, which provides the complete three-week schedule, and links to the first four entries:

SFSignal.com's close encounters with the contributing authors to Alien Contact continues with Nancy Kress and the "Alien Contact" interview.

The Alien Contact Anthology Table of Contents

For the past 26 weeks I have been blogging about each of the 26 stories included in my anthology Alien Contact, from Night Shade Books. That last story was finally unveiled on Saturday, October 29 -- and the anthology is on schedule for publication tomorrow, November 1.

So here is the anthology's complete table of contents, with links to each blog post that pertains to that story. In some instances, the entire text of the story was provided; in other instances, a link was provided to elsewhere online for the text and/or a podcast of the story.

Alien Contact anthology contents:

Marty Halpern -- "Introduction: Beginnings..."
Paul McAuley -- "The Thought War"
Neil Gaiman -- "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"
Karen Joy Fowler -- "Face Value"
Harry Turtledove -- "The Road Not Taken"
George Alec Effinger -- "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything"
Stephen King -- "I Am the Doorway"
Pat Murphy -- "Recycling Strategies for the Inner City"
Mike Resnick -- "The 43 Antarean Dynasties"
Orson Scott Card -- "The Gold Bug"
Bruce McAllister -- "Kin"
Ernest Hogan -- "Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song"
Pat Cadigan -- "Angel"
Ursula K. Le Guin -- "The First Contact with the Gorgonids"
Adam-Troy Castro -- "Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s"
Michael Swanwick -- "A Midwinter’s Tale"
Mark W. Tiedemann -- "Texture of Other Ways"
Cory Doctorow -- "To Go Boldly"
Elizabeth Moon -- "If Nudity Offends You"
Nancy Kress -- "Laws of Survival"
Jack Skillingstead -- "What You Are About to See"
Robert Silverberg -- "Amanda and the Alien"
Jeffrey Ford -- "Exo-Skeleton Town"
Molly Gloss -- "Lambing Season"
Bruce Sterling -- "Swarm"
Charles Stross -- "MAXO Signals"
Stephen Baxter -- "Last Contact"

Close Encounters with the Contributing Authors of Alien Contact!

This was the headline as it appeared on SFSignal.com on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, a few minutes past midnight. Actually, the words "Starting Today" prefaced that headline, but that was Tuesday, and today is Sunday -- nearly a week later....

In support of the release this week of Alien Contact from Night Shade Books, SFSignal is hosting a series of guest blog posts and interviews with a number of the authors who contributed to the anthology.

World Fantasy Award nominee Charles Tan conducts all the interviews, in which the authors answer questions like: "What's the appeal of alien contact stories for you?" and "What was the first alien contact story you read that made a lasting impression?" as well as a question or two specific to their story. The authors also discuss their current projects.

The guest blog posts revolve around each author's story in the Alien Contact anthology. Readers will gain some insight into the genesis of each of these stories.

The blog posts and interviews will be posted at approximately 2:00 PM (Central time) each weekday (well, almost), from Tuesday, October 25, through Monday, November 14. Here's the schedule; links have been provided for the first four entries, which have already been posted:

* Tue, 10/25: Nancy Kress, Guest Blog post: "Building a Story from Fortuitously Nearby Construction Materials"
* Wed, 10/26: Mike Resnick: The "Alien Contact" Interview
* Thu, 10/27: Mark W. Tiedemann, Guest Blog post: "It's Not About the Buttons"
* Fri, 10/28: Adam-Troy Castro: The "Alien Contact" Interview

* Mon, 10/31: Nancy Kress: The "Alien Contact" Interview
* Tue, 11/1: Ernest Hogan, Guest Blog post: "Once Upon a Time in SoCal: The Making of 'Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song'"
* Wed, 11/2: Paul McAuley: The "Alien Contact" Interview
* Thu, 11/3: Jack Skillingstead, Guest Blog post: "Thermalling"
* Fri, 11/4: Mark W. Tiedemann: The "Alien Contact" Interview

* Mon, 11/7: Ernest Hogan: The "Alien Contact" Interview
* Tue, 11/8: Barbara Hambly, Guest Blog post: "George Alec Effinger and the Aliens Who Knew Everything"
* Wed, 11/9: Jack Skillingstead: The "Alien Contact" Interview
* Thu, 11/10: Bruce McAllister: The "Alien Contact" Interview

* Mon, 11/14: Pat Cadigan: The "Alien Contact" Interview

Remember, you can check in with SFSignal.com at approximately 2:00 PM every weekday -- that's 3:00 PM on the east coast and 12-noon on the west coast -- or, you could just check back here at More Red Ink each weekday for the next two weeks and I'll provide each forthcoming link in a new, albeit very brief, blog post.

eBook Editions of Alien Contact Anthology

I'm pleased to announce that eBook editions of my forthcoming Alien Contact anthology are now available for preorder. Well, sort of...

The Kindle edition (MOBI format) can now be ordered on Amazon.com, and is currently priced at $7.99. Not too shabby for approximately 170,000 words of some of the best "alien contact" stories of the past 30-plus years.

The EPUB format -- for the Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo eReader -- has been submitted to the respective eReader stores, but is not yet available. If the EPUB edition is your eBook of choice, please keep checking back at your favorite eReader store.

I wish to thank the publisher, Night Shade Books, for making these eBook editions available simultaneously with the print edition.

The cover shown here is for the Kindle edition. If you carefully compare this particular cover with the print edition cover (shown everywhere else on this blog), you will notice one significant difference between the two covers. If you discover the difference please comment below, at which time I would be happy to confirm said difference, and explain why.

One final comment: If you are a book blogger/book reviewer and you would like to review this anthology, I can provide either the EPUB or MOBI eBook editions, or a PDF of the print edition. The caveat: Please contact me via email only at FirstContactStory[at]gmail.com -- and state your request, including a link to your book blog/review site. And feel free to highlight any previous reviews you are particularly proud of. I'd like to give them a read.

Alien Contact Anthology Review - 1

There was a time, not all that long ago, when "professional" book reviewers and "professional" publications were the only source for book reviews. I relied on genre 'zines like Locus, Asimov's SF, and Fantasy & Science Fiction for my monthly book reviews fix. And also non-genre sources such as Publishers Weekly. As years passed and the internet grew, we could read book reviews online, on sites like Locus Online and Tangent Online, to name just two.

But with the rise of blogs and blogging, and other social media sites like Goodreads and Library Thing, the sources for quality book reviews have grown exponentially. A new class of blogger -- the book blogger -- has taken his/her place alongside the "professional" book reviewer. Reviews from the likes of PW and Kirkus may still hold more cachet than a book blog review -- but the average reader neither subscribes to nor reads these publications, primarily because they can't afford them! [Besides, I'd rather spend my money on the books themselves, rather than on publications that write about those very same books.] And if readers spend much of their time online, then online is where they will find book reviews as well.

The first review (so far) that I have found for my forthcoming anthology Alien Contact (Night Shade Books, November 1) is courtesy of Ria on the Bibliotropic blog. The book was originally reviewed by Ria on Goodreads¹ -- which is where I first read the review -- and then posted to her book blog.

Here are a couple excerpts from Ria's review:

I'm not normally much for short story collections, but something about this book just spoke to me, so I couldn't resist taking the chance to read it, especially after seeing such a stellar (if you'll excuse the pun) list of contributing authors. Neil Gaiman, Ursula K Le Guin, Stephen King, and yet more. There's all kinds of talent evident in this collection, and I'll say right off the bat that this is a book that no sci-fi fan should really be without.

[...]

The fun thing that I find about alien encounter stories is that they end up saying more about humanity than about any alien culture we can dream of. Whether it's displaying our own human arrogance about the universe and all within it, or displaying our sheer curiosity about what lies beyond us, all stories I've found that involve humans and some unknown sentient life form end up showcasing humanity in ways that a human-only cast of characters just couldn't....

If these snippets intrigue you, please take this opportunity to read the full review.

--------------

Footnote:

1. Goodreads requires a user account and password, so I was quite pleased to learn from Ria that her review was also posted publicly on Bibliotropic. If you do have a Goodreads account, and you haven't yet ordered a copy of Alien Contact, please feel free to sign up for the giveaway that I am sponsoring, along with with publisher Night Shade Books. (See the Goodreads widget at the top of the right column of this blog.)

The Marty Halpern Interview on Suvudu.com

Publicist Matt Staggs (@mattstaggs) interviews me for Suvudu.com. Matt writes: "...When Halpern told me that he had finished a new anthology called Alien Contact, I thought now would be a good time for us to have a conversation about his career as an award-winning editor¹ and what it takes to get a start in the business today."

Here's a taste:

Tell me about your new project. How did it come together? Who is involved?

When I queried authors about contributing to the Fermi paradox anthology (the previously mentioned Is Anybody Out There?), a few responded with similar comments: they had already written what they felt was their best alien contact story, and they didn’t wish to write yet another. So this got me thinking about all the incredible alien contact stories that have been written in the past, say, thirty years — and wouldn’t it be great to have these all (or at least as many as possible) collected in one volume. And thus Alien Contact was born. After much perseverance, I sold the anthology to Night Shade Books. (Note: I actually have enough quality stories to easily fill another volume!)

Please check out Matt's interview with me on Suvudu.com.

---------------

Footnote:

1. Actually, that should be "award-nominated editor" -- though I'm a winner in my own heart!

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #25

Alien Contact is now available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and hopefully other booksellers as well, and will be published in November by Night Shade Books. If you are new to these "Story" postings, you may want to begin here. This is story #25 (of 26):

"MAXO Signals:

A New and Unfortunate Solution to the Fermi Paradox"

by Charles Stross

This "story" was originally published in the August 25, 2005, issue of Nature magazine, and is a short-short of approximately 800 words.

In fact, due to this story's short length -- and the style in which it was written -- I won't be quoting any of its actual content in this blog post. Regarding the story's style and content, Charles Stross had this to say:

I got an invite to write a short-short for Nature, one of the most prestigious real science journals there is! Which was great. However, there's a fly in the ointment: Nature's SF stories run on the back page. Not back pages, page singular.

It's kind of hard to write a one-page short story: you have to throw out a whole bunch of stuff you'd normally need in an SF story. Characterization, plot, theme, ideas -- pick any two and trash 'em ruthlessly and you'll still have to cut, and cut, and cut.

In the end, I decided to go tech: write a pastiche in the general style of a Letter to Nature -- not a peer-reviewed paper but a communiqué from a research group. What could they be researching? How about extra-terrestrial intelligence?

Let's take SETI seriously. We're listening for messages that Someone Out There feels strongly enough about to broadcast to the stars for decades or centuries on end. What on earth (or off it) could possibly repay the investment implicit in running an interstellar transmitter (a fearsomely high-powered device) for such a length of time? Well, there might be two-way communication: "I'll tell you how I build fusion reactors if you tell me how you build..." -- sort of a very slow-motion Galactic internet. But that's pretty unlikely. Because once you build an email system that anyone can broadcast on or listen into, sooner or later you'll get MAXO Signals...

I don't want to give too much away, but let me say that anyone who has received a solicitation email from Nigeria -- and that's pretty much everyone who has an email account -- will appreciate this short story. If you would rather not wait for the publication of Alien Contact, you can read an actual scan of the story from Nature via this PDF link.

[Continue to Story #26]

Alien Contact at World Fantasy Convention

The upcoming 2011 World Fantasy Convention will take place October 27-30 at the Town and Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center in San Diego, California.

The fine folks at Night Shade Books assure me that Alien Contact is still on schedule to ship nationally on October 28, and that copies of the anthology will indeed be available at their booth in the dealers room at the convention.

The following contributing authors to Alien Contact will be in attendance at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego:

Neil Gaiman (Author GOH)

Jeffrey Ford

Bruce McAllister

Pat Murphy

Robert Silverberg

Harry Turtledove

And hopefully yours truly, Marty Halpern. (see previous Status post)

Friday evening at the World Fantasy Con is always devoted to a mass meet-the-pros and autograph signing. Hopefully, all of the above authors -- and me as well -- will be on hand for this event. So attendees should be able to have copies of the anthology signed by all present at that time. We're also trying to arrange some various times when these individuals can stop by the Night Shade booth in the dealers room to do a bit of book signing, too. I, for one, plan to have them all sign my own copy of the book.

So, if you'll be at WFC in San Diego at the end of the month, please try to track me down, introduce yourself if we don't already know one another, and do say "Hi" and chat a bit. I look forward to meeting many of the readers of this blog at the convention.

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #24

If you are a Goodreads member, please sign up for the chance to win a free copy of Alien Contact. (See the Goodreads widget to the right.) Pictured in the giveaway is the Advanced Reading Copy, but winners will be receiving copies of the published version of the book. Alien Contact is also available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and hopefully other booksellers as well, and will be published in November by Night Shade Books. If you are new to these "Story" postings, you may want to begin here. This is story #24 (of 26):

"Swarm"

by Bruce Sterling

This story was originally published as the cover story in the April 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and is approximately 9,600 words in length. (The cover art for this particular issue was created by Carl Lundgren, who went on to create poster art for classic bands such as The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Pink Floyd.)

"Swarm" is part of Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist world, which includes four additional stories as well as the novel Schismatrix. As I was preparing for this blog post, I dug up my copy of Schismatrix Plus (Ace Books, 1996) -- a single volume that contains the complete Shaper/Mechanist stories, and reread Bruce's introduction, written in November 1995. Here are a few excerpts:

"Swarm" was also my first magazine sale...[and] is still the story of mine most often reprinted. I'm still fond of it: I can write a better prose now, but with that story, I finally gnawed my way through the insulation and got my teeth set into the buzzing copper wire.

[...]

In those days of yore, cyberpunk wasn't hype or genre history; it had no name at all. It hadn't yet begun to be metabolized by anyone outside a small literary circle. But it was very real to me, as real as anything in my life, and when I was hip-deep into SCHISMATRIX chopping my way through circumsolar superpower conflicts and grimy, micro-nation terrorist space pirates, it felt like holy fire.

[...]

People are always asking me about—demanding from me even—more Shaper/Mechanist work. Sequels. A trilogy maybe. The schismatrix sharecropping shared-universe "as created by" Bruce Sterling. But I don't do that sort of thing. I never will. This is all there was, and all there is.

When I asked Bruce to share some thoughts on "Swarm" with readers, this is what he wrote:

I have scientists in my family, and one of my uncles is an entomologist. That was how I came to understand, as a child, that insects were not just creepy vermin in one's Texan backyard, but could be proper objects of prolonged and serious study. They were here long before us and have every likelihood of being here long after us.

Social insects have a parallel alien world. One has to like the modest way they go about their own business without attempting alien contact. If these much older civilizations levelled with us about our current dominion of the planet, we likely wouldn't much care for that conversation.

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #23

I have set up an "Alien Contact Anthology" Facebook page; in the column to the right, scroll down a bit to see the widget. If you are an FB user, please consider a "Like" on this FB page for future updates, including the full text of more stories, book giveaways, and more. Alien Contact is now available for preorder from Amazon and other booksellers, and is forthcoming in November from Night Shade Books. This is story #23 (of 26):

"Lambing Season"

by Molly Gloss

This story was originally published in the July 2002 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, and is approximately 5,700 words in length.

The weekend of March 11-13, I attended the first of what appears to be an annual Bay Area SF convention: FOGcon. One of the panels I sat in on was on the idea of "Regional SF." Panelist Terry Bisson raved about the story "Lambing Season" by Molly Gloss, stating that it was one of the best stories he had read that dealt with "sense of place." I was able to support Terry's comments about this story, and also to state that I had acquired it for inclusion in a forthcoming anthology. But I will let this excerpt from the beginning of the story speak for itself:

From May to September Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his Mexican hands up every other week with a load of groceries but otherwise she was alone, alone with the sheep and the dogs. She liked the solitude. Liked the silence. Some sheepherders she knew talked a blue streak to the dogs, the rocks, the porcupines, they sang songs and played the radio, read their magazines out loud, but Delia let the silence settle into her, and, by early summer, she had begun to hear the ticking of the dry grasses as a language she could almost translate....

[...]

The wind blew out of the southwest in the early part of the season, a wind that smelled of juniper and sage and pollen; in the later months, it blew straight from the east, a dry wind smelling of dust and smoke, bringing down showers of parched leaves and seedheads of yarrow and bittercress. Thunderstorms came frequently out of the east, enormous cloudscapes with hearts of livid magenta and glaucous green. At those times, if she was camped on a ridge, she'd get out of her bed and walk downhill to find a draw where she could feel safer, but if she was camped in a low place, she would stay with the sheep while a war passed over their heads, spectacular jagged flares of lightning, skull-rumbling cannonades of thunder....

As I read this story I could smell the air of Joe-Johns Mountain -- the way it smells on an early summer morn, or when there is a bit of storm in the wind. Or the scent of wet grass after a heavy downpour. The two paragraphs above are only a small taste of this story's sense of place. Here's one more brief excerpt, with a hint of what is in store for Delia:

Lame Man Bench was a great upthrust block of basalt grown over with scraggly juniper forest. As she climbed among the trees, the smell of something like ozone or sulfur grew very strong, and the air became thick, burdened with dust. Threads of the yellow contrail [which she had seen moments early in the night sky] hung in the limbs of the trees. She went on across the top of the bench and onto slabs of shelving rock that gave a view to the west. Down in the steep-sided draw below her there was a big wing-shaped piece of metal resting on the ground, which she at first thought had been torn from an airplane, but then realized was a whole thing, not broken, and she quit looking for the rest of the wreckage. She squatted down and looked at it. Yellow dust settled slowly out of the sky, pollinating her hair, her shoulders, the toes of her boots, faintly dulling the oily black shine of the wing, the thing shaped like a wing.

"It's alive, alive!"

"Exo-Skeleton Town" by Jeffrey Ford (Part 3 of 4)

Exo-Skeleton Town

by Jeffrey Ford

[Continued from Part 2]

The Lancaster house was a creaky old retro affair from the part of Earth's history when they used wood to build dwellings. I'd seen pictures of these things before. The style, as I had read in one of my many film books, was Victorian. These baroque shelters with lacelike woodwork and myriad rooms were always popping up in the flicks from the thirties and forties. Pointed rocket-ship-looking turrets on either side of a big three-story box with a railed platform that went all the way around it. As I made my way toward the steps that led to a door, I quickly, out of desperation, mind-wrote the script for the next scene.

I knocked once, twice, three times, and waited, hoping the lady of the house was home. There was no way I would ever make it to Exo-town on my own. Eventually the door pulled back and a young woman appeared behind an inner screen door.

"Can I help you?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

"I'm lost," I said. "I wandered away from town, hoping to see the luminous veldt, and although I've found it, I don't think I can return. Something has been chasing me through the tall grass. I'm scared and tired." Having said this, I had a feeling my words had come out too stiffly to be believed.

She opened the screen door and looked at me. "Joseph Cotten?" she said.

I nodded and looked as forlornly as possible.

"You poor man," she said, and motioned for me to enter.

As I crossed the threshold, it became clear to me that old Joe was on the job. If it had been only me, she most likely would have locked the door and called the Beetle Squad, but since it was Cotten, the consummate professional of ingratiating Third Man haplessness, she immediately felt my pain.

Inside the bowels of the old Victorian, standing on an elaborately designed rug, amidst the spiraled wooden furniture, in the face of an ancient stand-up clock, I took in the beauty of Gloriette Moss. Stootladdle knew his film, because here was obvious star quality in the supernova range—an exotic hybrid of the young Audrey Hepburn and the older Hayley Mills. She was this and more than this, with a mid-length blonde wave, a face so fresh and innocent, a smile that was straight grace until the corners curled into mischief. She wore a simple, cobalt-blue dress and no shoes. She was Jean Seberg with hair, Grace Kelly minus the affectation.

"I rarely have visitors now that my husband has passed away," she said, her hands clasped behind her back.

"Sorry to trouble you," I said. "I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here into the wilderness on my own."

"It's no trouble, really," she said. "I rather enjoy the idea of company."

"Well, just let me get my bearings and I'll be off," I said, and though I spoke this plainly, I could feel Cotten creating a look of half-hidden dejection.

"Nonsense," she said. "You've come all this way to see the veldt. You can't go back to town by yourself, you're lucky you made it here alive. There are things in the grass, you know. Things that would just as soon eat you."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I had come all the way from Earth to scout locations for a film about the bug planet. I'm thinking of reviving the art of cinema back on the home world, and I thought what better place to make a movie than the only place in the universe where movies are still appreciated for their art and not how much freasence they will bring."

"That's wonderful," she said, her face brightening more than ever. "Stay here with me for a while and I will show you the veldt. This house has so many empty rooms."

"Are you sure I won't be putting you out?" I asked.

"Please," she said. "I'll have my man show you upstairs and get you situated."

I began to speak, but she said, "I'll hear nothing to the contrary," and that ancient, elegant phrase, issuing from that smooth face made me weak.

"Vespatian," she called out, and a moment later a pale green grasshopper as tall as me, dressed in a black short-coat and trousers, appeared at the entrance to a hallway leading left.

"We have a visitor," she said. "Mr. Cotten will be staying for a time. See him to the large room on the third floor, the one with the view of the veldt."

"As you wish, madame," said the bug with the obsequious air of a David Niven. "This way, sir."

"Exo-Skeleton Town" by Jeffrey Ford (Part 2 of 4)

Exo-Skeleton Town

by Jeffrey Ford

[Continued from Part 1]

I would have rather sat on the bowl backwards for a year than take that space flight. It seemed endless, but I spent my time reading books about ancient movies and dreaming what I would do with all my gold after I scored my load. My ace in the hole was that I had a great movie to trade. This was a real one too. It had been handed down over generations on my father's side. To tell the truth, I stole it from him the day I left for the spaceport. It was a little low budget job called Night of the Living Dead. My old man would dust it off for holidays and we'd watch it. Who knew what the hell was going on in the film? It was in black and white, but supposedly, from what I had read, it was a cult classic in its time. I remember once, as a kid of about ten, my old man leaned over to me where I lay on the floor one Christmas watching it with the rest of the relatives. He said to me, "You know what the deeper implications are here?" pointing to the monitor. I shook my head. "The director is trying to say that the dead will eat you." My old man was as profound as a stone. All I saw was a bunch of stiffs marching around. For years I thought it was a parade. If I were to see that movie today, it would probably still get me in the holiday spirit. Anyway, it wasn't as early as I would have liked, but I thought the whole anti-Hollywood, independent movie scene, a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, might be ready to explode on the bug planet.

I still remember the day when we landed at the little spaceport next to Exo-Skeleton Town, and I looked out the window at a village of one-story concrete bunkers in the dark lit by streetlights. It was like a nightmare. Putting on the Cotten was the only thing that saved me from crying. Climbing into those skins is a painful experience at first. There's a moment when you have to die and then be revived by the suit's biosystem. The one thing nobody told me about was how it itches when you first get in. I thought it would drive me wild. Then another guy who had been to the bug planet before stepped into a smart little Nick Adams getup and warned me, "Whatever you do, don't think about the itching. It can seriously drive you insane." I was in agony when I stepped through the airlock and into the slow, heavy world of insects.

It cost me a fortune but I managed to arrange a meeting with Stootladdle only a few days after my arrival. He was a sight to behold. Hairy, too many arms. His eyes were round as saucers and a thousand mirrors each. I became momentarily dizzy trying to watch each and every me he was seeing all at once. The voice that came through the translator was high and thin and full of annoyance.

"Joseph Cotten," he said. "I've seen you in a few things."

"Shadow of a Doubt?" I asked.

"Never heard of it," said the flea.

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #22: "Exo-Skeleton Town" by Jeffrey Ford (Part 1 of 4)

Just a quick opening comment: I've been blogging each week about the stories in Alien Contact in their order of appearance in the book. What readers need to know is that I've kept all the authors who contributed to this anthology in the dark as well. So as I reveal one story each week, the authors themselves also learn with whom they share this anthology. I've received some cool feedback from some of the authors, like when they discover that one of their favorite stories has been included in the book. Alien Contact is now available for preorder from Amazon and other booksellers, and is forthcoming in November from Night Shade Books.

"Exo-Skeleton Town"

by Jeffrey Ford

This story was originally published in the premier issue (Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2001) of Black Gate magazine, and is approximately 9,000 words in length.

In an earlier blog post, "Reflections on the 2000 World Fantasy Convention," I recalled attending the Jeffrey Ford reading and then meeting him afterward, all of which led to my acquiring and editing his first short fiction collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002). Prior to that convention -- and as I wrote, one of the reasons I attended was to specifically meet Jeff -- I had already read a number of his short stories. And, much to my delight, this first issue of Black Gate was one of the freebies included in the goodie bag that was handed out to con attendees. When I scanned through the magazine's table of contents, I was pleased to see that the issue contained yet another new Jeffrey Ford story. I

If you're not already a fan of the old, classic Hollywood movies -- and the actors and actresses that made these films such classics -- then you certainly will be after you've read "Exo-Skeleton Town." This is probably the quirkiest story in the anthology. And it remains one of the more unique story concepts I've ever read. In fact, even though I'm the editor, I'm almost tempted to ask Jeff: "Where the hell did this idea come from?"

But I don't really have to ask him that question, because he's already answered it. With Jeff's most kind permission, I'm including here most of his afterword to "Exo-Skeleton Town" in The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. [Note: There's a bit of spoiler here, so you may want to skip this quoted text for now and scroll a bit farther down.]

This story got turned down more times than my Visa card. What's not to like? It's got giant alien bugs, Hollywood stars, balls of aphrodisiacal insect shit, drug consumption through a spigot in the crotch, and Judy Garland...shooting herself in the head....

I got the idea for this story from a book my son bought about the history of Japanese monster flicks titled Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! by Stuart Galbraith. Before looking through it, I was unaware that the great actor Joseph Cotten had done a bunch of low-budget monster movies in Japan near the end of his career. I never saw any of them, but the book had plenty of pictures. "Exo-Skeleton Town" is told in the melodramatic fashion of the black and white movies I watched on TV in the afternoons when, as a kid, I'd skip school, which was pretty often.

The name of the movie that is coveted by the mayor of the bug world, The Rain Does Things Like That, came from a deranged guy who wandered the streets of South Philly when I lived near Marconi Plaza, only a stone's throw from Monzo's Meatarama. I'd see this guy at least once a week, and he never tired of repeating that same phrase.

I've often thought that someday I'd like to write the story of the rise to power of Stootladdle, the flealike mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town. Thanks go out to Dave Truesdale and John O'Neill [of Black Gate] for bringing this creature feature to a theatre near you.

In addition to allowing me to include this afterword, Jeff has also given me permission to post the contents of this story in its entirety here on More Red Ink. So, for your reading pleasure, here is "Exo-Skeleton Town," which won the 2006 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, the French national speculative fiction award. The French certainly do appreciate those old Hollywood movies....

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #21

I have created an "Alien Contact Anthology" Facebook page; in the column to the right, scroll down a bit to see the widget. If you are an FB user, please consider a "Like" on this FB page for future updates, including the full text of more stories, book giveaways, and more. Alien Contact is now available for preorder from Amazon.com and other booksellers, and is forthcoming in November from Night Shade Books. This is story #21:

"Amanda and the Alien"

by Robert Silverberg

This story was originally published in the May 1983 issue of Omni magazine, and is approximately 6,400 words in length.

My connection to this story goes back to 2003, when Claude Lalumière and I selected it for inclusion in our co-edited anthology of sardonic fiction (aka stories with attitude) entitled Witpunk, which was published at the time by Four Walls, Eight Windows. So, in selecting some of the best "alien contact" stories of the past 30 or so years for this new anthology, how could I not include this classic Robert Silverberg story: "Amanda and the Alien."

Cribbing from a couple different reviews, if I had to sum up this story in one line, it would be: A deadly, shape-changing alien, who escapes from a government detention center, has the misfortune of meeting Amanda. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the story:

Amanda spotted the alien late Friday afternoon outside the Video Center, on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked over.

"You're doing it wrong," Amanda said. "Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are."

"Bug off," the alien said.

"No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center, or don't you?"

The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, "I don't know what the crap you're talking about."

"Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you," Amanda said. "I think you're getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me, and I'll teach you a few things about passing for human. I've got the whole friggin' weekend now with nothing else to do anyway."

A flicker of interest came into the other girl's dark, chilly eyes. But it died quickly, and she said, "You some kind of lunatic?"

"Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That's all I can do, is try," Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didn't look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylor's interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure.

[…]

"Wait," the alien said finally.

Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

"Yeah?"

"How can you tell?"

Amanda grinned. "Easy. You've got a rain slicker on, and it's only September. Rainy season doesn't start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old Spandex kind. People like you don't wear that stuff anymore. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but you've got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That's just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. It's like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear and then tried a little of everything. The closer I study you, the more I see…. You may think that you're perfectly camouflaged, but you aren't."

[…]

"Why should I trust you?"

"Because I've been talking to you for five minutes and I haven't yelled for the cops yet. Don't you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a minute. Here." Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline on the afternoon Examiner was:

BAY AREA ALIEN TERROR

MARINES TO JOIN NINE-COUNTY HUNT

MAYOR, GOVERNOR CAUTION AGAINST PANIC

"You understand that?" Amanda asked. "That's you they're talking about. They're out there with flame guns, tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. There's been real hysteria for a day and a half. And you standing around here with the wrong chevrons on! Christ. Christ! What's your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?"

"Home," the alien said....

Amanda eventually contrives a way to use the alien to get even with her boyfriend, the aforementioned Charley Taylor, who stood her up that weekend. And to hell with the consequences. Typical seventeen-year-old behavior? You be the judge.

Amanda and the Alien was filmed in 1995 as a Showtime cable movie, directed by Jon Kroll (Big Brother, The Amazing Race, Blade: The Series), and starring Nicole Eggert (Baywatch), John Diehl (The Shield), Michael Dorn (Star Trek franchise), and Stacy Keach (Prison Break).

[Continue to Story #22]