Category: fiction

Pan Am 617 Heavy – novella serialisation at Bewildering Stories

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

My dieselpunk novella Pan Am 617 Heavy is being serialised on the Bewildering stories site. You can read Chapter One, Part One now, with future episodes coming weekly.

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Dominic knew Keyshaa wanted Miterall dead. She wanted the money back, and the patent documents and plans, but first she would be putting a gun to Miterall head to make him squirm.

Dominic prised the carry-on bag from her hand as the cab pulled up at the SFO terminal.

“How long has he been gone?” she asked.

“Less than a day.”

“It will go very badly.”

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Suitcase Nuke – short story in Monk Punk

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

It seems that anytime you like you can add “punk” to a word and create a new literary genre – that’s kind of cool. A.J. French has put together this cool anthology of monk stories. My own – Suitcase Nuke – is an action-driven sci-fi thriller (as I hope the title suggests). The book is available at Amazon.

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Staring across Schema Menovanni’s shoulder, Gerry looked through the narrow window at the snowy Pyrenees. He glimpsed one of the eagles, wings spread, head fixed then darting as it sought prey.
“Are you listening to me, Brother Mitchell?” the Schema said.
Gerry turned to Menovanni’s face, wondering how it had become so very lined. He’d never seen the old man change his expression from neutral. His outward elderly calm perhaps belied a vexed youth. As the oldest monk in Sopphoreo, no one knew his history. “I am listening, Schema,” Gerry said.

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Editor A.J. French is doing a great job of promoting the book, with review copies going out, print ads and fliers. It’s also available at the Pill Hill bookstore.

There’s a good roster of authors here – nice to be sharing the table of contents with people like Joe Jablonski, Dave Fragments, A.J. himself, and others. John R. Fultz has a good overview of the book and his story at his blog.

Two stories in Bounty Hunter

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

This has got to be one of my favourites. My story “A visit to the theatre” appears in the Static Movement anthology Bounty Hunter. The story is only a little over a couple of thousand words, but it’s a fun romp, I hope. It was inspired a little by the cover illustration (I love that picture), though it’s pretty dieselpunk. Lots of chasing and shooting, and I hope, an engaging satisfying story. Okay, opening paragraphs:

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Nikki heard Sam’s Sikorsky spiracopter put down on the apartment building roof and she had her leg strapped on and guns layed out on her bed before he even got down to her door.
She opened the Venetians. In the wan dawn light commuter traffic was backing up along Lexington. Horns blared and taxi drivers yelled. The new traffic signals on thirty-second hadn’t worked right for weeks.
“It’s open,” she yelled to Sam’s pounding.

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Nikki and Sam feel like characters I want to take out again, and their world is just slightly shifted from ours, so there’s lots of world-building which could be fun.

The anthology also has another story of mine, under the byline Michael Shone (I liked the theme, but I’m a bit shy about having multiple stories in a single anthology, so this was a solution), titled “Katie Stumbled”. This is a longer piece, still a bit action-oriented, but a very different tone (I hope) to the other story. It opens like this:

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Bill Sefheron landed the ornithopter in Clarkeson’s town square. He’d known about the Casselith here, but seeing it loom from the South Dakota horizon as he’d made his low approach had surprised him. He hadn’t realized how big this one was. The main mass of its black stone must have been six hundred feet high, the near face tapered to perhaps two hundred feet across at the top. This Casselith probably occupied close to four acres at its base, making it one of the bigger ones. Sefheron saw windows in some parts.

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Thanks again to Chris Bartholomew for her work on these anthologies.

Bergamot Silhouetted – Flash Fiction in Unquiet Earth from Static Movement

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My hard (?) sci-fi story “Bergamot Silhouetted” is out now in the Static Movement anthology Unquiet Earth. Yes, this is collection of zombie stories (just look at that cover), and yes, mine includes zombies, eventually. At $17 from Amazon, with dozens of stories – it’s a collection of flash fiction, ie, all under 1000 words (mine is 998) – it’s a bargain. Here’s the opening paragraphs of my story:
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Corey stared through the Astoria’s viewport at the battered Bergamot. Years amongst explosion debris, and tidal stresses from the gas giant system, and from swollen and pocked Bellatrix, made her look like a lump of dead coral. The ship seemed modular though the briefing said she was a bulk carrier.

“Lover,” Luese said. “Nearly time for the briefing.”

“I never thought you’d notice me,” he said, staring at the shard that had once been a spaceship.

“Well, you are blocking the viewport.”

Corey dropped back to the bunk. “I meant the whole trip. I’ve been watching you since we left Mintaka.”
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My thanks to editor Chris Bartholomew

Jet-Propelled dieselpunk story in Oil

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My action-thriller dieselpunk piece “Deadstick” is the lead story in the Oil anthology from Static Movement, available now at Amazon. Would you risk your career and a pricey prototype aircraft for a slim chance to rescue someone? Here are the opening paragraphs:
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Hank pushed Sally-Jean over the crest and slammed on the afterburners. He’d logged more hours strapped into her snug cockpit than in the rest of the test planes put together. The snub-nosed Lockheed felt like she was a part of him. Some of the guys at Ridgecrest were starting to make lewd comments, asking when the wedding was.
He didn’t mind. What they didn’t know was the sheer bliss of pointing her heavy ass at the ground and shunting her into the stratosphere at six-gees, then bending her around, butterfly-like, into a parabolic arc, cutting the engine and letting her float fifty thousand feet down before re-igniting and pulling up, all sense of butterfly gone, screaming along fifty feet above the desert floor. He didn’t need the amphetamines they sometimes offered around, Sally-Jean kept him alert and hopped-up all he needed. She always came back with an empty tank.

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My thanks to editor Marty Zeigler for taking the story – and for working with me on finding a great title.

Two New Anthologies I’m editing

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As well as Dieselpunk, I’m editing two more anthologies for Static Movement.

Hospital is an anthology about scary hospitals. Think crazed doctors, abandoned asylums, body parts coming to life and so on. This is meant as a horror anthology, but I will look at other speculative genres (and even a literary story or two)

A Butterfly in China: stories of the butterfly effect. This is an anthology about where a tiny change can have a huge impact on an outcome – think about the time you missed that bus by just a moment, went to a diner to wait for the next bus, spilled your coffee and met the love of your life… or something like that. Or, perhaps, how some incremental shift causes disaster. This is a speculative fiction anthology – horror, sci-fi, fantasy and so on. Time travel is popular for this concept, and that’s fine, but I’m keen to see stories that go in other directions too.

As with other Static Movement anthologies, these are non-paying. Click on the titles for full submission details.

Infinite Windows on hiatus

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

Infinite Windows is on Indefinite Hiatus. Infinite Windows was the publisher of my serialized novel The Rotated. The serialization hasn’t finished yet: it’s only about a third of the way through. This means that I’ll be looking for a new publisher.

Infinite Windows has been a cool site, though not without some glitches and problems over the years. What I enjoyed about the publication was the longer stories that Dan took on – especially, of course, some of my own – so that as well a flash fiction, there were some more immersive stories published on the site.

It was at Dan’s encouragement that I pursued The Rotated as a novel. He published the original flash fiction version of The Rotated in June of 2009, but then asked me what else was there to the story, to the concept and suggesting (quite rightly as it turned out) that it felt like there could well be a novel.

So I set to and wrote the novel. It grew and changed, remaining aligned to the original story, but naturally different in scope and development. Initially, as I drafted the novel, I thought that the flash fiction story would play out as a scene within. It didn’t work out that way, but the scene is still a microcosm of several chapters, and perhaps is a sense of how things might have gone differently.

I feel a little sad at the hiatus, which could well be an end, but pleased with my stories, and the novel, that appeared on the site. I’m working on a query letter – which is proving harder than writing the novel itself – to send to agents as I try to find a new publisher for The Rotated.

Shells Walter interviews me for Walter Rhein

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 4 Comments

The wonderful Shells Walter has interviewed me here on Walter Rhein’s website.

Reading over the interview on the site, I seem to go on a bit – I’m sure the responses didn’t feel like that. Hope it doesn’t all sound like waffle.

Thanks Shells, I appreciate it. Shells is the author of the horror novel Dead Practices, and numerous other works. Walter is the author of The Bone Sword and other heroic fantasy novels.

Oh, She’s a Witch in Static Poetry

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

My poem “Oh, She’s a Witch” is in the first poetry anthology from Static Movement. It was my first publication for this year, I’d just been waiting for it to appear on the Amazon page.

Nice little book, with a great range of poetry in it, lots of familiar names (well, from the Static Movement stable), and lots of new.

I’ll have another poem – “Devil with Angel Wings” – in the next anthology, Static Poetry II, as well.