The Veranda In the beginning there were five of us at the Veranda. LeGuard was our employer, a New Magician from somewhere in South America. I and the other three…
Science Fiction
Cold Days in Hell
The cops kicked Urfirer’s ass—and it wasn’t a pretty ass. Scales, stray hairs an inch thick, and a bleary blind eye on the left cheek. The thing that was pretty,…
Dirty Dishes
Cassie always knows what I’m thinking. She told me about the whole ESP thing just before we moved in together. How she had inherited the gene from her mother’s mother…
Who Put the Coke in Coca-Cola?
Coke is it: the best-known commercial product in human history. Uh huh! It’s the real thing. And – for the first 15 years of its life – it contained the…
Outmatched: a Jagged Steel Creek Chronicle
Rico rode for months before he picked up the Tinker’s trail. He rode through woods in the South populated by ancient giants, cybernetic dwarves, and trees that grew higher than…
The Judgment of Cambyses
It was August 2075 in Brussels. A dying arts and antiquities dealer needed an heir – a suitable one, one that wouldn’t squander and ruin the business he had spent…
Where Is Japan, And When?
I am a writer, and so I write. I tell myself this—often—to explain why I persist in my scribbling. For I may fill sheet after sheet with hurried recollections, I…
Always the Young Alien
I don’t know why, but lecturing the extraterrestrials unnerved me. Oh, they assumed the respectful attitude—tentacles tucked beneath scaly feet—and rarely spoke. But if they objected to the lecture, they…
Demon’s Orbit
“The idea of Laplace’s demon was that if you had had some kind of intelligence with enough processing jam and enough triv about this moment, it’d be able to see…
P2=A2 Sin 2ø
Nullity, lethe, preoccupy. And fear comes over me. Heavy shadows slipping from corners, quickly sliding, cover my face. A thick blanket falls and suffocates. Shadows of death, everywhere, leave…