Fiction

The Angry Astronaut Affair

It only takes a spark to start a raging inferno.

One sharply-worded post online, and now Reginald Waite has a flamewar on his hands. A welcome distraction from the frustrations of preparing for a technically demanding space mission -- or so he thought.

The conflict just kept spiraling, until it attracted the attention of higher-ups. Now Reggie's looking at serious trouble.

A short story of the Grissom timeline, originally published at Liberty Island Magazine.

This edition includes a bonus essay on the Space Race in the Grissom timeline.

Much of the story deals with a flamewar in the forum of a MMORPG based upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft

Red Star, Yellow Sign

Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.

It's 1934, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad's Communist Party chief, has rocked the Soviet Union. When an up and coming young Party official is assigned to investigate, it looks like an open and shut case.

The further Nikolai Yezhov looks into the case, the stranger things become. Mysterious entities lie beneath the swamps upon which Leningrad was founded. Because he has stumbled upon these secrets older than humanity itself, Yezhov must be eliminated. But first he must be led to commit acts that will ensure that history will forever remember him as a vicious criminal.

Originally published in Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time April 20, 2011.

Reprinted by Starship Cat Press, May 30, 2021.

The Secret of Pad 34

Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?

That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.

His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.

Published by Starship Cat Press, April 3, 2021.

Time Slips

What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?

To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?

Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.

What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?

Published by Starship Cat Press, March 1, 2021.

The Baying of the Hounds

In the world we know, Nikola Tesla's Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion?

In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe.

Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds.

Originally published in Steampunk Cthulhu, Published by Chaosium, June 25, 2015.

Reprinted by Starship Cat Press, January 3, 2021.

Phoenix in the Machine

Dreams come true in cyberspace -- but so do nightmares.

Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He's reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer.

Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni's local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness.

When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he's awaited for a century.

The initial scene takes place within a full-sensory-immersion virtual reality MMORPG based upon the works of HP Lovecraft

Published by Starship Cat Press, July 4, 2020.

The Damnable Asteroid

Danger comes from the sky.

Seryozha and his pod-brothers were miners on a distant asteroid. It was a lonely life, and a lot of hard work, but they could take pride in work accomplished.

And then their asteroid captured a mysterious object. One that drew their minds even as it left them profoundly uneasy.

When a passing suttler provided the opportunity to investigate its mysteries, all of them discovered that there are some secrets best left unplumbed.

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Originally published in Future Lovecraft, Published by Innsmouth Free Press, November 22, 2011.

Beach House on the Moon

The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.

But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?

She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.

Her life will never be the same.

Originally published in Eldritch Embraces,February 28, 2016.

Reprinted by Starship Cat Press, February 28, 2020.

The Shadow of a Dead God

What secrets lie beneath an alien world?

A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage -- until the dreams started.

Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.

Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants' rule. Nothing will ever be the same.

Originally published in Visions V: Milky Way by Lillicat Publishers, August 15, 2016.

Reprinted by Starship Cat Press, December 30, 2020.

Vengeance Is Mine

Chance spared Bina when the Sand Locusts destroyed the village of her birth. Determination kept her alive in the years that followed.

But survival has come at a price. Each day she lives among her captors, she must ignore the signs that their nameless god is not a force of law and justice.

Will she continue to turn a blind eye? Or will she put an end to the scourge that is the Unspeakable, once and for all?

Published by Starship Cat Press, November 18, 2017.

Starlight Running

Eight lives depend on Kyle's desperate trek across the Moon to get help. But someone -- or something -- intends for him to fail. Can he defeat it in time?

Published by Starship Cat Press, October 27, 2017.

She Dreams Day and Night

Nancy White they called her, a good, solid name for a troubled girl. But she knew her father had called her by another name, before he disappeared through the gate into another world of strange stars and stranger moons. No matter how hard the staff of Hildred House try to force her to forget, she remembers. And longs to reopen the gate, to rejoin her father on that alien shore where cloud-waves break.

Published by Starship Cat Press, November 1, 2016.

The Shadow over Leningrad

In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.

He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary.

So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.

Published by Starship Cat Press, August 30, 2016.

The Other Side of Midnight

Life has been a nightmare for Mitya ever since he was arrested on trumped-up charges and exiled to Siberia. But this labor camp in the far north of Magadan Oblast hides a secret far more terrible than the merely human evils of the Great Terror. For the universe we know is not the only one, and there are places where it interpenetrates with universes where the laws of nature as we know them do not operate, where humanity has no place. Worlds inhabited by beings ancient and terrible, to whom humanity are slaves, playthings, food.

Published by Starship Cat Press, July 29, 2016.

The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy's Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don't bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

Published by Starship Cat Press, February 11, 2023.

The Space Race Trilogy: Time Slips, The Secret of Pad 34, and Beach House on the Moon, Plus two exclusive new essays

All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.

Time Slips

What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?

To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?

Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.

What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?





The Secret of Pad 34

Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?

That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.

His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.





Beach House on the Moon

The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.

But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?

She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.

Her life will never be the same.





Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era





How would H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first?





Space: Gernsbeck vs. Lovecraft





A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsbeck and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.

Published by Starship Cat Press, January 27, 2022.