I’ve not been writing fiction for the blog in recent months due to family and professional commitments. Not that I haven’t wanted to; this has been frustrating for me. So I’m happy to point you all to a very short story I wrote about alien life on another planet. It’s called “The Saturnian Rings of Life,” and you may find it here.
It’s brought to you by the blog Sci-Fi and Scary: Sci-Fi and Horror Reviews, News, and More. I’ve been watching this site grow into its name, with its emphasis on covering independent and small press authors and books, commenting on movies, and posting occasional simple silliness. So after you’ve read my story on their blog, mosey around a bit on it to see what else they have to offer, see if there is anything you like.
If you’re coming from that direction, because you want to check out my fiction, you might want to check out some of my shorter horror fiction, “The Day After Halloween” for humor, “Dead Cellphone” for horror with a bit more angst. If you’re feeling ambitious, there are several novel-length stories listed under the blog’s header. Summer of the Netherfield Witch is quite different from either of the short stories, and not a bad place to start.
Not those rings, though!
Photo courtesy of NASA, and isn’t it gorgeous!
Sillyverse 
I did leave a comment on that site but it seems not to have taken (probably because I’m not a logged-in member). And so I here repeat it: Wow, Brian, whatever inspired you to that? Blowing bubbles, perhaps? Whatever it was, may it continue to fertilize your creative grey cells. That just totally boggled my mind. And so visual. Have you been partaking in anything ‘funny’ of late? I mean . . . Brilliant.
The prosaic answer is
a) I didn’t think it possible to do the story request justice in under the 1000 words specified;
b) I did not want to tackle Europa (the other body specified as a possible setting) having read Warren Ellis’s “Ocean” comic, which tackled that;
c) I wanted something like the floating beings on a gas giant that figure in Iain Banks’s “Look to Windward,” but not like them; and
d) remember Flatland? I decided to mix it with chemistry.
The “gut feel” answer is that I’m tired of not writing, and I got ornery about being challenged, even impersonally.
And I think I have expressed my reaction to the fullest. Though, while reading your comment I was reminded of a programme (1970s I think) by exo-biologist Carl Sagan (for a while I hero-worshipped him) in which he described one possible form of life that MIGHT be able to exist in Jupiter’s weird atmosphere. I remember that was kind of balloon-like (or am I confusing it with the alien in Dark Star?) Anyway, hope to see more mind-boggling stories from you, now the dam has been removed from your creative juices. 🙂
Met him once, for an hour or so, as part of a small group of maybe a dozen. Even got a moment to have a brief back and forth with him. Did NOT change the course of Science, though.
Oh, and now I am envious.
Please don’t tell me you’ve met Steven Pinker as well.
No, no. But EJ was in your position a few years back when I met Joscelyn Godwin at a conference; she’s owned books on occult and magic by him before I’d ever heard of him. Since then, they’ve corresponded, so I’m off the hook there. Will have to arrange a seance for you with Sagan, and hope Ben Franklin doesn’t crowd in — he used to turn up at all those 19th century seances. 😉
Yea, I bet he did. My only ‘claim’ beyond comedians and the like, is a recent contretemps with Marc Morris, author of best-selling ‘Norman Conquest’ when I argued against the legitimacy of William to claim the English throne, and he argued for it. And I’d no idea who he was, but I wouldn’t back down. Moreover, it was rather public, being on Twitter where, devious devil, he doesn’t tweet under his own name. Grrr. My supporters all tweeted under Saxon names. Oh Yay!
I like that last bit in particular. 🙂
Saxons of the world unite! 🙂
You have something against Angles or Jutes?
Hey, I live in East Anglia, My ancestry is predominately Anglian with heavy input from Germanic regions (Frisia and Saxony, I’m guessing). I can hardly have something against Angles. But, despite investigations into the subject have recently suggested that Angles and Saxons were the same people, from the same area (southern regions of what today is Denmark, and into Northern Germany) historically, as far as can be ascertained, the ‘southern’ Saxons (south in Britain that is) probably migrated from what today is Normandy (where the Romans had settled them) in the closing yawns of the Roman occupation, and chiefs of said Saxons quickly wed into the native (Briton) royal lines and thus claimed a legitimate foothold. Or something similar to that. Thus the Saxons were more anciently in Britain, and had more anciently migrated from flood-worn Saxony, and were in fact more closely related to the Franks, than were the Angles. Which explains much of the odd patterns found in the archaeology of early medieval Britain. In other words, Saxons were Franks by another name, and Angles were probably what today we’d call Frisians. Wow. There you go. Great, all this ancestry stuff. Anyway, the Kemps were spinner/weavers from northwest Germany.
Hence your fascination with the Spinner in the Asaric lore.
Yea, you could be right there. There’s also the fact I like puns and ambiguity. The spinner spins yarns, and I spin tales. The Danes called cloth a ‘web’.
🙂 🙂
I read the story – I find it hard to imagine up alien races, but you came up with something unique! Enjoyed reading it 🙂
Thank you.
Now if I could only figure out how I did it!