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My story Red Queen's Race has recently appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Cirsova Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense. Want to know how I wrote it? Start here...
Web link to the Winter 2023 issue of Cirsova Magazine on Amazon.com
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For a short while, there was a science fiction magazine called Spectrum SF. It was published in Scotland by a guy named Paul Fraser, and I used to really enjoy it. If memory serves, he published the first version of Charles Stross' novel The Atrocity Archives over several issues.
I particularly enjoyed one short story, Lunar Classifieds by Mary Soon Lee. I can't remember the details because I've packed the complete run of Spectrum away in a box in the loft, but it was an experimental story told through, as you've guessed it, a series of lunar classifieds. There were various adverts set over a span of time, and several different stories were implied through the adverts.
I felt inspired by this, and came up with my own idea for futuristic classifieds, but with even more of a 'cyber' feel to them. I took loads of different science fictional ideas and tried to push them to the extreme, coming up with ever more bizarre extrapolations. I remember sitting in a local cafe for hours with a notebook and pen, my brain on fire, scribbling down advert after advert in a massive stream of consciousness. One of the themes that I wanted to work on, and which came through really well, was that the human brain would be programmable and would be commodified and 'corporatised', just like everything else in the real world of the day. You think those hoardings with moving adverts on them at football pitches are bad? Imagine what those adverts will be like when we have brain-to-computer interfaces. Do you think they'd allow you any peace inside your own skull with tech like that?
The earliest version that I can find is dated August 2004, but that was very rough, just lots of random adverts. It took shape as a real 'story' by the end of September. I've just been reading this version again, and my draft was full of great adverts, like the one headlined "Change Your Biometric Identity Now, While It's Still Legal".
"Never be worried about forensic surveillance again. Â Genetic re-sequencing, fingerprints altered, cloned-blood ampoules at discount cost. Â Brain-waves re-programmed while-U-wait. Â Query us for full body suit, hair etc. Â Skin samples guaranteed to come off under any fingernails!
Only at Crrrrazy Dave's Biometric Warehouse! Â vrtp://crazy-dave/ "
Faking one's biometric identity, I can see it happening. "Skin samples guaranteed to come off under any fingernails!" I can't believe I came up with that one. Man, that level of free marketism and legal duplicity is something that would only exist in a libertarian's idea of heaven - but that's where I saw (and see) the world heading.
The story ended with every person's body being forcibly purchased by one of the companies that offered 'operating systems' for the human brain. But never mind, everyone was offered the chance at transcending into higher dimensions and becoming godlike entities - all available through Crazy Dave's Interdimensional Warehouse, of course! Some things never change: no matter how high you ascend the spiritual ladder, there will always be someone trying to make money off you.
There are some prophetic assumptions in there on topics that are now de rigeur, such as gender identity.
"If you have spare memory and processing power, then we at the NuSeti Project want to know! Let us run our massively parallel NuEarthSearch in your brain while you sleep. No pain, no side-effects, just a great feeling of satisfaction in helping us find another world for Earth's teeming billions. Dream of other worlds – literally! Headlink to bwtp://nuseti.org/.
(NuSeti accepts no liability for the download of alien viruses or parasitic thought-beings. Pregnant men and women should interface to NuSeti with care as use can lead to malevolent telepathic offspring and mutant super-intellects.)"
Today, in the UK, the National Health Service is removing references to pregnant women and replacing them with 'pregnant people', as if the other 50% of the population can give birth.
A few years latr, I attendied an art course, and my project meshed with this perfectly. I did some paintings based directly on quotes from the story, and used them in my end of course show.
I had something that outdid Lunar Classifieds in its strangeness, but I quickly realised that it was completely unpublishable. There was a plot, but it was implied rather than being laid out; worst of all, it wasn't tied to an individual, it was about the progression of society as a whole. That's interesting, but without identifiable characters, any story is a hard sell.
At about the same time that I had been generating all of those original crazy adverts, (January 2003, in fact) I'd written the start of another story called Breathing Space, about a man who lived in an ultra-consumerist society. I never got beyond the first two scenes, but at some point I realised that the wacky adverts could form a part of this. I was looking for something to break up the story at crucial moments, a bit like the end of those old movie serials from the 1930s and 1940s, where there would be a cliffhanger as Flash Gordon was fed into a disintegration machine or something. It's a cheap but effective way to add tension - cut away at the vital moment, keep the reader in suspense, before coming back to the real action. I also wanted a quick way to communicate the feel of the future society effortlessly. What better way than to understand a society than to see its adverts? They aren't so much info-dumps as info-pills. The original Robocop movie used them perfectly. And who cares if I took elements of two stories and fused them? It worked for The Beatles with A Day in the Life, didn't it, two songs jammed together to create something different? That's the advantage of sexual reproduction for you - two sets of DNA.
So, I smushed a load of the adverts into Breathing Space (the original opening scenes are still identifiable) and hey, presto, the result was Red Queen's Race.
I don't want to say too much more about it, because I don't want to spoil the story for you, but Red Queen's Race takes the core idea of the corporate takeover of the human being, and turns it up to 11 and beyond. In fact, the reviewer at Tangent Online loved RQR, and made a great observation: "it’s like jumping into the deep end and going even deeper." Going even deeper - that's what I try to do with my stories, but in an entertaining way.
Tangent Online review of Red Queen's Race.
Web link to the Winter 2023 issue of Cirsova Magazine on Amazon.com
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PAUL LUCAS, WRITER AND THINKER
paul.lucas0001@gmail.com