"The Weapons Shop" in 'Featured Stories', SpecFicWorld.com

http://specficworld.com/fiction/DVSHORT.aspx?Id=41

In my own reading, Spider Robinson was the first SF writer to point out the particle-beam weapons system that Nikola Tesla tried to sell to both FDR and British Prime Minister Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. One huge Spider fan I know is CBS radio's own Big Jim.

Jim advanced the idea you are about to see. I find it truly horrifying in a way... but in a way, I kind of wish it would happen.

I wrote a lot of cynical things during the Bush Administration. I was sure it was Game Over. Game On passes strange, many times, but the winds have begun to blow hard out here. Hopefully, I too can get a job picking up the downed branches from the storm of the previous regime. Or at least mucking biofuel someplace.

In any case, "The Weapons Shop" was inspired by a great painting by Kenn Brown (http://www.mondolithicstudios.com .) Kenn told me he titled the painting, in turn, from A.E. van Vogt's SF chestnut 'The Weapons Shops of Ishtar."

Completely off-topic, but I finally get to nod three hands away at that old Dutch master, whose story "The Enchanted Village" was the best damn piece of SF I was ever exposed to in elementary school, period, with the exception of "Night of the Cooters"...

Anyway, enjoy. More on the way. ---ed/

Poetry Break: "On Shaving My Head", 01/06/09

The bathroom is all over blood.

I had to cut it off. I had
to change. Couldn't
take it any
more and
she can't
take me
any

more.

The bathroom is all over blood.

I learned this trick

From a Lakotah medicine-woman I
once knew. She told me the shamans
among her people (most of 'em, in
short) see what I just did as a sign

of mourning, change, flushing the brain
of uneven cat-steps, dermatitis,
cowlicks that won't stay down,
gray hairs (too many)

equalized,


Razing out the weed-grown mistakes
of the brain that is the soul's worst
enemy, at times like this,

egobabbling cold black fear,
dislocation which she told
me is "the last true trapping
of personal slavery,"
just before

her own medicine
made the owie all
better, just
for that
night.

Sometimes, all you need
is just

that night.

Big Pimpin (#3 Antonelli collaboration sold, second to Planetary Stories, #44 short story sold)

http://www.planetarystories.com/acroscaphe.htm

I've blogged about my collaborator, Lou Antonelli, on here before quite often. Absolute craftsman of a storyteller, and this one is no exception.

Every time we get together on a story, it's a different kind of collaboration. I brought a little bit of Ludlum and guys like that to the table, but Lou took it a step further and suggested that it be a Fifties 'big bug' scenario done our way. Both of us spent a great deal of time and used many pairs of pliers and forceps yanking parts of this story from dark fathoms in our heads, way down deep where the pressure would kill most... but not all... life forms.

Read it, dammit, it's free. Shelby Vick runs Planetary Stories pretty much on his own shoestring, and it is a wonderful showcase of all forms of Pulp style, in everything from SF to Westerns to Boys' Adventure. People need to keep those lights on, and tend the desk by the sputtering VACANCY sign.

As we march onward into the new century, Robert Silverberg is proven right time and again, the part where he said that the futures postulated by Golden Age SF are still not necessarily outmoded or irrelevant at all. Planetary Stories keeps that lighthouse very brightly.

Just finished a major ghostwriting project. My karma had to have its episiotomy sewn up, but is doing very well in Recovery, thanks, and the baby was well received by its adoptive parents.

Lou, if you read this blog, Music For Four Hands is now almost big enough to sell...