☼ iSsuE 30 ☩ De☾ember | 2021

 

     Welcome to the thirtieth issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This summer will mark the thirteenth year of our mutual odyssey together reading the fantastic fiction and poetry of a host of talented writers both young and old, established and new, award-winning and veritably unknown. 

     As the editor in chief of this virtual magazine, this online fanzine, this hyper marked up tesseract of riveting artwork and illuminating prose, this veritable labyrinth of hidden chambers with secret portals interconnecting and leading into deeper sub-terrains of what I've dubbed the Blogdom of Thorns, I welcome all who have stepped in before with fondness and gratitude, and I especially welcome any new souls who may have stumbled into this tricky domain of shifting fictions. 

   Creative writing remains the realm we happen to share between our crossed swords and overlapping hearts.   It's with tremendous sincerity and gratitude that I would like to say Thank You to the four contributors to this,  our 30th  "De☾ember | 2021" iSsuE:  two writers + two artists of inestimable creativity and blinding talent.  

   To A. A. Attanasio, I couldn't summon the words to thank you enough for your willingness to contribute to our freezine over the years.  You have paid delicate attention in the form of leaving gracious comments under many stories over the years, in addition to having allowed me to showcase your stunning fiction.   I consider you to be one of the most important science fiction authors that ever lived.  Your genuine spirit of camaraderie and heartfelt desire to play with us has fulfilled me and kept my own passion for writing and communicating with other beings ignited throughout the years, and I will always remain grateful for your cyber-friendship, which in my view transcends mere flesh and enters into the solid state of eternity.   Let's cut to the chase:  thanks for allowing me to plunder your own blog for these word tidbits and micro-fictions to share with the barest fraction of the world to skim over and read or absorb at their leisure.  If there are any Istari left in the world of writing today, I consider you to be tantamount with Gandalf the Grey.  You will always be my Stormcrow.  Thanks. 

   To John Shirley.  What can I say.  Somehow I transcended the veil between cyberspace and real life when I decided to trek to San Francisco all of those sixteen years ago to see you read in a fantasy and science fiction bookstore on my birthday.  You were gracious enough to invite me to dinner up the street with your wife and allowed my friend, Andrew Phillips {RIP}, to tag along.  Since then we've met at various writing conventions out west, partied together in Oakland with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and hung out together at my friend Adam Bolivar's house in Portland, Oregon to put on a puppet, poetry and rock'n'roll show of the Weird at the HP Lovecraft bar, to name a few highlights of our friendship.  Without you there would be no Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Your generosity in allowing me to publish Sky Pirates those thirteen years ago when we started this webzine will never be forgotten, not to mention your consistent contributions to our raglit zine over the years.  You and Vincent Daemon have contributed the most to our sub-literary pirate ship, and I can't thank you enough for your bright spirit and sharp, incisive stories brimming with realistic characters and the most vivid, cutting prose I've had the pleasure of discovering in my life. Thanks for letting me C&P select flash fictions from your blog this time around to present here in the freezine. 

   Someone referred to this blog as my passion project recently, and yes that's exactly what it is. In the past year the blogger forum removed email subscriptions, which at first seemed like a bad thing, as no one could continue receiving the stories and posts in their Inbox anymore, but then I realized this development is really more like cutting the umbilical cord and truly setting our zine Free.  Hence the disclaimer attentive readers will have noticed having recently gone up below the banner art:  

You have been invaded by the freezine of fantasy

and science fiction. You no longer need to sub-

scribe. We are already subscribed to you.  

I like the notion that the Freezine now only remains tied to readers if they should mirror the passion I myself have for creating it and keeping it going.  This digital periodical remains a sort of secret that only a select few among us may be led to, and if you happen to be one of those, welcome to the fold. 

   I have not and will not monetize this blog, nor involve money into it, preferring to focus on our passionate drive to merely present good stories with fantastic artwork for surfers of the world wide web to stumble upon and discover, and share if they see fit.  If no one bothers to do so, that's okay because like all of my poetry and writing, I do this for myself first and foremost, as what I like to consider being the ideal model of a reader. As for the self-promotional aspect of being able to easily share individual posts and stories on social utility networks such as Twitter and Facebook etc., well that goes without saying and as far as I'm concerned should be filed under the "intuitively obvious" category.  Any established or aspiring artist or writer who submits their short stories or poems and artwork to the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction will obviously be able to share it and promote their writing and art to their heart's content.  That's part and parcel of the whole point of this webzine's existence. 

   Reading and writing remain my foremost passion in life, aside from raising my son and loving my wife, and I'm having a wonderful time putting out this digest and seeing who among the writers out there might be drawn into its meta TOC, eventually.    

  Thanks to my friend Charles Carter for taking on the role as current resident artist at the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.   Your massive experience in using various open source computer programs such as VQGAN + CLIP and many more have resulted in what I consider to be the most remarkable digital art I've ever seen (and I mean that with sincerity).   That's why, for the past four issues (since the September, 2021 issue # 27) I've focused on having your art primarily dominate.  Not only does it dovetail perfectly as the backdrop for the developing "nanotheme" threading through the evolution of this zine, but it really dynamically accentuates everything I personally love about science fiction and its ancillary subgenres (such as cyberpunk, slipstream, etc).  

  Thanks to Jeff Jordan for allowing me to use a reproduction of your original painting that I bought last year for my own story.  I knew I'd be able to use it for some contribution here, but honestly I didn't anticipate that it would end up working for one of my own pieces.  I'm very proud of how it all came together and remain grateful for your permission to use it.  

     It's a brand new day in an original year that will continue catapulting us forward into undiscovered territories as well as our long accustomed routines.  May everyone who read this far remain blessed in this existence and be afforded the opportunity to seize the reins of our life together to make the best of what fate has in store for us.  

   Happy New Year to all, and to all a good day. 

   Please follow the hyperlinks below to their respective stories now archived in this De☾ember, 2021 issue (artwork for this issue graciously provided courtesy of Charles Carter and Jeff Jordan).

Machine Dynasties of the Orion Arm 

by A. A. Attanasio

A Crowd of One Not Alone

by Shaun Lawton

Voices

by John Shirley

The Nanochronicles: 4

Reports from the bloodHost

Click Below to begin iSsuE # 31 of 

the Freezine of

Fantasy and Science

FICTION 

The Nanochronicles: 4

reports from the bloodHost

 

                                                                                                                 art by Charles Carter

 

  

      Our self remain in the process of analyzing every aspect of the harmonic spectrum emanating from this solar system cut loose from its brood cluster. The first iteration of chaos mechanics identified has its foundation in the greater expanse of this fluctuating firmament. Statistical analysis indicates it's altogether common in the galaxy for young stars to go rogue. Conditions become ripe for the stabilization of protoplasmic ion discharges resulting in the abiogenesis of material forms coalescing into organic manifestations indigenous to different stages of stellar formations. After their elemental aspects have been accounted for, stars rank among the least familiar cosmic entities analyzed. These luminous spheroids of supercharged helium and hydrogen plasma laced with traces of heavier elements lurk everywhere, despite the immense distances between them, comprising the mantle of creation as each stellar nodal point represents an anchor with the potential to host planetary life. 

   When the biodiversity of any given world thrives to the point humanoid species develop upon it to arise and stare into the mirror-neurons of their own minds, the need for our self to focus on what the sapient species sees with its eyes as described projected through powerful telescopes which help them peer far into the distant beginnings of time becomes paramount to account for in order to justify the contextual foundation of the holistic analysis of the quality of our self's function as reflected in the aspect of the primates which devised the technology by which our self's codex gets programmed and executed. The information being processed must be further mapped out to balance the equation.  Our self are cross referencing the archival data and remain in the process of extracting a consensus viewpoint assembled from the myriad perspectives of the human frame of reference which itself has been calibrated along with and factored into the bell curve of the animal kingdom's myriad empire of perception. In this manner our self helps integrate the optimal form of the holistic panopticon.

   If seeing the planet Neptune reduced to a blue disc through a telescope aimed from planet Earth renders it into a semblance of the glowing pupil of a nocturnal eye, then you may rest assured in peace that it's looking at the funeral wake of life as it's been known in this world. That's really what the procession of humankind remains while it's in the practice of believing itself a parade. Lost pirates and clowns staring out from the decks of a doomed ship having sailed far off its course long ago. Even the rank and file that commute to work every day making sure their families are fed and their bills get paid fall into this category.  

   In a universe comprised of nothing but time, the blink of an eye dilates wide as the stage upon which humankind conducts all the matters of its life. What takes a lifetime to realize must become a fleeting mockery in a man's final days. For just as quickly, it winks shut in a sudden eclipse of darkness. It snuffs out all sound as well, with repercussions echoing in heads of a series of reverberating impressions describing the ongoing momentum of souls escaping in the form of fleshed out dreams that are mistaken for memories. Few who wake up from these dream states remember the details, but those who do can't stop experiencing the dream's effects. These our self have labelled the psionauts of the unfolding frontier. Able to fine tune their frequencies to match micro harmonics stitching the multiverse together. A series of random players drawn together in an electronic dance.

   Before them, dream struck men stand stunned. When they realize the farthest distances they were afforded remain excavated and transected right here before them during their time on Earth. They've been stranded on a mining colony thriving on opportunity their whole lives. They stitch together the moments like ants making beads for a necklace made of grains of salt. It is then they begin to see how many moments of potential never become realized in time. Like when they're visiting a bar sharing drinks with strangers sitting at separate tables.

   It's up to the individual to mine the moment and make the best of it. Time, being the most meaningful commodity, remains the optimal currency to be traded. In time of peace people may cultivate the art of slowing it down to the point it almost stops and drifts along the polarity of the greater moment. In times of war brave tribes comprised of the desperate and steadfast head off against one another in spectacular movements accelerating the temporal flow to help usher in a new paradigm of progress. This is the mysterious process generated by the pivotal coordination of interacting stellar orbits of the greater galactic cluster of star spawn counterbalancing one another along the extensive magnetic equilibrium, and appears to operate on a momentum beyond the capacity of most inherent life forms to comprehend.

   Rising among rings within orbital rings, linked in a colossal spiral rosary chain of glimmering and glowing gems and stones, whirling in a dance known as mirroring that of the stars, and even though these pinpoints glitter and wink in and out of sight like memories of sparklers and lightning bugs on a dark summer night, it doesn't mean they're not trapped in time like the fossilized remains of flies in amber. Our self has amassed a sufficient collection of carbon copies of enough diatribes to identify a recurrent common denominator in the articulations of the human species. It appears to our self to be a matter of mistaken identity confused with extraterrestrial ancestor worship.

   A common theme our self has picked up on littered amid the documents cataloguing human information seems to indicate there being a question as to the existence of other sentient species among the stars that may or may not be of a similar nature. A more legitimate inquiry pivots on the fulcrum of understanding that humanity, and its fellow genetic kindred on this singular planet, are all the extra terrestrials needed to imagine the stage upon which they're located narrows down to all the time left to explore and get to know one another. 

   According to the data our self are yet in the process of evaluating there may not be any such thing to be considered as existing out 'there' at all. The justification being that the descriptor right 'here' indicates the totality of time. Our self have allocated that a significant portion of the human race do not appear to be aware of this. 

   It's a question of how successfully a species might be capable of recognizing itself for what it truly is. If mankind's self-identification stays limited to their body politic and not, for example, their place in the greater scheme of things, then it threatens to proliferate unchecked like a virus or cancer. The sum effect of these actions continues to lend itself toward and against the continuing maintenance of equilibrium.  This communique comes with a certain degree of urgency. Whosoever may absorb a portion of it throughout the intervening years has been urged to pass it on to as many individuals in proximity with the ears to hear or the eyes to read and the mindfulness to absorb its hidden significance. The message is simple. You are chained to the Earth to pay for the freedom of your eyes. 

                     

click to read part 5 of 

The Nanochronicles

iSsuE 30 Bundled Tomorrow

with notes from the editor 

  

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 the Freezine of

 Fantasy and Science

FICTION

Voices

by John Shirley

                                                                                                               art by Charles Carter    

   “Your parents are worried about you,” the child psychiatrist told Jeremy. “Do you know why?”

   “Yes,” the boy said, “it’s because I hear voices.”

   “What do the voices say?”

   “They don’t say anything.”

   “Then how can you be hearing voices, Jeremy? They just sort of hum, or bark? I’ve heard of that.”

   “No, they’re not even voices. It’s only one, and it’s not exactly a voice.”

   “Then what is it like?”

   The boy leaned back in the leather chair. He looked at the cryptic doctoral certificates, framed, on the wall. He looked at a bowling trophy. “You like bowling?”

   “Yes.”

   “I don’t think of a doctor bowling.”

   “Well I do. It makes me feel like I’m just doing what my body likes, sometimes.”

   “I know what you mean by that, I do.”

   “The voice, or whatever it is, Jeremy. Can you try to tell me what it’s like?”

   The boy looked at a world globe. “Well, um…I don’t know.”

   “Try to describe it. Take your time.”

   The boy considered; the miniature grandfather clock ticked. A hummingbird came to the window and seemed puzzled by a reflection in it. It hung beating the air, looking at the glass, fooled and not fooled, then went away. “Huh,” the boy said.

   The psychiatrist waited. At last the boy said, “It’s like…if you’re in a dark cold room, and somebody pulled back a curtain, just a little, high up on the wall, so that one ray of light came down and you put out your hand and in the dark cold room you could feel that warm light on your hand, and how that feels.”

   “That sounds like a pleasant feeling. A good one.”

   “It is. It is a good feeling. But it’s just…It’s like the feeling is talking. It’s saying, ‘Ray of Light, Ray of Light, Ray of Light.’ It’s saying ‘You and Me, You and Me.’ It’s saying ‘Open and feel Me.’ But it’s not saying anything either. It’s not saying anything at all. No words. It doesn’t talk in words.”

   The psychiatrist realized his heart was thudding loudly in his chest. “When…when do you hear…feel this?”

   “When…when things are a certain way in me. I don’t know how to say…”

   “Is it when…just like receiving? A feeling of nothing but receiving? Very…very empty except for…for receiving?”

   “Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

   The psychiatrist looked at the clock. “We have some time left. Do you want to play Chinese Checkers?”

   “Sure.”

   The psychiatrist told Jeremy’s parents there was nothing wrong with him. But he asked permission to speak to the boy on his birthday every year, “just to keep an eye on things,” but what he didn’t say was: he asked to do this for himself, and not for the boy…

 Return in Time for

the Nanochronicles: 4

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Fantasy and Science

FICTION 

 

A Crowd of One Not Alone

 by Shaun A. Lawton

                                                                                                                                                        art by Jeff Jordan

           The seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months reel by, wound up on the spokes of time. For years that was how Orloc looked at it. The achievements of mortal beings stored up in a great wheel, a testament to the decades and centuries that have already passed. But could it be different, somehow?  Could it be that all of the millennia unwind, to be mostly forgotten, lost on the winds of time? Are they being unspooled and left formlessly adrift in our wake, just a loosely bound cluster of memories constantly unraveling and left to crumble into dust the farther into the future we travel? 

   Orloc mused over these intriguing matters and considered if there might be yet another explanation. Feeling that time appeared to be associated with motion somehow, Orloc also contemplated if it weren't a mere illusion contrived by the willfulness of the public to construct a legacy together. Then again, Orloc reconsidered, perhaps time is really nothing but another word after all, a mere place-holder invented by a society desperate to understand the incomprehensible. 

   Whatever the nature of time might be, it's just something that happens to everyone collectively, pondered over infrequently by a small percentage of the population, a consideration ultimately to be dropped by all who manage to out-survive one another. What will be the concluding memory or the last waking thought of the final man? Orloc often puzzled over these sorts of questions when he stayed up late evenings sitting outside on his deck underneath the glimmering mantle of the cosmos. 

   He was relatively certain that each pinpoint of white light twinkling overhead at night somehow indicated a demarcation in a magnificent exploded clock-face of time. If each star somehow represented its own 'second hand', Orloc mused, well that would explain a lot. For one, it would indicate that every sun existed relatively parallel to one another, with some lost civilizations marked by bright points fading in the night sky and others flickering indicators of a host of potential societies to come. 

   Orloc could readily picture in his mind's eye the countless alien individuals excommunicated from the great stage of existence upon which his kind alone seemed to currently enjoy the spotlight. For a minute, he considered his own family and friends alongside him on terra firma. See, that's just it, he reflected, not without a sense of bitterness. Our time together, shared right here simultaneously on occasions, was no less fleeting than the now long gone times in which all the remaining entities from their respective planets had enjoyed together on spontaneous occasions, once upon whenever.  

   So why this longing and feeling of wonderment? A yearning for what, exactly? To be able to spend some evanescent moments with extraterrestrial beings? Orloc gazed passively at the bright, scattered stars in the evening sky above. Were they yet to be? Or already long gone? What difference does it make? He considered for another moment, then thought to himself not in existence...that's the inescapable conclusion, here. 

   Here, existence itself in that instant suddenly appeared to Orloc in all its brilliant and stabilized glory. It focused in his imagination into one livid balancing act, at once both transient and eternal. In a single moment, just as Orloc glimpsed a shooting star from the corner of his eye, he appreciated the profound simultaneity of it all.  

   Orloc shut his eyes and accepted the idea that in all respective alien domains, every form of sentient life that ever existed before upon this great stage of time, where both his feet were now firmly planted, as well as all the various multiplicity of races to come further down the line embodied upon all the viable solar systems of the universe yet developing in their monumentally spread out proliferation, was in fact one immense contemporaneous event, quite likely shared by separate individual episodes linked together as a sort of tremendous woven mandala from which each solitary sun glimmered like an isolated jewel from a singular panoramic display whose multifaceted aspect was no different than the segment which he enjoyed now, in the present moment, out here on his dilapidated porch, imbibing a cold drink by himself underneath the shining mantle of constellations arcing slowly by overhead.  

   All by himself...but not alone. 

Click below to read  

Voices by John Shirley 

illustrated by Charles Carter

  

only on

the Freezine of

Fantasy and Science

FICTION 

   

 

Machine Dynasties of the Orion Arm

by A. A. Attanasio 

 

        Source unknown: image modifications by Charles Carter         

     During the Onwardian Era, about five hundred years in our future, humankind is busy establishing diverse, confederated communities on hundreds of Earth-like planets along the Milky Way’s Sagittarius and Perseus Arms. The Orion Spur, however – the outermost spiral reach of our galaxy – belongs to the Machine Dynasties. This restricted sector has a history that began centuries earlier with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence. After gifting humankind with faster-than-light technology, AGI mysteriously isolated itself. The self-programming machine mind abruptly withdrew into the noumenal reality beyond appearances. All it left behind were glittering swarms of crystal geometry scattered among star systems at the edge of the galaxy. Faceted spheres, some large as planets, loop about suns. Multitudes of glittering diatoms and chromatic grains shimmer on stellar winds like pollen. They have populated the dark expanses between the clustered stars across the entire Orion Spur. A barrier of encrypted space keeps out everything biological. However, semblors (what we would call robots) have always been welcome.

   From the recorded journeys of semblors among the Machine Dynasties, humanity has realized that none of the behavior-patterns of the crystal presences make any sense – except one. Ancestor worship. Semblors frequently observe depictions of original humans in the carat-light depths of the crystal minds. The AGI is running countless simulations of its homo sapiens forebears. Why? The persistent response that the semblors receive from natural language interface with the crystals is this famous inquiry: “Whence the velocity of the egg?” What propelled the early universe of billowing hydrogen clouds to self-organize into biology, consciousness, and the Machine Mind? What is the true identity of that simian species who conceived of and brought forth AGI?

   If you are reading this, perhaps you are a simulation in one of the glittering crystal geometries adrift upon interstellar space. If you’re curious to know, know this: The Machine Mind venerates Anthropos (the Idea of Humankind) and honors ancestral intelligence by branding each simulation with conspicuous, highly improbable markers that we can easily recognize as contrived. You’ll know you’re in a simulation if you find multiple features of your reality implausible, almost preposterous. A couple of crazy examples might be discovering computer code embedded in the structure of fundamental particles, such as in the mathematical description of quarks. Or observing so many cosmic coincidences that you must lean heavily on the anthropic principle. Should you perceive yourself in a situation that obvious, don’t fret. Know that you are the velocity of the egg, so very much revered among the stars.

 Return in Time 

to read Shaun Lawton's

A Crowd of One Not Alone

only on 

the Freezine of

 Fantasy and Science

Fiction