Editor’s Note: This is the twenty-first in a series of interviews and story excerpts spotlighting some of the most innovative fiction writers at the recently-launched new media publishing platform Liberty Island. The first nineteen can be read in this collection here and the twentieth here. Find out more about Liberty Island’s new writing contest here, running through the end of April. An index of 8 newly-released stories can be found here. Please check out this interview Sarah Hoyt conducted with CEO Adam Bellow here to learn more: “It also has a unique mission: to serve as the platform and gathering-place for the new right-of-center counterculture.”
I started off as a mild-mannered Mad Scientist (physics) but now I torture software for a living. Writing at first was merely a way to cope with my favorite authors not writing fast enough–but it grew. I like to tell tales of adventure, with interesting people I’d like to spend time with, doing interesting things they care about. Oh, and someone wins in the end. There may be a price for that victory, but there WILL be one. No grey goo or emo navel-gazing in my books! I’ve just completed my 8th book, which should be out Real Soon Now.
1. Who are some of your favorite writers, books, movies, and intellectual influences?
H. Beam Piper is my favorite–not just for his great writing, but his ability to keep it remarkably free of dated thinking. He died in the 1960’s but you can’t tell from his books. Also Terry Pratchett, Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse, and Mark Twain. As for favorite books, I will just say I have a library in my house and leave it at that. I love ALL books! I suppose that makes me a hedonist… Favorite movies–Secondhand Lions, Galaxy Quest, Ladyhawke, Buckaroo Banzai, and Princess Bride (of course!)
2. How do you describe yourself ideologically?
Someone who fits in the usual conventional boxes about as well as a cat being stuffed in a carrier for a vet visit. Whichever one you pick, there’s always something sticking out. Sorry! I’m very opinionated and don’t like buying boxed sets of ideas. I guess I’m in the No Spending Money You Don’t Have, Intentions Count Less Than Consequences, And By The Way Leave Me Alone camp. (And I’m pro-dark-chocolate but even though I think milk chocolate is a waste of time I don’t want it banned.)
3. Which thinkers/commentators have influenced you?
That’s hard for me to say, since I’m still swimming in that sea of influence. Maybe my readers will tell me!
4. Where are you from/currently reside?
The great and soggy Pacific Northwest, home of the Giant Banana Slug and no I did not make that up.
5. What are your writing goals?
I always wanted to make the reader live in the worlds I create so deeply they forget they are reading a story. Judging from the reviews saying things like “I stayed up all night reading this and I had to go to work the next morning, damn you,” I am making progress. (Evil chuckle) If I write all the books currently in my head I will be very happy, but the need for sleep interferes with this.
6. Where can people find/follow you online?
My writing website is chaseadventures.com, where I try and keep my readers informed about forthcoming books, appearances, and Really Cool Science.
7. What’s your craziest hobby/pastime/interest?
Webcomics! There are some very talented artists and writers out there. Current favorites are Girl Genius, No Need For Bushido, and Banished. I really wish Ursula Vernon of Digger would do more too.
An excerpt from Sabrina Chase’s “Inscription“
I wish there were another way to do this. You didn’t have any warning and now I’ve changed your life, just by writing the words you are reading. Your situation won’t get much worse if you read the rest, though, so if you can do so without getting caught, I’ll try to explain. It might help you survive.
My name is Dexon, and I worked in this Complex for ten years. My Social Index was never high enough for any of the sealed urbs, and I’m guessing you have the same problem or you wouldn’t be here. And obviously they never fixed the leak or you wouldn’t have found this message. Try unclogging the drain first.
It started like this.
I was crouched in a dusty corridor, hastily eating some stale protein chips I’d stolen and trying to figure out a solution to an increasingly desperate problem that could get me killed, when I noticed the smell of mold, old and sour. I felt a stab of fear–if the safety committee found mold our team would get a toxic health hazard fine, and I was dangerously close to permanent reassignment as it was. Of course the monitors claim they want us to have a healthy work environment, even if they won’t give us the equipment we need to actually do work.
So I did everything a good Mindful Citizen should do–signed out a set of safety gear on my task pad and went to fix the problem before they noticed anything. I put down “repair work” as the reason. That was vague enough to cover anything I needed to do and I knew the safety committee monitored equipment usage. I was supposed to be doing cleaning and maintenance anyway so it was approved immediately.
The smell was strongest in a section of the Complex that had been built before the Fourth War, possibly before the Third. They used a strange, compressed chalky substance sandwiched between thin sheets of fiber for interior walls back then. I pulled away furniture and storage cabinets until I saw it–a mottled black stain spotting the surface near the concrete floor. The chalky part of the wall had turned to a slimy, sticky mess, but I eventually got enough pulled free to see something was blocking a drain. It looked like a pile of large leaves, and I was surprised when they came out all together, as if they were attached.
The leaves were rectangular, and had writing on them, most of it still legible. Not interactive like a task pad, just marks on the surface, and I wondered how it had been done. Reading further I figured out this thing was called a magazine. One article was titled, How to make a pencil–what we don’t know about technology. If you are unfamiliar with the term, a pencil is a device that makes marks, for writing, but doesn’t use electronics. So it can’t be traced. Ever. And it can be erased, too.
You can see why I thought this might be useful.
Enough of the article was legible to let me know I needed wood, graphite, and clay. I think it was the mention of wood that really started me thinking. It wouldn’t be enough to just have something to write with; it would need to be easily concealable too, and I had an idea. I picked greenspace cleanup for my mandatory volunteer hours that week. The greenspace here is large enough that no matter where the job router defined my section, there would be some kind of shrub in reach. Then I saved a handful of dead branches of the right thickness and brought them back in with me. Not something you could hide, and I didn’t try. I put them in an old metal container I’d found elsewhere in the Complex, made a few “leaves” from broken circuitboard and put it in the Mindfulness niche of my personal space. The Social Index evaluator gave me so many biopoints my index actually went up.
Graphite I tracked down in the lubricants cabinet, strangely enough. It’s used where volatile hydrocarbons would contaminate a processor, or to gain biopoints for the Complex. Clay was much more difficult. Eventually I went back to where I had found the mold and used the chalky white powder from the old interior wall. Then it was just a matter of drilling a long, thin hole down the center of a piece of branch and carefully packing it with a paste made from the graphite and powder, mixed with a little water. Since my “pencil” still looked like a piece of branch, I could hide it with the other branches in the niche and no monitor would even think to examine it. They had approved of it earlier, after all.
Of course I needed something to write on, too. Something easily hidden, or that could be mistaken for something else. It would be dangerous to leave a message where the monitors might find it. One of the processors on the lower level makes big sheets of plastic film–they use it in the urbs, I have no idea what for–and the trimmer leaves odd bits and pieces behind. Dipped in microchip rinse solution, the film becomes frosted and rough enough for the pencil to work, and with a little effort it looks just like a piece of beancake wrapper. Another thing the monitors wouldn’t notice.
Have you noticed yet how freeing this message is? I’m communicating with you, directly, without any evaluator program involved. No monitoring. No one else knows. It’s just like the bird…no, I’ll explain the bird later. I can say whatever I want here, and just to you. They had a word, long ago, to describe this. I read it in another part of that magazine I found. Private.
This message is a permanent record of my thoughts, but independent of me. I could even be dead by now, but my words still live in your mind as you read them. I didn’t go to all this effort for you, of course. I don’t know who you are. Certainly I wouldn’t risk erasing my entire Social Index and reassignment to a permanent punishment post for a stranger.
I did it for Jessen.
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