Our very own Gill Hollands, guest speaker at our June meeting, writer of children’s Sci-fi Alienship trilogy and winner of many of our competitions, kindly agreed to adjudicate our June competition with the competition brief of:
In 300 words, write a science fiction story, in the style of a memoir
And the winners are…
First Place: Lynn Clement with The Best Things in Life Are Free
Second Place: Francesco Sarti with Stop. They’ll Hear You
Third Place: Diana Batten with Epsom Dunes
Highly Commended: Graham Steed with Mayflower 2
Highly Commended: Ben Culleton with Berserk
First Place: The Best Things in Life Are Free – Lynn Clement
A solid memoir about a girl alone in a cold pod listening to her neighbour’s ultimate punishment for not paying his oxygen bill. An intriguing, dark tale set firmly in sci-fi. I love the description of the pod door unsealing. Even the last line works. Potential here for a very good book! Well done.
A Memoir of My Rise by MI Destiny
The Night the Carters Came
It was a time I had my recurring nightmare. Pools of red. My parents had been eliminated after their interrogation by the Polisnazers. Crimson blood on the capsule-kitchen floor and a broken bottle lay discarded.
Banging from next door’s pod had woken me. Thud, thud, thud, shook me awake. I remember wondering what old Soma was doing in there. He had plenty of time on his hands. He’d been laid off by the carbon mine.
I was cold, it made me cough. I tapped the gauge on my wall. The red finger pointed to full. I’d paid my bill.
The hammering in the next pod was steady, until there was a sucking sound and a whoosh, followed by voices. I strained to hear what was being said, something about Bill and Jen?
I drained what was the last ration of water for that day and held the glass up against the wall. A trick my mother had taught me when she was listening for traitors to the polisnazers – before they turned.
Soma was pleading, ‘please don’t,’ but there was no reply.
The lights in my pod flickered, the incessant hum lessened. That’s when I knew.
I watched from my flimsy porthole.
One of the men in Hazmat Suits was sick in his helmet. It was revolting.
‘You’re getting soft in your old age,’ I heard.
They threw Soma’s body onto their hover-cart. Then, re-sealed the door on his pod and painted a red X on it.
‘I always find that bit funny,’ said carter number one. ‘X, do you get it?’
‘It’s a cruel way to die.’
Be careful, I thought.
‘Yeah, well he should have paid his oxygen bill,’ said number one, his hooded eyes on his workmate.
‘Let’s get out of here and get drunk,’ he replied, climbing into the vehicle.
I watched them float away. I refused to cry.
I took a deep breath – and held it for as long as I could.
Second Place: Stop. They’ll Hear You by Francesco Sarti
An interesting comparison of reality in science versus media hype. It feels like a grandad telling a fireside tale. A well written memoir that flows perfectly and leaves you hanging, breathless at the end. I’m eager to know more! A great opening for a book. Well done.
I always despised the films and documentaries made about my time at NASA. They’re so inaccurate and sensational, when the reality was quiet, steady, and the sense of terror entirely dependent on my understanding.
I need to tell the story from my point of view, in the exact same words I’ve used to explain it to my daughter and my granddaughter, because films make us believe that it’s all fake, especially so many years after the discovery.
I was alone that night, monitoring the last operative minutes of the James Webb Telescope’s brand-new feature: the interstellar radio transmitter—my design, by the way.
In the movies, I’m usually played by a gorgeous actress; long, silky hair free to wander over smouldering eyes and full lips, tight lab coat over hourglass physique. I’ve got pictures of those days. I had an owl’s nest on my head, black and puffy eyelids, and my chips diet was starting to worry the department’s doctor.
In the movies, what happens next is even further from the truth. Loud sirens, red lights, people fleeing in terror, and a big, smoky explosion brightening the night sky.
What happened, what really happened that night, was as unmemorable as it was meaningful; but as many life-changing events, it almost went unnoticed.
At 03:02, during the routine screening, the telescope stopped transmitting. Not a sound, not a light, just an error message on my computer. All the sensors went blank, all at once. Although it was the only possible explanation, I couldn’t imagine the telescope had just been destroyed. And, afterwards, the infamous words everybody is familiar with now—though they weren’t words flashing on huge screens. They were just a pulsing radio signal coming from outer space.
“Stop,” the signal said. “They’ll hear you.”
Third Place: Epsom Dunes by Diana Batten
A great description of an alternative Derby, straight out of Star Wars and Dune. A lovely, informal style, slightly tongue in cheek. The second paragraph takes you into memoir. I want those contacts! I really felt I was right there with the family. Such a lot of imagery crammed into the small word count. This definitely has scope for a book and I would want the first copy. Well done.
Everyone remembers the first time that they went to the Derby at Epsom Dunes. Watching the sand flies surfing round Tatts with the jocks at full throttle on the turbines. All that kickback from the boosters, the swish of beating wings and the heat slamming into you from every angle. No minors allowed. You can see why. Too addictive for the under eighties.
Luckily the folks in my tribe were pretty relaxed about all that stuff. I had barely turned eighty when Pop waved his scanner at the way marker and asked what I thought about it. There was a purple ring around the first Whursday in June. No kidding. Derby Day. I didn’t need any invitation.
We went to Epsom in Pop’s old trucker but before we set off we had to put our Contacts in. That’s another thing that everyone remembers. Their first time with real Contacts. Of course I’d tried blank ones before, like every kid has, but that is nothing like the headspin of real lenses. When I opened my eyes it was like exploding out of the bottom of a deep lake and being catapulted into a brightly coloured swirling galaxy. The trucker was racing along the edgeway with all the other truckers loaded with folks swerving around us like crazy, all headed the same way. Epsom Dunes.
The race that year was insane. Sherstar and Kill Reef both in the field of fifteen hundred. I didn’t see who won. Too much crush, and noise, and truckers and the heavy scent of the gaz. At one point I got some scoot in my eye and I rubbed it, but it made my lens go all weird and it was like I was back at home sat in the trucker in the yard. Strange.
Highly Commended: Mayflower 2 by Graham Steed
An interesting, very personal memoir of a space mission. This intriguing sci-fi snippet opens the door to something much bigger. A space opera, perhaps? Well done.
‘You’re a lucky man, Jack,’ they told me before take-off. ‘You can forget the past. No more drinking yourself into cloud cuckoo land. You’re the best navigator we’ve got. If anyone can get us to Mars, it’s you. And Captain Hay will be in command.’
‘Not that man of straw?’
‘Come, Jack. That’s an old joke. Like you, he’s proved himself on the moon missions.’
* * *
So we set off. 150 days of history. Before I joined NASA, I was a navy pilot used to long deployments. That’s where I got a taste for the bottle. Two things I never do in space: never fret about time, nor about death. I’m not supposed to drink either. The Buddha said there are three states of existence, the past, the present and the future. The past is my memory, the present is the cognac I’ve hidden in War and Peace, the future is Mars – if we make it, unlike the first manned mission. Did their onboard magnetosphere fail so they perished in a hail of cosmic radiation? Nobody knows…
Then our laptops crashed. Hay wanted to do a ‘We’ve got a problem, Houston.’ He said too much radiation was affecting the laptops, and therefore us, so we must turn back. By then we were eighty million kilometres out. I reminded him the course to Mars was set after launch, that the magnetosphere alarm had not sounded and that without laptops we could access neither the main computers nor rocket motors. Hay knew all this, but he’d got the worm of doubt in his head, and it wouldn’t let go. I said that Houston would not authorise a turn round, but we could connect our personal laptops, despite their limited RAM. Hay wouldn’t listen, so we restrained him. With a helping swig of cognac, I took command, radioed Houston and ordered our historic mission to Mars continue…
* * *
Extract of Memoir recovered from Mayflower2 at Mars crash site
Highly Commended: Berserk by Ben Culleton
A strong memoir, tucked neatly into sci-fi. Not limited to a particular incident, so much as a succession of them, capturing well the horrors of war. ‘Oh the noise,’ works well. Considering his hatred of war, the last line is very sad. However, it leaves the door open to a much longer story or book. Well done.
I hated the wars I was a part of. No one should love war, but some people do. In my line of work, people assume that I’m one of those ‘war junkies’, like those old Vietnam vets that went on repeated tours of duty in the 20th Century, but I’m not. I was just there to do my job.
I really hated it. The grime, the sweat, the noise. Oh the noise. The deafening roar of munitions exploding, the incessant wail of the dying. The rubble of destroyed buildings, craters blotting the landscape, the smell of burning, acrid smoke stinging your eyes. There were goggles, and noise reducing helmets, but that stuff still gets to you, and you never forget the howling of the dying, and the lamentation of their families. You can’t wash away the memories like they’re dirt under fingernails, or blood on your hands.
Oh, I have plenty of blood on my hands. Not that I’m a murdering, rampaging killer, although I have seen plenty of those. The first time I saw one was at the Battle of Edington in the Ninth Century. The Heathen Army deployed a berserker against King Alfred’s troops and thus began my search for the savage warriors that I’ve followed through time, through endless wars and battles, following their blood trail, yet remaining elusive, always one step ahead of me. From the blood soaked hills of ancient Wessex, to the Zulu kingdom in Natal, and from the Retreat from Gettysburg to the TV Franchise Wars of the late 21st Century, there was one constant throughout.
Berserkers.
The Office for Paradox Criminality is where I work. Affectionately known as the Time Crime Agency, I have been an investigator here for two years, and I have seen over four hundred battles. Berserkers are now my life.
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