Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction

Daria Makes A Deal, Chapter Eight

Now and then, I see someone mocking the idea of fanfiction—typically, “Tumblr fanfic” in particular. And it’s understandable. I mean, when the canonical material rises to such heights as, um, Batman V Superman, and Tumblr can only offer Martha Kent fighting off time-travelers who come back to kill young Clark, well, is there even really a choice to make? With the “Captain America is Hydra” story arc, Marvel provides readers with the innovative and unprecedented story of Bad Guys Use Space Thing To Make Big Good Guy Bad. Seriously, for sheer inventiveness and entertainment value, how could Tumblr or AO3 even compete?

*snerk*

Yes, fanfiction did give the world Christian Grey. But it also gave us Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter having Christian Grey for dinner, which has to count for something.

For previous installments of Daria Makes A Deal, see the chapter index. (For my research in quantum information theory, see my recap of recent publications.)

Fair warning: I got the Granada TV Sherlock Holmes series for Christmas and have been watching a lot of that lately.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Daria noticed herself climbing a rope up towards a treehouse.

“This is odd,” she said. “I shouldn’t have nearly the upper-body strength to be doing this so easily.” She took a good look at the knotted hemp rope.

Daria tried to work her memory backwards, to see if it offered any clues about her current situation. She recalled the fracas in the hotel lobby, and then Tom and Saavik were looking at her as though she were unwell, and she was telling them that she was just tired. She remembered thinking that she could pass off any odd behavior as due to her recent discovery of her own apparent bisexuality. Which sounded plausible enough. And so she had begged off, pleading the ineffectuality of caffeine, to hide in the room where she had awoken from her dream—

It had been only a dream, but that meant nothing at all.
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Fiction

Spitefic: Access Denied

And now, the third installment in my Atlas Shrugged spitefic series! For the previous entries, see here and here.

Today’s vignette is inspired by a scene which so perfectly embodies an intellectually and morally bankrupt “philosophy” that it becomes viscerally repulsive. I figured that this scenario would be a better served if the cast of characters were enlarged and some substitutions made. We begin with Dagny telling the guard to let her, Hank and Francisco pass. Again, the italicized lead-in is a quotation from the original.
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Fiction

Daria Makes a Deal, Chapter Seven

Fair warning: In my dubious wisdom, I have decreed that it is time for a flashback. This is where we get to see the cascading aftereffects of Jane Lane’s summer in the art colony play out in her college years. For previous installments of DMAD, see the chapter index. The escapade with Jodie Landon was recounted in Chapter Two.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The wind down Huntington Avenue is cold.

It is the Sunday before Thanksgiving, 2001.
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Fiction

Daria Makes a Deal Chapter Index

Present Day. Present Time.
AH HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
— Serial Experiments Lain

Are dolphins making self-glorifying edits on Wikipedia?
Cetacean needed, next on #SickSadWorld!

It’s thirteen years after high school, and Daria Morgendorffer is eager to turn her life around. Standing for her principles put a serious crimp in her academic career, and finding out that her fiancé was less than faithful brought a definitive end to her domestic plans. She wants to start over, but her best chance to do so is to seize an opportunity that is fantastic in all the wrong ways…

Fiction

Daria Makes a Deal, Chapter Six

PREVIOUSLY, ON DARIA: Thirteen years or so after high school, Our Heroine is a washed-up academic with a series of advanced degrees, failed relationships and irregularly successful writing efforts behind her. She left her cheating boyfriend and moved back to Boston, to live with her friend Jane Lane. Jane, now running an art shop specializing in custom movie and TV props, introduced her to a social circle featuring both old and new faces. Soon, friendship got the better of caution, and Daria found herself agreeing to cosplay Edward Elric at a science-fiction and fantasy convention.

At the convention, Daria finds herself out of place, but at just the right time to be a sympathetic listener for Saavik—a clerk, aspiring actor and Tom Sloane’s girlfriend. Their night takes a turn for the fantastical when a woman from Daria’s past arrives with a business proposal… from the Sandman, Dream of the Endless.

Content note: Frank discussion of physical intimacy. On-screen portrayal thereof at maybe a soft R. Brief violence. One instance of homophobic language. Adult 4chan Man.
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Fiction

Daria Makes a Deal, Chapter Five

PREVIOUSLY, ON DARIA: Our Heroine has a new friend, Saavik, a clerk and aspiring actor who entered Daria’s life by way of being Tom Sloane’s girlfriend. They’re up late together at a science-fiction convention (cosplaying as Edward Elric and Motoko Kusanagi respectively). After a movie in the small hours of the morning, they encounter a woman from Daria’s past, a character that Daria believed she had never really met in the first place. And the visitor is here to tell Daria about a certain proposal….

Content note: One character gets a glimpse of another character’s fantasy that’s a touch TMI.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Perhaps we’d better discuss this outside,” Halloween said.

“Outside?” asked Daria. “In the snow?”

“Doesn’t look like snow,” Saavik said, crossing the lobby to the revolving door and pushing her way through.

Daria followed. The wind that met her as she emerged was as gentle as she expected it to be cutting. She reached out her gloved hands and gathered a few of the… “Cherry blossoms?” They caught in Saavik’s wig and melted to water, like snowflakes, on her face.
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Fiction

Daria Makes a Deal, Chapter Four

PREVIOUSLY, ON DARIA: Thirteen years or so after high school, Our Heroine is a washed-up academic with a series of advanced degrees, failed relationships and irregularly successful writing efforts behind her. She left her cheating boyfriend and moved back to Boston, to live with her friend Jane Lane. Jane, now running an art shop specializing in custom movie and TV props, introduced her to a social circle featuring both old and new faces. Soon, friendship got the better of caution, and Daria found herself agreeing to cosplay Edward Elric at a science-fiction and fantasy convention.

Content note: A character recalls experiences with Pick-Up “Artistry” and blithe cissexism.

CHAPTER FOUR

The party thrummed and pulsed and mingled with itself. It wound around furniture and up steps. It carried drinks outward from the bar, where Tom watched over the grand central room of the suite, shaking cocktail mixers and spinning bottles with his white-gloved hands. His jacket-over-tunic ensemble gave the appearance of a military uniform, worn by a man with open contempt for his nominal superiors. He took a moment now and then to slide his shades back up the bridge of his nose, so that their oval lenses caught and toyed with the light.

Daria caught sight of Morgan the fire-spinner, currently in heavy makeup as a Borg drone. Ze gave Daria a nod and saluted rather solemnly with an umbrella drink. This prompted the woman with whom Morgan was speaking—a lanky figure dressed as a brown teddy bear—to turn about with an inquiring glance. Jane waved happily and beckoned Daria to join them.

This, Daria was only too happy to do, but it required working her way through a substantial amount of the crowd. A grandiose gesture from a young man she passed nearly connected with the side of her head. He looked over and then made apologetic noises, adding, “Wicked outfit!”

“Thanks,” Daria said. “Excuse me, I have to go meet its maker.”

Every third or fourth person at the party was, Daria estimated, in cosplay to some extent. This was representative of Aletheia on the whole, judging by what she had seen over the past two days.

At last, she stood beside Jane, who hooked an arm around hers and leaned in close. “Told you it would be a hit!” A lock of Jane’s hair flopped forward. A crosscross band just above eyebrow level kept the lock constrained in a bundle.

“You win the bet,” Daria said. “Do you want quatloos or woolongs?”
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Fiction

Daria Makes a Deal, Chapter Three

Content note: Reminiscences of depression and family strife. For the previous chapters, see here and here.

CHAPTER THREE

Daria’s Journal, Inaugurating a Brand New, Posh Hardback Notebook. Tuesday, 15 January 2013.

I braved the slush yesterday and made my way to a stationery store up near Raft. Treated myself to a fistful of disposable fountain pens. I hadn’t known that such things were a thing. Between these, my history of failed relationships and my coffee intake, I must be a Real Writer.

The convention—that is, the fifteenth annual Aletheia—is to kick off this Friday. Jane has Plans for my attendance. I refuse to let this frighten me.
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Fiction

“And Half the Seed of Europa”

In the previous post, I looked at one way to take the theme of geek-culture wish fulfillment and run sideways with it. Another tempting possibility is a more Evangelion variation: play all the genre conventions absolutely straight, and show just how psychologically damaged every character would be.

Say you’re one of those gamer prodigies who’s whisked off to fight a glorious war in which your mad skills are the key to Saving the World. What happens when the war is over? What happens when you get shipped home with a headful of PTSD? Everything you enjoyed in your old life now reminds you of ordering good men to their deaths.

When you were a child on Earth, you fled all your troubles by escaping into games of war. Then the war found you.

What do you do when you can’t escape any longer?

(Title based on Wilfred Owen.)

Fiction

Starfighter 2015

Laura Hudson’s review of Ernest Cline’s Armada (2015) reminded me that I had my own idea for a “reimagining” of The Last Starfighter (1984). In fact, I’ve had this notion knocking around for a few years now, but I’ve never written down a synopsis in an easily accessible format. So, here goes:

Our protagonist is Alix, a young trans woman trying to make it in the field of video-game journalism. Tired of regurgitating press releases for ultimately forgettable AAA titles, she decides to delve into the mystery of Starfighter, a science-fiction action-adventure game that appeared on the net seemingly from nowhere. Nobody knows who wrote the code or even the IRL identities of the people who first noticed it, but once it caught a little attention, its popularity snowballed. Alix, a fiend at Starfighter herself, gets a lead on where it might have come from. The movie opens with her on her way to a big SF/gaming convention in some large city. At the convention, she meets a fellow we’ll call Greg, because he asked for it. Greg knows Starfighter amazingly well, not just its game mechanics and the design of its fictional world, but the details of its code, too. They joke around about Phillips-head sonic screwdrivers, reversing the polarity on the main deflector dish and so on.

Alix and Greg are walking back to the convention after dinner with some champion Starfighter players, when some ominous guys who have been skulking about the shadows burst out and instigate a fight scene. Greg snaps into action and fights them off, using martial-arts moves that escalate until they really should be impossible without wire work. Just when the ominous guys have been roundly trounced, their reinforcements arrive, and they run over Alix with a Humvee. Fade to white.

Alix awakens, floating in microgravity, wearing a jumpsuit uniform over skin that feels a bit too much like plastic.
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Fiction

Nixiepunk

A few years ago, my friends and I came up with the label “nixiepunk” for science fiction set in a world where atomic spaceships are navigated using slide rules. Nixiepunk would be analogous to 1930s–50s science fiction as steampunk is to Victorian proto-SF. Whereas classic cyberpunk projected a future, clock-, steam- and nixiepunk reinvent a fetishized past. Choosing the term nixiepunk over “atompunk” emphasizes the other child of the Manhattan Project: computation over raw destructive force. But to live up to the “punk” half of the name, the genre must concern itself with the preterite, with the “Left Behinds of the Great Society.” If Asimov’s The Caves of Steel or the Byron the Bulb excursus in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow came out today, they’d be nixiepunk.
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