Short Fiction – Dear Comrade Winter

Dear Comrade Winter, How are you? I write this letter because recent events have, as you know, been momentous, and I found myself worrying about you. This is not a time that you and I ever believed we would see, and our old discussions on the matter really do seem so quaint now – but...

RENT FREE PART FOUR – WARRIOR

(PART THREE: GANGSTER) HE ROSE FROM THE GROUND WHERE HE HAD FALLEN He the invader was on his feet, howling it had been such a very long time since he had stood Three of them mere juveniles in weak human shells THEY TREMBLED BEFORE HIM The one that had grabbed Melanie’s leg stared at the...

Short Fiction – DANGER FROM HEAVY SEAS

English coast; great splendid roar of the waves battering the cliffside, the rush of wind, the howl of despair from across the freezing sea – over there within the abyssal sky nothing, brother, but death and slow and squalid death at that, and here, at your back, the verdant Jerusalem, the fields where in ancient...

RENT FREE – PART THREE: GANGSTER

(PART TWO: ASSASSIN) Smoking in the haze of a Waisheng dump; the club’s name was JET OFF. Old junkyard in the midst of their side of town, near Prosperity Plaza where it all stank of old machine parts and rust, where once the great ships that had threaded together astro-socialism were hewn from material into...

RENT FREE – PART TWO: ASSASSIN

(PART ONE: INVADER) She was three miles down the Genocide Highway to New Red Star City when she realised something was wrong. Not the parasite in her head wrong and not militiamen in black armour coming to arrest her wrong and not swarms of Asura descending wrong but the usual kind, mundane-ish – she was...

RENT FREE – PART ONE: INVADER

Something was within her perimeter. The scanner beeped; a chirpy tune of six notes that meant there had been movement detected in the area covered by the sensors all around what she and no one else called the office, which was actually a metal prefab outpost for security men from the mines on the road...

The Great Schism of China – Hong Kong And Taiwan And The Mainland And All That

Once at dinner I encountered the “social credit” meme in real life. I was in Hong Kong, sharing my experience of mainland China over hotpot in a blandly apolitical way (China is big, it’s nice, the traffic police are irritating) when someone, an acquaintance I sort of got on with, chimed in to something I...

BLOOD LUST

Luka and Dragan followed the Austrians into the cornfield and held their fire until the last second. There were twelve of them, exhausted, drawn-looking older men in grey uniforms staggering and stumbling under the weight of their packs, cursing and spluttering in some foreign tongue which Dragan had said was German but Luka did not...

Market Stalinism – The Danger Of Limited Revolution

What’s the limit of a revolution? That’s the question that keeps coming to me – in a decade or more of continuous international stagnation, in which everything in many developed countries is largely the same, but shabbier, as it was in 2008 or so, we can find that outside of that developed bubble things have...

Short Fiction – THE PERVERTED DETECTIVE

The detective got out of the car, hands in pockets of her shabby greatcoat, suit stiff and faded, patches on the knees of her trousers at her elbows, and went to Mr. Fleming’s house, at number fifteen on Newsome Road, watched by all the neighbours from behind their curtains. The road was steep and the...

Short Fiction – BLOOD LAND

The soldiers of the march battalion, deployed to a small village near the Russian border, had long warned one another – if at night you hear a girl’s voice, frail and slender, call out in German, innocently asking Wer da? from the darkness, then do your best not to reply. She may ask once and...