The Glass Weaver’s Tale
and Other Stories
The Glass Weaver’s Tale and Other Stories blends near and far futures, time travel and parallel Universes, generation ships and bio-engineered post-humans, sprinkling unintentional alien invasions into a heady mix of hard science fiction.
The seven stories include two novellas (Café Arabica, The Glass Weaver’s Tale), a novelette (The Boy Who Built A Rocket Ship), three short stories (Needle and Groove, The Other David Kindlebach, Holiday Home), and flash fiction (The Patter of Tiny Feet).
Needle and Groove — Dr Richard McGill, the inventor of time travel, flees into the past — from what he does not know, yet — only to become entangled in a time loop he must break free from by persuading his younger self to commit murder. It is a murder they both know will break Time. Yet McGill has sworn to preserve the integrity of history. He is presented with an apparently impossible task, made all the more when his younger self balks at committing the crime. However, both younger and older McGill have forgotten how chance moments can change the course of history and about Molly, their black Labrador…
The Boy Who Built a Rocket Ship — Josh worships his older brother Jim. But Jim has a secret — he is desperate to find his real family. Jim hates the great cylinder world they are trapped in with its militia soldiers and commune louts. He secretly builds a rocket ship with help and encouragement from Josh. However, the journey of discovery Jim makes takes him away from Josh and those who really love him and turns him into the very thing he hates.
The Other David Kindlebach — Have you lost someone you love so desperately that you are left numb and empty? What if they could be returned to you? Not a machine, a robot, or a simulacrum, but the living, breathing embodiment of the person you lost, someone who has a beating heart and who can learn to love you once again. You’d jump at the chance to repair the void in your life. But what if you can’t quite recapture the past, no matter how hard you try and the new relationship slowly falls apart? What happens to the person created to love you? What do they do?
Holiday Home — Desimone and Mathilda have eloped and are cruising the Galaxy together when they stumble upon the perfect holiday home, a little nook where they can ensconce themselves away from the judgmental eye of family, and the stuffy social mores of the Galactic Core. It is a lovely little place in a quite stellar system, far away in the boondocks, the third planet a perfect location to share their illicit love together. However, the planet seems to have other ideas, thwarting Desimone’s plans to tame it at every step until his patience finally snaps, and he takes drastic measures, only for the planet to bite back…
Café Arabica — Pippa is a hard-working homemaker and wife with two beautiful, boisterous children. Their new, prosperous neighborhood is close to the underground path of a massive synchrotron. She worked there once but chose a different path. However, with the lighting of the synchrotron, she has become troubled by visions from a dark period in her life, which, as they solidify and seem to become more and more real, threaten to rob her of the things she loves most, her family…
The Glass Weaver’s Tale — Mica was birthed as one of the sterile Worker caste of the Reef. He works under the stern eye of the Overseer caste, who are commanded by the Guards. That is, until the Black Sphere is budded from the Reef and a female caste appears. Females may only consort with reproductive males. For Mica and all the other sterile castes, females are strictly off-limits. But Mica has fallen in love and strikes a bargain with a corrupt Overseer to be surgically made fertile so he can spend a night with a mate and be made a man…only to discover there is something much worse in store for the Reef than the disruption caused by the female caste.
The Patter of Tiny Feet — There are so many humans on the face of the Earth that there just isn’t room for anything else. That made Gillian Wilbert sad. So, digging out some old Schmidt specimen boxes his grandfather had hidden away from the Biocrimes Police, Gillian decided to bring back one of the closest friends of the human race, the one that scuttles around in the kitchen after lights out, little knowing what he is really unleashing…
The Glass Weaver’s Tale
Sample:
Hunched over the alpha’s body, Mica gazes upon her nakedness. She is young, eyes closed, deep in the thrall of slow-sleep, senseless to the world. She is bald, all hair shaven from her lithe body, so that her skin is perfectly smooth, to ensure the glass adheres to her without forming bubbles or wrinkles.
Yet, for all her baldness, she is beautiful, all the more so because her lifeblood has been drained and she has been perfused with diamond cryosol, rendering her translucent, like sea glass.
Mica can see the shadow of her muscles and skeleton where they lie below the surface of her skin. Her aura, like that of the beta guard, is a bruise of violet light under her breast bone, its intensity a marker that she is made gravid.
It is the badge that marks her status as a member of the reproductive caste. Her oval face is blank, eyes, behind the translucent eye-lids, staring sightlessly into the depths of slow-sleep, teeth visible behind the soft, full lips of her closed mouth.