Tag: Science Fiction

Welcome to weekend writing warriors. Many fine authors, and me, contribute short snippets for your delectation. This is the start of a new work, Illegal Aliens. It is something of a cross between a horror story, a science fiction tale, and a romance.

Roland awoke after bringing an attractive young woman home, alone. Something of a surprise, and in some ways a shock. His mobile chirruped into life and the works manager – where he’d been called to examine a mysterious block of Roman concrete – told him the “bloody German bomb, it went.” A knock on the door interrupts their conversation just after Mr Shah explains that one of his workers couldn’t even stand the firecrackers on Guy Fawkes.

One of a somewhat menacing pair of visitors finished last week with “that is irrelevant.” Maybe for them.  The visitors found a mysterious note in what looks vaguely like Arabic, in a somewhat illegal search. Roland, in a mixture of embarrassment and pride read it (or at least its summary) last week. Another element from Roland’s past and a cat show up.  Last week we met Roland’s old post-doctoral supervisor. This week Roland continues translating (and the cat is back).

The man handed Roland his phone, there was an image, a scan of a fragment on it.

Roland started reading, darkness, despite the sunny morning, surrounded them and ‘his’ cat hissed; Roland stopped and the room lightened; the cat resumed her purr, “It’s a curse … not to be read aloud, at least not if you don’t mean it; it invokes Apep and Set among others … they’re the least obscure of the deities.”

“Who?”

“Apep, the God of Chaos and Evil, not to mention destruction; Set … basically the model for Satan the Bible, much as Osiris’s life and resurrection were models for Jesus or Mithras.”

“You don’t believe that tripe, do you?”

Roland shook his head, “No, not really, but it’s been such a strange last few days … I’d rather not tempt fate.”

He read further, silently; after looking at the wall for a moment, he turned to the agents and said, “It invokes them as protection; protection from something else; something far worse.”

The next image was spray-painted on a brick wall, “It’s from here, painted on the new biochemistry building, off Sherrington Road … keeps coming back, no matter what they do to clean it.”

“It’s a warning, about transgenic animals … bringing a curse from Bastet upon their efforts.”

His cat purred louder.

My sincere apologies for abusing semi-colons.

Illegal aliens is up for order on Amazon. In the end, the way to fix my mistakes was to issue a new edition. I still used kindle create but in a more native way to produce a “reflowable” book.

You can get a copy of the first four chapters on instafreebie.

I’ll be off exploring Exmoor next week. High open and wind-swept hills with unbelievable views (when it isn’t raining) and sea nearby (wet suits are a good idea if you want to actually bathe). Horses and horse-flies.

The ordnance survey maps show stone circles and other neat neolithic monuments. One has to be careful, however, the last time I was there I used the British Grid and a GPS to find one. It was literally a circle of small stones (about 2Kg each) in a field of heather. Unlike Stonehenge of Avebury, it wouldn’t have been a difficult feat of engineering.

You can find my, well our, works here.

The Art of Deception, first in a series of late Georgian/early Regency spy novels is available for preorder. You can get the first part here.

Welcome to weekend writing warriors. Many fine authors, and me, contribute short snippets for your delectation. This is the start of a new work, Illegal Aliens. It is something of a cross between a horror story, a science fiction tale, and a romance.

Roland awoke after bringing an attractive young woman home, alone. Something of a surprise, and in some ways a shock. His mobile chirruped into life and the works manager – where he’d been called to examine a mysterious block of Roman concrete – told him the “bloody German bomb, it went.” A knock on the door interrupts their conversation just after Mr Shah explains that one of his workers couldn’t even stand the firecrackers on Guy Fawkes.

One of a somewhat menacing pair of visitors finished last week with “that is irrelevant.” Maybe for them.  The visitors found a mysterious note in what looks vaguely like Arabic, in a somewhat illegal search. Roland, in a mixture of embarrassment and pride read it (or at least its summary) last week. Another element from Roland’s past and a cat show up. The cat isn’t in today’s post, but hasn’t gone away (yet).

Roland sighed, Welchmann wasn’t his favourite person, not since that time when he was a post-doc and the professor had made a pass at Janet; more than a pass in fact, but the police hadn’t been very enthusiastic about pressing charges; not against an eminent and well-connected scholar when the charges were based on the word of a grubby post-doc and his wife.

He took the phone, “Yes,”

“Ah, Roland, I hear you’re reading Demotic now; quite fluently if you translated that – fairly obscure.”

“Yes.”

“Not a lot of call for that in Roman Britain, so I’d think.”

“You’d be surprised, besides I was thinking of a trip, need a change of scene.”

“No news about the lovely Janet … or your boy, whatshisname, then.”

“No.”

“Sorry, anyway there are a few cryptic inscriptions I’d like you to look at,”  Roland looked at his male guest; the man’s mobile buzzed and he jumped.  Welchmann continued, “I’ve sent them to our mutual acquaintance.”

My sincere apologies for abusing semi-colons.

It’s a little difficult to type them in wordpress, but you can get the appropriate fonts for hieroglyphics from psifer.com.  Hieroglyphic writing is an interesting mixture of more or less alphabetic approaches, combined with determinatives (shades of meaning) that make it something like a rebus. A reed might be the symbol for ‘i’ and a cup for “i’b” – but a cup could also mean that this word is an offering and not be part of the sound of the word at all. The Semetic people who developed the ancestor of our alphabet took the idea of pictures for sounds, but (fortunately) left the determinatives behind.

The hieroglyphs for Bastet (Bst) show how this works. The unsealed olive oil jar (Gardiner sign w2) is ‘Bs’ and the loaf of bread (it looks like a rising sun to me, but it’s a loaf) is ‘t’.  Sometimes you’ll see it with two ‘t’s to make it clear that it is bstt. The final sign is a determinative for a female god. Just for the heck of it the sealed olive oil jar (Gardiner sign w1) has a different sound.

Illegal aliens is up for order on Amazon. I tried using kindle creator on it to control dividers and formatting, and worked from a pdf file. The results are not as good as I’d hoped, but Amazon – in its wisdom won’t let me change it now that the kindle create program actually works from word files. It has, as usual, laid an egg.

You can get a copy of the first four chapters on instafreebie.

You can find my, well our, works here.

The Art of Deception, first in a series of late Georgian/early Regency spy novels is available for preorder. You can get the first part here.

Welcome to weekend writing warriors. Many fine authors, and me, contribute short snippets for your delectation. This is the start of a new work, Illegal Aliens. It is something of a cross between a horror story, a science fiction tale, and a romance.

Roland awoke after bringing an attractive young woman home, alone. Something of a surprise, and in some ways a shock. His mobile chirruped into life and the works manager – where he’d been called to examine a mysterious block of Roman concrete – told him the “bloody German bomb, it went.” A knock on the door interrupts their conversation just after Mr Shah explains that one of his workers couldn’t even stand the firecrackers on Guy Fawkes.

One of a somewhat menacing pair of visitors finished last week with “that is irrelevant.” Maybe for them.

The man pulled a warrant card from inside his jacket and showed it to him, “It’s better if you don’t know the details.” The card identified the bearer as an agent from MI6 and little else.

“For me or for you?”

“Very funny, Dr Stevens; may we come in?” Neither of them seemed to have much of a sense of humour.

“I suppose; not like I have much of a choice, is there; I need to shower; do you mind waiting?”

“Not at all.”

The man followed Roland upstairs and waited outside the bathroom while he showered. The woman used the time to search the downstairs rooms; she found a letter, written in an obscure script, one that looked suspiciously like Arabic or maybe Farsi, on the kitchen table; after sending a picture of it to the office, she pulled a chair from the breakfast table and sat. Satisfied with her efforts, she’d await the outcome.

My sincere apologies for abusing semi-colons.

Illegal aliens is up for preorder on Amazon.
You can get a copy of the first four chapters on instafreebie.

Bastet had an important role in Egyptian mythology. One of the several gods of evil, Apep, would attack the Sun God Ra in the evening. He or it would attempt to eat the sun and place the Earth in eternal darkness. (Though as a snake he’d freeze first, but then logic was never a strong part of mythology.) Bastet would routinely defeat Apep and slice his head from his body with a flint knife. Thus the sun would be available for the new day.

The featured image shows the asteroid Ida and her satellite Dactyl. 99942 Apophis or Apep (a synonym) was supposed to crash into Earth in 2029 or 2036, but NASA has shown that it won’t. This image is often labeled as Apep, but it isn’t.

You can find my, well our, works here.