“I have no objection to truth,” I said, “but I enjoy untruths too, they’re the building blocks of human culture. Actors pretending to be kings, singers faking heartbreak or elation, novelists inventing heroes in their heads to escape the mindless dullards around them. Reality is a vast sea of tedium interrupted by brief flashes of the repugnant – why would anyone chain themselves to that?”
Out now on Amazon, Lies We Will Tell Ourselves is the latest, and for now last, of my anthologies pulling together my previously published stories. This time it’s the turn of science fiction…
A spin doctor forced to deal with aliens who loath lies.
A squad of soldiers torn apart by the fiction in their midst.
A hunting submarine with its dead captain strapped to the prow, the crew promising that one day they’ll revive him.
We all tell lies to get through the day, some of them to ourselves, some to other people. Now read the extraordinary lies of the future in these nine short science fiction stories.
Includes:
- How We Fall – trapped behind enemy lines, faith and duty clash for Sergeant Grund’s squad.
- So Cold It Burns – long cut off from home, Gandpa Jo must decide the future of his frozen wife.
- Distant Rain – the submarine Promethean hunts a mutant whale through a polluted Pacific.
- Our Man In Herrje – Julius Atticus lives by lies, but can he defend them to the alien Gatherers?
- Day Labour – a dark secret waits for the farm labourers of a distant world.
- Digits – a robot finds his humanity in a hand.
- The Extra Mile – race driver Geordie proves how far he’ll go to win.
- Second Skin – stock trader Eddy’s symbiont has all the latest apps, including one no-one told him about.
- The Harvest – as aliens devour the Earth, an anthropologist recognises an unsettling truth.
Lies We Will Tell Ourselves is out now on the Kindle. I’m just releasing it there for now as experiment, and I’ll get into my reasons another day. But because it’s exclusively on Amazon I’m able to give it away through there for a few days, and so it’s free from tomorrow until Sunday, after which it will still be only $1.99.
So what are you waiting for? Go forth and read your way into a bright new future!
I’m giving away my steampunk short story collection, Riding the Mainspring, to anyone who signs up to my mailing list. So if you’re looking for some exciting steam-powered action, why not go and sign up here.