Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal me what you think it’s worth to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of whatever anthology it eventually appears in, or any initial stand-alone book version.

Summary:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps with surveillance experiments conducted across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled a conflict that reaches across time, space, and other dimensions. The story is told from the POV of Mormeck on the planet (Mountain) and the Mormeck in the winter city (avatar/Outpost)

Archive is here Journals of Mormeck and first entry is here.

I was not rid of my avatar once he traveled to the winter city under siege. I thought I might be, and I was glad of this, for he still troubled me. But the angels had their luna moths in the city, and they wanted me to use them for surveillance. “Only you,” said Gabriel, “will know what might be odd and what might be normal for your avatar. If your avatar is subverted by the Komodos or a presence, the evidence of this may be imperceptible to anyone else.”

So I watched my Outpost performing his mission in the city. First, his disappearance into the soil, which I knew was to acquire the right molecular structure, and then his reappearance as a member of one side in the conflict. I knew where to look, knew the signs, for where he might arise.

In those first moments after he once again registered in the surveillance of the luna moths, my avatar was a stranger to me—more even than when he had stared at me while Seether destroyed him to rebuild him. This sense of something wrong grew stronger. I was here, but I was also there, with no connection between the two. He wasn’t my doppelganger or my brother. He was me, but now different. On the one hand there was my sense of loss, of a need to communicate with my avatar. On the other, there was a growing dislike, as if I watched someone else pretending to be me and not behaving as I would behave, but being taken as me by those around him. This feeling was bizarre to have, I know, and yet it seemed encoded in my DNA.

It did not take long, watching him run from shadow to shadow, sometimes hiding in plain sight by joining members of the same army and sometimes leaving them to wander in the most deserted places, that I began to want him dead. My avatar. Me, in a sense. Most of me rebelled against this idea—found it perverse and distressing—but underneath like some constant, distant drum beat, I still had the thought.

By the time he encountered the komodos on the second day, I had become too embedded in the situation, too fixated on my avatar, and it took awhile to realize that within thirty-six hours of my Outpost entering the city, a third of my luna moths had winked out, just disappeared into the snow.

And I had no idea who had done it.

(Our editor, Diana Gill, thoughtfully took a photo of some finished copies they just received at HarperCollins.)

In addition to a great review in Romantic Times and in Fangoria, Bookgasm has just reviewed The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities—a full three weeks before the publication date. It gives a nice sneak peek at the book, and really gets what we were trying to do, calling it “amazingly creative and delightful.” And, as with any cabinet of curiosities, “This is a book you keep on your nightstand or end table to pick up and dip into every now and then, rather than read from cover-to-cover in a few sittings. But you’re likely to find it hard to resist reading more than one entry in any of the various sections once you begin.”

I’ll cheerily will note, though: this is not a steampunk anthology. It’s an antho that contains some stories with steampunk elements, but if you don’t like steampunk you’ll find that most of the antho isn’t related to that subgenre at all.

Cool Steampunk: Time-Traveling Digital Victims Just Getting Started…But Really It’s All About Balls.

Some Addictomatic searches tell little stories! Yay for stories! Especially on USA Today blog and in LA Times.

(Mormeck returns tomorrow.)

Would you buy a clock from this grump?

Just a short note to say Cheeky Frawg will debut the e-book of my limited edition collection Secret Lives by the end of next week. We have also acquired the e-book reprint anthology Women of the Supernatural: A Tartarus Press Sampler, edited by Ray Russell. Finally, we will be publishing the e-books of John Grant’s awesome Corrupted Science: Fraud,Ideology, and Politics in Science, Discarded Science: Ideas That Seemed Good at the Time, and Bogus Science, Or Some People Really Believe These Things. More on these acquisitions and on other titles soon.

Evil Monkey:
I’m starting a new ideology.

Jeff:
Based on what tenets?

Evil Monkey:
Everyone is evil. Everyone is a monkey.

Jeff:
Even aarkvarks?

Evil Monkey:
Even aarkvarks.

Jeff:
Don’t do it, dude. Ideologies are toxic.

Evil Monkey:
No they’re not—they’re the life’s blood of social change.

Jeff:
Until they go rogue.

Evil Monkey:
You live under the constraints of a rogue ideology—capitalism.

Jeff:
Capitalism is like the morphine of ideologies. You’re going to become so addicted you’re going to die, but everything will be so fuzzy around the edges you’ll almost enjoy it, if you’re selfish enough.

Evil Monkey:
Like a cocoon protecting you from the irrational insanity of your brain.

Jeff:
Um, not exactly. Okay, maybe that’s it exactly.

Evil Monkey:
My ideology will be pure, though. It’ll only do good. It’s been created to do good.

(more…)

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here Journals of Mormeck and first entry is here.

Returned to the winter city usually called Stalingrad but on this alt-Earth known as “Volgograd”, Russian, German, and the subsonic language of the Komodos crammed into me. I appeared in a crush of snow, dropping reconstituted through five feet of air with none to see me. I tried to change my molecular structure immediately, but this was impossible. No one was around. Not even a rat. Without hesitation, I shed all but a tendril of myself and runneled into the substrata and found a sluggish worm, became a worm, found a rat, became a rat, tunneled up and found a dead human, thawed that, became that. All the time paranoid, afraid that some Presence might find me. But it didn’t happen.

I don’t know how long this process took—I was too engrossed in it—but long enough that I had gotten over the aftershocks from being devoured by Seether. There’s a horror in being ripped at, being torn apart, that has nothing to do with pain—the pain had been deadened—and everything to do with the pulling, the ripping rendered numb. It felt to me as how it would feel to a human if peeling off the dead skin from a sunburn, but instead, with the same level of intensity, long swathes of flesh came with it. What had the humans felt so long ago when the angels had sent out their holy bears to bring back specimens.

Did those hunted down think that after their savage deaths they had been to Heaven? Did they misinterpret the smiles of the angels?

Not me. I knew I had been brought to a kind of hell. Under siege. On this alt-Earth, the date was December 14, 1942. The Germans and Russians had fought themselves to a stand-still for over a year, and both sides barely existed as coherent fighting forces in the city despite the reflexive sending of more reinforcements and supplies. Air support had become almost non-existent. Trotsky was plagued in the Far East by an all-out Japanese assault upon his borders. Hitler had launched an attack against the East Coast of the country known as the United States, after a failed revolt by his generals, and spending much of his time keeping his supply lines safe and ruling Europe and part of Africa.

This winter city was now forgotten and full of corpses, almost equally divided between the two sides, but poorly ruled. Into that lawlessness had come spies and profiteers and, oddly, an area scooped out of the boundaries near the Volga that now served as a kind of neutral zone. And everywhere, too, the komodos roamed, silent and invisible, their brand of life-taking unnoticed amongst so much carnage.

I became human hidden behind a ruined, frozen wall, hearing the soft crunch of a patrol across an ice field that once been a courtyard, and the sound of mortar shells, and a low clear moan somewhere distant, and a gasoline-blood smell that had soaked into the snow. The shouts of men and women accompanied by machine gun fire. The sun was a blood-orange at the horizon, but it had been that way for hours.

Dusk, and I’d stolen the dead man’s clothes, his boots, his gun, and his face. I discovered I was cold but I could freeze through and it wouldn’t matter. I was now part of the Russian side: Trotsky’s White Army, stalemated with the German Christo-Fascists…the information dissolving into my brain like a painkiller, each new fact bringing me calm. I would always have a map in my head, always know exactly where I was, and thus how far away from home.

Mormeck Mountain rarely knew outright fear, but I was an Outpost—I could as good as die before being saved, and the Mountain would remain if I disappeared to my last cell. From the first, then, in that new and tactile place I found I had become autonomous and through rebirth as worm-rat become my own person. A dead person. I looked like a dead person. I had to.

The dead man had had a name, but I didn’t want to know it. I had to know only that he’d been on patrol and a sniper’s bullet had taken him, and now he would lurch up and find another patrol or wander, seeking others, seeking a certain…Presence.

But the swift-shifting komodos that found me first.

(The bear known as Seether.)

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal me what you think it’s worth to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of whatever anthology it eventually appears in, or any initial stand-alone book version.

Welcome Boing Boing readers! Some context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps with surveillance experiments conducted across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled a conflict that reaches across time, space, and other dimensions.

Archive is here Journals of Mormeck and first entry is here.

My kind cannot be killed—extinguished for a time, yes, but the truth of me lives in every cell, and were I ever treated more like a castle-keep than host and stormed and sacked and put to the torch…some small piece of unconquered me would survive, slip into a river, be picked up by the mud on an invader’s boot, and over time, centuries perhaps, Mormeck would rise again, mountain-massive.

So when the angels told me I must leave my self in my avatar, sever the connection, exist in two places at once, I was at peace with this situation. But what I had not been told was that this must happen before my Outpost’s dissolution by the bear Seether—that it was expected I would observe the beginning of my Outpost’s passage to the winter city.

At first, this unexpected thing did not bother me, and I did my duty: I disengaged so that my avatar/Outpost was no longer me and yet we both were me. I, Mormeck Mountain, watched through the sensors in my skin as Mormeck Outpost was torn to pieces by Seether, the bear-door. Watched the busy work of claws and fangs haphazardly reduce me to slashed chunks of flesh, the blood pouring out onto the grass while the angels laughed.

I felt almost superior, reflecting on how mere humans on the whole—the intelligent species we spy on most throughout all the alt-Earths—do not understand their fellow animals. Their endearing but sad attempts at science have never understood that a luna moth is not just Actias luna (Linnaeus), a member of Lepidoptera, but also an intricate surveillance device that can transmit live images, sound, taste, smell, and feel across a million alt-worlds to a remote destination presided over by a living mountain. That a single komodo dragon might exist in multiple realities at once, its skin porous in a way that would be considered supernatural by the primitive. That certain bears might be a horrifically painful but efficient way of travel. Or even, switching to the science of religion, that angels might not just laugh at the human idea of God but cynically seek to reinforce it, too.

But, gradually, I was drawn to the spectacle in front of me. It was a strange sensation to see myself—even such a small part of me—die in such extreme and methodical a fashion without any connection, to not be experiencing it too. I had no time for admiration of Seether’s killing efficiency. I was watching instead what should have been the face of pain on Mormeck Outpost, those features smeared with blood, offal, and ripped flesh, cheek ripped from the bone, orbital exposed…and yet still the expression, the eyes, screamed not of horror or discomfort but of release, of freedom, of anticipation…even as the remains sank in on themselves due to Seether’s happy gorging and the bear slapped off the head and cracked open the skull, feasted on the brain, cracked the bones, slurped the marrows.

Just the price of passage, and Mormeck Outpost’s expression no concern of mine, perhaps even beyond his control. But to me in that moment I thought, with a sense of loss, that he was glad to be rid of me, glad to be gone. And that, dear diary, was a revelation, and Seether only in that minute having licked the last of him off of the grass. A great fear, a great longing, a great envy rose within all of me, like some sort of revolt at the cellular level. For the first time in dealing with the angels, I felt as if I had made a colossal mistake.

(The video shot at the Edison with the League, while being interviewed for the LA Times)

The LA Times features our book, the League of Steam, Clockwork Couture, and more. I led the reporter around LA talking to Steampunks and whatnot for a day last month, and had a lot of fun. I have to say–The Edison is absolutely magnificent, and I would say that a “steampunk” vibe is really just a small part of why it is so incredibly cool. The space and the way it’s been refurbished is remarkable. Anyone visiting LA should go take a look.

The Sydney Morning Herald also did a piece on Steampunk, including quotes from my coauthor SJ Chambers and me.

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal me what you think it’s worth to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of whatever anthology it eventually appears in, or any initial stand-alone book version.

Archive: Journals of Mormeck

The first six of the twelve recovered in canisters from the war-torn winter city came back to us sane but with their memories wiped clean and their motor functional infantile. The seventh was insane at first. They resurrected him from his own ashes and he screamed with the first breath of air in his lungs. He was one of the angels, but still he screamed, as if he didn’t remember. His name was given to me as “Kathar,” and he had been tortured in the winter city.

After a time, Kathar stopped screaming and regained the preternatural confidence that marks all of these “angels.” Kathar had been on surveillance elsewhere but something he had seen that now existed as a hole in his memory had sidetracked him. Before he had been taken, Kathar had destroyed his own wings, changed his eyes, created for himself a uniform of white-and-gray that matched the besiegers, who he thought were winning the war. Then the other side had found him, and brought him to a hospital that wasn’t for sick people but for experiments. There, he was interrogated and tortured, and when he didn’t talk they burned him alive, some inkling having formed in his captors’ minds, Kathar said, that he was not entirely human.

This was all I knew because this was all I observed before the others took him someplace more private for a full debriefing. Some time afterwards, the leader of our laboratory, who calls himself Gabriel “but only as a joke” came to confer with my laboratorial avatar. Gabriel has my respect, but I think he likes his naming joke too much; a joke can grow into a truth, and a truth become someone’s burden.

Gabriel came to recruit me in a new way, one that went beyond our agreement. “Kathar tells a story that disturbs us greatly.” As his mouth curled upward in an almost-smile that his kind could not help. “He says he came into contact with a presence, and that this presence influenced his captors—first in the capture itself and then what happened afterwards. Kathar believes that under cover of the torture, this presence took something from him.”

I knew that the angels had their enemies, that part of their purpose in establishing the laboratory was not simply to monitor for irregularities, for things that might naturally create instability, but also to combat interference from others. They had never named these “others” to me, and it had not mattered to me. For me, if I must be honest, just the opportunity to glimpse through surveillance a hundred different worlds was enough.

But when I questioned Gabriel on this point, he shook his head, and even the half-smiled seemed oddly tinged with doubt…even fear. “This is nothing we have encountered before. No one has watched us, the watchers, before without our knowledge. Those who know of us, know because we wish it.”

Then he told me they needed my help, that someone needed to return to that winter war, in that particular reality, and investigate, report back. It could not be the remote surveillance of the luna moths. It could not be another angel, because this presence could track them “as if we have a recognizable heat signature” that registers on their instruments. Gabriel said they needed me to go. They needed my budded avatar to go because Mormeck Mountain could change not just Mormeck Outpost’s appearance but also the cellular composition. “You will go, with our instructions,” Gabriel said, “and as soon as you are there, you will alter yourself to perfectly mimic the humans there. The presence may sense your arrival, but then you will go dead to them.”

Was this, perhaps, what Gabriel and his kind had been moving toward all along? That I become not just monitor, home, and house to their efforts, but also active spy? Part of me wanted to scream as Kathar had screamed, at the thought of the unknown, but the greater part felt a great upwelling of an emotion close to happiness. My avatar was me, yes, but also separate from me. Once embedded in the winter city, my avatar’s bond with Mormeck Mountain would be broken, and we would have to synchronize our memories once I returned to myself, but I was as much me as Mountain as avatar, and vice versa. It was not even that my avatar would be a copy of me—we both were emissaries of a greater whole, a city, a host, that happened to appear as one creature. If Mormeck Mountain were to come to grief while Mormeck Mobile roamed a far-off place, then it would be Mobile that became Mountain, over time, lacking only a week or a few months of memory.

In a word, I said yes to Gabriel, and they prepared me for the journey today. I received four objects to take with me, all made very small. They briefed me on the specifics of the local conflict in a place “most commonly known across the alt-Earths as Stalingrad” and noted that in this particular iteration of that conflict “The forces of Adolf Hitler, a genocidal despot, have laid siege to the defenders, soldiers for the Soviet Union, an empire run by a autocrat named Trotsky.” He hesitated then, as much as Gabriel ever hesitates. “Complicating matters slightly, a third force works in Stalingrad: a highly evolved carnivore not native to Earth, with supreme powers of camouflage and working without the knowledge of the human population. We call them Komodos after an Earth species, but that’s not really what they are; and they are neither our enemies nor our friends. You can trust no one. Trade allegiances, even shape, as necessary.”

“Where do I start?” I asked.

“In the hospital where we found the ashes,” Gabriel said. “Any orthodoxy, any ideology, whether progressive or repressive, is a weakness, Mormeck. Anyone free of it can manipulate it, while anyone who is a true believer cannot be free of it, and will react in one of a limited number of ways. Use their ideology against them.” He had uploaded into my avatar a complete knowledge of all factions, including the Komodos—their history, their beliefs, and the wider context. I was also equipped with new languages that felt itchy in my avatar’s mind. I decided, too, to bring my “journal” with me, hidden within a sealed pouch of skin against my thigh. I could write in it without taking it out of my body.

“And what of the presence?”

“You will encounter proxies of the presence, and you will know them because in their speech and their actions they almost but not quite match the orthodoxies of which we have spoken. You will record all information about the presence that you can, and you will not engage the presence unless forced to.”

“And if I am in danger?” After the seventh reconstituted from ash, the last five had been placed in a secure facility. All five had suffered psychotic breaks as soon as they’d regained consciousness.

“We will give you the coordinates for doors back.”

Then it was just a matter of traveling to Stalingrad. Except the journey wasn’t as easy for me as for the angels. They carried that power in their bodies, the knowledge of it, the ability for it. They were doors, in a sense. But only they could open those doors and go through. For me, as for anyone else, the process was perilous and painful. My avatar would have to walk across the lawn outside of the laboratory, into the little forest, and there be devoured alive by the sentinel bear known as Seether. He would strip my flesh down to the bone with claw and fang, and feast on my remains…and when I was nothing but bones, he would crack the marrows and eat all of me…and then and only then would I travel across the alt-worlds to my destination, knit back together. I would not scream because I would suppress my nerve endings first, but it would not be a pleasant sensation. Seether too was a door—ancient and feral and containing worlds. He too was, in his way, as aesthetically pleasing as the luna moths or any other of the angels’ discoveries, experiments, and inventions. But not to the traveler. To the traveler, he was the very experience of violent death, even though was no other way.

Of course, the angels came to watch. To them, it was funny, and their half-smiles became broad and merry even as my view of them dissolved in a sudden spray of my own blood and tissue.

Avaunt!

Lovecraft’s ugly brother (well, they’re both ugly) has returned from a three-year stint serving time in the SF Museum. He’s been oogled and admired by thousands. Reunited, neither of one of them is saying anything, but they will soon feature in a webcomic I’m putting together. They’ll talk then, dammit!

In other news, USA Today’s Pop Candy lurves the Steampunk Bible. But I’m here to talk about more serious matters. Like…

—Don’t email me to ask “What is Steampunk?” I am not the king’s hand for steampunk. I am not the instant Obvious Information Dispenser. Google it.

—Don’t email me to ask about squid anymore. I mean, seriously. Don’t email me to say, “Hey, I saw this squid while I was snorkeling, and it about yay-big and these colors. Do you know what it was?” It was a squid. Now go google it.

—Don’t email me with photos of mushrooms you found and ask me to identify them, either.

In general, I am not your personal Google. Thanks, though, for continued comments about my books. Those help keep me going, in all my glorious curmudgeonry. But otherwise…I’m just not going to be answering anything stupid anymore. All indications to the contrary, I think I’ve been too approachable in the past.