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“HE HAS A DELIGHTFUL STORY SENSE and tells those stories

in remarkable ways,” Sam Bellotto Jr. writes in his Introduction to “Northern Futures," Mark Anthony Ayling’s first bound collection of short stories. “He always brings a fabulous sense of wonder to the pages of our webzine. He is constantly a reader favorite, and I personally enjoy his stories immeasurably.”

Ditto that—even though “delightful” is a rather diabolical descriptor of Ayling’s black humor and disturbing plot twists.

“I shall avoid discussing the desperate state of politics in the Western world at the moment,” Ayling blogged recently. However, his views emerge clearly, thoughtfully, with that proverbial feather instead of a hammer—and with boundless wit and humor.

The stories are a mix of fiendish protagonists, hapless heroes, resourceful bad boys who do sketchy things to earn a living, and villains we can’t help but enjoy.

I love this sort of thing: “He’d briefly contemplated revenge, but then decided it was too much bother. If he ever bumped into (no spoiler here, naming villains) again, he would be sure to torture them with a blowtorch, douse them in combustible fluids, and set fire to them both before dumping in an asteroid belt.”

But I wince and cringe at “an oozing, sticky mess of blistering pustules” and fingers turning black. “Surprisingly, there was no pain, and when a finger came off in his hand and he accidentally dropped it into the toilet a while later, he felt strangely euphoric.” Oh, the joys of a science experiment gone wrong. Next, “... it was meat he was craving, raw and bloody. He was starting to look at things oddly, like dogs and cats.”

Did I laugh out loud at all this? Ha! I wouldn’t admit it if I did.

Nor am I telling which stories these excerpts are from. Readers can experience the surprise and delight of spotting such gems without me leading the way through my favorite passages.

My list of favorites does not include this sort of thing: “I pressed the silencer-muzzle against his skullcap and shot him ... Brain and bone spattered the tiled hallway. His feet kicked. I watched dispassionately as his body convulsed.” Eww!

Okay, I have to tell you the spilled brains are in the story “(225-50) Agnes,” originally published in “Perihelion,” 12-JAN-2015, which is the name of a giant asteroid heading toward Earth. Funny, how this was my least favorite story, yet it’s the one I can’t stop talking about. Some people will do anything, however despicable, to secure a place on a spaceship that will get them out of Dodge before the shit (er, meteor) hits the fan—at almost 50,000 kilometers per hour. I don’t like our fifty-year-old hero, the things he does to his own body, and the number of people he’s willing to kill in order to save his own skin.

“Agnes” is brimming with satire and wit as well as horror and depravity. Gotta love this:

“Humanity’s response to the (imminent) disaster was surprising. Instead of panicking, as was the general expectation, the people of Earth embraced Armageddon ... corporations typically saw it as an opportunity. They exploited the world’s end with an impressive array of products ... Fast food companies released apocalyptic tie-in meals and Asteroid burgers ... Conspiracy theories began to circulate that Big Business had engineered the asteroid’s arrival to boost flagging profit margins with the world’s governments. Construction companies were already bidding over redevelopment contracts for when the surface of Earth was habitable again, just like when Hurricane Katrina hit all those years ago—disaster capitalism on a cosmic scale.”

Ha! Disaster capitalism. Like ambulance-chasing lawyers, it’s unstoppable. So is human optimism, even in the face of an Extinction Event. Agnes, a mile-long piece of space rubble, is certain to hit with the power of so many nuclear warheads. “What it meant for humanity was that we had to vacate the premises long enough to allow the dust to settle or dig a hole deep enough to hide out underground until the all clear was given,” and neon-pink graffiti proclaims that the meek shall inherit the Earth, but our hero’s guess “is that once Agnes hits, there won’t be much left for the meek to inherit.” Odds of survival are better in one of the Arks, mega-sized space vehicles capable of housing millions of inhabitants. Trouble is, billions of humans will be left behind. Our evil narrator isn’t taking any chances. The surprise twist at the end is ... well, devilishly delightful.

Ayling has a rare gift for putting us in the point of view of sadists, monsters, and losers, and somehow getting us to care about them.

One of my favorites is a nerdy twenty-one-year-old nursing student named Ezekiel who falls in love with a Test Clone. (“Cynthia 2246,” originally published in “Perihelion,” 12-NOV-2013.) “It’s all in the handbooks,” our delightfully unreliable narrator explains. “They tell you what to expect, how to maintain professional boundaries,” and how to kill and resuscitate, over and over, their very-human-looking subjects. Ezekiel is supposed to remember that Clones “look like us, dress like us, talk like us, and behave like us, but that doesn’t make them any less artificial.”

These clones have a three-year life cycle, due to the stresses they endure, and end up incinerated like so much rubbish. One of them is named Cynthia. “I fell in love with her, her biologically engineered nose and ears, her borrowed memories and organically grown heart,” Ezekiel tells us—and I swear I don’t laugh at him.

All right. I laughed.

One scene in particular had me in stitches. Ezekiel starts writing a message to his mum, apologizing for his impulsiveness, then deletes it: “I can imagine how she’ll react, smashing her phone, praying for my eternal soul ... Rather than subject myself to that, I consider the alternatives ... rather than confess, and have her condemn me as a heretic, I’ll ignore her completely and let her learn about it online.”

For all the humor in the story, the missteps, the mishaps, there is an undercurrent that reflects social issues in our own world. Ezekiel is on a mission to kidnap someone less-than-human and get her to Scotland, where Clones have more rights. “The law was different there. The ruling party was Pro Clone. They were a tolerant government and known for the humane treatment of escaped non-humans.”

We meet another clone in “Silas Marvel Investigates,” a story that’s richly comic in a classic, noir-detective way. The widow of a recently murdered Clocker (and you’ve got to read this to see what a Clocker is) hires Silas Marvel Investigations to find the killer. Marvel is a futuristic Sherlock, but instead of Watson, he relies on the help of ex police forensics model Hollyz5218. After years of indentured servitude, Holly has been allowed to work as a consultant and carve a life for herself in the biological world. She’s also “in thrall to the old world exploratory charms of Marvel Investigations Inc.,” and so am I. Holly’s synthetic brain enables her to “analyze and process a crime scene in the time it takes for Marvel’s coffee to cool down.”

The dialogue is fun and witty, particularly between Silas and Holly. So, too, are the comments of a suspect under interrogation. Did she know she was dating a transgender AI whose florist work was a front for his real job as a hired killer? Yes. She knew. “People do worse things for money,” the suspect reasons, “and since the people he murdered were bad people, it felt to me like a social service he was providing, rather than a criminal enterprise he was involved in.”

Ayling’s love of music emerges in every story without being self-indulgent or intrusive. I love it that Marvel can build a case with facts to get a jury to convict a killer, but he can’t convince an AI that Prince Rogers Nelson was a musical genius. So Prince was a top-of-the-line six-stringer, an inimitable showman, a consummate bandleader. So he managed to blur the boundaries between race and gender. So what? His music sounds like rubbish to Holly. There’s no arguing with that. But there is a resolution, and this story ends on an upbeat note.

More satire, current events, social meddling, government interference, and dark deeds entertain readers in “Vegan State,” set in a future where unhealthy is outlawed, and eating meat is a crime punishable by death.

In “Skipper Jeremiah Dudd,” Jeremiah Dudd, “squatter, speed demon, and veteran Skipper extraordinaire,” becomes the unwitting test subject in an experiment conducted by ruthless Dr. Ignatius Welsh.

Here’s the low-down on other gems you’ll find in this book:

“The Engine” is a tale of triumph over rival mercenaries who try to steal from a low-life hero who’s crazy enough to risk his own demise before letting them lay hands on the prize.

“Smart Home Blues” is hilarious. Originally published in “Perihelion,” 12-NOV-2015. The premise is unusual: not a person, not a robot, but a home—a Smart Home—is kidnapped and held for ransom. Another sketchy character (Ayling depicts them so so well!) takes another sketchy job: “Are you available for work? Fancy a spot of home invasion? What about a kidnapping or a high profile ransom? The price is negotiable. The target is specific. It has to be sentient. It has to be an AI.”

Unexpectedly, a derelict woman is the world’s best computer hacker. When she employs her usual methods to get to know an AI, better, she opens a Pandora’s box of memories. Social and political innuendos make us laugh, but woven into the comedy of errors, there’s a cautionary tale on the cost of health care and the price one man is willing to pay for a family member’s cancer treatment. Sad stuff, but well written.

“Bodies” features a great villain, Eddie the Dog, and a very enterprising protagonist, Prescott O’Hara, captain of the Leadbelly. O’Hara takes a routine job transporting cargo across the galaxy, but one complication after another turns it into the job from hell.

“A Dish Best Served” begins forty years after a ship of aliens came “thundering out of the sky, trailing fire and black smoke,” then flattening buildings and killing innocents. The devastating impact leaves horror, despair at the wreckage and lost lives, and divided opinion: some thought the “Extras,” surviving aliens from the ship, should be tried and imprisoned. Others thought it wasn’t their fault, “not like they were drunk driving or anything,” just that their engines failed. “They were just passing through, on their way to a different system.” Internment camps were set up. “There was head scratching from politicians. The right-wing loony contingent wanted them deported. Where to exactly none of them were able to clarify.”

The "Extras" were quarantined until deemed non-contagious—“The idea was they should be segregated and policed in isolation with the minimum of fuss and minimum of cost”—then they had to be housed, fed, and integrated into human society.

There’s a lynching, and a home invasion. Obadiah Wickes is cleared of all charges of any crime committed against an Extra, because local law enforcement are complicit, and because he has good reason to hate Extras: his own parents died when that ship “sucker-punched the hilltops,” flattening people as well as homes.

There’s also a robot, one of the best in all of science fiction. “He wore a black woolen greatcoat and his name was Bob.” I don’t know why, but the incongruity of that name with the elegant figure in polished black high boots, manning the gate of the Wickes mansion, just cracks me up. “Bob was a state of the art security bot. He was programmed to know Kung Fu,” I’m laughing again, and is “more than adequate defense against any would be intruders.”

Bob does a lot of cool stuff in this story. The ending is brutal, but just.

The darkest story, for me, is “Verdict.” A man is arrested, tried for murder, and executed live on television. Archie was innocent. His brother, private investigator Brady Harris, will unmask the real villains and their motives, but that won’t bring his brother back.

Ayling brings to every story a voice that is uniquely his. No matter who the narrator is, the observations are smart, sardonic, piercing and probing. I’ve read all these stories twice. Trust me, they’re all good. (“Northern Futures,” Mark Anthony Ayling, Lillicat Publishers)

source: Goodreads

Mark Anthony Ayling

was born and raised in St Helens, near Liverpool in the northwest of England, where he spent his formative years reading horror, fantasy, science fiction stories, and comics and listening to as much decent music as he could possibly get his hands on. He eventually went to university to study English Literature and French and later decided to complete a diploma in nursing. Mark is happily married (most of the time) and has a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. He spends whatever spare time he can salvage writing stories (often late at night), rearranging his record collection, going to watch live music, attending rugby league games, and watching films. Northern Futures is his first collection of short stories.

Lillicat Publishers

is an award-winning indie publisher of science fiction and fantasy, as well as mainstream fiction and biographies. Our titles include the reader acclaimed anthologies in the Visions Series of speculative short stories, available in paperback from our on-line store.

Our primary genre is Science Fiction, although good speculative fiction comes in many forms. We also are interested in Fantasy and Mainstream fiction. No Erotica.

The editor, Carrol Fix, has been on medical leave, sad to say. She has published some of my all-time favorite authors, and most of them happened to have short stories published in Perihelion Science Fiction ezine as well.

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Carrol Fix

writes and edits for Lillicat Publishers. She is the editor of the Visions Series, science fiction short story anthologies describing human exploration of space that includes Visions: Leaving Earth and Visions II: Moons of Saturn. She was an editor for The Future is Short: Science Fiction in a Flash, Vol. 1, and the biography, Sunshine & Shadow: Memories from a Long Life. Carrol is a short-story author and novelist whose science fiction work includes the award-winning novel, Mishka: Book One of the Quadrate Mind. She is currently writing the second book in the Quadrate Mind Series, while working on a young-adult fantasy novel, Worlds Apart. Her most recent short stories appear in Visions: Leaving Earth, The Future Is Short: Science Fiction in a Flash, and Perihelion Science Fiction Online Magazine. A former computer consultant who has lived in six different states, Carrol currently resides near San Diego, California, USA. [email protected] http://www.lillicatpublishers.com http://www.mishkabook.com

Thank you for reading!

"Keangaroo,"

because Kean sounds like Kane (not keen, hint, hint)

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