lunchtime reading, free fiction online, fulcrum, gwyneth jones, stories

Mash Up Some Genres For Lunch

Gwyneth Jones, author of the fantasty-scifi-pop-music Bold As Love series, has put some of her short fiction online for free recently — plus some great essays, including the thought-provoking "Aliens In The Fourth Dimension." But my favorite story she's put online is the weird, gritty and unpredictable "Fulcrum," which is sort of a cyberpunk noir cowboy occult adventure story. It's the perfect thing to read right about now, to give you a jolt of insanity to help you get through the rest of your day.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot of "Fulcrum," but I will mention a few of the things that were cool about it. Its main characters, Orlando and Grace, are aliens who look just human enough that they have to keep reminding everyone that they're not human. There are also some hints that their sexuality doesn't quite work the same way as ours, including a great scene involving tea.

A lot of the story's "noir" comes from two thuggish guys who hang around the Kuiper Belt station, waiting to be shot out into deep space on a probably deadly prospecting run: Jack Solo and Draco Fujima. They both have virtual-reality sex bots that follow them around, and Jack's sex-bot, Anni-mah, is a quivering masochist. She literally follows him around asking him to hurt her, and it's disturbingly creepy. But then it's only much later that Jones reveals that "A softbot sextoy (and this was why the bots had been only a passing phase on earth) inevitably reflects the owner's secret identity."

There's a lot more twisted and unsettling but fascinating stuff — including a murder mystery and a weird quasi-creature that could be the most valuable object in the universe — in "Fulcrum." [Fulcrum by Gwyneth Jones]

10:00 AM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
947 views
13 comments

Comments

braak at 10:11 AM on 04/15/08
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Man, that is not a pleasant form in which to read a story.
Charlie Jane Anders at 10:24 AM on 04/15/08
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@braak: I didn't mind it, actually... it's true that she could afford to spend some of her fabulous earnings from writing SF on a new web designer, but whatevs.
Seth L at 10:39 AM on 04/15/08
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I'd rather buy the book, but thanks for twigging me to a new author!
braak at 10:39 AM on 04/15/08
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@Charlie Jane Anders: It doesn't matter. I have copied it into a word document, and well send it to my Kindle.

Bwah-ha-ha!
Rusty626 at 11:01 AM on 04/15/08
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Whoa! Excellent story. I don't usually enjoy short stories, since they often seem just a chapter from the novel the author hasn't finished yet. This one was excellently complete.
flexiverse at 11:23 AM on 04/15/08
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@Rusty626:
flexiverse at 11:27 AM on 04/15/08
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Don't Enjoy Short Stories?
My god.
Short Stories are the purest form of science fiction there is out there. It is the form where science fiction was and is created and exits.
If you've not read NightFall, The Nine Billion Names of God, The Sentinal, PKD and others from H.G. Wells etc..
You really shouldn't be reading this blog you aren't a true sci fi person.
I can't believe such philstines read this blog.
A sci-fi short is in effect a blockbuster film, just look at the PKD shorts.
Get a grip and get reading.
Gann at 11:50 AM on 04/15/08
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@braak: Saved the html and changed a few color/background settings. My eyesight's too precious.
Charlie Jane Anders at 12:21 PM on 04/15/08
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@Gann: Wow, I must have superhuman eyes... it really didn't bother me as much as it did you guys.
loosenut at 12:43 PM on 04/15/08
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I wrote a little Stylish style for that page if anybody firefox users want it:
[userstyles.org]
braak at 12:43 PM on 04/15/08
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@Charlie Jane Anders: I'm less bothered by the color scheme than I am by having to have to scroll down. If I have to read something like that for too long, I end up losing my place a lot.

Also, I like traditional, left-aligned text and paragraph breaks.

A vestige of my old eyes and their preference for books.
Tim Faulkner at 12:49 PM on 04/15/08
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The centered text was the worst bit.
RAHfanboy at 07:35 PM on 04/15/08
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@flexiverse: I agree totally. Shorts have to be much more tightly crafted than novels, make better movies, and anyone that says they don't like shorts probably doesn't read at all but just watches movies and TV.