There was a sudden screech, claws scraping down the outside of the door. They’d found her.

“Did you say a cupboard?” barked Dimitrov.

“Be quiet,” Nakata snapped. “There’s one right outside the door. If you want to be useful, get a squad from Military down here.”

The noise from outside was setting her teeth on edge. Nakata shut off her communicator (technically a class five offence, but that only mattered if she survived) and put her hands over her ears. If she was lucky, someone would come to clear out this section before the monster out there figured out how to open the door.

There was a jaunty bing and the door began to slide open. Nakata dived for the button on her side to close it, but a massive clawed hand caught the edge of the door and forced it open.

She’d seen ’Racks on news reports, and in training videos, but nothing quite compared to having one towering over her in the flesh. It was forcing itself through the doorway, teeth and razor-sharp claws advancing while the grotesque bulk of its abdomen stayed out in the corridor. Nakata shrank into the furthest corner, though she couldn’t escape its reach. The rancid stench of slime and death clogged her lungs.

This was it then. Janitor Grade One Nakata, tragically killed in action during the first incursion of her first tour of duty. Another statistic in the unending war, mourned only by the brother she’d left planetside. Another piece of paperwork for Dimitrov to bitch about.

As the creature studied her with compound eyes, some desperate survival instinct kicked in and Nakata grabbed the only weapon she could use from one of the shelves, pointed it at the beast and squeezed the trigger.

The bottle of Shini-Brite gave a pathetic squeak as it squirted a thin stream of liquid in the monster’s face.

There was a single moment of stillness, during which Nakata closed her eyes and accepted her fate. There was a hiss and an almighty shrieking.

The liquid was fizzing where it had touched the ’Rack, the powerful grease-cutting action working overtime on the alien slime and burning through the skin beneath.  The monster was clawing at its own face, trying to clear the froth away.  Nakata gave another experimental squirt and it shrieked louder, scrabbling backwards out of the door, leaving behind the fresh scent of pine.

One corner of Nakata’s mouth lifted in a smile. There were plenty of bottles in here, so she grabbed several and jammed them into her belt before taking one in each hand. Then she stepped daintily through the door, giving the writhing mess in the corridor one last squirt for luck.

It was time to get back to work.

………………………………………………

Claire Simpson writes code by day and stories by night (or at least that’s what she claims to be doing when she’s actually on Twitter). Congenitally incapable of doing nothing, she also sews, crochets and favours a peaty single malt if you’re buying.

Story Competition

Sharpen your bluetooth-enabled iquill and dip into your jar of ink made from finest Jovian squid. On the next page we’ve a specially commissioned artwork from Dumfries artist Stephen Pickering, and we’d like you to write a science fiction story inspired by one or more of the panels.

The prize for the best story is £80, a print of Stephen’s artwork and a 4 issue digital subscription to Shoreline of Infinity. The story will be published in Issue 3, of which the winner will also receive a printed edition. We’ll also do an interview with the winning author to run alongside the story.

Maximum word count: 4,000 words.

To submit your story please do so via the website at www.shorelineofinfinity.com

The deadline is midnight UK time (GMT) of 21st December 2015.

Get cracking.

Interview: Charles Stross

Charles Stross is one of Britain’s best and most prolific science fiction writers. He emerged in the 1980s as a short story writer appearing in Interzone. Apparently he could often be seen at SF conventions wandering around with a half-finished manuscript under his arm. His talent and persistence paid off; his first novel,  Singularity Sky, was published in 2003 and nominated for a Hugo the year after. He has since released a whole string of books, each one stuffed with fizzing ideas, strong characters and an I-dare-you-not-to-turn-the-page attitude. We welcome Charlie to our first issue of Shoreline of Infinity.

Shoreline of Infinity: When and how did you first realise you were a writer? What influenced you and what drew you to SF?

Charles Stross: I’m not sure when I began writing. Certainly, one of my earliest memories was of my mother sitting at the kitchen table, hammering away on a manual typewriter, trying to write a novel. I think she only got about two chapters done—but somehow this imprinted on me the idea that books were written by people, and it was okay to write fiction.

Around age twelve I got an English teacher who set my class a fiction-writing project, to fill an entire exercise book with a story over the course of a term: I was one of the 10% who filled two books. At that time, the mid-to-late 1970s, Dungeons and Dragons was catching on in the UK and I was playing with friends. I borrowed the portable typewriter my sister’d learned to type on for writing up D&D adventure scenarios, taught myself to type, then somehow slid into writing fiction around the age of 14 or 15.

This was in the late 1970s to early 1980s. We made our own entertainment back then: we had 3 channels of TV in black and white, no VCR (let alone DVDs), no internet, no computers. On the other hand, I grew up surrounded by books ...

I never really thought about writing anything other than science fiction or fantasy. It was what I grew up reading, because it held my interest—remember, we’re talking teenaged males here. And what I wrote was pretty dire until I hit my twenties, much as you’d expect: the real function of literature is to explore the human condition through creative but plausible lies, and you can’t really do that until you’ve acquired at least a minimal grip on what the human condition is. SF and Fantasy offer the broader context of letting us examine how the human condition might be modified by—in the case of SF—possible but not actually existent circumstances, and in the face of fantasy, by frankly implausible conditions that nevertheless have  emotional (or mythic) resonance.

Together these genre categories belong to what critic John Clute labels the fantastika—that branch of literature that diverges from the ultra-mundane path that so much mainstream literary fiction took during the 20th century.

It’s worth bearing in mind that one of the functions of fiction is play. Much as playful activities provide young mammals with an opportunity to rehearse useful adult behaviours—if you’ve ever seen kittens or puppies play-fighting, there’s a big clue—fiction provides us, even as adults, with an opportunity to rehearse situations we’ve never experienced.

The trouble I had with the realist mainstream branch of literature when I was young was that it was rehearsing stuff that didn’t resonate with my life. You don’t have to live an adventure-filled life, hob-nob with aliens, or spend time in a haunted dungeon, to feel that a form of literature that barely admits the existence of the technological sphere—much less of any technology more abstruse than the television, telephone, or automobile—is somehow missing key aspects of how we live.

Let me give you a concrete example. Since I turned 18, our computers have grown in performance roughly a billion-fold, and we all think nothing these days of carrying around magic mirrors that give us access to the sum total of human knowledge at a finger’s touch. We use them for watching cute animal videos and for taking photographs of ourselves. One side-effect of this technology is that our governments spy on us in a manner that would have warmed the chilly hearts of any pre-1970s dictatorship’s secret police. Another is that we’re living through the most photographed time in human history, with about 20% of all photographs ever taken having been snapped in the past year, and 30-40% of them being uploaded to Facebook, which in turn has a few million computers permanently tasked with recognizing and tagging faces in those photographs, working out where they were taken and what this says about our physical social relationships ... and then using this insanely hypertrophied police state infrastructure to market consumer goods at us.

So we’re under Gestapo-on-steroids level surveillance all the time, through automated snitches that we pay for the privilege of carrying, and the main subjective consequence of this is that if we’re seen frequently with someone who just died, we get ads for wreaths and condolences cards.

SF gives me a tool for working through those issues, and in particular through the consequences of the third industrial revolution that I’ve lived through. The traditional literary realist-mode novel doesn’t do that. Most novelists don’t really get a start until they’re in their thirties (it’s that human condition thing, again: you have to have some experience of life before you can write about it), and by the time they’re into their second decade of writing they’re middle-aged—the typical point at which  engaging with change becomes difficult. If they spent their youth acquiring a pure liberal arts education, then they almost certainly missed out on the quantitative sciences and the engineering arts—and so they won’t be a very reliable guide to the world in flux around us.

Your first story, The Boys, was published in 1987 in Interzone. That, dare I say, is looking back nearly 30 years. Before that was the ‘Golden Age’ of SF in the 40s and early 50s, with writers such as Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein and pals. How would you compare being a Science Fiction writer in those earlier days, to when you started out, and for anyone new to writing SF today?

CS: I have no idea how to compare being an SF writer today with the 1980s, because the changes wrought by the arrival of the internet have been so pervasive and insidious that it’s hard to remember what things were like back then.

Circa 1982, roughly 40 SF/F novels were published in the UK per year, and one magazine (Interzone) was regularly buying and publishing short stories. Unless you lived near a town with a specialist bookshop who could buy grey-market imports from the USA, that was it. Much like trying to explain the era of two television channels in black and white to someone reared on cable TV and YouTube, it’s very hard to think yourself back into what it was like in those days.

We’ve seen such a massive flowering of written and visual media in our field that it’s hard to remember that it was a mostly-ignored ghetto back then; today geek culture is mainstream. A third of Hollywood’s movie output is tailored to the public appetite for SF/F; Dr Who is one of the BBC’s most watched TV shows by adults: if you turn on the TV and watch the adverts, you’ll rapidly see that around 80-90% of them employ computer-generated graphics and generally use them to portray impossibilities—often relying on SFnal imagery. While rhetorical devices (”that’s really science fictional, isn’t it?”) are part of the language of the TV or radio commentator or newspaper columnist, the reality is that we’re living in a science fictional age. We don’t have jet packs, food pills, or holidays on the moon, but we have 250mph atomic-powered trains (or at least the French do), sushi on every street corner, and the pocket-sized magic mirrors that connect us to the sum total of human knowledge.

One side-effect of this is that the markets for fiction are evolving furiously fast. We tend to forget that, although people have been experimenting with ebooks since the mid-1980s, the commercial market for them was less than 1% of all book sales as recently as 2009. (Today, 50% of my book sales are in electronic form.) Any advice I received when I was starting out is long since obsolete; any advice I could offer to a new writer starting out today will be of similarly questionable utility.