One of the things I’ve been focused on recently is planning stories for the latest Kickstarter from Zombies Need Brains. These fellows have been doing multiple anthologies every year for a decade. They get a few well-known anchor authors for each collection, then once they’re funded, they do a call for submissions so that Joe Random Author can be published alongside the big names.
Not going to lie - that’s a really cool setup. They get a lot of submissions, of course. So the goal is to pay attention to what they want and develop a solid story that isn’t a cookie-cutter version of a standard plot.
This year’s titles are “Artiface & Craft”, “Dragonesque”, “Game On!”, and “Solar Flare”. I’ve got a story I’m plotting out for “Dragonesque” already, but I’d like to submit something different for “Artifice & Craft”.
The guidelines for that anthology state “… we invite writers of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and other speculative fiction to spin their own tales of works of art that have been enchanted, hexed, charmed, or cursed.”
Now, there are two obvious routes to go with this one.
The first is your standard magical enchantment story. Whether it has horror aspects (a la Hans Christian Andersen’s “Red Shoes”) or not can be up in the air. In any case, you have a standard story of witches, wizards, and magical art where something goes spectacularly wrong (or right!)
The second is your standard horror story. Whether it’s a possessed car, a haunted statue, or something straight from the realms of the SCP Foundation, you’ve got something that’s straight up going to give you nightmares, and you’ll probably never even know why. That door in an abandoned building that leads to an endless staircase descending into uncharted depths? No explanation, it simply is - and you have to deal with it, or (more likely) die trying.
When I started contemplating this, though, I found myself thinking of Clarke’s Third Law.
So - how could I write a science fiction story about a cursed item?
I bounced around a couple of ideas before I settled on one, more because of the setting and characters than anything else.
The idea of “cursed technology” led me to think of Ray Bradbury and “The Martian Chronicles”. The idea came to me that in a wide universe, men might encounter technology from some ancient race. Technology that they can barely recognize, and which they definitely do not understand. Michael Flynn’s excellent novel “The January Dancer” touched on that idea.
I read a bit earlier this month about H. P. Lovecraft, warfare, and the difference between “eerie” and “strange”. Meld that with thinking of “The Martian Chronicles” and some old ideas of mine, and a picture of a dead world came to mind. Someplace that once lived, but is now empty of life (eerie). Someplace where something completely incongruous (strange) would appear for some reason.
A painting, perhaps. A living painting, a mural, the remnant of ancient technology. At first, there would be questions about its purpose. An animated backdrop? The playback of a recording? A soothing screen saver on an alien display?
That’s what it would look like, at least. At first. Something that has never been found before; something that is exhilarating, breathtaking, and of incredible value - until its true capabilities are revealed, and it becomes something priceless.
So I have the germ of an idea. An abandoned world. A living mural.
How do we make it grow? Easy. I need to get people there.
What kind of people would be likely to encounter something like this? Alien treasure hunters, maybe. Some sort of expedition. A private investor or a government team. Maybe even someone who’s found it once, leading a team back to secure it.
All of those are possibilities, but they all have a problem. Whoever it is, they will be looking for something like this. They will be expecting trouble. Even if they don’t plan for trouble from the artifacts themselves, they may have to deal with pirates, brigands, indigenous aliens, competing looters… er, archaeological teams…
No, I wanted someone who was unprepared to encounter the alien.
Hmm. Alien. “Alien”.
A distress signal?
Picture a tramp freighter, making its way through space. Having to take a detour for some reason - a rare solar flare, perhaps, causing them to re-route. On a longer than usual journey, on a seldom-traveled path, they encounter a faint distress signal. Their captain, normally a hard man focused on the bottom line, might be unwilling to pass - but the ship’s logs show the receipt of the signal, and questions will be asked at the next port o’ call; questions he would rather not answer.
So, reluctantly, the ship turns, heading for a dead world where something waits. An alien artifact. Something that was designed to be helpful. Something which was also tuned for an intellect very, very different from man… so who knows what it will do when it encounters the crew of a tramp freighter, tired and lonely, billions of miles from home and yearning for their voyage to be done?