I’ve converted my entire library of science fiction stories… which admittedly isn’t much, but there’s still some good stuff in there.
- Bobs - One of my very early stories. It’s a humorous piece about the power of suggestion.
- Crimes of Personality - a nasty little story. It’s quite obvious that I was trying to illustrate a very specific point, yet the obviousness didn’t bother people as much as I would have thought. It’s a bit preachy, but its my most popular science fiction story.
- Code 2 - I wrote this a few years after “Crimes of Personality” and a few years BEFORE I even knew who Phillip K. Dick was. I can see now that this is clearly a ripoff of Minority Report… only I’d never even heard of Minority report when I wrote it. It’s basically a more action-packed version of the same point that I was trying to illustrate with “Crimes of Personality,” although the two stories are not related.
- The Drawing - Clearly, I have issues with old people. Clearly.
- Mother’s Day - Ahh, now THIS is a story! You could describe this one as “Dark Icon loves guns and explosions” or “What if Dark Icon had written Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, and you would be 200% correct on both counts. It is by far my favorite of the five stories on this list. Oddly enough, I got very little feedback from readers. Everyone loves “Crimes of Personality” much better than this one, and if you read both I think it’s obvious which one is the better tale. I guess people are into preachy scifi vs. action scifi. Who knew?
That’s it. Five stories. Almost enough for an anthology (if the stories weren’t so damned short). I don’t do a lot of science fiction (obviously), because it is the most difficult of the three genres that I write. With fantasy, you just make shit up and all you have to worry about is being consistent with your own rules. Horror is like fantasy, only in a setting that (usually) has to be realistic. Science fiction? To write GOOD scifi you have to know bit of science and be consistent not just with made-up bullshit, but with actual hard facts and laws of physics, too. Sure, you can BS your way through a lot of it, but the very effort of sounding like you know what the fuck you’re talking about is hard… so I guess that’s why I go for swords and magic over rocket-cycles and alien physiology.