I wrote this story last summer when I was in the UK. I had been thinking about writing a story set in a Soviet city deep behind the Iron Curtain, but I just couldn’t bring myself to start (it seemed depressing).
Whilst I was in London, I visited the Barbican to have a look around and to take some photos, and as I was looking around at the brutalist architecture, I had the thought that perhaps the story shouldn’t be set in some grim Soviet city, but at a penal colony in the distant Alpha Centauri system, on Planet B. Once I made this change, injecting the science fiction element, I couldn’t stop writing.
I have serialised the story on this website, and the version available here is an earlier draft (complete in its own context), but the new ePub version is expanded, with several new chapters and greater sharpness. The ePub version is available here, for FREE!
The book tells the story of an ‘Other Human’ trapped in the penal colony known as The Ghetto, who is the mistress of a powerful military police commander. The story is very noir, and even neo-noir, with lots of tension, set against a dystopian and retro-futuristic backdrop.
Here’s what my long-term reader had to say about the story:
Of all the stories I’ve read for you over the years, this one is by far the most interesting from a literary perspective. Technoir is difficult to get right, and I’ve never seen it handled quite this way before (with the noir tone dominating the sci-fi elements). The concept/style was so interesting and well-handled that I would have read the story solely for that, regardless of any other aspects.
(The story is) Fascinatingly unique. I’d go as far as to say this may be my favourite story (of yours).
It is not a long story (36k words), but I have found that my sweet spot for this type of story (with my naturally inclined pulp-esque and minimalist tilt) is between 30k and 50k words. I find that I can pack a lot of story into a few words, which helps with pacing and keeping the tension high, which, for a tech-noir espionage thriller, is important.
It isn’t all noir darkness, though, and I packed a fair amount of solid sci-fi into this story as well, including interstellar travel with anti-gravity drives (powered by the exotic alien ore Gravitite, which is mined on Planet B), aliens, synthetic humans, and pan-galactic communication via entangled quantum computers.
I had a lot of fun writing this story. I am pleased with this story, and for lovers of dystopian / espionage / tech-noir / sci-fi, this will be right up their strasse.
Here are some of the photos I took at the Barbican (and one of the Lloyds building).
