The Stone Weta

I’ve a new story out! “The Stone Weta” is free to read in this month’s issue of Clarkesworld.

It’s one of my favourites of the stories I’ve written – although, to be fair, the new and shiny ones tend to be my favourite at any given time. But this one is special. Partly because it deals with science denial, which can always exercise me to ranting, and partly because although it started as a short story, it very quickly became apparent to me that this was a short story I could build a novel around. And so I am: my current writing project (one of them, anyway) is a sort of sci-fi thriller set in this world, and around this issue.

“The Stone Weta” is about climate change, and how scientists can work to preserve data that governments want deleted or repressed. It’s a fairly topical subject at the moment, given the pressure put on organisations such as the American EPA and the Australian CSIRO when it comes to climate science. And in this story, an underground network of women scientists are smuggling data, stashing it in different places around the world in case it disappears from where it shouldn’t. And they take the code names of weird natural creatures, these women, because that’s what they study and the lessons of biological survival given by these species are an inspiration for keeping resistance alive…

Hemideina maori

In winter, the mountain stone weta crawls into crevices, into cracks in the stone and it squats there, waiting. It is a creature of summer days and winter strengths, of cryogenic hibernation. When the world freezes about it, becomes a stretch of snow and ice and darkness, the stone weta freezes solid in its bolthole. Eighty-two percent of the water in its body turns to ice; the weta is climate in a single body, it is a continent broken off and geology made flesh.

When the weather warms the weta thaws, resumes its life amidst the stone monuments of the Rock and Pillar range…

Please check it out! And keep an eye on your elected officials, because some of them wouldn’t recognise the scientific method if it fell on them from a great height (or entrapped them in a poisonous circle of gympie gympie).