Tag: We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice

SFF, Short stories

Year’s Best Aotearoa SF&F 2019

OJ

I have a new story out! Well, it’s an old story actually. “We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice” was originally published by Strange Horizons last year, and its creepy creepy bears have shot to the top of my own personal favourite stories.

So when Marie Hodgkinson of New Zealand’s Paper Road Press decided that she was going to put together the very first volume of Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy I knew precisely which story I was going to send in. Given that New Zealand is hosting WorldCon next year, the time has come for an anthology series of this sort – it’s a great idea to showcase local talent to our soon-to-be visitors! And I knew with Marie publishing it the result would be outstanding. Though I say that with bias – Marie and Paper Road have published my stuff before, namely my SJV award-winning novella The Ghost of Matter, about famous Kiwi scientist Ernest Rutherford.

Fittingly for my creepy bears, the first volume of YBANZSF&F was launched on Halloween, and I was down in Wellington for the event. Even did a reading, so that was exciting (in a nerve-wracking sort of way). Being launched at the same time was a novella from a mate of mine, Andi C. Buchanan. Their book is called From a Shadow Grave, and it is outstanding. Andi also has a story in the Year’s Best  anthology, as do a number of other fantastic Kiwi writers, including A.J. Fitzwater, Mark English, J.C. Hart, Sean Monaghan, M. Darusha Wehm and more! And just look at that gorgeous cover by Emma Weakley…

Horror, SFF, Short stories

We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice

OJ

I’ve a new story out! “We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice” is free to read over in this week’s edition of Strange Horizons. It’s a climate horror story about bears and lies.

It’s an odd mix of fantasy and fact, this one. Clearly, ghost bears the size of houses are not prowling over the ever-less-frozen north of the Americas. But I like finding interesting new ways to write about science so folded in with all the gore and mayhem are bits of biology and climate, and sprinkled through the whole are links to science news stories from journals like Science and Scientific American. The articles inform the story, so you can read them if you want but the mere presence of the titles in the text should clue you into context if you don’t want to follow the links.

I wrote it in cold rage a few months back, after seeing that terrible video of the starving polar bear. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it was either swallow down all my bile (which didn’t seem to work, apparently spite concentrates in small spaces) or spit it out and make other people suffer too. Fair warning, this one’s really dark. Strange Horizons lists content warnings before each story, and this hits quite a few of them. As you can see from the opening snippet:

Look at what we woke.

We feed them lies and watch them burn for it.

Koala bears rarely run during bush fires. Their instinct at danger is to climb up into canopy, where the leaves are shot through with eucalyptus oil, and flammable. They cling to the trunk with charred paws when it begins to burn, the thin bark catching easily and falling off in flaming strips. It sets their fur alight.

They die screaming. ….