Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Flash in the Pan?
    A Flash in the Pan?
    A Flash in the Pan?
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    A Flash in the Pan?

    By Mark Webb

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Ever wonder why aliens don't visit Earth? Or what coffee a demon likes to drink? Or how bureaucracy could really screw up a grand space adventure? A Flash in the Pan? is a collection of speculative flash fiction and short stories that answers these questions and more.

    The collection includes the following speculative fiction stories:

     

    Flash fiction
    - Shipwrecked (500 words)
    - The Gloriously Cunning Plan (500 words)
    - Make Mine a Macchiato (500 words)
    - Striking Twice (500 words)
    - In the Service of the Public (500 words)
    - The Devil Wears Ugly Shapeless Garments Covered in Dog Hair (500 words)
    - The Regersek Zone (500 words)

    - Authentic Empathy (500 words)

    - Narration Blues (500 words)

    - Indistinguishable from Science (500 words)

     

    The "50 worders"

    - Beware Antipodean Shores (50 words)
    - Hindsight is a Bitch (50 words)

     

    Short stories
    - Where Everybody Knows Your Name (3,200 words)

    - Wefting the Warp (4,300 words)
    - Showdown (5,100 words)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Webb
    Release dateAug 18, 2024
    ISBN9781301998791
    A Flash in the Pan?
    Author

    Mark Webb

    Mark is a part time writer and full time Servant of the Public. His mid life crisis took the form of writing speculative fiction at a very slow pace. While sceptical of the results, his wife maintains that it was probably a reasonable course of action considering (1) the relative low cost of the exercise and (b) the cliched alternatives. Mark lives in Sydney, Australia.

    Read more from Mark Webb

    Related to A Flash in the Pan?

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Sub Mission

      Mar 23, 2022

      Sub Mission
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Whale Who Will Come Soon

      Sep 8, 2021

      The beachfront narrows to an ocherous ribbon, belted by blue, above and below. After a while, a handful of shearwaters appear in the air above the Cat Balou. The birds flash around us; like knife-thrower tricks at a circus. Diving through the water,

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Why We’re Drawn Into Darkness

      Oct 10, 2019

      Robert Macfarlane grew up obsessed twith climbing mountains and nearly died on several occasions as he scaled some of the world’s high peaks. He found a safer way to indulge his alpine passions, writing about the mystique of mountains. As someone dra

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Extraterrestrial

      Dec 1, 2019

      Extraterrestrial
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Starshift

      Sep 9, 2019

      Starshift
      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2023

      1. Wine-makers say it’s the complex flavorcreated by the singular terrain of place: the kinds of minerals in the soilfiltered through the soft pulse and coil of earthworms; the curl of fog that snakesaround blushed grapes like wisps of smoke; the tas

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Jan 5, 2022

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

      Sep 1, 2019

      The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Deluge Gallery

      May 30, 2024

      Deluge Gallery
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Animal Planet

      May 3, 2020

      Animal Planet
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels

      Feb 3, 2022

      The paradox of imagined apocalypses is that they’re always more about the present than the future. Here's a list of a few haunting and evocative titles. The post Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wisdom for The Future

      Dec 20, 2021

      Wisdom for The Future
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      When Worlds Collide

      Nov 6, 2020

      When Worlds Collide
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The World The Book Can Build

      Oct 13, 2021

      The World The Book Can Build
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Books

      Apr 22, 2024

      Books
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Water Believes What We Cannot

      Nov 1, 2020

      I wrote this love letter in the spring, when there was pandemic, which was news, and weather, which was not. Now pandemic has been superseded by police brutality, the American presidential election, and wildfires. The unknowns, the unknowable, accumu

      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Stars And Bones

      Jan 26, 2022

      Stars And Bones
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Children Of Ruin

      May 22, 2019

      Children Of Ruin
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lucy Corin Picks Up Where Virginia Woolf Left Off

      Apr 14, 2022

      The episodes of The Swank Hotel are weird because the world is weird. And the world is even weirder when the person you love most on earth might be dead but you still have to go to work. The post Lucy Corin Picks Up Where Virginia Woolf Left Off appe

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Everyday Wonder

      Aug 5, 2024

      Everyday Wonder
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Caves Of Qud

      Dec 23, 2024

      Caves Of Qud
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Taking Flight

      Oct 12, 2021

      Taking Flight
      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Flash in the Pan?

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Flash in the Pan? - Mark Webb

      Introduction

      Over the last dozen or so years I have been a semi-regular speculative fiction writer.

      My primary publication channel has been Antipodean SF, an Australian speculative fiction website devoted mostly to flash fiction and maintained by long time industry veteran Ion Newcombe (Nuke to his friends).

      Nuke established Antipodean SF back in 1998, an early pioneer in online publishing (back before most of us knew how to even spell internet, let alone publish to it!). It’s amazing how many Australian speculative fiction authors have Antipodean SF as an early publication credit. These days, I help out with the magazine by producing a simple eBook edition each month and very occasionally publishing a story.

      In between the Antipodean SF publications, I also have had a couple of short stories published in other venues.

      A Flash in the Pan? is a short collection of the pieces that I’ve published. It is designed to give you a sense of my writing. You can also see the evolution of my writing style over the years.

      The stories are divided into three sections. Part 1 is the flash fiction, stories generally between 500 and 1,000 words. Part 2 is a couple of much smaller stories - Nuke occasionally likes to set the challenge of a very short story. And Part 3 is a 3,000 word short story I wrote for a special edition of Antipodean SF plus two other short stories.

      Each story has a brief author’s note, which gives some context for the story.

      I hope you enjoy this sampler plate of some of my published short stories. If you like these, make sure you come back for more!

      Mark

      August 2024

      Part 1: The Flash Fiction

      Shipwrecked

      Danic sat humming mindless , tension-relieving tri-harmonies. Being chosen as Advocate for Intervention was an honour, but as the years rolled on the Breenic seemed further away than ever from deciding how they would interact with humanity. Direct contact had been ruled out almost as soon as they arrived. The most advanced civilisations on the planet still sailed their seas in wooden boats. No, the Breenic had too much experience in inadvertently ruining civilisations to act in haste.

      In their long voyage amongst the stars, the Breenic had refined their methods for dealing with primitive natives like humanity. They could leave behind technological marvels that would reveal themselves when the human race sufficiently matured. Alternatively, if humans were deemed too great a threat—well, aggressive races had met a premature end before. But never before had the Breenic been so divided on the fate of a civilisation. For every observed act of tyranny, there was one of benevolence. For every brutal impulse, a creation of stunning beauty. They could foresee the human race adding to galactic art and culture. They could also imagine them unleashing a firestorm of destruction. The Consensus was torn.

      Even by their long-lived standards the Breenic had dallied here, and many were eager to begin the journey again. Without Intervention, their best scientists predicted that humanity was centuries away from slipping the bonds of their solar system. Danic felt his opportunity to convince the Consensus evaporating. Influenced perhaps by the antics of the race he had spent the past decade investigating, he decided to risk all in one final, desperate roll of the dice.

      He suggested a test.

      His fellow Advocates were intrigued. They knew that such a test was the only way Danic could sway the Consensus, but they also knew it would bring quick resolution. And quick resolution was what the Breenic now yearned for.

      Once decided, it was the effort of a moment to shipwreck one of those quaint wooden ships. Marooned with little hope of rescue, the behaviour of the stranded humans would decide the watching Breenic.

      Danic watched with mounting hope as the valiant commander headed off on a perilous journey to summon help, and revelled in the courage with which the remaining crew faced their fate.

      But that hope soon melted like ice exposed to the searing light of an approaching star. Bravery twisted into ruthlessness. Power corrupted, and soon acts of stunningly savage barbarism left the Breenic reeling. Only some small acts of courage and sympathy for the suffering of the abused prevented the Breenic bringing humanity's creeping evolution to an abrupt stop.

      Mourning lost potential, the Sol system was marked on interstellar charts with signs that warned, here be dragons. As the fleet moved on and Danic prepared for the big sleep, he looked back at the slowly fading light of Earth—marooned and set adrift from all other intelligent life—and hoped that the fate of that shipwrecked crew did not represent, for humanity, prophecy.

      Author’s Note

      This was the first story I had published in Antipodean SF, in issue 163 (January 2012). I originally wrote Shipwrecked for an 800 word writing competition in mid 2011, but didn’t finish it by the deadline. When I first decided to submit to Antipodean SF, I polished and cut it back to 500 words then sent it in. I still remember the excitement of getting the acceptance from Nuke and the interesting experience of working through editorial notes on my work.

      The story itself came from the unoriginal thought that if there are alien civilisations out there, why haven’t they contacted us? Perhaps they’ve been warned away...

      The Gloriously Cunning Plan

      Second Lieutenant Sanders hovered in perfect equilibrium between oblivion and suffering. He longed to let go and allow the breaking waves of pain to drag him back into a sea of blissful unconsciousness. But a nagging sense of some important task left undone wouldn't let him rest. That, and the bloody distracting siren that someone insisted on blasting into his eardrums.

      One eye opened as a lifetime's experience of eyelid manipulation had led him to believe it would. The other was... sticky. Gummy—clearly refusing to toggle as required. Already feeling put upon, Sanders tried not to take this additional injustice personally.

      Activating muscles that protested being press-ganged into service, he raised a

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1