Taxa Disaster (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Only finding fossils, we never suspected the flesh of the dinosaurs could’ve been so strange, could’ve climbed off whenever it felt like it and even borrowed our shape.  That is the forgotten clade thanazoa, but they know of us, thanks to communing with their fungus-like oracle Atropos.

A defeated villain resurfaces to abuse those predictions, her predatory eyes set on the future she thinks she is denied.  Discover a brand new world on familiar bones in this wildly speculative novella of the Triassic period.

Taxa Disaster

by

Blaine Arcade

‘Even if, one day, we had access to perfectly preserved fossils, a vital aspect of animal life would still elude our grasp. Behavior is almost entirely lost in the fossil record. Imagine the richness and strange wonder of animal life today. The eerie, ululating songs of whales, the elaborate middens of bowerbirds and the surreal spectacle of a peacock’s display could never be deduced from inanimate remains.

Likewise, some of the most spectacular sights of the past will never be seen, or even guessed.’

– All Yesterdays

Centipede

The insects were reluctant to touch it, and that reluctance continued on down to everything that could be called life. The fungi refused to take the first bite. The bacteria self-destructed rather than continue touching it for more than a moment. It was as if they knew what kind of will had inhabited it just one day prior. Continue reading →

Juicy Stardrop (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

Y2K threatened to destroy the world, all computers to go mad when the year ticked over to 2000, but a solution was found! Now the nineties play over and over again, and things just keep getting better! The guns are off the streets, the ozone hole is patched, the cops are tough on drugs, and competitive recycling is the number one sport in the world.

Life should’ve been perfect for one of its star players, Joey ‘Kanga’ Reuben, but after his best friend was taken from him in the middle of a match he could think of nothing else. It was all the work of those superhuman terrorists, the dastardly Millennials…

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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Competitive Recycling in the Fifth 1990s

by

Blaine Arcade

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With a robotically chauffeured limousine and enough free soda to raise the Titanic from the depths, nobody could call it a young man’s average Friday night. It was to be the fantastic Friday night characteristic of the reborn Rockford Rendezvous, and this trial run would culminate with the latest tour stop of the sexiest and most fashionable hologram to ever grace the stage and the drifting dust in the beams of the spotlight. Continue reading →

Eyelids of an Aristocrat

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

Quarantined?  Isolated?  What a perfect time to read a horror short story.  Everett finds himself trapped underground, prisoner of a most peculiar family, missing their sanity as well as a few other pieces…

Eyelids of an Aristocrat

by

Blaine Arcade

Overboard

This account exists, in various lengths, a hundred times over, and the world over at that too. I suspect this will be the longest version of it, and the most difficult to stuff in a bottle or box, but I’m going to bury it the deepest as well. It brings me joy to imagine the sense of reward of reading it to be directly proportional to the effort put in to acquire it. Continue reading →

Blaine’s Short Story Blurbs

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

Well, they aren’t quite blurbs, given that these stories are, you know, short, but now that we’ve got descriptions for our books and novellas available, it’s time to move onto these.

If you don’t know me, I’m Blaine Arcade, a speculative fiction writing hobbyist, and I write lots of out-there science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, and a little horror.  All of my stories are available here and free to read, so please check them out if you’re interested.  Happy reading!

Mary Annette’s Big and Beautiful Dog and Pony Show

Somewhere in the enchanting space between dinner theater and the wild west, performer Madrigal Mora finally gets his shot to use that ol’ dirt-kicking magic, but the owner has seen fit to cast him as the villain… Continue reading →

Blaine’s Novella Blurbs

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Hot off adding blurbs to all my books here on the blog, I figured I’d do the same thing for all of my novellas as well.  I write lots of wild speculative fiction, and it’s all freely available here, so please check out anything that looks interesting to you.

The Justice Backers Series

Justice Backers, Justice Backers: Secret Shuffle, and Justice Backers: The Lichen Calls

It’s the mid 2010’s, justice systems grow ever more rigid as crime takes to the internet.  With a little help from a crowdfunding website, a newly forged team of superheroes is looking to fill in the gaps, and provide their backers with some cool merch along the way!

Get all the updates straight from each hero as they take on vicious trolls, a trading card blackmail ring, and an ancient fungal entity with its own world wide web in this trilogy of novellas that also work together as a book. Continue reading →

Blaine’s Book Blurbs

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

In doing a little reorganizing around here I realized I don’t have blurbs up for my work.  I’m adding them in order to put my best foot forward, and collecting them here in this post along with links to the work.

Please give them a read, and if any of my speculative fiction nonsense sounds interesting you can check out the whole works here and free of charge.  This post is all my novels and my gamebook, with novella blurbs and short story descriptions found here.

Labor of Ruby and Pearl

A pact struck in the distant future, after mankind has colonized dozens of worlds and diversified into engineered subspecies, saw the death of guns and missiles.  With the new stigma of ‘farcoward’ weapons comes a return of the sword, shield, and bow.

Dana Rudolph is a grumpy travel writer hopping world to world, keeping to himself until date of publishing, when he is pulled into a vast, and surprisingly icky, conspiracy where he must do his best to protect the ‘appearl’, an anomalous learning gem that formed on its own inside a supercomputer.

Follow him and his sword as he teams up with an amazon and a leprechaun to dismantle the supposedly divine, forcing him to confront his traumatic past. Continue reading →

I Thought it was the Cat (horror flash fiction)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

I Thought it was the Cat

by

Blaine Arcade

Demoted for a raise. Strange I know, but it’s the only way to put it. They wanted me out of the building after the ‘softball incident’. I won’t go into detail about it other than to say they’re all sore losers.

It was mutual. I get an extra five K a year and I use it to pay the price of being near all our distribution centers on the East coast. Being equidistant from three truck stops in the middle of nowhere puts you, you guessed it, in the forgotten rusty storage shed of nowhere’s overgrown backyard.

No partner. Had one, but they also didn’t care for my gloating after the softball incident. So when I got there, town called Cracklebranch, my roommates were a pair of suitcases. Got a tiny house on the cheap. Couldn’t hear anything at night. No crickets. No birds in the morning either. Continue reading →