(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes)
Münstereifel was the forest where one couldn’t help but feel watched. Despite the stodgy old growth being stuffed into a pocket of Germany, the sensation was not like being a grim fairy tale child wandering between dark trees with glowing beastly eyes all about. No, the eyes were far more ethereal, and for Kanga more frightening. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 26 minutes)
A dark cloud would be just one more uncomfortable bump on any transoceanic flight, but the pilot and copilot couldn’t see it or detect it with their instruments. Even the normal filters of first class team recycling travel, which kept out the riff and for a minor additional fee the raff as well, could do nothing against this particular phenomenon. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 31 minutes)
The night sky was beautiful, almost nauseatingly so. There was purple, orange, and blue in great drifting clouds. Nebulae, but they were supposed to be impossible to see from Earth. The Milky Way was there, under them, everything out of place but rapturously so, the celestial bodies nuzzling each other like puppies in a pile. Continue reading
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…
(reading time: 1 hour, 6 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 5 hours, 16 minutes)
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Competitive Recycling in the Fifth 1990s
by
Blaine Arcade
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
Everett finds himself trapped underground, prisoner of a most peculiar family, missing their sanity as well as a few other pieces…
(reading time: 54 minutes)
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
Well, they aren’t quite blurbs, given that these stories are, you know, short, but now that we’ve got descriptions for our book series, books, novella/novelette series, novellas, and novelettes 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 some horror. All of my stories are available here and free to read, so please check them out if you’re interested. Happy reading!
Jesus has come to town in his big black SUV. He says it’s time for the rapture. The only problem is that this is white Jesus, and he isn’t so friendly.
Hot off adding blurbs to all my book series, standalones, novella/novelette series, novelettes, and short stories 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.
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 standalone novels and my gamebook, with book series blurbs, novella blurbs, novelette blurbs, novella/novelette series, and short story descriptions found here.
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
(reading time: 5 minutes)
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
(reading time: 1 hour, 49 minutes)
The Deal
The entrance to Peako Dagyvr’s workshop, deep in the stony crevasse of Crosstahl, was sealed off in a most unusual manner. The original door was gone, its frame filled by uneven stones that were held together by a bright, almost luminous, blue adhesive. This barrier had a weak spot, an eye drifting in the adhering slime, but it kept on the interior side. That meant it had to watch everything happening within, occasionally dodging a dagger as it was tossed across the chamber.
Even in the relatively short time since Captain Rob had taken the new recruit Alast there to purchase a weapon, Peako’s output had increased significantly. The walls had always had very little empty space, with shields, spears, and war forks hung everywhere, some even modified into braziers to light the place. It was much more cluttered now, the space shrunk by shields overlapping, like the dermal disorder of a scaly beast. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 