Tag: Apocalypse

Flash: Pizza and Movie Night

Erin Penn

7726129 © Alexandros Chamilakis | Dreamstime.com

“Pizza and movie night!” Jae belly flops on the sofa beside me.

I nod happily, reaching for my phone to order when it buzzes with an incoming text and then an emergency alert. I’m afraid to look but swipe it out of habit.

*Zombie apocalypse*

I show it to Jae.

“Nooooo,” they moan rolling over to reach for their ever-present machete, “It was pizza night.”

“Maybe we can end it quick?” I said hopefully, walking over to where we store the sawed off shotguns.

“Let’s head to Pizza Guy and Fries first and make sure they are okay.”

Few things were more important to Jae than pizza, and if I was honest, me too, so I planned out the route in my head.

(first published 1/26/2021; words 123)

Pizza and movie night series
Pizza and Movie Night (2/21/2021)
Pizza and Movie Night Part 2 (3/7/2021)
Mop Up Part 1 (Pizza and Movie Night Part 3) (4/4/2021)
Mop Up Part 2 (Pizza and Movie Night Part 4) (4/18/2021)

Visitor at Movie Night (Pizza and Movie Night – A Flash) (5/23/2021)

Author Spotlight: Larry N. Martin

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

Larry N. Martin is part of the Gail Z. Martin and Larry N. Martin writing team. Together they have created the steampunk Jake Desmet Adventures, the urban fantasy monster hunter Mark Wojcik – a mechanic out of Pennsylvania, the post-apocalypse Wasteland Marshals, the historic fantasy steelworker Joe Mack, and I am going to stop there for brevity. I know there is more; this team is so prolific they have their own imprint: Sol Publishing … and they still create works for other medium and small presses. 

For the most part, Ms. Martin runs the social media and marketing end of the post-production while Mr. Martin takes care of the editing and uploads. Watching them churn words is like watching a waterfall, the magic never ends.

Even with all of that, Mr. Martin creates books on his own including the fantasy The Splintered Crown and the science fiction novel Salvage Rat.

Of all the many genres he works in, I’m going to say Mr. Martin loves Steampunk the best. He even cosplays in steampunk at conventions. I’m not sure it’s his favorite genre to write in, but his eyes sparkle the most when he gets on the Steampunk and Costuming panels.

Flash: Burn the World

Erin Penn

Photo by Idea go from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Staring out at the burning world, the red blaze sinking into his dark skin, the warrior grinned as the ancient quote from Genghis Khan came to his mind, “It is not sufficient for me to succeed. All others must fail.” While Damdin had not yet succeed to his full sufficiency, those before him had surely failed.

Viking. Such a perfect term. To raid, to go on a quest to pillage, rape, and burn. While those cowering in their homes associate the term with white men in flowing blonde hair on the covers of the bodice rippers from yesteryear, the term applied to anyone who participated in those types of activities, if he remember rightly, and considering he taught history for over a decade, he did.

Now he and those who have joined him created a new Viking history, a new Mongol Horde as they leveled what is left of the false society. Burn everything to the ground and start over.

The aliens started the process, taking down the centers of commerce with strange weapons, destroying and changing everything they touched, before those who had believed their false claims of “coming in peace” turned the tide with even stranger weapons created by mad scientists reverse engineering stolen technology. None of the scientists started mad, but by the time they had worked on the creations enough to understanding them, all of the scientists were mouth-frothing insane.

He and his band will finish what the aliens had initiated, while watching the thousand falling chunks of starstuff from the aliens’ failure steak across the sky each night as they celebrate their victory in the arms of captured women.

“Damdin, Elba has sent a messenger to negotiate.”

“Is she pretty?” the war chef asked without turning around, knowing if the messenger had been male no report would have been made. His aide had been with him since the beginning.

“If you like pale-skinned, thin women used to sleeping in soft beds.”

“Brand her, feed her, and put her in my lean. Tomorrow we take Elba. Either they will offer us their soft bellies or we will slit them.”

The nineteen year old, a student from Damdin’s teaching times and disciple since the burning times had begun, ran to accomplish precisely that with no further acknowledgment, his booted footsteps fading quickly.

Once satisfied that the false dawn his raiders had made will shimmer on the horizon all night, reminding the town of Elba of their coming doom, Damdin retired to his lean-to to see what Elba deemed worthy to distract him from 30,000 souls they sheltered. Souls he would bend to his will on the morrow.

(words 440; first published 8/25/2019)

 

Author Spotlight: Elisa Hansen

Erin Penn

Book Cover from Amazon

Editing can be a long journey, and I started the journey with Elisa Hansen over a year ago when I first read her “The Company of Death” and told my boss at Falstaff Publishing I wanted the book. During that time we did a minor rewrite, a couple other editing passes, brought on new staff at the publisher, and dealt with bottlenecks in getting books out the doors into hands. Also during that time I got to know Elisa Hansen as a person. And she is a pretty awesome person.

On one hand, she is a vlogger about Vampires of all sorts. Check out her youtube channel “The Maven of the Eventide”. Wonderfully camping, she explores books and movies on this long-running vlog (four years and counting). If it has fangs, it is fang-tastic for her channel. (Also includes her announcement about this book.)

On another hand, she is a mother of a soon-to-be expanding family. Her present spawn is adorable in his madness, and I think present-parasite-soon-to-be-outside-body shall be equally entertaining in her ability to tear through the house faster than the progenitors. 

A third hand is devoted to her writing career, with the publication of her second book this week and working on other vlogs.

Want to get to know this awesome lady too? Her website is here. And her patreon is here. If you are into vampires and camp, I highly recommend her vlog. If you just want to dive into an urban fantasy about Death (not humor-oriented), check out her book on Amazon (and other outlets).

Geeking Science: Seed Banks and Bad-ass Scientists

Erin Penn

By Frode Ramone from Oslo, Norway – DSCF0896.jpg,
CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61440340

 

Bad-ass Viking Scientists. That’s how I think about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Arctic World Archive. Norway is a culture who looks at the world dying and rebuilding as a given – and have prepped to jump start the next cycle after Ragnarok. The whole world is betting on them pulling it off.

Around the world, over 1,700 seed banks exist as a stop-gap between starvation and human stupidity – with Svalbard being the final line in the snow. At this time, 95% of humanity’s food comes from 30 crops. Monoculture agriculture at its scary finest. In case something happens like (cough) climate change (cough) making some of the food crops non-viable, humans (in an amazing feat of intelligence) have set aside historic seed for biodiversity.

Doing so wasn’t easy. Bad-ass Scientists around the world have died saving this hedge in the seed banks against humanity’s bone-headiness.  The St. Petersburg gene bank faced sure destruction during the siege of Leningrad from hungry citizens and a starving German army. The Russian scientists locked themselves in their vault, and some died waiting for the conflict to end surrounded by grain seed they could have eaten, hungry but never hungry enough to compromise their principles.

And just in case you were thinking this is all a pie-in-the-sky-someday-thing, in 2015 the first withdrawal of seed occurred. The Syria Seed Bank had been heavily damaged in a civil war and forced to be abandoned, so they asked for their wheat and barley seeds back. They had sent extra off to the Bad-ass Vikings for storage in the Doomsday Vault, as it is nicknamed. Doomsday just came a little early for them. The Bad-ass Farming Scientists then planted that defrosted seed in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and in Morocco – since home still wasn’t safe, and collected the seed, splitting it between their hopefully future rebuilt seed bank and the Doomsday.

Not having enough to do, the Viking Scientists decided to add a Data vault as well. They came up with data storage materials that can last 500 to 1000 years and offered their services to the world. They aren’t asking for the originals, just copies of what countries want to save. Like the golden record of Voyager.

“The data will remain searchable online … as long as the internet and servers are still functioning.” (Jones 2017)

A chilling thought, not to have the internet. But that is what Doomsday Vault is about. Against just that eventuality. Brazil and Mexico sent the first materials, Brazil from a collection of more than 300 life stories recorded between 2006 and 2016, and Mexico copies of documents dating back to the Inca period. 

addition 2019 – Since the initial deposit in 2015, other government and governmental agencies has sent in material. Such as manuscripts form the Vatican Library and the European Space Agency recording of data acquired by a 1991 satellite. (Piql 2019)

Scientists united around the world, picking up keyboards, digging holes, saving genetic material, and grinning with bloody teeth against humanity’s self-destructive tendencies and a planet who both is our mother and ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Geeking Science – Hear the Nerds ROAR!

 

Bibliography

Duggan, Jennifer. “Inside the ‘Doomsday’ Value.” Time. (undated). https://time.com/doomsday-vault/ – Last viewed 12/2/2019.

Jones, Rhett. “Norway Gets a New Doomsday Vault That Stores Data.” Gizmodo. 2017 April 2 at 11:37 AM. https://gizmodo.com/norway-gets-a-second-doomsday-vault-that-stores-data-1793935778 – Last viewed 12/2/2019.

McCoy, Daniel. “Ragnarok.” Norse Mythology for Smart People. 2012-2019. https://norse-mythology.org/tales/ragnarok/ – Last viewed 12/2/2019.

Wikipedia. “Svalbard Global Seed Value.” (undated). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault – Last viewed 12/2/2019.

Addition 2019

Piql.com. “Arctic World Archive receives more world treasures.” 2019 February 21. – Last viewed 12/2/2019. (note – Piql oversees the Arctic World Archive)