C. C. Blake's Sweaty Space Operas, Issue 3

By C. C. Blake

Rick Cave knows a thing or two about working with old friends, but when Wallach comes into his life dangling old debts over his head in exchange for a little delivery, Rick finds himself pressed into service. An old flame, mysterious agents of the Star Sultan, and the Secret Police stand between him and a clear shot out off this corrupt world. It will take smarts and courage to get out of harm's way.

Looking for patronage in his next race, Finster gets an offer he can't refuse: Drive for a Cracking Crew during one of their jobs an get a split. When the job involves a school bus and a highly secured schoolyard, Finster soon learns he may have bit off more than he can chew. He's driven into danger, but can he drive himself out of it?

C. C. Blake's Sweaty Space Operas is back for a third issue of fun adventures set on down and dirty science fictional worlds. Crime, horror, hopes, and fears mesh in these thrilling tales of men and women facing impossible odds because they have to. It's the biggest issue yet with over 12,000 words of fiction as well as Blake's take on why reading fabulist fiction from yesterday is a must in today's world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twice Told Tales II
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463937822

C. C. Blake

C.C. Blake has lived across the United States, starting in the suburbs of Detroit, to Massachusetts’ second largest city (Worcester) to the country’s seventh largest city (San Antonio, Texas, that is). He’s has a variety of jobs, working as a substitute teacher, the graveyard shift dishwasher at a haunted Denny’s, lab research monkey and teaching assistant at a second tier college. Currently, he works as an automation consultant for a chemical company on the Northeast side of SAtown (which isn’t as Hellish as it sounds). Blake’s most popular character, irrepressible adventurer Chuck Cave, has appeared in over two dozen stories, including the 2005 Man’s Story 2 Story of the Year Award winner “Chuck Cave and the Vanishing Vixen.” The character’s supernatural thriller stories (which began with the seminal “Cave and the Vamp”) are all being released as a part of Vampires2.com’s initial foray into e-books. These new versions are presented in expanded and revised versions, all are the author’s preferred texts. Be sure to collect them all! In addition to his pulp stories for the 2-Empire (Man’s Story 2, Vampires 2, Androids 2 and Paranormal Romance 2), Blake’s fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Unparalleled Journeys II (from Journey Books Publishing) and Fearology: Terrifying Tales of Phobias (from Library of Horror Press).

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C. C. Blake's Sweaty Space Operas

Issue 3

By: C. C. Blake

Blake's Take

There is something exciting about science fiction or speculative fiction or syfy or whatever the kids are calling it today. I don't mean the goofy space battles, either. Spaceships operating like World War II dogfighters aren't quite what I mean, which is funny for me to say since this story delivery vehicle sports the name SPACE OPERAS in its lengthy title.

Sure, I don't write heavy thoughtful hard science fiction by any stretch of the imagination. Neither will the stories I write for this magazine be appearing in the pages of either Analog or Asimov's digests. Those magazines and my desires are about as different as apples from Snapple. However, I do enjoy reading the stories in those magazines. I sometimes even venture into the contemporary world of sf novels. My interests lay more in reading the stuff I missed from the sixties and seventies instead of the stuff new to shelves. No real reason other than there was a mix of social consciousness and awkward fascination/dread about what was coming tomorrow that appeals to me more in yesterday's fiction than today's. Is this still a topic for debate in sf? Of course it is, but the stuff from the sixties and seventies is richer (or poorer, depending on your view; for me it's richer) given the perspective we have forty or fifty years down the line. Some of the stuff getting discussed back then is still pretty relevant today. The lack of ecological awareness rampant in John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, the soul wearying clock-watching society in Ellison's 'Repent Harlequin,' Said the Ticktock Man, the psychological breakdowns in Philip K. Dick's Maze of Death, and the racial insensitivities and tricky interplay between broadcast news and economic-political machinery found in a book like Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron . . . These are topics we still tackle at length and at full volume today.

However, discussion is not something we are prone to these days. Not much at all. Discussion is the nice word for what we aspire to, but instead we seem content to shriek back and forth waiting for our turn to speak. It's gotten pretty brutal, and visits to social media tend to make me suspect we are backtracking over years of what I had perceived as societal progress. Are we really? Hard to say. The days before the internet did not have comment threads, after all. The news is unreliable, and so many voices are clamoring for attention that the truths they have to share about how we are living and what we are doing as a species or a country seems to get drowned out by the need to express nonsense through clickbait creative typing. News stories are not getting buried by angry governments or suspicious saboteurs, they are getting overwhelmed by the public's need to know nothing more than a catchy title or byline. Vote for Deez Nuts. Save kids from burns caused by LED shoes. In fact, think of the children and eradicate anything offensive. Sanitizing the world to make it a better, cleaner place is a job for politicians. It is not the responsibility of writers and artists.

Books are where the weird and the unsettling need to thrive. Stories are the strange wine we need to sip, to help us understand where we are and where we are going, and I'd say science fiction is one of the more interesting vehicles for understanding it. The New Wave, the Cyberpunks, the DadaSpecFicker (sure, I made that last one up) show us where we were and where we were going, but here we are still on those same roads. Space opera, even. It's supposed to be escapist, but is it really? We can grapple with important issues in escapist vehicles, with the added buffer of a safe distance. I like to think the roiling heart beating underneath pulp fiction shows us the