C. C. Blake's Sweaty Space Operas, Issue 5

By C. C. Blake

In the far future, humanity has moved among the stars. However, they have brought along all their baggage in addition to the hopes and dreams of better worlds. Theirs are not bright, shiny, litter-free futures. They are lived in, sweaty space operas . . .

C. C. Blake's Sweaty Space Operas returns with a brand new pair of adventures set in futures that have dirt under their fingernails and blood on their hands.

After flushing himself through an alien waste system in a previous adventure left Rick Cave with neuronal damage, he gets the opportunity to go under the knife for an infinitesimal chance at recovery. When old enemies catch wind of this chance to take him out, he gets more trouble than he anticipates. There are bad trips, there are acid flashbacks, and then there is "Rick Cave's Nasty Flashback", which takes trouble to the next level.

Join recently resuscitated Detective First Grade Gleeson on board the satellite casino and tourist trap Matrix, as she faces off with a robber who is targeting large payouts. A game of cat and mouse ensues when this robber against all odds manages to defy the station's best security measures and requires some good old shoe leather detective work to identify and catch. Sometimes justice takes more than "Facial Recog".

Hop aboard for C. C. Blake's latest excursion through the space ways. Two more tales of crime, desperation, and hope set in the filthy far futures . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twice Told Tales II
• Release date: Oct 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463282625

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).

Book preview

C. C. Blake's Sweaty Space Operas

Issue 5

C. C. Blake

Blake's Take

When a friend of mine related the story of getting his passport, he told me all about the challenge of not laughing his ass off. The way he explained it, every time he grinned or smiled or guffawed, the photographer would roll his eyes and declare, We need to take another one. No smiling please. As it turned out, smiling changes enough characteristics of the face to make immediate software-based recognition of a photo's subject somewhat challenging. This was years ago, of course. We were chatting over dinner at the now defunct CONTEXT sf/f/h convention that took place annually in Columbus, Ohio, home to some mutual friends. It was a small con, and there were some beloved aspects of it, but it came apart due in no small part to some committee members inability to take sexual harassment charges seriously. A topic for another day.

Anyway, hearing my pal talk about the picture process and facial recognition—an issue which Facebook has since addressed with relative success—I got to thinking about how much we rely on technology and how much golden age SF expected we would come to do so. The future was considered to be more or less leisurely, a place where bots would take care of the big bad labor thing (until they went rogue and killed us all, of course; once upon a time, robots were to society what zombies have sort of become: a means of that society's end) and humanity would be left to think its big thoughts. Well, as it turns out big thoughts are not what the mass of humanity is interested in pursuing. Too much work, maybe. Or else the average IQ has dropped thanks to constant exposure to whatever the poison pill of the day is. Streaming entertainment? Pornography? The mental and spiritual degradation values of Twinkies? Who knows?

Anyway, as sf moved on, the idea that humanity was on its rise toward some kind of luxury renaissance grew less and less interesting to the writers and the readers. Instead, the idea that humanity would drag its own prolonged history of hate, greed, selfishness, ennui, morbidity, perversion, and other lovely aspects wherever it went. To the stars? To infinity (and beyond)? To the limits of human psychical ability? The Hugo Gernsback ideal of there's tech to solve that!, which is arguably the first expression of that dreaded There's an app for that!, seems less and less likely. We have detrimental slavish devotion to the technology, I believe. Call me a Luddite, but a calculator is supposed to play an auxiliary role to mathematics skills not supplant them altogether.

As a writer of futures, no matter if they are space operatic or harder stuff, it is challenging to look at where we've come from, look at where we are, and then posit where we might end up with any degree of accuracy. In fact, I for one don't look for technical accuracy much at all in the stories