E-Force: Sixteen Stories of Ultra-Freaking Awesomeness

By Minister Faust

E-Force presents sixteen wide-ranging stories, including the hilarious, the terrifying, the mystical and the compassionate.

Behold anti-colonial liberation struggle at the cosmic level ("The Sun Dogs"), philosophical explorations of the nature of organic and artificial intelligence ("Droplets of Thought"), the hypocrisy that afflicts human communities ("Shecky the Green Pig"), a revisionist take on D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation ("The Worth of a Nation"), and a Grendel-style psychohistory of ancient Egypt's founding myth ("The Belly of the Crocodile," a companion story to Minister Faust's novel The Alchemists of Kush), among many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minister Faust
• Release date: Dec 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781927081006

Minister Faust

Minister Faust is a novelist, print/radio/television journalist, blogger, sketch comedy writer, video game writer, playwright, and poet. He also taught high school and junior high English literature and composition for a decade. According to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, “Since 1960s, Afrodiasporic authors including Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Minister Faust have become luminaries within the SF community.” The critically-acclaimed author of The Alchemists of Kush and the Kindred Award-winning and Philip K. Dick runner-up Shrinking the Heroes, Minister Faust first won accolades for his debut The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, shortlisted for the Locus Best First Novel and Philip K. Dick awards. Minister Faust’s short stories have appeared in Cyber World, Edmonton on Location, Fiery Spirits, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, and elsewhere. iO9, Adventure Rocketship, Canada 150: Stories of Reconciliation Connecting Us All, Engineer Magazine, The Globe & Mail, Greg Tate’s Coon Bidness, and more have published his articles. Minister Faust's Afritopianism draws from myriad ancient African civilisations, explores present realities, and imagines a future in which people struggle not only for justice, but for the stars.

Book preview

E-Force:

Sixteen Stories

of Ultra-Freaking

Awesomeness

by

Minister Faust

CONTENTS

Introduction

Jali Tales

The Worth of a Nation

The Devil’s Advocate

The Belly of the Crocodile

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Droplets of Thought

De-Conking Some Sense from The Colour Purple

The Ghosts of Carnivores

The Sun Dogs

The Brown Moth

Ciphering Naturalism in Native Son

In the Parliament of Stone with the Man of Metal

Homing Pigeon Floating Through the Ghettoes

Death and a Bad Headache

In the White Room with No Corners

Shecky the Green Pig

Novel Excerpts

The Alchemists of Kush

Shrinking the Heroes

The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad

About Minister Faust

A Memoir of an

Introduction

Novels are long-term relationships, and short stories are flings. In art, as with life, I always opted for relationships.

That choice wasn’t necessarily in my best interests (although I’m happily married now, thank you very much). And one of the key long-term relationships that shaped me was with the guys with whom I studied Creative Writing at the University of Alberta more than two decades ago.

It’s been, well… weird editing these short stories, most of which were written a lifetime past. Re-reading and revising them has been like jumping through the Atavachron from the third-season Star Trek: The Original Series episode All Our Yesterdays, allowing me to visit an ancient and mostly forgotten time, glimpsing a disturbingly familiar-yet-not world as it sort-of was, and what I thought of it at the time… also sort of.

I say sort of because no matter how old we are, when we’re creating art, we’re not forensically documenting reality, but rather creating doodles and caricatures expressing often passionate arguments about how one could view the world, but not necessarily our own true convictions. Does George Lucas really believe that the best way to solve problems is to slaughter people by the tens of thousands or millions? Because, after all, that’s the clear message of the Star Wars series (and of scores of SFF novels, including, of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings).

Sometimes we take an extreme position in art, but that may have more to do with expressing our emotions at the time of creation than of our true moral or strategic convictions. Are we more susceptible to literary crimes of passion during our youth? Maybe we’re just as susceptible when our audience is gigantic and cheering us on, as with rock stars behaving badly onstage, or when our audience is so tiny that almost nobody gives a flying Quebecois beaver what we’re saying (as with students in Creative Writing class).

So back to feeling weird while editing these stories… I’m struck at how often that stories I was sure were my best work, twenty years later, required the most reshaping to reach my satisfaction and enthusiasm, and stories I feared were destined for the shredder actually ended up making me proud and requiring only minor work. In one case, a story that was nearly beyond saving got a new life thanks to a multi-day style-and-content overhaul and unexpected current events that offered me a brand new chance for social commentary.

~~~

I took Creative Writing classes at the University of Alberta (the country’s second largest university) inside the beautiful Humanities Centre. The grey concrete building, kind of like a Cubist boomerang, overlooks the North Saskatchewan River, and offers a gorgeous view of the High Level Bridge and the Provincial Legislature during summer and a depressing one during winter (which is when most classes run).

If you walk through the HC during high summer, you’ll bear witness to stunning pillars of light cascading through coloured sky-lenses embedded in the fifth floor’s ceiling down to the floor of the first storey. Those coloured lenses looked like nothing so much as giant Jolly Roger candies. Should I make a metaphor out of that? Uh… it was a sweet place to learn? No? Sorry.

I’d love to say our Creative Writing professors offered us great instruction, but that’s just not true. Mostly they had lousy ideas and didn’t seem to have a clue what we were attempting, as when, for instance, one prof thought that an anti-colonial SF story I wrote about nuking alien invaders was about forgiving them (he was disgusted when another student explained it to him, as the writer whose work was under discussion had to remain silent during critiques). In fairness, four decades’ difference in age and pop culture references between students and teachers are a hell of a gap to leap, especially for teachers who had such minimal interest in doing so that their motivation could not have been detected even with the planet’s most powerful electron microscopes.

One prof declared to a sadly-unstable student that his story was six pages of shit. That student subsequently submitted a revenge story entitled Six Pages of Shit, written with a code: the first letter of every paragraph spelled out For best results, PROF NAME should be dipped in vitriol. (The same story included a female character using the expression tac nuke, which I pointed out to the writer was, for reasons of gender, statistically unlikely; still, in ten years of teaching English literature, I never compared a student’s work, on paper, no less, to excrement). As fiction and as vengeance, the story failed, and our poor comrade quickly left the university entirely, eventually ending up on the street.

However, we guys—and those of us who stuck it out were all guys—taught each other a great deal, sometimes by example and at other times with our comments. Yeah, we’d fight and sometimes drive each other crazy; one guy named Dan was furious at another guy named Tom and spent an entire class staring him down because Tom had published (in our campus paper, The Gateway) a cartoon parody of Dan’s Metamorphosis-homage about a man stricken with an ever-expanding uvula. Tom was so devastated by Dan’s relentless optical-assault (what Baltimore police call eye-fucking) that he went on to win the Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize (Caribbean & Canada Region), and a whole bunch of others awards (although none for the uvula cartoon), and get hired as a prof to teach in that very same building where the he’d been so ruthlessly glared at. I have no clue what happened to Dan. I couldn’t find him on Facebook.

As it turned out, Tom and I were the only ones who stuck with writing prose, but I must emphasise that many of the finest writers I’ve ever known were in that cohort. One became an independent filmmaker who’s beaten the odds to direct three features and get them distributed; one co-founded a popular online casual games company and became a multi-millionaire; one became a delivery driver and a black belt in Uechi-ryu karate-do; one became a magazine publisher,  web designer and marathon runner; one self-destructed; others, I don’t know what happened to. All of them, either as Mirror, Mirror upside-down versions of themselves or as personal inspiration to keep on writing, ended up in my first published novel, The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad.

To you guys, I say thanks. Those times were frustrating, bizarre, painful, exciting, hilarious, and wonder-filled, and absolutely the highlight of my university days. I’ll never forget them, or you.

Jali Tales

They better watch they asses,

or I’ma call Sister Rosa on em.

—Eldridge the Jali

Christmas 1990.

First Tale: Sister Rosa, More or Less

Me an Eldridge were chillin—literally—waiting for the bus.

Damn that bus, man, he said, shifting from one frozen foot to the other. I’da known the weather was gon be like this, I would’na wore m’sneakers.

Exams were over and all we wanted to do was go relax. The weather wasn’t really that cold, but we weren’t dressed for it. It was a December blue-sky day, around four-thirty, when red and purple begin bruising up the horizon. The cold was just at that ass-biting phase when the bus finally came into view. When it lumbered up to our curb it kicked up frozen surf, and an ice puddle knifed its way through my runners.

Yeeaaooooow! I squealed.

Dope James Brown imitation.

Get on the bus.

We flashed our transfers to the driver. He gestured for us to stop, looked at our transfers more closely. These are almost expired, he said.

Good to know you can read the clock, said Eldridge. We snatched back our transfers and walked past the driver. Most of the seats were packed, including by a couple of skinheads at the back. But I saw a friendly opening next to a sister.

Eldridge, man—check that—

Eldridge didn’t even hear me. He busted his way down the aisle and slam-dunked himself in the seat next to her. I caught up and sat down in front of him, next to a boy of about nine.

How ya doin? he said, leaning back and smiling. The name’s Eldridge.

The sister looked up from her book, flashing us eyes like black marbles. A few braids dropped out from under her scarf as she turned to look at us.

Hello.

Oh, shit. Her voice wafted towards me like cinnamon on a spring breeze. She seemed amused by our forwardness. Don’t you have a name, too?

I waited for Eldridge to respond. When it took him so long to reply, I was about to dis him down for bein a fool. He punched me in the shoulder.

Yo, Benjamin Banneker, the lady wants to know your name.

I chuckled nervously. Bobby.

Hello, Bobby, she said, the syllables falling on a smoking bass line. My heart jumped from 33 1/3 to a full 45. This is Ojikeme, she said, pointing to the little boy. Say hi, ’Keme.

Ojikeme rocked his little head to some funky beat on the Walkman he was plugged into, ignoring us.

Is this your boyfriend? said Eldridge, indicating Ojikeme. I knew what question he was really asking. He didn’t care if she had a boyfriend—that’d never stopped him before. He wanted to know if this was her son.

No, she said. She tilted her head, narrowed her obsidian eyes, smirked. Triple-play. Amazing. I could hear the sax blow. And those lips! He’s my little brother. She wasn’t stupid. She knew the score.

You have me at a disadvantage, Miss, said Eldridge, smoothly.

I’m Fanta. Nigerian, then. Always loved that name. Sweet as the drink.

Eldridge shifted himself around in the seat so he could take all of us in. You out Christmas shopping with little Ojikeme? Or just out for the day?

Just out for the day.

Ojikeme’s lucky to have such a nice big sister, I said. She looked up at me. I couldn’t help smiling.

Say, lil bross, whatcha listening to? Eldridge gave the boy’s shoulder a playful shake. Ojikeme finally looked up.

Hah?

I said, whatcha listening to? What’s on the Walkman?

Ice Cube and the Lench Mob. You like em?

Eldridge broke into a big smile and laughed. Your parents know you’re listening to this?

Why, what’s wrong with it? asked Fanta, closing her book, something by Terry McMillan.

Eldridge and me looked at each other. Nothing, said Eldridge, looking back to Ojikeme. It’s fine. It’s just, uh, very new is all.

My sister bought it for me the other day.

You’re lucky to have such a nice sister, bross! said Eldridge. I’d just said that!

Eldridge gently took an earbud from Ojikeme’s ear and put it into his own.

Say, Bobby, he said, turning to me. It’s ‘A Gangsta’s Fairy Tale!’ I could hear the rhymes dropping as Eldridge held up the bud. We’d laughed many times about the rhyme—crude but hilarious. Totally stoopid lumpen.

Eldridge broke into rhyme along with the tape, rapping right along with Ice Cube:

Saw a fight over colours, too

Red Riding Hood fightin Little Boy Blue

A bad influence? Yo, I don’know—"

Me and Ojikeme jumped in on the last line:

But Ice Cube’ll tell the kids how the story SHOULD go . . . .

The three of us with Y-chromos broke into laughter. Fanta looked at us, amused but confused. The ear phone, now hanging in space, continued:

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall

With a joint, drinkin some Eight Ball—

Eldridge closed his hand on the little speaker in a snap. The boy didn’t know how close he’d come to losing his tape permanently. What else you listen to? asked Eldridge.

Ojikeme looked up, smiling. He obviously liked hanging with some older Brothers. Fanta just bought me this Neville Brothers tape today.

Oh, did she? said Eldridge. Damn, I wanted to jump in on this one. Eldridge was scoring all the points. What a nice thing to do for this young man, he said, one eyebrow up, smiling in Fanta’s direction. That’s the one with ‘Sister Rosa,’ isn’t it?

Yes. Great song, isn’t it? said Fanta, smiling at Eldridge.

Yeah.

What’s it about? piped up Ojikeme.

Ah—you don’t know who Rosa Parks is? How come the boy don’t know who Rosa Parks is, Fanta? he chided her smilingly. Boy’s got to know his history. After all, ‘history shouldn’t be a mystery, our story’s real history, not—

‘—his story!’ I jumped in. We laughed again. Ojikeme smiled. He caught the Public Enemy line.

Well, Ojikeme, Rosa Parks was this African woman who lived in the United Snakes and was riding the bus. She took the bus to work every day of her life. But the damn thing was, cuz she was an African woman, the punks—I mean, the Bad Guys—they said she hadda get up from her seat if a White person wanted to sit down.

Ojikeme sat forward with interest, his eyes getting big. Eldridge’s own eyes were gleaming.

"Well, Rosa was a smart woman. She said that business was nuthin but a straight-up bit a nonsense. So one day she says, ‘I aint gettin up fo no mo Whitefolks.’ So when these White people get onna bus, the fat-ass cracker-redneck-cheese-head rip-in-tha-couch low-down scurvy dog driver— Eldridge looked up, big grin on his face, hoping to see our driver insulted. The driver hadn’t heard. Eldridge kept his record spinning: —comes up and tells her to move. So, Sister Rosa, she was just this small woman, right? She looks at that pig straight inna eye an says, ‘Yo, Devil, step off!"

Ojikime’s eyes gogged and magogged. Fanta didn’t seem upset by Eldridge’s interpretation of history. In fact, she seemed entertained by his energy. I shoulda told the kid a story.

"So anyway, the driver looks at her an says, ‘Well, looks lahk we got an uppitty nigga!’ So he runs down to the front of the bus an calls out the door for the cops. Now, there were some totally Tom-ass Uncle Toms onna bus who started tellin Sister Rosa maybe she should get up an leave peaceful, knawm sayn? But she be sayn, ‘I aint goin out like that!’ So this fat apple-chewin cave boy Babylonian gets onna bus, see? An he walks up to Rosa, an he says—"

Eldridge got up and acted fat, puffing out his gut an walking in the aisle, real low like he weighed an extra hundred, "—he says: ‘We-e-e-e-ll. Whut duh we have hyaah? An uppity nigga! Why oncha move yo mungkah ass t’the backuthabus?’" Eldridge straightened up, got a real calm look on his face, then put on a woman’s voice.

"‘What if I don’t wanna move, officer?’ —‘Then Ima hafta put uh bullet through yo ass!’ Well, lemme tell you, bross, Sister Rosa, she’d just about had enough, so alluva sudden, BIP! she up an karate chops the fool right between th’eyes—"

—Eldridge staggered back, pointing between his eyes—

"—and she hit em right at the bridge of the nose, shootin shards a bone right up in his brain. Pig falls down dead right there onna spot.

"Well, the bus driver just about takes a shit, an he starts runnin. Well, Rosa, right, she aint goin out like that, knawm sayn? So she pulls out the pig’s gun an pumps the driver one—BIP!— (for all of Eldridge’s talent as a storyteller, his sound effects were wack) —an he goes down like a sack a shit. Then the Uncle Toms onna bus start screamin for her to stop, an she says, ‘I’m sick an tired, an I’m sick an tired of bein sick an tired!’ So she runs to the bus driver’s seat an plops down. Well, the Toms and the White folks go crazy, start screamin crazy shit!

"So some Brothers, right, are like BIP! jumpin up an sayn ‘You lead an we’ll folla, baby.’ So the Brothers make the Whitefolks get inna back of the bus with the Toms an be quiet while Rosa drives em outta the city! She’s drivin, an she’s drivin, an they got these Babylon-mobiles comin after er, an she’s knockin em off the road, BIP!" Eldridge slammed himself down and swerved for effect. Ojikeme seemed caught in the momentum. Fanta bit back her laughter. I was enjoying myself.

So she takes em all the way out to the top of this mountain, right? Snow’s blowin all aroun, an everyone’s teeth is chatterin, an she says: ‘All you people who love the front of the bus so much, get up in there!’ So the Brothers, man, they was just like S1Ws or Fruit of Islam, knawm sayn? They had all the crackers inna front like that, and the Toms sobbin up there with em! Snap! So she drives the bus right up over the edge of this cliff edge of the mountain, right? So that the bus is teeter-totterin on the edge—

Eldridge put his hand on the seat handle and demonstrated the gravity of the situation. Back-and-forth rocked the hand. Ojikeme’s eyes bugged.

So all the Brothers and Rosa and the Sisters go to the back of the bus, open the emergency exit an Rosa says, ‘Sa-a-a-ay, muthaf—’ Eldridge glanced quickly at Fanta and then back at Ojikeme. "‘Say, fools, see how you like the front of the bus now!’ An they all get off, an the bus tips an rolls down the mountain an explodes in a big ball of orange flame—"

‘Bip,’ I added.

Fanta broke into laughter, and we smiled at each other. Nice.

"Naw, bross. More like BOOSH!" His hands formed a ball, and he shot them outward to show the path of the debris.

I noticed Fanta’s sterner expression and shot Eldridge a look. He picked it up on the beat: But Rosa, she was a righteous woman, so at the last second, she let all the Toms and Whitefolks off the bus. Fanta went back to smiling. I know it’s hard to believe but it’s all true. But they sure as hell won’t teach you that in school, ’Keme. I shook my head.

But how’d Rosa and her friends get down? asked Ojikeme, his head pushed forward as far as it would go. He looked liked getting down the mountain was the most important moment in history.

Well, luckily, Sister Rosa was a big fan of white water raftin, an she got on the bus after pickin up her inflatable raft at the cleaners. So she whips it outta her purse an all the non-Tom Black folks who gets on. She looks at the White folks an says to em, ‘Now all God’s lil chillun can walk!’ So Rosa an the Brothers ride the raft down the mountain— his hand became a raft on the snowy mountain of the seat, "—and into the river, an back to town.

And that is the story of Sister Rosa— Eldridge smiled at me and Fanta, —more or less.

Ojikeme breathed a big sigh of relief. Wow.

Fanta reached up and pulled the cord. Damn, she was getting up to leave and we hadn’t even talked. I thought to myself, get her phone number, quick, before Eldridge gets it.

Fanta got up and looked at Eldridge and me. Well, it was nice meeting you both. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas! squeaked Ojikeme.

Yeah, you too. Maybe we’ll see you around, huh? asked Eldridge.

Maybe, she smirked.

What a minute, said Ojikeme. "That’s not true, is it?"

Yeah, course it’s true, Eldridge said.

Come on. It can’t be.

Why not?

Girls don’t know karate!

Eldridge laughed. Okay, li’l bross—you got me. She just canned the dude.

I knew it, said Ojikeme, delighted at his logic-fu.

Once they were off, I looked out the window to see if Fanta was gonna wave, and it looked like she did. But she might’ve just been adjusting her scarf.

Eldridge smacked my shoulder. Why didn’t you get er number, man?

What? C’mon, man, you were the one throwin down all that shit. Think I coulda stepped in then? She woulda dissed me for sure. You had er wrapped aroun your finger.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, b’what’s up with all this Rosa Parks nonsense, anyway? You’re gonna give the kid a complex! What happens when he goes to class an says that? They’ll throw him in detention til he grows roots!

Caa-mawwwwwn. Fanta’ll set im straight. Sides, Eldridge said, grinning, Eldridge’ll tell the kid how the story should go.

We laughed. I looked at the back and saw the skinheads glaring at us. They musta overheard your story, bross.

Eldridge didn’t care. They better watch they asses, or I’ma call Sister Rosa on em. I smiled, looked out the window. It was totally black out now.

Second Tale: Throwing Away the Gods

Around nine o’clock me an Eldridge drove my dad’s Olds back to the Video Spot. Parked way downstreet in the first open