Streams of Speculation: Collins Creek, #2

By Ron Collins

Rock & Roll, Steampunk, and Starflight

 

Jump in, the water's fine!

 

In Collins Creek, Volume 2, you'll find another memorable 10-pack of short stories from prolific writer Ron Collins—this time mixing, matching, and bending the constraints of science fiction and fantasy—all of which first appeared in Fiction River original anthology magazines. From the Grand Dangoolie to a prohibition demon to a genetically engineered Special Forces agent, the characters in these pages will take you on a collection of wild and unpredictable rides.

 

What do they all have in common? That little spark of humanity that yearns for more answers than we have questions.

 

Stories Include:

 

The Grand Dangoolie

Movie Boy and Music Girl

The Robin Club

A Steady Diet of Dragon

The Legend of Parker Clark and Lois Jane

Rock of Ages

A Demon from Hell Walks into a Speakeasy

Playing God

Fraternization

Some of This Is True

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyfox Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781946176271

Ron Collins

Ron Collins's work has appeared in Asimov's, Analog, Nature, and several other magazines and anthologies. His writing has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked developing avionics systems, electronics, and information technology.

Book preview

Foreword

Like Pete Seger, if I had a hammer I’d hammer out a warning, and I’d hammer out justice, I’d hammer out freedom and love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land. But I wouldn’t stop there. I’d also hammer out a world where the short story is considered the ultimate tier on the ranks of the most perfect forms of artistry.

I really love short fiction.

Sure, a good novel can be hard to put down—but sometimes for me a novel can get to be a slog. Side characters don’t get full arcs (something I’m as guilty of as anyone) or the writer decides to spend lots of time in places that work, but maybe don’t matter as much to me. Still, a novel can succeed even when it gets a little sloggy. Pacing is important, but readers of a novel give a writer more leeway to miss the mark page-over-page, so long as they don’t go too far astray.

A short story, though …

Every word counts in a short story. When done well, every word sings.

Double so in the arenas of speculative fiction, because when a writer endeavors to create a world of magic or in which technology is more advanced than we have now, that writer is faced with the challenges of creating both a great storyline fueled with compelling characters who have things to say, and a world so interesting that it resonates deeply with the reader. All in 7,000 words or less.

No pressure, though, right?

This is Volume 2 of my Collins Creek series—a project that collects up stories first published in the Fiction River series—which is a brainchild of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. The first volume is filled with contemporary stories, pieces that were drawn from real-world settings. This one is all about the speculative fiction.

My love of the short story is among the reasons I asked Lisa Silverthorne to introduce this volume. Lisa is one of my favorite short story writers of all time. Her work can also be found in many editions of the Fiction River series, and she (in fact) is arguably the reason I found my way to the workshop to begin with—all right, let’s be real, she essentially dragged my butt out to Lincoln City, Oregon, that first year, and then I never looked back.

Without her, none of these volumes would exist. Which is another reason I really, really wanted her touch on this volume.

A few years back Lisa published The Sound of Angels through Wildside Press, which is a thin volume of her work that I still pull out to read something of at least once a year—often more frequently. Her work is always interesting, and always powerful. You should look it up.

Equally important to this volume, though, is that Lisa and I found each other early in our writing careers when we both stumbled upon CompuServe’s IMPs and then into a small group named the Fishers Five. This means we went through our learning curves together. After each meeting, we would disband and Lisa and I (sometimes others, but always Lisa and I) would go to dinner where we would spend another hour or two talking about writing and what it meant to us. We would discuss the market, and editors, and share our reactions to events happening in the industry.

I learned a lot from Lisa in those moments.

The most important of which is probably this: You’ve got to have something to say, and you’ve got to love saying it.

I hope you’ll find that I’ve said something in this book you hold in your hand.

I know for a fact that I had a blast writing them, anyway, so I’m at least halfway home.

Ron Collins

Oro Valley, AZ

Introduction: Buckle Up! It’s Going to Be a Wild Ride

Lisa Silverthorne

It was the mid 1990s. The worldwide web was the new frontier, the wild, wild west, allowing images and sounds and movement for the first time, a quantum leap from the text-only internet with USENET groups and BBS groups and proprietary services like CompuServe and Prodigy. The internet was little more than the wild west. One of the last frontiers as technology warped across the world at light speed.

Even then, there was a group for everything. Like writers, for instance.

On CompuServe, I found a post about a new writer’s group forming in the Hinterlands of Indiana. As a brand-new baby writer with a handful of professional sales, I decided to take a chance on this group. Little did I know that it would form the basis of a lifelong friendship and a crucial writing partnership I would cherish for 25+ years and counting.

Of all the writer’s groups in all the world and across the internet, Ron Collins walked into mine. And changed my life forever.

We were young and hungry to forge our writing paths. We’d meet halfway in Fishers, Indiana, for the writer’s group and then go to dinner afterward. Conversations burned with story and technique and style and markets and—and the excitement and the passion for writing was a writhing, scorching flame. That flame consumed dozens of emails, hours of conversation, and days of writing story draft after draft. Followed by weeks of watching that mailbox flag go up. Hoping against hope that the next story would find a home. Back when email subs weren’t a thing yet. All that drive and persistence seemed as endless as that sparkling sense of hope.

Today, that flame continues to burn. Ron Collins has sold well over a hundred short stories and published more than a dozen novels. He is one of the most compelling, hard-working, and talented writers I know. He builds intricate, complex worlds of fascinating science fiction. He conjures sweeping, intense magical places that enchant readers. His innate sense of humor burns across the page and his stories glow with heart and emotion. He has a mastery of plot and story that few writers attain, and he knows how to throw both an emotional punch and a heart-stopping cliffhanger onto the page to keep readers (like me) riveted.

So, sit back in your comfy chair, fill a glass with iced tea, and settle into the intricate and intriguing worlds of Ron Collins. Detailed places that you can see and feel and experience. Places that explore technological constructs and cutting-edge what-if scenarios. But be prepared to feel like you know these people—a colleague, a relative, a friend—because the heroes and antagonists that Ron paints in his stories are real. They have flaws and dreams and goals. Once you start reading his stories, you won’t want to put them down.

After more than 25 years, I still can’t put down one of his stories. He’s one of the best science fiction writers in the field and I’m proud to introduce his latest collection of short fiction to new readers and his current fans. Buckle up! It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Lisa Silverthorne

July 12, 2021

Las Vegas, Nevada

Ron’s Foreword: The Grand Dangoolie

The Grand Dangoolie appeared in the Alchemy and Steam edition of the Fiction River series. It was great fun to write because it represents my first attempt to create anything remotely as dashing as the Steampunk I like to read. I was able to harness a certain essence of that controlled daring while writing it, though, and the result was so much fun that I thought it was the perfect way to start this collection.

The Grand Dangoolie

While I always considered myself to be an independent man, it can be argued I made the first real choice of my life the evening Stubby, Gauze, and I chased August McDormand off the Majestic. It was dark when we rambled out the back of the showboat, and into the cool humidity of a Cincinnati evening.

McDormand had already made it off the boat, and, despite the shine from a moon that was nearly full, was too far ahead of us to get in a good shot. He climbed onto the bike-flier he had parked outside. The engine kicked to life with a sound that was half tiger and half dying sheep, and he fishtailed away, spinning up a rooster tail of dust and mud that made the nighttime even hazier, struts shaking above him and wings drooping behind like the tail feathers of the showgirls who had gone on just before his act.

Fire now! I yelled. Aim for the tire!

While Stubby and Gauze—the Boss's two goons—pulled their revolvers, I vaulted the box office rail and raced over the steamboat's wooden deck, hoping they didn't notice how long they had to wait for me to get out of the way before taking their aim. Shots eventually rang out, but their only effect was to leave clouds of burnt gunpowder to foul up the mist. I jumped over the showboat's rails and, ignoring the mud of the riverbank as it slopped up my shoes, ran ahead even though I knew I couldn't catch him.

The Boss said August McDormand was a cheat and a charlatan, but despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that I was still a young man and of considerable science at heart, I had quietly begun to wonder.

We had been chasing him for a year, after all, travelling from the Northeast to find him in a pub in Charleston, then down the coast to Jacksonville, and through the Southlands to watch him in Macon and then at a club outside Atlanta, before coming up to the northernmost edge of Dixie to find him once again here in the Queen City. Cheats never won for long, right? Charlatans were always found out, fakers exposed for the frauds they were. If all of this were true, how then could this man always manage to make the world work to his favor every time he needed it to?

So, while the Boss remained staunch to his plank that there was no magic in this world—no ghosts, no spirits, no things that go bump in the night, and while the Boss would pound the table and say he would know it if he saw it, and while I supposed if anyone could make that statement truthfully, it would be him ... I still felt something stir inside as I ran toward McDormand and his fleeing bike-flier. A part of me couldn't help but wonder about the chemical nature of the vapor that formed as he dumped a stream of some foul-smelling concoction onto the hot manifold of his machine, and his motorbike lifted off the ground, supported by wings he had affixed to the machine's structure, their canvas forms rounded and full and the blattering growl of the engine somehow seeming to be pushing the craft forward into the night, its front wheel spinning freely—upward and upward, out over the bend of the river that smelled thick of dead weeds, and into the nighttime air that smelled burnt of revolver fire and stale internal combustion.

The Boss would later say it was just physics, that the motion carrying August McDormand was made of the forces of Newton clashing with modern man's capacity for design, the velocity of the motorbike times the distance travelled creating lift in wings set to strategically proper angles.

But no glider flies like that.

And I felt the aura of power left in the wake of McDormand's motorbike-flier as it lifted him upward until he had, once again, disappeared, literally, into thin air.

I first met August McDormand a year prior, in the fall of 1922. I was a third-year at Princeton, having arrived there to follow my passion, and having spent every moment I could thereafter in the school's laboratories rubbing elbows with some of the most brilliant minds of my time.

I am convinced that my father, who was a successful merchant in Boston, sent me to university merely to keep me from burning the house down with, as he called them, my infernal experiments. My mother once told me he was on a first-name basis with every new member of the fire house, just in case. Regardless, I found every moment spent in those Princeton labs to be joyous, and I could get lost there for hours upon hours, stewing up solutions and logging precipitates for any one of a thousand reactions.

I wish I could report I felt the same about my other studies. Alas, I did not.

My father, for example, once tried to teach me finance, and he had at another time asked his floor manager to train me for the production of hats. Neither took. There were other efforts, too, none of which proved to satisfy my craving for the excitement of my sciences, and a few days later my father would find me back in my bedroom, mixing various compounds or studying the vapor point of whatever collection of liquids I might find around the house. Only my mother's brief attempt to teach me how to cook fired my imagination, a fact that father warmed to only when she pointed out to him that many of the world’s top chefs were men.

Cooking was not interesting enough, though.

The practice of food preparation starts with the end in mind and, barring some unique catastrophe, that projection is usually not so far off. And while there is much of creation in the culinary arts, it was not like the study of chemistry or the search of good science—which are more like vast puzzles with the greatest of open ends, puzzles where a man is free to explore, free to let his mind examine infinite possibilities. Indeed, it is probably for this fact that I found subjects other than the sciences so desperately lacking (and to these other subjects I specifically add the utterly horrid case of pure mathematics—a study that is far too rigid and precise for my fancy).

I couldn't bear the idea of living the stodgy life of a merchant at all, and I resented deeply the need to study these things that seemed like so much dreck that I could scream. I wanted to do something with spirit, something that went to the very powers that held the world together, or dare I say, the very powers that created us all to begin with.

Which brings me back to Princeton in the fall of 1922, and to August McDormand.

He was an enigma to us all, a nomad who bounced from lab to lab, showing up for a few days to try out some new concoction or another, then disappearing. Some called him a flake, others, a genius. He sat in classes as if on whims, sometimes commenting, but usually leaning back with his eyes closed and to all appearances napping, until such a time as he had something to say. There were whispers, too, that he was a magician, a man of the vaudeville. Someone told me he was versed in hoodoo, or necromancy, or some other such pagan thing, but rumors of such dark connections were, to me, just the flapping of lips. Never have I seen August McDormand dally with such forces as those.

Once, while attending a reception for a symposium set to discuss Bohr’s intriguing views on atomic structure, I heard a man I admire say McDormand had worked with the Army Corps during the Great War, and that he had been involved in the development of gases or some other hideous thing. Someone else said they thought he had spent time in the Yukon, and yet another said he rode on San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt (a statement I immediately discounted for the fact that McDormand was clearly too young to have been with the Rough Riders).

Regardless, the murk that appeared around the edges of McDormand’s past served double duty to also cloud