The Glittering Vista Just Beyond the Hill

By Minister Faust

Minister Faust returns with a new volume of short fiction during the global bench-clearing brawl between the forces of fascism, industrial eco-destruction, and AI conquest, and the billions striving for a world in which humanity, nature, and technology thrive beside and because of each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Narmer's Palette
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9780986902451

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

The Glittering Vista

Just Beyond the Hill

Short fiction by

Minister Faust

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of Shit

The Ibex on the Day of Extinction

Freeze Police

Reflection Eternal

The Shaggy Cure for ‘No, Baba!’

Sweet Dreams on the Prairies at the Dawn of War

About the Author

The Glittering Vista Just Beyond the Hill.

Copyright © 2023 Minister Faust.

The author’s imagination created the names, characters, places, events, and objects of this novel and/or used them all fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

The author reserves all rights. Do not reproduce or transmit any part of this publication in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Permission requests: ministerfaust.com/contacts.

Narmer’s Palette

Edmonton, Alberta

Cover art and jacket/interior design by Gentle Robot. Cover photographic illustration including image by Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Ebook edition: ISBN 978-0-9869024-5-1.

~~~~

Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of Shit.

Originally published in Cyberfunk, ed. Milton Davis. MVMedia, 2021.

The Ibex on the Day of Extinction.

Originally published in Cyber World: Tales of Humanity’s Tomorrow, ed. Jason Heller and Joshua Viola. Hex Publishers, 2016.

Freeze Police.

Originally published in No Police = Know Future: Stories of Alternative Futures of Alternative Justice, ed. James Beamon.  Amazing Selects Edition/Experimenter Publishing Company, 2022.

Reflection Eternal.

Originally published in Particulates, ed. Nalo Hopkinson. Dia Art Foundation, 2018

The Shaggy Cure for ‘No, Baba!’

Originally published in Avenue Magazine

Sweet Dreams on the Prairies at the Dawn of War.

Originally published in Eighteen Bridges: Canada150, ed. Curtis Gillespie. 2018.

Introduction

It’s 2023. I sometimes wonder how we made it this far, although when I was younger I never doubted there’d be a desirable future.

Perhaps I had too much confidence in that glittering vista just beyond the hill—after all, even while I knew that climate chaos was real, I figured we’d have that pesky problem fixed by now (I mean, if the likes of even Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan could help close the hole in the ozone layer, why not?). I knew that artificial intelligence could be a problem one day, but I wasn’t worried about Terminators or the Sentinels from The Days of Future Past in X-Men #141 and #142. But I also had never considered the threats of facial recognition with racial false-positives, social media as Big Brother, the possibility of autonomous vehicles killing the jobs of millions of workers, or Cambridge Analytica subverting democracy around the world. And while I had definitely enjoyed Babylon 5, I considered its allegory about the rise of fascism to be a little too on-the-nose. And then I saw literal Nazis swarm the US Capitol with zip ties and gallows in service of their bloated, narcissistic, sub-cognitive, id-mounted, giga-grifting, ketchup-throwing megalomaniacal version of Leto II from God Emperor of Dune.

Hey, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

Of course, the future is also full of awesome possibilities for joy and justice, and in the coming years I’ll be devoting more of my work to grounded techno-optimism and eco-fiction as I leave behind forever (very soon) fiction extolling the power of violence to solve our problems, which is standard in much of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure fiction, and in pretty much all superhero, police, military, and other genres in print and on-screen.

Right in this book you’ll get to see my transmigration from that grim and false view of reality, even though you’ll also find nightmares about technology. But there’s also writing about tenderness in our present, and childhood adventure in the past.

That’s because our ancestors live in us... and our descendants will live—or die—because of us. So we need to see that reality and feel it all together. Fiction gives us the venue to forge that fusion.

Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of Shit

Even a scumbag like Marvin Shkully knew the second he hit that freaking dog dashing across the street, the chances of getting a blowjob from the engorgifying Ms. Bam Drozdova during the drive back to his place had fallen to hayl-no .

Stop ze car, you fakkink ess-hole! she snapped, and punched him hard on the shoulder. That’s not really how she talked, but that’s the way he heard it, because that’s what he liked, and that’s what he was paying for. But he’d already stopped.

What the shit! he said, rubbing his shoulder.

So she punched him again in the exact same spot. He couldn’t even scream—it hurt that much. He just gaped at her like a dipshit in mid-dip. Fine, she was in shock or whatever. But shoulders weren’t free, and her knuckles were like iron wrapped in divorce lawyer.

Of course he’d stopped the car (without her telling him to) because he had to make sure his smoking-new, fully-tricked-out Bezos Infinitive wasn’t fucked up because of that goddamned dog.

Standing outside, he flared his watch-light over his front bumper, his grill, his wheel wells, his still-spinning rims, his side panels, his back bumper, and even his spoiler because you just never knew.

"Why’re you looking there, ass-wank? said Bam, stomping towards him unsteadily. Blood on her white jacket and miniskirt. She didn’t look like a trade attorney now (or maybe she did, but even more). You think dog shot up from back wheel and smashed into spoiler?"

He backed away a couple of steps. Her kicking him with those Lucite stilts was one thing. When he wanted it. But out in the street? With his whip chipped?

Bam, you gotta relax. You are seriously bumming my vibe here.

"Your vibe? Look at dog! You kill him!"

I didn’t kill it! he said, pointing at the goldish retrievery bag of breathingless crap on the road. Bam, seriously, your head’s cut—

She held up a SHUT THE FUCK UP hand while she triple-blinked.

Emergency vet, she enunciated, and then eye-scrolled. "There is vet only