The King now old and paper thin
With marching wrinkles in his skin
Who on his deathbed silent lies
With failing breath and fading eyes
His son, the prince, is pink and smug
And quite as charming as a slug
Inside he smiles, but hides his eyes
While outwardly he cries and sighs
The tall princess in silence stands
And carefully regards her hands
The doctor looks and shakes his head
Then baldly states ‘the King is dead’
The prince looks up with gladsome face
At last he gets to rule the place
His sister pours him golden wine
He savours it and takes his time
‘This truly is a wine of note’
But then he coughs and grabs his throat
The princess laughs and makes no bones
‘That’s how you play the game of thrones’

© jane jago

Welcome to the Hotseat of Truth, a device in which your protagonist is trapped. The only way to escape is to answer five searching questions completely honestly or the Hotseat will consume them to ashes!

Today’s victim is Madelyn Lawrence who you can find in Contact (Instinct Theory #1) by Ian C Bristow.

Why did you become an anthropologist?

There is something about culture, the way it defines a bigger picture of human existence and exemplifies our need for a social connection, that just fascinates me. Always has. Or at least for all my adult life and most of my teens. So, basically, I became a cultural anthropologist because I wanted to better understand how differing cultures affect the human experience and share that with others so they might better appreciate the beautiful diversity of humanity.

If you didn’t have your fiance Jonathan’s support would you still have gone on the mission?

If I didn’t have the support of Jonathan and we were together, I would have stayed. He means more to me than my work, though it has taken this great uprooting of my daily norms to show me just how true that is. But if I didn’t have his support because he wasn’t a part of my life, I’d have been all over this mission without a second thought. Well, barring a bout with the typical fear anyone might experience facing the unknown.

Is there anything in the world you would consider killing to defend?

The helpless. The weak. The preyed upon. Anyone who couldn’t defend themselves. It’s easy to say, of course, but when it came to pulling a trigger or thrusting a blade, I’m sure there would be a far more complex battle taking place in my head. But that is how I feel about it when I can just say how I think I’d act.

In a few words can you give us your philosophy for life?

Wow, in a few words? Let’s see… Be kind and just to the best of my ability, and let others live as they please with the hope they will let me live in as I please just the same. Clearly, life is far more complicated than that, but it’s a good place to start.

What is your favourite musical genre?

Well, I really enjoy the different tribal music I’ve been exposed to, both in Africa and South America, but as for more mainstream stuff, I really like ambient beats. Like lofi or ambient jazz. It helps me think and creates a nice space for my head.

You can read more about Madelyn in Contact (Instinct Theory #1) by Ian C Bristow.

Dying might not be so bad. It was living that had broken him. Taken from his family at eight years old, vowed to celibacy before he understood what the word meant, and sold to the highest bidder time after time. His sword had eaten the blood of so many enemies that he felt today was no more than reparation. As the hooded figure came to his side he looked into its compassionate eyes.
“Am I dead?”
“Nearly. Say farewell to your loved ones.”
The Knight spoke the saddest three words under all the stars.
“I have nobody.”
Then he died.

A Drabble by Jane Jago inspired by original artwork from Ian Bristow.

Despite living in Wilmington, Delaware for over a decade, Moira had never understood the point of Thanksgiving. She was a proud Scot by birth and she came from a long line of proud Scots. Not that she was unfriendly or anti-social, her knitting circle and reading group were always well attended and her role as librarian was highly respected.
She had moved to the US from Linwood in Renfrewshire when her husband died. Her only daughter being, at that time, herself a widowed single-mother in Wilmington.
For a few years, Moira had spent Thanksgivings with her daughter and grandchildren, always a bit bemused at having another major family festival so near to the one she saw as more traditional – a secular Christmas. But, when in Rome, she told herself.

Then three years previously her daughter had remarried to another man in the armed forces and was off to live where he was based in California. Moira looked at the climate charts and decided that she was most decidedly not going to move to anywhere like that. She liked the climate in Wilmington, it made her think of her childhood home.
So for the last two years Moira had not celebrated Thanksgiving and had been happy to stay at home for the holiday, Skype with the grandchildren and catch up with her reading. This year, however, it was not proving so simple. Anna, who attended both Moira’s knitting circle and her reading group, started asking about what she would be doing for Thanksgiving.
“Oh, it’s not my festival is it?” Moira said, and gave a short laugh. “It’s for you who had ancestors here in sixteen hundred and frozen to death. The ones who had a big party with some local inhabitants who saved your ancestors, helped them survive and then came to celebrate. Or something like that. Nothing to do with me, really. I’m Scottish.’
Anna had put down her knitting, a sharply orange and cream acrylic and wool mix which she was turning into a bolero, and stared in disbelief.
“Now where do you get that from? My ancestors didn’t move to the United States until early last century. In fact, if only the descendants of those who were at the original Thanksgiving ever celebrated it then I would think it had died out as a custom long since.”
Moira’s lips twitched into a tight line.
“You have been brought up with it, Anna. You were born American.”
The other woman stared a little.
“Part of Thanksgiving is celebrating a welcome to those from other cultures. Even Scots,” she added the last tartly.
“It is a classic family festival,” Moira said, “and my family is in California not Delaware.”
Anna looked as though she was going to argue but instead gave a small sigh and returned to her knitting.

Thanksgiving came and Moira had enjoyed a brief Skype with her family and was just wondering what to eat when the doorbell rang. A little irritated as today was not a day she had planned for visitors and so her usually immaculate bun was replaced by a cascade of unruly wavy hair, Moira answered the door.
Outside stood Anna, her husband their children and the grandparents. All of them burdened by savoury smelling boxes or bags. Moira opened her mouth to speak and Anna gently grasped her arm and led her back inside her house. As Anna’s family unpacked the well-cooked, Thanksgiving meal with all the trimmings, Anna hugged Moira.
“The local inhabitants have come to save you and celebrate,” she said, “and we are not taking no for an answer.”
It was the best kind of Thanksgiving for all of them – but for Moira the first of many more.

E.M. Swift-Hook

We was doing all right until Pa was took away, then things got hard. Ma set her jaw and got on with it, but we never seen her smile.

Thanksgiving come, and me and Joe shot us a couple of turkeys what ‘escaped’ from Ole Man Matthews’ farm.

Ma clipped us round the ears, but she cooked ‘em all the same.

We was just sitting down to eat, when the back door opens quiet like and Pa slips in, bone thin and with his prison haircut.

Ma never said nothin’ just set a plate of turkey in front of him.

©jj 2019

A new collection of the Sam Nero Stories by Jane Jago, Sam Nero PI, is now available on preorder. This is an excerpt from the notebooks of Anastasia Throbb, ace reporter, and presenter of the prime-time magazine show The Throbbing City.

Sam Nero didn’t want to meet with me. It took six months of poking and prodding, and outright bribery before I found a man who was both willing and able to lean on this most archetypal of private investigators and make him talk to me. In the end, a friend of a friend introduced me to a man who goes by the name of O’Halleran, who promised me an hour of Sam’s time. Rather to my surprise, it even seemed as if he was going to deliver.

He sent two huge mutes to my office and they escorted me to a back-street diner where a sullen-faced waitress stuck me in a booth and stopped chewing gum for long enough to mouth “sit”. I sat and waited, concealing my growing impatience as best as possible. I was just about to make as dignified an exit as I could when a shadow fell across the table.
“Miss Throbb, I presume.” The voice was lazily amused.
I turned and got my first look at Sam Nero in the flesh. He was about six three, maybe six four, wide at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, and his face looked as if it had been designed to meet the expectations of every pre-pubescent female in the city. It was hard, and sculpted, and sported what I could only assume was a permanent five o’clock shadow. I turned my attention to his companion, a lush-bodied bottle blonde who looked at me as if she could discern my innermost secrets. I think I hated her on sight.

They slipped into the booth opposite me, and something about the pair of them set the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. For a moment I was floundering, then I realised what had spooked me. There were two of them, but only one shadow. While my flesh was still crawling, the waitress appeared with a pot of coffee and two tall mugs. She put a mug in front of Nero and one in front of me before favouring me with a sneer and sloping off.
“Doesn’t your lady friend get coffee?”
The voice that responded was feminine and breathy and sounded to me as if it had been honed over a lot of years of practice.
“I never touch the stuff. Ruins the complexion.”
Then Nero laughed. It was a deep sound that sent little shivers running around all sorts of inappropriate parts of my anatomy.
“Be nice.”
“I was being nice, Sam. You should know that.”
She laid a red-nailed and possessive paw on his forearm and he smiled.
“Sure you were being nice, Sugar. I’d just like to keep it that way.”
“Sugar?” I think my voice went up an octave, I mean what sort of a prehistoric monster calls his woman sugar?
“It’s my name. Sugar Kane. That’s Miss Kane to you.”
Mentally cursing my luck I turned my most winsome smile on Mister Nero.
“Sam,” I said. “May I call you Sam?”
He raised a lazy eyebrow and looked me up and down for a moment before laughing that damnably sexy laugh again.
“I guess so. It’s what Ma Nero named her little boy.”
“Is it really? I mean I can find no record of a family called Nero, let alone a male child called. Samuel?”
“Nah. Just Sam. And where I was born nobody keeps records.”
“And Miss Kane. Where and when was your sidekick born?”
“That ain’t the sort of question a gentleman asks a lady. Not if he wants to keep wearing his face. You can ask if you are that stupid.”
I looked into his companion’s icy eyes and quickly framed another question.
“The first record I can find of a Sam Nero is about four decades ago when a licence to operate as a private detective was granted. Would that be you?”
“Maybe.”
“The age of the applicant is stated as being forty-two.”
“Sounds a responsible sort of age to me. What say you Sugar?”
They exchanged a look of such naked trust that for a second even I felt de trop. But I pressed on.
“But that can’t be you, Mister Nero. If it was you would be in your eighties by now. And you don’t look like an eighty-year-old man to me.”
“Neither he does.” The blonde seemed to be laughing at me, and I didn’t like the sensation one little bit.
I made my voice hard and assertive.

“In my book, Mister Nero, that makes you an impostor. I’m sure the authorities would love to look at my findings and throw you into jail for a good long time.” I leaned forward and slapped the palms of my hands on the table hard enough to sting.
Nero laughed.
“Think again, sweetheart. The authorities as you so sweetly call them know precisely who I am. Next question.”
He took a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes out of his pocket and lit up.
I coughed.
“I do not care for tobacco smoke,” I said icily.
Nero sneered at me.
“Door’s over there. Make sure it doesn’t hit your ass on the way out.”
I was incensed, but some vestige of intelligence stopped me leaving. This was my only chance to persuade an icon of old-school cops and robbers violence onto my show so I swallowed my bile and tried for a forgiving smile. The obnoxious Sugar shrugged her shoulders and her rather overblown assets jiggled.
“I think the lady has decided to forgive you.”
He grinned lazily, and twitched a mobile eyebrow, sending my hormone count soaring yet again. This man was hot, hot and dangerous. I needed him to boost my flagging ratings, and maybe for the odd other job or two.

I set myself to charm him, sipping my coffee and running my tongue along my lower lip. He watched with what I can only describe as detached amusement, and I felt my anger begin to rise up once more.

“What’s with you Nero?” I snapped. “You come here sneering, and looking down your nose at me…”
He leaned back and crossed his long long legs.
“Wasn’t me asked for this meet. Suck it up.”
I drew in a breath and tried for calm.
“Fair point Mister Nero. I asked to meet you.”
The blonde bombshell laughed huskily.
“I think the lady is after your body, Sam.”
“Why’d that be Sugar?”
“As if you didn’t know, big boy.”
“And as if you didn’t know old Sam’s heart is yours alone.”

It seemed to me as if they had completely forgotten my existence and I rapped my nails against the crazed china of my mug.
“I’m still here,” I grated.
“Why so you are.” Nero looked me up and down a bit more, and the silent insult in his stare had the blood rushing to my face and I blushed for possibly the first time in two decades.
“Why are you being like this? You have been chauvinistic, unpleasant and downright rude. Why? What have I ever done to you?”
He got up from his seat and looked down at me with a most peculiar expression on his face.
“It’s not always about you. I am what I am. How I was made…”
Then he was gone, and the woman went with him. Two entities with one shadow…

You can also find Sam Nero in The Last City – a science fiction anthology from Dust Publishing

They will tell you Fae can’t cry….
In a way that’s true, but we can be hurt, although we are forever denied the healing benison of tears.
I knelt on the forest floor, and I replayed the moment the orcs sawed down my tree over and over in my head.
My tree was dead. I did not understand why I was not dead too. They meant me to die. They mean all the forest spirits to die…
But I am still alive and in a moment I must stand and fight them.
For now I just wish I could cry.

A Drabble by Jane Jago inspired by original artwork from Ian Bristow.

Hengist ‘Dog’ Gethick is one of the stars of the science-fiction show ‘Starways Pathfinders’.

Dog was half drunk and wondering if he should have accepted the invitation to join his best friend in the dive bar on thirty-three. Teram was the kind who liked to go slumming — said it kept him grounded. He ran the family salvage company and was the hands-on type who liked to do the work at the sharp end. His idea of a good night out was to go drinking with his hard-core salvage crews.
“They are good people, Dog — and they would be made up to meet you.”
“No. They would be made up to meet Sub-Commander Arlan Stude, not Dog Gethick, jobbing actor.”
Teram did not deny it, just rolled his shoulders as they took the glides down.
“They won’t recognise you anyway without that uniform and the sexy half-mask,” he confided. “But you got to know what you are to these boys. They won’t miss an episode. You are like their hero.”
Dog shook his head and altered course to avoid his towering bulk blocking the way for a couple with a baby.
“It’s all crap. Just kids’ stories in grown-up words. None of it real. Not like it’ll ever happen. I don’t see the real Strands ever funding a space exploration mission. They’d not see profit in it.”
Teram glanced up at him.
“You don’t get it do you, Dog? It’s not that it’ll never happen — everyone knows it’ll never happen. It’s that it shows something bigger than this.” He gestured to the buzz of humanity around them. “These are people penned into the cage this city’s become — you, your show, it opens the doors of that cage for a while. Opens the doors and lets in hope. More than hope. Real belief in a future that can be more than this.”
That was too much, and Dog shook his head. “I’m an actor, not a fucking messiah.”

The bar was not as bad as Dog had thought it would be. It was well ventilated and the people who were vaping whatever noxious substances sat in a side room where an androgyne gyrated naked on a podium. Teram’s crew sat together by the one window which offered not so much a panorama of the cityscape of the kind Dog had at home, but more like a murky glimpse into the bowels of the world — dark and lit by sudden flares.
“So, what do you do, Dog?”
Someone had to ask, and lulled by the strong spirits and the rough but good-natured bonhomie, Dog almost forgot himself.
“I’m an actor.” He remembered in time and quickly added, “Used to do that commercial for Eatin’ Quix delivery?”
That met with a few nods of recall and the topic moved on. But it was too much to expect Teram to let it lie for long.
“So, what did you guys make of the latest SP? You think they will find those Kyruku?” His eyes slid to Dog and he winked. “Makes you think. Aliens and all.”
Dog said nothing as the men around him speculated. “Ain’t no fucking aliens. If there were, we’d have met ’em by now. Stands to reason.”
“Yeah. But The Golden Strand is headed ’cross the fucking galaxy, not just round the block and home; it’s different.”
“Different? You see that view screen they get to see stuff on? Huge thing. Dream of that for our ship. What you say, boss — when we getting that kind of tech?”
There was laughter, and Teram laughed loudest of all.
“What if it was for real, though?” someone said. Dog had not picked up the names; he’d tried, but the faces were too similar — worn, weary and bleak. He recalled an odd conversation he’d had with Heila a couple of days before: she’d been going on about her fans, her people. Well, he guessed these were his people. Gnarled by life before they hit thirty, running on dreams and stardust and the false hope held out by the allure of each episode of Starways Pathfinders.
“What if? You kidding? I’d sign up in a second.”
“Yeah. Think of it. The freedom of the stars. Going where no other fucker’s ever been.”
“Be like, you’d be alive. You’d matter. You’d be doing something — something good.”
Heads nodded and someone called another round of drinks. Dog stared out of the window at the inky sludge that coated it, dulling the grim sights it would otherwise expose.

From ‘Star Dust’ by E.M. Swift-Hook

The life of an elderly delinquent in limericks – with free optional snark…

I am old, and I don’t give a shit
About gravity’s work on my bits
I’m not some humble dame
Who can be ‘body shamed’
By a halfwit with silicone tits

© jane jago

The Rabid Readers Review Contact (Instinct Theory #1) by Ian Bristow.

The first contact with alien intelligence is going to bring out both the best and the worst in humanity.  In Contact, Ian Bristow brings us a story that sharply contrasts those who seek to profit from those who seek to befriend.

Our heroine. Madelyn, is an anthropologist and a person with a clear moral compass. She sets out on a mission to a far planet with a great deal of hope and bucketload of intellectual curiosity, but she is destined to find out that first contact with an alien race is very different from observing natives deep in the Amazon jungle.

Danger stalks every move both she and her companions make, and the question of who to trust becomes a matter of life or death. The question this novel poses very well is whether our first duty is to fight for the fate of the human race, or do we have a moral obligation to do no harm?

Read and decide for yourself.

Jane Jago

First-Contact With A Twist!

When anthropologist Madelyn Lawrence is asked to join a secretive mission to study the first intelligent alien life, she is honoured and excited, even though it means leaving her fiance for another year. But she comes to learn that this mission is not entirely as it seems. There is a dark agenda behind the group of young scientists sent to study the planet and its biodiversity – a dark agenda that threatens her life.

Set in a not-too-distant future 140 years hence, what is really striking from the first about this book is that whereas many first-contact books have the aliens as the ‘bad guys’ when the first contact is hostile, in this book it is humanity which comes to the party with a hostile agenda. That makes this a rather unique take on the subject.

Like most good sci-fi, this is a story which has its focus on the people not on tech – although there is some interesting tech in there with such things as self-piloting air transport, space-elevators and holographic augmented reality maps. But the people, their relationships, their conflicts, fears, hopes and decisions are the focus.

The glimpsed descriptions of the alien world are really well done, creating an impression of a very different kind of landscape but with hauntingly familiar echos of earth. There might be ‘forests’ but the ‘trees’ are not as they are on earth. There are some truly alien – and often terrifying – flora and fauna for the exploration team to encounter.

This is a well-written book with interesting and believable characters, lots of action, sci-fi and intrigue. My main criticism would be a spoiler to go into in any detail here. But I do think that key in any first-contact novel, for me as a reader, is exploring the way in which an alien culture would be removed dramatically from anything we have on Earth. But then this is a story about human experience and one with a powerful message to deliver at that.

Contact (Instinct Theory #1) is part one of an ongoing series so don’t expect resolution of all the story elements by the end of the book.

Overall a great read that comes highly recommended!

E.M. Swift-Hook