Genre Stories 5

Here’s the fifth collection of twitter-length stories.

Crime: “Wanna get high?” said the paraglider dealer. Brad was tempted. It had been a while. But he knew the product would be cut with tent.

Political: At the UN were 120 interpreters and Juan, who was translating speeches into the international language of love.

Adventure: “I’m gonna literally wipe the floor with you,” said the GI. “I doubt that,” said Hans, who was literally a Grammar Nazi.

Self-Help: Help yourself. To pudding. I can’t solve your problems in one tweet, but pudding is delicious.

Revisionism: The plagiarist Shakespeare stole and renamed the plays Sir Michael o’Bay: rIIIch-Hard, 2 Gentlemen 2 Verona, and ShrewTamer.

Crime: All the victims were the same: Perfectly healthy and alive, with one tiny paper-cut. This was the the work of a psychohomeopath.

Music History: 1976: US weaponises Disco Fever. 1983: USSR drops Da Bomb.

Fable: The Billy Goat Gruff convinced the troll that a more gullible goat would soon be on the comment thread.

Family drama: He enjoyed his daughter’s enthusiastic tales of spring break, and assumed she was listing Disneyland rides. Not sex positions.

Political: He was always vocally dismissive of the sheeple. Until he met the wolfple.

Crime: The police had no trouble catching the Dyslexia Killer. He’d written detailed descriptions of his murders in a dairy.

War: The Sergeant respected the General’s command of the tactical map, but worried about the “Brrrm!” sound he made when moving the tanks.

Legal: The music industry released a track about how copyright law stifles free speech. Protestors were then sued for infringing the lyrics.

Horror: “You’ll sleep like babies,” said the innkeeper. Which was true. They spent half the night screaming, and the other half throwing up.

Palindrome: These are easy, as long as you don’t mind the second half going gniog flah dnoces eht dnim tnod uoy sa gnol sa ysae era eseht.

Slice Of Life: In the interview he claimed he was a workaholic, but arrived drunk on the first day. He had his own definition of “Workahol”.

Music History: The punks were bored. They needed a new genre that would REALLY get up people’s noses. And call center music was born.

Scripture: “G-O-L-D!!!!” “FRANKINCENSE – Cheap!” “Myrrh – For Men. FREE SAMPLEZ!” Mary was getting suspicious about her son’s new followers.

Adventure: That awkward moment when you discover that the light at the end of the tunnel you were so relieved about is lava.

Erotic: “Who’s your equal?” he growled respectfully.

Action: “Extreme sports always have two extremes,” said the winner of the shortest triathlon, lowest bungee and least flips on a skateboard.

Occult: He marked the back of the carriage with a rune: A red “L”. A curse to summon lamp-posts and pedestrians out of nowhere.

Modern Fairytale: the Wicked Witch gave Snow White an apple, and cackled as the helpless princess drove up a massive debt on the app store.

Epic: The Thousand-Year War between the Thirty Tribes and the Dragoneers of Crya was brought to a sudden, devastating end by writer’s block.

Legal Drama: “I find the defendant…” coin arcs, lands in palm, slapped onto back of other hand, revealed, “…not guilty!” Mistrial.

Horror: The outbreak of vampirism amongst the walruses went completely unnoticed by everybody.

Time Travel: dox but couldn’t, because the past had already happened, so he tried to make a para

Trailer: The nihilists wear the symbol of the naught. If the priests don’t stop them, it’s Game Over. NAUGHTS AND CROSSES- THE MOVIE. 2012

RomCom: He caught her speeding, but blew it again. As she drove off she wished he’d just ask her out. This was costing a fortune in tickets.

Autobiographical: Hypocrisy is an absolutely terrible thing unless I’m doing it.

• Previous collections: 1 2 3 4

Genre Remix: Horror

Jeff Noon has been experimenting with what he calls “Dub Fiction”: Using online text randomisers to scramble text, and finding new and surprising images in the results. His idea is to create something like a remix b-side that can be presented next to the original work. He demonstrates his technique here.

I wanted to try it out and remix some of my @Genrestories, so I started with all the horrors. The originals were:

Horror: “You’ll sleep like babies,” said the innkeeper. Which was true. They spent half the night screaming, and the other half throwing up.

Horror: The outbreak of vampirism amongst the walruses went completely unnoticed by everybody.

Horror: My soul haunts the spot I died, cursing those who enter the building. But someone turned it into a Home Affairs, so no one notices.

Mild Horror: Biologists studied the outbreak of zombiedom in the turtle population with interest, but not alarm.

Horror: “Bind Them Forever!” chanted the eyeless ones, holding a rusted needle. And the couple began to regret having a themed wedding.

Horor: “Fish Fingers tonight!” said New Mommy. Jimmy looked at his plate. Scales. Knuckles. They weren’t what Jimmy expected. Not at all.

Horror: “Wear this ring,” said the shopkeeper, “and all your dreams will come true.” They did. Even the one with the teeth.

Horror: Lovecraft stared at the page. During the fever he’d channeled a phantasmagorical tale of sentient beasts, and signed it “B. POTTER.”

Horror Metafiction: Vampire romances suck the life out of all new young adult novels. They turn every new book into a vampire romance.

Horror Movie Trailer: 140 IS THE NEW 666. This summer, Follow the warnings. Follow your instinct. Just don’t follow… DeathTweet.

Horror: “You used to love this before the accident. Now open wide,” said his daughter patiently, holding up a spoonful of crushed eyeballs.

Psychological Horror: She stroked his cat. A seam burst, and sawdust poured out. “I can’t let go of anything I love,” he said.

Erotic Horror: Fingertips touched the nape of her neck, stroked her shoulder, and brushed down her body, envious of its completeness.

Horror: The stone suit pinched his skin until he bled. It wouldn’t stop until he picked up the tools to carve more of them, for his family.

I remixed them, stripped out the nonsense, and polished them up. Here are the results:

“The tale begins tonight,” said DeathTweet. “There is no time for eyeless love.”

—

Jimmy hoped the teeth would go unnoticed amongst his knuckles. But everyone noticed. Biologists studied them. Lovecraft stared at their truth; their fever spot.

—

With interest and a needle, I fixed a burst seam, and pinched it closed with summer.

—

“Follow,” he said, and fingertips poured out of his hand, every one a sentient beast.

—

He held her neck open with a spoonful of vampirism. She regretted having him as a shopkeeper.

—

“Don’t follow… crushed eyeballs!”

—

The vampire’s outbreak was romantic. Envious, the zombie wouldn’t stroke his cat.

–

I can’t be a vampire if I follow your adult novels.

—

140 is new, young and true.

A Valentine’s Day Treat

Last week I took a break from writing to direct and edit this music video for my friend Matthew Gair, which we shot in the park with our friends. I finished it last night. Enjoy!

Something Wicked: Pandemonium review and interview

This month’s issue of Something Wicked magazine includes a great review of Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, as well as an interview with Charlie Human and myself about our stories in the compilation.

So obviously the first question is how the hell did so many South Africans get onto this anthology?

SAM: It’s pretty much entirely Lauren Beukes. Pandemonium was put together by Jared [Shurin] and Anne [C. Perry], from Pornokitsch (the website) and they had already awarded Lauren the Kitschies Award last year. So when they asked Lauren to be part of [the anthology] and asked if there was anyone she knew who might be able to whip up some good stories, she very kindly said us.

CHARLIE: Ja, it’s like a lot of the things I end up writing, Lauren has either commissioned or sorted out for me…

SAM: [laughing] It’s basically anything Lauren is too busy to do herself.

So you’re basically her whipping boys.

SAM: Well, yeah. [laughs] No, we’re just kind of under her table clawing at the crumbs which drop from her mouth.

• The full interview and the review can be read in the January 2012 issue of Something Wicked.

Book details

• Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by Jared Shurin
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780957039216
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

“Walled Garden” review

The Pornokitsch website has published a really good and thoughtful review of my short story The Walled Garden, originally printed in Chew Magazine and available for free here. The review compares it to another short story “The House On The Wall” by Stanley Weyman, which deals in a different way with society’s gatekeepers.

Sam Wilson’s “The Walled Garden” (2010) is emotionally and morally ambiguous throughout – a brief and disturbing tale about a corporate employee whose role is to evaluate “inappropriate” content from a major (unnamed) website. The work is grinding, both physically (“We each have to get through sixty thousand images a day, or we’re out”) and mentally. The images are of the most horrific scenes imaginable.

The full review is available here.

Genre Stories 4

Here’s the latest collection of Genre Stories, condensed and edited for your reading pleasure.

Social Drama: He listened to new music and hung out with new people. He told his old friends that they just didn’t get bald culture.

Spiritual: “Only by shutting down all thought can you achieve happiness,” said Michael Bay.

Somnambulist Detective: Idunnit.

Horror: My soul haunts the spot I died, cursing those who enter the building. But someone turned it into a Home Affairs, so no one notices.

Fable: The prince climbed the tangled hair and heard swearing from above. Legend said Rapunzel’s hair grew long. It never said which hair.

Drama: His tattoos were stretching. His piercings got caught on his wife’s doilies. He had lived fast, but was bad at following through.

Dickensian: “I may lack fancy clothes, but helping strangers gives me something more valuable.” The stranger’s pocket-watch, for starters.

SciFi: “Laugh at me?” said Dr Zarxo. “I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!” So he did a double-blind study and got the results peer reviewed.

Sequel: All things considered, a spoonful of sugar wasn’t the wisest way to encourage Jimmy to take his insulin.

School Memoir: “Think quick!” his friend shouted, so he did a differential calculation and got hit by a cricket ball.

Apocalyptic: Meteors. Explosions. Lava. It was a terrible day to have (a) drunk lots of coffee and (b) worn white trousers.

Action: “Anyone on board have pilot training? Or played Flight Simulator? Or had flying dreams on absinthe?” And Philipe’s hour had come.

Drama: Moral dilemmas are like birthdays. Even if you ignore them, they add up. He sighed, and blew out the candles on the skull-cake.

Medical: He isolated the virus responsible for procrastination. No one believed him except the makers of Angry Birds, who made millions.

Fantasy: Gromud raided the ruby mines of Xethi and foiled the Greed Kings. This alienated his friends, who worked in finance.

Creepy: Hundreds of dead butterflies, each labeled with the name of one of the girls who’d seen his collection and left him forever.

Political: “Well, I didn’t WANT to be grand dictator for life and exulted father of his people anyway.”

Crime: The museum paid the consultants millions to install laser sensors and pressure plates. Minutes later they were gone with the diamond.

Mild Horror: Biologists studied the outbreak of zombiedom in the turtle population with interest, but not alarm.

Hedonistic: The pills kicked in. The music filled his mind with joy. He raised his hands up towards the lights. And crashed the ambulance.

Drama: She thought he called her “Lightswitch” because she turned him on and lit up his life. Actually, it was the on-again-off-again thing.

Apocalyptic: “At least I’ll get thin now,” thought Bob. He hadn’t counted on the stress-eating.

Tragedy: Swimming at night. The riptide was strong. He had been drinking. He even kept his shoes on. He didn’t die. Darwin wept.

Chick Lit: She stood on her own two feet. She didn’t want to get swept off them. High-heels.

History: Isaac Newton made an important discovery in that orchard: Birds sitting in apple trees don’t always control their bowels.

Fantasy: The spell took him to a strange world. The ground was pink and covered in fine hair. It was unfamiliar, like the back of his hand.

Horror: “Bind Them Forever!” chanted the eyeless ones, holding a rusted needle. And the couple began to regret having a themed wedding.

Coming Of Age: He learned a lot that year. Laundry won’t do itself. Deodorant is not a bath. And scurvy is still an actual thing.

Modern Romance: “Why do you still sell AA batteries?” he said. “What devices still use them?” The cashier’s blush gave her away.

Fantasy: The scientist uncovered the wires that the mystic used to fake levitation. And Tlazotl the God of Skeptics grew powerful.

If you want more, here are the previous collections:

One
Two
Three

And if you still haven’t had enough, you can follow @GenreStories at twitter.com/genrestories.

The Walled Garden

Originally published in Chew Magazine, Issue 18.

Photo by Irini Michopoulou

The new kid is crying. Someone should comfort him, but he’s the third one this week. We ignore him. He’s better off quitting.

We don’t have time to talk anyway. We’ve been slipping on our quota. The rules are clear: We each have to get through sixty thousand images a day, or we’re out. This is the kind of outsourcing work the Indians snap up, and we were lucky to get it.

On my screen is a five-by-five grid, twenty-five images at a time. They’re all from the same website. Every time a user flags an image as inappropriate content, it’s sent to us to be verified and, if necessary, deleted. Sometimes they click the “flag” button just because it’s an unflattering picture, but those times are rare. Mostly it’s porn. Sometimes it’s worse. And sometimes it’s much, much worse.

Charlie used to grade the images according to what it’ll take to get the image out of your head. Drinkers. Shrinkers. Mallets. Bullets. Before lunch, our new kid catches his first Bullet. He runs to the bathroom and we hear retching.
“Oi!” calls Riaad. “Close that door!”
I feel sorry for the boy, so I go to his computer to delete the image. When I see it, I turn away.
“Bad one?” asks Riaad, not looking. I don’t need to answer.

I surreptitiously send a copy to my computer before I delete it.

As I’m walking back, Riaad calls me.
“Sandy!”
I go over to his desk.
“This’ll cheer you up,” he says, and shows me an image of a charred, twisted body.
“Cable thief,” he said. “Tried to steal a live electric wire. Dumbass!”
“You’re sick,” I say.
He’s still giggling as I sit back down. I can’t blame him, though. We’ve all got our own way of dealing.

At lunch we sit together at the corner café downstairs. The new kid doesn’t have anything to eat.
“We have to tell the police,” he says.
“We don’t,” says Riaad. “Nondisclosure agreement, remember? No-one wants this stuff getting out.”
“You won’t try to stop it?”
“We can’t!” said Riaad, laughing. “Have you seen how much there is?”
The kid claws at his scalp.
“Charlie said we can’t make the world a better place,” I said. “All we can do is make one little place on the internet where everything’s safe. A walled garden.”
“Who’s Charlie?” said the new guy.
“Your predecessor,” said Riaad, and mimes a gunshot to the head.
I look down at my food.

The new kid doesn’t come back after lunch.

I spend the last few minutes of my break opening his Bullet in Photoshop.

This is a trick Charlie taught me. I select the girl in the image and delete her. I copy some of the wall and paste it into the gap. I extend the window and the carpet with a content-aware fill, and spend a few minutes with the clone tool cleaning it up. Now it’s just a picture of an empty hotel room, with floral-print curtains and a cream bedspread. Behind the bed is a sliding-door cabinet and a floor-lamp. On the other side is the back of a door with an empty coat-hook. There’s no sign that anything’s wrong.

I upload the picture onto the website, into the gallery with all the others. Hotel rooms, store rooms, bar-room floors, playgrounds, all sterilised and safe. One thousand and twenty seven images so far. My safe place. My garden.

Something I Found While Moving

My girlfriend and I moved house over the weekend, and while we were piling four years worth of accumulated telephone bills, refrigerator magnets and toy robots into cardboard boxes, I found a handwritten copy of this (very) short story.

I wrote it on stage during this year’s Open Book Festival, at an event in which eight writers were given a few minutes to write a short story with a given style and topic. The style I was given was “Enid Blyton” and the topic was “Space”.

Here’s what I wrote.

FOUR GET EATEN BY A XENOMORPH

Harry, Suzy, Freddy and their dog Toby were on their way to visit Auntie Gladys and Uncle Ben at Penal Colony IX, known to the locals as “Agony Nine”.

“I hope Auntie Gladys gives us sticky buns!” said Harry. “I’m starving after all those months in suspended animation.”

“You’re starving all the time,” laughed Suzy. “Tubby!”

“Woof,” said Toby.

Their transport shuttle dropped slowly towards the blasted terrain.

“Wait!” cried Freddie, pointing to the view-screen. “There was movement out there, by that ice-cave!”

“Perhaps it’s smugglers,” said Suzy. “Or pirates! Let’s go explore!”

They landed the transport, and walked into the jagged mouth of the cave.

“Shh, everybody,” said Harry. “I’m sure I heard a sound. Whatever could it be?”

In the torchlight above them were two cocoons. One held Auntie Gladys, the other Uncle Ben.

“Kill Me,” said Auntie Gladys.

THE END

The Cringe Factor

It’s the Open Book Festival, and I’m stuck here in Joburg missing out on the awesomeness. As I can’t be there in person, I’d like to post the text I wrote for one of the events happening this evening.

It’s for the “cringe factor” event, where we had to write the worst possible opening page for a novel, starting with the words “In Cape Town, nobody…”

In Cape Town nobody lives in Johannesburg, except for the people who are there on holiday or business trips or for some other reasons, medical maybe, but those cases are rare and not worth mentioning. Most people in The Mother City as it’s called live there all the time, in houses and apartment blocks or shacks in the city center or the suburbs or the townships or the favelas as they’re called in Brazil. The people in Cape Town also don’t live anywhere else like Port Elizabeth.
 
That’s why it was hard for the South African Special Emergency Relocation Service (SASERS) to know what to do with all the people they had to evacuate from Cape Town, because if they lived anywhere else it would be easy. In fact, mused General Neo Motsepe, the general in charge of the South African Special Emergency Relocation Service, they would probably be home already, wouldn’t have to worry about the giant squid.
 
But they couldn’t not worry, because the people didn’t not live in Cape Town. So General Neo Motsepe needed a plan, and needed it yesterday, when the voluminous squid attacked the harbor, which was positioned along one of the world’s busiest trade routes and is one of the busiest ports in South Africa, handling the largest amount of fresh fruit and second only to Durban as a container port.
 
Was, thought General Neo Motsepe privately to himself, because that was yesterday, and this was Friday. Now, there was nothing in Table Bay except for a ginormous squid which was bigger than any squid before it.
 
Why the corpulent squid had attacked Cape Town, nobody knew. What the gargantuan squid wanted was anybody’s guess. How it had grown to such a Brobdingnagian size was impossible to say. Where it had come from was a total mystery. Why it wanted to eat Cape Town was still up in the air. The only thing General Neo Motsepe of the South African Special Emergency Relocation Service knew was he had to act, and act quickly.
 
“Sheila,” he barked at his buxom assistant who was called Sheila. “I need to act quickly.”
“Yes Sir,” Sheila accorded. The night before they had been making wild, passionate love, but today they were entirely professional, as is befitting of members of the South African Special Emergency Relocation Service and government departments in general.
“What is the plan?” he interrogated.
“There’s only one option,” she responded. “We cannot relocate the citizens of our beloved Mother City to anywhere else in the country. They would not understand our ways and customs, and cultural sensitivity is very important.”
“Then where should we send them?” quizzed General Neo Motsepe.
“It’s dangerous,” said the 23 year old blonde who kept her body in good shape with regular tennis sessions, “but it might be possible to relocate the city in its entirety into the only place that is safe from being eaten by that massive squid.”
“And where is that?” queried General Neo Motsepe, batting the question at her. She served the answer back like one of the many balls that she hit when she was playing tennis.
“We can relocate the city – into the squid itself!”
General Neo Motsepe stared at Sheila like she had just turned into an elephantine squid herself. The idea was demented, farcical, preposterous, harebrained, cuckoo, nonsensical and cockamamie, but it just might work.

The Ends of the World are Nigh

The good people at the Pornokitsch website (low down and dirty, but not in that sort of way, at least not while on the clock) are editing a collection of apocalyptic fiction, and I’m one of the lucky writers who put in a story.

The collection is inspired by the works of John Martin (1789-1854) A british painter of wildly dramatic apocalyptic scenes that were popular with the masses but largely dismissed by critics. Or, as the Pornokitsch people put it, “our type of guy”.

The book features works by fellow South Africans Lauren Beukes, S.L. Grey (The chimera of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg) and Charlie Human.

It’ll be on sale in October.

My story is about a postmodern apocalypse:

One of the placards read “MATHEMATICS IS RACIST”. Another read “WHATEVER”. A third read “TINRBTOWMFO”. Dr. Chandrasekhar pointed at it.
“What’s that? Is that self-parody?”
Shelly Bream looked up to see which sign was irritating him this time.
“I asked them about it,” she said. “It means ‘There Is No Reality But The One We Make For Ourselves’.”
“Well, how is anyone else meant to work that out? Did you ask them that?”
“Um. I did. They don’t care. That’s sort of the point.”