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The Aquarius Code (100 pages). Printed book or e-book (read more)
Originally published by Chippewa in 2006, this newly revised edition (2010) includes a bonus story: The Naked Guru.
When a group of tourists disappears on a visit to Stonehenge, the police suspect a publicity stunt. But Professor Henry Vaughan, head of Gnostic Theology at Oxford University, knows better. A crack has appeared in reality, and a cosmic crisis is looming! Vaughan embarks on a frantic quest as powerful forces close in. He takes a vital piece of evidence—the Aquarius Code—and goes on the run. With him is Ruth Totton, the only witness to what really happened. As their desperate search leads them across the ancient landscape of Britain, Vaughan and Ruth gradually learn the secret of the Aquarius Code and its astonishing links to Gnostic Theology and secret sex rituals. A fast-moving thriller in the spirit of The Da Vinci Code.
The Invisible College and Other Mysteries (112 pages). Printed book or e-book (ISBN 978-1-4476-0589-8). (read more)
SOLVED! The Secret Oxford League of Volunteer Extracurricular Detectives in: The Case of the Dangerous Book; The Case of the Invisible College; The Case of the Shakespearean Super-Chimp; The Case of the Abducted Astrobiologist; The Case of the Ghost in the Machine; The Case of the Shocking Science Quarterly, and The Case of the Inverted Pyramid.
Seven old-style mystery stories set amidst the dreaming spires of Oxford University.
Kundalini Conspiracy (84 pages). Printed book (ISBN 1-4116-1739-8) or e-book (ISBN 978-1-257-39682-5). (read more)
Strange things are going on in the town of Blastonbury, and paranormal investigator Byron Bland is determined to get to the bottom of them. UFO sightings, a sinister military experiment, a mysterious cult and a mad scientist are just the start of it. Byron finds himself embroiled in the weird world of Blastonbury's New Age subculture, and acquires a reluctant ally in the form of Jessica Peace-Lily -- a diminutive, mousy-haired young woman who turns out to be a black-belt Tantric Elemental. Between them, Byron and Jessica uncover evidence that a long-forgotten but fearsome force is at work -- a force that goes back to the time of ancient Egypt, Atlantis and the lost Indian civilization of Rama.
SOLVED: The Case of the Dangerous Book (4400 words). Folio (British Mensa), February 2009. (collected in The Invisible College )
Stormson was making a careful examination of the binding of the book. "Hmm -- a most interesting example of anthropodermic bibliopegy."
"Beg pardon?" I blinked at him.
"Anthropodermic bibliopegy," Stormson repeated. "The practice of binding books in human skin. Undoubtedly this binding is all that remains of Mr George Simms."
The first in a new series featuring SOLVED -- The Secret Oxford League of Volunteer Extracurricular Detectives.
SOLVED 2: The Case of the Invisible College (4200 words). Folio (British Mensa), May 2009. (collected in The Invisible College )
Philpott looked around nervously. "You've heard of cold fusion?"
"I have," Stormson answered. "Cold fusion is a controversial process which has never been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientific community. If successful, it would be a source of limitless free energy."
Philpott nodded vigorously. "That's it exactly. I am on the brink of success. You can see why they are out to suppress my work at all costs."
Paranoia and a scientific mystery in the second SOLVED story.
SOLVED 3: The Case of the Shakespearean Super-Chimp (1200 words). Folio (British Mensa), December 2009. (collected in The Invisible College )
"It's Bonzo, our experimental chimpanzee." Melissa pouted. "Everything was going fine, and then he started typing out Hamlet."
I nodded in understanding. "A monkey typing Shakespeare, eh? Well, they always said it would happen sooner or later."
A bizarre mystery with a rational explanation.
SOLVED 4: The Case of the Abducted Astrobiologist (3500 words). Folio (British Mensa), July 2009. (collected in The Invisible College )
"Ah, astrobiology," Stormson nodded. "The study of extraterrestrial life."
My ears perked up. "That's a subject I'm interested in myself. Aliens... UFOs... shadowy government conspiracies...."
Stormson glanced at me disdainfully. "I think not. I believe modern astrobiology is more concerned with organic molecules and such like."
A prominent scientist goes missing during an academic conference.
SOLVED 5: The Case of the Ghost in the Machine (4000 words). Folio (British Mensa), October 2009. (collected in The Invisible College )
"Mad Scientist?" I raised my eyebrows. "It's not like you to use sensationalist language, Prof."
"There's nothing sensationalist about it. Maxwell Quain is a scientist, and he is mad. Ergo, he is a Mad Scientist. He was the most eminent nuclear physicist in Oxford, until he went out of his mind. He now lives a reclusive existence in a large gothic house in North Oxford. Quain is obsessed with alchemy and the occult, and in particular the work of the 16th century sorcerer Edward Kelley."
Ancient mysteries and high-technology in a tale of Gothic terror.
SOLVED 6: The Case of the Shocking Science Quarterly (5800 words). Folio (British Mensa), February 2010. (collected in The Invisible College )
“No-one knows why the magazine was withdrawn from circulation. It’s generally assumed that the cover story, ‘Jetpack Jenny and the Tentacle Men of Jupiter’, violated the many obscenity laws of the time. But conspiracy theorists say there was a more sinister reason. The back-up story is listed as ‘The Amazing Anti-Gravity Machine’, and some people believe it contained important scientific ideas the authorities wanted to suppress."
The one remaining copy of a 1930s pulp magazine goes missing!
SOLVED 7: The Case of the Inverted Pyramid (2400 words). Folio (British Mensa), to appear. (collected in The Invisible College )
As the bus headed out of the town centre, I had time to catch my breath and do some thinking. I recalled what the Egyptian specialist had said about the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps that was it -- some kind of sinister New Age cult, using the Inverted Pyramid as its symbol. Maybe the missing primadonna, Hermione Smythe, had fallen into their clutches!
A female undergraduate goes missing, the only clue being a pendant in the form of a crystal pyramid.
The Rendlesham Magi (2500 words). Folio (British Mensa), Winter 2008.
"It's all nonsense, of course," old Dodson went on. "The Star in the East is purely symbolic. A theological necessity, to demonstrate fulfilment of God's prophecy in the Book of Numbers. But materialists like yourself refuse to be satisfied with the beauty of religious symbolism. You insist on looking for comets and supernovas and planetary conjunctions. But these theories are all discredited -- totally discredited."
Here at last is the true story behind the Rendlesham Forest Incident -- the mysterious object that came down near an airbase in the East of England on Christmas Day 1980.
The Balloon Factory (2000 words). Fortean Bureau, August 2003.
"It makes me angry, it does," Fripp said. "The contempt our so-called government has for its own citizens. They tell us there's no such thing as Martians, that anyone who sees flying machines is either mad or lying. Well I've seen them, and lots of local people have seen them. So there must be Martians."
This is a satire on conspiracy theories of the Roswell variety. I've always been amused by the effortless ability of true believers to turn a blind eye to the complexity of events going on in the world around them, and to shrink the facts to fit their hopes and expectations. It suddenly occurred to me that people like that may have been around a hundred years ago...
The Mythologist (2800 words). Twilight Times, January 2004.
"The quotation is a hoax," I said. "It's true that a man named Petronius Arbiter really did exist -- he was a satirist in the Roman empire at the time of Nero. A lot of his writings have survived, but that simply isn't one of them. The quotation was invented -- probably not even as a deliberate hoax -- by someone trying to make a point back in the 1940s or 50s. The precise origin is obscure, but it's almost certain that the quotation didn't exist prior to that date. Yet as soon as it appeared it struck a chord in the world's collective consciousness. It cropped up more and more frequently, until now it's everywhere. Wherever there's gratuitous bureaucracy, you'll find that quotation pinned up on a noticeboard."
Another story about myths, and the way that society will grab hold of them and accept them as "Truth" if they reflect current preoccupations accurately enough!
The Gravity Engine (2700 words). Quantum Muse, July 2000.
Like its sister Belgravia further south, Tyburnia was among the first districts in London to be planned on both aesthetic and functional principles. Elegant four-storey town houses, with stuccoed facades and Doric porches, lined the broad squares and avenues. It all seemed a far cry from talk of anti-gravity and inertialess motion.
An "alternative history" tale set in Victorian London in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. The story is told from the point of view of Robert Stephenson, the by-then middle-aged son of the famous railway pioneer. Stephenson travels across London to the Surrey Shot Tower, at the invitation of down-and-out scientist Michael Faraday. Ostracized by his peers as a result of his discredited notions about electro-magnetism, Faraday now claims to have had dramatic successes with his gravitational experiments... A steampunk story which is also a satire on scientific intolerance.
Flowers of the Future (1700 words). Bewildering Stories issue 61, September 2003.
"On February 1st 2003 a returning spaceship bursts into flame and plummets to Earth. At the same time, the brave men and women of the free world are preparing for the last stand in the War on Terror... So begins Melvyn Pettle’s chilling vision of a future just forty short years away..."
I've always been amused by the way left-wing SF writers of the sixties -- people like Brian Aldiss, John Brunner and J G Ballard -- used to project their blinkered, Cold-War politics onto what to them was the future, but is now the present (or even the past). It occurred to me that even if one of these writers could have seen the world of 2003 as it really turned out, they still would have twisted it to their own agenda...
Secrets of the Green God (1400 words). Nuketown, June 2000.
The creature had four arms and three eyes, and it was green. Surrounded by the relics of past centuries, it stood motionless, frozen in its cosmic dance of creation and destruction... Arthur beckoned the sales assistant. "That Indian figurine," he said. "I'll take it."
"A fine choice," the assistant said, unlocking the display case. "You're a collector?"
"No, not really," Arthur said. "But it reminds me of home. It reminds me of Earth."
I produced this deliberately contrived opening hook in 1988, as one of the exercises at a creative writing course I attended. This short story is my only real attempt at hard SF.
Loss of Power (2300 words). Quantum Muse, June 2000.
"The Rhinegold"... the beginning of the great story. A loveless man, renouncing love in favor of supreme power. The symbolism was precise. Replacing the natural with the unnatural, changing nature's rules to beat nature's system, the essence of all human endeavor...
Originally written in 1980, heavily revised in 1988, and finally published on the Web in 2000. A rich eccentric lives a virtual reality existence immersed in the fantasy world of Wagner's operas... until there's a power failure.
The Day the Myths Came True (1700 words). PhilipKDick.com, August 2000.
Parts of the universe had been put together badly. Betraying poor workmanship. To give the system its due, most of the universe worked just fine, but a few corners were distinctly sub-standard in quality. Cracks began to show; surface appearances started to peel; things didn't work the way they were intended to. That's how it was with the Earth.
This story was put together from several fragments (originally titled "He Shall Come Again", "Come Together" and "Allspace in a Notshall") that were written as pastiches of Philip K Dick between 1975 and 1980.
The Call of Cool-O: Philip K Dick meets H P Lovecraft (2300 words). PhilipKDick.com, December 2000.
Information is being beamed into my head, Hank Wilcox thought grimly. By some vast, timeless, impersonal entity. He speeded his pace, then, as he moved along the sidewalk clutching the small paper-wrapped package...
What do PKD and HPL have in common? They both scraped a living by writing for the bottom end of the literary market, and both died before receiving establishment recognition. And despite their different writing styles and imagery, there are definite parallels between their world-views. Dick's novels are founded on his life-long interest in Gnosticism - the idea of a demented and/or evil demi-god usurping a benign but no-longer-present true God, both having come to Earth from the stars. There's an obvious echo here of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos (as used by HPL himself, I mean - not the warm and cozy version of some of his later imitators). It was this observation that inspired me to attempt a re-telling of "The Call of Cthulhu" in the style of PKD.
The Naked Guru (7000 words). Nuketown, May/July 2001. (included in The Aquarius Code )
The image on the screen showed a bustling city street, seen from a strange and constantly changing perspective. The viewpoint spiralled in from a dizzying height, then levelled out and swept along just above the heads of the oblivious crowd. It looked for all the world like an insect’s eye view -- which, in a sense, it was... One figure among many stopped and turned, looking straight into the camera. There was something chilling about the man’s reaction, because from that distance a normal human eye couldn’t even see the tiny insect... let alone identify it as something worthy of attention, such as a remotely operated surveillance device.
Now thoroughly revised, this story was originally published in two parts as "The Void" and "Pigalle".
Planet of Evil (2000 words). Bewildering Stories issue 48, June 2003.
The origin of the short story that follows is something of a mystery. It appears to have been written at great speed circa 1950 by a now-forgotten hack writer who was desperately trying to meet a deadline. Indeed, some experts believe that the story was written so quickly that it momentarily exceeded the speed of light, causing it to break out of its local space-time continuum and spontaneously reappear in cyberspace 50 years later...
"Planet of Evil" was one of my first attempts at fiction, back in 1977. It was intended as a parody of hack sci-fi, and eventually found its ideal home (with the addition of the preceding blurb) in the online magazine Bewildering Stories!

Copyright © 2011 Andrew May

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