DreamForge Anvil | Issue 6

Welcome to DreamForge Anvil Issue 6.

For Issue 06 of DreamForge Anvil, we have a story from Writers of the Future winner Terry Madden to give us insight into our species’ “Dark Matter Myopia,” two stories provided by members of our DreamCaster writing group – “One Small Step” by Henry Gasko and “Dandelion Brew,” by Ana Sun, a comment on the obsession and necessity of love in “Sidha,” by Bruce McAllister, and “Wild Cards” contributor John Jos. Miller offers a labor of love in his baseball themed tale “Don’t Look Back.”

John Jos. Miller is a science fiction author known for his work in the long-running Wild Cards shared universe series of original anthologies and novels, edited by George R. R. Martin. He has also published nine novels, and nearly 30 short stories and eight comic book scripts.

About Don’t Look Back

All I've got to say about “Don’t Look Back” is that all the historical details are accurate, down to the weather as described in the final Kansas City section. Kind of a labor of love on my part.

Ana Sun (pronounced “Soon”) writes from the edge of an ancient town along the River Ouse in the south-east of England. She spent her childhood in Malaysian Borneo and lived on two other islands prior to moving to the UK. In another life, she might have been a musician, a psychotherapist, or a criminal profiler.

About Dandelion Brew

To adapt to our changing climate and overcome challenges, we are going to need everything across the gamut of human knowledge, skills and technology. Too often, I've witnessed people taking sides in believing that their evidence is the only version of truth — whether it's empiricism or folk knowledge — to the extent that we would reject each others' perspectives without listening to each other, because we are blinded by prejudice. Writing "Dandelion Brew" was my way of exploring the relationship between technology and lore, and to play out a tiny slice of this conflict and examine how we might find common ground, and that seeing the world differently, together garners a collective strength.

Henry is our second editorial assistant. Henry joined us as a First Line Reader early on. He's stepped up at each turn to review the most stories of any FLR, write an outstanding story for us (Flight of the Brolga), and help us get our Discord channel started and engage with our DreamCaster group members.

Henry Gasko was born in a displaced persons camp in Yugoslavia after World War Two. He was raised on a vegetable farm in Canada, and emigrated to Australia more than forty years ago. He has recently retired from a career in data analysis and medical research.

Henry has had stories published in the anthologies "Dreamworks", “Alternate Apocalypse”, “On Time”, in Australia's Aurealis magazine, and in the SciPhi Journal. He is a two-time semi-finalist in The Writers of the Future and he won first prize in Positive Writer's "Why I Write" essay contest. He also won the 2018 Sapiens Plurum short story competition, and came third in the 2020 competition.

When he is not writing, he enjoys cycling, kayaking, swimming and playing bridge.

About One Small Step

I don’t know if you remember a story called “The Island of Doctor Death” by Gene Wolfe. He wrote that and then later wrote a story called “The Death of Doctor Island”. He said that his mind just naturally flips things around in his head (he is an engineer by training). A lot of people said that was a funny way to come up with a story idea but to me that was a perfectly logical way of thinking. My mind (perhaps because I am a mathematician), whenever I come across something, automatically looks at the inverse, the converse, the reverse, just playing around with it.

So when Armstrong’s famous words were being broadcast constantly in 2019 (the 50th anniversary of the moon landing), my mind just naturally flipped it around to “One giant leap for a man, one small step for mankind.” And that immediately rang true – it really had been only a very small step. So I thought of how to put that into a story, which meant constructing a scenario for the first part of the sentence, and that led to something in the ancient world where some peoples (if you believe the stories) thought the moon could be reached if you simply climbed high enough. So, the Roman background is just a necessary construction to the O. Henry style punch line. But a punch line with a very serious message.

Even though humanity’s legacy so far is a bit mixed to say the least, I do think there is enough of value there (not to mention future potential) that it would be very sad to lose it. And I also think that it is a statistical certainty that there is a killer asteroid out there with our name on it. So, the logical conclusion is that we should be doing everything possible to establish a viable foothold off the planet. And yet we have only taken one very small step, and that was over 50 years ago, with virtually no progress towards that goal since then! How incredibly disappointing and frankly disheartening.

Terry’s tenth grade paper on the evolution of Frankenstein’s monster from tragic construct to boogeyman set her on the path to write her own stories of the weird and wonderful. As an award winner for both short fiction and screenwriting, Terry has explored settings from the historical to the far future and finds inspiration in the classroom where she teaches chemistry and astronomy. She is the author of the fantasy series, Three Wells of the Sea, and her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

For more on her writing, visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

About Dark Matter Myopia

We all experience the material world through our biological interface, the five senses, all imperfect, all unique. We don’t all “see” the same color when we look at blue. This is made clear by several photos circulating the internet revealing that some of us see a striped dress and some see a golden dress. I hear “Laurel,” but others hear “Yanny.”

This can only mean that reality is heavily filtered through our personal sensorium. My story, “Dark Matter Myopia,” takes this fact one step further. What if someone could see dark matter?

Any scientist willing to work three kilometers underground in pursuit of truth is likely a person who feels on the fringe of society. Isolation of this kind appeals to those of us who have never felt like they fit in. My character, Varia Hoit, has retreated from society in the name of research. But when a group of physicists invades her paradise in search of dark matter, she finds that isolation has kept her from seeing people as they really are. And she likes what she sees.

Bruce McAllister’s short fiction and poetry have appeared over the decades in the SFF magazines, literary magazines, “year’s best” volumes, and college textbooks. His Hugo-nominee short story “Kin" was selected to launch LeVar Burton’s new podcast, LEVAR BURTON READS, and the story of the symbolism questionnaire he sent to 150 famous writers when he was sixteen (and just starting to write SF) goes viral occasionally. He grew up with his younger brother in a Navy family, lived on a lot of seas, and now resides (a little restlessly) in southern California.

Wulf Moon’s SUPER SECRETS: Mentors: The Fastest Way to Become a Jedi

Wulf Moon learned oral storytelling as a child when he lived with his Chippewa grandmother. He begged stories from her every night and usually got his wish—fireside tales that fired his imagination. If Moon had a time machine, those are the days he would go back to. Since he doesn’t have a time machine, he writes.

Moon wrote his first science fiction story at fifteen. It won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and became his first professional sale in Science World. He has won over forty writing awards, and thirty in public speaking. His stories have appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. 35, Best of Deep Magic Anthology 2, Future Science Fiction Digest, Best of Third Flatiron, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2 by Pocket Books. Moon is a professional voice-over actor and is podcast director at Future Science Fiction Digest.

Wulf Moon's award-winning SUPER SECRETS Writing Resource and Workshops have been attributed by many aspiring writers as the secret to their success in obtaining first professional sales. Two of Moon's books on writing will be published by Mark Leslie of Stark Publishing Solutions in the spring of 2022. Want in on the Secrets? JOIN THE WULF PACK at http://thesupersecrets.com.

Illustration, Design, Layout

Jane is the Founder of Chroma Marketing Essentials, a digital marketing agency located in Jeannette PA. She holds a degree in Visual Communications from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and more years of experience than she cares to count.

Before founding CME, Jane worked as an Artist, Art Lead, Art Director, and Project Manager for the computer game developer DreamForge Intertainment, where she worked on a number of early computer games, including Roger Zelazny’s Chronomaster.

Editor, Editorial Selections, Essays, and more.

Scot Noel is a content writer for websites, blogs, social media, e-newsletters, and the like. Speculative fiction has always been his obsession, resulting in a Writers of the Future 2nd place win in 1990, a 7-year career in computer game development, and a handful of published stories, ranging from far future and zombie fiction to the tale of a fairy sheriff fighting an evil dragon. He serves as the editor and publisher of DreamForge Anvil.

Editorial Assistant, Lead FLR

Jamie D. Munro is our number one fan, first Patreon Supporter, Kickstarter supporter, and our Editorial Assistant, too! It seems Jamie found us the minute we came online and sometimes I think he understands our mission better than we do. That’s why he became our initial First Line Reader and now our official Editorial Assistant too. Jamie is an aspiring speculative fiction author from Western Australia.

Henry has had stories published in the anthologies "Dreamworks", “Alternate Apocalypse”, “On Time”, in Australia's Aurealis magazine, and in the SciPhi Journal . He is a two-time semi-finalist in The Writers of the Future and he won first prize in Positive Writer's "Why I Write" essay contest. He also won the 2018 Sapiens Plurum short story competition, and came third in the 2020 competition.

When he is not writing, he enjoys cycling, kayaking, swimming and playing bridge.

Lloyd has been a science fiction fan for close to 45 years, busy with conrunning, clubs, and being a vendor, but has finally been able to match up his literature of choice with his career of being an editor/copy editor/proofreader. His has been a copy editor/proofreader with Amazing Stories Magazine, and book editor for Amazing and various other authors, and is looking further afield for new editorial challenges.

Photo credit to Yvonne Penney.