Thursday, 7 August 2025

It hasn't got my name on it...

 


But I'm in it... Out now, $4.99 (ebook) or $16.99 (paperback), buy it here!

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You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Wednesday, 6 August 2025

It's got my name on it...


Out now, $8.98, buy it here!

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Friday, 25 July 2025

If you're in Utah this autumn...

 

Two books, and I'm in both of them!

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Monday, 21 July 2025

Strike two!

I recently mused on how I seem to have come out of alignment with the decision-makers at the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future competition after my 9,000-word ghosts-on-a-spaceship story (oh, how Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores really, really hated that concept) got a 'D- see me' scribbled in the corner by teacher. And I used to count on at least a couple of silver honorables (sic) each year.

I followed that up with a 13,000-word crossing of the timelines story set in both the 1920s and 2030s, about inadvertently, indirectly killing Hitler and letting out a horror even worse. It was originally, pre a heavy rewrite, the first and third parts of a triptych, the middle of which was published as a standalone in Ossury Press's 'Under the Stairs' a couple of years ago. It got the same treatment.

Well, my ability to submit to WotF may soon be no more as Utopia SF have taken my near future dragons versus robots story The Black Dragon, to be published in their August issue. And, unlike the vast, vast majority of my publishing credits, this one counts against my eligibility for WotF. So, after Sunrunner's appearance in Third Flatiron's 'After the Goldrush' was my first, this is my second strike. I'm allowed a third, but after that the scientologists regard me as a professional. At this rate it should happen in, oh, about fifteen years. Perhaps Tom Cruise will return my calls then?


And can I say a big 'chapeau' to Utopia for an unusually frictionless editorial and contractual process - within fourteen hours of seeing the acceptance email and responding, all the blue pencilled i's were dotted and rights and responsibilities t's were crossed. I can't be bothered to look back a past posts detailing polar opposite experiences, but I'll let you dig through the archive and find them. Let's just say they're there.

Whilst we're talking about the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future competition, the story which got me to the finals back in 2017, Doctor Herzog's Collection, is due to be published soon by Graveside Press in their Tiny Terrors strand. And, frankly, when I went back to the manuscript, it was so baggy I'm amazed teacher didn't scribble 'D- see me' in the corner. I'm a better writer now, and have tightened it until it'll confess to anything. I'll let you know how to see for yourself when it flies the nest. How it got to be a finalist in the state it was in is a mystery...

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Thursday, 26 June 2025

Mission: Highly Improbable - but, oddly, they seem to pull it off every time

Contains spoilers


Seemingly unlike the rest of the world, judging by the part-empty auditorium we watched it in, we've recently been to see Thomas Cruise Mapother IV's latest downbeat, slice of life, arthouse offering, Mission: Impossible - the Final Reckoning. A film with twice as much of pretty much everything in it, including punctuation marks in the title.

In this, Ethan Hunt has a second bite at taking down the rogue AI known as 'The Entity', a name suggesting creatives perhaps need not fear the future as much as some suggest.

The Entity's fiendish plan that Ethan Hunt needs to prevent involves taking control of all the world's nuclear weapons, lighting the blue touchpaper on all of them, and then hunkering down in a solar-powered subterranean digital bunker to wait out the apocalypse and then take over a world without humans. I think. I'm still not sure what The Entity's end that this is all a means to is.

But, am I the only one thinking that total nuclear annihilation will result in a nuclear winter, blotting out the sun, thus killing the power to The Entity's bit-cave? It's a hole in the survival plan so obvious, it can only mean one thing:

It wasn't The Entity's plan at all. It was a lie, a ruse, a false trail of breadcrumbs...

It's still out there.

Oh, Christ. There's going to be another one...

#


Click on the images or search on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Tuesday, 10 June 2025

Dread Mondays

Which may explain why I'm posting this on a Tuesday...

No, I think that's a red herring. I just wanted you to know that my story 'Second Amendment', about a sleep-deprived games designer confusing reality and screen with bloody consequences, will be coming out in October in the anthology Dread Mondays from Whisper House Press.


That said, Tuesdays are the most productive day of the week, a fact Business News Daily found surprising - which is strange given it's pretty much a one in five chance to start with, and that's before you work out it's almost certainly not Friday and probably not Monday. So not that surprising at all, really...

#


Click on the images or search on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Lots of people, one vote

I recently mused that the dominance and popularity of the Catholic Church offered an insight into how the Nazis may have eventually presented, had they won WW2, winners becoming patrician in the rear view mirror of history regardless of what they needed to do to win. As if that wasn’t enough to stymie any future chance of me running for elected office again, let me have a pop at voters (including myself) and democracy itself.

The Guardian recently ran a piece suggesting voters are driving our basket case politics (from a British perspective, but you may have a local equivalent). The timbre of that article was that we, the electorate, have become credulous and uppity, forgetting our place in the democratic process, demanding contradiction, such as great change in order to stay the same. And that politicians are running scared, falling over their feet in order to deliver chips with custard, because the customer is always right even when driven by false facts and undeliverable promises.

Democracy of the one person one vote model should be able to cope with selfishness. Indeed, it seems predicated on it. If, as an altruist, I vote for what’s better for others, and those others vote for themselves, where’s my stake? I’ve given it away. Better we all vote for what’s best for us then we get what’s best for the majority. The politicians’ task is then to make sure the losers don’t get left behind too much. Democracy should work.

My suggestion is that democracy is failing as it completely ignores a significant group with a great deal of skin in the game. 

Future voters.

Yes, for all those wondering what this political ramble was doing on a science fiction blog, my pitch is that we, as a species, through our science and technology, are now able to influence the future by what we do here and now to such an extent that our ‘what do we do for the next handful of years’ model of democracy no longer fits.

It’s well established that delayed gratification is a sign of intelligence. But in a wise, not just intelligent species, shouldn’t it come as standard? You don’t need to turn many pages of the history book to find examples of jam today and a can kicked down the road into tomorrow. Look at privatisation, whether Britain’s “family silver” or Chicago’s on-street parking.

Combine that with our ability to create cans bigger than any generation before, that can be kicked further. We have touched, modified, or, at the very least, polluted practically every corner of our small blue marble. Almost everything we build or process we set running is there for generations. America still suffers the aftershocks of slavery. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. Nuff’ said.

I’m not even sure whether I’m making the case for future generations or just future me as our species appears hard wired not to give too big a damn about ourselves in years to comeIf we struggle to make sacrifices now to help ourselves later, what chance is there of making sacrifices now to help others later?

Winston Churchill is quoted as saying democracy is the worst form of government except for all others. Agreed. But what I’m saying is that it’s getting worse all the time.

Anyone got any good news?

#


Click on the images or search on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how?


My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.


  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).