Get this cyberpunk novella free

It's all about collaboration and vibes

Ever since I saw Blade Runner by Ridley Scott — in the theater in 1982 — cyberpunk has been my jam. I ate up William Gibson’s short fiction in Burning Chrome and his novels — Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero. I grooved on Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) and Hardwired (Walter Jon Williams) and dug into the Shadowrun TTRPG when it was released in 1989.

It’s why I wrote so much cyberpunk as a fledgling writer. Cool and edgy with blurred ethics. So different from the black-and-white, hero’s journey morality of Star Wars — which I also loved, but which didn’t make me think about humanity and life and who deserves to live and die.

Compared to many writers, I came to love the craft fairly late. I was raised by scientists, was on a college track towards becoming a doctor or a research geneticist, when a friend dared me to fill a vacant slot in my class schedule with a short story writing class. This eventually led me to take all the creative writing courses the university offered and add English as a second major. So what if it added a year to school?

Collaboration

It was good that I didn’t drop biology since that was the main reason I actually landed a job out after college. But with a full-time day job and no deadlines, I stopped writing. Until a friend—Jonathan Bond—challenged me to collaborate with him. Our brainstorming sessions, inspired by a few pages of his initial drafts, were epic. We created a whole world, outlined several multi-novel story arcs, and wrote dozens of short stories and over a million words on novels. Jonathan and I were natural collaborators. We had a blast and made some good (and some not so good) art.

Most of those million words went into the trunk, never to see the light of day. But we got better, and we started submitting stories to magazines until—finally—in 1992, our first story was published in Amazing Stories.

Deadwise

Vibes are strong in this fast-paced mystery/adventure—a cyberpunk novella that features young Sly on the run from a mythical, jacked-up assassin. Sly has no idea why Deadwise wants to kill him; she’s been in hiding for years. What would bring her out now and can he escape her long enough to find out why she wants him dead?

Jonthan and I went on to publish more short stories and novels, both in collaboration and separately, but we’ll always have a special place in our hearts for Deadwise.

Now, after years of being hard to find or unavailable, you can read it again. Buy it from your vendor of choice: $0.99 at kobo, play, and b&n, and $2.99 at amazon. The cost is higher on amazon because for low prices they take a much higher percentage.

… Or you can get a free copy by subscribing to Dear Future. (Both free and paid tiers get Deadwise. Paid tiers also get a copy of my novel Liferock.)

The Deadwise universe

Sly is a boy recovering from experimental brain surgery after a hover car accident when a cyber-enhanced killer attacks him in the hospital. Rose is a teen who helps Sly get away, and together they unwind the mystery of why someone is trying to encode new memories into Sly’s mind… and why the assassin, Deadwise, has emerged from years of hiding to kill him before that happens.

Cyberpunk has always been about the blend of tech and biology. It’s also been at the forefront of gritty science fiction. In Deadwise, Jonathan and I blend these elements and push them. Molecular biology and cybernetics and ghosts in the machine—they’re all in there.

While Deadwise is gritty and dark and dystopic (like the worlds of Gibson and PK Dick), it’s not unmitigated bleakness. Orwell’s 1984 is one of my favorite books of all time, but damn does it suck the hope out of the world. In my own writing, I like to offer at least a glimmer of light in the dark.

Check out Deadwise.

“Torn clouds” by Vern, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0