Chris Beckett The Holy Machine

Short Stories

The following is a list of my published short stories, starting with the most recent
Stories marked * are included in the short story collection The Turing Test
Reviews of some short stories are listed below.

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The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9	Postscripts, forthcoming
Johnny's New Job	Interzone, forthcoming
Atomic Truth	Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2009	See review
Greenland	Interzone, Oct 2008	One of three of my stories in this issue, which also included an interview with me by Andrew Hedgecock
Poppyfields	Interzone, Oct 2008	Ditto
Rat Island	Interzone, Oct 2008	Ditto
Karel's Prayer*	Interzone, Sept/Oct 2006	See review Second in Interzone's annual readers' poll.
Dark Eden*	Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2006
The Perimeter*	Asimov's Science Fiction Dec. 2005	Reprinted in Russian in Esli magazine
Piccadilly Circus*	Interzone, May/June 2005	See review Third in Interzone's annual readers' poll. Selected for "Year's Best Science fiction # 23", edited by Gardner Dozois Reprinted in Russian in Esli magazine
We Could be Sisters*	Asimov's Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2004
Tammy Pendant	Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2004	See Review
Monsters*	Interzone, February 2003
The Turing Test*	Interzone, October 2002	Selected for: ''A.I.s" edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, published by Ace Books 2004. Read this story - click here
To Become a Warrior	Interzone, June-July 2002	Reprinted in: "Year's Best Science Fiction # 20", edited by Gardner Dozois, published by St Martin's Press, 2003
Watching the Sea	Interzone, November 2001	Fourth in Interzone's annual poll
Marcher	Interzone, October 2001	This came first in Interzone's annual reader's poll and was reprinted in: "Year's Best Science Fiction # 19", edited by Gardner Dozois, published by St Martin's Press, 2002 Starting point for the novel of the same name.
Snapshots of Apirania*	Interzone, October 2000	See review
The Welfare Man Retires	Interzone, August 2000	Read this story - click here
The Gates of Troy*	Interzone, April 2000	See review
The Marriage of Sky and Sea*	Interzone, March 2000	Reprinted in "Year's Best SF 6", edited by David Hartwell and published by Harper Eos, 2001 See review
Valour*	Interzone, March 1999	Reprinted in "Year's Best SF 5", edited by David Hartwell and published by Harper Eos, 2000
The Warrior Half-and-Half*	Interzone, December 1995	Reprinted in "The Ant Men of Tibet", edited by David Pringle and published by Big Engine Books, 2001
Jazamine in the Green Wood*	Interzone, August 1994
The Welfare Man	Interzone, August 1993	Third in Interzone's annual reader's poll, this story was reprinted in: "The Best of Interzone", edited by David Pringle and published by Voyager (HarperCollins) in 1997 (A truncated version of the story was also reproduced in "Health and Disease: a Reader", published by Open University Press, 1995)
The Circle of Stones	Interzone, February, 1992	Read this story - click here
The Long Journey of Frozen Heart	Interzone, July 1991
La Macchina*	Interzone, April 1991	A prototype for my novel "The Holy Machine" Reprinted in: ''Year's Best Science Fiction # 9", edited by Gardner Dozois (it appears in the UK as "Best New SF"), published by St Martin's Press, 1992 "Gedanken Fictions: Stories on Themes in Science, Technology and Society", edited by Thomas Easton and published by Wildside Press, 2000 "Robots", edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann and published by Ace Books, 2005
A Matter of Survival	Interzone, October 1990

Some story reviews:

Piccadilly Circus

The eighteenth story of Beckett's in Interzone, and one of the best that I have read. A near-future London is the setting, and for Clarissa Fell it is decaying, dark and lifeless. However, for the rest of the population, now uploaded into an Urban Consensual Field, the virtual London which they inhabit, still largely co-terminous with the bricks and mortar reality, is still a vibrant, brightly lit place. Clarissa is determined to visit Picadilly Circus, to see the lights she saw as a child - the real lights - and she is pottering into central London, her Implants enabling her, when she chooses, to be part of the virtual London.

Beckett effectively illustrates, as she flicks between the dark, lonely London which she inhabits, and the vibrant virtual London, that which will be lost when the virtual life replaces 'real' life - a process, IHMO, which we are already embarked upon, as there is an increasingly consensual 'other' reality coming at us (or at those who choose to receive it) from the media, which bears little resemblance to reality.

Mark Watson, Best SF, Reviewing 'Piccadilly Circus', June 2005

Snapshots of Apirania

I don't often laugh out loud when reading, and even less often at stories that are not comedic. "Snapshots of Apirania" by Chris Beckett is not comedic, and it made me laugh. It is funny in a peculiar sort of way. The story is simply the monolog of someone displaying their vacation slides, from their trip to Apirania, a world somewhere else in our galaxy. The narrator is as clueless as any aloha shirted American wandering the streets of Lhasa looking for french fries. It is the tension between the scenes described in the snapshots and the narrator's remarks on them that brings both laughter and sadness. A clever story, this is the gem of the issue.

Jay Lake, Tangent On-Line, reviewing 'Snapshots of Apirania', June 2001

The Gates of Troy

Simply put, this is the best time travel story I've ever read. The story opens on the yacht of Alex, a recent college graduate and ne'er-do-well, who has invited his friend Han on a sailing trip. They spend some time happily cruising about the Mediterranean together until Alex's meddling father drops in (via helicopter, of course,) and gifts them with a time machine. The three of them decide to sail their ship to the sack of Troy, and join in the "fun" of the Trojan Horse. Alex, who is dubious about this whole affair from the beginning is out-voted by the exuberance of his father and his friend. One of the great things about this piece is how much it really is about Alex. Both Han and Alex's father go through the adventure fairly unfazed, but Alex is affected very deeply by it. Things will never be the same for him, and, with luck, the reader as well.

Lynda Moorhouse, Tangent On-Line, reviewing 'The Gates of Troy', April 2000

Tammy Pendant

From the writer's bio we learn that Chris Beckett has been a social worker, a career that judging from "Tammy Pendant" lends a tint of gritty nastiness to one's worldview.

The title character is a problem teen caught in the ministrations of the British social service. We meet her in between foster homes, suffering the attentions of psychologists and caseworkers. Tammy is bitter and angry. She alienates everyone who might otherwise care for her.

All the kids at the center where Tammy now lives know about the Shifters, a group of people who can move between worlds. Here's Tammy's self-defined salvation. She seduces a Shifter, steals his bag of magic pills, and takes one, only to be caught by the police and brought to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. The system, it seems, won't let her go.

Does the experience change Tammy? That would be telling. Suffice it to say that this is an excellent story with a mean streak that's true to the very end.

Jeremy Lyon, Tangent On-Line, reviewing 'Tammy Pendant', Feb 2004

Karel's Prayer

I’ll admit that Chris Beckett’s ‘Karel’s Prayer’ was the one I was really itching to read, and so I left it till last, just like the Yorkshire puddings with my Sunday roast. Ah, sweet deferment of gratification - it was well worth the wait. The clever layering and deep themes are a hallmark of Beckett at his best - mixed in with the clash of science and religion are questions of identity, of knowing who and what one is. Dovetailing with current events in the news, there is torture and sneaky governments enacting backstage shenanigans in the name of national security. The very ambiguity of right and wrong is the pivot for the whole thing - comparative morality portrayed with all the warts and scars. It would be a shame to spoil this one for a reader, so you’ll just have to take my word for it - this is a brilliant story. At the risk of veering into hyperbole, Beckett may run the risk of becoming (thematically, at least)

Britain

’s Philip K. Dick - I say ‘risk’ only because that’s one hell of a benchmark to set for anyone. I hope he lives up to it - minus the descent into religious paranoia and insanity, of course.

Paul Raven, Velcro City Tourist Board, reviewing Karel's Prayer in Interzone #206, Sept 2006

The Marriage of Sky and Sea

The writer and traveler Clancy, who has built fame and fortune on selling his accounts of foreign lands and exotic experiences to his native Metropolis, discovers that “The Marriage of Sky and Sea” may hold more wonders than even he can capture. This tale presents his attempts to construct a narrative that will be faithful to his latest trip, one to a primitive and possibly idyllic planet, while at the same time recounting those experiences directly. But unlike the dozens of times he has followed the same process before, Clancy now struggles to provide a commercially viable work that will be snapped up by the masses. His difficulties supersede the ordinary art-versus-commerce polemic, delving far deeper into his psyche and his predicament. In a delightful twist, his creative process is brought to life by his dictation to Com, his artificial assistant. Beckett’s ambitious story works on all fronts, fully rendering a complex individual, intermingling past with present, commenting on tropes like the “stranger in a strange land” or the “noble savage,” but never reducing itself to them. It’s a superlative, unexpectedly lyrical story and the perfect choice for a final piece: the ideal marriage of idea and execution.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, reviewing 'The Marriage of Sky and Sea' as part of review of 'The Turing Test' short story collection, in The Fix, July 2008

Atomic Truth

Everyone wears bugeye goggles to interact with the virtual world while shutting out most of the real one. Everyone but Richard, who is not "normal." Richard sees too many things that aren't really there for everyone else, like Electric Man and Steel Man. He doesn't need technology to make him see even more delusions.

Emerging from the burger bar, Richard too confronted the drizzle and the electric lights: orange, white, green, red, blue. But while Jenny had taken the everyday scene for granted, for him, as ever, it posed an endless regress of troubling questions. What was rain? What were cars? What was electricity? What was this strange thing called space that existed in between one object and the next? What was air? What did those lights mean, what did they really mean as they shifted from green to amber to red and back again, over and over again?

Richard thinks that one day he may be the only person who ever sees the world as it is, and that perhaps, if no one sees it any longer, it may cease to exist. To see atomic truths, you need to have atomic eyes.

A fascinating and humane look through a pair of different eyes, with hints from Bishop Berkeley.

Lois Tilton, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, reviewing 'Atomic Truth', March 2009.

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