Stephen Marley: Short Stories

Short Stories


Perfect Timing	Diary of a (Mad?)man	Decalog 5
An anthology of 10 science fiction stories, two of which were Stephen's: Bibliophage and Waters-of-Starlight. Other writers included Stephen Baxter and Ian Watson.	Novella written to accompany Dreamweb, a Playstation game. This noirish cyberpunk novella created a stir and was in great demand separately from the game.	A collection of short fiction celebrating 35 years of television's favourite time traveller, Dr Who.

COUNT (BARON) DRACULA and BARON (COUNT) FRANKENSTEIN

Appears in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

Published 2010

This features the ridiculously good-looking and haughtily arrogant Miles Dashwood, a young vampire-hunter from the a future reinvention of the Regency period, accompanied by his wily ‘commoner’ sidekick, Crocker.

This is essentially a satire of the conventions – and low budgets – of Hammer Horror movies. Pretty much all the stock Hammer characters are there: Dracula, Van Helsing, Baron Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s Monster, a werewolf, and all those familiar Transylvanian yokels in the inn, unaccountably speaking with English accents.

KNITWORLD

Anthology: Perfect Timing 2

Published 2000.

This features Tom Baker’s Doctor Who in a tale of the overly long scarf he wore through numerous adventures. We discover that the TARDIS has a back-door of some sort, and an intruder has broken in, his intrusion announced by the TARDIS’s Terror Trumpet. While the Doctor sets off in pursuit of the intruder his own scarf turns against him and he is saved only by help from Mrs Moggins, a charwoman he hired years earlier to clean the TARDIS interior (and has since forgotten about).

BIBLIOPHAGE
Appears in Decalog 5:Wonders.

Virgin Publishing Ltd UK / London Bridge

Published 1997.

In this spoof of xenophobic Bulldog Drummond heroes, pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed Reginald Forthman and his foul-mouthed, mini-skirted Buddhist nun sidekick head for the Horsehead Nebula in their brass spaceship Inquisitive, a craft shaped like ‘a pregnant walrus’ in their quest for the Library of (almost) Everything. In Reginald Forthman's world, all extra-terrestrials are sinister and tentacled and referred to as ‘bloody foreigners’.

WATERS-OF-STARLIGHT
Appears in Decalog 5: Wonders.

Virgin Publishing Ltd UK / London Bridge

Published 1997.

Published in the same anthology as Bibliophage, Waters-of-Starlight is a stark change of tone. Set in the far, far future in which a mystical river – the Waters-of-Starlight – binds the entire universe together – and as a by-product is unravelling the structure of matter – River Woman, a member of a revamped Native American tribe, paddles up the cosmos-spanning river in a canoe, hunted by her own people as she searches for the last bend in the river that leads out of the dying universe.

DIARY OF A (MAD?)MAN
Novella for Dreamweb, a PC and Amiga videogame.

Published 1995, Empire Interactive Entertainment UK

This novella was brought out as a companion to Dreamweb, a videogame developed by Creative Reality and became something of a cult in the videogame world.

It recounts the story, in diary form, of the descent of college dropout Ryan into what may or may not be madness (hence the ambivalent title). Ryan is beset by dreams that urge him to kill seven demons in human form before they destroy humankind.

The question is: are the seven actually demons or is Ryan lapsing into homicidal psychosis? Although this question never arose in the videogame, reviewers noted that it added a literally novel dimension to the game.

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