Jon-Paul Smith

1. Wherein Things Known Become Unknown And Things Unknown Become Known Thirteen year old Tommy Wheeler was pushing his bike through the underbrush, taking the shortcut home this time, when he saw the Big Tall Man. The Big Tall Man didn’t see him though which was a good thing for now because, as Tommy would find out later, once he looked at you he took you down the Rabbit Hole, in the Away From The Light, somewhere deep in the Halfway, and once he took you there no one knew what happened next except for the fact that you never came back. But Tommy wasn’t currently thinking about any of that. Right then he was thinking about finding his way home. Because this shortcut wasn’t as easy as he remembered, especially with the long gnarly fingers of darkness reaching through the branches of the trees overhead, clinging there with a death grip. He’d come back home in the dark probably hundreds of times before but something about this was different.  The darkness itself felt different.  The dark

A Gorgon In Dade County by Jon-Paul Smith Ronald kept telling me there was a Medusa that lived in Dade County up on the mountain in a trailer. “She got snakes in her hair,” he said, his eyes getting wide behind giant plastic frames, holding his hands around his head.   “Keeps em up in curlers.” “They’re not Medusas.   They’re Gorgons,” I said, handing the joint back to him.   “Medusa is the name of a person.” He ignored me every time I told him that.   I’m not sure he understood the difference. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.   Born and raised on Sand Mountain.   Three years in the state pen.   Didn’t learn to read until he was maybe twenty-five.   Even then he kinda struggled with it.   I got to know him back when he was slinging weed for my step daddy.   After a while he got tired of smoking weed with the old man so he took to hanging out with me in my room. I was twenty one years old, a junior in college, writing code in Pascal on an ANSI terminal.   It always made his eyes

Elmore Leonard’s Night Before Christmas Author’s Note: This short story is the result of a writing challenge.  A close friend of mine, who likes to throw these challenges out there to his writer friends, asked me if I would be willing to do a rewrite of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” using the writing style of a favorite author.  I told him that one of my favorite writers was Elmore Leonard.  He said cool, do that.  Hemingway was already taken anyway. He showed me the Hemingway version that someone did and it was pretty much a straightforward rewrite using Hemingway's prose style.  That was way too boring for my tastes so when I got home I sat down, started doodling, and when I was about four hundred words in I sent my friend a message on Facebook letting him know that I hadn’t even bothered to re-read the source material yet. That’s just how I roll, ya’ll.  We both thought it was pretty funny. Anyway by the time I had the story more than halfway finished I did

  ENGINES OF SURVIVAL - Strange Horizons, Issue Dec. 22, 2008 Like a lot of science fiction buffs I’ve been a fan of time travel ever since I first picked up a copy of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.  The Morlocks really did it for me and I’ve been hooked ever since.  Doctor Who certainly didn’t help things.  Doctor Who did a lot of things right. Having said that, time travel, as a plot device, generally sucks.  It’s wonky, it doesn’t always make sense and even when it does it’s too often used as a convenient, albeit cheesy, way for writers to write themselves out of a situation they couldn’t otherwise write themselves out of (I’m looking at you Avenger’s: Endgame , Star Trek too - and I say that despite the fact that Star Trek IV is my favorite Star Trek movie, so I’m not completely immune to its charms - I’m just, um, realistic about it I guess).  Still sometimes it’s like the writer cops out and says, “well, I can’t think of a way to fix this, so let’s just go back in time and

I don’t normally do reviews, especially short story reviews, but I think I’m going to start.  The world could use a little more short story. So I guess I’ll start with Fermi’s Prism from Cosmic Horror Monthly . Why?  Because it’s a kick ass story, that’s why:  a short Lovecraftian space romp with hints of Alien and Event Horizon and just a dash of military sci-fi .  The title is an homage to Fermi’s paradox, but I won’t go into the details of that.  I’ll just let Wikipedia do the splaining . The story can be a bit disorienting to read at first though because half of it takes place on an asteroid in zero gravity.  They use magboots to walk around, so it’s hard to tell up from down.  But that’s OK.  Because once you get your bearings you’re in for a special surprise. Yes, of the Lovecraft variety. I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of a universe that does not hold our best interests at heart.  And so has David F. Schultz , apparently. The cast of characters seems pretty typical