Authorpreneur Dashboard – Mark Cantrell
Deadly Night Shade
Science Fiction & Fantasy
SHORT FICTION: She was the one who was afraid of the dark, that's why the other vamps in her gang laughingly called her Shade, but now the joke's on them, and she's the one still breathing. When a night on the town turns deadly, when all her friends are slain, Shade must stalk the man who slaughtered them or join them in the grave. But he's no ordinary vampire slayer... and Shade is no ordinary vampire. Only one of them is getting out of this alive...
Book Bubbles from Deadly Night Shade
Forever In Our Shadow
Real or imagined, the simple truth is that vampires are defined by the dark desires of the human imagination. This is the cruel contradiction that shapes their existence -- they are nothing but a shadow without us, the creatures that give them life.
We Are What We Must Be
The truth is hard to take, even for a vampire, but faced with the possibility of extinction, like any animal, poor Shade must find the strength to survive -- or succumb. When all is said and done, the truth of her existence can only be found within herself -- and her determination to exist.
A Blade For Bloodletting
Shade prefers a knife to the traditional fangs, it's a legacy of her making. With a few notable exceptions, the vampire mythos has always placed style over substance. It's part of the allure, but it does mean our girl has to work a little harder to get at her food.
Need To Feed
Poor Shade, it's not easy coming to terms with what she is, but tonight she'll face the greatest test of all. Deadly Night Shade is part of a trio of stories that played with the vampire mythos (but don't worry, none of my vamps sparkle), adding a science fiction horror trope to humanity's fascination with these creatures. The vampires are as much victims of our lurid interest, brought into being by it, as we are apt to become victims of their bloodlust. We make our own monsters, and they will not thank us for their existence.
One For The Road
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Out on the road, you find out who you really are. What you really are… Escaped killer Daniel is sure of himself. Armed and dangerous, devil-may-care; he's a hunter – a vampire – on the run from the police and enjoying the ride. Sarah, she's just lost; escaping a troubled home, she's running from herself. Until she meets Daniel, she has no idea she's running for her life… Poor Sarah, she doesn't know who or what she is, but Daniel knows – and he's going to show her. The two of them were made for each other… Daniel's desire will take them both on a road trip to sex and murder, and the destination will reveal far more than either cares to know about themselves. It's a relationship blessed in blood – and death is coming along for the ride…
Book Bubbles from One For The Road
Making A Monster
Nature or nurture, it's a moot point when you find yourself becoming a vampire. Daniel was never bitten, but you might say he was bitten by the bug. Left to face the changes alone, when his rogue DNA began to assert itself, all he could do was make his own understanding out of the pop-cult mythos, making it a part of his identity. We make our own monsters, then we invite them to consume us -- and damn them for it.
Citizen Zero
Literature & Fiction
Inspired Quill presents an exciting new edition of CITIZEN ZERO, a science fiction thriller in the dystopian tradition... “Those people are no-hopers.” “And what does that make me?” In a bitterly divided nation where security trumps civil liberty, unemployed David is on the verge of sinking into the ‘Zeros’ – a destitute underclass numbering millions. But then JobNet's advanced virtual reality world offers him a gateway to a worthwhile future, and a chance to rejoin society. But David is an unwitting pawn in a deadly conspiracy to topple the Government: he's the ideal carrier for an intelligent virus designed to shatter the system and set the Zeros free. When the virus activates, chaos ensues and the Zeros rise. David is left trapped inside a corrupted reality. If it doesn't shatter his sanity, the secret he finds there will change everything... Sometimes even a pawn can hold the balance of power.
Book Bubbles from Citizen Zero
Sins Of The Father
Nicolae Ceaușescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, was said to have recruited his closest bodyguards from state orphanages and had them raised in his service. It's claimed they were his most loyal men. It didn't do him any good in the end -- he was executed after his regime was overthrown during the Velvet Revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989. Still, Prime Minister Alexander Carlisle has gone one better. His most loyal and trusted agents in the Social Security Agency are for all intents and purposes his own children, though he sees them as more like mobile AIs. The agents Reich and Shreck are clones, grown from the Prime Minister's modified DNA -- they are also his most feared agents...
Here's Looking At You
Imagine if your bank card transmitted locational data 24/7 to a local city computer network, and would transmit your identification when queried by a remote device carried by police, traffic wardens, indeed any agent of state or a business empowered to do so -- without you even being aware you'd been scanned. That's the idea behind the rfID tags embedded on people's ID cards in this extract. It's very similar to the Nexus40 card that Mills must carry with him at all times, constantly tracking individual movements. If I were writing Citizen Zero today, perhaps I would be expected to use a mobile phone. Indeed, it was an option in the late 90s when writing this passage, but I felt a specific ID card had more clout for this story.
Security
Someone once asked how the unemployed came to be so criminalised in the society depicted in my novel. One quick answer is that it is happening around us, right now, today, courtesy of the Coalition Government's welfare reform policies, and the ongoing lurid portrayal of claimants as 'feckless scoungers' in sections of the media. Attitudes have certainly hardened towards people on welfare, but the less covered flipside is the growth of housing benefit claims, for instance, among people in work who nevertheless can't afford sky-rocketing rents. So much for making work pay, Mr Duncan Smith! However, the novel isn't about hardline welfare policies per se; rather it explores the theme of welfare as one of the means of constructing a stern surveillance state. It's part of the process of subordinating civil liberties in return for security from perceived threats...
We Have The Technology
A Demos poll has suggested that people would like Government to control what people can spend their benefits on. This implies a considerable degree of scrutiny of people's daily spending, and not just of the unemployed; a good many claimants are in low-paid work. This opens up the welfare system to become a core component of a surveillance state by normalising state intrusion into our personal financial matters. This is the case in Citizen Zero. Mills's Nexus ID card does exactly that; regularly charged with his benefits, it then operates like a bank card, providing detailed information about his spending, movements, and even his whereabouts. Linked to a nation-wide wi-fi network, it fires regular packets of data to a central government database, permanently tracking his movements. That welfare becomes a core aspect of a 'Big Brother' regime, policing a brutally unequal society, is a key premise in the novel.
Welcome To The Glass House
We think of the surveillance state very much in terms of Orwell's 1984, with the state scrutinising everything we do. This is the core of the hi-tech panopticon taking shape around us, but we forget that the State is a public-private partnership; there is a degree of overlap between the functioning of the State and the activities of the large-scale private sector. So it follows that the surveillance state will itself be conducted by both, each assembling the montage of our public and personal lives for their mutual and exclusive ends. So we are watched for a multitude of overlapping purposes: state and corporate security, yes, but also for intelligence, to harvest marketing data, to identify behaviour traits, to keep track of individuals and groups, to create a general aura of watchfulness that suppresses any natural exuberance or dissent within our behaviour. Much of this evidence will lie fallow, but it is there, ready and waiting to be used -- or construed -- against you. Should you ever find yourself noticed and noted by the agencies, both private and public, with a vested interest in nullifying your influence on those around you.
Secrets Of The Machine
At the heart of every machine, physical or institutional, is a human mind sundered from itself. We can call this alienation, we can refer to it as an existential vacuum, but the 'machine' consumes its maker, at the behest of those who own and operate the machinery for their own profit and power -- yet even they are slaves of the mechanisms they have created. That's one of the over-arching themes with Citizen Zero, but here in this snippet, the technician has encountered but one fleeting manifestation of the 'ghost in the machine' that is a subsumed humanity. He cannot fully perceive it, for he is as much a component of the technology, as the keyboard and mainframes he utilises in the course of his daily job, but when the machinery breaks, the human doesn't necessary find release. At least, not immediately.
A very British coup...
Alexander Carlisle is billed as the longest serving Prime Minister in history, and in terms of modern British history, he certainly is. The remarkable thing about his rule, perhaps, is the constitutional arrangements -- they are largely unchanged. On paper, he heads a government that is based and supported by a majority of MPs in the House of Commons. Consequently, he can in theory be voted out of office. Carlisle, however, is a master of the backroom deal; he sits at the centre of a web of intrigue and convergent interests between politicians, business and financial elites, security chiefs and corporate interests. He is a player in a multi-layered world of subterfuge and manipulation hidden behind the theatre of conventional politics. He is, as is pointed out, a member of all parties but beholden to none; a businessman and a statesman, and a charismatic leader... Beneath the PR, the truth is a little darker: ultimately his rule is grounded on fear and anxiety, on delivering security against the threats of crime and terrorism bred amongst the ranks of a carefully maintained underclass of 'zeros' Ultimately, it is the machinery of an authoritarian surveillance state that has preserved his long rule.
Shades of Mark Kenndy...
Whether PC Mark Kennedy was operating undercover as an officially-sanctioned agent provocateur, or just went rogue, is neither here nor there for CITIZEN ZERO, but he provides a convenient contemporary vignette to pin to this extract. In my novel, the undercover activities of the secret state run deeper, far darker, and are far more routine. Operatives, such as Frank depicted here, run deep cover operations organising crime, stoking terrorist acts and groups, assisting the operation of dissenting political organisations, as much as they seek to curtail their activities. It’s a fine balance, with the agents of the secret state serving almost as ‘gardeners of criminality’, all to nurture an environment of fear among the populace that makes them easier to control. Living in fear, the citizens have surrendered their civil liberties to the protection of this security state. Over the years, it’s kept the Prime Minister securely in power.
Beyond welfare
Away from the language of reform and welfare dependency, there is a deeper theme of social control. Here, the story sets the scene for an exploration of the role that a draconian benefits regime can play in maintaining a surveillance state over all citizens.
