Angry Robot (www.angryrobotbooks.com) has offered up 5 daily sample chapters from Winter Song, by Colin Harvey!
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When she leaves you alone for a little while, you taste the straw that is your bedding. It’s almost inedible, but overwhelmed by hunger you force it down. When she returns and catches you, she scolds you. “I’ve bought you extra gruel,” she adds. “It’s all there is.” You get most of it in your mouth, finishing it within seconds. You lick the plate clean with what the rational part of your mind flags with inappropriate haste (inappropriate to what?), then you nuzzle amongst the straw and lick it clean. “Oh, Loki.” Bera gently touches your arm. “You have to start behaving more like a man, and less an animal, or Ragnar will have all the excuse he needs to get rid of you.” You look up at her, drinking in her features. She says, “Does my looks repel even you, my child-man? Or do you not care? He didn’t.” Then, as if the food has awoken some animal from its slumbers the world is again full of voices shouting mostly meaningless words: “Iceland had no fruit-bearing trees–” “Humanity has split into a myriad of factions–” “Isheimur’s low gravity and inability to generate carbon dioxide through vulcanism render the colony sub-optimal, unlikely to return the company’s investment–”
Angry Robot (www.angryrobotbooks.com) has offered up 5 daily sample chapters from Winter Song, by Colin Harvey!
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Three Loki
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The world through your eyes is full of pain and wonder, made even stranger by the whirlwind of voices shrieking for your attention: “The Mizar Quartet are Sol-type hydrogen-fusing dwarf stars–” “Isheimuri lingua confirmed as mix of Standard and Icelandic–” Some voices verge on making sense, but most babble gibberish. Each is accompanied by a dizzying sense of vertigo, and little shocks deep inside your body. Occasionally you smell burning. Sometimes you taste colours, can hear, flickering jeering shadows. “Absolute magnitude uses the same convention as visual–” You are dimly aware that the nanophytes within you that keep your muscle tone even as you waste away are locked in a desperate fight against the cannibal predations of the remaining lifegel in a near sub-atomic battle of the idiots. Either through accident or a design flaw, the inhibitors appear to have failed, and if left to themselves will eat you alive. “The Long Night was the longest conflict since the Hundred Years War–” A strangely familiar voice cries out, “I won’t lie down and die!” “The Isheimur populace is likely to suffer genetic drift and disease–” The man Ragnar’s voice is a rumble from a mouth full of misshapen teeth, his words unintelligible. “Pappi: estimated height one-metre-eighty, mass eighty kilos–” The woman beside him answers, her voice lower. Her hair is lighter, but her features equally mismatched, one shoulder slightly higher than the other. “Oedipus: son of King Laius and Jocasta of Thebes–” You realize that the voice refusing to die was your own, but it sounds strange. It should be alto but is tenor instead. Perhaps your voice-box was damaged in the accident? “Pantropy lost favour as Terraforming grew easier–” The accident. The pain increases as a shard of memory brings with its suddenly perfect recall the accompanying agony: The smell of burning dust, the isolation, the heat. After a while your throat hurts with the scream – which tails off into a whimper. “A quasar at absolute magnitude −25.5 is 100 times brighter than our galaxy–” The girl – barely a woman – Bera strokes your head. “Hush, Pappi, he kannske skilja you,” she says. Her breasts ooze milk, and a part of you realizes that while she has given birth in the last three weeks for there to be lactation, there is no sound of a baby. The rational corner of your mind tucks this away for later, but the animal part that has control has you lunging forward on all fours, scrabbling at her clothes. “Humanity only found other sentient life after four centuries of spaceflight–”
