TO DRINK UP THE SEA

Islands of Weirdhope, the maritime expandalone to ECO MOFOS!!, by the fearsome pairing of David Blandy and Daniel Locke, is currently crowdfunding.

Scant hours left! The Backerkit campaign ends Tuesday. Go back it NOW.

You should back it because I am part of it. I will be in Four Fathoms Deep, an adventure anthology launching together with the core rulebook. I will be in very good company.

I am still writing my adventure. But I have a title, and I have a blurb:

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TO DRINK UP THE SEA
The tide is falling—continuing to fall. The tide has been falling for three days, now.
On the sand are jellyfish lumps, drying out. Look closer! Their tentacles are bundles of optic fiber.
On the surf is a dolphin, poisoned, dying. “Stay away!” he wheezes. His blowhole sputters blue blood.
In the middle of the bay the waves are breaking. What is it—a shoal, a wreck?
A head, a metal head, the size of a comet. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its temples. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its eyes.
Its eyes are open. It is awake. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its hungry mouths.

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This is a follow up to TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, the dead-mecha adventure I wrote for ECO MOFOS!!.

In SWORD the giant robot was an obvious metaphor for hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry. In SEA the giant robot will be the same. I keep writing about the same things; hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry is personal to me, I guess? I live in a petrogas town. Every breath I take reminds me of hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry.

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Was going to post some images / references that make up my moodboard for this adventure.

The first is the Salton Sea Monster, from the Hellboy / BPRD comics:

A kaiju sitting at the edge of a dead sea, spewing a deadly gas. I can’t help read her as a refinery gas flare.

But she also lays eggs. BPRD as a whole concludes by the world ending—but also beginning again, with the earth now an Eden for the amphibian people born from monsters like her.

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Another is “Dragon’s Breath”, one of five short stories in AS Byatt’s The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye.

I’ve never liked this story, but also I’ve never forgotten it: its disgusting dragon(s) like lava flows, like landslides. I believe Byatt wrote the story for / during the Siege of Sarajevo?

In it is the sense of unavoidable catastrophe. That to be human is to dodge around it, prod at it, find boredom in it, rescue what you can from it.

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The most recent is from my own life.

Last week, Senyar, a tropical cyclone, formed in the Straits of Malacca. This never happens in the Strait of Malacca, you understand? Ours are relatively halcyon waters, protected from monsoons, weather systems, tsunamis.

Not any more, I guess.

Hundreds have lost their lives in Sumatra and Thailand.

Senyar hit my hometown last Thursday. The wind wailed; the trees did jigs. I shut what I could, and tried to sleep. The next morning I woke to mess: pools of rainwater in the living room; a porch strewn with pots and branches; trunks and power lines had fallen all around town. (Later the news would report a hundred homes damaged.)

After checking in on loved ones the next thing I did was hurry to our favourite beach, to check in on our favourite mangrove trees. These trees would’ve been worst-hit by the storm.

They survived—though the bedrock around them has eroded further. I worry for them.

Still: our mangroves survived. They survived when concrete did not. During the night, a jetty platform owned by the Petron refinery collapsed into the sea. This is a platform where the tankers moor, to offload crude.

That morning I squinted at the jetty’s rump remainder, water gushing from its broken edge. (No oil spills, thankfully!)

Is the giant in TO DRINK UP THE SEA the cyclone storm, or the petroleum platform?

I don’t know yet. I’ll be writing to find out. It will be an ecocidal disaster, of course. But perhaps such disasters will be calamities for each other—

And I hope imagine us rescue ourselves from them, and belonging, transformed, to the world that comes after.

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