Pebblestone Index

I. Mouths \ (Benzo by Nulberry)

II. Pigs \ (Button Masher by Aesop Rock)

III. Flotsam \ (Rich by Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

IV. Who's There \ (In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly)

V. I Got So Wasted Last Night \ (Let The Light In by Lana Del Rey)

VI. Calling All Cars \ (Reckoner by Radiohead)

VII. You Have Never Known Fear \ (Twilight Zone by Golden Earring)

VIII. You're Not Taking Me Alive \ (Forbidden Zone by The Misfits)

IX. Home Movies \ (Between the Flatlands and the Caspian Sea by Keren Ann)

X. What She Is \ (The Police and the Private by Metric)

XI. The Snoozemaster General \ (Brazil by Geoff and Maria Muldaur)

XII. All Lines Singled \ (My Blakean Year by Patti Smith)

XII. Our Glorious Leaders \ (Kyanite Toothpick by Aesop Rock)

XIV. Bright and Shining Gifts \ (Commin' Home by Cheeseburger)

XV. Captain and Commander \ (Waltz of the 101st Lightborne by Joanna Newsom)

XVI. Disgust and Terror at the Pebblestone Mall \ (Hey You by Dope Lemon)

XVII. The Chain of Command \ (Diane Young by Vampire Weekend)

XVIII. Your Excellency \ (Parabola by Tool)

XIX. I Will Always Love You \ (Vulcan, AB by The Rural Alberta Advantage)

XX. This Is Our Lives Now \ (Echoes by Pink Floyd)

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Full Playlist/Pebblestone Mixtape

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Maj Reginald Curlicue

Lt Amelia Ramsay

Lt Frey

Sgt Zoe Hennrickson

Cpl ‘Trapper’ Jakes

Cpl Arjak

Cpl Judie Bendercurl

Cpl Buster Butterfax

P Edison Starheart

P Glowmorn

P Jawford

P Ben Bladesmith

P Josie Bendercurl

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Simon Whistlestop (Manager of Custodial Affairs)

Kal Pernicky

Yellowbloom

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Dr Sara Starheart

Dr David Rosepalm

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Ted Dampfringe (the ‘Viceroy’)

The Viceroy

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Arnald Rockjack

Neena Sunwind

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Nathan Freewheels

Jools Velator

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The Pilot

The SHAPE

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I had a nightmare as a teenager in which a pilot in an ejection chair floating in space became a sort of gateway that allowed a monstrous creature to enter our reality. For whatever reason this idea stuck with me, and about ten years later when I decided I wanted to try writing a science-fiction novel, it came back to me. This was the original premise and then what would unfold after that would be an extended disaster plotline in the place where the pilot’s body is eventually discovered.

I wrote all of the chapters up until Home Movies (except Who’s There, which is more recent) in about two weeks or so during that period but then my life fell apart and it went on the back burner for a while.

Fifteen years passed.

Then I created this Substack account! And suddenly the rest of this novel came pouring out the taps! And the peasants rejoiced!

Sorry about this biographical digression, but the point of it is that this setting is something I have been thinking about for a long time. Honestly to the point where I was sick of it and wanted to write other things. But I heard some advice that you should always finish what you start to write, and that seems like truth to me. So I came back to this.

What’s kind of ironic is that by this point I was utterly sick of dystopian settings in science-fiction and wanted to see more stuff that explores the possibilities of having an entire galaxy as the stage, and all that implies. I am especially weary of ‘the Earth is destroyed and we need to seek out a new home among the stars’. Go apologize to the Earth right now for killing it in a story hundreds of times. Then I come back to this setting and it’s another grimdark dystopian hellhole.

But it’s not connected to our planet historically in any way. In fact in my mind these events may well predate human existence on Earth. Which touches on this other idea I’ve long been fond of that ‘humans’ or human-like things exist throughout various places in the galaxy for reasons that, from the point of view of the humans in question, have been lost to time and remain quite mysterious. Perhaps this mirrors our own history on this planet.

With this in mind, the Pebblestone Cluster is a colony on the edge of a galaxy. It is located in a region of space in which humanoids are common and have been for thousands of years. It was founded by a place called the Core, which is a massive gigastructure that is probably more like millions of years old, though I hesitate to put a number to it. It is so old that its origins have been lost to the memories of its current inhabitants.

Its size was disorienting, once he understood what he was looking at. Long ago, this had been a star system and, not for the first time in his life, Redblake tried to imagine it that way, and failed. Somewhere in its center was what remained of the twin suns that had once ruled here. What was left of those suns was now crammed into the Core's reactor complex like two deflated balloons. Around this was stacked layer upon layer of schools, factories, hospitals, residence modules, and always the sprawling commercial complexes.

The Core was more or less a space station, though it was the size of most star systems, its people and their works concentrating rather than expanding. It was the center of Authority control in this region of space, though apart from this facility the rest of the Authority’s holdings amounted to swathes of deadspace, ship graveyards, and a few podunk rural stations and clusters.

It had grown over the millennia into something its founders would no doubt find unrecognizable, consuming the suns in the system of its origin to have them become nothing more than reactors for its enterprises. Even though its extensive growth and thorough assimilation of its environment had resulted in the formation of a wide variety of different styles of architecture, machines, humanoids and other creatures, over millennia its titanic, honeycombed interior had come to accommodate two main class distinctions in its society.

Bit fantastical, I guess.

Should the name of this place be changed to something else, by me, to eliminate confusion over whether it is referring to the galactic core, or to the ‘core systems’, or something similar?

OK, fine. ‘The Great Core’ maybe? ‘The Big Bad Core’? I don’t know. I have mixed thoughts and feelings on this.

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This is a fairly high technology setting as far as science-fiction goes. But then on the other hand I tried to make it extremely relatable despite these fantastical elements. The idea of setting this story in a place like the Pebblestone Cluster is similar to setting a horror movie in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

So this is a ‘small town’ by the standard of the civilization they inhabit, but it is massive by the standard of contemporary cities on Earth. I don’t know if the original intent kind of gets muddled by fantastical stuff.

• In terms of the technology, one of the main things I started to include more was this use of the ‘lensview’. A 'lens’ is like a contact lens that they can put in their eye and see augmented reality interfaces which they can use to control various electronic systems.

• I like railguns. Who wouldn’t? So there’s a lot of magnetically accelerated projectiles in this. A ‘railrifle’, a term I will delude myself into believing I have coined, is an automatic rifle sized railgun. An ‘autoshotgun’ fires metal pellets or slugs also by magnetic acceleration. It can fire various materials through an ‘igniter field’ and produce incendiary reactions.

• A ‘stungun’ is an energy weapon that can only be used at close range. If it’s fired at a person’s head on a low power setting, it will render them unconscious. If a high setting is used, it will cause brain damage, potentially ‘brainwiping’ someone, which is an effect sort of like amnesia except permanent. The stunguns Colonial Enforcement use have an energy blade on the opposite side which can be deployed at baton-length or lance-length.

They are shaped like this:

These are tonfas, a self-defense weapon used by Okinawans, who were banned from owning swords. They also used to be used by law enforcement in the real world, but were often called ‘nightsticks’, which is kind of amusing if you think about it. Then they were also banned.

• Another key technology that is commonplace in this setting is control over gravity, both in the sense of the ability to generate artificial gravity and to control or completely cancel out inertia. How does this work? I dunno. Maybe ask The Bathrobe Guy 👘 . An object can be locally ‘anchored’ in space, and will not move except as space moves. In the Pebblestone Cluster itself, there is a thing called the ‘tradelanes’ which is like a space highway, and it is spatially anchored. It also generates a gravitational field which allows various rocks and modules to orbit it. It also also generates a low level microwave field which provides heat, as there is no local star.

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I will continue to add to this nonsense glossary as things occur to me, or if anyone asks.

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Wildhouse (also featuring Amelia Ramsay in her early days with Colonial Enforcement)

The Silver Saucer (a story about a first contact fiasco that occurs in the Pebblestone Cluster. More of a comedy)

Redblake (I probably should put some kind of graphic content warning on this, but suffice to say it’s not for the faint of heart. For anyone who reads this, keep in mind that I removed all of the more violent parts already to try to make it more palatable/submittable to magazines)