I had started a while ago to post brief pieces on the short stories contained in my collection Fluctuation in Disorder; here is the next in the series. Each story is also available as an individual e-book priced at €/£/$0.99—the stories are quite wide-ranging in style and genre, so this allows readers to pick and choose the ones they most like the look of. You can find the details of all the individual stories here.
'Thicker than Blood' started out as a back-story for a character in a short novel I outlined many years ago, but have not (yet) written. Although it was written before the worlds of Hibernia Altera, Muinbeo, and the Outlands were developed, the world of the story is an ancestor of the corrupt, post-catastrophic world that emerged when, within that later mythos, the Pharaoh’s Court degenerated from the nexus of escape from invasion into a self-serving gravy-train. In this short story, it is an explicitly dystopian world where the undeclared ideologies that lie behind the structures of ‘real’ life are flayed and exposed.
The idea I had for the novel involved the re-location of the protagonists into the oceans, as a way not only of surviving but of hiding and regrouping before openly opposing those in power. At the time, I did not appreciate the impact on the oceans of environmentally hostile industrial processes. I saw it as a sanctuary, and also as a potentially endless source of both inspiration and opportunity for invention, containing as it does some of the last places on Earth that are still not fully explored or understood.
It seemed necessary that any humans adapting themselves to life in the water would benefit from a contact with whom they could communicate, but why was the contact there, and why would they care about life on land? Cliona’s dramatic turn to the sea was the answer.
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