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    Alien Vibrations: Five Strange Science Fiction Short Stories
    Alien Vibrations: Five Strange Science Fiction Short Stories
    Alien Vibrations: Five Strange Science Fiction Short Stories
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Alien Vibrations: Five Strange Science Fiction Short Stories

    By Dean Wesley Smith

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    About this ebook

    Dean Wesley Smith, famous for being one of the most prolific and wide ranging authors working today, draws on his library of science fiction short stories to produce this strangely twisted collection, Alien Vibrations.

    From two androids falling in lust on an alien planet to a story that spans generations, Dean’s science fiction reads like no other. Here he takes you along on an alien first contact to a movie, then jumps you a thousand years into the future to take a peak at a basic university class. The collection ends with a multi-generational story of looking for a lost gold mine and what finding it really means.

    Funny, sexy, and just plain strange, these stories keep the reader turning pages.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWMG Publishing
    Release dateDec 29, 2017
    ISBN9781386494515
    Alien Vibrations: Five Strange Science Fiction Short Stories
    Author

    Dean Wesley Smith

    Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA TODAY bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published far over a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres. He currently produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and the superhero series staring Poker Boy. During his career he also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds.

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      Book preview

      Alien Vibrations - Dean Wesley Smith

      Alien Vibrations

      Alien Vibrations

      Five Strange Science Fiction Short Stories

      Dean Wesley Smith

      WMG Publishing Inc.
      Contents

      Introduction

      Don’t Rust On Me Now

      Don’t Rust On Me Now

      The Great Alien Vibration

      The Great Alien Vibration

      For The Delusion That Waited

      For The Delusion That Waited

      Nostalgia 101

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Playing in the Street

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Also by Dean Wesley Smith

      About the Author

      Introduction

      I am known to be one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, writing across many genres. But still most people would know me from the thirty-plus Star Trek novels I wrote back in the 1990s.

      And a few people might notice I also wrote Men in Black novels and gaming novels and comic books novels, all solidly based in science fiction.

      I love science fiction in all its different forms and grew up reading it. So when I started writing, it seemed logical I would write science fiction.

      Now forty-some years later, I am still writing science fiction along with mystery and thrillers. But my one true love will always be science fiction.

      So I figured I would put five of the stranger science fiction stories I have written lately in this single volume you now hold in your hands.

      So starting off this collection is, in romance terms a meet cute, where two people in a far-distant future meet while in android bodies. Don’t Rust on Me Now combines a number of things not normally seen in modern science fiction.

      The Great Alien Vibration takes the idea of first alien contact or sort of twists it. Well, not sort-of, it really twists it. And that’s why I thought the title for this collection should be Alien Vibrations. All these stories are twisted away from the normal forms of science fiction.

      In the very short story For the Delusion that Waited I took a modern invention and asked the simple question all science fiction writers ask: What if this goes on?

      For the next story, I was given an assignment from an editor to write a story that extrapolates what the future would be like in one thousand years. Almost impossible to do, but I gave it a shot and the story Nostalgia 101 came from that assignment.

      Playing in the Street comes from my love of the history of Idaho. I was born and raised in Boise and still love the city and the state even though I haven’t lived there for almost fifty years. I set my time-travel Thunder Mountain novels in Idaho because of that love of the history.

      The governor of the state at one point was assassinated because of his stand on a mining dispute in Northern Idaho. I took that fact and tried to figure out what would be worth killing a governor? And as a science fiction writer, things got twisted and this story is what I came up with.

      So I hope you enjoy these five samples of my science fiction short stories. At least as much as I did writing them.

      —Dean Wesley Smith

      Lincoln City, Oregon

      Don’t Rust On Me Now

      I wrote this under one of my open pen names: Dee W. Schofield.

      Can romance be real between two androids on a poison planet with beach sand in all the wrong places?

      Dr. Susan Taft discovers the answer to that question when her ship crashes in the middle of a lake in a very hostile place.

      The only thing not hostile: Another android with her.

      An Android with a great body and an even better mind.

      The alarm bells were going off as I came up out of transwarp sleep, trying to remember where I was. Who I was, actually.

      Oh, yeah, Susan Taft. Dr. Susan Taft, actually; originally from Canada on Earth, recently from the Mars city of Bensen.

      I remembered now. Waking up from transwarp sleep was supposed to be calm and comfortable, like waking up from a long nap. Yeah, alarms blaring can really help a person be calm.

      Damn I hated alarms.

      The one echoing around me had a distinctive whoop-whoop screaming sound that I was sure could hurt a person’s ears given time. What was going on?

      And why didn’t someone shut off the stupid alarm? And let me out of this sleep chamber. I didn’t want to open my eyes because I knew there was nothing but padding about five inches above my face.

      Everyone says that the human brain doesn’t dream in transwarp sleep, but I’d had this uncomfortable dream about losing my body in an industrial accident, and having my mind temporarily put into an android body so I could make the journey to New Wells a couple of hundred light years away for a new and younger and healthier body.

      On New Wells they grew the human replacement bodies tall, strong, and pretty in the organ beds in the light gravity. Anything would be better than the old, scarred-up and dying original body from my dream. I remember dreaming that I had ordered larger breasts as well, just to spend one life rotation seeing if the things might change my life in any way.

      Then the dream firmed up and became a nasty memory, and I remembered.

      No dream. I really was scarred up by an accident and I had really ordered new and larger breasts on my body replacement. Yeah, that was dumb.

      And I really was in an android body right now.

      Damn. I didn’t want to open my eyes.

      But I sure did want to shout for someone to turn off the stupid alarm. It seemed to be vibrating my sleep coffin. Even if I were dead, that sound would wake me up.

      I sure hoped I wasn’t dead.

      I had come too close to that totally dead state in the accident back on Mars. I had plans to stay around for another ten body rotations—a good four hundred Earth years—if I

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