Further Adventures

Apart from the novels Twinmaker (aka Jump in Australia), Crashland (Crash), and Hollowgirl (Fall), I have written many, many stories concerning the teleporting technology I call “d-mat”. Some have been published in the leading magazines of the day. Some have won or been nominated for awards. Some came out in my newsletter or as guest posts on blogs. All try to present another aspect of this wonderful idea – the ability to go anywhere, anytime, for free. If we choose to.

These stories come in different flavors and genres, from flash fiction to novel-length, from horror to humour. There are even some poems. In them you’ll find inventive criminals, deadly shortcuts, unlucky travellers, and every manner of cultural quirk that has ever found its way into an urban myth.

There are also deleted scenes from the novels, which didn’t make the cut for one reason or another, and some essays on older matter transmitter stories and why I think the trope is so interesting.

In all, there’s over three extra novels worth of material, nearly all of it free for anyone to read. See below for more info and links. Enjoy!

Latest:

• “The Thirteenth Protocol”, forthcoming
• “Loopholes in Light” (free), “The People Paradox” (free)
• LeVar Burton reads “Face Value” (free)

In chronological order:

Here is a list of the stories as they wrap around the novels, from the beginning of d-mat to the end of humanity itself.

Early Days of D-mat

• “Noah No-one and the Infinity Machine” – Too much is not always a good thing when your mum is a mad scientist. (Rich and Rare)
• “Immaterial Progress” – The unexpected legacy of the first person to use d-mat. (Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine)
• “Encore” – True legends never die. Literally. (free)
• “Go” – There’s no such thing as a free jump #1. (free, with a bonus reading)
• “The Hacker” – There’s no such thing as a free jump #2. (free)
• “The People Paradox” – A glimpse of another timeline, and another, and another . . . (free)

Life in the Age of D-mat

• “Tall Tales about Today My Great-great-granddaughter Will Tell” – The future as told through the eyes of a kid. (Daily SF – free)
• “Sing, My Murdered Darlings” – A peeping tom with a taste for the macabre uncovers a secret too horrible even for him. (Dreaming in the Dark – World Fantasy Award winner)
• “Death and the Hobbyist” – Growing old gracefully isn’t easy in a future that terrifies you. (Lightspeed – bonus interview – free)
• “Deconstructing Decompression” – A book report about an old sci-fi novel that hits some surprisingly prescient notes. (Twinmaker)
• “Tailgate Fume” – Chasing cars, without the cars. (Seizure – bonus audio – free)
• “Zero Temptation” – Lust and sabotage on a tropical desert island. (Lightspeed – free)
• “Collision” – With d-mat, when things go wrong, they really go wrong. (free, with audio performance)
• “Haunted” – The ghost in the machine. (free)
• “Popcorn” – What price the perfect popcorn? (free)
• “Between” – If d-mat takes you from A to B, what lies in the middle? (free)
• “Behind You” – Lightning doesn’t have to strike twice to cause double trouble. (free)
• “The Child” – Don’t stand too close. (free)
• “A New Christmas” – The second coming for a modern age. (free)
• “The Ghost of What Might Have Been” – Never cross the peacekeepers, even if you’re trying to fix the world. (free)
• “On the Road to Tarsus” – Playing hide and seek via d-mat has unintended consequences. (free)

Crime in the Age of D-mat

• “Lust, Entrapment and the Matter Transmitter: A Case Study” – Young face, old eyes, new crimes. (In Your Face)
• “The Lives of Riley” – The price of self-love is sometimes too high. (Lightspeed – free)
• “The Beholders” – Eternal youth, the hard way. (Breaking Beauty)
• “Artistic License” – Why take no for an answer when you can make someone say yes? (free – bonus reading)
• “Happy Families” – Cheaper by the dozen, but why stop there? (free)
• “Crystal Clear” – Deadly snake oil with a modern twist. (free)
• “Plenty” – Crime never pays, except when it does, too much. (free)
• “The Hole” – Committing suicide by d-mat is harder than it looks. (free)
• “Die with a T” – The unintended consequences of losing weight. (free)
• “The Devil D-mat” – Matter transmitters and exorcisms don’t mix. (free)
• “The Other Fly” – I know an old lady who chased a high. I guess she’ll die. (free)
• “The Missing Metatarsals” – Forest and Sargent, a crime-fighting odd couple, take on a case involving dinosaur bones and an over-obsessive collector. (Lightspeed – bonus interview – free)
• “Face Value” – Forest and Sargent, in a world without money, bring a bare-faced counterfeiter to justice. (Lightspeed – bonus interview – free) (Read by LeVar Burton, also free, and completely brilliant)
• “Murdering Miss Deboo” – Forest and Sargent investigate a case involving identical twins who helped invent d-mat. (Cosmos – free)

Twinmaker/Jump

• 113 – A complete rewriting of Twinmaker from Q’s point of view. (free – blog post)
• “I, Q” – A series of thirty-one short pieces that tells the story of Twinmaker from Q’s point of view (Allen & Unwin – an abbreviated form of 113)
• “Incomplete No.7” – Tells the story of Twinmaker from the point of view of a lonely dupe. (Review of Australian Fiction)
• “Wolf’s Clothing” – A vigilante who uses cancer to kill meets his match in Forest and Sargent. (See “The Thirteenth Protocol”, at the top of the page.)

Crashland/Crash

• “The View from the End of the World” – Tash confronts a mountain, boys, and the end of the world. (Crash)
• “The Tyranny of Distance” – What to do when you stumble into a deadly secret on the day d-mat dies. (SQ Mag 14 – Shadow Award winner)

Hollowgirl/Fall – Aurealis Award nominee

• “Redux” – Stuck in New York while the world is ending, and all you want do is find your girlfriend who made it happen. (Allen and Unwin)

Future

• “The New Venusians” – A girl, her grandfather, and the end of a world. (Drowned Worlds)
• “A Giant Leap for a Man” – Difficult decisions at the edge of the solar system. (AntipodeanSF – free)
• “A View Before Dying” – Halfway to the stars riding a rocket carrying little more than a d-mat booth, what could go wrong? (free)

Far future

• “Loopholes in Light” – Sometimes suicide is definitely not the easy way out. Due in 2018 from Daily SF. (free)
• “Rare Justice” – A megalomaniac meets his match, again. (free)
• “All the Wrong Places” (Aurealis Award winner) – Looking for love through time and space. (Meeting Infinity)

Alternate Timeline

• “New Flames for an Old Love” – How d-mat destroyed the world. (free)
• The Resurrected Man (Ditmar Award winner, Aurealis Award nominee) – A man who should be dead helps solve a crime that shouldn’t be possible. (Pyr)
• “The Dark Matters” – Turn out the light and find out what lives there. (Galaxy’s Edge)
• “The Legend Trap” (Ditmar Award winner) – Never test the urban myth. Never ever test the urban myth. (Kaleidoscope – Ditmar and Aurealis award nominee)
• “The Cuckoo”  – April Fools, art crimes, and saving the world from itself. (Clarkesworld – free)
• “The Last Christmas” – Sometimes they do all come at once. (free)
• “The People Paradox” – when d-mat goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong (free)

NB: If you’re interested in knowing who appears in what stories, there’s a “family tree” here.

Other:

Six-word stories

• Here are a handful of tiny bonuses, rather silly six-word stories, each of which is shorter than this sentence.

Poems

• Here you’ll find find a villanelle (“D-mat is perfectly safe, okay”) and the tragic romance of “Love in the Time of the Matter Transmitter”.

Remixes

I dig breaking the stories apart and putting them back together again.

Over the course of almost a year I tweeted selected lines from Twinmaker, partly to keep the book out in the ether, partly to highlight my favourite lines and moments, also as an exercise to see what the book would look like after such a radical disintegration. You can read the “raw” extracts and a brief commentary on them here. Then I did the same thing with “I, Q” and Crashland. The hashtag version of Hollowgirl is available here.

There’s a remix hashtag to help you find posts relating to this kind of thing.

The Murdering Twinmaker

Finally, f you’re interested in reading about my PhD, which touches on matters related to teleporters and Twinmaker, you can find a list of posts and excerpts here.

Deleted Scenes:

These are scenes cut from earlier drafts of Twinmaker. Actions scenes, alternate endings, lost character moments . . . just like the special features on a DVD, these are all the bits that were too bad to go in but too good to get rid of forever! (The image below is an unused cover concept. Read more about that here.)

• The Beginning(s)
• Jesse Is Grouchy in the Morning
• Zep is a Bit of a Sleaze
• Improved-Libby has Issues
• Gemma Gets High
• Clair is not a Killer
• Dylan Linwood Bites the Dust, Again
• Q Cracks a Bad Joke
• Clair has a Very Bad Dream
• Endings are HARD

This is a deleted scene from Crashland:

• Clair and the Prize Giants

These are deleted scenes from “I, Q”.

• Pondering the Linwoods
• Clair in Danger
• Outside the Cage
• Hard Light
• Powerful Forces

Here’s an alternate ending to Hollowgirl.

• Q

Essays and opinion pieces:

Personally, I think the matter transmitter is the greatest science fiction idea ever invented, and I’ve written a lot of words to back up that opinion. I even have a PhD in the subject! Here on my blog and elsewhere I’ve written quite a bit about it, enough to think there might be a book in it one day. Until then, here’s some short pieces to give you an idea.

• “Doctor D-mat” – the intro to my PhD (warning: academicspeak)
• “I Totally Stole D-mat But it Wasn’t From Star Trek, Honest” – I am far from the first to think of this idea, just standing on many, many shoulders
• “The Reading of Recommended Texts is Recommended (But not Compulsory)” – some of my favourite d-mat stories starting with the very first one, from way back in 1877
• “Return of the Recommended Texts” – More wonderful old stories featuring my favourite trope
• “Larry Niven Was Here (More Recommended Texts)” – Acknowledging the great in this field, who played a huge part in bringing me where I am today
• “On the Fly: Reference” – the first in a series of essays about why “The Fly” is such an amazing idea and franchise, followed by “Disintegration”, “Destination”, and “Redux”
• “The Power of Names” – from the Telepomp to d-mat (more on that subject here)
• “Why Twins?” – I am a bit obsessed, it would be fair to say (more on the subject here)
• “To Paraphrase is Human” – quotes and misquotes in Twinmaker (a metaphor)
• “The Tragic Demise of Science Fiction’s Greatest Idea” – Why isn’t d-mat as popular as the time machine? I’ll never stop trying to work out why . . .

And finally, follow this link and press play to see a video campaign my friend Sputnik developed for d-mat before the first book came out. Fun times!