A Moment with Leah Rhyne

What's your favourite thing about speculative fiction and why?

I tell my child all the time that I’m terrible at picking favorite anythings. Seriously, I can’t even pick a favorite color – it changes daily. When I’m feeling bright and happy, I love yellow. If I’m a little down, perhaps brown, or grey. On neutral days I go for blues or greens.

I can’t pick a favorite thing about speculative fiction because I love it all, because in speculative fiction, anything can happen. Anything.

Want to go back in time? See the world as it was a thousand years ago? Then go ahead – build a time machine. If you’re writing speculative fiction, you can. You can even choose to ignore the complexities of paradoxes, of changing the past and thus the future, because in your own world, anything goes.

Want to create a new race of alien creatures that inhabit planets in a distant galaxy? Go for it! The weirder the better! Make them look like insects. Make them look like jiggling puddles of Jello. You can even make them look like giant, fuzzy bunnies if you want. It’s your world.

One of my favorite science fiction books of the moment is John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, in which humans get genetically engineered to have green skin and super-strength. He turned people into superhero soldiers, and with them he tried to rule the universe. And why not? It was his universe.

Want to bring to light all the terrifying skeletons that inhabit your deepest, darkest dream closets? Do it. Scare us. In speculative fiction, there’s room for all the monsters.

Picture Stephen King, creating a monster that takes the form of a clown with razor-sharp teeth and claws like knives. Picture him scaring a little girl so much with the resulting novel, she had no choice but to grow up and become a writer herself, to give shapes to her own inner demons.

Now try to imagine a world without speculative fiction. A world that never included the stories of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells or Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. Imagine a world without outlets for our fears, our dreams.

It’s a drab place, don’t you think? A place where people might never have considered space travel achievable, that might never have made it to the moon, let alone Mars. A place without a ticking telltale heart or a time machine.

Picture a place without Aliens, without Back to the Future and Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. I wouldn’t want to live in that world.

My favorite thing about speculative fiction is all of it. Really. I mean that.

Because the sky is not the limit, in speculative fiction. Only our imaginations are.

Leah Rhyne is a Jersey girl who's lived in the south so long she's lost her accent...but never her attitude. Her first novel, Undead America Book 1: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights, released in October, 2012. When not writing she can be found playing with her daughter and husband, running, or drinking good red wine.

Learn more about Leah Rhyne on her website. Stay connected on Twitter.

Leah's book Undead America Book 1: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights, is available HERE.

Thoughts on Writing

by Barry Rosenberg

In the beginning was the Word. For many, perhaps, but not for me. In the beginning was the Number. As a young person, I was pretty much inarticulate but from school I won a place to study maths at university. Though I wasn’t a diligent student, I did go on to do a PhD in Artificial Intelligence.


At the time, my unconscious assumption was that the brain/mind was to be understood as information processing. This was in the late-60s, the early days of computing. In the mid-70s, however, I became involved with meditation and tai chi. Re-thinking mind, I became convinced that little bits did not add up to make a whole. In other words, data did not add up to make the mind. Atoms and molecules did not add up to make objects. Becoming a 70s dropout, I spent hours in meditation and tai chi.

Until this time, I’d never taken much note of poetry. Yet in meditation, whole poems would appear in my mind. And they would stay as an uncomfortable itch until I wrote them down. For quite a few years, I was highly itinerant while scraping a living from teaching tai chi and relaxation classes. With me went an increasing paper burden of “spiritual” poems.

Later on and married, my wife was part of an exhibition called, Hebraic Connections. I put in a self-published book of my poetry with the same name. It has since become a collectable and sells for slightly more than the original price!

Over those years, I saw a fair number of gurus - either in Australia or in India. Quite a few were pretty shonky, reflecting what is known as the left-hand path. This means that as meditation deepens, psychic abilities may (seem to) appear and the searcher concentrates on them rather than on the inner search. It is these characters who provide tension in a narrative.

So when I became more settled (conventionally employed), my writing focussed more on guru-types who follow the left-hand path. Initially, this led to a gentle quirkiness. For example, in one little story a teenager exudes wax from his ears while he sleeps. So he sticks a string in his ear and concentrates on making candles that he can sell at the market. During this quirky period, the main influence on me was Terry Pratchett and his Discworld.

So my writing was quirky, but not horrorble. Now, I hadn’t seen the film based on Stephen King’s book, The Green Mile. Nor did I have a particular interest in horror. But one day, I picked up the novel and began to read it. I became an immediate convert to Stephen King - and to horror.

Horror comes in many forms. The worst kind can be read in the newspapers. Just as children like to be chased, adults enjoy the more controllable horror that appears in books. In fact, writers derive an unholy glee in describing destructive zombie hordes or plagues of biting vampires. The problem, and the fun, with these and other eldritch creatures is to find new ways of presenting them.

Which brings me, in a rather convoluted way, to my story. Penumbra wanted stories of exploration in a speculative fiction setting. My story could never have been written by one whose beginning was the Number. Nor even by one whose middling was the Word. Dare I say it? It required someone willing to explore the darker shades of fantasy.

So, from the humorous fantasy of Terry Pratchett and the scarifying horror of Stephen King, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you ArachnidMan - a humorous yet scarifying slant on first encounter.

Barry Rosenberg was born in London, then moved to Australia after completing his PhD. Since 1997, Rosenberg has lived on the Sunshine Coast with his artist wife, Judith.

He started to write poetry in 1974 and moved onto short stories and plays. Most of his stories are quirky or speculative fiction. It is only in the past few years that he has been active in submitting his work. His short stories are available on Amazon. The Buddha Leaves, Rosenberg's paranormal e-novel is available at jaffa BOOKS.

Barry invites you all to join his Yahoo group.