#6 John Gregory Hancock
John Gregory Hancock is a tall human. He has seen sixty-two revolutions of his planet around its star. He has lost body parts and collected scars. He has gained and lost family and gained family again. He knows the time left him is short, but fair. He writes down stories that come to him, in dreams or shadows, and he listens to the whispers of his characters. As a young human he wanted to achieve space. He desired to be the first human on the tiny red planet. Maybe the planet will come to him instead.
If you, wayward traveler, are reading this far into the future remember him as a fan of space, who dreamed of sleeping under the glow of planets and stars unfamiliar.
ROOF, like many of my stories, has a starting point in one of my dreams. I found myself in a hidden moralist society on rooftops of a city, with my fear of heights and the sense of danger along the edges, a cobbled together clutch of people trying to survive above and apart from the unwitting world below. A palpable separateness that acted as a touchstone I clung to in the back of my mind while writing.But the final product is about so much more; the conflict between technology and humanity, or how the misplaced cog becomes more important to the machine, or under what circumstance does sentience evolve. And of how there are greater angels and devils squirming in the animal that is man.
It started as a much shorter rejected story that I then expanded, out of spite. That complete overhaul made it an even more thoughtful story.
This seems by far my most beloved speculative fiction story thus far.
CRAWLSPACE also derives from a fragment of a dream. In the dream, I am being led between the walls of a house, drug by my arm by a small girl. The walls keep narrowing, triggering my claustrophobia. Nails are jabbing my exposed skin. We arrive at a darkened interior circle, where a gathering of ghosts was arguing amongst themselves. I am an interloper observer of this moot, and old grudges between the ghosts develops into something more violent. The girl drags me quickly back to my bedroom and throws me back onto the bed.
It is a haunted house story that is a puzzle which assembles itself as you read it. It tells the disparate stories of various people with psychic ability that encounter the same troubled plantation house through time. Reality gets twisted and reassembled in powerful ways. Time is a guideline, not a rule. The world is not as we know it.
This is one of those pieces where the characters wrestled me to the ground and forced my bleeding fingers to write them the way they wanted me to, not vice versa.
THE MORTUARY ARTS was not based on a dream, but a challenge. Could I write a plausible Victorian horror story? Could I put myself in that time completely and live in the characters I was writing? Kate, the main character, has great tragedy befall her and she struggles to survive in Victorian England by taking a job in a mortuary. This story is a at times love story, survival quest and horror.
THE ANTARES CIGAR SHOPPE is a short story at the beginning of THE IMMORTALITY CHRONICLES anthology. It is one day on a planet which ends in a gathering around a fire. Several humans and a robot play an ancient game of Vrai or Faux? (Truth or lie) in which more truth is told than anyone expected.
Find John Gregory Hancock’s stories here.