Release date: May 31, 2018
Subgenre: Apocalyptic anthology
About Holding On By Our Fingertips:
Holding On By Our Fingertips
An anthology of science fiction and speculative stories exploring the many different reactions and experiences of people during the 24 hours leading up to the end of the world. Our base instinct is to survive, but when the end is nigh, do we simply lie down and die? Or do we celebrate our life and achievements?
Love, loss, forgiveness, revenge, or just that final goodbye…
Gaie Sebold -- James Everington -- Sarah Higbee -- Charlotte Bond -- Kim Lakin-Smith -- Steve Carr -- Leontii Cristea -- Charlotte Strong -- Tabitha Lord -- Theo Graham -- Adrian Faulkner -- Phil Sloman -- C.A. Yates -- Ren Warom -- Terry Grimwood -- Scott Hungerford -- Courtney Privett
Excerpt:
Heatstroke Harry by James Everington
People called him Heatstroke Harry, although whatever malady
affected his head was obviously more permanent than heatstroke. But
then, Harry was homeless, his only shelter from the heat his ragged
clothes or a cardboard box. Maybe anyone would end up like Harry,
if they’d had to live out in the shimmer and blaze of the streets all the
time.
“Sure,”one of us would say—me or Clarkie or Deepak (never the woman). “But first a story, Harry. Tell us what you can see up there today.”A face, a devil, a flame-breathing dragon—you never knew, with Harry.
Harry would pause as if this time he wasn’t going to demean himself, but then sigh, his stiff clothes
rustling and crackling like cinders. He’d look up with that cracked and parched face to the sky that had
afflicted him so.
“The world’s ending,”he’d say, every time. “Today.”
Harry looked to the sky: his shtick, the personal touch he brought
to his beggary and madness was that he claimed to be able to see the pollutants up there, see all the invisible crap the sky was
bursting with. See the patterns it made, like tealeaves, and in
those swirling patterns Harry claimed to be able to see the future.
It was never good news.
We’d laugh, loud and brash, at this words. A cigarette held out just
out of reach. “What, again, Harry? How is the world ending this time?”
He was nothing if not predictable, Harry.
“It’s the time of false hope,” he might say. “In a few hours time it will all be over. All of this, gone. All of
you, dead. A meteor…”
“A meteor throwing up ash and blocking out the sun? You did this one
last week, Harry!”We constantly interrupted him, when he ended the world, as if
trying to exert control over what he was saying, despite its
obvious nonsense.
“No, not ash. It’s only a small meteor, relatively speaking. It will kill a few
thousand in Tianjin, that’s all; it’s not big enough to cause much damage. But even though we know
that, there’s a prototype AI in China which won’t. And it controls all their nukes…”
I didn’t realise it at the time, but every apocalypse Harry constructed
fell from the sky. Meteorites, nukes, space plagues, gamma rays…As if when he looked to the sky he really could see the damage we’d done to it and was envisaging its revenge. Each time, I’d try to gaze into that pitiless blue as long as Harry could, but
after a few seconds I’d have to look away, eyes too dry for tears.
Harry kept looking.
“The failsafes don’t trigger and the AI will interpret it as an attack from America
and fire back before anyone can switch it off…”
And the world would be over in an instant. Boom, again.
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About Kate Coe:
Kate Coe is an editor, book reviewer and writer of fiction & fantasy. She writes the sparkpunk GreenSky series and blogs at writingandcoe.co.uk.
In real life she's a typesetter and fills her spare time in between
writing with web design, gaming, geeky cross-stitch and DIY (which may
or may not involve destroying things). She also reads far fewer books
that she would like to, but possibly more than she really has time for.
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Google+
About Amanda Rutter:
Amanda Rutter was previously trained and worked for over a decade
as an accountant. She eventually became an editor with Angry Robot
and helped authors to their Strange Chemistry imprint. Since then,
she has become a freelance editor through her company AR Editorial
Solutions, Wise Ink, and BubbleCow. She also writes for the Tor.com
blog when she has time.
