The Sunday Archive: Andy Duncan
An excerpt from "Criswell Predicts!"; plus, an interview from the archive
Happy Sunday!
For this edition of The Sunday Archive, we are sharing an excerpt from Andy Duncan’s wonderfully wacky short story, Criswell Predicts!, featured in Storyteller.
We are also re-publishing an interview first posted on April 13, 2024, about his experience meeting Tanith Lee, his influences, and more.
Excerpt from Criswell Predicts!
Princeton, Indiana, present day
It was a long, wearying day, one bus disgorging after another, and Faith’s co-worker never showed. Owen had caught the Aphrodisian virus, claimed Karl, the leering old security guard who could make “Closing in one hour, folks” sound dirty. Probably Owen was just hung over.
Faith was relieved to realize the group raggedly forming in the lobby would be the last of the day—but as she glanced in its direction, the vintage Zoltan machine seemed to shimmy and blur. And then she felt an unexpected internal lurch, as though aboard a balky elevator that had dropped one more afterthought inch after stopping. The space shaped and resolved itself into an Inner-Earther. It looked just like the ones on the livestream of the Intergalactic Conference now in its third week. Its featureless green carapace—like a six-foot avocado—hung suspended two inches above the marble floor. No face, no sensory organs, completely opaque. Whatever lay beneath was unknown.
The visitors were astonished and delighted by their sudden tour upgrade.
“Look at that!”
“Damn, it’s a big one!”
The newcomer, unsurprisingly, made no sound. The conference—filling the three largest convention centers in Vegas—was in its third week, and the Inner-Earthers had spoken only once, to ask whether the lieutenant governor of Mississippi would be present. No one knew what that was about, but that worthy had been flown in, only to run up a hefty expense account, while the Inner-Earthers, to date, had totally ignored her. Humans had not responded in kind; adding comic subtitles to photos of their intergalactic visitors had become a meme: HOLY GUACAMOLE! and NOT IMPRESSED, and so forth.
And now one had appeared for Faith’s four o’clock tour. She recovered quickly. When in doubt, stick to the script.
To read all of Criswell Predicts! plus more incredible fiction, pre-order Storyteller now at this link!
Andy Duncan is a writer, teacher, journalist, and connoisseur of weirdness. His honors include a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, three World Fantasy Awards, and awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Science Fiction Research Association. His latest collection is An Agent of Utopia from Small Beer Press; he narrated nine stories on the Recorded Books audio edition. His ongoing nonfiction project Weird Western Maryland has a new home page at www.frostburg.edu/personal-arduncan/. A former board member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, he lives in Maryland’s mountains as a tenured writing professor at Frostburg State University. You can find him at linktr.ee/andy_duncan.
Not one for long videos? Check out this playlist, where you can find segments of the interview sorted by topic.
See you on Wednesday for our Spotlight on a Storyteller series!
The Essential Dreams Press Team