Grimdark Magazine Issue #8 MOBI Read online

  Well. The crates hadn’t been that empty, I suppose.

  As the dropship dynamos whined to life I glanced at one of the crates the settlers had left behind. Buried deep under the clothes, and the machine parts, and a few tins of food, was a pair of beady little eyes watching through the slats.

  Kevin bent over Mathers. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. Like I didn’t fuckin’ know.

  Maybe we should have visited the settlers. Maybe we should have killed them. Now I had to get creative, as the dropship lurched up into the air and left a smear of exhaust across a sky turning orange in the light of dawn. I pulled out my radio transmitter and reset the signal to command the dynamos. More specifically, the fuel for the dynamos.

  Nat must have known what I was doing because he attacked me again. This time, he grabbed at my arm and tried to pull the transmitter loose.

  ‘We have to scuttle the craft!’ I said, like he would just believe me. Like he would ever just accept that I knew what the fuck I was doing.

  ‘No, God dammit!’ Nat screamed. ‘Just let them get away!’

  Even Kevin was trying to get the transmitter away from me now, Kevin, after all the bullshit he’d spouted about Rodentius this, Longevicus that. They’re dangerous. They’re invasive. I had to plant my boot into his gut to get him to let go, had to kick him while he tried to get up until he coughed blood onto his chin and finally laid still. Nat was a little harder to put down. He struggled. He tried to twist my arm, tried to break it, until the tendons stood out on his neck and his face burned as red as Satan’s asshole.

  I don’t know what it is with kids. Sons, specifically. Every day they think, today’s the day. Today’s the day I’m finally tougher than my old man.

  Well, that day never came for me. And it wouldn’t come for Nat or Kevin, either.

  I took a step back and flipped Nat onto his ass. He hit the dirt, and I pinned him with my shoe on his throat while I jammed the button on the transmitter. Up above, the dropship burst open—a firework of shrapnel and burning flesh. Smoke trailed behind embers arcing out over the jungle.

  Nat was sobbing like a little bitch and I knew I’d been right earlier. Some cunt. Probably, he’d seen her get on board. I moved my shoe off him and glanced over at Kevin. Kevin didn’t look like anything. Just a blank face, and some blood on his chin. He didn’t even try to get up.

  I felt … I don’t know what I felt.

  ‘Get your asses up, both of you,’ I said. ‘Nat. You and your men must have got here on another ship. I know it’s low on fuel but take us to it. We’ll figure something out. We’re going home. All of us.’

  Well.

  Some of us were, anyway.

  * * *

  The longies came for Mathers and they seemed to decide his porky ass wasn’t enough, because they started swarming us as well. We had to get the fuck out of there. I had all of three bullets left in my sidearm. Nat’s flamer had gone completely dry after one blast, and only Kevin had anything left in his assault rifle. That’s one advantage of being a scared little bitch, I guess. Ammo conservation.

  We ran through the jungle, just us three, side by side. Nat and Kevin didn’t say anything to me. No thanks. No nothing. Which was fine… I didn’t need the little shits to like me. I just needed them to get out of this alive.

  They had plenty to say to each other, though.

  ‘How much fuel is left in your dropship?’ Kevin asked. Nat shook his head.

  ‘I don’t remember…’

  ‘Fuckin’ try.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nat answered. ‘Maybe… 29 rods. Why?’

  Kevin glanced back at me. I was too tired to ask him what this was all about. We’d been up for a day and a half, on the move, doped out of our minds, chased halfway across this shithole planet. If Kevin wanted to spout some nerdy shit, this was his chance. I was getting ready to listen to him go on about weight ratios, and ballast, and delta-force-to-fuel volume comparisons.

  What he did instead, was raise his assault rifle and blast me in the leg.

  I didn’t go down right away. I think I was so surprised that I actually managed to run another few steps before the pain hit and locked up my knee. My sidearm jumped out of my grasp when I fell. The whole jungle went grey and it was only with every ounce of my willpower that I was able to keep from blacking out. I managed to look up at Kevin. I didn’t ask him why. I didn’t need to.

  Twenty-nine rods of fuel was not enough to get three people into orbit. I should have known.

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ Kevin told me. ‘It’s just the cold equations.’

  But I saw it in his eyes, before he and Nat shrank into the distance and disappeared into the trees, without missing a single step…

  It was fucking personal.

  My boys.

  I wonder… if Kevin ever knew he was my favourite.

  * * *

  Jesus. Fuck! My leg is killing me.

  I managed to fight off the little shits long enough to find some kind of burrow to hide in. I’ve got some dead ones with me, which should throw the others off the scent long enough for me to finish this recording. I lost my K-bar when one of them chomped my hand pretty good and I ran out of bullets for my sidearm a long-ass time ago. Days, maybe. For the record, Rodentius Longevicus does not taste very good uncooked.

  Anyway. This message is for General Ritters of the U.S.S. AeroCorps.

  The president of BioGen needs to issue a galaxy-wide recall on Rodentius Longevicus. They must be destroyed.

  They are not cute.

  They are not pets.

  This is coming from Colonel Vilhaus so you know I’m not just saying this as some bleeding-heart cunt. I don’t give a shit about ‘playing God’ or whatever the fuck they say to protest the creation of these things. I’m saying we made them, great. And they’re fucking dangerous. We need to put them down, for the safety of our colonies all over the galaxy. Confiscate them as pets wherever they are.

  Jesus, I think they found me again.

  Here I am, you little shits! Come get some!

  Did you think just because I don’t have a weapon, that I won’t crush every last one of your goddam furry little

  * * *

  END OF TRANSMISSION

  Transmission detected at roughly the same time that passengers VILHAUS and VILHAUS, Lieutenant, Specialist, U.S.S. AeroCorps, were picked up in orbit. Recording discovered on colony planet HAWEN, status, ABANDONED.

  Recording to be stored on database of the Mothership Ophidian until requested for use in case of AEROCORPS COLONIES vs. BIOGEN.

  Est. Date [0000/00/00]

  <> //Insert text

  ///Doctor. If you get this message, please refer to fauna storage sample X552B. The order went through to molecular bomb the planet Hawen but we already have our specimens on board so that doesn’t matter. Go secure them before anyone notices. Delete this message as soon as you find it.

  Viva Longevicus.

  //End Text

  [GdM]

  Brandon Daubs is a science fiction and fantasy writer based out of Santa Rosa, California. His short stories have appeared in the UC Davis campus literary magazine Nameless Magazine and 4 Star Stories.

  Is the Alien Trilogy Grimdark?

  C.T. PHIPPS

  The Alien franchise has had an immense amount of influence since the release of the first film in 1979. While combining science fiction and horror were nothing new, dating back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at least, Alien’s hostile vision of space resonated with contemporary audiences. Many grimdark authors and film makers have cited the film as an inspiration for their works. The Warhammer 40K universe, in particular, draws from the Alien trilogy to create its Tyranid monsters. But is the Alien series, itself, grimdark? That is an interesting question, one that delves into a lot of the assumptions about what constitutes the science fiction side of the genre. It would be enough to have humanity confronted with its own insignificance like in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, but the A
lien films make it clear humans are their own worst enemies.

  The trilogy serves as a contrast to more optimistic sci-fi. The future predicted in Alien is not one especially different from our own despite the addition of space travel. There are workers, executives, soldiers, miners, and more with lives different in specifics rather than generalities. I believe the moral ambiguity, the general bleakness, and the cosmic nihilism of the Alien franchise lands this trilogy squarely in the realm of grimdark.

  Grimdark is a genre which is defined by heroes who are not driven by traditional motivations like altruism or righteousness but greed or revenge. The worlds, whether fantasy or sci-fi, are dark with little in the way of hope. Furthermore, they have no great goods like interventionist deities or heroic organizations to fall back on. The heroes of grimdark must survive by their own wits and ruthlessness rather than out of any cosmic fairness. Even so, their endings are bittersweet rather than triumphant with the heroes rarely winning without horrific cost.

  For readers unfamiliar with the Alien trilogy, it comprises Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), and Alien 3 (1992). It follows the story of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Warrant Officer on the doomed starship Nostromo, which picks up a terrifying monster, the Xenomorph, that proceeds to move from crew member to crew member with deadly precision. After surviving the events of the first movie, Ellen returns to confront the Xenomorph on the world where they discovered its egg, and then finally faces them on a prison world where none of her efforts seem to have any effect on the monster.

  In Alien, there are no heroes, not even Ripley. The protagonists are a group of ‘space truckers’ who are only interested in delivering their cargo and getting paid. When a distress beacon lures the crew to the Xenomorph's world, their reaction is ambivalence, and only the threat of losing their pay for the trip causes them to investigate. From the point the Xenomorph is born after an egg infests a crew member, the protagonists are solely interested in their own survival.

  The original incarnation of Warhammer 40K’s setting was the Rogue Trader role-playing game. There, the motivation by the characters was to make vast fortunes exploiting the populace of undiscovered worlds. That’s actually less cynical than the depiction of Alien where space is nothing more than another avenue for the same daily grind to take place only alone in a dark and empty void. It’s no coincidence our protagonists are neither nobles, nor heroes but common labourers since those individuals tend to have much more prosaic motivations than the heroes of traditional heroic fantasy. It’s why pulp heroes like Howard’s Conan the Barbarian or Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser care about coin foremost. They don’t have the luxury of worrying about higher ideals because their next meal is a bigger concern.

  Captain Dallas, the only crew member willing to take risks to save the others, is horrifically murdered midway through Alien as a direct result of his attempt at heroism. Indeed, the entire conflict of the movie would have been avoided if Ripley's attempt to force the infected crew member to stay outside the ship for 24 hours was allowed to occur. Her ‘cold equations’ that the value of one life, even that of a friend, doesn't outweigh the risk of a deadly plague is correct.

  Making the most heroic character a victim before setting up the more pragmatic character as an alternative is a common grimdark plot device. In Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series, Geralt frequently encounters idealistic heroes who get themselves killed trying to do the right thing like Aryan La Vallette in The Witcher 2 or the dragonslayers from The Bounds of Reason. George R.R. Martin kills both Ned Stark as well as Robb Stark to illustrate the dangers of relying solely on moral justice to survive. Collem West is unquestionably the most heroic and decent protagonist in Abercombie’s The First Law trilogy but he dies the most horrific pointless death, leaving the fate of the Union in the hands of none other than the nefarious yet practical Sand dan Glokta and Bayaz.

  When the crew first encounters a crashed alien spaceship, their awe is swiftly muted by their desire to get their job done then get out. Their loyalty is not to any United Federation of Planets or each other but a nebulous organization called ‘The Company’ (later called ‘Weyland-Yutani’) which turns out to have sent them as expendable pawns with a Manchurian agent android to recover the Xenomorph for biological research. Part of what makes the film so effective is the similarity between the alien ship and the Nostromo and the knowledge that the crew of the former has been annihilated by the Xenomorph. It's a ship which is, if you look carefully, no different from the Nostromo in that it is just hauling cargo. The crew of the Nostromo soon discovers that the alien race that existed millennia ago was no different from humanity in its working class values and died out without anyone taking notice of it. The Xenomorph, by contrast, is just an unintelligent hostile animal that could theoretically destroy the world if it reached Earth but has no more malice than a collection of plague-carrying rats.

  Cynicism about alien and inhuman society is a common part of grimdark fiction. In Warhammer 40K, aliens are universally every bit as corrupt as humanity or utterly monstrous. Similarly, Kiriath, the protagonist of Richard K. Morgan’s Land Fit for Heroes, is not as noble or heroic as she believes. The Witcher series, again, makes it clear elves and other races are just like humans in virtually every way. The same cynicism about nationalism with the government’s virtual non-presence in Alien applies to grimdark. In the Takeshi Kovacs series, for example, corporations are the primary motivational force behind the war on Sanction IV. The government is unimportant compared to the people with money.

  The sequel, Aliens, wastes no time in establishing how pitiless and cruel the universe is. Ripley, the sole survivor of the previous film, wakes up to discover fifty-seven years have passed and her daughter has died of natural causes. Traumatized and disbelieved by the public, Ripley is sent along with a contingent of Colonial Marines to investigate a possible new outbreak of the Xenomorph on a colony world. Ripley's motivations are, once more, not the least bit heroic (at least at first). Ripley is going to investigate the outbreak of the creature because her piloting license has been suspended and she desperately needs to regain it to avoid poverty. The Colonial Marines are cocky, heroic, and badass – seemingly the clichéd stereotypes of a standard monster-slaying action film. This presumption is quickly dispelled as the Colonial Marines are slaughtered by the Xenomorphs. The sole survivor of the original colony proves to be a young girl who understands the only way to deal with the threat is to run away.

  The failure of the Colonial Marines is essential to establishing the trilogy as grimdark. Cynicism about the military and its effectiveness go hand-in-hand with de-romanticizing war the way other sci-fi and fantasy lionizes it. Warhammer 40K portrays the Imperial Guard as a largely ineffective force of conscripts slaughtered en masse by the monsters. The Union’s army in The First Law trilogy is a largely untrained and led by morons (with the exception of the doomed Collem West).

  Weyland-Yutani's evil continues with the character Burke (Paul Reiser), who takes the form of a sympathetic and likable corporate executive concerned with the possibility Ripley's story is true. This proves to be nothing more than a facade as the Company has not only sent the crew of a starship to serve as hosts for the Xenomorphs but a whole colony of men, women, and children as well. Burke intends to infect not only Ripley but the seven-year-old Newt in order to gain himself a greater share of the profits from analysing the Xenomorph's unique biology. While evil corporations are nothing new to grimdark, the extreme level of power and influence W-Y has over the lives of ordinary citizens is demonstrated by its complete ownership of the colony as well as Burke’s ability to send a troop of government Marines wherever he wants.

  Money as the motivation for grimdark antagonists is not an uncommon one. The slavers of A Land Fit for Heroes may have the patronage of the Dwenda but their interests begins and dies with the wealthy can accumulate from their crimes. The Witcher's Nilfgaard is a conquering despotic nation but when we actually get inside it in The Tower of the
Swallow, we discover they're only interested in securing trade routes to enrich their capital city. Valint and Balk is a terrifying presence throughout The First Law trilogy, ultimately controlling the direction for how the Union operates for decades to come.

  Aliens remains the inspiration for countless novels and video games despite the Marines largely ineffectual fight against the Xenomorphs. Indeed, their ultimate triumph over the Hive is completely accidental. The Xenomorph Hive is destroyed by the colony's nuclear reactors exploding thanks to the ineptitude of the soldiers who accidentally damaged them during their initial attack. Ripley manages to achieve some success rescuing Newt and defeating the Xenomorph Queen with some power armour, which gives the movie some measure of a happy ending. Even so, the movie's misanthropy is summarized by Ripley's statement: ‘You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.’

  Any hint of a happy or uplifting ending dies with Alien 3. The movie opens with the tragic death of Newt and the other crew members in a starship crash. Even android Bishop is forced to endure a mercy kill since there's no chance for his systems to be repaired after such catastrophic damage. Trapped on a mostly abandoned prison planet, Ripley discovers yet another Xenomorph, which is killing the prisoners one by one. A bunch of murderers and rapists, they react poorly to Ripley's presence. Indeed, she barely survives a rape attempt before the mass murder of prisoners by the Xenomorph begins. Ripley’s worst nightmare comes true when she discovers she is pregnant with a Queen embryo.

  Even Ripley's final act of sacrifice, plunging herself into molten metal rather than let the Company get its hand on a Queen is ambiguous. After having gone through such horrific events, the event has as much an air of suicidal resignation as heroic sacrifice. While it prevents the Company from retrieving the Xenomorph, it does nothing to impede the organization or prevent them from investigating the creature elsewhere. This ambiguity is not something which the movie, itself, picks up on but is one which the Alien Expanded Universe and subsequent films all addressed. It was discussed at length by the fan boards and letter columns of the day.