© The Sirens Call
The Colony, a short horror story I wrote under the pseudonym of Jim Mountfield, has just been published in Issue 66, the summer 2024 edition, of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.
For Issue 66, the Sirens Call’s editors suggested that contributors write something on the theme of ‘heat’. I thought I would write a sci-fi / horror story set in the globally-warmed future. Come to think of it, you can no longer describe global warming as ‘science fiction’. We’re living in a globally-warmed world now. This year, for example, my current place of residence Singapore has been stricken with extreme temperatures. It was headline news here in March when thermometers recorded highs of 36 degrees. And the local taxi drivers’ main – only? – topic of conversation in recent months is how they can’t remember the city-state being as swelteringly hot as this before.
Major inspiration for The Colony came from an article I read last year in the web magazine Atlas Obscura about the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab in Oregon where, among other things, scientists have been experimenting with an item called a ‘chungus’. This combats coastal erosion by “dampening the waves, robbing them of some of their energy before they crash onto the… shore.” A chungus is a ‘five-foot-wide, lumpy brown blob floating in the water, encased in webbing and studded with… floaties. Long plastic tentacles trail from its underside like vinyl seaweed.” The lab’s researchers suggest that “future versions… would be connected in a vast network, their plump bodies seeded with marsh grasses and seaweed. Eventually, they would form floating gardens surrounding coastal cities like fluffy green tutus, potentially saving them from disaster… a network of them could dampen a real-world storm surge.”
Of course, my warped mind quickly got wondering… What if these floating blobs of tentacles and vegetation weren’t inanimate objects but sentient creatures designed, then cloned, in genetic research laboratories, and tethered offshore in their millions to stop coastal erosion and storm surges caused by global warming and rising sea-levels? And what if, in the tradition of sci-fi horror stories, The Science Goes Wrong?
Meanwhile, it was a no-brainer where to set the story. I spent a couple of years living in East Anglia, one of England’s most scenic areas but also its flattest and lowest. It’s severely prone to coastal erosion – something whose effects are in plain view if you visit places along the East Anglian coast like Dunwich, Happisburgh and Orford.
As ever, Issue 66 of The Sirens Call is an absolute bargain, being free and having some 280 pages stuffed with stories and poems. It can be downloaded here.