Showing results by author "Gene Doucette" in All Categories

In the heart of the authoritarian country of Wivvol, astronaut Xto Djbbit is about to embark on his first mission off-planet when the exiled High Hat of Chnta comes to him with an unusual request: Help smuggle a Septal artifact out of Wivvol. It’s an impossible favor to ask of Xto, but it’s also impossible to refuse; the High Hat of Chnta is also his uncle. Meanwhile, waiting for Xto in space? His estranged father - who has his own impossible favors - and a mysterious anomaly whose secrets Xto is uniquely positioned to unlock.

For most of humankind, the woman calling herself Eve has been nothing more than a shock of red hair glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in a crowd, or from a great distance. She's been worshipped, feared, and hunted, but perhaps never understood. Now, she's trying to reconnect with the world, and finding that more challenging than anticipated. Can the oldest human on Earth rediscover her own humanity? Or will she decide the world isn't worth it?

When Oliver Naughton joins the Tenth Avenue Writers Underground, headed by literary wunderkind Wilson Knight, Oliver figures he'll finally get some of his wild imaginings out of his head and onto paper. But when Wilson takes an intense interest in Oliver's writing and his genre stories of dragons, aliens, and spies, things get weird. Oliver's stories don't just need to be finished: they insist on it.

Adam has accidentally stumbled upon an important period in history: Vienna in 1814. Mostly, he'd just like to continue to enjoy the local pubs, but that becomes impossible when he meets Anna, an intriguing woman with an unreasonable number of secrets and sharp objects.

On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has. The madman's name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he's going to die soon. He may be right. Because there's trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.

When he's in a funk, Adam the immortal man mostly just wants a place to drink and the occasional drinking buddy. When that buddy turns out to be Santa Claus, Adam is forced to face one of the biggest challenges of extremely long life: Christmas cheer. Will Santa break him out of his bad mood? Or will he be responsible for depressing the most positive man on the planet?

Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land. In Immortal At Sea, the first adventure in The Immortal Chronicles, Adam talks about what it took to make it back to shore safely, and why it's a bad idea to sail on a gilded ship.

I knew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar. She was a redhead. I always had a thing for redheads. One in particular, actually. She was dead, but that didn't mean I wasn't holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair. This one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room.

A region of space with different laws of physics. A child’s story about black holes. An interoffice memorandum presaging the end of the world. An alien named Gerald. These are some of the stories you’ll find in There Is No Cat, a collection of short fiction by Gene Doucette. Each story is unique, both in the topic and the telling, as Gene never seems to approach his stories the same way twice. See what our world looks like from the perspective of a newly self-aware nanobot, or the eyes of a precocious child. Read between the lines of corporate-speak for news of an impending apocalypse.