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Mythographers we Love: Fates and Furies by Christine Lucas

Genre legends Gwyneth Jones and Melissa Scott were ecstatic over Fates and Furies.

Visions of the fate of our flesh, set in the far future and in our own bitter times, all informed by ancient Hellas: I think I liked the alien migrants in modern Greece best, but I loved all these stories. A very fine cover too!

Gwyneth Jones

This is an extraordinary collection. Myths old and new sing to readers, drawing them ever deeper into a world deeply informed by the Hellenic world. My only regret is that I would gladly have read more of every one of them.

Melissa Scott

Fates and Furies is available on Amazon and on the Candemark and Gleam website, where a purchase brings along the full digital bundle (PDF, Epub and Mobi, with the PDF containing the usual bells and whistles) . All C&G ebooks are DRM-free. The stunning mosaic that graces the collection’s cover, embedded in the deep sea-blue background created by Alan Caum, perfectly distills the collection’s essence in both appearance and backstory.

Christine Lucas lives in Greece with her husband and a horde of spoiled animals. A retired Air Force officer and mostly self-taught in English, she has had her work appear in many SFF magazines, including Daily Science FictionPseudopod, and Nature: Futures. Her stories appear in highly-claimed anthologies; among them Ellen Datlow’s Tails of Wonder and Imagination (“Dominion”, Night Shade, 2010), and Athena Andreadis’ The Other Half of the Sky (“Ouroboros”, Candlemark & Gleam, 2013). She was a finalist for the 2017 WSFA award; her story “Χίλια Μύρια Κύματα” (“A Thousand Waves from Home”, included for the first time in English in Fates and Furies, translated by Christine herself) won the 2017 Φανταστιcon Award; and she’s working on her first novel. You can visit her at Of (Wo)man and Mau.

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Teaser Chapter: Slow Up

Teaser Chapter: Moirai – Brains operating @ 12 times normal human speed

Two weeks ago:

It was a secure white room, in a nondescript basement owned by Moiragetis Holdings. The three women were perched upon their marble pedestals, mumbling and threading the flow of information.
The women, dressed in white, seemed aged beyond their years. Their thin hair barely flowed, their frail hands moving, twitching, as if working the air with purpose.

The Fates by Toradh

Bundles of flashing and glowing optic fibres were feeding into their backs, directly into their spine. They connected them to the server at the room below, an unlisted supercomputer with a singular purpose.

Their eyes were glazed white, for they could not see in the conventional sense. Their optic nerves had been claimed by the stream of data. In front of their eyes, it was as if the internet was the Earth’s seas and rivers, and you had struck a blow in the rockface and made a marvellous shower erupt, the rays of the sun making rainbows in the mist. It was like that, each second of each day, for the three Moirai.

Klotho, to weave the thread of data.
Lachesis, to measure the thread and assign it to its proper owner,
And Atropos, to cut the thread at its proper place.

For data was fate and fate was data. For if one person or three could see the twists and turns of fate, they could see the immediate future and seeing the future meant seizing it. Snatching it out of the infinite possibilities and probabilities in the quantum foam of the universe and forcing it to gel into existence, an Observer making electrons decide on molecular trajectories by the mere push of his gaze.

There was one misunderstanding, though.

Fate was not tailored to a person, as it was commonly believed. No. Fate was a given constant, only the person it was assigned to was the thing to be decided.

Take the Twelve Labors of Hercules, for example. One might think that Fate came with the life of the person itself, the demigod, despised by Hera and forced to endure endless tragedies. In truth, the Fate of Hercules was a constant, and it happened to befall upon the poor man. Like a story looking for its protagonist.

“Sister?” Klotho wheezed.
“Yes, my dear?” Lachesis replied in the same rasping whisper.
“Take note of this particular thread of Fate,” Klotho said and passed the data on to her left.
“Oh, my, what a nasty one this is!” Lachesis rasped and measured the thread of data.
Klotho turned her cataract eyes to her sister, watching with interest as she worked the thread. “To whom shall we assign this, Sister?”
“Give it to me,” snapped Atropos, the nastiest and oldest sister, as she snatched the thread from them. “Yes,” she said with delight as she cut the thread. “Yes, yes, yes.” She picked up another thread of data from the folds of her white dress, it seemed as if she was saving it for a special occasion. She spun and weaved the smaller thread to the original one, matching twists and making ends disappear. It was an expert’s work.

The younger sisters turned to her side, dreading to interfere. A woman’s face showed up in the shower of Augmented Reality they saw, along with every bit of data about her. Every keystroke she ever pushed, every step she ever took, every frame of video she ever watched and was in. Her life, digitised. They gasped. “Can she endure it?” the two sisters said in unison.

Atropos, finally done with her work, smiled.