I’ve always loved talking guns since I read the first Rogue Trooper story back in 1981. Gunnar was a feisty and slightly kill-happy foil to the more level-headed Rogue and the idea of a soldier carrying around the personalities of his dead comrades in his equipment is a stone-cold fucking genius idea.
I added a talking gun to Slingers because we were trying to make the thing as attractive as possible to producers and having a core character as an inanimate object with an attached voice-talent really hit their sweet spot.
Tom Mason as Frank with GUN in Slingers
A few years later and I was noodling with the idea of another character, a nameless soldier given the mission of tying up loose ends in a post-worldwar mess of a planet, and her constant companion a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence rifle. They sprang from the oft-quoted Godard/Griffith line about cinema:
The first story I wrote for them was All You Need that you can read here.
This one came about after Andrew Liptak was co-editing a new Anthony of future war stories from authors such as Joe Haldeman and Linda Negata… was I interested in being a part of that? You betcha. It was also a little experiment in style as I wanted to strip everything back, but also drop a little Richard Brautigan in there (although I bet he’d HATE the idea of a war story).
I think it came out in pretty good shape and was well reviewed.
There are no named characters, no histories, no expository writing at all.
Each paragraph is pared down to a skeleton, each word a bullet:
“They find the first dead body that afternoon.
Nice shot, says the gun.
The girl looks down at the dead man.
The dead man looks at nothing.”
The Future Fire
The book itself, War Stories – New Military Science Fiction, is filled with future-war gems and is well worth a read and, I believe, still in print.
By the time this was published I’d already written a handful of other stories with the characters and I still come back to them from time to time in between other projects. I’ve been calling the series A Girl and A Gun, naturally.
I tend to drift from short stories to scripts and a lot of my stuff exists in multiple formats. Dave brought these two to life in the character design for the comic book version that I use atop of All You Need, but we’ve both been too busy to crack on with that version.
So far only the second story, 0100101101010100, has seen the light of day (you can read it here), but now my new website is taking shape I aim to fix that.