As long promised: with a lovely illustration by Avery Liell-Kok and a gracious introduction by Shira Lipkin.

“Mike Allen’s ‘Sleepless, Burning Life‘ is a very Moorcockian trip through cosmic clockwork, in search of ‘the dark-eyed dancer who made the cosmos turn.’ The worldbuilding is beautiful, and I’d have loved to see a full-length novel with a similar conceit in the same setting.”
— Cold Iron & Rowan-Wood

 
In the afterlife, the warrior Jyshiu searches for her lover Amritu, a goddess cursed to dance eternally inside a cage that hangs at the top of the clockwork universe. Kitsartu the Engineer imprisoned Amritu when she created the cosmic spheres; Amritu’s dance powers the gears that make the stars turn. Should the goddess ever escape her cage, the universe will end.

Jyshiu intends to set her free.

“My favorites … Mike Allen’s ‘Sleepless, Burning Life,’ perhaps the strangest story here, and the most erotic, about a woman punished for defying her religion by an epochs-long climb up a clockwork structure to meet her sleepless goddess.”
— Locus

 
“Mike Allen’s gorgeous ‘Sleepless, Burning Life’ bases the mythology of a universe on something that feels like clockwork.”
— The Future Fire

 
This clockpunk novelette first appeared in the pages of JoSelle Vanderhooft’s ground-breaking anthology STEAM-POWERED: LESBIAN STEAMPUNK STORIES. Now it appears for the first time as a standalone e-book, revised and updated by the author, with a beautiful illustration by Avery Liell-Kok and a new introduction by author and activist Shira Lipkin.

Allow me to now pretend I’m a book company instead of a self-promoting author and editor (though I suppose I’m both) and suggest you might also like these other titles:

And there’s more to come.

Posted in Clockwork Phoenix, Editing, Short stories, Signal boosts, Writing