SEA LION PRESS

By Ryan Fleming. The ground shook violently as the Renaissance continued to follow the man calling himself ‘Arry Bell towards a promised escape from this strange new world. ‘Arry held aloft a bronze disc he had taken from a font in an alcove beneath some grotesque idol carved into a stone wall. The bronze disc had immediately created two changes in the situation faced by he and the Renaissance. First, the part-human, part-fish creatures that looked ready to tear them to shred

By Ryan Fleming. The Renaissance regarded the new arrival who had suddenly appeared on the beach of the strange new world where they found themselves stranded. He was a young man in a merchant navy seaman’s uniform, a uniform so caked with mud and torn that it looked as though it been through some ordeal recently. That same wear and damage did not extend to the man that had introduced himself as Harry Bell. For someone who had been trapped there for a number of days, he looke

By Ryan Fleming. So the soundtrack was good, at least... (Image courtesy Amazon Marketplace) A peculiarity about filmmaking as a collaborative process is that sometimes those involved in making the film can have conflicting visions of what sort of film they’re making. And then there’s Cool World (1992), where it seemed like any one person involved had a different idea of what they were doing than any other single person on the set. Cool World was intended as a comeback pictur

By Ryan Fleming. The Renaissance had at last made it to the strange new world that had seemingly appeared from thin air in the South Pacific several days before – shipwrecked, exhausted, and having narrowly escaped death by both armed freebooters and tentacled monstrosities. Their situation had not improved upon landfall, where a momentary distraction had allowed the form of some piscine abomination of a man to attack their meagre camp. It let out a guttural roar as it towere

By Ryan Fleming. The Renaissance were aboard their launch speeding towards the shore of the strange new world that had captivated the imaginations, and greed, of the entire world. They were two hundred yards out and closing. Closing in upon them were the long, trunk-like tentacles of some unseen monstrosity. Another fifty yards closer to the share, but still the tentacles closed upon them. The colour had drained from Eileen Wong’s knuckles from how tightly she gripped the hel

By Ryan Fleming. Not for the first time, not even the first time that day, Charles Chance found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. As ever, the latest time could be the last time. “I should have done this when I had the chance.” The hissed words of Frank Slate, first mate of the Visigoth and the man at the other end of that gun. His knuckles were white on the handle as his index finger twitched. Chance blinked at the sound of a gunshot. Slate fell backwards. Could not

By Ryan Fleming. Frank Slate was practically giddy to have the famed Renaissance Man, Charles Chance, on the business end of his revolver. He had never cared much for the do-gooder or his ilk that the press and swell types fawned over. Even at his end of society the sheer number of people inclined to like him annoyed Slate. Who would they regard as the more impressive figure now, he wondered. The Renaissance Man? Or the one who had control over his life or death? He could gla

By Ryan Fleming. Harry Bell had not slept in days. He was the sole survivor of the Brunswick, whose discovery of an unidentified continent in the South Pacific had meant quick (Harry hoped) death for all his shipmates, whether they had remained aboard or been in the first party ashore. Harry had survived, and he intended to keep it that way. It was that intent that kept him from sleeping. He had seen enough from what lurked on the island to never let his guard down. One membe

By Ryan Fleming. Romero directs Resident Evil.... 2's Japanese trailer. Screenshot from the 1997 Making Of video, uploaded to Youtube by the Residence of Evil channel. The zombie as it is understood in modern popular culture exists because of George A. Romero. Its ubiquity across popular culture owes a lot to video games of the 1990s, especially Resident Evil. The very first Resident Evil game was released in 1996 and quickly its potential for a film adaptation was recognised

By Ryan Fleming. A gaggle of newly joined candy stripers, the more mobile patients, and even a few resident doctors all tried to sneak a look at the Renaissance Man when they heard he would be calling at their Bellevue Hospital that night. Charles Chance, the Renaissance Man himself, was all smiles and handshakes punctuated by the odd pithy one-liner or wink when he and his entourage arrived. A moving scrum developed around the Renaissance Man as he made his way from the entr

By Ryan Fleming. On the steps outside the Main Branch of the New York Public Library, a quiet man with his right arm in a sling drew with his left hand a revolver from the pocket of his raincoat. His unfamiliar aim drew at a pair walking down those steps having recently exited the library. The pair were Reginald Cullen and Annie Thomas, two members of the Renaissance. Seeing the drawn weapon, Cullen raised his arm in front of Annie and reached for his own concealed weapon. It

By Ryan Fleming. In the docklands of New York City, a gang of armed ruffians approached Eileen Wong and Benjamin Williams with felonious intent. An eight-foot chain fence topped with barbed wire blocked their escape to the busy streets of the metropolis. Each of the five ruffians carried a weapon, but whether brass knuckles, a chain, axe handle, or a longshoreman’s hook, the implement would mean bad news for the two members of the Renaissance. Their options limited, Williams

By Ryan Fleming. In the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from where there should be any land, Harry Bell and his shipmates stepped tenderly from their launch onto the shore of the mysterious land Harry had spotted the night before. The ground was soft underfoot, in some spots the landing party’s boots sank into the mud all the way to the top and the men had to be pulled out their shipmates. They soon began moving in a file by pairs, led by Chief Officer Chapman. There had bee

By Ryan Fleming. Outside a familiar brownstone in Manhattan, a quiet man stood on its stoop. He held a package in his hands, and a pistol in his pocket. Inside that same familiar brownstone, Charles Chance was brought up to speed by his partners on the appearance of a strange new world in the Pacific Ocean. “Speculation of dragons and gold and all sorts,” Annie Thomas was concluding, “but despite such embellishments, it does appear that the actual reports of a vast new contin

By Ryan Fleming. Outside the Midtown brownstone, the assembled press of New York City was aflutter with excitement that the reports of a strange new world coming from the Pacific were being investigated by the legendary Renaissance Man. Inside the brownstone, on the other hand, Charles Chance, a name he had adopted long before the moniker of the Renaissance Man, was slumped against the heavy door that marked the demarcation point for that persona. Outside the brownstone, Char

By Ryan Fleming. Harry Bell did not care for the night watch. There were precious few jobs he did care for aboard the Brunswick, but the night watch was an especially frustrating one. He was stuck on deck for the entire night, and that far out at sea on that dark a night he was staring into an unending darkness for the full watch. There was only the muffled sound of the engines to keep him company. Very few crewmembers moved about deck at night, and those that did would much

By Ryan Fleming. A sinister TV broadcast will kill your kids... Cropped from the Halloween III, uploaded by Shout Studios, in low quality to illustrate article. There are plenty of ideas for films that never see the light of day due to their subject matter being too provocative. There are even plenty made whose subject matter makes them the source of great controversy. One of the former that it is easy to imagine becoming the latter is The Big, Big Giggle from Manx playwright

By Ryan Fleming. Gump & Co cover, image courtesy Amazon marketplace Every work is a product of its time. Some might be ahead of their time or look back to an earlier time, but even these cannot look forward or back without being products of their time. At times, whether or not something can be a product in a particular time can change very suddenly. Adaptations of the comic Watchmen kept struggling during the 1990s in part because the dark Cold War tale seemed out of sync wit

By Ryan Fleming. Watchmen: The Deluxe Edition cover, image courtesy Amazon. Hollywood loves to throw around the word ‘unfilmable’ for any work they can’t quickly turn into a motion picture for immediate profit. One such ‘unfilmable’ work was Watchmen – past tense, because like many works at one point considered ‘unfilmable’ like The Lord of the Rings or Dune , it was only ‘unfilmable’ until it was filmed. Although it lingered in development hell for more than two decades, W

By Ryan Fleming . Alternate history anthologies focused on a single country were nothing new by the time we began work on The Scottish Anthology , nor were themed anthologies unknown in other genres, in alternate history, or even from Sea Lion Press by the time of those first nation-based anthologies. While this was my first effort as an editor of a fiction anthology, I had been proudly featured in anthologies edited by others in both alternate history and other genres. But w