Napoleon supposedly said, “To understand a man, you must know the world he lived in when he was twenty.” And to understand this story, that’s not far off.
It was the 1990s, never mind the exact year. The cyberpunk future loomed, but it was at least a generation away. I was reading The Tempest in a class themed around the colonization of the New World. I encountered a phrase that stuck with me: Two of these fellows you must know and own; this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
Pretentious, of course, to quote Shakespeare’s Prospero, but I was young, and referencing him seemed like a natural outgrowth of my favorite pulp subgenre, RPG fiction. I wrote up a short story told in a film-noir-like tone, a la Blade Runner. It was about a hired killer battling the inner monster of cyberpsychosis. I got a pretty good grade on it, and before I consigned it to the bin, I noticed that the Isaac Asimov Awards for undergraduate fiction were looking for submissions.
“Well, crap,” I said to myself. “I might not be able to compete with the pros writing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or even Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, but I’ve seen the stuff people my age crank out. I could compete with them, easy.” So, I submitted “This Thing of Darkness,” and won an honorable mention. Got a T-shirt and a little certificate I could put on my wall. The story didn’t get into a magazine or an anthology or anything cool like that, unless you count our campus science fiction club fanzine. I chalked it up as a minor success and filed it away on my hard drive, never to be looked at again.
Except…
I had a habit. Whenever I got a new computer, I transferred over all my old writing, even my high school fanfic. Then I got my first laptop, and did it again. And again. I converted the files to more recent formats when they started getting incompatible with current versions. And I just kept them in a folder, stored away, just in case.
Fast-forward to the fall of 2025. I was focused. I was writing away on Civil Blood‘s sequel, determined that this year I’d finish its rough draft. But Raconteur Press had a call for stories to be put into a book called Pinup Noir: High Class Muscle. They wanted heroes with a moral code, men (no ladies… their stories were in the previous Pinup Noir collection) who were good but definitely not harmless. Detectives, bouncers, bodyguards, hitmen.
The writing prompt reminded me of my old story. I didn’t want to take time away from the Civil Blood universe… but would it be that much to revise and submit one story I’d already written?
Turns out my hunch was right. I dug out the file I hadn’t seen in decades (inconveniently labeled “Introduction to Fiction and Poetry Assignment #8”). I fixed up the grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes that a student might tolerate but that modern me never would. Ran it past a writer’s workshop. It went over pretty great.
I edited away lines about being a brooding antihero because they’re an overdone trope now, and laughed at the descriptions of cellular phones that treated them like a novelty. But the core story was there: a murderer who must acknowledge the darkness, because it won’t stop with just him.
And, some thirty-ish years later, “This Thing of Darkness” has found a home. Pinup Noir: High Class Muscle is available in paperback and on Kindles via Amazon, here.
We’re well past 2020 and living in cyberpunk’s disposable future. But sometimes you can do okay clinging to the past.
