Different Skies: Villainy

Been concentrating on writing and job-hunting this week. The former has been going pretty well and I'll just have to wait and see on the latter.

So getting back to the contents of Different Skies and despite what it says in the title of the piece there is no story called 'Villainy' in the collection; it's simply a catch-all description for four stories that all take place against the background of a world where a 'superhero' race takes place in instead of a 'space race'; a world where superheroes, and supervillains, are made not born.

This mini collection consists of four stories; 'Genealogy', 'Minion', Mandatory Origin Story', and 'Audition'

Genealogy takes the form of a series of excerpts from a book on the history of Superheroes from the Soviets taking an early lead and on through Vietnam to a present day where the collapse of the USSR has made the means to acquire super powers available to anyone with the money and the degree of insanity to risk using cheap Eastern European knock offs.

Minion is essentially about a man who works for a supervillain having a very bad day, while Mandatory Origin Story recounts how a US government superhero turns into a supervillain and Audition sees a washed up actor getting a very strange job offer.

You may have noticed I'm being rather stingy about the details of those last three; that's because in addition to being the three shortest stories in the book they have a central conceit that I really can't discuss without ruining. What I'm say is that you will have to read the book if you want to find out what they are all about...