*ANOTHER* New Story – The Health Police

Short stories really are like buses, it seems; you wait all year for responses and progress and then two of them come out at once.

This time it’s ‘The Health Police’, in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine #99. (My fourth Aussie credit for my third Aussie publisher; Australian readers, am I doing something right without realising it?)

It’s an unusual bit of smuggling this, essentially: sneaking around below the radar of the law, but with a very different type of contraband… diseases. Because I’m British, and with all this too-topical dystopian fiction around these days it’s important to feel represented. No corporate overlords and nuclear wastelands here – just interminable, endless bureaucracy and excessive government oversight, taking the British instinct to demand a license and registration for every aspect of our lives and extending it even to the diseases we catch and the medicines we take. I wanted to put a different spin on the potential futures of gene therapies and weird treatments to explore how those systems can get abused – because what if you could take an illness away entirely, but it still had to end up somewhere?

Sound interesting? Read this story, in ASM #99.

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Published on October 07, 2025 04:36
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