Ready to be Sharkpunked?

I suppose that you could theoretically be a little cynical about a short story anthology entitled Sharkpunk.  After all, haven't we had just about every imaginable form of punkage conceivable to the English language by now?  Just off the top of my head, there's been Steampunk, Shakespearepunk, Dieselpunk, Monkeypunk, Banjopunk...*

But, say what you like, there's something awfully appealing about seeing those two words stuck together.  And as Jonathan Green explains in his introduction, it's long past time that someone reclaimed the not-so-humble shark.  Forty years ago they were the greatest of movie monsters; now they're battling giant octopi and getting caught up in sharknados.  I mean, in a world where sharknado can be a word, slapping shark and punk together feels practically obligatory.  And perhaps that is the true punkiness of Sharkpunk: it aims to put sharks back where they should be, at the top of the underwater food chain.  It's kicking against the pricks, only in this case the pricks are those guys who keep churning out lousy movies about sharks doing dumb stuff.

Anyway, my contribution has nothing to do with any of that.  It possibly doesn't have a great deal to do with sharks at all.  It certainly contains the least punky shark ever to disgrace a body of water - in this case, a garden pond, which is also the least respectable home imaginable for a shark - and in short is about as far from the spirit of Sharkpunk as could possibly be. 

Or is it?  Maybe being against the spirit of Sharkpunk is the most Sharkpunky thing of all?

But no, it probably isn't.

The point of all this - because, yeah, there's always a point! - is firstly to say that Sharkpunk is coming in not much over a month, and promises to be one of the year's most interesting, not to mention strangest, anthologies; and also to mention that I now have an interview up on the Sharkpunk site, which you can read here.  Needless to say, you could count the number of sensible answers I came up with on a hand that a shark had just chewed all the fingers off.






* Disappointingly, it seems I made three of these up.  You'd really think Shakespearepunk would be a thing.