Thursday, 26 September 2019

The Way Stationer

My short story 'The Way Stationer' will shortly be published in the anthology Colp: Solitude.

This sci-fi tale wrestles with the meaning of 'home' when mankind begins discovering other planets to populate beyond Earth.  Here's an except:

"The visitor ships always departed soon after they arrived.  The occupants were making new homes out in the far reaches of the galaxy, new homes with a new set of wonders.  Kayin was just a stop along their way.  A way station, they called it.  Its soil had been deemed too acidic for agriculture; it’s winds at times too relentless for human beings to tolerate.  No one mentioned the breath-taking beauty of Kayin’s sky at night.  Instead, for more than a hundred years, they had stored fuel and foodstuffs here, in the huge station complex where Amelia lived most of the time alone.  Amelia sometimes tried to imagine these other planets her visitors were headed too, but mostly she thought about Earth.  She pictured in her mind Earth’s cities, its oceans, it deserts, its green meadows.  Polluted, the visitors said when she asked them about it.  Dangerous.  Overcrowded.  Concepts she found it near-impossible to imagine."

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