Dinosaur world, On the Premises

So I’m “officially” a curmudgeon. 🙂

TangentOnline posted a glowing review this month for my Galaxy’s Edge story “Aftershock,” but check out the last paragraph of their review, in which they (correctly) hypothesize about my worldview:

If you’re contemplating time-travel, read ‘Aftershock’ before the attempt. If it doesn’t dissuade you, nothing will. The main character, a shuttle pilot whose wife was recently killed in a space station disaster, wants Earth to deploy an asteroid alert system, but realizing how slowly politicians work, creates his own demonstration. He and a small crew divert a tiny asteroid towards Earth, not a planet-killer but big enough to destroy a city or two. When their plan goes horribly wrong, they return to the past in an attempt to fix their errors. Of course the law of unintended consequences takes control, and each intervention makes things worse.

Although some many be put off by it, Trent’s biting cynicism was a style I enjoyed. For example, the line, ’empathy is directly proportional to the quantity of lives lost’ says a lot about his view of society.

Yes. Yes it does.

“Aftershock” has an interesting backstory in my personal history, as it was inspired by one of the first novelettes I ever wrote. When I was a kid, with museums and astronomy and Land of the Lost Sleestaks and Ray Harryhausen classics parading through my head, I scribbled down an 80-page, handwritten-on-blue-lined-notebook-paper story called “Trapped in Time”. It was about a man living in the future who takes a trip into the primeval past to study dinosaurs. While he’s there, he ends up accidentally diverting the asteroid that caused their extinction, and when he returns to his own time… it’s a different timeline, populated by two warring camps of highly intelligent dinosauroids. To say more would spoil the twist at the end of “Aftershock”.

By Jim Linwood – Dinosauroid, The Dinosaur Museum, Dorchester, Dorset, England.Uploaded by FunkMonk, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6948073

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In other news, I’m pleased to announce that I was notified a few days ago that my story “By the Moon Unblessed” was selected as the First Place winner in the 33rd On the Premises short story contest. It will be published and available in April.

The contest challenge was to write on the theme of things hidden. I wrote about children living in an enchanted kingdom, where not everything is as it seems. I’ll post more about the writing of the story in next month’s post.

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