Tag Archives: extinction

Book Review of Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary”

hail mary

Cover art for Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

Finally got to dig into Andy Weir’s 2021 novel Project Hail Mary. It’s a relatively new book in my local public library system, so I only get to keep it a max of fourteen days with no renewals. As of this writing, I have five days left.

My main reason for bumping it up on my reading list is also the reason I wrote my May 22nd blog post Does Every Single SciFi Story Absolutely Have to Have a Social Justice Theme?.

Some people I follow on twitter (and like) mutually complained that Weir’s book:

feels like the Hugo Award nod for Project Hail Mary fell out of a time travel portal from the year 1986 (Like many of the best-selling science fiction novels of that time, the book largely ignores pesky questions of race, class and gender).

My answer is that not every single story in the universe published after 2001 HAS to be about “pesky” race, class, and gender (my Oxford comma included).

Continue reading →

“The Babel Project” Has Been Accepted Into the Terror Tract Anthology “7 Deadly Sins”

7

Promotional image from Terror Tract Press

Yesterday, I published a bit of a tease, but have since been given permission to make a more complete announcement.

My short story “The Babel Project” has been accepted into the Terror Tract horror anthology “7 Deadly Sins”. Not including the Sweetycat Press contest winner and the Reedsy publication, that’s nine stories accepted into anthologies and periodicals so far for 2020.

You may recall that my short story From Deep Within the Skin has been published by the same press in the anthology Infestation.

Both horror stories are presented in a science fiction context, but where the former included both homegrown and alien creepy crawlies, this one, like so many other stories these days, focuses on a global pandemic threatening to wipe out all human life.

Continue reading →

Dunia

mtn fog

Phillip Wyatt 2020 Cadillac Mountain Fog

“I never thought anything could be so beautiful.” Natori, the young shaman’s son staggered on the rough trail in the lush forest. The fog was a widow’s shroud on the land. Though he was warm in the unfamiliar clothes of the Qu’ullad people, he still shivered.

Vastusia, took his hand, his flesh slightly darker than hers, and smiled. “I told you there was a world beyond the savanna.”

He frowned. V’rovi traditions do not forbid us traveling to other places.”

“Only discourage it.”

“Our land, our traditions define us. We would cease to be a people without them.”

Continue reading →

Cylinder

cylinder

Computer monitor wallpaper

Suspended from the airlock by his thick umbilical, Astronaut Jonathan Weaver watched the ring of illumination inside the enormous hollow tube code-named “Oumuamua” move away from him toward the other end of the spinning alien habitat, creating the illusion that he was now in early evening. The forty-two year old Air Force Captain, weightless because he was positioned near the center of the tube, marveled at the view. Essentially, the interior of a massive cylinder was filled with atmosphere that included clouds, with the entire rim covered with soil and water that supported farms, forests, lakes, rivers, small mountains, and even buildings and highways. And yet in the fifteen minutes since he had gone EVA inside the object, he had detected no sign of life.

“Weaver, this is Nguyen. Any change in your readings?” Danielle Nguyen was a civilian pilot and exobiologist who had been put in command, and at thirty, was the youngest member of the hastily assembled mission. After the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii had located Oumuamua eight months ago and determined it was approaching the sun from outside the solar system, NASA, in cooperation with two private space exploration companies, had quickly adapted the Argonaut spacecraft, originally designed for a manned Mars mission, to intercept human history’s first visitor from interstellar space.

Continue reading →

The Elephants of Yesterday

elephant

© C.E. Ayr

“Which end is the face?”

The class started giggling at Dao’s remark, and Gima laughed so loud that their teacher Mr. Ji scowled at her.

“That’s her tail, but you’re right, it could be her trunk.”

“What are they called again?” Merilyn looked down at the small sign next to the reconstructions. “Elephant. That’s a funny name.”

The twenty six-year-olds were milling about the “mother and child” exhibit. It was their class’s annual field trip, and this year, Mr. Ji had chosen the Mother Planet Museum in the capital city of Colima.

“All of their names will sound strange because we aren’t familiar with them, just like the appearance of these animals seems so odd.”

The excitable redheaded Merilyn circled the “elephants” again and again, trying to imagine what they’d be like if they were alive.

“Do they still exist?”

“It’s difficult to say. They were an endangered species when our colony ship was launched three-hundred years ago, but we can’t communicate with Earth over so many light years.”

Their teacher started guiding the class toward another exhibit, but Merilyn stayed behind, looking into the eyes of the smaller representation. “I hope you made it, elephant.”

I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge for May 13, 2018. The idea is to use the image above to inspire crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 200.

I just finished submitting a nearly 10,000 word science fiction short story for potential publication in an anthology, and part of it included Mr. Ji’s first grade class (in a flashback). Since I have Merilyn and her classmates on my mind, I thought I’d include them in a museum tour on their colony world, trying to learn more about their “mother planet” Earth.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Not Gone Forever

tasmanian tiger

Robert Harbison/The Christian Science Monitor

“There they are, a small streak of them.” Clive Ambrose was actually over five kilometers from the subjects of his research, looking at the group on a laptop in a small hut which served as a blind at the edge of the Southwest National Park in Tasmania.

“A group of Indian Tigers is called as streak, Clive. Is that what we’re calling a collection of Tasmanian Tigers?

Ambrose’s scientific colleague and occasional lover Cappi Lawrence was looking over his shoulder.

“Aren’t you amazed, Cappi? Definite proof that Tasmanian Tigers aren’t extinct, and that they are organized into social groups which include breeding pairs.”

Continue reading →

Bee Drones

robobee

© Eijiro Miyako

It had been forty years since Eijiro Miyako and his colleagues at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology developed the first generation robo-bees. Pesticides, land clearing, and the effects of climate change had resulted in a steady decline in the bee population. Without bees, many plant species, including crop plants from apples to almonds, could not be pollinated and reproduce.

By the tenth generation of the tiny drones, they were self-replicating, self-repairing, solar-powered dynamos. They did not replace the natural bee population, but they greatly enhanced pollination efforts, allowing flowering plants to survive and finally to thrive again.

Each individual robo-bee’s AI formed a collection of nodes, which, when linked to the population of drones as a whole, formed an intelligence that was arguably sentient.

The problem was finding a way for the natural bee population to either develop an immunity to what was killing them so they could increase their numbers to a viable level, or eliminate the causes of their die off.

The drone AI quickly realized the cause of the die off of bees, and many other environmental problems, was the human race. Robo-bees could go even where the natural bees could not, so the almost complete extinction of humanity was ensured by swarms of millions of these tiny assassins.

I read a story yesterday called Robotic bee could help pollinate crops as real bees decline at “New Scientist,” and thought there could be another side of the story.

This is a pretty grim outcome, and hardly superversive, but if you push your biosphere too far, the biosphere will push back.

A Sky Filled With Hope

israel from space

Photo credit: NASA/Barry Wilmore – Israel from space

Each of the 1,038 nanosatellites that launched from the Satish Dhawan space port in India was hardly larger than a milk carton, but these small, inexpensive spacecraft, originally designed at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, were the hope of mankind.

Avi Salomon and Havah Tobias stood in Mission Control and watched the monitors as the nanosats reached their initial orbits. The “father” of the project, Professor Dan Blumberg, received a remote feed at Ben-Gurion in Beer-Sheva.

“It’s looking very good, Professor.” Tobias spoke into her microphone. “I think we will be successful.”

Continue reading →

She Who Endures

rain forest

Image: ABC.net.au / Rocky Roe

The plague struck swiftly, perhaps not by human standards, but certainly quickly enough to sicken three-quarters of the people of the Earth within fifteen years. At first the disease seemed very widespread and indiscriminate, but five years into the plague, the CDC’s Chief Epidemiologist, Dr. Sandra Fry, determined that it was most virulent in high population centers with a heavy industrial base.

The nation with the largest number of deaths by year five was China, which correlated very highly to their level of pollution and generally poor environmental standards.

However, as the plague progressed, the Euro-Asian continent fell, as did North and South America. By year ten, four billion people were dead. Disposal of the bodies in any civilized manner was impossible due to the shortage of manpower and resources, so they were bulldozed into mass graves.

Continue reading →

The Homecoming

planet

Image: hongkiat.com

Thanks to the revolutionary Roddenberry-Cochrane drive, Ellis Vanderberg was able to travel to Proxima Centauri A, the closest Earth-like planet to our own, perform a year-long survey of its one continent and the six largest islands, and then return home in a little over four decades.

Of course, due to the time dilation effect, much more time passed on Earth than Vanderberg experienced during his trip. That’s the good and bad thing about traveling in interstellar space at a significant faction of the speed of light.

Vanderberg was twenty-two years old when he was launched into space. The only son of Billionaire Charles Vanderberg, he had volunteered to test the space craft and experimental drive his father’s corporation invented. The government first insisted that the journey not be made, but the Vanderberg fortune and influence insisted otherwise. Then they insisted that a team of trained astronauts and mission specialists be sent instead of Ellis, but again, the Vanderberg fortune and influence won out.

In the end, Charles Vanderberg got his way and Ellis Vanderberg got the singular honor of being the first person to travel to another planet outside of our Solar System.

Now he’s back. Ellis knew that much more time had passed for the people of Earth than he experienced. Subjectively, he was a man in his mid-sixties, but he expected his parents, his sisters, his friends, everyone he’d ever known would be dead.

Continue reading →