Gus and Rita on the cover
Via the Naked Truth, the news is out! My short story, Skipping Stones, is now available at the Naked Reader Press site for direct, non-DRM downloady goodness in whatever format you need. The story will hit the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites later.
The genesis of this story comes directly from the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest that Bill Ledbetter’s been running since 2007. The criteria for participating in the contest is near-future, solar-system centric. No warp drives, in other words. The idea was to drive a renaissance in enthusiasm for space exploration using more realistic concepts. Of course, the other implicit goal is to tell a great story that people want to read. Therein lies the challenge.
I’ll be honest, I had previously not spent a lot of time constraining myself to the Sol system and near-future scenarios. Still, I wanted to participate, so I set my mental gears in motion to try and come up with a scenario that might prove to be interesting.
When I tell stories, I tend not to be focused so much on the “gee-whiz” technology. I get to it, but only as is needed to build the story around my characters. That was why, after some thought and decision making, I decided to look at the asteroid fields. Not directly at the mining side of it but, rather, at what people living that sort of life might end up doing day to day and for occasional fun.
I suppose that somewhere along the line my brain melded thoughts of yacht racing, solar sails, and gravity wells to come up with the Palas Cup race, which is core to the conflict of the story. In the end, the gestation of the narrative deleted the idea of solar sails and instead drove the pilots of the sling ships to rely completely on the dubious tendrils of gravity generated by the rocky denizens of the belt. Thus “Skipping Stones” was born, albeit with an initially cumbersome title of “Skipping Stones in God’s Pond” (which never came to light before now.)
The race is only one aspect of the story, though. The existence of high end cybernetic enhancement also rears its head, although I’d never go so far as to call Rita ugly in any sense of the word. I have a deep seated suspicion that, as time goes by and technologies improve, cybernetics are going to be some of the main drivers of human health and severe environment survivability. We can try to extrapolate how endemic and far reaching such change will be but, because we are limited to our current paradigms and imaginations, it takes effort to extrapolate out how people will live their lives within the worlds created by that tech. This, of course, is one role of speculative fiction, both honorable and long established. You need to take things out as far as you can and then extrapolate behaviors and changes both for guidance and for warning.
Well, I won’t ramble overlong. I’m very pleased that Naked Reader Press accepted Skipping Stones for publication. I hope that lots of people will enjoy the tale and take something away from it to keep for their very own.