Full Power Ahead

I have a short story I have been working on and I finally have it to a state where I am ready to share it with folks.

< Read ‘Full Power Ahead’ >

Please share your thoughts. For those who have read the story, there is some further information below.

Epilogue

I love stories about space but I am also someone who looks at our history and especially our present with a great deal of criticism and skepticism. I guess what was missing for me, in the narrative of mans first brushes with far away stars, were the mistakes, and not just the funny ones like who forgot to put the exit coordinates into the hyperdrive, but the kind of deep, widespread, costly mistakes we have made as a species throughout recorded history. The tragic bad decisions we have carried out on one another, our planet and every living creature on it. I wanted to show our first grand misstep in front of the galactic audience.

Just as on Earth, we have a romanticized notion of how things came to be that often ignores the horrors that preceded it, I wanted to show us not in our finest hour, making a mistake that would be the shame of any educated Earthling enjoying their space empire for centuries to come, just as slavery and genocide are inextricable from our history and conditions here in America. Like many mistakes it was not out of the blue, not totally unjustified, not without a reason. Just not a good enough reason, one that when viewed through a less xenophobic lense was undeniably a mistake. Inescapably a disaster of our own creation.

Not all stories are happy, certainly not in real life. And that’s OK if we learn from our mistakes.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all of my friends who helped me work through these ideas and came up with names or encouraged me to follow through, in particular Shaddae, EJ and SPNDA.

Artwork

I created the illustrations using images made available to the public domain by NASA.