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Out now in Roses & Wildflowers!

I wrote this over a year ago, well before current events in and beyond Minnesota. That said, racism and its cronies aren’t at all new. Nor is authoritarianism. So old, we might dismiss them as tropes, except for the ever-present danger they represent.

One of my favorite authors is Ursula LeGuin (you’ll find a nod to her in this story vis-a-vis the ansible). She was master at use of speculative fiction (and poetry) to hold a mirror to society–a mirror that returned images of devastation as often as it returned hope for a future utopia. What I enjoyed about writing Paul is how he at once is in the middle of it, but also a little on the outside of the chaos. Perhaps there is something familiar about that for me in the work I do.

Work. Let’s go on a brief side quest and consider hazardous jobs, as that is a topic where I have some street cred, even if my firewall between my day job and this gig doesn’t let us probe it too deeply. The temporal hazards I describe are (for the moment) invented, but consignment of higher hazard work to less privileged members of society is, once again, something we’ve seen before. Hazard pay or not. Still, when there are hazards, heroes can emerge.

Paul experiences both worlds—the world of privilege as a decorated hero and the world of derision as a Synth. He’s a deliberate nod to Ben Barres, renowned neurology scientist who transitioned from Barbara, then wrote a commentary in Nature about the experience.

In my story, I lift a mirror to real life–that mirror fractured, that view of Utopia lacking something in the day-to-day application. When things blow up, they blow up, and thank goodness there are cracks in the subsequent authoritarian crack-down, or our heroes might not even have a chance to make it off the planet. My hope lies in the day-to-day decency of a typical person. Or perhaps in the power of a small professional courtesy from the Captain of an Earthforce Destroyer.

Huge shout out to Joel Bisaillon who did the illustration for my story — magnificent!! Really close to how I imagine the Waystations!

Oh, and huge apologies to the card-carrying astrophysicists out there. I’m a doctor, not a…