Monday, April 13, 2020

NEW SHORT STORY: "Our Sun Is Shining on the City"


One of the very few perks of the self-quarantine lifestyle is that it has freed me up to start packaging some short stories that I had intended to get onto Amazon at some point. Well, that point has arrived!

"Our Sun Is Shining on the City" is a science fiction/post-apocalypse short story about people surviving inside the guts of decaying alien machinery that was once used to hollow out the planet's core. Here's the synopsis:
From origins unknown, towering machines descended upon the planet of Narashi and forcibly hollowed out its core, leaving behind an uninhabitable world, a decimated civilization, and a sprawl of interconnected drilling rigs that dwarf even the tallest mountains. 
Inside these decaying rigs, what remains of Narashi's natives endure, subsisting on captured oxygen, water from cooling lines, and what little food can be grown with scant sunlight. 
Taura and Carth are young siblings who scavenge abandoned settlements in the dark for their benefactor. As they pick through emptied shelters and shops, they begin to wonder just how long any of them have, as the alien machinery that sustains them begins to show signs of death throes.
I really liked how this story turned out. The inspiration for it actually came out of some books I read that centered on environmental justice. Stories about outsiders coming in, taking what they need out of the ground, and then just leaving, usually devastating communities in the process. I wanted to extrapolate that out to a planetary scale, where people literally have nowhere to go and just have to survive in what's left.

By the time this is posted, the story should be published. It should also be included in Kindle Unlimited, if you happen to have that!

Stay tuned for some more stories! Also, if you missed my last post, I have a story coming out soon in the sci-fi anthology, MY BATTERY IS LOW AND IT IS GETTING DARK.

Be safe, everyone!