Short Stories

Here you will find several short stories I have written. Nothing has been published, although I retain the copyright on everything here. None of it has ever been presented to any publishers for consideration. 

All of it can be considered science fiction or fantasy; I consider some of the best and most influential literature in history to be fantasy, of which science fiction is a rightfully proud example.

All poetry, fiction, and art are, in fact, metaphorical in nature. Through these media we explore many issues, many hopes, and many conundrums. As with dreams, we explore many possibilities of what could be explored in the "real world," and what consequences might ensue.

I am no "great writer," but I do have some thoughts worth passing along.

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I wrote  A Web Too High in the mid 1980s, after sitting on a toilet, watching a spider thumbing its nose at me from its web in a high corner of the bathroom.  

The story itself is a complete and utter fantasy, in an unspecified land, with an indeterminate technology, economy, etc. None of that is the point, just as none of that matters when reading Aesop's Fables. It is simply a story about pride, wit, competition, dealing with frustration, and such. That is all. 

I wrote several versions of this story, but this was the original. I also wrote a radio script version and submitted it to a competition conducted by BBC in London. It did not win, which did not surprise me at all--I had to adapt it to radio in less than  24 hours, in order to submit it by midnight on January 31st, 2013, and I did a poor job of it; but I do still think that done properly, it could make a fun and interesting radio play.

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When I wrote The Judge, in the late 1970s, I was on the board of the Lincoln Gay Action Group for a brief time. While I was not gay, I did empathize with the difficult and dangerous straits through which every homosexual had to navigate their life. This was less than a decade after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, so those straits were every bit as dangerous as today, and even significantly more so.

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I wrote Pass The Word in reaction to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and specifically the events depicted in the movie, Hotel Rwanda. An important part of the message is that while we can discover much in space, we have a lot to learn before we are ready to join any community larger than Earth. After the German Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge catastrophe in Cambodia, and many other such genocides in the last century alone, we seem to be not ready to deal with Earth itself, much less the rest of the Universe!

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Other fiction I intend to  post here consists of at least the beginnings of stories that I would like to write:

• • Jimmy Zahng’s  Spirit & Qetj Book & Wrynd

  • Life on Luna

  • The Naff Rebellion

  • The Prehensile Performer

  • Theft

  • Rattle Rock

  • The Astronomer Fish; or How I Became an Exobiologist

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