As I receive contracts and final edits from authors, I’ll post a teaser from their story here and on our Facebook page. You know where to get the rest, right? Comments are welcome.
Mikeys
By
Robert J. Sawyer
Damn, but it stuck in Don Lawson’s craw—largely because Chuck Zakarian was right. After all, Zakarian was slated for the big Mars surface mission to be launched from Earth next year. He never said it to Don’s face, but Don knew that Zakarian and the rest of NASA viewed him and Sasim as Mikeys—the derisive term for those, like Apollo 11’s command-module pilot Mike Collins, who got to go almost all the way to the target.
Yes, goddamned Zakarian would be remembered along with Armstrong, whom every educated person in the world could still name even today, seventy years after his historic small step. But who the hell remembered Collins, the guy who’d stayed in orbit around the moon while Neil and Buzz had made history on the lunar surface?
Don realized the point couldn’t have been driven home more directly than by the view he was now looking at. He was floating in the control room of the Asaph Hall, the ship that had brought him and Sasim Remtulla to Martian space from Earth. If he looked left, Don saw Mars, giant, red, beckoning. And if he looked right, he saw—
We’re thrilled to have a story from Robert J. Sawyer this year, and it’s a doozy too, 4000 words of excellent SF and a fitting culmination to the Last Contact theme. This brings to an end our teasers. We hope you will read the rest of the stories (as Paul Harvey might have said) and recommend the collection to friends, family, and fellow supporters of short fiction. The book goes on sale at the Confluence Convention in Pittsburgh this weekend (252 pages, $16) and I’ll post here when it becomes available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. We also plan on a Kindle edition and various ebook formats for those of you who like your books electric.
The full Table of Contents is here.