I have a new short story, ‘The Song Between Worlds’, out in Slate.com as part of the Future Tense fiction series. It imagines the dovetailing paths of a young one-percenter space tourist and an indigenous Martian ‘shepherd’ out in the desert of settled Mars.
Accompanying the story is a response essay by astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, which I loved, about ‘our own relationships to technology, our bodies, and experience’, and sensory subjectivity across planets. Read it after the story here.
The beautiful art for both pieces is by Lisa Larson-Walker. Many thanks to my editor Joey Eschrich, to planetary scientist Jim Bell for answering my questions on Mars, and to the entire team at Future Tense and Slate.com for inviting me to be a part of this project and working with me on it! I’m very proud of what resulted, and hope you all like it.
If you’re unfamiliar, Future Tense has featured many sci-fi stories by a variety of authors, including Carmen Maria Machado, Ken Liu, Nnedi Okorafor, Meg Ellison, and Charlie Jane Anders (I’ve listed my favourites, but there are many more I haven’t yet read). Each story is paired with a response essay by a scientist. You can read them all here: https://slate.com/tag/future-tense-fiction
