"Planet Jumpers" published in Every Day Fiction
I received my subscriber email from EDF yesterday with my story, "Planet Jumpers," in it. It appears it went up on the website the day before.
This was one of the many stories I've written that began as a one-hour challenge. Two major inspirations are at play in it. One is Italo Calvino's story about how the moon used to be much closer to the earth and how the people (of some sort) in those days used to go back and forth from one to the other. It's one of the t-zero or Cosmicomics stories narrated by Qfwfq. Scientifically it makes no sense, but it's such a lovely and rich story that the science doesn't matter. The other source is a detail from Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun. In that series, there are two planets, and the alien natives of one of them are able to jump between planets (or claim they are able to, or the narrator believes they are able to--one always has to be cautious about this kind of thing in Wolfe's books, and especially when it was a series I read only once and that was years ago). There are reasons to question this ability, not just the science of it, but within the story. But the image was a fun one. So those two ideas came together as I wrote this. Where the alien species came from and the idea of their intense breeding programs, well, I don't recall any specific inspiration for that, just the whimsy of my mind.
This was one of the many stories I've written that began as a one-hour challenge. Two major inspirations are at play in it. One is Italo Calvino's story about how the moon used to be much closer to the earth and how the people (of some sort) in those days used to go back and forth from one to the other. It's one of the t-zero or Cosmicomics stories narrated by Qfwfq. Scientifically it makes no sense, but it's such a lovely and rich story that the science doesn't matter. The other source is a detail from Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun. In that series, there are two planets, and the alien natives of one of them are able to jump between planets (or claim they are able to, or the narrator believes they are able to--one always has to be cautious about this kind of thing in Wolfe's books, and especially when it was a series I read only once and that was years ago). There are reasons to question this ability, not just the science of it, but within the story. But the image was a fun one. So those two ideas came together as I wrote this. Where the alien species came from and the idea of their intense breeding programs, well, I don't recall any specific inspiration for that, just the whimsy of my mind.
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