Passage of Earth

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I'm in e-print again!  But before I say anything about that, I should apologize for not posting yesterday.  Technically, I only ever explicitly promised to post on Fridays and Mondays, but I've been so consistent with Wednesdays that it's become a implicit promise.  So I apologize.

So why did I miss yesterday?  I was doing my taxes.

"Oh, you poor man," I hear you say.  "Don't tell us about it."

Deal.

Anyway, my newest story, "Passage of Earth" is up at Clarkesworld.  And I find myself at a loss as to how to describe it.  If I tell you that a great deal of it is a detailed description of the autopsy of an alien worm, that might make the reading experience sound a bit more off-putting than I honestly believe it is.  And if I tell you that a section of it reads very much like a horror story, that would be misleading as well.  And if I try to tell you what classic story it most resembles ("like The Dunwich Horror, only with bunny rabbits," or "imagine Bears Discover Fire set on Mars and ending with the destruction of the universe"), I come up with nothing.

While I was writing "Passage of Earth" I thought it would end up in Analog.  But then I came to the ending, and there were two obvious ways to conclude the story, neither of which I could bring myself to write.  So I put it aside for a year or three, returning to it regularly to see what I could come up with.  And finally, recently, the current ending came to me.  It was one I didn't think I could sell to Trevor Quachri, but it pleased me enormously.  So I sent it to Neil Clarke, he bought it, and now you can read the story online.

The story is free for the reading, and if you do, I hope you like it.

You can find the story here.  Or you can just go to the magazine itself here and start poking around. 


Above:  Sunrise from Mars orbit, an image as beautiful as one of Chesley Bonestell's paintings.  But it's a photograph!  This is an era of greatness.

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