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Found a broken link? May be the story can still be found.
Rachel Swirsky has been blogging from an event called Launch Pad - NASA folks interacting with science fiction community, as I understand.
I've read only one of the several reports she's filed so far - Day 3: Kevin R Grazier.
Good enough read, but it has been done before. Probably the closest read I can off-hand recollect is the third (I think) story in Adam Link series of Eando Binder: girl falls in love with robot, but robot must break her heart & go out to be alone to figure out his own identity & how he can fit in among the humans.
Background & environment of the story will likely resonate better in some cultures than with others. This is not a story for global audiences.
Sometimes very moving story of a young girl, sacrificed to please a god in the hope of getting a boon, by her own father - after luring her to sacrificial grounds by promise of her marriage.
Thing I didn't like about it was: it sounded like cruelty fetish. Early in the story, we know she's going to be killed by her dad; story is narrated by her spirit. Why drag us through the horror throughout the story? In fact, the girl herself & her mother knows she's about to be killed long before the story ends; we go through their detailed reactions awaiting her execution!
Two audiences will likely read more into this story than I could:
Short posts on 9 novellas, some with online links. Plus a "good reads" list of novelettes, again some with download links.
Going by the ones I've read from these lists, I'm not sure we share tastes.
Note: Carolyn Ives Gilman's “Arkfall” can also be read online, though Rachel doesn't link it. This is a good read.
Link.
Includes download links for online stories that make up majority of the list.
Note: I've never previously read Swirsky's recommendations; so no idea where this leads.
Related: Stories of Rachel Swirsky.
Rachel Swirsky quotes A D Jameson: '“Literary fiction” is what I’d call a super-genre that pretends, a la Derrida and Foucault, to not be a genre at all. It calls other things genres to subordinate them, and to deny its own genre elements. Which is what the ruling power usually does: it calls itself nothing (other than normal or correct), and calls everything else something.'
This is actually a very readable doomsday story. Only I don't like negative stories - where everyone gives up, & lets the world go to dogs.
Download full story text here.
Story summary.
A good sized asteroid is going to hit earth. When it is detected, there is no way to deflect it, because space travel has long been underfunded.
There is technology to absorb shock at city scale - "pressure shields". Only there are budget issues. And self-serving politicians decided to save their own city, & let other be the inevitable casualties.
Only some of the others don't like it. Men at a biology lab in a place that won't be saved release a dangerous virus into the atmosphere. Most people will be killed long before asteroid hits. When it does hit, it hits at a place where nuclear waste is stored - contaminating the atmosphere, & killing pretty much everyone. Only a few isolated tribes survive with primitive technology; they will die out in a few generations as pathogen reaches them.
Story is primarily told from a human interest angle. Which is what makes it readable.
Fact sheet.
"Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind", short story, review
First published: Subterranean magazine, Summer 2007.
Rating: B
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