It’s a great honor to have my novelette, PLANETFALL, appear in the May/June 2022 issue of Analog Magazine. I’ve been submitting to Analog since the early ’90s, and their rejections have been papering the walls of my study for three decades now, so it’s especially gratifying to finally break through. This story is a stand-alone chapter from my novel-in-stories, SPACESHIP DAYS, about an intergenerational voyage to settle a new home for humanity in the Tau Ceti system.
Some background: The protagonist, Nadia, is a recurring character who first appears in the book as a small child, midway through the voyage, and she features in several other chapters as a wayward orphan girl, a rebellious teen in officer training, and finally as a seasoned leader at the ship’s helm during the most challenging moments when the mission’s success is at stake. PLANTEFALL centers on this crisis, when pieces of the ship must be jettisoned in order to reduce mass sufficiently to be able to slow down and enter orbit around their destination. Whole swaths of history and culture must be sacrificed, and it comes down to Nadia to make these wrenching decisions: what to save, and what to give up? At the same time, she faces profound choices about her own life: whether to become a mother, even though she risks condemning her child to the life of an orphan.
The deeper inspiration for this story is the idea that human civilization isn’t a collection of books or artifacts or social structures, but rather it’s something that each of us carries inside. At a decisive moment in PLANETFALL, when Nadia twists the lever that jettisons a portion of the cultural archives, she’s moved to press her hand to the porthole, leaving a fading print on the glass. It’s a moment of crushing loss, but I think there’s also a pinpoint of optimism in the act: no matter how much we lose, we still carry everything we need within us.