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If you have made it this far, perhaps you would like a little background on the stories in this collection.
“The Thursday Plan” was strongly influenced by my time in Africa. Not South Africa—I only visited that country for the first time some years after writing the story. But off and on, from 1986 through the ‘90s, and into the early 2000s, I was living in the Gambia and then Ghana. In those countries—in fact, across Africa—we had our eyes on South Africa and the inspiring work of Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement there. The demise of apartheid aroused a contagious hope, but still left us with an appreciation that to fashion a just world a lot of work remained.
“Problem Solving” is probably the most autobiographical of the stories in this collection. That may sound farfetched. After all, I’m not a Gambian; I’m a middle-class white dude from Canada. Nor have I ever been shanghaied. And as far as I know, I’ve never been abducted by aliens. But at the time I wrote the story, I was, like the main character D.K., a frustrated science fiction author wanting to write stories that reflected my dark view of the world.
“Communion” was my first science fiction publication. It was considerably influenced by “Kaleidoscope”, a short story by the great Ray Bradbury.
There were a few currents that flowed into the writing of “The Gig of the Magi”. I’ll mention two. At the time I wrote it, I was between full-time jobs and trying to support my family through sporadic consulting contracts and gig work. I gained a bucketful of respect and sympathy for people who stay in the gig economy for the long haul. And in addition to that, in case it is not obvious, I’m a fan of the storytelling style of O. Henry.
As for “Money, Wealth, and Soil”, the more that I’ve learned about the various environmental crises the world is facing, the more I’ve come to understand that we need to pay as much attention to soils as we do to climate change and biodiversity. This story is part of my attempt to take a hopeful but realistic look at the near future of these crises.
The first and last stories in this collection are obviously set on the same world, although they were written about fifteen years apart and are set many hundreds of years apart. Intrigued by the metaphor of the daily cycle of the sun as representing cycles in history and the spiritual rejuvenation of humanity, I filtered the metaphor through my interest in extrasolar astronomy, made the metaphor literal, and the result was “Chasing the Sun”. But the question of how human beings first came to be on the planet Epsindi Ta and how those first colonists might have reacted to it had been nagging me, so eventually I wrote the prequel, “Five Days Until Sunset”. Additional stories are suggesting themselves, so you may soon see more sequels, prequels, and sidequels. Writing those will be the best way I can think of to thank you for reading this far.