I fell in love with science fiction because I wanted to tell stories like the ones in this collection. As a child, growing up aboard a leaky old wooden sailboat in the southern sweep of the Caribbean, I looked at the stars every night because I read about daring adventures set out in the bone-chilling cold of vacuum, or I imagined the creatures who dared risk diving into the boiling nuclear heat of the stars themselves.
A better salesperson than I am would have found a well-known author friend to write an introduction to this collection of science fiction stories to lend their credibility to this project. It would suggest “take this author seriously, they write just as well as (more or less) I do, so if you love my fiction, you’ll love his.” But I write this in the fading vestiges of a pandemic, and I don’t want to bother my friends because we’ve all been leaning on each other so much these days.
Instead, I’m going to pitch you this collection myself. These are my words, after all. I will stand up and defend them.
Years ago, I escaped from an insecure childhood filled with the struggles of food insecurity, unstable governments, war, substance abuse, and more by looking so far ahead in space and time that I began to trust that there was more to the world than my own concerns. That image of vast new worlds to see, astronomical wonders to investigate, and deep time to ponder, helped me gain a perspective that allowed me to survive. And more than that, I thrived. Adventures in time and space gave me ambition, taught me lessons about survival via characters facing galactic odds far greater than my own, and filled me with a sense of wonder at the universe.
Now, as a writer, those are my favorite stories to write. Galactic adventures, deep space, dirty tramp freighters hugging the speed of light, I love it all. When I looked at what I could pull together for this collection, I knew I wanted to create a space-oriented collection.
So if you love the twinkle of a distant star that we’re headed to explore, or if you want to read about how human we will fight to remain even after strange aliens arrive, you may enjoy this collection. If you are curious about how we may retain our humanity even as we become more and more robotic in form, please read on. If you love reading about brave, hard choices made in the cold of vacuum, flip ahead and try a random page of this book.
Because there are whole worlds out there to explore.
Let’s visit a few places that are far, far away from today, and this place, right here, right now. Earth is a beautiful home, one I hope we learn to take better care of. But in this collection, it’s just one point of tiny light in a vast cosmos of possibility.
Tobias S. Buckell
Bluffton, Ohio
September 20th, 2022