An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
Today’s stories take us away from the safe hearth of Wespirtech and forge out into the surrounding universe. Get a taste for what life is like on the frontiers where Wespirtech is mostly a legend… until the effects of their scientific discoveries trickle outward. Continue reading “Asteroid Racing and Sun Gardens”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Untied Shoelaces of the Mind, Issue #5, September 2011
Daisy chains are kind of tricky, so I didn’t believe the frezzipod when he said he could daisy chain his way from Altu 7 to Altu 5 in fifteen minutes flat. First of all, that’s a forty minute flight, if you pull up above the belt and fly without all those rocks in your way. Secondly, frezzipods look like a cross between a crab and a pineapple — the perfect tropical hors d’oeuvre. Who’s going to believe anything a walking hors d’oeuvre says anyway? Continue reading “Daisy Chaining”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Golden Visions Magazine, No. 15, July 2011 (print issue)
News spread like wildfire of the first successful sun garden. The sun was Hegula, hearth of a destitute system. Normally, I don’t waste my time on mining colonies. There are plenty of systems with two, three, or more populated planets. Those systems can supply me with crowds for months. Mining systems are a different matter. I’ve been to systems where the miners close the mines, gather up their families, and take the day off to see a good show. That’s it. They have a great time, believe me. They enjoy my starwhals more than anyone in a cosmopolitan system. From my perspective, though, it’s hardly worth weeks in the dead space between stars. Continue reading “Of Behemoths and Bureaucrats”
For day two of our twelve-day launch event, we bring you two stories that appeared online originally but have been out of print for several years.
Close-knit communities can be wonderful, inspiring, energetic places, but when you live and work with the same people — spending all day and night together — home can turn to horror on a dime. In My Words Like Silent Raindrops, a young Wespirtech scientist invents technological telepathy, drawing her close-knit community even closer and, well… read it and see. Continue reading “Day two!”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Spaceports and Spidersilk, June 2011
The nebula was empty. Cold. Proto-star matter, so many dust motes, drifted, dully refracting the light of nearby constellations. The dust motes didn’t even swirl. There was nothing to disturb them into motion, except for the nebula beast herself. In earlier times, during her youth, she frolicked — expanding space here; squeezing tight there; watching the space debris splash about. She chased the dust motes between her many dimensions, but now she was too sad to make her own fun. Continue reading “The Nebula Was Empty”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in The Lorelei Signal, January 2012
Nicole and Ivan were among the newest, promising young scientists at the Western Spiral Arm Planetary Institute of Technology. For the time being, they were working on a project together. He did the chemistry, and she did the physics. The partnership worked well. Almost too well. Continue reading “My Words Like Silent Raindrops”
As our present to you today, we’re releasing our very first stories, two tales about scientists at Wespirtech (The Western Spiral Arm Planetary Institute of Technology) and their wacky inventions. The scientists in both of these tales have to worry about balancing pure science — invention for its own sake — with the practicality of the real world. They don’t always succeed. One of them fails more spectacularly than the other… Continue reading “And we are go…”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in FlagShip, Volume 2 Issue 6, September 2012
The elasti-tron was covered with dried and wilting plants again. Einray grumbled as he started peeling the putrid produce off of the glass sample plate. He hated the squishiness of biology.
“What are you guys doing in here?” Einray asked. Continue reading “Einray and the Biologist”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in COSMOS, August 2011
“Hey, Deenah, want to come down to the grav-lab with me? I hear the physics department is putting on a wild party tonight. Free-fall twister, skate around the edge of the black hole… That sort of thing.”
Deenah put down the annulator she was using to fine-tune the wires in her hackishly made brain-wave generator. Wespirtech was legendary for its parties, and the physics department hadn’t thrown one since Deenah arrived. She was sorely tempted to put her work aside and accompany Rayston… Continue reading “Slug Time”
We’ve loaded up our cargo bay with twenty-five stories — the complete contents of three science-fiction anthologies, Welcome to Wespirtech, Beyond Wespirtech, and The Opposite of Memory — and we’ll begin releasing the stories, several per day, on December 25th, 2015.
Many of the upcoming stories have been published online before, but some of them have only ever been available in obscure anthologies or small press magazines.
Get ready to read some science-fiction!