MPF 2.05 – Command Performance

I'd probably suggest you go read the story before I talk about the conceit behind it.

Done?

Great.

See, the story started out with the old Clarke's law – sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So what if faeries were aliens? Trolls? Goblins? Gnomes? Etc? And all the crazy stories were people back in the day trying to understand things like lasers and spaceships and who knows what else? Okay, sure. There's been a lot of history channel playing in the house for the last few weeks – which seems to have devolved into constant commentary about ancient astronauts building the pyramids and providing the Children of Israel with a magic manna machine that fed them in the desert. Seriously.

So I initially started writing something like Mutineer's Moon (free at Baen's Free Library site) – a story where the rulers had to deal with the mutinous engineers who had crashed the ship on Earth. And about three paragraphs in, I knew the idea was right, but given the crazy idea I'd come up with, I needed to make the plot equally fantastic.

So, naturally, what else do you do but speculate that Elvis was kidnapped by faeries and taken into space?

Command Performance is dedicated with grateful appreciation to my daughter's third grade teacher, for helping my daughter with her reading, and helping instill an appreciation of the finer things in her – like the musical stylings of a certain Mr. Presley. This one's for you, Mrs. Campbell.