Evolution and Space

I have a new short story out as a “single” on Amazon. It’s called “Finding the Future” and it’s priced at $0.99c for those on a low budget. For pensioners, concession card holders and people who wouldn’t spit in my mouth if my teeth were on fire, you can actually get the story for free online where it was first published, in the newly relaunched Scareship Magazine (Issue #7, Sept 2012 – NB, if you click the link you’ll get the whole of issue #7 as a PDF file).

I can’t tell you much about it without spoiling it but it involves an uplifted orang utan, a transparent “hamster”, and the crew of an Earth colony ship that finds itself in dire straits.

What I can tell you is that it’s a story about evolution. (The scribble on the cover probably gave that away, huh? If not, see the front matter inside the ebook for an explanation.)

Evolution by natural selection is such a beautiful idea. It’s an idea that moves me the way I imagine great art or music moves the people who are sensitive to such things. I’ve loved it since the moment I first heard about it. When I read Darwin’s Origin of Species, I was moved all over again. When I read the last page and closed the book, I held it for a while, overcome with the notion that there, in my hands, was a brilliant exposition of one of the most important ideas ever. Right there, in my hands! The precious distillation of a lifetime of research and thought, a huge leap forward in our understanding of the world and of ourselves.

In recent years, I’ve written a couple of stories with evolution as their theme. “Finding the Future” is one. “The God on the Mountain” – one of my Placid Point stories – which first appeared in the anthology Hope (ed Sasha Beattie, available from Kayelle Press), is another. There, the idea of evolution is handed as a gift to a future scientist in a world where all human history has long been forgotten.

I’m pretty sure I will write more. Evolution is one of those enormous ideas that touch on everything, one of the greatest triumphs of our species.

And when we go off into space, filling up our solar system and leaping out to the stars, the same laws will apply. No matter how sophisticated our science and technology become, evolution, like the laws of entropy, will always be there to shape our ends and to determine what we might become.