Would an intelligent species help another intelligent species if it had nothing left to lose? You could describe the ending of my short story "Remnants" as a cynical one, or an optimistic one, depending on which side of bed you got out of this morning. The same question can be levelled at the humans in the story. I'll leave it to you to decide. "Remnants", my story set on one cold night in the Falkland Islands, is published today in the December/January issue of the brilliant online zine Reflection's Edge.
I woke up early this morning on my 50th birthday. It was as bright outside as it would ever be at 5am due to it being the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight time. From here on, the nights get longer. Sitting in bed with a cup of tea I started to think about some of the first stories I wrote, and a few memories came back to me. The first thing I remember writing was in my penultimate year in primary school, so we're talking 1983-4. Successfully combining two major phobias of mine, it was called "Tarantursnake" and took up a whopping four pages of my English workbook. I remember getting a decent mark for it, but the only thing I could remember from the story itself was a man hanging on for dear life to a pole suspended over a pit of tarantursnakes. In fact, that may have been the whole thing. I'm not so sure it followed any conventional rules of narrative. Later, in 1987, in high school, a collection of us smuggled copies of the newly published paperback of
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