“The History Within Us” up at Clarkesworld Magazine March 2, 2010 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy, Fiction, Free Content

I’m very happy to announce this morning that my short story “The History Within Us” is up at Clarkesworld Magazine alongside a fine story from Gord Sellar and an interview with Kij Johnson.  You can read my story here.  And you can find the full issue here.

The story’s genesis is an interesting one.  My father had several old reels of film from when he was a boy, back in the early 40s, which he had recently converted to DVD.  On one long weekend we added his narrative voice-overs, so he could explain who the folks in the pictures were.  I saw a window into my ancestral past that I had never seen, and it was amazing, to see how my great-grandparents dressed, strolling through New York City, or idling their summers in the country.  I saw Passover Seders and New Year’s celebrations and walks through the Central Park Zoo.  And I saw my dad as a boy, a very rare sight.  And I realized that because the videos had now been digitized, they would never be lost.  I could pass them on to my offspring without degradation.  And my children could do the same to theirs, ad infinitum.  A thousand years from now, my ancestors could watch this film, if we kept it with us.  Now mix in an article I read in Discover Magazine about the possibility of black holes spawning other universes, and the possibility of sending information into that new universe as a way to escape the heat death of ours.  About a year and several revisions later appeared the story you see up at Clarkesworld today.

Please drop me a line and let me know what you think!