Death of a Spaceman

Death of a Spaceman - a science fiction novel. Space travel opened many opportunities for humans, but the discovery of faster-than-light speed added a new complication for the Human Interest: Relativity. Society reorganized and stratified. Special Agents - pilots who could travel between the segments of the new culture - were employed to advance Human Interest while avoiding war among the stars. Kit became a Special Agent for the Human Interest. Blind, Kit was granted special cybernetic eyes, and he could see much more than the average human. But nothing prepared him for what he witnessed on the planet Kozar. I saw something menacing. It was just a glimpse, but I was sure that I'd seen it. Something sharp and lethal. A dagger lifted into the air. My eyes followed it faithfully, mesmerized. I couldn't turn away. Couldn't blink. Couldn't flinch. Then it descended. In slow motion, the way things happen when time is meaningless, when fate has turned a card, and there is no stopping the inevitable. The dagger struck my chest. Deeply. Except that it wasn't my own vision that I was viewing. My special sight had been hijacked by another's vision. Through someone else's eyes, I suffered the attack and then saw E'Lowa run to the door. E'Lowa had opposed human intervention in Kozarian space and now that the tide of events had turned against him and his faction, he had decided to take matters into his own hands. His opponent K'Mack had won approval to grant humans access to Kozarian space. I finally made it to the victim's room to stop the attack, but I already knew that I was too late. The guard grabbed the Kozarian standing there. The captive made no move to resist. In his right hand, he limply held a bloody dagger. I was ready to strike E'Lowa, the man I had just seen raise a knife and plunge it into my chest. But the Kozarian emerging from the victim's chamber wasn't E'Lowa. It was K'Mack. --- Winner of eLit Bronze Medal for Short Story Fiction.
About the Author: I am a novel writer, and I am a screenwriter, having written an episode of Stargate SG1 (with Daniel Stashower). I also served as the President of the Chicago Screenwriters Network - a network of more than 500 screenwriters in the Midwest. Death of a Spaceman is a work entirely of my own (Dan can't be blamed for any of it), and I threw every ounce of imagination I had into the story. Nothing unusual there, I guess. Every author does that. At times you might find the book "cinematic" but I couldn't help that. I studied film for many years, and I have written science fiction screenplays. I have also proposed stories to Star Trek with some success. I have seen as many scifi movies and read as many space fantasy books as I could absorb. My father was a science teacher. My mother taught English and Literature. My life was peppered with interesting facts, scientific anomalies, and fascinating stories. I have tried to find a new take on the standards. For instance, in countless sci-fi space travel stories, the heroes pop into their spaceships, speed to warp 9 or hyperspace (or whatever), fight a space battle, hop back into their ships, and return to their world which hadn't changed a bit since they left. Einstein would have an issue with this scenario. According to his theory of relativity, the world and people left behind would have aged many, many "years" while the heroes were off battling space aliens. In Death of a Spaceman I tried to imagine how society would adjust and restructure itself given that space adventurers could travel faster than the speed of light. Families would be disrupted as members aged at different rates, space pilots could vanish into a different era by running off at light speed, and it would be nearly impossible to hold the whole thing together unless a superior entity could calculate the time differentials and somehow keep the factions together. At least that is the solution I came up with. I also created strictures to control the inevitable power of cloning and bio-enhancements. Again, I merely presented my prevision of the subject. I try to treat these subjects loosely as a fact of life in the future and not get bogged down into the details. Stories need to be about interesting but relatable characters. I did my best to create them; each with their own powers, characteristics, and secrets. You can decide if I succeeded. I hope you enjoy Death of a Spaceman. It has been a great adventure to write it.