I'm very pleased to have the opportunity of sharing this story with the public through this anthology. The other stories from my fellow contributors are:
"A Dead Art Form" by Calvin Jennings
"Byte Heist" by J. M. Hughes
"Promised Land" by Matthew Griffiths
"Story Material" by Rachel White
"Al-kimiya" by Tony f. WhelKs
"The Big Quiet" by Diana Haugh
"Crown Prerogative" by Martin Hensher
"A Fish Tale" by David Trammel
"A Break with the Past" by Joseph Nemeth
"A Mile a Minute" by Martin Freitag
"When It Comes A Gully Washer" by N. N. Scott
All of these stories are about people dealing with the constraints of resource depletion and the creaky shifts and declines of industrial civilization in the near to middle future. Mr. Greer's challenge for the story contest was to show this in a way that relied neither on world-shaking catastrophe nor a leap to a game-changing new technological solution ("alien space bats"). The characters in these stories, by and large, are dealing with the interlocking crises of our civilization by simply muddling through - so the tales may not be on as bold and heroic a canvas as some, but the people inhabiting them are most human and real.
Okay, "Winterfey" actually does have some Space bats, if you look closely. But these are definitely not alien ones, but ordinary small flying mammals, completely native to Terra. It was nice to see that white-nose syndrome had spared them as of the mid to late 21st century, since the prospects of North American bats at present in 2015 are a bit daunting.
Of course "Winterfey" is not about bats; but their eventual recovery from the terrible plague currently devastating them is implicit in their small presence in the story. Perhaps some of the other losses we can foresee now, though real and mortal enough, are also seeded moderately with hope. At the close of the story I sought to evoke this mixture in its bitterness and its sweetness.
