This week I was very pleased to learn that my short story "Pen Pal" - actually at 11,000 words I guess it is a novelette - was chosen for the forthcoming science fiction anthology Vintage Worlds. The concept of this collection is space opera set in the old-style solar system of the 1940s and 1950s - packed full of habitable worlds, with Venus a swampy jungle planet full of dinosaurs and insidious creepy-crawlies, Mars the seat of an ancient desert civilization, and inhuman sinister intelligences in the worlds of the farther reaches. True, the space probes of the 1960s and 1970s informed us that Venus is about as habitable as a pressure cooker full of sulfuric acid, and Mars is not a lot more inviting... but the older setting was and remains a great work of collective imagination from Edgar Rice Burroughs and C.S. Lewis on to Bradbury and Heinlein.
And a mere few gigabytes of ugly facts are no reason to give up writing stories set in the Old Solar System, right? There have been a few recent books in this retro style, including the anthology Old Mars and S. M. Stirling's spectacular In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. But there is plenty of room for more!
So, Zendexor of the Solar System Heritage website, in cooperation with John Michael Greer, have assembled a collection of seventeen stories spanning the spaceways from the Sun itself out to Pluto.
In "Pen Pal", the events of the late 20th century have played out a bit differently, on Earth as well as on Mars! An unlikely long-distance friendship grows as history continues to throw curveballs. I had a good time writing this story and I became very fond of Meliari Thulissia and Mary Havens; I hope others will as well. I am quite looking forward to reading the rest of the stories in the collection!
