Zero 9-4: New-Classic Science Fiction Short Stories: 1 (New-Classic Sci-Fi)

• The stories you’ve dreamed of; the people you crave to meet; or would love to be. The aliens who’d make you shiver, or laugh. The huge risks of guiding your spacecraft here, or there. The adventures you’d have if only you had the nerve… Or the utter romance of doing that…
• The humour of orbital disasters and alien conflicts; the perils of ill-advised time-interference; the sheer romance of null-gravity love; the terrors of a leaky hull; the fear of a bullying boss when you’re a thousand light years beyond.; the choices you face in the big, black Vac.
• Mostly a laugh or a satisfied smile; or maybe a “Yes, get in there”.
• More from the lighter, laughing side than the dark-dungeoned depths; but they’re all here somewhere.
• From crackling two-pagers where someone hasn’t quite read the situation right, to sixty-plus sides chronicling what you really have to do if you want to survive on this planet.

At the 2039 annual all-species barbecue, it is confidently predicted that these tales will be unanimously voted the funniest and most thought-provoking sci-fi short stories in The Spiral Arm – the famous pub and restaurant on Ganymede – shortly before the Covid38 virus sends us all scuttling and slithering back to our socially-isolated orbits.

• Could this be the future of homo sapiens in Cleanup, or Rigged and Ready, or in the poem Together Again?
• Are the aliens already among us in Betty, Kalai Alaa and Friday Night in Somercotes?
• What really happened the time his wife said 'Go for a walk, Oscar, dear.'?
• Dare you immerse yourself in the laughs and trials to come in 'It isn’t easy being a Hero', or 'Holes aren’t my Thing.'?
• Are you prepared to join the war of the alien genders in Kjid, or Typical Man?
• If the Foundling in “Kyre” can endure a skyfall into the forest swamp, encounters with a grallator, a pack of hounds, murderous soldiery and a supersensory woman, what destiny might await him, if he can run the gauntlet through the horde of rebel troopers?
• Is They call the Wind Pariah a premonition of our fate in the grip of the Corona virus?
• Or is it in the hands of the scientists who believe the formula for space-time manipulation is Zero 9-4?

Fourteen illustrations light up the whole continuum.