This is actually one of my favorite short stories that I’ve ever written. For a while, I was thinking about expanding it into a novel, but while the story has a 4.2 rating on Amazon, I don’t think it hit on with the readers well enough to justify that sort of an investment. Maybe at some point down the road.
In any case, I think the time has come to take it down. It will appear in my next short story collection, Beyond World’s End, which is scheduled to come out in a few months. If you want to read this story before then, now is the time to pick it up.
From the description:
For the promise of paradise, the last civilization will surrender to the apocalypse.
Elysium was a world without without pain or suffering, hunger or disease, poverty or crime. So naturally, it was a world that was already dead.
Gehenna was a dead world, poisoned by the Great Catastrophe that had driven their ancestors into the underground vault. Few knew or cared what lay beyond the ancient airlocks. The bleak and windowless tunnels of Gehenna held nothing to the shared simulation of Elysium.
Gehenna still had a Watchman who searched diligently for the promised land. But would the people of Elysium give up their truth in order to have a future? Or is cultural suicide a price worth paying for paradisiacal bliss?
