Guest Post: A Space for Storytellers

Leigh and I did a post swap - you can find my post over at StarshipCat, on maps and fiction. Wander on over and say hi! at least, and enjoy the twin essays (we didn't talk topics or anything before doing this, which was fun). Also, Leigh has a plethora of stories on the blog, well worth exploring. 

A Space for Storytellers -- a Guest Post by Leigh Kimmel

From my earliest days I grew up in a house filled with books. I am told that when I was very young, I would want my favorite stories read to me over and over again, especially when we were traveling. It got to the point that my father had some of them memorized, and could recite them verbatim. However, as soon as he'd try, I'd tell him, "No, Daddy, read to me." Even before I learned how to read, I knew the difference between reading and reciting.

As I grew older, I started spinning stories of my own, although it was only when I had access to computers that I began to actively seek publication. In "Tell Me a Story," I portrayed the future history of humanity's expansion throughout the Solar System through the vehicle of a beloved children's story. As each successive generation shares that childhood story with their own children, the new generation sees it in a different light, further and further away from the original notion of the collision of the old folkloric Moon with the new astronautic Moon.

"Tell Me a Story" was the first story of the Grissom timeline to be published, in the anthology Rocket Science, edited by Ian Sales. However, the story can be read without knowing anything about that fictional universe, and as such makes a good introduction to the Grissom timeline. Because I needed the story to stand on its own, complete unto itself, I avoided mentioning that Reginald Waite was a clone of Alan Shepard, although I had already written his adult adventures in "The Angry Astronaut Affair" (a story which would wait another two years after the publication of "Tell Me a Story" before finding publication at Liberty Island Magazine).

"Tell Me a Story" begins with young Reggie in his childhood home in Salem, Massachusetts. In a bedroom filled with astronaut memorabilia, his father reads him the story of the Astronaut and the Man in the Moon. It's a children's picture book, richly illustrated by two different artists. While the images of the Man in the Moon are done in dreamlike watercolors, the Astronaut's world is rendered in sharp inks with a draftsman's careful attention to technical detail. The latter artist is broadly hinted to be an actual astronaut and moonwalker, a detail that fits just as well in a story that is presumed to be set in the future of this world.

The politics that form the background of both "The Angry Astronaut Affair" and "Bringing Home Major Tom" (published in the anthology Forging Freedom: Dimensions in November of 2014) play little or no role in the subsequent scenes. Reginald Waite lives in Shepardsport, but there is no mention of the conflict that led to him being exiled there. Instead, his role is primarily the father reading to his own son, much as his father read the same story to him when he was Howie's age. While Howie is aware of his father's position of authority in the settlement, he's more interested in comparing the Apollo Lunar Module (painstakingly rendered by a man who actually flew in one) to the modern landers out on the spaceport landing field, which he can see via a webcam.

With later generations I tried to weave hints of extensive technological and social changes into the scenes, juxtaposing them with the timeless wonder of being young and having a parent read a bedtime story aloud. There is strong evidence that hearing stories read aloud is important for children's intellectual development, so I believe that storytelling will be a tradition that goes with us as humanity spreads throughout the Solar System and beyond.

"Tell Me a Story" reprinted by Starship Cat Press

Originally published in Rocket Science: Science Fiction and Non-fiction 

"Bringing Home Major Tom" in Forging Freedom: Dimensions 

"The Angry Astronaut Affair" at Liberty Island Magazine