ROWELIT
Author's Commentary: "The Edge of the Abyss"
This is the third Julian Hartsock story that I’ve written for the Sci-Fi Shorts series, and it’s a little later getting out to people than I would have preferred. The topic—Your Own Personal Spaceship—was one I anticipated writing for in October, and I did in fact write this in October. Then I got sick and couldn’t record it. So I thought it would be a good time to get this story out now.
Personally, I really like these Hartsock stories. I find them taking the story to interesting philosophical grounds that I hope the reader or listener can get to without getting too bogged down in the philosophy. I think it’s because, though these questions might be largely theoretical for us now, they’re very much real-world for Julian. And he’s got a lot of responsibility in that world.
I’m not sure how many more of these stories I’ll publish here. The more I write “The Autobiographical Ramblings of Julian Hartsock” the more I think I need to write them all. We’ll see what happens with The Lifeboat in 2023, but this is in that storyworld, and Precipice might be a nice way to follow up Lifeboat. I’m not sure how many of them I’d want to have already extant in the world if I want to publish the whole book. We’ll see.
In the meantime, the personal spaceship seems more like an aside than an important idea in this chapter. But, when I thought about owning a spaceship, the first guy to come up was Julian—that guy would own his own spaceship if anyone would, I thought. So Desu ne. As the Japanese would say.
I hope you like where he took it! Thanks for listening and reading.
Rowe