Exclusive fiction: The Silver King
What if one of our billionaire supervillains woke up in his own future?
Hello friends! I’m trying out some new things here at A Stranger Comes Home, in an effort to make this project feel sustainable in the long term and to also hopefully to provide interesting content for those of you who have so generously decided to support my work. This week I’m giving you a “director’s cut” of a recent dark satirical piece that ran in Storiaverse, a new platform for stories with mixed text and animation. The version that ran there was cut significantly in order to flow with the animation, so I thought I would give my paid subscribers an exclusive chance to read the original version here (about 3k words). But please check out Storiaverse and their hybrid stories! Lots of punchy SF and crime fiction up there for fast reads.
I wrote this while thinking about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and co. who are so obsessed with humanity’s future in space and yet so unwilling to imagine any of the necessary technological and social adjustments that we need to make in order to survive here on our poisoned oasis of a planet. The idea of one of them being confronted with the truth of their apocalyptic fantasies filled me with a delicious schadenfreude, which is perhaps not the highest emotion from which to create art, but, hey, it did feel good.
The story begins with our hero waking up a little later than he expected…
