Curved Space, the first story in Songs of a Befuddled Muse but it wasn’t the first one we did.
“A Pizza delivery guy proposing to a spaceship captain“
It was a simple prompt and pretty easy to use the minimalist required elements. The fun came from trying to figure out why a spaceship captain would need pizza delivery.
Just like Jamie in her image below, my first thought was to make it a heterosexual couple and since the prompt said pizza “guy” the spaceship captain needed to be a woman, which I, of course, have no problem with in theory. But for the story, what is the fun in that?
To me, the most fun in this story is plotting out what would happen if you were one of the first interstellar explorers and when you finally reach your destination, what if people had already been there for years.
And if space colonization is not prohibitively expensive (something that is even less likely than navigable wormholes), who might try to colonize other worlds? Who might try to create separatist societies and how would various groups fare?
When I created the book, Jamie created a tattoo representing each of the stories to use on the cover and at the top of each. Here is pizza in space.
This story was never meant to be deep but I really like it, maybe more than I should because I get to play a little bit with common sci fi tropes and turn them a little on their heads and to use a few jokes that I think are funny that no one else in the world agrees with me on.
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