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Here’s an outlier, for sure.
In the 2023 short story “The Nameless Dead,” crime and sci-fi writer Rusch introduces a NAMELESS detective who decides, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, that life on earth just isn’t working for her, and pulls the plug.
She signs up for a job somewhere at the ass end of the galaxy; far, far away, abandoning her husband and her newborn son. The hell with that. Alcohol may have been involved.
Yeah, her newborn son. I didn’t say she was likable.
She signed off on all the waivers, acknowledging that she was fully cognizant of the consequences of time dilation, and that there really was no going back. Except she didn’t really understand those consequences.
Nope. Not really.
But there’s no going back. She signed a contract. And even if she could somehow manage/afford the long trip back, anyone she ever knew back on Earth would be long gone. Dead. It may be thirty-five years ago for her, but that’s almost a hundred years ago for anyone she left back on Earth.
That’s how time distillation works.
So now she acts like a private investigator of sorts who has become the “go-to woman for all things time distillation,” offering her services to others caught up in a similar situation, ploughing through various data sources for information on the families they left back on Earth.
And then she scores a big case that involves hundreds of people, and even more secrets — including ones in her own past.
“The Nameless Dead” first appeared in the March-April 2023 of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and was the winner of that year’s Asimov’s Readers Choice Award.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an award-winning writer of science fiction, romance and mysteries. She also writes about the unfortunately named private eye Spade and his sometime-associate Paladin, who prowl the mean hallways of… sci-fi conventions? As Kris Nelscott has written the acclaimed Smokey Dalton series, about a Black private eye in racially charged Memphis, Tennessee in the 1960s.
SHORT STORIES
- “The Nameless Dead” (March-April 2023, Asimov’s Science Fiction) | Kindle it!
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Down Those Mean Skies…
The Case of the Private Detective in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Related Genres
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
