Del Sol SFF Review

The world is my expense The cost of my desire Jesus blessed me with its future And I protect it with fire Rage Against the Machine – Sleep Now in the Fire   Night had crept up and brought a bitter cold that clawed and bit at any exposed flesh. As if they were panes of glass, the frozen puddles shattered with each step, and the condensation of every breath danced and swirled like ghosts before being swept away. The car-clotted highway receded further and further behind us as we made our way through these desolate fields. All around us were rusted farm equipment and the dry, stunted remnants of failed crops. I glanced back at the distant city. The tale-tell mushroom cloud had dissipated hours ago, but a luminescence brushed the undersides of the tattering clouds with faint light. The city still burned. I could see snowflakes drifting down around us in the faint moonlight. My mouth was dry, and my lips chapped; I held out one gloved hand and let the snowflakes slowly fill my cupped pa...

         The worst part of the situation wasn’t the missing building, Stan realized.   It wasn’t even that his job – and all his workmates – had seemingly vanished with it into the unknown.  No, it was that everyone out here on the street was behaving as if  nothing  had happened. That was the really  weird thing. Stan stared at the absence on the other side of the road. He’d only nipped out for lunch fifteen minutes ago. Now, Manchester One was  gone , all 20 storeys of it. It just didn’t make any sense. How the hell was he going to explain this one? Screw that, who was he going to explain it to? “Sorry I’m late, boss, only…” Yeah, right. He didn’t believe it either; not that the boss was in any position to complain. Stan staggered towards the pedestrian crossing; eyes glued to the point in space where his particular workplace had once existed. He neglected to check the lights and stepped onto the road; a blaring horn hurled him ba...

     I am Cabot. My ward is eight-year-old Benny Lanz, orphaned during the recent coastal retreat of the continents. His parents, cybernetic engineers Dr. Emilio Lanz and Dr. Patricia Bosworth, were washed away into the Atlantic Ocean after the third tsunami of 2090. They left the infant Benny in my care. As Dr. Lanz and Dr. Bosworth had no extended families — all had perished in the pandemic of 2062 — legal and administrative authorities had no choice but to relinquish care of the boy to me, as instructed in their respective wills. I was fully equipped to raise, educate, and yes, protect Benny Lanz for the duration of his life, unless he specifically — upon attaining adult status — released me from my contractual obligations, in which case I would be decommissioned, something that did not concern me one way or the other. I was not the first one tasked to raise an orphaned child. Indeed it had become all too commonplace, given the environmental and societal upheavals of t...