When I have spare minutes I use Metrocles House, my self-pub operation, to put up short stories at 99 cents, which seems to be a reasonable price to a lot of people. This one is a novellette (by 138 words) under the word count rules, but otherwise definitely a novella (my opinions about why the word count doesn't mean as much as what the words do can be found here). It's a pretty good one and if you haven't read it, well, you should.
"Things Undone" was tied for second (with two others) for the Sturgeon Award for Short
Fiction; I have long since ceased to caper about chanting, "We're One
Third Of Number Two!" It also made it into the Gardner/Strahan Best of
the Year anthology. So it comes highly recommended by people who read
an awful lot.
This was sort of a trial canter for several ideas that I know I'll be
back to later (some of which I've been to a few times before): the
mutability of memory, the awkwardness of remembering things that other
people don't (or say they don't), the genuine alien-ness of people with
various socially-isolating brain syndromes, are all in one complex. In
particular, in most stories in which time travelers alter the past,
either some time travelers are immune, or everyone's memory changes
instantly; I wondered what it might be like for a mind to feel the
world ghosting in over it, maybe taking months or years (an idea I sort
of played with in Finity and am sure I will play with again).
Another one has been with me ever since I noticed what the copywriter
had come up with for the cover of an S.M.Stirling novel: "Think about
history. Imagine it's worse." That led me to an idea I'm still playing
with: how much worse would history have to be for us to declare a
do-over or a scrape-and-pitch, i.e. just decide, well, that was all
wrong, let's do something else? Pick your favorite bit of horror out of
the last few centuries, say, and imagine sending back a force whose job
was to prevent or mitigate it. If it's big enough, most of us would
either cease to exist or cease to exist as ourselves; but if it's bad
enough, might it be worth it? And how bad and big, and what about all
the people who are just blameless byproducts?
Another idea: "live and let live" is an old idea but its prevalence is
very much modern. Ages ago I ran across what seems a truthful comment:
if you brought a European forward from 1200 A.D. to the present, the
most inexplicable thing about all our greatly expanded powers to him
would be that we hadn't declared a crusade and use the atom bomb to
reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. It's probably--well, definitely--a good
thing that our ancestors didn't have all our capabilities; you can
construct your nightmares here about what a society with airplanes,
electric fences, behavioral conditioning, effective psychopharmacology,
and poison gas might have done in the way of slavery or genocide, back
when those were done with virtually no compunction.
What sort of modern world might grow in a society that poisonous?
And what if we were descended from them? What if we could then reverse
things so we would only, in that revised world, have been as wicked as
we actually have been? How many never-weres would be a fair price to
move from deep to less-deep evil?
Obviously there can be a lot more than one answer to that question; this story is one of mine.
Anyway, mundane details: you can get it from my ejunkie store in either epub format (most readers including Nook and iPad) or mobi format (Kindle and a few esoteric readers), or from Barnes and Noble for the Nook, or Amazon for the Kindle. 99 cents at all such places, contracts in the business being what they are. I hope you'll take a look!
We will shortly return you to more grumpy reflections.
