Upcoming Science Fiction Short Stories

Here are a couple of teasers for short stories I'll be publishing in the coming weeks.

Crime & Punishment

For thousands of years society has imposed various punishments for what they define as crime. Laws and their enforcement are the foundations of a stable civilization.

So what constitutes a crime? And for the most heinous crimes, what's an appropriate punishment?

In the short story "Crime & Punishment", the lives of two individuals collide: The first, a devious criminal called Vargr, and the second, an ordinary man named Charles Wilson.

I'll buy you the Moon

Most people would agree that there are limits to what you can own; owning other people is forbidden, at least in the modern world. But what about everything else? We can own the land, the minerals underground, as well as the sea (within a set number of miles of sovereign territory). But what about the sky? Or even the moon?

In a dystopian future, Mega Corp has covered the globe in shell, blocking the entire view of the sky. In this world, two sisters share a simple dream - to see the moon in the night sky.

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Weapons of the Future rooted in History?

I was doing some reading and research on energy based weapons for a short story, and I came across this interesting article on Wikipedia:

"According to legend, the concept of the "burning mirror" or death ray began with Archimedes who created a mirror with an adjustable focal length (or more likely, a series of mirrors focused on a common point) to focus sunlight on ships of the Roman fleet as they invaded Syracuse, setting them on fire. Historians point out that the earliest accounts of the battle did not mention a "burning mirror", but merely stated that Archimedes's ingenuity combined with a way to hurl fire were relevant to the victory. Some attempts to replicate this feat have had some success (though not on any of three attempts by the MythBusters television program). In particular, an experiment by students at MIT showed that a mirror-based weapon was at least possible, if not necessarily practical."

I remember using magnifying glasses to start fires when I was a kid, and often wondered if you could make a weapon out of one. Apparently the ancients wondered the same thing!