Renard's Menagerie, December 2008

"An Arbitrary Deprivation of Life"

Pages 45-56

Avery Granitski, an aparatchik in the Revolutionary Council's Sphere of Correct Thought, finds himself drawn into the investigation into the first interstellar murder to occur on Martian soil.

The first spin-off short story from my unpublished novel "Alien Impact", this story is set about a year and a half after the tale told in the novel, and is framed on the notion of what will happen when Humanity makes its first contact with a sentient alien species.

The story was written as an exercise in creativity, because the writers' guidelines specifically asked for sories involving "teddy bear aliens" which described to a T the Keleyat race I had already created. I put the story together to fit the magazine's guidelines, and was pleasantly surprised not only by the story being accepted, but by being offered the opportunity to vet the galley proofs. RM's editor, Fox Cutter, is without a doubt one of the most professional editors I have ever worked for.

The story is in Issue #8, available at Renard's Menagerie.