I’ve decided to post the opening of my as-yet-unrevised sf novel Beamstar. The excerpt below represents the first 400 words of the novel, and is followed by a scene break. Please feel free to comment.

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            The disaster happened without warning. It happened this time in a small village far across the wide sea from the great and populated land of Ofrelia, with its teeming cities and ports. It happened far from Briwor College with its learned old men and young scholars. It happened in a place that most citizens of Ofrelia knew only as the wild backworld. It happened in a place of no consequence.

            It happened in the morning, as a mother of nine children stood washing breakfast dishes in her sink. She was angry at her eight sons, and had scolded them before sending them out about their morning chores. She was angry because one of them – she did not know which – had apparently said something hurtful – she did not know what – to her youngest child and only daughter, and now the child had run away.  She had no doubt gone to her hiding place – maybe in one of the caves along the sea, or in the hills overlooking the village, or in the abandoned palace with its cracking terrace – her mother did not know where this secret place was.

The child’s nurse, a handsome robot with concern for the child programmed for perpetuity into his dark eyes, had offered to go looking for the girl. But the mother was feeling peevish and irritated with her daughter, too, that morning, and she commanded the robot to stay in the house. Let the girl sulk, and come back when she would. 

            And then it happened. In one six-thousandth of a second, a point in the sky – a point visible only through a telescope – pulsed. And in one six-thousandth of a second, the mother at her sink, her husband still lying in his bed with a broken leg, her eight sons at their chores, and twelve hundred other inhabitants of the targeted village were reduced to a thin vapor. When the attack came, it came in a space of time smaller than an instant, and so the mother never knew it, and thus she never had time to wonder if her daughter was safe.

            Meanwhile, the child, whose name was Yola, finished sulking, and returned home when the sun was already high. She found her village a ghost town, and her house empty, except for her robot. He wrapped the frightened girl in his padded arms, and told her that now, he would be her parent. 

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