Shell passes other people lining the boulevard and she is amazed that some of the survivors wear both Tehani t-shirts and the Ragtime mission patch. She can’t help thinking they are flaunting them in her face, daring her to react. She never does. It’s not like her to be baited. She does feel that homicidal urge come back each time she sees Brisbane was Right or What are they telling you? What are they not telling you?

Not killing Brisbane personally is unsatisfactory. It leaves her with a sense of something undone, an itch unscratched.

She runs. Since her return, since her physiological markers returned to normal after prolonged life in space, she has been trying to get some bone density back. She is using weights every third day and running on alternate days. They warn her that her muscles need to recover, and to be gentler on her joints, which haven’t known real gravity for so long, but she doesn’t care.

As sweat drips from her nose, she mouths to herself that she is not atoning, not punishing herself.

It wasn’t my fault.

No.

But it was my responsibility.

And from this she cannot run.

Afterword

I don’t generally enjoy talking about a book I’ve written because it always strikes me as a kind of failure. The book should be able to stand on its own. If it can, this is superfluous. If it can’t, I’ve failed anyway, and an afterword won’t save it. That said, and salvation aside, I do think it’s a good idea to contextualise what I’ve done.

Far from the Light of Heaven was inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). I thought to myself, what if Locked Room Murder, but in space, the ultimate locked-in environment? It was around the time a hole was discovered drilled into the Soyuz capsule docked to the International Space Station in 2018. I’m a fiction writer and details like this tend to set me off on a speculative adventure.

I’d never written about space before, definitely not long-form. I knew that I didn’t want to depend on decades of reading and watching space opera. I wanted to set my story in an environment that, as much as possible, was derived from the actual experience of astronauts rather than the tropes of science fiction writing.

Which is tricky because tropes exist for a reason. Some aspects of human experience don’t translate easily into a narrative structure. Who would the audience be? The usual readers of spacefaring adventures have been trained to accept certain fictional conventions like Faster Than Light travel and artificial gravity. Many don’t mind if you play fast and loose with orbital mechanics, although many do.