Just Like Being There: A Collection of Science Fiction Short Stories, Springer Nature, 978–3‑030–91604‑6, 2022
My dual career as a writer and aerospace engineer was undoubtedly influenced by two childhood memories. One of my earliest recollections is of making a Lego model of the Voyager spacecraft, cutting pictures of Saturn out of a magazine and imagining that my little plastic space probe had taken them. Another was a grainy television image of an unfortunate man in a red shirt being killed by an acid secreting silicon-based lifeform in what I later learned was the original series Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark”. For as long as I can remember, science and science fiction have been like two sides of a coin.
Star Trek might have remained the extent of my science fiction universe (not that there’s anything wrong with that) had it not been for a childhood friend named Leslie Gelberger who introduced me to a story called “The Road Not Taken” by Eric G. Iverson in the November 1985 issue of Analog magazine. I was thrilled to think there was apparently a science fiction writer out there also named Eric (alas, the table of contents outed him as Harry Turtledove). The ending of “The Road Not Taken” lingered with me for days, and it fostered a dream that perhaps one day I might also write science fiction stories that are equally thought-provoking.
My fascination with space exploration began in childhood and has never diminished. The only question was whether I would pursue a career in engineering or the sciences. My decision was made in high school after reading a National Geographic article about Voyager which described the miracles performed by the engineers that enabled spacecraft to continue its mission beyond the original destinations of Jupiter and Saturn. Designed and launched in the 1970s, Voyager used a mechanical tape recorder to store data. If the tape recorder was turned on, then a thruster would have to be fired for counter-torque to keep the spacecraft steady during the long exposures needed for taking images in the darkness of the outer Solar System. My teenage self was amazed by the very notion that there are people whose job is to do such astounding things.
So, I decided to become an engineer, enrolling in the engineering science program at the University of Toronto. During the third year of my studies when I began a specialization in aerospace, my friend Raakesh Persaud made me aware of the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. This is a contest established by Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts whose goal is to encourage emerging student writers of speculative fiction. I entered the contest, and all these years later it is still difficult to describe my shock at becoming the first winner of the Asimov Award (now called the Dell Magazines Award) in the first year it was offered. My winning story was called “Dedication”, which is appropriately the opening story of this collection.
Following my undergraduate degree, I completed graduate studies at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies with a specialization in satellite orbit and attitude dynamics (no doubt a reflection of my early fascination with the spacecraft pointing requirements of the Voyager mission). Over the course of my aerospace engineering career, I’ve had the privilege of working on a number of space projects including QEYSSat (Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite), the Meteorology (MET) instruments on the Phoenix Mars Lander, the Canadarm2 manipulator on the International Space Station, the RADARSAT‑1 Earth observation satellite, and the MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere) instrument on the Terra satellite. In 2009, I was one of the Top 40 finalists (out of 5,351 applicants) in the Canadian Space Agency’s astronaut recruitment campaign.
I am not a prolific writer. Since winning the Dell Award as a student all those years ago, I have only written eighteen stories that have appeared in twenty-eight publications. Fourteen of my science and engineering themed stories are reprinted here, plus a new story called “A Sky and a Heaven” which closes this collection. Readers should be aware that the reprint stories may not be identical to the versions that were published elsewhere. This is because I went back to the manuscripts as I had originally written them and in some cases made minor revisions. For example, in the opening story “Dedication” I changed what I had called a “palmtop” computer to the modern term of a tablet. The high school mentioned in the title story “Just Like Being There” was renamed for Leslie Gelberger, the childhood friend who introduced me to science fiction short stories. I moved out the dates in “From a Stone” because as of the publication of this collection humans have not yet resumed crewed voyages beyond low Earth orbit. In general, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how well my stories have held up over time. For each story, I have written a new afterword that discusses the engineering and science behind them.
The short story is a beautiful literary form because each paragraph or sentence or even word can have so much more impact than they would in a longer work like a novel. It is also an ideal format for exploring new ideas. To quote the American editor and publisher Patrick Nielsen Hayden: “Short fiction is…the R&D laboratory in which SF [science fiction] constantly reinvents itself. Novels are all very well…but short fiction is where SF writers take chances, stir the pot, kick out the jams. It’s no accident that short fiction has been crucial to each period of major ferment and invention in the modern history of the field. It is, if you will, the garage rock of SF.”[1]
The title story “Just Like Being There” was first published in a volume of a series called Tales From the Wonder Zone that was created by the biologist and writer Julie Czerneda which uses science fiction to illustrate scientific concepts for elementary school students. One of the greatest challenges of our time is the lack of scientific literacy amongst both the general public and the political leadership of many countries. In the era of pandemics and climate change, not having an inherent understanding of fundamental principles like exponential growth, statistical significance, the sensitivity of models to initial and boundary conditions, and the risks of extrapolating data beyond established domains of validity is putting all of us in peril.
Science fiction is the literature of change, the genre that examines the implications – both beneficial and dangerous – of new sciences and technologies. It is uniquely able to do this because science fiction is not just about what is and what was, but what could be. This is what appeals most to me about the genre. A compelling science fiction story can take a reader to any point in space and time, from the farthest reaches of the universe to the depths of the human soul. It really can be just like being there.
Eric Choi, Toronto, Canada, September 2021
[1] Hayden, Patrick Nielsen (editor). Starlight 1, Tor Books, 1996, Pg. 9.