Centrifugal

The following is a historical document, of sorts. It’s one of the first short stories that I ever wrote. Way back in 1994—when I was a high school senior—I wrote this story to enter a writing contest being held in conjunction with the sf convention called Andromeda One.

I have posted the story here unedited, exactly as I sent it to the judges at the convention. I actually took first place in the student division of the contest. That awards ceremony, held in a sparsely-attended hotel conference room, was one of the proudest moments of my youth. It was one of the first times I can remember thinking “Wow. Maybe I CAN do this!”

Despite that, the story is . . . well . . . not very good. It shows promise, perhaps, but it does not show skill. Not yet. However, there must have been SOMETHING about it to convince the judges to award me the prize. In fact, they had to overcome some pretty mean barriers to do so. One of the judges later confided in me that there was something strange about the manuscript I’d turned in. “At first, we thought you were doing something really post-modern and telling the story from back to front. Then we realized you’d just stapled the pages backwards.” Whoops.

With that introduction, I present CENTRIFUGAL, one of my very earliest pieces of writing. (And I do so without posting it backward, I hope.)