Showing results for "Promised" in Science Fiction

A surreal audio drama about a village caught in a loop it can't remember, a sky without stars, and the strange lives drawn into its orbit. In Gratch Hollow, a dying stranger wakes to the same violent moment again and again. A pig-man named Jon, hulking and powerful, offers comfort to those who need it. The seamstress tells stories of constellations no one has seen. And a young girl named Sara studies equations that could rewire all of time. Many of their truths never happened. Written, narrated, and produced by Shawn Fitzmaurice. Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc. © 2025 All rights reserved.

Promised Land is part of my James Dean sequence of stories, which includes the recently published novel The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean. My intent was to explore the great icons of the 50’s and 60’s. Major iconic characters in the novel (besides James Dean) and short stories include Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe and, in this story, President Lyndon Johnson.

An immense asteroid field is on its way to deliver a torrent of pathogens into this galactic sector, guaranteeing the destruction of any civilization in its path. Cyann, astrobiologist and Human-Delphian hybrid, is eager to join the research expedition dispatched to investigate. Before they depart, she is called upon by the secretive members of a Delphian sect who believe that the elusive Tughan Wai, a supernatural creature of their own making, plays a part in this calamity.

Zuri has the perfect life—a beautiful home on the Hillstead, a loving family, and a powerful job keeping the LA Basin’s grid humming. If only she didn’t see the ghost of her dead twin in the mirror. Her grief-counselor husband understands too much, Aunties Cora and Vivian smother her to excess, and her mother can’t look at her daughter without seeing the half that’s missing. Zuri can’t begin to face her sister’s little daughter—to Ruby, Zuri is the ghost. Which is why she’s running away to work, again, on the anniversary of her sister’s death.

For better, for worse. In sickness and in health. It’s a legal vow of care for families in 2050, a world beset by waves of climate-driven plagues. Power engineer Lucía Ramirez long ago lost her family to one - she’d give anything to take that vow. The Power Islands give humanity a fighting chance, but tending kelp farms and solar lilies is a lonely job.