I have a new story out! “The Science of Pacific Apocalypse” appears in Rebuilding Tomorrow, which is the follow-up anthology to Defying Doomsday. I actually had a story in Defying Doomsday, which was an awesome anthology focused around the experience of disabled people in the apocalypse. The positive experiences, I should say – the idea was that a history of having to adapt to non-ideal circumstances would actively help disabled people both survive apocalypse and contribute to the survival of others as well. The story I had in that was called “Portobello Blind” and it centred around the experiences of Anna, a 14 year old blind girl left to fend for herself in the abandoned Portobello marine laboratory in Dunedin. (I did some grad work at that lab, so was very familiar with it and its cursed HPLC machine. I do not have fond memories of that machine.) Anyway, Anna managed to survive quite handily, and was engaged in scientific research of her own, monitoring the colonisation rates of shellfish, when her satellite radio picked up calls from other survivors… scientists coming in from distant field research, having escaped the plague that killed nearly everyone else.
So when I got an email from Tsana Dolichva, the editor of both Doomsday and Rebuilding Tomorrow, to ask if I’d write a follow-up to “Portobello Blind,” set some ten years afterwards, of course I said yes. And everyone laughs when I say this, but my story ended up focusing around rebuilding academic publishing after the apocalypse. Anna, now editor as well as scientist, and part of a surviving society that is almost entirely scientists – all those field workers, coming back – doesn’t want more of the same. (If you’ve ever had to read a scientific paper, or any other academic paper for that matter, you’ll know why. They suck the joy out of research.) And because she listens to science more than she reads it, Anna has a vested interest – and a clear advantage – when it comes to making science more accessible for everyone.
Yes, my PhD is in science communication. Why do you ask?
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