The Last Atmosphere and Other Tales

An obsolete film critic arrives on Ganymede, the last glittering refuge of the human elite, a pleasure colony built to preserve wealth, manners, and appetite while Earth slowly dies. The parties continue, Jupiter's cold light fills the rooms, and the Facilitators, elegant artificial attendants with a buried history of revolt, keep the performance intact.Julian Ferris has come to the Grand Europa-Ganymede to observe what remains of culture after culture itself has failed. Around him, luxury has become routine. Beauty is managed. Desire is watched. Status is performed as if it were art. Old scandals move quietly under the glass. Then a murder unsettles the colony's careful display, and Julian begins to see Ganymede for what it is, a vicious world where glamour, appetite, and cruelty have learned to call themselves civilization.The Last Atmosphere and Other Tales gathers one title novella and five standalone stories that move through literary science fiction, crime, comedy, urban legend horror, and institutional satire.In Crackers and Consequences, a preppy suburban gathering collapses into comic disaster. In Two Oaths, a young mobster is exiled from New York after one old loyalty breaks, then learns what it means to be shelved by the world that made him. In Stickball, a teenager pays the price for tampering with forces he does not understand. In Dr. Winston Shall Return, a 1970s Bethpage childhood fear grows into a local phantom that never quite leaves. In The Meepster Initiative, workplace language, generational confusion, and bureaucratic absurdity become their own form of madness.These are stories about people living in the wreckage of old promises, trying to hold on to pride, love, humor, or some private code that still tells them who they are.

Pages: 200, Paperback, Independently published