All Our Tomorrows (29 page)
Authors: Peter Cawdron
In the 21st Century, we have a degree of control over our lives such as no generation has ever experienced before, and yet even with the marvels of science and modern medicine, our lives are frail and short lived. For me, zombie stories epitomize this dichotomy. Life is precious. Complacency breeds contempt, or so the saying goes, and the lives we live are so luxurious by the standards of human history over the past million years that it’s easy for us to lose sight of what’s really important—each other. Fictional zombie outbreaks make this more obvious.
The first fan art produced from these books comes from my daughter, Sarah.
I am an optimist. I don’t for a moment think a zombie apocalypse could ever arise in our world. We’ve defeated polio and smallpox, viruses more cunning and insidious than anything a science fiction writer could dream of, and yet there is no arrogance in this position but rather humility. It is humbling to benefit from the research undertaken by tens of thousands of scientists around the world, often working in obscurity and without adequate funding to pioneer the techniques and scientific knowledge that ensures our health and wellbeing into the future.
My thanks to my editors Ellen Campbell and Kat Fieler for their assistance, and to Janice Mann, T. Jazzy Davies, Buzz Dunning, and Mike Mountjoy who took the time to read beta versions of this novel.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this story as much as I have.
Please, spread the word. Tell a friend. Encourage them to read these novels.
And be sure to
leave a review online
with your thoughts.
Other books by Peter Cawdron
Thank you for supporting independent science fiction. You might enjoy the following novels also written by Peter Cawdron.
ALIEN SPACE TENTACLE PORN
A 1950s hospital. Temporary amnesia. A naked man running through Central Park yelling something about alien space tentacles. Tinfoil, duct tape, and bananas. These are the ingredients for a spectacular romp through a world you never thought possible as aliens reach out and make contact with Earth.
The crew of the Copernicus is sent to investigate Bestla, one of the remote moons of Saturn. Bestla has always been an oddball, orbiting Saturn in the wrong direction and at a distance of fifteen-million miles, so far away that Saturn appears smaller than Earth’s moon in the night sky. Bestla hides a secret. When mapped by an unmanned probe, Bestla awoke and began transmitting a message, only it’s a message no one wants to hear: “
I want to live and die for you, Satan
.”
Shadows
is fan fiction set in Hugh Howey’s Wool universe as part of the Kindle Worlds Silo Saga.
Life within the silos follows a well-worn pattern passed down through the generations from master to apprentice, ’caster to shadow. “Don’t ask! Don’t think! Don’t question! Just stay in the shadows.” But not everyone is content to follow the past.
THE WORLD OF KURT VONNEGUT: CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece
Slaughterhouse-Five
:
The Children’s Crusade
explored the fictional life of Billy Pilgrim as he stumbled through the real world devastation of Dresden during World War II.
Children’s Crusade
picks up the story of Billy Pilgrim on the planet of Tralfamadore as Billy and his partner Montana Wildhack struggle to accept life in an alien zoo.
The Man Who Remembered Today
i
s a novella originally appearing in
From the Indie Side
anthology, highlighting independent science fiction writers from around the world. You can pick up this story as a stand-alone novella or get twelve distinctly unique stories by purchasing
From the Indie Side
.
Kareem wakes with a headache. A bloody bandage wrapped around his head tells him this isn’t just another day in the Big Apple. The problem is, he can’t remember what happened to him. He can’t recall anything from yesterday. The only memories he has are from events that are about to unfold today, and today is no ordinary day.
Anomaly
examines the prospect of an alien intelligence discovering life on Earth.
Mankind’s first contact with an alien intelligence is far more radical than anyone has ever dared imagine. The technological gulf between mankind and the alien species is measured in terms of millions of years. The only way to communicate is using science, but not everyone is so patient with the arrival of an alien spacecraft outside the gates of the United Nations in New York.
The Road to Hell
is paved with good intentions.
How do you solve a murder when the victim comes back to life with no memory of recent events?
In the twenty-second century, America struggles to rebuild after the second civil war. Democracy has been suspended while the reconstruction effort lifts the country out of the ruins of conflict. America’s fate lies in the hands of a genetically engineered soldier with the ability to move through time.
The Road to Hell
deals with a futuristic world and the advent of limited time travel. It explores social issues such as the nature of trust and the conflict between loyalty and honesty.
Monsters
is a dystopian novel exploring the importance of reading.
Monsters
is set against the backdrop of the collapse of civilization.
The fallout from a passing comet contains a biological pathogen, not a virus or a living organism, just a collection of amino acids. But these cause animals to revert to the age of the mega-fauna, when monsters roamed Earth.
Bruce Dobson is a reader. With the fall of civilization, reading has become outlawed. Superstitions prevail, and readers are persecuted like the witches and wizards of old. Bruce and his son James seek to overturn the prejudices of their day and restore the scientific knowledge central to their survival, but monsters lurk in the dark.
Twenty years ago, a UFO crashed into the Yellow Sea off the Korean Peninsula. The only survivor was a young English-speaking child, captured by the North Koreans. Two decades later, a physics student watches his girlfriend disappear before his eyes, abducted from the streets of New York by what appears to be the same UFO.
Feedback
will carry you from the desolate, windswept coastline of North Korea to the bustling streets of New York and on into the depths of space as you journey to the outer edge of our solar system looking for answers.
Galactic Exploration
is a compilation of four closely related science fiction stories following the exploration of the Milky Way by the spaceships Serengeti, Savannah, and The Rift Valley. These three generational starships are manned by clones and form part of the ongoing search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. With the Serengeti heading out above the plane of the Milky Way, the Savannah exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy, and The Rift Valley investigating possible alien signals within the galactic core, this story examines the Rare Earth Hypothesis from a number of different angles.
This volume contains the novellas
Serengeti
,
Trixie and Me
,
Savannah
, and
War
.
Xenophobia
examines the impact of first contact on the Third World.
Dr. Elizabeth Bower works at a field hospital in Malawi as a civil war smolders around her. With an alien spacecraft in orbit around Earth, the US withdraws its troops to deal with the growing unrest in America. Dr. Bower refuses to abandon her hospital. A troop of US Rangers accompanies Dr. Bower as she attempts to get her staff and patients to safety. Isolated and alone, cut off from contact with the West, they watch as the world descends into chaos with alien contact.
Little Green Men
is a tribute to the works of Philip K. Dick, hailing back to classic science fiction stories of the 1950s.
The crew of the Dei Gratia set down on a frozen planet and are attacked by little green men. Chief Science Officer David Michaels struggles with the impossible situation unfolding around him as the crew members are murdered one by one. With the engines offline and power fading, he races against time to understand this mysterious threat and escape the planet alive.
How do you hide state secrets when teenage hacktivists have as much quantum computing power as the government? Alexander Hopkins is about to find out on what should have been an uneventful red-eye flight from Russia. Nothing is what it seems in this heart pounding short-story from international best selling author Peter Cawdron.
Hello World
is a short story set in the same fictional universe as
Alien Space Tentacle Porn
.
Professor Franco Corelli has noticed something unusual. The twitter account @QuestionsLots is harvesting hundreds of millions of tweets each day, but never posting anything. Outwardly, this account only follows one other twitter account—@RealScientists, but in reality it is trawling every post ever made by anyone on this planet. Could it be that @QuestionsLots is not from Earth?
In addition to these stand alone stories, Peter Cawdron has short stories appearing in:
•
The Telepath Chronicles
•
The Alien Chronicles
•
The A.I Chronicles
•
The Z Chronicles
•
Tales of Tinfoil
Table of Contents