Derek Künsken

writer
Short Story

Schools of Clay


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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Short Story

Pollen from a Future Harvest


A breeze of pollen from intelligent alien vegetation continually blows into one artificial wormhole and out another eleven years earlier, which gets Major Okonkwo’s government het up about using it to repeatedly send back research results while Okonkwo and her team try to figure out how and where the rival government is spying on things and why the pollen stream has stopped. All the while, there are discussions of how careful everyone must be to avoid grandfather paradoxes.

For me, Künsken’s earlier novella of aliens and time dilation (“Schools of Clay”) was a realistic, character-driven, multi-layered story worthy of a Hugo, but this second novella was less engaging, even though it does involve actual time travel.
On their way, the Force had discovered the time gates, a pair of artificial wormholes connected across eleven years of time. All the ancient wormholes were incalcuably valuable; their possession was the defining feature of the patron nations. Finding a wormhole was the Union’s chance to slip from beneath the yoke of the Congregate.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Flight from the Ages


In a mind-bending story with vast ideas on every page bang, the artificial intelligence Ulixes-316 starts as a financial agent for a galaxy-spanning bank in which he and Poluphemos witness (or cause?) an explosion that sets off a wavefront that’s collapsing space time at an ever expanding rate. With this as background, time travel plays both a minor role in a light-years-wide tachyon-based computing network and the key role in how a degenerating Ulixes can take care of his damaged companion Poluphemos and take an ethically questionable step that involves rewriting the Big Bang.
Correct, little algorithm, but we are not in your present. We transmitted ourselves by tachyons into the past, back into the stelliferous period, to one of the first galaxies. We have been working here in the morning of the Universe for twelve million years.
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  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel