Century to Starboard
by Liz Williams
Sometime around the publication of this story, Tim and I saw a ship called The
World docked on the Willamette in Portland. The ship is privately owned by the
occupants of its 165 residences, and as a group they vote on their itinerary every year.
It’s a nice fantasy to think about leading such a life, so long as the ship doesn’t
run into the kind of storms that Liz Williams’s similar ship hits in this story.
Each of those storms take the entire ship, including Italian citizen Vittoria Pellini, further and further into the future.
I finally got my head together and told Julio what I thought—that maybe, just maybe,
we’ve gone through some kind of slip in time, like the Bermuda Triangle, only in the
Pacific. I know other people sometimes say—just to be spiteful—that I’m maybe a
little bit of a bimbo, and Julio tends to laugh at me sometimes. Affectionately, of
course. But this time I really thought he’d laugh, and he didn’t.
“Century to Starboard” by Liz Williams, in Strange Horizons, 2 February 2004.