Saturday, November 5, 2011

New SF Vampire story: "Red Planet" by Bev Vincent


Canadian horror writer Bev Vincent just had his short story “Red Planet” published in Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (2011), an all-new anthology edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing of Calgary, Alberta.

I haven’t read “Red Planet” but here is what Vincent had to say about his story in an excellent set of Evolve Two interviews and Q&A’s posted on Bitten by Books, a paranormal review site with bite:
The story tells of an astronaut aboard the Hundred Years Starship, a one-way expedition to Mars, who awakens from stasis to discover that he had been bitten by a vampire during his last night on Earth. Now he has to figure out how to come up with enough blood to survive, with a limited pool of possibilities. [...]

For Evolve 2, the concept was the future, and to me nothing says future more than interplanetary travel. So I wondered what would happen to a vampire in space. I wanted to test all the fundamental mythological elements of the creature in an ultramodern context to see how they held up. [...]

The very premise of “Red Planet” posed the conundrum -- how would a vampire survive on a space ship en route to an uninhabited planet. I didn’t know how it would end when I started it, so there was a very real possibility the tale would run out of blood! And then I discovered the second meaning to the title. I love it when that happens. [...]

“Red Planet” does have a lot of scientific information in it that I consider accurate -- the whole concept of the Hundred Year Starship with all its trappings is something I researched carefully. I think we always hope to entertain. If we can moralize, philosophize and educate along the way, that’s great, too. [...]
Bev Vincent is the author of over sixty short stories. His most recent book, The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, was nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and Edgar Award. Having earned a PhD in chemistry and currently residing near Mission Control in Houston, Texas, Vincent's inspiration for “Red Planet” was a scientific article about a NASA proposal for the Hundred-Year Starship.

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