First 200 Words (part 9)
Do you remember how much fun Philip José Farmer had, paying tribute to his pulp heroes among other things, with the extremely unlucky character Greatheart Silver? Don’t you wish Phil had written more than three stories about him? So do we, which is why we were so thrilled when Chris Roberson said he wanted to write…
“The Final Flight of Greatheart Silver”
by Chris Roberson
The future wasn’t what it used to be.
From the front door of Greatheart Silver’s apartment, he could see the rusting bulk of a long-deactivated robot on the far side of the veranda. Once the robot and thousands more like it had served as Minerva’s workforce, performing all of the unpleasant but essential services that the island-nation’s populace required. But the Utopian vision of Minerva’s founders had not long survived contact with reality, and the delicate circuitry and mechanisms of the robots had quickly corroded in the hot, humid air of the south Indian Ocean. Now immigrants from Australia and Indonesia cleaned the Minervans’ laundry, washed their dishes and trimmed their hedges, but none of them had any hope of becoming citizens. Even with the island-nation now a faded shadow of its former glory, only multimillionaires could even think of applying for citizenship.
Which led Greatheart to suspect that the raven-haired beauty at his front door had come to the wrong place. Trim and athletic, no more than thirty years old and less than half Greatheart’s age, she was surely looking for someone else.
“Mr. Silver?” Her voice had a lilt to it he couldn’t quite place, an accent that …
(Copyright © 2010 by the Philip J Farmer Family Trust)
The rest of “The Final Flight of Greatheart Silver” can be found in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. Keep watching this space for more 200 word excerpts.
