Outreach is the first hard science fiction story I completed.  At the time I was struggling to make the transition from writing longhand to writing in a word processor on a computer.  I wrote this story when I was 21 years old and didn’t own a computer so I actually wrote it in longhand, finishing it in October of 1995.  I attempted a couple times along the way to switch the writing process to the computer but for some reason I kept running into a mental block.  I just couldn’t seem to make the creative process happen between the keyboard and the screen like I could on paper.  It wasn’t until some years later that I began to feel comfortable creating in a word processor and eventually transcribed this story from paper to disk.

Being eager to finish a story I really didn’t do much research which probably shows in the story.  I just wanted to get something out there, to be able to say I’d accomplished something, and I figured it was good practice regardless.  This was also the first “long” short story I completed; up to this point everything I’d written had been under ten pages due, no doubt, to my characteristic impatience at the time.  I wouldn’t say this is one of my strongest stories by any stretch of the imagination, but it holds a nostalgic value for me.  I still like the premise though (which was inspired by Larry Niven’s Bordered in Black) so it’s not impossible that I could try to rewrite this story with better characters, plot development, research, etc.

Synopsis:

Jerry Raines is a moon base captain looking to make his mark on history.  When an interstellar ship returns from a distant trip to a far away world, the captain sees this as his opportunity to cash in on a legend.  Headstrong and impatient, Raines races to get to the bottom of what went wrong on that journey.  What Jerry Raines discovers aboard that ship, however, could make him legendary for all the wrong reasons.

You can download “Outreach” below.  Feel free to comment on it below on this page and/or rate it here as well.

  Outreach (202.6 KiB, 35 hits)

©1995, Brian James Jarrett

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