It’s time for this week’s Song Title Challenge.
Write a short piece of fiction, around 300 words, using the song title as your story title but don’t listen to the song. You can pick your own genre or use the one suggested to me. Remember to link back to this post so I can find yours.
If you would like to suggest a song title for a future post, you can do so from the challenge page. You can also leave a suggestion on the Facebook page.
This week’s song is Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks and the genre is Fantasy/Sci-Fi. Thanks to bumblepuppies for the suggestion.
Edge of Seventeen
We call it Seventeen. It has no other official designation. That’s because when it was first spotted, it was thought to be a passing asteroid and we paid no further heed. Only when it returned several years later did the scientists realise that it was, in fact, another moon of the gas supergiant we were orbiting. The seventeenth and most distant moon.
We had to wait five years for it to pass again. We sent out a probe, but no one expected the data it returned. Seventeen was exactly half a sphere. The scientists theorised that some ancient cataclysmic event must have split the satellite in two, but they couldn’t tell for certain, as tidal lock had caused the flat side to permanently point toward space.
We were ready to write it off as an astronomical oddity when we received the last burst of data from the probe: images of lights on the far side of the moon, and high frequency electromagnetic signals. Could there be life on Seventeen?
A year before Seventeen passed again our ship was launched on a course to intercept. It’s gravity was much greater than the scientists had predicted and we crashed. Life support systems are barely functioning, the captain and first officer are both dead and we have no way to lift off again or signal the station. And it will be five years before they will be able to send a rescue mission, if they do at all.
We can do only one thing. We must seek out whatever civilisation is on this satellite and hope they are friendly. I’m leaving this message so that, should someone find this ship, they’ll know what had happened to us.
We have abandoned ship and are going over the edge of Seventeen.
Copyright © 2013 Herman Kok
Very nicely done.
And did you have fun at your in-laws’?
Thanks.
And yes, I had a lovely time. But I like all my wife’s aunts and uncles that I’ve met so far. They’re a very social family, so there’s never a dull moment. Not very conducive to writing, though 😉
On a completely different note…
Did you notice that they’ve eliminated the “follow” button from the wordpress reader? Looks like no more spam followers.
I did not. Been using the android app all week and haven’t really read any blogs. The training was a tad exhausting. I’ll catch up once I’m back behind my pc tomorrow.
Cool story! With a certain sense of mischief, I’d like to suggest a challenge based on any of the more curious song titles by Frank Zappa. But maybe I shouldn’t… 🙂
Please do. The more unusual the title, the more it stretches my creativity. And some of the suggestions serve to expand my musical horizons as well.
nice one – thinking of something : -)
not really science fiction but here you go:
http://poemcollision.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/song-tittle-challenge-edge-of-seventeen/
Thanks for joining the challenge, and for next week’s suggestion.
thanks for giving us the opportunity to experiment with words through the challenge!