Order Your Copy of Venusification Today

Order Venusification and Other Stories today. For just $13, you can have your own copy of this book of short stories by Joseph DeMare. Set in a variety of times and places, from distant nebulae to the wild plains of Montana, the protagonists in these stories face unusual dilemmas.

100 Pages. Perfect Bound. Shipping and Sales Tax included.

Here is an excerpt from "The Old Spaceman," one of the stories in the collection and winner of the 2004 MARCON national short story contest.

There was an old spaceman who lived in our village. As sometimes happens to people who fill their lives with adventures, he had never married. His family had died long ago and most of his friends had met spectacular deaths among the stars, plunging into black holes or exploding in space.

Consequently, he liked it when our little gang of five or seven kids would come over for a visit. He had exotic gems from other planets; the mission tapes from new worlds he had explored; and in his basement he even had a complete mock-up of a space cruiser command room. If he was in a good mood, and if we begged hard enough, he would let us run "missions" that were more exciting and chaotic than even he had known, I'm sure. We counted him as one of the wonders of our domain, along with the abandoned steel mill and the waterfall near the frog pond.

But there was something wrong in his home. It's not that it was a permanent building, like the town hall and the storage depot. There were several other ancient stone and steel houses in our area. It wasn't in the smell of it or the old man's attitude. It was something visual, something that made one blink and involuntarily look around. After a while, it became disorienting. There was definitely something wrong with the monitor screens. Their color always needed adjusting and he wouldn't let us fix them.

Ryan spent the most time over there. He was training to be a spaceman himself. They would talk about propulsion systems and physics at a depth that both awed and bored the rest of us. One night as we were sitting by a campfire, listening to the wolves and roasting chestnuts, I asked Ryan what was so different about the old man's home. . .

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