True to the laws of thermodynamics, the expanding universe keeps cooling down. Now, the last transformed humans linger near the black hole at the center of our Galaxy.
The UnAttached, who count their age in billions of years, feed on the powerful X-ray emissions and rail against Entropy, that selfish cousin who sucks leftover energy. The Attached, recently forced to leave their ruined worlds, live too fast.
As the stars around them wink off one by one like in a dying city, what can they hope for ?
A short and crunchy hard-SF story set far, far in the future, told by multi-award winning author Michèle Laframboise, translated from the French by N. R. M. Roshak.
Accolades
The short-story published in Future SF had received several accolades:
“Cousin Entropy”… has a wonderfully Stapledonian scope. –Locus Magazine
“The hardcore physics fans out there will certainly enjoy this.” –Kat Day, for Tangent Online
“…a far-flung space opera reminiscent of Liu Cixin’s book.” –Alex Shvartsman, Future SF
“...a wonderful piece of Science Fiction, full of physics and feeling.” –Eamonn Murphy, SF Crow’s Nest (link underneath)
My inspiration for this story
My father Jacques- E. Laframboise had a fine telescope, and I recall many summer nights where he would adjust the position with patience, to point at this or that star, or planet. I still have the 1970’s astronomy books he had bought and, with another telescope, I search the skies, when said skies are not obscured by clouds or the luminous pollution of cities.
I always pondered the fate of our (pear-shaped) universe. The heat death of the universe linked to the ever-growing Entropy, does rarely make for an upbeat story, but add the transformed, long-lived remnants of humanity, and a pinch of spicy black energy, a tiny bit of humor, and voila!
I wrote the story in a short form, so it makes for a thin paperback, be warned. However, I allow my readers to share the paperback and give it to someone close, so you commpose your own chain of friendly atoms.
The translation had been done and edited by N. R. M. Roshak, to whom I owe a lot of gratitude. French is my first language, but a growing part of my public understands and read in English.*
Get your own End-of-the-Universe Story!
Fresh from my indie house Echofictions, Cousin Entropy has come out on several platforms. You can even order a paperback on Amazon.ca.
About the the nice cover image: it is a NASA/ESA pic taken by the Hubble Telescope, showing two colliding galaxies nicknamed The Mice, located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices.
* The French version, La cousine Entropie, is also available.
Echoes of a Sunday artist 