FEATURED STORY
RECENT STORIES
STORIES BY TOPIC
NEWS
TRANSPORTER
Take me to a...
SEARCH
Enter any portion of the author name or story title:
For more options, try our:
SUBSCRIBE
Sign up for free daily sci-fi!
your email will be kept private
TIDBITS
Get a copy of Not Just Rockets and Robots: Daily Science Fiction Year One. 260 adventures into new worlds, fantastical and science fictional. Rocket Dragons Ignite: the anthology for year two, is also available!
SUBMIT
Publish your stories or art on Daily Science Fiction:
If you've already submitted a story, you may check its:
DAILY SCI-FI
Not just rockets & robots...
"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.






For the War Effort

Rachel Rodman (a href="http://www.rachelrodman.com">rachelrodman.com) the author of the food-themed collection Exotic Meats and Inedible Objects (Madness Heart Press). This is her fourth appearance in Daily Science Fiction.

It was a civil war of the most bloody, brutal sort, not East vs. West, or brother vs. brother. But rather: Past vs. Future.
They (the Future) had a staggering technological advantage. Our skies were filled with weapons that we did not understand; our cities pillaged and brutalized by invasions for which we could devise no shields. But our position gave us another kind of advantage. Just one, really. So, for there was no other choice: none at all.... We exploited it.
To our hands--violently, unnaturally--we transferred bundles of our own flesh: uprootings of potentialities that many of us, at one time, had wanted very much. (That I, too, had wanted so very, very much.) So it felt like more than war, this sacrifice. But we were members of the Great Generation. The Final Generation.
We could not let them win.
Around the fires we gathered, in our public squares: heat and whoosh and flicker, in long long lines, extending through cities and countryside, and we roared as the smoke ascended, for we could see it--Yes! Yes! Yes!--the count of our enemies/descendants, diminishing across distance; the shrinking phalanxes of their armies in the sky; the dots of their ground troops, viewed through our spyglasses: fewer and fewer; and we, yes, we, determined and resourceful we (and here the roar went up again!), reducing the numbers of this superior force at this clever remove, as we could not in direct combat.
Into heat; into plumes of smoke; into Never-Was. Attrition and annihilation.
To the front of the line--my turn--I pushed at last, with thousands still behind me; thousands upon thousands, each with our bundles of flesh: compatriots-in-war, each of us hunching for pain, hobbled by the recency of our surgical scars.
"'U' is for victory!" I intoned fiercely.
And I cast my uterus onto the fire.
The End
This story was first published on Monday, January 11th, 2021


Author Comments

This story has two points of origin: 1) My husband's grandparents met in Trafalgar Square. Early in our first child's life, I would sometimes take her there, en route to the National Gallery (babies love art museums, turns out, especially when they are asleep). And I would get a little existential shiver, as if the barrier between times was a little thin, and I might, by mischance, step through, and endanger her existence by disrupting her great-grandparents' first date.

2) I read a fair amount of Heinlein as a kid, before I was old enough to know better. Ever since, I've thought a lot about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress--especially about how, in a war against the Earth, the lunar colonists, by launching boulders, might be able to turn the gravitational difference between the two worlds to their advantage, and harm a much stronger army. I wasn't sure what to do with either of those ideas, until it occurred to me (although--patent pending; please don't tell anyone--in reality, this is simply my solution to every artistic problem): Just mash both of them together.

- Rachel Rodman
Become a Member!

We hope you're enjoying For the War Effort by Rachel Rodman.

Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.

Daily Science Fiction is not accepting memberships or donations at this time.

Rate This Story
Please click to rate this story from 1 (ho-hum) to 7 (excellent!):

Please don't read too much into these ratings. For many reasons, a superior story may not get a superior score.

4.6 Rocket Dragons Average
Share This Story
Join Mailing list
Please join our mailing list and receive free daily sci-fi (your email address will be kept 100% private):