Frank Cardon is a curious soul. A genius with almost idiot savant proportions, he posesses no social skills. Frank's mother dies leaving him the fortune he needs to complete their life-long project to build the first anti-gravity drive. With his lawyer/partner, he pulls off a stunt that secures his name in the history books and starts humankind on its migration to space. Note-This story has been updated and renamed from an earlier version entitled Prelude.
Size: 77 KB (14,424 words)
Genre: Science Fiction
Sex Contents: No Sex
Tags: Science Fiction
Review by NC-Retired [other reviews by NC-Retired]
Reviewed:
As I write this, the score is just 8.05. I think this short story should be scored much higher, perhaps in the 9+ range. Hope it gets there as more folks read it.
Flight time is an author that's been around for quite a while, 10+ years, but is not especially prolific with some major gaps between postings. That's OK if we get a gem like this one from time to time.
What would humanity do if someone were to invent a way to cancel out gravity? The government would be interested for sure! And that paranoia drives the protagonist to great lengths with the secrecy for his invention.
The one individual that he could trust, his mother, has died only to have another individual come into his life to fulfill the same sort of role that his mother did. Different, but much the same role.
There is no overt love, but at the end our author allows us to see that there is some affection between the two main characters.
Overall, a very good short story that unexpectedly got inside me and grabbed me hard. For me, at my slow reading pace, it took just about 20 minutes to finish the story, but I've been thinking about it now for over an hour. Just the sort of writing I like... thought provoking.
There are some formatting issues that should be corrected, but I did not detect any overt grammar oopses that would spoil the story. Try it, I hope you like it as much as I did. Nines across the board for me.
