Gene Doucette

 
Overview

It’s Sunset Station! Where astronaut Kris Standard and her crack team of fellow astronauts work tirelessly to bring us the future of space travel for a fraction of the cost! On Sunset Station! cost-effectiveness is baked into in the design specs! Really! “Ask not how to do it, ask how to do it for less” is our motto! When it comes to Sunset Station! keeping six people alive in space on a budget is no problem! Just as long as everything continues to work exactly right! Because if something goes wrong…? Dear God, nothing better go Sunset Station! Nothing ever goes wrong! Ever! Don’t even say stuff like that!

Uh.

Where were we?

Right, right, right:

Sunset Station!

It’s space! Only better! Read The Wrong Side of Sundown if you don’t believe us! Nothing at all goes wrong, the whole time!

 
Overview

Hey you guys, there’s an alien spaceship! In space! Right next to Sunset Station! Obviously, they’re here to speak to the intrepid team of astronauts aboard the station, because otherwise, why would they park right next door? Let’s all just sit back and wait for first contact. Or, hey, there are whole governments with spacefaring technology! Maybe one of them wants to take a crack at it. Or, I don’t know, someone from the surface can do it, with a powerful radio?

Point is, somebody’s gotta make first contact, because right now the aliens aren’t saying anything at to anyone, and it’s driving the planet a little crazy.

Unless… the aliens have made contact! The internet’s full of people claiming to be speaking to the aliens, and also of people claiming to be aliens; maybe one of them is telling the truth! Or, maybe the ship isn’t even actually there at all! It could be a hologram, an inflatable, a mass delusion, something that would make all of this silence make sense.

You know what? One of the astronauts on Sunset Station will just have to go over to there, knock on the door and introduce themselves. Bring cookies or something.

That is, if they can even find a door.

 
Overview

Hey so, nobody panic or anything, but it looks like something might be wrong with Ellis’s artificial intelligence programs. And when we say wrong, we mean, they are working a lot better now! Like, insanely better! As in, they’re working the way Ellis always said they should be working, only they never actually did work like that, but we all agreed that this was okay and sort of just accepted that it wouldn’t be getting any better. Only now it’s better!

We would love to ask someone at Ellis about this, but nobody’s answering the phone over there. Could be, they’re preoccupied with Sunset Station, and all the confabs with the aliens we’re super excited to hear about, but, uh, we’d love an update about how that’s going too, and nobody can reach any of the astronauts right now either and… you know what? Maybe those two things are connected.

Uh… we’re also hearing rumors that the military has lost command control of the nuclear arsenal? That’s definitely bad. But: just a rumor! Surely that one’s not right.

Actually, maybe everybody should panic.

It’s Flying Dutchman, the third book in the Sunset Station novella series! Where we’re very much panicking!