Redstone Science Fiction #3
August 2010

“Death’s Flag Is Never at Half-Mast” by Rahul Kanakia
“Memorial at Copernicus” by Gray Rinehart

Reviewed by Jo-Anne Odell

“Death’s Flag Is Never at Half-Mast” by Rahul Kanakia opens with the protagonist, Lieutenant Halfacre Nelson surveying a group of boys, clones of the original hero.  In this world, they’ve achieved the ability to reach back into time, either cloning, or repeatedly plucking out heroes from the past.  The point is to allow France and Britain to replay their battles, but in spaceships, using neural implants and neuter soldiers, called grunts.  One of the clones behaves differently from the rest and insists on implementing his own strategy.  Battle chaos ensues, and Halfacre is forced to take action.

I’m a big fan of funny stories.  This one managed silly, but didn’t quite make it to funny; at least, not for me.  I found its impact hampered by a lack of imagery.  There are a good many unfamiliar concepts which are hard to visualize without more description.  The spaceship and the equipment receive the briefest of mentions with only fragmented images.  I couldn’t picture the scenes or most of the action.  

In “Memorial at Copernicus” Gray Rinehart uses the Apollo 18 lunar landing and the name of a real astronaut, as the jump-off points for his story.  Machek takes his reluctant son to visit a special lunar site, the grave of Deke Slayton, the hero who saved Machek’s grandfather.  His son Tomas wanders off to view another artifact.  When Machek is ready to leave, he can’t raise Tomas on the comm.

From that point on, Rinehart juxtaposes scenes from Slayton’s rescue with Machek’s efforts to find and free Tomas, who’s become trapped under a fall of rock.  With the jumping back and forth between time lines, it took me a few paragraphs to figure out what he was doing, but it works.  The implicit bad outcome from the original mission adds tension that would otherwise be missing from Machek’s search.

Redstone Science Fiction can be found online at http://redstonesciencefiction.com.  Issues are available for free download as PDFs or can be read online.