A Long Way Home: A Tale of an Immortal Living Long After the World Ended
A Long Way Home by Jake Lake
So right now I’m actually reading along winded steampunk fantasy by Jim Butcher. And as much as I love Jim Butcher’s work, this book so far is just a little, let’s say “Hard to finish.” Now that doesn’t mean that’s bad. It probably just means I haven’t got to the meat of the story yet. So I had to take a break and read a short story before returning to it. The short story, I once again pulled from 29th edition of The Year’s Best Scifi and this time around the short story is called A Long Way Home by Jake Lake.
So what is it about? The story follows Ask, an enhanced human (the story’s way of saying cyborg) who has been living almost a thousand years. And unlike many other people who live so long, he has not succumbed to madness or suicide because of absolute boredom. He keeps himself busy studying science, specifically geology. At the beginning of this story, he is down in the empty lava tubes of the planet Redghost. And during his research, there is loud noise. An increase as a wave of neutrinos rushes past him and the equipment he’s working with is fried. Also junk from space orbit had seemed to suddenly fall from the sky. He heads back to the camp, and finds everything there is useless and fried as well. He has no ship and no computers. He considers himself lucky that there is nothing inside his own body that shorted out. So he starts walking. He comes across a town. There he finds everyone is missing and elsewhere he finds the same. With no way off the planet. Ask is forced to search until he finds someone alive or a way off of the planet. And seeing how he can just about live forever, he has all the time in the world to search every city and try to solve the mystery.
The good. This is kind of an old tale. I am Legend had similar tropes. But the execution is what makes it great. Though this tale is rather short, the author did a good job expressing the weight of the situation. The loneliness. The madness. The hopelessness. It’s about how he handles this situation. And unlike the novel I listed before, Ask is practically immortal. The story basically tackles the theme of “What does an immortal person do after everything is gone?” And it’s a fascinating concept to be explored. Also the ending I loved. It’s kind of an ominous ending that makes your mind wonder and I expressed in many earlier reviews. If the ending makes me think and doesn’t seem cheap, I like it.
The bad? For some people, the ending I like, many others will hate. I can imagine a lot of people going “What happened next?” and feel that Ask’s story had no ending not knowing what his fate was. So as always these ambiguous endings are love it or hate it endings. Also the reason for the electronics to short out is an increase in neutrinos. Now I know what they are, but not much about them. I just know they are a popular thing being researched in science right now. But I know the majority of the population does not have a clue what they are and I think there should have been just a little bit of detail about them, just to make it more grounded for those who don’t know so it doesn’t sound like magical silliness that is made up for some scifi story.
Overall, this is a good story. Its short and bitter sweet. Its good read and some great science fiction. So if you stumble across this short somewhere. I strongly suggests that you give it a read. You won’t regret it.
4 smoothies out of Four.
Overall Rating: A Tale of an Immortal Living long After The World Ended