The Lost Stories: A Series of CoSmic Adventures

Introduction

“Feghoots” is the name given to a certain kind of story: usually a bit silly, often contrived, always ending in a groan-inducing pun. In bad cases, a feghoot isn't a story but a joke; in better cases, a feghoot is an interesting story in its own right, with the pun-ending adding a layer of detective story, where instead of figuring out whodunit, the reader tries to anticipate the final line.

I didn't know any of that when I wrote “Lost Eternity,” the first story in this collection. It was 1994, I was 15 years old, and I'd decided I wanted to write for a living. Although young, I was smart enough to know the steps I needed to go through to achieve my goal. Step 1: write a story. Step 2: get it published. Step 3: don't lose your head when you become rich and famous. To tackle Step 1, I thought of one of my favorite authors at the time, Isaac Asimov, and some of his stories, especially the ones that ended in puns. Those were clever, funny, and—best of all—very short. The latter quality appealed to me on two levels: first, I figured a magazine would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown author when the story was a short-short, and, second, with perhaps a bit of laziness tempering my ambition, I felt it would be easier to write a shorter story than a longer one. That summer I assigned my mind the task of thinking up a good story and a good pun. Why I picked a religious pun, I'm not sure. I was born into a Christian family and have been a lifelong believer, but it would only be a few years later that I really embraced my spiritual side and faith became a powerful force in my life.

Step 2. I don't remember how long I deliberated on where I wanted my first story to be published. I settled on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the top speculative fiction magazine at the time and, unbeknownst to me, the magazine that had originally published Richard Bretnor's Ferdinand Feghoot stories (the ones that give this type of story its name).

I heard from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at the end of the summer. Strangely, bewilderingly, amazingly, they didn't want to publish my little story (so much for Step 2, let alone Step 3). But school was starting up again and there were assignments to complete, exams to study for, sports to play, and girls to figure out (not necessarily in that order), and I decided to go back to Step 1 when I had a bit of free time (the idea that one could send a story rejected by one professional magazine to another professional magazine, an obvious and universal practice among writers, took me a few years to figure out). When my brother, who is two years my senior, was looking for work to publish in our high school's poetry and short story anthology, which he and his friends were editing, I submitted “Lost Eternity.”

That publication led to one of the greatest writing memories I have. My uncle Saad, who was attending university in Alabama, came to visit us in Ottawa, Ontario during the summer of 1995. The anthology was on the shelf in our computer room and when my uncle found out I had a story in it, he wanted to read my work. I remember standing beside him while he read the story, stopping every once in a while to laugh out loud or to tell me he liked a particular line. Although it was more than a decade and a half ago, I can remember exactly which parts made him laugh: the words “Gamma Bamma,” the mix of colors that made up the plain-yellow bush, the pun at the end. Perhaps this is the kind of early encouragement any artist needs to keep pursuing and trying to perfect their craft. For me, from someone I really admired (my uncle was the personification of cool, as far as I was concerned), that reaction was priceless. This book is dedicated to the memory of my amo Saad, “amo” being the Arabic word for uncle. In December of that same year, he and some friends were driving home in bad weather and the driver lost control of the car, which swerved off the road and crashed into a tree. The tree collapsed onto my uncle, who was napping in the back seat, and killed him instantly. I have many cherished memories of my uncle, but watching him read through my story, enjoy it (or at least fake it really well), and then laugh out loud when he came to the end is a particularly special and meaningful one.

I liked “Lost Eternity” and, although you only see glimpses of him in that first story, I liked the main character. Years later, a man named B. Joseph Fekete was editing a magazine of Christian speculative fiction called GateWay S-F. I'd sold Joe a few original stories, and one day I remembered “Lost Eternity.” I sent it to him to see if he'd be interested in publishing it. He was interested, and he and his assistant editor asked if I, in turn, would be interested in turning the story into a series.

Over the course of the next five years, Joe published six more “Lost” stories, the writing of which was often instigated by Joe sending me friendly emails wondering when he could expect the next installment.

We discussed putting together a chapbook once I'd felt I could wrap up the series, but unfortunately, in 2006, circumstances caused Joe to shut down the magazine and withdraw from his publishing work before that could happen.

Here I'll be serializing the complete series, from the first story that made my uncle laugh, to the ones Joe thankfully hassled me to write, to the final arc that, I hope you'll agree, take the series from silly but fun into territory a little more serious. That's the danger with God: you introduce Him as a minor character to help you sell a joke, and soon you realize He's taken over the whole show.