Blue Sunset

“Can we watch the sun set tonight?” AI-kita asked me as she put the supper things away.

“Of course, sweetheart. Whatever you want,” I said, turning the knob inside the cupola. The shutters opened to reveal Mars’ blue twilight. I felt AI-kita’s hand slip into mine, recalling the first time we held hands, expecting hers to feel synthetic, cold and unresponsive. It wasn’t. No part of her is. Which is why I divorced my wife and took AI-kita to start a new life on Mars.

But I still miss the gold and red sunsets on Earth – and the human memories I shared with my wife.

a new life on Mars
close-ups of stars and comets
distant Earth is blue

Kim M. Russell, 18th November 2024

Sunset on Mars, free image found on Pixel4k

It’s Haibun Monday with Frank at the dVerse Poets Pub, and he asks us to “imagine journeying across the stars in a generation spacecraft” or in a starship travelling “to a distant star for a duration no longer than a transatlantic flight”. Yes, we’re exploring Sci-Fi haibun!

Frank reminds us that “Science Fiction is a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction, literature that utilizes settings and motifs of a reality different than our own” and “speculates on how advances in technology can influence our collective lives”. He asks how haiku and haibun fit science fiction, and gives us an explanation from Julie Bloss Kelsey, a self-identified “haiku and scifaiku poet” together with examples of her scifaiku, as well as a haibun by Alan Summers.

40 thoughts on “Blue Sunset”

  9. If a bio-link sensory awareness can be effectively created between a synth and an organic alpha, and if the organic alpha can be brought to minimum function, enough to keep the brain awareness alive, and the organic alpha maintained in an environment to minimize physical stress and degradation — the future may see a time when one’s experiential essence of self may “live” for significantly extended periods of time. Of course, assuming such a complete bio-link being possible can, at this time, only be entertained conceptually. But today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact. I can also see a real problematic situation where a “person” may not want to be aware indefinitely. A entire lexicon of medical law would certainly have to be ushered in.

    Anyway, I enjoyed this piece very much Kim. I wonder when that day will ever come? And how will that impact the religious concept of conscience and soul? I wonder — I am always wondering.

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  10. This takes my breath away, and returns it to me as a teenage girl newly discovering John Wyndahm, Arthur C Clarke, and C.S.Lewis’ Sci-Fi trilogy in the 1960s (I totally missed out on Ursula le Guin).

    You breathe a tenderness into Martian life. So much so that I read the narrator as a woman at first, with her daughter….

    Love the architectural detail of the Cupola!

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  11. You dealt with some general themes so well, under the sci+-fi mantel: of always wishing for more, of things to be different, of what is home or where we are from…and if ot has a bearing on is, and finally what is love. These are all major themes well-opened in this piece, where a dimple device like changing the colour of s sunset can be so thought-provoking. It seems tender, as well as surreal, and unnerving…v good writing.

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