Sex War One

Sex War One – my dystopian Sci-fi novel – is available for purchase in all eBooks & iBooks stores & devices. “Fast-moving plot and skillful characterization,” said the Science Fiction Studies journal. “This book unifies within it the principles of major Science-Fiction literature,” said This World. Kindle Edition & Smashwords Edition (for iTunes, Kobo, B&N & more.) For further details please check my books page.

To give you a taste of the book, I’ve been posting segments of my award-winning short story, “The Monster,” which serves also as the basis for the book. Here then is the twenty-one segment:

D.L. began a slow climb toward her, following her footprints in the soft ground. How small her bare footprints were, he marveled. He was surprised, and not for the first time, by her calmness: she did not look once in his direction when he was climbing up the mountain. Now, when he reached the rock and stopped beside her, she remained still and quiet, looking away and ahead. He was breathing hard, surveying the valley and the faraway mountain range at the other side of it. Those mountains had a shade of red embedded in them, he could see that clearly. For a fleeting moment he thought that he saw, down at the foot of those faraway mountains, a bluish color as well. He was hallucinating, probably, tired and thirsty, but nonetheless thought he saw the color of a large pool of water.
Inadvertently, again, he touched the radiation-gun in his pocket, feeling it with his gloved fingers. He thought to end it all here and now, without any further hesitations or delays. He would shoot her from the back, as she sat motionless on the rock’s edge, with her eyes closed, soaking up the sun. With one hit on the electronic trigger key he would transform her into a small pile of ash: a cloud of dust that the wind, once returning later in the day, would spread on and around the rock.
The notion of eliminating her disturbed him greatly, though. It caused him to look away from her. He was surprised to discover a cave there, just a short distance behind them, unseen from the slope of the mountain below the rock. Curious, he walked closer and stood by the cave opening, looking inside. It was not a big cave at all, and there was a small rock in the middle of it. He stepped inside, amazed to find that the ground beneath his feet was solid. Even the color of the soil was more brown than gray, and it didn’t raise any dust when he stepped on it. The air inside was cooler, as if it contained some moisture, in addition to shade.
D.L. was tired. The walk across the valley and the climb atop the mountain were strenuous activities for an underground colony-citizen. He was used to sitting and standing, mostly, and occasionally walking over the slow moving tracks in the colony’s corridors and tunnels. He felt the weight of the trip-suit, with the radiation-gun inside it, as well as the weight of the task ahead of him. He sat down on the small rock in the cave, his conflicted mind heavy with the burden of indecision, and laid Z.Z.’s belongings beside it. He looked at the sunlit cave opening and could see Z.Z. through it. She was sitting as before on the edge of that big rock. Ahead of her in the background he saw the valley and the red mountains at the other side of it.