“Outstanding. . . . It’s a fascinating future, and Jude’s personal story is involving.” —Rich Horton, Locus Magazine Jude Plane is not your typical teenage boy, even among the other kids in his cloistered religious enclave. He belongs to the Machinist Guild, a group that forbids the use of any technology more advanced than a doorknob. But advanced technology can be hard to avoid when you live in an overlooked corner of Netherview Station—a giant wheel in space, twelve light-years from earth. Jude wants to live an obedient life, whatever that means, but his resolve is put to the test when his abusive father sends him to work outside the enclave, unloading freight at the station’s hub. There Jude will make friends stranger than any he’s ever known, and will find himself confronted by choices he never imagined. But will he solve the biggest mystery of all—the mystery of who he is? Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, this novella was shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. “An intelligent, well-crafted piece. . . . Shunn’s elaborate details about the religious rules and philosophies of this group form thought-provoking parallels with some of today’s fundamentalist religious groups. It would not surprise me if this tale eventually finds a place in someone’s year’s best science fiction anthology.” —Jeff Cates, Tangent “A well-considered examination of a basic SF concern: the clash of differing technological levels, and how this (especially now) can cause the lower-tech culture to retreat into fundamentalism. . . . Shunn gets a lot of good satirical digs in, and a contemporary dilemma is penetratingly illuminated.” —Nick Gevers, Locus Magazine
Author
William Shunn was born in Los Angeles and raised in Utah, the eldest of eight children in a devout Mormon family. A writer from a young age, he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University in 1985, when he was 17. As was expected, he departed on a proselytizing mission for the LDS Church at the age of 19. He was assigned to preach in Alberta, Canada, but after six months he was convicted of felony mischief in connection with a false bomb threat and expelled from the country. The complete story is recounted in his memoir The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, available November 10, 2015. In 1991, Shunn graduated from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City with a degree in computer science. Soon thereafter he began finding success as a science fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in Salon, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Storyteller, Newtown Literary, and various anthologies, including year's-best collections. His work has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and twice for the Nebula Award. A small collection of his stories, An Alternate History of the 21st Century, was published by Spilt Milk Press in 2007, with an introduction by Cory Doctorow. Cast a Cold Eye, a short horror novel co-written with Derryl Murphy, appeared from PS Publishing in 2009. Shunn served three years as a national juror for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and for three years hosted and produced the acclaimed Tuesday Funk literary reading series in Chicago. He has long worked as a software developer, notably for WordPerfect Corporation and Sesame Workshop, and on September 11, 2001, he created what may have been the first online "survivor registry," a database that allowed people in affected cities a way to report their status and allowed friends and families to see if their loved ones were okay. William Shunn left the Mormon Church in 1995 and developed one of the earliest ex-Mormon web sites. He lives in New York City.
