About the New Science Fiction Story: Otherside
Jason is abducted as a child from Earth and survives in the care of a hard-edged orphanage in The Rime until he reaches the age of “service.” Chosen by a young aristocrat, Jan, who has a family history to build on and a long-standing war to win, Jason grows alongside her, navigating her political world while harboring a secret desire to return to Earth and find his lost family. But the Others are bearing down on him and the entire Empire, leaving Jason, Jan, and his friends with irrevocable choices that threaten their deepest desires and ideals.
It’s Been a Journey
Fourteen years ago, Sara Barkat saw a writing prompt that inspired her. She tried it. Years passed, and the story that had started so simply took on a new shape and depth. Themes arose, a frame was added based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and philosophical underpinnings became profound, exploring what it means to be Other to each other, what it means to hold different cultural lenses of individualism versus collectivism.
In the meantime, while Otherside continued to take shape, Sara released The Shivering Ground & Other Stories, which was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. The great critic John Wilson said, upon reading her debut story collection, “Sara Barkat is an original.”
Otherside continues in the path of originality, experimenting with a non-chronological plot that consistently weaves from present to past and back again. A timeline is provided at the end of the story for readers who want to unravel the chronology. But, caution, spoilers abound in the timeline. Sara’s use of the Coleridge poem with a science fiction take also feels refreshingly original. As usual, her language itself feels new, giving the reader passages that brim with ache and awe at the same time.
About the Author
Sara Barkat is the author of the National Indie Excellence Awards finalist The Shivering Ground & Other Stories. She is also the illustrator of two graphic novels: The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. Sara adores art, sailing, random coding projects, and quantum physics. You can find her at sarabarkat.com or drawing mostly daily at sadbook.substack.com
Table of Contents for Otherside: a Novel
1 – Old Tomo
2 – The Trash Heap
3 – Cat’s Cradle
4 – The Seekers
5 – Durley Street
6 – The Mission
7 – Blood
8 – Lilia
9 – Dee
10 – Marla
11 – The Body
12 – Frontline
13 – Scummer
14 – The Impossible Tunnel
15 – Saeinth Arth
16 – Our Rituals
17 – Jan
18 – Otherside
19 – The Lighthouse
Timeline
Otherside: a novel: excerpt
Jason had spent the week off-duty in the port-houses, floating tethered by massive cables to the ground of the planet, upon which the elevators would run up into the low-atmosphere. Those places were neither here nor there, and no one looked twice at anything. He spent the week gambling away exactly thirty percent of his monthly credits; he kept the rest locked to send directly to savings. He wasn’t going to end up washed up like old Tomo, who spent the time shuttling between his job sorting the recyclables and the casinos where he spent all his money before he could use any of it. But even old Tomo was good enough to hang out with; if you could get him to leave the hooks for two seconds. Jason had his ways; yanking them off worked. The disorientation of leaving the VR made Tomo mad enough and dizzy enough to be dragged off without a fuss to go eat and take care of himself and perhaps be bribed into a story before he drifted back into the dripmachines.
“Why d’you wanna hear about it?” Tomo said, with a singular frown. His icy blue eyes were still intimidating, his big, calloused hands threaded through with stick-tags and rings.
“I told you,” Jason said, like always. “You’re the only one who ever escaped.”
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Poetry Prompt
In the quote above, the character Marla asks Jason if he wants a certain activity to be the sum of his life. Write a poem that works with the concept of “the sum of a life.” What is the sum of a life? Can you find an inventive way to explore this in your poem? Try it.
Painting: The Day after the Shipwreck, by Paul Jean Clays, 1853, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Creative Commons, via Wikimedia.
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