Welcome Allison Wall and her debut self-publishing short story adventure. Allison and I met at Novel-In-Progress Bookcamp a few years ago.
Footnotes on a Space Opera: A Musical First Encounter Short Story
sci fi short story
.99 ebook
buy on Amazon
About the story:
In the year 2026, aliens landed on Earth. But they didn't come to take our planet or to annihilate us. They came for the last thing anyone expected. They came for opera.
Told from the distant future, this first encounter short story imagines a reality in which opera--one of Western culture's greatest but most polarizing musical traditions--becomes planet Earth's greatest interstellar export.
Arrival meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
In Footnotes on a Space Opera, author and classically trained soprano Allison Wall fuses her love of opera with a dry, brilliant humor that will have readers laughing out loud.
Allison, what do you love about your story?
So many things! The form. The combination of two of my favorite
things: science fiction and opera. Most of all, I love the "what if"
the story asks: What if aliens arrived and they were interested in the last
thing we thought they'd be? Because that seems to me like the most likely
option—not that real aliens would necessarily be classical music fans, but that
their intentions and goals are probably nothing like what we imagine. I think
that's the strength of fiction, and what interests me about speculative fiction
in particular, the ability to ask a fantastical "what if" question
and follow cause and effect to see what might happen in a scenario like that.
Introduce us to your best-behaved character.
Interesting question... Because the short story is in an
unconventional format—that of a paper or a chapter in a history book—characters
don't show up on the page in the way they typically would. It's not always
clear who's behaving well and what people's true intentions are! I suppose I
might put forward the narrator, but even she is breaking rules, though she's
doing it for the right reasons.
What do you want readers to tell other readers after
they've read the short story?
I would love for readers to compare their favorite humorous
moments. There are so many to talk about. A few are classical music inside
jokes, but the vast majority are very accessible. I would love for readers to
talk about the treasure hunt of the footnotes, and what they revealed
about what was really going on in the story. I would also love for readers to
talk about opera! It's an art form that the majority of contemporary society
has never learned or forgotten how to listen to, which is a shame,
because, as the aliens in Footnotes on a Space Opera convince the world,
it is an extremely powerful medium.
What are you reading now?
I just finished reading The City of Dreaming Books by
Walter Moers, a German writer with a really fun, whimsical style. It's a
comedic adventure novel about writers, literature, and the publishing industry,
and the main character is a dinosaur named Optimus Yarnspinner. I highly
recommend it.
What’s next for you?
I have several novels in the works! Currently, I'm editing
and exploring publishing options for The Violet Tamarind, a futuristic
speculative fiction novel, in which a crew of cyborg airship pirates go hunting
for a legendary treasure.
About the author:
Allison Wall is an American writer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and has published short fiction and personal essays and book reviews.
Allison is trained as a classical singer and pianist, and
she works as a music teacher, dissertation editor, and academic tutor.
In the general chaos of 2020, Allison found out she is
neurodivergent (autism, ADHD). She is passionate about sharing her experiences,
advocating for empathy, and contributing to a world in which neurodiversities
are seen on an inclusive spectrum of brain differences, not pathologized as
illnesses. To that end, she runs NEURODIVERSION,
a monthly newsletter that centers neurodiverse news, research, and current
events. Connect with Allison on her website or Twitter
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