Hover Bother

(Written November 2010)

I wrote this for a Flash Fiction competition in New Scientist magazine on the theme of Forgotten Futures. The competition was being judged by Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite fantasy authors. I decided against submitting this one as I didn't think it fitted the competition theme closely enough, and wrote and submitted The Last Martian instead.

The competition brief was: Send us your very short stories (less than 350 words) about futures that never were. Tell us where we'd be today if the ether had turned out to exist after all, or if light really was made up of corpuscles emitted by the eyes. You don't have to be scientifically accurate, but the more convincing your story, the more likely it is to win!

I'm not sure I stuck to that...

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