The Sky Is Solid

Read my latest story from Heart of Flesh literary journal.

The world is flat and the sky solid, an impassible barrier–but that doesn’t stop one ambitious businessman from trying to tunnel through to what lies beyond.

“The Sky Is Solid” started out very different from how it ended up. My original idea was to have a science fiction story set on a flat Earth with a dome sky, yet I wanted this to be a world with science and technology, not magic. I imagined industrialists building skyscrapers to reach the sky-dome and mine stars from the rocky firmament.

The story ended up taking a very different direction after a friend lent me the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a parable about the people’s limitless ability to accomplish what seems impossible. I wanted to express the opposite through a story of our inability and the limits that we cannot break no matter how hard we try.