I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Lacey and Time is a story about two people on a spaceship. This review contains spoilers.
I'm an absolute sucker for character studies. I think when they're done well, they're the maybe the purest form of fiction, because ultimately there's no [interesting] fiction without the pretend people. That element of human interest is vital to the stories we enjoy.
You see this in all the best stories, even outside science fiction and fantasy (which I mention specifically because they're the only correct genres). Once, I was stuck in a small town for a few weeks with nothing but the Stephen King book Thin and a Somebody Koontz book called Intensity to keep me company. I'll bet they're both really good authors because they're really popular, but I read about half of the Stephen King book and all of the Koontz book and didn't much care for either, And while I don't remember what those books were about, I still remember aspects of the characters in them.
Humans, in stories, are like humans in photographs or films. When they're there, we find a way to identify with them. And when they're not there, we might still enjoy aspects of the thing, but the emotional connection is different or entirely missing.
So Lacey and Time is about two humans on a spaceship, and really that's all it's about, and that's fine.
Technically, this is a sequel to The Proposal, at least in the literal sense. Sequentially, it happens after the events of The Proposal. And probably there's not that much time between the two, because the experience of The Proposal is still fresh in Ejoq's mind, and the emotions are still raw. Lacey, in a way, is a vehicle for Ejoq to talk it out at us, the readers. We get to hear how he's feeling, and Lacey herself gets to suggest alternate points of view. She gets to challenge his ideas, his own interpretation of the subtext of that story. We don't know exactly what's right and what's wrong, what's real and what's subjective. It's a conversation. You've probably not had a conversation on exactly the same topic, but you've had "heavy" conversations before.
This is one of those.
There's subtext to this story too, though.
I think this story is a gentle reminder that a conversation isn't ever just two people throwing phonetics at one another. An authentic conversation is one where people are listening and talking to one another, and then listening to their own thoughts and processing those, and then repeating the process. When that happens, it's not just two people. Those two people mean something to one another, even if only for a short while.
Conversations happen a lot with people you know, the people around you all the time. There's something unique, though, about the conversations that take you by surprise. The ones that happen with strangers. I used to travel a lot for work, and it would always surprise me when I ended up sitting next to a skilled extrovert on an airplane. They'll talk with you, share all kinds of things about their lives, ask you about yours, make you feel like they're interested in your thoughts. The connection can be oddly intense, even though it only lasts for just a few hours. It's that human connection, again, like in the movies and photographs.
Lacey and Time is about connection. It's about how Ejoq connects, or doesn't, to people who are important to him. His family, people he's met in his travels, people he's gone through traumatic experiences with.
But it's also about Lacey herself. She's a steward on her family's ship, and has been all her life, maybe to her detriment. Her bones and muscles are weak, having adapted only to zero-gravity. She can't work on ships with artificial gravity, can't go down to a planet. And she resents it. She considers it a deformity. She's basically trapped in the shell of her family's ship.
Ejoq points out that there are spaceships that make allowance for zero-gravity spacers, with AG sections for the gravity-dwellers and zero-gravity seciton for those who grew up without. That's still seems alienating to Lacey, though, and she's understandably lonely.
Ejoq, of course, is maybe a little lonely himself, whether he'll admit it or not.
There's some insight within these pages about the Stardrifter setting. Little touches, like the economy of cold passage, a little bit of commentary about nobility, and engineering maintenance. There are no space pirates or nuclear warheads. Just the people, saying things about life that may or may not apply to you as the reader. But you'll find a way to make something apply. Because that's what we humans do. All it takes is a good story.