Free The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford

concise editorial style, made two pinpoint suggestions that cut directly to the heart of the matter. Incorporating them made all the difference.
    The story is about Fantasy and genre and literature and writing, but for me it is most importantly about two individuals and their relationship, how they help each other. Both the characters of Ashmolean and the narrator, Mary, are in some ways autobiographical and in more ways not. Why is it written in the voice of a young woman? I don’t know, it’s just the way I saw it, as Ashmolean might say. I think it is important to keep in mind that at the end, Mary does not adopt the older writer’s style, but writes her own story in her own way.
    Glandar’s phrase, “One must retain a zest for the battle,” comes directly from my father and is part of his personal philosophy of life.
    This story has always been for Bill Watkins, author of “The Beggar in the Livingroom,” Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer, Cosmic Thunder, Going to See the End of the Sky, and The Last Deathship Off Antares, who gave me great encouragement and insight into the writing of Speculative Fiction.

The Far Oasis
    In their exquisite self-centeredness our ancestors believed that they were alone in the universe. At the same time, they had convinced themselves that Earth was the blue apple of God’s eye and the sole reason for all of creation. This two-headed fallacy caused humanity both delusions of grandeur and a paranoiac sense of loneliness. Although we eventually achieved the ability of space travel at speeds exceeding that of light and discovered a proliferation of planets along with the near-infinite diversification of species inhabiting them, we could never flee far enough to escape those ingrained disabilities of ego and the angst of isolation but carried them with us like ghostly stowaways to the most remote corners of the universe. The drama caused by the tension between these two psychological conditions born of the same impulse played itself out on a million far-flung stages. As a historian, I can tell you that in studying the history of mankind, this is, though it dons a multitude of disguises, the sole phenomenon one studies. At least a thousand instances come readily to mind, but allow me to apprise you of a single case, and it will be for you like a mirror. One glance and you will be assured that you are not alone in your willful loneliness.
    The celestial city of Aldebaran had pirouetted through the limitless vacuum for centuries, and its population, whose original purpose was to find a habitable world to colonize, had grown so at home in the star-studded blackness of space that the group mind could not conceive of leaving its clear-domed vessel for the natural atmosphere and sunlight of any planet no matter how blue. The citizens of Aldebaran had done well, not only in maintaining their systems, both mechanical and organic, but also in maintaining their society. To their credit they remembered the concept of love and kept it alive all the long years they aimlessly drifted.
    In order to ensure survival it was absolutely necessary that their laws be strict. Those of the original population, who had written the precepts for the city, knew the dangers of allowing chaos to get a foothold in a closed system. Justice on Aldebaran was humane, but it was also swift and given a place of utmost importance. When a citizen too egregiously violated the code, he or she was viewed as a plague virus and banished, with the greatest expediency, to the surface of the closest habitable planet. The citizens viewed this punishment in the same manner that their ancient Earth ancestors did the consignment to Hell.
    Somewhere in the fifth century of the history of Aldebaran, a little less than halfway to its annihilation in the maw of a black hole, there lived within the city a man named Honis Sikes. He was just one of a hundred other agricultural workers who tilled the soil that lay between the