Friday 2 November 2012

Penumbra by Gregory Benford

More flash fiction than short story this little story weighs in at three and a half pages.

If you are interested in astronomy then you may have heard of gamma ray burst. Gamma ray bursts are described as when a large, high-mass star implodes to form a black hole. When this happens huge amounts of gamma ray energy is released.

This kind of discharged has only been observed in other galaxies and it has been speculated that if such an event happened here, in the Milky Way galaxy, it could pose an extinction level calamity on Earth.

This story delves into such an occurrence.

Frankly the story was too short - it could have been expanded a lot and been very entertaining.

I loved the realization of how the characters in this story survived. Nicely thought out.
Gregory Benford
Gregory Benford's website is HERE

Gregory Benford's bibliography is HERE

You can read the story online HERE
First published in the June 10, 2010 issue of Nature

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