When Mining Asteroids, Don't Forget Your Trusty Dog

The recent arrival of the privately designed-and-built Dragon space capsule at the International Space Station dovetails nicely with another recent event: the announcement of a privately funded initiative called Planetary Resources, Inc., to seek out and mine near-Earth asteroids.

Both dovetail nicely with my own initiative: the release of my short story "Dog Star" as a standalone ebook. The dovetailing has to do with the fact that "Dog Star" is about a young asteroid miner who finds himself grounded on just such as asteroid, just him and his disabled ship... and his trusty "smartmutt," an enhanced border collie named Sam. Dogs who can discuss astrophysics with you while thinking about digging on an asteroid aren't a dime a dozen even in this future. Sam has to prove his mettle while helping his human dig his way out of this life-threatening jam.

This is a reprint of a story that first appeared as part of an online science-oriented anthology of stories called Diamonds in the Sky, which was funded by the National Science Foundation to help further the cause of science education, particularly in astronomy. (This new release has a couple of minor corrections from the text as it was released in the anthology.)

Gretchen, the student who has been working with me, helped get "Dog Star" up for sale on the last day of her interning stint. (Thanks, Gretchen!) It's now free at Smashwords, and you can also get it in the Kindle and Nook stores.

Kindle | Nook | Smashwords (free!)

"Dog Star" will also appear in my forthcoming short story collection, Reality and Other Fictions, which is rapidly moving toward completion. I hope to make an announcement about that in the next few weeks. It will contain about half my published stories, including a couple not released as standalone ebooks. The other half will follow in Going Alien, soon after.