The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree E-Book

Cora Buhlert

• Herausgeber: Cora Buhlert
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Bertha and Alfred, married for twenty years, enjoy a truly science fictional life in the twenty-first century. But in spite of all the technological marvels surrounding them, an argument about how to decorate the Christmas tree escalates and threatens their marriage.This parodistic piece is a mundane short story of 2900 words or approximately 12 print pages, written in the style of science fiction’s “golden age” of the 1940s and 1950s.

Leseprobe

The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree

by Cora Buhlert

Bremen, Germany

Copyright © 2015 by Cora Buhlert

All rights reserved.

Cover photo by Wong Mei Teng

Cover design by Cora Buhlert

Pegasus Pulp Publications

Mittelstraße 12

28816 Stuhr

Germany

www.pegasus-pulp.com

Introduction

The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree is a parody, intended to poke fun at the conventions of a certain kind of science fiction story.

This story was written in response to the Not Really SF Short Story Challenge instigated by science fiction and fantasy writer E.P. Beaumont.

The challenge was a response to complaints by some more traditionally minded science fiction writers and fans that science fiction had been invaded by literary writing and that the virtues, values and scientific rigour of science fiction’s so-called “golden age” had been forgotten.

In response, E.P. Beaumont proposed launching a counter invasion of literary fiction by science fiction. The challenge was to write an entirely mundane and realistic short story in the style of science fiction’s “golden age”, complete with clunky overexplanation of every single piece of technology, no matter how mundane, with which the characters interact.

The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree is such a story. It is the story of a couple arguing about how to decorate the Christmas tree told as if it were a hard science fiction story of the 1950s. There is also a lot of Latin and bonus bad anthropology and history, since a lot of hard science fiction never really took the “softer sciences“ seriously.

I would like to thank Wikipedia and the Internet for providing an overview of the science and technology behind many common household objects.

I would also like to apologise to the brilliant German comedian Vicco von Bülow a.k.a. Loriot for borrowing some elements of his famous skit Weihnachten bei den Hoppenstedts (Christmas at the Hoppenstedts). However, since the borrowing was done for the purpose of satire, I suspect Loriot would not mind. Perhaps he would even smile.

The Tinsel-Free Christmas Tree

A Not Really SF Short Story

Even in the twenty-first century, the two point four billion adherents of Christianity, the world’s largest religion, still celebrated Christmas, a holiday that marked the birth of Jesus Christ, whom Christians believed to be the son of God and saviour of humanity.

Alfred and Bertha von Bülow considered themselves adherents of the Christian religion, even though the last time they had seen the inside of a Christian temple, a so-called church, had been twenty-three years ago during their marriage ceremony. And so they, too, celebrated Christmas as was traditional on planet Earth.