My head spun. It was like my head was tossed into microgravity and all the facts I thought I had learned that day had been tumbled into space and rearranged themselves. I had been wrong. About all of it. And about Tracy. But Nick—I looked at him. “But if you knew this already, why didn’t you say so? Why did you let Tracy twist in the wind? Why did you let her suffer? She left here practically in tears!”

  Nick sat in his chair, leaned back, knotted his fingers before him, and looked at me for several seconds. “Carver, you may have gotten over what she put you through, but I still had a bit of a grudge to work out. She almost cost me the best junior officer I’ve ever had. She appears to have grown up since then, but she still had earned a little suffering for that. And I knew you would never give her what she deserved, so I had to do it.”

  “You … You planned that?”

  “It was a simple calculation. I had nothing to gain. It’s not like exonerating her is going to endear me to her. It’s far too late for that. But I had nothing to lose as well. It’s not like she could hate me any more than she already did. So I might as well play the villain.”

  “So you were cruel to her just because you had nothing to lose?”

  “You missed the final line in my calculation: I would gain nothing by exonerating her; but if you get on that shuttle and present the evidence that clears her name, you’re her hero. You’ll come in and save her from my vile accusation.”

  I blinked. Nick playing matchmaker? But … “No. I can’t play games like that with her. I won’t lie to her.”

  “Oh, don’t be a complete ass, Carver. Tell her a lie, tell her the truth for all I care, but don’t you dare let her leave you behind the way she did last time. That woman is going to space, with or without you. So get going before you miss that shuttle. I don’t need you moping around for another six months. Go work out whatever it is you two have to work out.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I leapt for the door.

  “Oh, one last thing…” Nick halted me on the threshold. “The Aldrin leaves Earth for Mars in three months, with or without you. If I’m wrong, and she’s not going back to space … If I’m going to need a new Chief Officer, please try to give me enough time to find a replacement who can measure up to your standards.”

  “Yes, Nick. Permission to go ashore, Captain?” But Nick ignored me, turning his music on instead. Once again I heard “Brigas Nunca Mais.” Without waiting for an answer, I was already in the outer office and heading for the corridor.

  I would be back on the Aldrin, I was certain of that. And I was just as sure that next time I wouldn’t be alone. That would give Nick something to complain about, so everyone would be happy.

  Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince

  JAKE KERR

  After a long career as a journalist, Jake Kerr turned to fiction in 2011. That year his first published story, “The Old Equations,” was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novelette, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His stories have been published by Lightspeed, Fireside, and other magazines and anthologies.

  Here he delivers a story that’s just what it says it is: a collection of Wikipedia articles and other essays and news pieces about a famous author, along with book reviews and critical analysis of his work. But he’s also a writer who becomes famous some years after an asteroid crashes into the Earth and obliterates most of North America.

  JULIAN PRINCE

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Julian Samuel Prince (March 18, 1989–August 20, 2057) was an American novelist, essayist, journalist, and political activist. His best works are widely considered to be the post-Impact novels The Grey Sunset (2027) and Rhythms of Decline (2029), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2031.

  * * *

  Prince was a pioneer of Impact Nihilism, a genre that embraced themes of helplessness and inevitable death in the aftermath of the Meyer Impact. His travelogue, Journey Into Hopelessness (2026), outlined Prince’s return to North America, ostensibly to survey the damage to his home state of Texas. The book’s bleak and powerful language of loss and devastation influenced musicians, artists, and writers worldwide, giving voice to the genre as a counter to the rising wave of New Optimism, which sprang out of the European Union as a response to the Meyer Impact and the enormous loss of life.[1] [2]

  Early Life

  Not much is known of Prince’s early life. He spoke rarely of his childhood, and with the loss of life and destruction of records during the Meyer Impact, little source material remains. What is known is that Prince was an only child, the son of Margaret Prince (maiden name unknown) and Samuel Prince. He was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, but moved to Dallas, Texas, when he was eight years old.[3] In an interview before his death, Prince noted:

  * * *

  I was a good kid, a boring kid. I didn’t cause trouble, and trouble didn’t find me. I studied hard and planned on being a journalist, figuring that I was better at observing the world than shaping it. I graduated high school, and continued with my journalism classes via the net. Up until the Impact, I was thoroughly and utterly average.[4]

  Upon earning a bachelor’s degree from Khan University in journalism, Prince embarked on a career as a web reporter.[5]

  EXCERPT FROM JULIAN PRINCE’S NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, 2031

  So it is that life, to which we all cling with desperation and joy, prevails. Yet I cannot let go of the memories, the experiences, and the physical reality of those that have passed away. The ghosts are all around us, even as we squint to see through them. It has been said that I deny optimism and ignore our future, but that is not true. It is just that I refuse to let the difficult questions remain unasked. I refuse to conveniently ignore the graveyard that is now half our planet. And I refuse to feel joy that so many have lived when so many—so many—have died.

  It is with humility that I accept this award, not for myself, but for the hundreds of millions who are not here with us today. I did my best to tell their story, but they deserve so much more than I can possibly give. If I achieved even a small part in doing so, I am glad.

  Pre-Impact Career

  Prince spent the decade before the Meyer Impact crossing the globe courtesy of a series of freelance journalism jobs. His first writing job was with AOL Local/Patch in 2010, where he aggregated citizen journalism stories from North Texas and rewrote them for syndicated release to the net. He continued to work for AOL Local for seven years, until he quit in 2017.[6] He wrote about this transition in an essay on the carefree lives of the pre-Impact world in 2031:

  * * *

  I quit because I wasn’t excited. Can you imagine such a thing today? To leave security and stability because your life just isn’t dangerous or crazy or exciting enough? Such was the innocence before the Impact. So I left the boring to move to Africa, where the excitement was, and where I could write about things that shed light on life and death, not ennui or entertainment.[7]

  * * *

  Prince took a job with European news agency Star News in 2017. His writing up until the Impact in 2023 was spare and fact-driven, although flashes of Prince’s eye for emotion could occasionally be seen. Prince would say of those years, “Everything I wrote back then was worthless, but it was also worth everything—because it was the mind-numbing limitation of facts and cold description that allowed me to view the Impact in its true light.” [8] [9]

  EXCERPT FROM “MALDIVES’ LAST GRAIN OF SAND,” REPORTED BY JULIAN PRINCE (STAR NEWS, 2018)

  Ahmed Manik sits in a rickety wooden boat, watching as a wave crests over a strip of sand. Manik is the grandson of Maldives’ last President, Mohammed Manik, and the strip of sand is all that’s left of the island country of Maldives, a country wiped away by global warming, rising water levels, and decades of mismanagement. Scientists don’t even bother estimating how long this last remnant of the former island nation will remain before it is washed away. It may be weeks, perhaps even days.

  Manik shrugs when asked about the lost legacy of his family and former country. “We are all grains of sand, just waiting to be washed away,” he says and smiles, which accentuates the heavy creases around his eyes and mouth. He may have accepted the inevitable force of the rising waters, but it has taken a toll.

  Impact Year

  Prince was already in Africa during the six-month preparation for the Impact and thus didn’t have to take part in the Expatriation Lottery. He wrote many news articles during this time, but no fiction or essays. There is no record of Prince’s life for the 18 months following the Impact and the immediate global environmental catastrophe it caused. Prince would write about this time often, but never about his own life—only what he had seen.[citation needed]

  EXCERPT FROM “IMMIGRATION CONCERNS DOMINATE SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE,” REPORTED BY JULIAN PRINCE (STAR NEWS, 2023)

  Cheers followed South African presidential candidate Maxwell Mahlangu on each stop of his tour of the country, despite deep concerns that his endorsement of the United Nations Emergency Emigration Plan for North America would upset the entire framework of the country. “Our country’s motto is ‘Unity in Diversity,’” Mahlangu said at a rally in Port Elizabeth. “How can we let these people die simply because we refuse to accept more diversity?”

  Later in his speech, Mahlangu touched upon a common theme expressed by leaders across the globe as countries prepared to take in refugees from North America—no one really knows what the Meyer Asteroid will do to the world. With a massive death toll a certainty, the real economic unit of the future may be people, so taking in immigrants is a good idea: “No one knows what God has in store for us and what life will be like. In the future, with more people, South Africa will be stronger!”

  Sitting president Jacob Sisulu rejected Mahlangu’s moral and economic argument. He continued to object to the UN’s current plan for South Africa to accept up to a million expatriates from the United States. “Such a wave of people would severely stress every part of our country,” Sisulu explained during a press conference in Pretoria. “They will starve! China or Russia or Europe should take them!”

  “Coming Home”

  In 2025, Prince’s essay “Coming Home” was published in Der Spiegel.[10] It became a worldwide sensation and ironically helped create the New Optimism movement that Prince’s later work would reject. In the essay, Prince described the unloading of thousands of North American refugees in various cities along the African Coast, using the metaphor of humanity leaving its doomed colonial past to come home to Africa.

  Literary critic Gerald King described the essay as the perfect origin point for both Impact Nihilism and New Optimism, and its publication immediately marked Prince as the leading light of post-Impact literature:

  The central concept of “Coming Home” is warm and welcoming. Africa, the cradle of civilization, is welcoming home its wayward sons and daughters, even after their many sins. The deep themes of forgiveness and generosity fed directly into the New Optimism being loudly voiced in Europe. But many overlook that Prince did not flinch in describing the gaunt, guilty looks of those that exited the boats—a few million survivors while hundreds of millions of their friends and family members were doomed to die back home. The language that Prince uses in describing those left behind is very stark and makes it clear to the close reader that one should mourn, as well as celebrate.[11]

  The reception of “Coming Home” led directly to Prince tackling the difficult subjects of the Impact and “the Lost,” a term for those who died in the Impact that Prince coined himself in Journey Into Hopelessness.[citation needed]

  EXCERPT FROM “COMING HOME” BY JULIAN PRINCE (DER SPIEGEL, 2025)

  Not one person who landed in Africa looked over his or her shoulder. It was as if the direction labeled “West” no longer existed. Sunsets were no longer a thing of beauty but a painful reminder of those doomed across the ocean, a literal dying light. Thoughts stopped at the ocean. It was overwhelming to consider friends and family alive yet suffering with the knowledge of their impending deaths.

  Denial was the coping mechanism of choice. No one that landed in Africa could remember having any family or friends remaining in North America. I asked dozens of refugees, and none would admit to having left anyone behind. Friends, neighbors, colleagues, family—they all somehow made it into the expatriation program.

  In Mogadishu I met a man I used to work with. I asked him about several of our former colleagues and whether he knew if they had been chosen to expatriate. He denied ever having known them. I was shocked for a moment, but recovered and asked about his family. He smiled and said that they all made it and were settling across various cities in Europe. He didn’t know anyone that had been left behind.

  No one knew of anyone left behind.

  To know was to be a participant in their death sentence, and that was too painful, too sad, too horrific. But the guilt existed, nonetheless. So they did what they could to avoid it. They didn’t look West. They didn’t watch sunsets. They never called or messaged North America, even as it still lived. They cut off their former lives and looked ahead to their new ones.

  And thankfully, mercifully, Africa was there with open arms. A return to home and hearth, as it had for time immemorial, made everything better.

  “THE CONSCIENCE OF A GENERATION”

  Prince traveled back to North America to survey the damage from the impact in early 2026. He spent six months traveling across the continent with a United Nations Blue Team, observing and sometimes helping as they assessed the damage. This experience was the basis for his worldwide best-selling travelogue, Journey Into Hopelessness. His stark and often graphic descriptions of a barren landscape, littered with dead flora and fauna, were described by critics as “poetic,” “beautiful,” “poignant,” and “chilling.” Prince himself described the trip as the “hardest six months of my life. It was like performing an autopsy on your own parent.”[12][13][14]

  After returning from North America, Prince spent the next six months working on his first piece of fiction, the novel The Grey Sunset. The novel follows the life of Phil Gumm, who is a working class truck driver from Kansas and a winner of the Expatriation Lottery. The novel is highly introspective, and the narrative follows Gumm’s descent from exhilaration at being one of the lucky few to the depths of guilt over those he left behind. The bulk of the novel takes place on the journey from Galveston, Texas, to Capetown, South Africa, and the physical journey is an extended metaphor for the emotional and spiritual journey that Gumm also takes. As Gumm physically gets closer to safety and a new life in Africa, he emotionally and spiritually gets closer to guilt, despair, and, eventually, suicide.[15]

  The book was released at the height of the New Optimism movement and was immediately heralded as a compelling counter. The phrase Impact Nihilism had already been in use since the publication of Journey Into Hopelessness and similar works, but it was The Grey Sunset that defined the genre and helped propel its popularity.[citation needed] The Grey Sunset won the Pulitzer Prize in 2027, which had been re-established by the Expatriation Heritage Foundation the year before.[16]

  Prince shied from publicity, and spent the bulk of the next two years working on what many consider his masterpiece, Rhythms of Decline. The novel is a complicated narrative of five families, each of whom lives on a different continent. The centerpiece is the impending impact of the Meyer Asteroid, and how each family deals with an uncertain future. Only one family survives the Impact, although their future is full of doubt as the novel ends.

  Literary critic Malcolm Spencer described the book as “the work of unparalleled genius.” He described the American Smith family, as “the definitive representation of our times. They face impending death with a kind of sad and yet warm acceptance. They live one day at a time, knowing that days are all they have left.” Spencer described Prince as “the conscience of a generation” for his unflinching look at the tragedy of the Impact and the guilt and pain it left behind.[17]

  Some critics saw the book as a complete repudiation of New Optimism, and this led to significant criticism of Prince. London web daily The Beacon called Prince “The Prince of Doom and Gloom.”[18] The Paris Review printed a scathing review of Rhythms of Decline, describing it as “one man’s self-absorbed journal of guilt over surviving the Impact.”[19]

  Prince did a series of interviews in the wake of the criticism. His most famous appearance was on the popular holo The New Day, broadcast out of Berlin. When asked about his critics, his reply became one of the most quoted lines of the post-Impact era: “I’ll listen to them when they’ve walked among the three hundred million ghosts that I have.”[20]

  Despite the controversy, Rhythms of Decline won the Pulitzer Prize and led directly to Prince being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later.[21]

  EXCERPT FROM JOURNEY INTO HOPELESSNESS BY JULIAN PRINCE (VINTAGE/ANCHOR, 2026)

  Finally we landed in Texas.

  When I was young my parents took me to Palo Duro Canyon in northwest Texas. It was a massive rift in the Earth that my mother told me God himself had carved out of the Texas plains. I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as a broken land born of violence, something left behind when the plains and hills had collided. But broken as it was, I saw it as natural and beautiful. The sharp angles and the bare rock acted as a balance to the plains that spread into the distance. And despite the wound in the land, life continued to thrive around it.

  There is nothing natural or beautiful in the tortured land that now covers North Texas. The force of the impact stripped away everything. There are no trees, no plants, no grass. There is nothing but scarred land, windburned ridges, and fetid water. Everywhere there is decay, death, and the certainty that this is a barren land with no future.

  EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW ON THE NEW TONIGHT SHOW (CANAL+, JANUARY 18, 2030)