Faster Than Desire – A Science Fiction Short Story by D. Colin Palmer 1990

Here’s a short story I wrote a long time ago—back in 1990.

It’s not a new story. It’s not AI-generated. It’s mine.

It was first published in an old men's magazine—not a porn mag, just one of those weird fringe publications where writers used to get published for copyright purposes. A bunch of science fiction authors did it at the time. I'm not ashamed of it anymore. It was a legal defense and a good one.

The story’s called "Faster Than Desire." It’s about a quiet professor named Elliot Frank who figures out how to break faster-than-light travel—not by brute force, but by understanding the nature of time, fate, and consciousness.

The machine works. But the war hero meant to fly it crashes two nights before launch. So the professor—who never wanted the spotlight—has to step up and pilot it himself.

It's got physics, Buddhist recursion, psychoanalytic theory, and a strange kind of hope at the end.

This is just me testing how this stuff sounds when run through my narration setup. If it works, I’ll be doing more: horror stories, audio fiction, political monologues, audiobook stuff, and whatever else makes sense.

Thanks for listening.

—D. Colin Palmer
(Saint John, New Brunswick)