A World Away
In a distant future, humans have terraformed much of the habitable worlds in our branch of the Milky Way. Only a handful of worlds bearing alien life have been allowed to exist without human intervention. A select group of human rangers steward these worlds, and protect them from further human interferance.
I wanted to use this story as a way of exploring the real-world complexity of national parks and poaching, where the moral lines are not always as clear-cut as they seem.
I wanted to be careful about how I depicted our poacher, Emil. Poachers are almost always victims of circumstance. Emil may be an adversary for the space rangers, but he is hardly their true enemy, Industrialization and human greed are far greater threats to the preservation of these alien worlds.
More than sinister, I thought Emil should feel ambitious and inventive. His EVA suit is an old hand-me-down from the factory-world he came from, and most of his gear is made of improvised tech he built on the job as a shipbreaker.
