Christmas in Selene City
Or, A Lunar New Year. A collaborative writing project!
This is a collaborative writing project run from Christmas 2024 to Lunar New Year at the end of January 2025. Five wonderful authors joined me in imagining the stories that could come out of the scenario below. Read on for the setting and for the stories!
The Setting
Welcome to Selene City, the first international base on the Moon. There are other lunar stations around. China’s Chang’e Special Scientific Zone was the first, closely followed by the privately run Muskovy, then India’s Chandra City and Nigeria’s Goodluck Station. Selene came later, built as an international cooperative research station to promote peace in the aftermath of the Oceanic War. Situated at the centre of the Mare Serenitatis, it was the brainchild of eccentric Aotearoa billionaire Shijie Heping, who seemingly made his fortune during the War. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances the night after laying the foundation stone for Selene City fifty years ago, and has not been seen or heard of since.
The base hosts around three hundred scientists, some of whom have their families with them — Selene puts a high value on education, and on being a place where people of different nationalities and languages can work together. With the families and auxiliary staff, there are about a thousand people living there at any given time. Selene City is overseen by its General Director, Maria Celeste Lamarr, while the science programme is headed by Research Director Dmytro Grossman. The scientific staff include astronomers, geologists, physicists, botanists and a couple of sociologists. Auxiliary staff include technicians, mechanics, engineers, medics, primary and secondary school teachers, cooks, administrators, media specialists and so on. There’s also an Artist in Residence, there for six months to produce a work of art that will communicate to the world the work of the base, and a Writer in Residence, also there for six months.
Selene City is shaped like a huge “+”, with four long arms which hold living quarters, laboratories, offices and other facilities. At the centre is the Dome, where much of the base’s social activities and large gatherings take place. Now, on the 30th of December, people are busy putting finishing touches to the decorations for the annual New Year Feast. The big party will take place in the evening of the 31st.
Selene hosts people of many cultures and faiths, so the New Year Feast includes elements from all those willing to contribute. There’s a huge high-verisimilitude Christmas tree, a gift from the Kingdom of Norway a couple of decades ago, to which all are invited to bring a bauble or other decoration. There are Diwali lights and flowers, Hanukkah candles, and red Chinese lanterns, even though Diwali has already passed and the Lunar New Year is still a few weeks away. The life-size statue of Shijie Heping in the centre of the Dome, above the foundation stone, has been draped in tasteful flashing lights. Everyone has a week off work, and there’s a festive buzz in the air.
This year’s celebration is especially significant, because New Year’s Day, 1st January, will be the 50th anniversary of the founding of the base. Shijie Heping’s daughter Serena, who was only five years old when her father disappeared, will be there for the occasion, with her son Frankie Khan, twenty-three-year-old heir to his grandfather’s billions.
You’re leaving your quarters sometime on the 30th when, somewhere in the distance, you hear music. You recognise the melody, but can’t quite place it. It draws you. You walk through the corridors trying to trace it, but though it seems to grow louder, you never seem to approach the source. It leads you to one of the airlocks. Impossibly, the music seems to be coming from outside. Outside, where it’s lunar night, cold as liquid krypton, and the stars are thick in the sky…
The Stories
Subira the janitor finds something strange in the vents in No Dogs on the Moon by
Disenchanted exogeologist Livia Lamarr has a powerful encounter in Music of the Spheres (part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4) by
Taye Briggs is racing to finish his study on the social behaviour of rats when things take an unexpected turn in Stragglers by
Ten Little Explorers are trying to figure things out in the tunnels below Selene City in
’s story (with awesome artwork by !)Epicurus the Mouse and Tremorsense the spider have a mystical adventure in
’s magical taleDisappointed newlywed Cecilia wonders what microbiologist husband James is up to in Heart Music by
The Instructions
These are the instructions given to the writers who chose to participate. Leaving them here for future reference!
You are invited to choose a protagonist and give us your take on what happens next!
Your protagonist could be one of the characters mentioned above, or it could be an as-yet-unnamed member of the Selene City personnel. If someone else has already written from the point of view of an existing named character, though, I suggest choosing a different character.
You are free to take the story any direction you would like in terms of genre. You could lean more into the sci-fi, or fantastical, or horror, or romance, or mystery / thriller, or weird, or…
Ideally, your story takes place in the 24-36 hours between when it starts on the 30th and the big party in the evening of 31st December. It would be cool to have everyone finish up at the New Year Feast. However, if your story needs more of a lead-in before that, or to continue beyond the party, that’s also totally fine.
Please keep it clean - think PG-13, though judicious use of colourful language for emphasis is OK. I reserve the right not to include any stories I consider inappropriate.
Have fun!!!
Let me know if you have a story to add to the collection and I’ll link it into this page! You can email me (sdglemaitre at gmail dot com) or tag me on Substack with a link to your story. If you don’t have a Substack or other online platform, I can host your story on my site, clearly attributing you as the author. There isn’t a strict deadline, but I’m hoping this will be active up until the Lunar New Year / Spring Festival at the end of January.
Credits
This collaborative writing project was inspired by two projects that I took part in when I was very new to Substack and that were hugely helpful for me in getting connected with other writers, as well being a whole lot of fun! These were The Blackwater Files, run by
, and ’s Penter Painter’s Holiday Haunts anthology. There are heaps of good stories in both these collections, and I highly recommend checking them out!
Cover image photo credit: NASA/JSC.
Oh I'm so down for this! Adding it to my writing to-do list 🔥🔥🔥
I'd love to collaborate. I'll try a writing :-)