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SHORT STORIES:Life in the UniverseBy Michael J Farrell The Stinging Fly Press

When the digital revolution is complete and we can ask our software to discover at the twiddle of a touchscreen what it would hitherto have taken multiple lifetimes of reading to even guess at, it will surely be found that climatic phenomena are mentioned in the first lines of almost all our written fictions. We are creatures of the weather, of the seasons, of degrees of light and dark, all still in thrall to our old god the sun. The natural allies of the fiction writer in promptly establishing atmosphere, or what is often referred to as the “emotional climate” of a work, are therefore atmospheric conditions themselves. Sometimes, as in gothic fiction, a conscious fetish is made of the prevailing atmosphere, but in fiction generally the sheer recurrence and obviousness of the tactic as often as not makes for dull work, or for inadvertent comedy, as in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s legendary “It was a dark and stormy night” opening to Paul Clifford(1830).