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    The Lost Stories: A Series of Cosmic Adventures
    The Lost Stories: A Series of Cosmic Adventures
    The Lost Stories: A Series of Cosmic Adventures
    Ebook69 pages53 minutes

    The Lost Stories: A Series of Cosmic Adventures

    By Karl El-Koura

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    About this ebook

    These are the adventures of James Kollins: greedy, petty, selfish captain of the galactic warship "DeVille"; a man obsessed with the holodrama "Captain Courageous and the Women Who Love Him"; a man completely unforgiving of his much-maligned first officer. A man who has just met the Creator of the universe, though he doesn't quite realize it yet, and whose life is about to change in ways he never dreamed possible, though he doesn't quite know it yet.

    Find out what happens when an overgrown child in charge of a large military ship, and sadly lacking a conscience and possessed of a strange sense of humor, comes into contact with God Himself, who isn't above playing a few tricks of His own.

    You'll be plunged into interstellar war and ultramodern espionage, witness textbook-poor diplomacy and longstanding family feuds, even encounter a seemingly evil empire of cute babies.

    It's a safe bet you'll laugh while reading this book; a virtual lock you'll crack a smile or twenty; and inconceivable that you won't groan and shake your head on a regular basis. In the tradition of Isaac Asimov's pun-in-cheek “feghoots,” each of these twelve short-shorts ends in a play on words and phrases that will leave you wondering what's wrong with the author.

    Part loving Star Trek parody (I mean, homage), part spiritual journey, THE LOST STORIES is a series of cosmic and comic adventures that is silly, fun, and also demonstrates the Power of God working in the life of even the most self-obsessed warship captain you've ever met.

    THE LOST STORIES is approximately 14,000 words (50 pages).

    CONTENTS

    Introduction
    1 - Lost Eternity
    2 - Lost Inheritance
    3 - Lost Time
    4 - Lost Word
    5 - Lost Ship
    6 - Lost Opportunity
    7 - Lost Reward
    8 - Lost Empire
    9 - Lost Prayer
    10 - Lost Show
    11 - Lost Everything
    12 - ... and Found

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKarl El-Koura
    Release dateSep 15, 2011
    ISBN9780987693884
    The Lost Stories: A Series of Cosmic Adventures
    Author

    Karl El-Koura

    Karl El-Koura was born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and currently lives with his beautiful editor-wife in Canada's capital city. More than sixty of his short stories and articles have been published in magazines since 1998, and in 2012 he independently published his debut novel Father John VS the Zombies. Karl holds a second-degree black belt in Okinawan Goju Ryu karate, is an avid commuter-cyclist, and works for the Canadian Federal Public Service. Visit http://www.ootersplace.com to discover more about Karl and keep up-to-date with his latest news.

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      Book preview

      The Lost Stories - Karl El-Koura

      The Lost Stories:

      A Series of Cosmic Adventures

      Karl El-Koura

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2011 Karl El-Koura

      To my amo Saad.

      Introduction

      "Feghoots" is the name given to a certain kind of story: usually a bit silly, often contrived, always ending in a groan-inducing pun. In bad cases, a feghoot isn't a story but a joke; in better cases, a feghoot is an interesting story in its own right, with the pun-ending adding a layer of detective story, where instead of figuring out whodunit, the reader tries to anticipate the final line.

      I didn't know any of that when I wrote Lost Eternity, the first story in this collection. It was 1994, I was 15 years old, and I'd decided I wanted to write for a living. Although young, I was smart enough to know the steps I needed to go through to achieve my goal. Step 1: write a story. Step 2: get it published. Step 3: don't lose your head when you become rich and famous. To tackle Step 1, I thought of one of my favorite authors at the time, Isaac Asimov, and some of his stories, especially the ones that ended in puns. Those were clever, funny, and—best of all—very short. The latter quality appealed to me on two levels: first, I figured a magazine would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown author when the story was a short-short, and, second, with perhaps a bit of laziness tempering my ambition, I felt it would be easier to write a shorter story than a longer one. That summer I assigned my mind the task of thinking up a good story and a good pun. Why I picked a religious pun, I'm not sure. I was born into a Christian family and have been a lifelong believer, but it would only be a few years later that I really embraced my spiritual side and faith became a powerful force in my life.

      Step 2. I don't remember how long I deliberated on where I wanted my first story to be published. I settled on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the top speculative fiction magazine at the time and, unbeknownst to me, the magazine that had originally published Richard Bretnor's Ferdinand Feghoot stories (the ones that give this type of story its name).

      I heard from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at the end of the summer. Strangely, bewilderingly, amazingly, they didn't want to publish my little story (so much for Step 2, let alone Step 3). But school was starting up again and there were assignments to complete, exams to study for, sports to play, and girls to figure out (not necessarily in that order), and I decided to go back to Step 1 when I had a bit of free time (the idea that one could send a story rejected by one professional magazine to another professional magazine, an obvious and universal practice among writers, took me a few years to figure out). When my brother, who is two years my senior, was looking for work to publish in our high school's poetry and short story anthology, which he and his friends were editing, I submitted Lost Eternity.

      That publication led to one of the greatest writing memories I have. My uncle Saad, who was attending university in Alabama, came to visit us in Ottawa, Ontario during the summer of 1995. The anthology was on the shelf in our computer room and when my uncle found out I had a story in it, he wanted to read my work. I remember standing beside him while he read the story, stopping every once in a while to laugh out loud or to tell me he liked a particular line. Although it was more than a decade and a half ago, I can remember exactly which parts made him laugh: the mix of colors that made up the plain-yellow bush, the words Gamma Bamma, the pun at the end. Perhaps this is the kind of early encouragement any artist needs to keep pursuing and trying to perfect their craft. For me, from someone I really admired (my uncle was the personification of cool, as far as I was concerned), that reaction was priceless. This book is dedicated to the memory of my amo Saad, amo being the Arabic word for uncle. In December of that same year, he and

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