There are lots of types of stories out there. Some are long, rich feasts that go on for thousands of pages, colouring their readers' lives for days. Some are spare and polished, a tiny insect trapped in amber, small and exquisite. And some stories, stories like Speed of Love, manage to package that sense of rich immersion into an itty-bitty package.

The story Speed of Love forms one part of @DeborahWalker7's Future Tales series, a set of stand-alone science fiction narratives. Speed of Love is a short story, but it presents a richly-imagined future world, with a unique society that grows out of a novel use of ancient-futuristic technology. This is a world where relativistic time-dilation effects influence not only individuals, but society as a whole. The implications for one woman's love life form the main topic of the story, and those implications rigidly proceed from the science-fiction scenario

The prose is generally very good, though a few errant typos do find their way into the story. The sense of voice in the writing is strong, allowing for the creation of a sympathetic protagonist with very few words. This is a character whom a reader can't help rooting for.

Nevertheless, the main draw of the story is not the characters; it is the sense of a larger universe, a whole society of people teeming just outside the boundaries of the page. Every paragraph, every phrase, deals in some way with the social conventions and mores that the protagonist is skirting the edges of, or outright rejecting, in her search for love and a sense of belonging.

A meditation on friendship, love, and the commonplace mixed-blessing that is time, Speed of Love is a short read that will leave you thinking about the importance of acceptance and of belonging – and some great science fiction concepts, to boot!