“Today in London History” • by Judith Field

Welcome to 1999 Week!

[Introduction:] Who of us can ever forget that this coming Friday, Sept 13th, 2024, is the 25th Anniversary of the day a freakish and unexplained explosion in the massive nuclear waste dump on the dark side of the Moon blew our celestial partner completely out of Earth’s orbit, and sent it careening across the galaxy like an errant billiard ball scratched off the table by a colossal drunk?

At least, according to the 1970s TV series, Space: 1999, that’s what happened on September 13th, 1999…

Here at Stupefying Stories, this got us thinking: what if it had really happened? What if the Moon truly was blown out of Earth’s orbit 25 years ago? How would life on Earth be different now? More importantly, how would we be observing the 25th anniversary of this incredible, spectacular, and quite possibly horrific event?

So that’s what we’re doing this week. All week long we’ll be running stories that examine (with varying degrees of seriousness) the question of how life on Earth has changed, adapted, and in general, become something different, now that we can no longer look up in the night sky and see the Moon. 

Today, of course, we begin with Judith Field’s answer to the question of how the Sunday papers would cover it, and the one burning question that’s on everyone’s mind: what does this mean for the upcoming football season?

You’ll probably want to click on this image to enlarge it.

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Judith Field was born in Liverpool, lives in London, and has been writing since 2009. She is the daughter of writers. Her short stories, mainly speculative, have been published in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Her short story collection, The Book of Judith, was published by Rampant Loon Press in 2014. She was shortlisted for the Cinnamon Press Literature Award in 2022.

Judith is also a pharmacist, freelance journalist, editor, medical writer, and indexer. She was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University in 2018.

Judith’s most recent appearance in our virtual pages was “Lord of the Tropes.”