Not that you'd recognize Ontario in "Lost in Space and Love" (the only Ontario connection here is that it's the home of the author, Dorianne Emmerton).
It's a flash fiction story, a 2011 winner in an Open Book Toronto monthly flash fiction contest. The challenge that month was "to take us somewhere we’ve never been. Use setting to bring a foreign land or a new world alive for us."
The setting in Emmerton's story is great and if it weren't for the double suns (which I think steals from Star Wars) nearly meets the challenge requirement. The gray, dangerous planet certainly complements and adds to the despair of the narrator and her girlfriend. Having escaped from a war in which the two women were supposed to be enemies, it doesn't turn out to be the happy ever after story I'm sure either had imagined. Night's coming on, and they have a lot of kicking at the darkness ahead of them before this planet will bleed a double daylight again.
I wonder if the story is a metaphor for the pressures put on couples who try to love one another against the odds and against society (they had been fighting on opposite sides, after all), or is it just a simple but sad piece of sci-fi?
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