Notes on “The Game of Puppets and Devils”

I wrote this piece of flash fiction for Chuck Wendig’s regular Friday flash fic challenge. It was heavily inspired by a short short story by Robert Sheckley, “Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace In Flames, Jon Westerley Dead”, which I read in an anthology, The Space Opera Renaissance, some years ago. Although Sheckley’s story is meant more as a satire of space opera, I wanted to do something similar that earnestly captured the epic far-out-ness of my favorite space opera books, comics, movies, and TV series. If my piece is short on character depth and focused more on spectacle and flavor…that was purely intentional.